Dead man's hand (disambiguation)

Transcription

Here's an idea: Evangelion demonstrates the Death of the Author. For many people Neon Genesis Evangelion is not AN anime, it is THE anime. Produced by famed animation studio Gainax and the grey-matter spawn of Hideaki Anno - or ... Anno Hideaki - NGE began as a TV series, airing over 5 moths starting in late 1995. It follows several characters - - most notably Shinji Akari, Rei Ayanami and Asuka Langley Soryu - - as they pilot massive not-really-but-kinda robots in the defense of earth from truly terrifying Eldrich Abominations called Angels. The arrangement of big "robots" v big monsters makes NGE - TECHNICALLY - part of the anime genre "MECHA". So compare to like, Macross, GurrenLagann, and Big O. Except. Then. Dont. Because NGE is SORTA ANOTHER THING ENTIRELY. Where many mecha animes are gung-ho kill the bad guys good show! NGE is dark... and confronts the psychological pressure heaped on people - TEENAGERS NO LESS - tasked with SAVING THE WORLD. Characters have nervous breakdowns, struggle with depression, the construction of the self and, of course, whether or not free will even exists. EVERYONE. Has abandonment issues. Neon Genesis Evangelion is psychological, intense, philosophical and compelling... ...unless you ask it's creators. Anno has said "It's strange that Evangelion has been a hit. Everyone in it is sick!" And as for the weird, amazing relationships between characters and how they progress? "Whatever the story or the development of the characters, I made them without a plan...", he explained in an interview. Sources in the description! Hideaki has harshly criticized fans for searching out meaning where - he claims - there is none. As you might expect, there is a kind of intense love-hate for this guy. On the one hand, he's a tyrant: trolling, mocking and challenging the very people on whom his success depends. But on the other, he's the man who brought one of THE most beloved animes into existence. For many NGE fans, he's a saint. His vision is important; they know about his past, and battles with depression... ...that characters allegedly incorporate Anno's own personality traits and that production on Evangelion was always a bit rocky: He's talked about tight budgets, incredibly short turnarounds and unbelievably stressful production conditions. Conditions which lead - however - to some adventurous, conceptual, and most importantly inexpensive episodes; and if you count numerous movies and director's cuts, several different series endings. Like a kind of giant mecha anime onion, Evangelion has some LAYERS to it. We can't help but wonder, though: which layers are important for understanding the show? Sure, I mean you can be a total fiend and want to know everything about Anno and Evangelion and anime and everything ever. And that's fine. But if we're talking about watching, understanding, and enjoying just NGE - exactly which bits do we NEED? Do we NEED to know NGE is supposed to be a comment on the over-commecialization of Anime? Or that Anno thinks we're sorta dumb for buying - some of us LITERALLY - into his "meaningless" story? French Philosopher, Deconstructionist and Awesome Hairdo Haver Jacques Derrida says "NON". And furthermore, he might even agree with Anno that Evangelion is meaningless... just not in the way you think. Derrida says "There is nothing outside the text". / He doesn't mean that in interpreting a work, you shouldn't use info external to the work itself... ...but that everything - every communication - is in some way textual; there is nothing outside the text because EVERYTHING IS THE TEXT. Evangelion: text. Anno's interview answers: text. This youtube video: text. Text is troubling because it doesn't really CONTAIN meaning, it only suggests it. It's all these little symbols and noises that are stand ins for the actual ideas; everything is at least a little ambiguous. In other words, to communicate, you use representations; you go through, quote, a "detour of signs." Anything textual - so... anything - is open to interpretation. This kinda... robs the author's interpretation of it's authority, doesn't it? I mean, yes - Anno was there and he made Evangelion and knows what happened... But his actions during it's creation, his feelings about them, the way he describes, the way we read and hear them are, to phrase it as Derrida might - always already interpretation. Hideaki's comments, then, are unimportant because their meaning is just as ambigous as the thing they might un..am..bigu..ifuuhhh... shed light on. But of course, because nothing is ever easy or clear, THIS idea itself is a little bound up in another conundrum. Is the role of the the text - the artwork, the tv show, the sonata, painting of the monkey or whatever - to communicate the EXACT, PRECISE ideas of the author? A thousand years ago the ago the answer might have be WELL YEAH, DUHDOY Nowadays though - it's not so clear. Mine and Derrida's main man Roland Barthes wrote in the Death of the Author that "...the modern writer is born simultaneously with his text; he is in no way supplied with a being which precedes or transcends his writing, he is in no way the subject of which his book is the predicate; there is no other time than that of the utterance, and every text is eternally written here and now." In other words: Does the /modern/ text convey the EXACT meaning of the author? UH, NO: DERRIDUH-DOY Weirdly enough, Hideaki Anno agrees. "Don't expect to get answers by someone," he's said. "Don't expect to be catered to all the time. We all have to find our own answers." Which is, coincidentally , exactly what we watch Shinji, Rei and Asuka do throughout the entirety of Evangelion. DOES THE INPUT OF THE AUTHOR FACTOR INTO THE INTERPRETATION OF A WORK? I've been working on my Rei impression to ask you guys to subscribe ... [BLANK STARE]