Marching, Masks, and the Meaning of it all

Remember the second episode where Moriko falls unconscious and has that dream? That dream where she sees the castle with all of the works plummeting into the abyss?

That is meant to be a really big giveaway, I argue, in favour of performance. The idea that there's this bodily holism or thing, and then on top of it, the mask. The mask here operates as a shielding against a source, pivoting positions. Remember that saying? "The Japanese say you have three faces?" I mean, it's kind of a meme now, but I think that's pretty insightful of a thing in this context, right? That the face supposes a pivoting with a choice of something more innate. "You have three faces."

Shifting to animation suggests that the you is distended from the body that controls. Instead, the mask is challenged by the medium it represents, I think. I don't think one replaces the other, but I do think it's valuable to see how they work in tandem to give alternative views.

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Rough Script

Let’s begin with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s famous essay and question, “Can the subaltern speak?” but in relation to animation. Because while Spivak’s question deals with the shadows of epistemic colonialism, I want to consider – if only for this brief video - performance theory, in particular Erving Goffman’s performance paradigm, as its own hegemony.

Because performance is an incredibly seductive mode in looking at Net-juu no Susume, and it makes a lot of sense. After all, they’re people pretending to be other people online or even in the case of Moriko, you can argue that it’s her failing to perform as a long-standing, proper corporate office lady for the rest of her life.

But performance theory often works on a very specific axiom, and that is that you have a self managing your performance as an attachment. This management is determined by a fixity of that modifies by audiences. Roughly speaking, I am now genuine, and this other moment is a performance.

And I’d argue that Net-juu isn’t consistently about performance.

And here is where performance becomes hegemonic. A frequent motif of performance, itself often a benefactor of psychoanalysis, is the mirror. The mirror acts as a way in which a subject can be controlled, the multiplicity of identity is given definition in the mirror. And it makes sense in Net-juu. For instance, in Moriko, when she looks into the mirror, she is compressed into a figure that has to clean up to be presentable. We know she’s more than that, but the mirror functions as a way to control her as a subject.

And yet, the mirror isn’t consistent. Reflection in Net-juu isn’t consistent. After all, the ending of Net-juu has Moriko and Sakurai walk away, their hands being held.

And what’s left behind? Their avatars: Hayashi and Lily.

Now, there are two ways to look at this that make quite a bit of sense. First, we can take a look at it as a sort of ‘growing up’ lens, in which Moriko thereby casts away her old ‘Neet’ identity, but that message does seem to instrumentalize these relationships in somewhat dangerous political ideals. That if a subject is not a faithful working subject of Japan, Inc., then all instances of them deviating from the norm are meant to be this infantile endeavour. And there’s quite a bit of sympathy for that position to be the only position.

But I think there’s also another way to look at this, and that is by considering alternatives to the performance lens. If we believe that Moriko is not actually performing, but rather inhabiting or injecting another self on to a virtual space, then this is no different than friends with their own sort of sapience looking back with love at what happens.

And this makes quite a bit of sense when you consider that the reflection, the mirror, plays the disjuncture from performativity right in the opening. The mirror is a constant image, but when her character holds is up, who is looking back?

It’s not Moriko. It’s the others. And in the moment in which she walks from right to left, her initial reflection in the water is her character, but then it changes. It changes to Lily.

In this moment, the mirror doesn’t reflect the singular subject, performing to be, but rather it acts more like a window, a way in which we enter into another world. And this makes a lot of sense. Paul Manning makes a critical distinction in online worlds and how “the primary appeal of virtual worlds is that they involve alternate social worlds, and not…as often assumed, alternate social selves” (Manning 314).

And this is brought up in the show. In the first episode, Moriko (as Hayashi) assures Kanbe by saying, “There’s no need to worry, a game is a game, and the real world is the real world.” And the world created serves this distinction. The backgrounds are perpetually vivid and colorful, yet incredibly static. When Lily utters that the scenery is beautiful (綺麗な景色), the birds are running at fives, drawing attention to the animesis of the cut. And yet, at the same time, it transitions to still characters with moving backdrops, drawing attention to the virtuality of the world. 

This is, notably, in stark contrast to the sixth episode where Sakurai and Moriko have their first major walk-together outside of the game. Here, the cuts emphasize a completely different animetic language: movement is forward, controlling, with layers sliding off each other. Space moves in. The walk shares the perspective of both Moriko and Sakurai, an empathetic camera that cuts on objects, everything always in motion. If this is the mirror, then once again, it doesn’t reflect; it’s pairing that stresses spaces as separate.

And that gets at the heart of it, I think. For Net-juu, they aren’t projecting themselves, but rather creating new lives. And so instead of performance, I think we should consider animation - from an anthropological perspective - as a way of understanding the way in which the show animates virtuality.

<Show Le spectre silencieux du movement>

This is Bridget Walker’s The Silent Spectre of Motion, a 2012 finalist film in which a ghost stands out, emphasizing the motions of everyday life as a sort of puncturing of what we think of as natural, and thus it shifts from drawings to real life to a fake documentary-esque rendition of that life. Each rendition draws attention to the falsity of animation, that for us to buy it as animation, we have to buy into the life and motion of rendition. And when the ghost shows up, the natural world is interrupted, revealing how so much of it is animated.

And Walker’s work is useful because the artist is underlying a specific way of thinking about motion particularly relevant to Net-juu. See, Walker is working on Alan Cholodenko’s work on animation, in which if we believe in the broad definition of animation as ‘bringing to life’, then there’s quite a profound implication.

Teri Silvio has also talked about animation by defining it as “the projection of qualities percieved as human - life, power, agency, will personality, and so on - outside of the self, and into the sensory environment, through acts of creation, perception, and interaction” (Silvio).

Here, people being someone else online is itself a form of animation. They are giving life to these separate identities. Where there is Moriko and Sakurai, there is also Hayashi and Lily. They are, to call upon Silvio, ‘acts of creation, perception, and interaction.’ And this is an ongoing sentiment especially in digital ethnographies, that avatars are themselves animated, given life. There is an emphasis of object-relations injecting, so to speak. When Sakurai (episode 7) is frustrated about how he should approach Moriko, the pan of Lily is from a high angle, rendering her more like a doll, and object. And it into that object that Sakurai breathes life. But that act of creation is, interestingly, through an animated show. We’re watching one kind of animation talk about another kind of animation.

And yet it’s focus on coincidence brings to life that animus, that ‘projection’, doesn’t it? The romance is entirely based on coincidence. It’s a ripping of the naturalism we’d expect from what would be an otherwise more calming romance. Like Walker’s ghost, drawing attention to the everyday to stress the motions that we might otherwise call animation, the love story is predicated on coincidences that you ultimately either have to or don’t buy into. That you either project life, power, agency, will, and personality into the sensory environment, or you don’t, and thus the animus fails. In this case, the narrative becomes a reflexive analogy of its own (anthropological) animation.

Roland Barthes in Camera Lucida has a beautiful passage where he talks about trying to find the perfect photo that encapsulates his mother’s goodness. In it, he finally comes across a picture of his mother in the Winter Garden of her as a young girl, something he cannot have a memory of. Underlying this sort of reaction is the adventure that the photograph takes you on. To Barthes, “it animates [him], and [he] animates it.” (Barthes 20)

But like any work, there’s a multiplicity of meaning, so I want to bring in another perspective on another topic.