Akira and Ranma 1/2: The Monsterous Adolescent

In Chapter three Akira and Ranma 1/2: The Monsterous Adolescent, of Napier's book Anime from Akira to Howl's Moving Castle Napier works to show how these two Animes, in related, but different ways illustrate the temperament of male adolescents moving into adulthood. Just as Anime has crossed over to the West, so do important observations of this tumultuous time in one's life, but while this is true it is necessary to remember that this conversation must retain its context of Japanese cultures.

First let us take a look at Napier's interpretation of Akira. Napier says the Tetsuo Akira's protagonist/antihero shows a significant side of Japan cultural representation, that of isolation, and the outcast. Tetsuo is representing general adolescent opposition to a world that doesn’t understand, and is thus meaningless. A world filled with tyrannical adults.

With Ranma 1/2, Napier says there is a similar struggle of the adolescent, now more directly applying to male/female roles in Japan, and sexuality. Ranma ½ constantly illustrates, that maturing boys have significantly more expected of them then girls.

There is a disease particularly prevalent in Japan, which afflicts adolescents called hikikomori, or literally “pulling away”. This disease is defined as: one that stays in their room for six months or more. Some cases will not leave the seclusion of their room for decades, spending all hours within. These adolescents are smart, and have a sense of self, which current Japanese culture does not have room for. They fear the Japan that works for the generation before will only fail for them. Both maturing boys, and girls are equally susceptible, it is general the male adolescents who fall victim due to increased expectations of the male gender. The Hikikomoris may become angry, and frustrated, due to feelings of inability to affect change in their own situations, and fear of social pressures.

Napier is correct in these connections to Akira, and Ranma ½, and the adolescent, specifically within Japanese culture.

scopophillia, the ideal ego, and film

In the article Visual Pleasure & Narrative, Film Laura Mulvey uses film of the past, and that which is contemporary to this article to push her feminist agenda, and defends it with the Freud’s ideas of repression, sexuality, and the unconscious mind. In the Times Literary Supplement of May 23rd, 1997 one critic wrote that Freud was a "creator of a complex pseudo-science which should be recognized as one of the great follies of Western civilization". I will ad that this is not uncommon criticism of Freud, and I fear the same for Mulvey.

Mulvey writes that film uses two mechanisms in propagating the phallocentric point of view, the first being the visual pleasure of watching a film, and its relationship to scopophillia. Scopophillia is the love of watching. The second mechanism, the narrative, provides the ideal ego for man.

Mulvey uses scopophillia, with voyeuristic connotations (eroticizing the object), which again may relate to Freud’s anal stage. The audience member sits in the dark, and derives his pleasure from watching the female, as object, therefore possessing her, while remaining unseen. It is this gaze that helps continue the patriarchal manipulation of film.

Ideal ego concerns the relationship of the male viewer, and male protagonist. So when the object of sexual desire (woman) is possessed, the male audience member does not lose his dominance over her, because of relationship to the protagonist as the viewer’s ideal ego.

Both of these mechanisms by commodifying the female rob her of her humanity. I do understand, and agree that the commoditization of any person does remove humanity from all aspects of interaction. Commoditization of people occurs in all media and recently of all gender types.

What concerns me in this article is the methodology, in which Mulvey reaches this most basic point. How is it possible to quote a phallocentric thinker in sincerity to support an argument against a media based in this thought. Once Mulvey uses Freud’s beliefs she gives them substantiality within her world, and by doing that legitimizes the machine, which she is trying to destroy.

It is quite possible that I am misreading the article, and in fact she could be making fun of Freud’s unreasonable phallocentric theories, and it was just too tongue in cheek for me.