If “Revolutionary Girl Utena” were a novel of the Hyakkiyagyō series…
Friday, December 4th, 2009
Akio stands at the exit of the tunnel through which Utena and Anthy try to run away from the castle in the movie "The Adolescence of Utena".
I just want to do a quick post on a fanciful thought I suddenly had.
If Revolutionary Girl Utena were a novel of the Hyakkiyagyō series, I think the whole concept of “the prince” would probably be considered a youkai that is like a tsukimono (ie. a “spiritual thing that attaches itself to an individual”), which only someone like Chūzenji Akihiko can “let fall” [落とし] or exorcise.
Utena has always struck me as a story in which only one half is told (though I do not necessarily mean this in a negative way):
- It tells of adolescent development below the neck (ie. the emotional and the physical/sexual), but not so much above the neck (ie. the intellect). You see the teenage characters agonizing a lot over what goes on the below the neck, but you never see them reading a book and get hit over the head by a whole new world of ideas.
- Likewise, only the “female” side of the story is told – or at least feminist sentiments are echoed, although even then I am not sure I have enough information to draw any decisive conclusion, except that the scene in the movie where Utena and Anthy run away from the castle reminds me of a quote about atheists I once read. An atheist (I am just paraphrasing) is someone who walks away from church, but he walks away from church with his eyes fixed on the church and with his back facing towards where he is going. In other words, he cannot see where he is going. Atheism can only define itself against Christianity, whereas Christianity does not have to define itself against anything. I suppose feminism (at least as it appears in Utena) is also like that – you can walk away from “the prince,” but you walk away with your eyes fixed on the prince and with your back towards where you are going. If anything, I think it is the “male” side of the Utena story that is begging to be told – it is the male characters who are the active initiators in the story, whereas the female characters tend to be passively playing along or “acted upon.” As it is, I feel that I know about the key male characters (Akio, Touga etc) a lot less than I know about the key female characters.