“After All, It’s the Chasing After Him I Really Love”: The Filmic Religiosity of “Millennium Actress”

When I tell people that I study “religion and cinema,” the response I get is usually curiosity. “That’s sounds very interesting,” they’d say, “but how are the two related?” On all counts, arousing your listener’s interest is a great start to a conversation — only that I’ve often found myself not quite able to sustain that interest with a compelling answer.

The role that movies play in society today, I’d respond, is similar to that played by religious narratives. Both have the capacity to offer hope, inspiration and direction in time of need. Both are important contexts in which questions of ultimate concern are explored. Both are immensely influential in shaping the values and ethics of a culture. And so on. These are all decent attempts at answering the question. Instead of defining religion and cinema separately then relating them to each other, I try to use one to understand the other. But unfortunately, several folks I’ve talked to seem to space out in the middle of my spiel.

I’ve been feeling rather down about this for a while, thinking that I had somehow (no thanks to the countless hours I’ve had to spend on Japanese!) lost my ability to communicate effectively in English. In hindsight, however, I think the main problem lay in the impersonal nature of my response. Beyond analyzing the stuff that goes on in societies/cultures, the strength of my answer hinges on whether or not I can convey my experiences in cinema (cf Moltmann, “Experiences in Theology”), experiences that I believe are best described as “religious.” And in order to do this, I must root my answer in specific encounters with specific films — much like how religious testimonies tend to zoom in on particular incidents that reveal the deity’s intervention.

The essay below, written for my Japanese cinema class last semester, is a specific example of my attempt at studying religion and cinema comparatively. In this season of my intellectual/spiritual evolution, there is probably no other film that reflects my understanding of the “divine” better than KON Satoshi’s Millennium Actress (2001). This was the film from which, a year ago, I drew existential strength to continue on my academic journey; cf http://tinyurl.com/75xgrcv. I post my essay here as a manifesto of sorts, in case anyone was curious about where I am in terms of “faith” right now. But more importantly, I’m realizing that I need people to talk to about my ideas. I’d be honored if you had the time or inclination to read my paper (let me know if you’d like a .pdf copy), and even more so if you’d care to provide feedback, however negative/critical it may be!

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“The belief that becomes truth for me is that which allows me the best use of my strength, the best means of putting my virtues into action.”

– Andre Gide

It is possible to soften the incongruities of life endlessly by the scientific conquest of nature’s caprices, and the social and political triumph over historic injustice. But all such strategies cannot finally overcome the fragmentary character of human existence. The final wisdom of life requires not the annulment of incongruity but the achievement of serenity within and above it. Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime; therefore we must be saved by hope. Nothing which is true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore we must be saved by faith. Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore we are saved by love.

– Reinhold Niebuhr

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The twenty-first century, according to Stewart Hoover, has witnessed the increasing intermingling of the realms of religion and media (1). As the “fundamental truths, claims, and quests of religion remain in the media age, but in new forms, and with a new emphasis,” one key trend in the production and reception of media, especially that of entertainment media, has been the growing centrality of the “quest for meaning and meaningful cultural and narrative sources” (2). Though drawn primarily from developments in the United States and Europe, Hoover’s trenchant observations are no less relevant beyond the west. In fact, the trends he notes are perhaps even more salient in the context of modern-day Japan, a nation whose tradition of syncretistic religiosity has been well-documented by scholarship (3). Coining the term shukyo asobi (simultaneously meaning “religious entertainment” and “playful religion”), Jolyon Baraka Thomas makes a compelling case for how anime culture reflects the conflation of religiosity and entertainment in contemporary Japan, a conflation that stands as “one of the alternative strategies for negotiating spiritual needs in post-war and postmodern social circumstances” (4).

