The past is a foreign country? Bullshit. The past is just like now but with less convenience foods and more plagues (figures accurate at time of writing). Japan: Now that’s a foreign country. Books read from right to left; cars drive on the wrong side of the road, washing machines turn the opposite way and girls put lipstick on their bottom lip first. One need look no further for evidence of Japan’s alternative outlook on life than Manglobe’s latest anime, Ergo Proxy. Also responsible for another iconoclastic piece of TV eye-candy in Samurai Champloo this time round the concept is Blade Runner gone cyberpunk in a piece of breathtaking cinema with not a little existential anxiety. It’s been called “CSI meets GitS” and is getting the full high-definition treatment which speaks 5.1 surround sound volumes for the level of backing behind it. Even by the standing Ghost in the Shell: SAC benchmark for blow-your-brains-out-your-nose visuals Ergo Proxy is a beautiful vision of our computer-generated future. Pretty looks might have got Jezza Lopez where she is but it did not a great anime make so the prudent connoisseur must sniff beneath the seductive surface for the true nose.
Unfortunately the opening gambit doesn’t bode well for this bunch of writers with some wearily familiar themes propping up the schema. The plot of a Brave New World where androids and humans co-exist in a robotised, inhuman future has been done to SF-death. Yes, there’s been another of those pesky global environmental apocalypses (apocali?) and in the resulting aftermath has been forged a giant dome city called Romdeau (possibly an allegory for Ancient Rome - over-analysis ed?). As a premise it’s akin to running onto the stage with a handlebar moustache and shouting “Hello, Cleveland!” At first glance, it’s a future culled shamelessly from Blade Runner with some 1984-esque subordination and cyberpunk elements thrown into the mix in a rather try-hard snatch at ‘hip and trendydom’. Those who stay jacked-in, however, will learn that director Shuko Murase’s child is not the cynical blockbuster all admitted evidence suggests.
The question: Is anime serious? People who make a living writing about such stuff have recently been denouncing the Western canard that cartoons are ‘kids stuff’. Critics such as Dr Susan Napier have argued that anime should be approached critically with the same serious hat on as other more established media (film, literature). But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Whilst masterpieces such as Ghost in the Shell or Neon Genesis Evangelion may compete admirably against the cinematic heavyweights they are hardly representative of most. I mean, Cowboy Bebop is cool and all but you wouldn’t want to write your thesis on it. Like the best in pretentious referencing, when a ‘cartoon’ states its intentions with a quote from Michaelangelo and closes with an explanatory biography of several 19th and 20th century philosophers you can be sure we’re not talking Acme Hour here. In a market saturated with either exploding mecha-bots and schoolgirl romance fantasies this makes Ergo Proxy stand out like a shaved weiner. But while in-jokes about Battleship Potemkin and a pseudo-philosophical sounding title show admirable ambition they are obvious. Certainly, Ergo Proxy has haughty pretensions, but then so does David Lynch and it doesn’t make him any more likeable. This is no re-telling of the ‘beware the rise of the machines’ storyline. Ergo Proxy’s take on the replicant - the ‘autoraves’ – betrays there’s more than a few brain cells kicking against the cliché-mongers. In Romdeau citizens leave meticulously controlled, almost stupifyingly dull lives: “what a boring utopia”. Their robotic slaves, the autoraves, serve as guardians, companions, substitute children and even lovers by their human overlords. These are not the 2-dimensional ‘droids of traditional sci-fi, though; futuristic wallpaper to compliment the cool cyberpunk mantlepiece. As the story develops a bubbling subculture is revealed under the surface of doting subservience. The autoraves are installed with a Turing Application (as in Alan Turing’s test for machine intelligence) which may be switched on and off allowing for apparently human communication. Trouble brews when renegade machines begin contracting the Cogito Virus (another philosophical ref Descartes’ fans) threatening to de-stabalise the whole humans-and-robots setup. When infected, the robots become aware of their own existence. Thusly, the former servants of man embark on a mission to discover whether the virus created their identity or whether it was gained through their travels. It’s a parable for our own quest to discover if our nature is created by our environment or inherent. Naturally, they are all named after similarly perturbed humans of our world: Hegel, Husserl, Derrida, Lacan. Meanwhile, the government is conducting covert experiments on a humanoid lifeform known as the Proxy which they believe to hold the key to the survival of mankind.
One thing Ergo Proxy is not going to do is make it easy for the casual viewer. Hard sci-fiers will be in technological heaven picking apart the meticulously crafted and confusing future-vision. In a deliberate attempt to foment this confuddliness, a different writer is contracted in for each episode leaving an oftimes ambigous and foggy path. For those of us unfamiliar with the comi-tragic meanderings of traditional Japanese theatre may find the gargantuan leaps from existential despair to flippant japery boggling. Episodes swing like a lonely housewife from murder mystery to theology; from political machinations to introverted psychology; from dark suspense to cute kookiness; from rabbit deities of Aztec mythology to the Classical philosophy of Rousseau and Heraclitus. Much of how this will be interpreted depends as much on the viewers affinity for rabid conspiracy and obsessive over-analysis as anything spelt out by the script. One must read between the frames, as it were.
Kirsteva, Deleuze, Gattari, the name-drops come flying in. A Rome-like Senate exists and the two statures in Regent Donov Mayar’s chamber is based on Michaelangelo’s Night and Day stature in the Medici Chapel in Florence. The voices of Night and Day represent those of Lacan and Husserl. The Twilight and Dawn simulacra representing Derrida and Berkeley. Characters recite [surrealist poet] Joe Bousquet like they read it in the funnies and weighty philosophical musings are never to far from the gun-totting Matrix-like face-offs. Those who’ve recently been enjoying the slightly absent desolation of Hitsuji no Uta or Serial Experiments Lain will know the feeling. Those of us who’ve woken up on a gloomy Monday morning to watch their alphabet cereal spell out ‘misfit’ in the milky murk may start to believe the developers have an inside channel straight to their innermost thoughts.
Want more? No better evidence exists of both Ergo Proxy’s intended demographic and its status as a prime example of how the best anime manages to embrace European thought and Western film whilst giving it a uniquely Japanese air plays out as Radiohead’s Paranoid Android closes the credit-sequence. A fitting, if a little obvious, choice unusual in anime which usually prefer to pen their own cheesy theme-tunes (although Paradise Kiss did use Franz Ferdinand to close out their episodes last year). An English version should be heading our way in November. Ergo Proxy? Accept no substitute.
