On Neon Genesis Evangelion

On Neon Genesis Evangelion and its Poetics of Reticence
Alright, this journal entry is going to be pretty disjointed so bear with me. There is a lot to be written about Neon Genesis Evangelion, ananime about giant robots, monsters, and the end of the world. You can take your pick: the show mediates with violence, experiments with the materiality of bodies, makes about a hundred allusions todifferent religions, psychoanalyzes its characters, and subverts what it means to be a show. That last one might be a bit contentious, but I will argue that it is absolutely the case. Neon GenesisEvangelion is constantly drawing attention to its form. There is a noticeable change around episode 15: the show starts juxtaposing images of what is referred to as “fanservice” (characters of the show,often female, are exploited with the purpose of titillating its fan base) with somber, austere backgrounds. For example, one of the robot pilots, Asuka, is shown naked in a bathtub. Such a scene wouldnormally be included to excite the viewer, however, in in the show’s context, Asuka has just recently been brutally defeated in battle and stripped of her confidence (probably the one thing she has thatis of any value to her); she is weak and vulnerable. The bathtub she’s in is, jarringly enough, inside of a half-destroyed house with its roof missing. We get a top-down shot of Asuka lying in thebathtub. I say lying because that really is all she’s doing. She isn’t bathing; in fact, there is quite a bit of blood in the tub (this is never explained). Her cheekbones are prominent, her limbs arescrawny. She looks malnourished. Are we supposed to be enjoying this? There is a certain amount of voyeurism that is required to enjoy any form of entertainment. What’s more there’s a certain eroticisminherent to consuming a narrative. But what do you do when that narrative fights back? Barthes makes the distinction between “readerly” texts and “writerly” texts, saying that “writerly” texts are...