Given Mircea Eliade’s view that it is “by analyzing the attitude of the modern man towards Time that we can penetrate the guises of his mythological behavior” (5), this paper purposes to explore the dimensions of postmodern filmic religiosity in Kon Satoshi’s Millennium Actress (2001), a turn of the twenty-first century anime film whose “most important theme,” the director reveals, is precisely that of time (6). Though its intertextual richness and “mythic dimension” have been noted by critics, scholarship on the film is scarce (7). Most significant writings that do exist approach the film from perspectives in the study of audio-visual translation, Japanese visual culture and the otaku phenomenon (8). For instance, Melek Ortabasi argues that through its intertextual pastiche of motifs from the history of Japanese cinema, the film asserts the anime medium’s coming of age within the hierarchy of Japanese visual forms. While certainly illuminating in many ways, her analysis does not seem particularly concerned with the existential discourse that pulses, like a beating heart, through the entire film (9). In Kon’s own words:

When I started working on Millennium Actress, I was seriously thinking about how I should live on. In other words, “how to live my life” became one critical theme for me. The world is getting confusing and stupefying. Therefore, I set up a strong-minded character who is decisive and straight-forward. I wanted to be empowered by that kind of strong character (10).

Moreover, Ortabasi’s approach does not address the one fundamental question raised unequivocally on the diegetic level: what exactly is this “most important thing” to which the female protagonist Chiyoko’s key holds the secret (11)?

Further concerns await attention. Through its “shredding of the laws of space and time” such that “past and present, fantasy and reality, film and history all occupy the same place at the same time,” what vision of mythological meaning-making might the film be presenting (12)? If it is true that “we shape our tools and afterwards our tools shape us,” what does Millennium Actress suggest about how the production and consumption of film media shapes our social ecology and practices for self-actualization (13)? In an age where metaphysical metanarratives no longer seem credible, what existential lessons might postmodern homo religiosus draw from the concept of trompe l’oeil, which informs the paradigms of fictionality and performance operative within the film (14)? These are some of the questions that our present study will attempt to answer.

Taking cue from Bert O. States’ pregnant affirmation that “a theory of performance has to begin at the ontological floor [of] human desire to participate in performative transformation,” my thesis is that Millennium Actress presents a postmodern metanarrative of love in which subjective agents attain humanization and self-actualization in and through the performance of passionate pursuit, and when this pursuit engenders mimetic desire in others in their own quests toward these ends (15). This is how the essay will be structured. First, I employ Joachim Wach’s tripartite division of religious experience – as composed of theoretical, practical, and sociological expressions – as a framework for understanding the filmic religiosity within the film (16). Consequently, I hope to show that these three dimensions of filmic religiosity correspond respectively with what is sometimes called the “theological virtues” of faith, hope, and love, virtues which not only encapsulate homo religiosus’s will to mythic meaning-making in postmodernity, but also existential wisdom par excellence.

I. Theoretical / Fiction

Adapting Wach’s classic delineation of the universal structure underlying all religious experience, let us begin our study of the filmic religiosity presented in Millennium Actress by considering its theoretical dimensions (17). In an interview with Midnight Eye, Kon points out that the film’s original inspiration stemmed from the concept of trompe l’oeil (literally, in French, “deceives the eye”), an aesthetic of hyperrealistic representation that he had experimented with in his first and previous film, Perfect Blue (1997) (18). At the proposal of the producer Maki Taro, Millennium Actress was conceived as a vehicle through which the interpenetration of fiction and reality would be further developed. “The method itself,” Kon notes, “is the aim of the film,” and they had arrived at the figure of the actress after this thematic decision was made (19).

In this light, as a “headlong cartoon love letter to the grand tradition of post- World War II live-action Japanese cinema, from samurai epics to urban domestic dramas to Godzilla,” Millennium Actress celebrates the mythmaking capacities of the cinematic form (20). The power of mythic religiosity, George Santayana writes,

consists in its special and surprising message and in the bias which that revelation gives to life. The vistas it opens and the mysteries it propounds are another world to live in – whether we expect ever to pass wholly into it or not – is what we mean by having a religion (21).

By this definition, the film’s theoretical and formal concerns lie with what can be properly described as “religious,” insofar as the film depicts the dynamics by which the cinematic medium, both in its production and consumption, offers “another world to live in.” The presence of this self-reflexive discourse is signaled right from the start of the film, when the opening sequence of Chiyoko (as an astronaut, though the audience does not yet know that this is but one of the role she plays) in the space shuttle launch pad cuts, twice and abruptly, to a brief shot of Genya in a dimlit room, enrapt before an offscreen television. While traces of an ontological distinction between the “real” and the filmic worlds may be inferred from the stark juxtaposition of the two mise-en-scenes, what is emphasized is the way in which this very distinction has been dissolved in Genya’s mind. This is conveyed through the use of extreme close-up (as if Chiyoko’s film was living and playing in his consciousness), and more explicitly when he mouths, almost involuntary, the unheard confession of love (“I’ve always…”) made by Chiyoko’s fellow astronaut.

