1264: Smash the World’s Shell

I finished watching Revolutionary Girl Utena at last today.

Honestly, I’m really not sure what to make of it. I don’t mean I didn’t like it — I did — but rather, I feel like I’ve woken up from a dream and don’t really know how to parse what I watched.

As anyone who has watched Utena will tell you, of course, this is part of the attraction of the show. It is a show that prides itself in its surrealism, symbolism and deeply metaphorical nature. There’s a sense throughout that nothing is quite as it seems, and that you probably shouldn’t be taking some of the things that happen over the course of the 39 episodes too literally — not least because none of the characters appear to. They seem to shake off the frankly utterly baffling things going on with alarming rapidity, which leads you as the viewer to question whether those things were really happening at all, or whether they were merely representative of something else.

One of the best yet most frustrating things about Utena is that there are no definitive answers, though. The show’s creator, I’m told, enjoys taunting fans and deliberately misleading them, and pointedly won’t say what the definitive explanation for it all is. This might be because there isn’t a definitive explanation for it all; or it might simply be an attempt to get people to figure it out for themselves, come to their own conclusions and take whatever they want from the show as a whole.

In some respects, the whole thing reminded me somewhat of Silent Hill, of all things. Obviously the two series are very different from one another despite having a common heritage — Silent Hill is Japanese psychological horror, while Utena is colourful Japanese anime — but both actually have a surprising amount in common, not least of which is the fact that both are pretty open to a hefty degree of interpretation.

Both are riddled with psychosexual imagery, too. Neither are outright explicit with it — though Silent Hill 2 does feature a scene where Pyramid Head, that game’s iconic recurring monster, is raping a tailor’s mannequin — but both feature a very strong sense that sex and sexuality are a core theme. In Silent Hill’s case — particularly Silent Hill 2 — there’s a sense of guilt and shame attached to sexual desires for a variety of reasons; Utena, meanwhile, is rife with both phallic and… uh… whatever the word for the vaginal equivalent of phallic is… imagery. (Just “vaginal”, I guess, but that doesn’t seem to fit quite right.) There’s a strong sense of Utena’s characters reaching sexual maturity and coming to terms with that in different ways, much as James had to come to terms with aspects of his own sexual desires in Silent Hill 2.

Frankly, I’m not sure I’m intelligent enough to be able to do a particularly deep reading of Revolutionary Girl Utena without spending a significant amount of time researching, but suffice to say I enjoyed it and very much respected what it was doing, even if I didn’t always understand it fully. As I say, though, that was probably sort of the point all along.

If you’re curious, I’ll share a super-interesting essay I read earlier immediately after finishing the series. It doesn’t claim to be a definitive interpretation of the show, but it’s certainly a plausible reading of it, and definite food for thought. Check it out here.