Figure 1

The “Making Of” featurette included in the Dreamworks DVD release offers deeper insight into the film’s vision of cinematic mythmaking. Genya and Kyoji’s act of going through a dark tunnel (see figure 1) right before reaching Chiyoko’s reclusive abode, Kon discloses, is fraught with mystical, “apocalyptic meaning” (22). Though their physical pilgrimage ends with their emergence from the tunnel, it marks the beginning of their existential pilgrimage right into Chiyoko’s narrative, a “sweeping… mélange of fantasy and history” in which her personal life and cinematic roles (spanning from the Sengoku period of the 15^th – 17^th centuries to the distant space-age future) bleed into one another (23). Reserving our analysis on the ritual dimensions of the characters’ fictive performances for the next section, for now we limit our attention to the simple fact that Genya and Kyoji are virtually teleported to “another world” through their ostensible documentary-making.

If “the manifestation of the sacred ontologically founds the world” that homo religiosus inhabits, the originary hierophany founding the cinematic worlds within Millennium Actress must be located in Chiyoko’s first and only encounter with the dissident artist she shelters and with whom falls in love (24). During the one momentous conversation they share, he paints in her mind a vignette of himself painting upon the snow-covered plains of Hokkaido, conjuring a “strange, distant world” into which she finds herself helplessly caught up. At the start of this sequence, the phenomenological realism of poetic worlds is evoked by the quasi-apparitional manner in which Chiyoko materializes in the Hokkaido of their imagination (see figure 2). Toward the end of his description, this realism is again expressed through the sound of wintry gales accompanying the dissolve (from a close-up shot of Chiyoko against blue Hokkaido skies to a shot of her back in the cramped hut), as she gently bends her shoulders forward as if feeling the chill.

 

Figure 2

Notwithstanding the sincerity of Chiyoko’s devotion to her first love, it is probably the enduring power of this image – of her standing by his side in snowy Hokkaido watching him paint – that effects the “breakthrough of the sacred into [her] World,” fueling her relentless pursuit of her beloved and generating a millennia of filmic universes (25). Thus begins her illustrious career: she accepts Ginei Studio’s offer to star in their next film all so that she might be able to head to Manchuria, to perchance meet her beloved there. Or, as Eiko puts it snarkily while they are abroad the liner, Chiyoko appears to be going to Manchuria “for fun” (asobu). Though somewhat impulsive or childish a reason for such a major decision (she is still but a girl, after all), we may divine a method in her madness. In view of Thomas’s keen etymological observation that asobu refers to “[the will] to liberate one’s mind and body from daily life, and to entrust one’s self to another reality” – and further, there that is a “sexual register” to the term – we might discern yet another strand of the film’s discourse on cinematic mythmaking (26). Even the simplest gestures of playful, romantically-charged abandonment, Millennium Actress seems to show, can be charged with religious import, bearing infinite mythmaking potential.

II. Practical / Performance

With an understanding of the theoretical dimensions of Millennium Actress’s filmic religiosity in place, we proceed to its practical, or ritual, aspects. Religious experience, according to Wach, always “involves an imperative, a commitment which impels man to act” (27). In all paronomastic seriousness, we might note that in Millennium Actress the experience of filmic religiosity indeed impels one to “act.” For Chiyoko, acting is far more than a craft or a vocation. It is an existential ritual by which a foundational hierophany is made present, the sacred act through which she asserts her being and becoming:

The rite always consists in the repetition of an archetypal action performed in illo tempore (before history began)…. By its repetition, the act coincides with the archetype, and time is abolished. We are witnessing, so to speak, the same act that was performed in illo tempore, at the dawn of the universe (28).

Whether as a Sengoku era princess sprinting headlong into a burning tower; as an acrobatic Edo (1603-1868) ninja bounding through dense forests; or as a geisha running with wooden clogs through the peopled streets of Kyoto: through diverse social-historical celluloid contexts, Chiyoko reenacts the first chase she mounted as a teenager to the train station and upon its platform, after she learned that the dissident painter had left.

Figure 3

 

Figure 4

In a climactic sequence toward the end of the film, she dashes out of the Ginei Studios office upon reading the letter her beloved had written to her during the war, delivered decades late by the now-decrepit and penitent “Man with the Scar.” To the frenetic, escalating strains of Hirasawa Susumu’s “mythological” score, the employment of rapid, feverish parallel editing as Chiyoko races pantingly toward the train station in the rain speaks volumes on the archetypal nature of her first chase (see figure 3) – and the corresponding ritual nature of her performances across epochs (see figure 4) (29). As Kon puts it, she is “like a time traveler… running through time” (30). In the reenactment of this primordial running, past, present and future are fused in moments of filmic eternity, and she fulfills the meaning not only of her titular epithet as “millennium actress,” but also of her very name: “Chiyoko,” a “child of a thousand generations.”

Yet, unlike the structure of traditional metaphysics, Chiyoko’s transcendence of time through ritual performance is not merely a one-way street that makes present the archetypal act that occurred before the foundation of her cinematic worlds. “Each artistic performance,” writes Robert P. Crease, “rather than repeating or echoing, is a creation that pushes forward to produce what is repeated” (31). The relationship between ritual eternity and performative desire may be further elucidated by Bill Nichols’s concept of the “fantasmatic”:

[R]enactments effect a temporal vivification in which past and present coexist in the impossible space of a fantasmatic. This form of coexistence revolves around a lost object and the signifiers that serve as resurrected ghosts that both haunts and endow the present with psychic intensity. Reenactments, like other poetic and rhetorical tropes, bring desire into being and with it the fantasmatic domain wherein the temporality of lived experience and the efficacy of ideology find embodiment (32).

The key that the dissident painter hands to her for safekeeping; the almost-full moon on nights before the fifteenth of each month; even the way she slips and falls in the snow while running to the train station as a teenager: throughout the film (but most intensely in the aforementioned climactic sequence), these all function as signifiers for the ghost of her lost beloved that “[haunt] and endow the present with [the] psychic intensity” of romantic desire. In other words, perhaps akin to the dynamics of God’s cosmological providence as understood by process theologians, we might understand Chiyoko’s ritual reenactments as a continuously creative process that resurrects and sustains the primordial chase, as well as the desire in and behind it.

Figure 5

While directed toward a man and hence erotic in nature, Chiyoko’s performative desire is to be most fully understood as an expression of youthful lifeforce (33). This is evident in Eiko’s jealous recognition that “chasing one man kept [Chiyoko] young,” and more clearly in the sequence near the start of the film when Chiyoko begins recounting her biography. Flipping, as it were, through a series of black and white photos from her earliest years, Chiyoko reveals that she was born during the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923, the catastrophe that took the life of her father. The first shot of her childhood self in animated liveliness then has her as a running schoolgirl (presumably at some sporting event; see figure 5), to the sound of her heavy panting. These details, small by immensely significant, underscore the existential tenor of her chase: greater than the upheavals of history and the nearness of death, the film suggests, is the indomitable desire for life, for liveliness. In this way, through their repeated performance both in life and film (there is no distinction between the two for Chiyoko, as they reflect and reinforce each other), the “simple physiological acts” of running and chasing emerge as sacramental rituals through which Chiyoko communicates and perpetuates the “force which [stands] for Life itself” (34). Whereas avant-garde and Brechtian theory hold that the alienating effects of detached performativity enable ideological protest and critique, the aesthetics of performance in Millennium Actress demonstrates the power of affective engagement for practical, life-affirming existential action (35).

III. Sociological / Community

To complete our Wachian approach to the film, let us now consider the sociological dimensions of filmic religiosity presented in Millennium Actress. “Entertainment and ritual are braided together,” Richard Schechner points out, “neither one being the ‘original’ of the other” (36). In the film, the co-equality of the two is readily seen in the dynamic relationship between Chiyoko’s performances and their creative consumption. On the one hand, taking a “vertical,” production-driven definition of the consumption of film genres, Genya’s consumption of his idol’s movies follows the logic of ritual performance as well (37). Just as Chiyoko’s performances were sparked by an originary hierophany, these performances themselves become occasions and spaces for Genya to participate as an agent of cinematic mythmaking.

There is, for one, the hagiographic documentary that he is making, which shall surely assume canonical status amongst Chiyoko’s fans upon her passing. More pointedly, far from being a passive and apathetic observer, in the process of shooting this documentary Genya actually plays an active role in the events as they transpire in Chiyoko’s films. Though starting out with an attempt at objective distance – as Chiyoko’s mother argues with the managing director of Ginei Studios, he all but sits quietly in the room, even carefully dodging the latter’s gesticulating arms – Genya becomes increasingly involved in Chiyoko’s reenactments of her mythic chase. Be it as the loyal general Genemon taking an arrow for his princess in late medieval Japan; as the minder at the geisha house who frees her from incarceration; or (with a hat-tip to Toei’s wildly successfully Torakku Yaro series) as a burly truck-driver who gives her a ride to Hokkaido: in all these roles Genya engages in a generic performance as Chiyoko’s loyal protector, helping her to continue her mythic chase.

Figure 6

Kyoji’s evolution from detached documenter (“don’t meddle,” he tells Genya at first) to enthusiastic participant, in particular, illustrates how one is socialized into the “genre community” centered around Chiyoko’s films (38). Initially incredulous at Genya’s impassioned participation in Chiyoko’s narrative (“Since when?!”), he too is eventually immersed in the alternate mythic reality, cheering Chiyoko and Genya on (“Here’s a role that suits you!”). And when he even loses his camera near the end of the film to restrain a Genya hysterical at Chiyoko’s imminent blast-off into space (see figure 6), we see that

[f]ilms do not merely appear on a screen; rather, they only exist in any real sense as far as they are watched, becoming part of the fabric of our lives. Film viewing is thus a social activity that alters our interactions with the world (39).

Recalling the sociologically-rich biblical dictum that “where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them” – the social expression of filmic religiosity shared by Chiyoko, Genya, and Kyoji portrays how religious and genre communities are formed through repeated, intersubjective confirmation of otherwise solipsistic film-religious experiences (40).

 

Figure 7

On the other hand, adopting a “horizontal,” reception-based definition of film consumption, Millennium Actress corroborates Rick Altman’s thesis that genres (in this case, that of Chiyoko’s chase) “do not exist until they become necessary to a lateral communication process, that is until they serve a constellated community” (41). That is to say, Chiyoko’s ritual performance of the mythic chase is possible not only because of her passion for her beloved, but also because there is a community centered around her adoration and the creative consumption of her films. The various forms of paraphernalia that appear throughout the film – magazines, posters, billboards, photographs, and not to forget Genya’s documentary itself – indicate the existence of an invisible community for whom Chiyoko’s films serve as a medium of communication amongst themselves (42). Located right around the midway point of the film, the following shot of Genya pulling Chiyoko along in a rickshaw – with Kyoji following along in the background, as if on a dolly (see figure 7) – is a picture of the social ecology of communal filmic religiosity: it is the love Chiyoko receives from fans like Genya that propels her ritual performances, and in that, her continued self-giving toward mythic self-actualization. Chiyoko herself, perhaps, intimates some cognizance of this economy of giving and receiving through her refrains of gratitude (“I will not forget your loyalty;” “I won’t forget this”) whenever Genya comes to her aid.

In light of Emile Durkheim’s insight that “religious representations are collective representations that express collective realities,” we see that Genya’s adulation of Chiyoko can simultaneously represent Japanese cinematic culture’s commemoration of its own rituals, symbols, and mythmaking potency (43). This reading is supported by Kon’s comments on the historicity of the various period settings:

Most modern Japanese have specific images of the Edo Period, which are not necessarily the actual Edo Period. Television and movies have created those particular images…. What we included is our image of history. I wanted Chiyoko to run through such images. Historical verification doesn’t really matter in this case. We created this film with our own vision of Japanese history (44).

Mirroring the “substantial increase in generic intertextuality” in the new millennium, Millennium Actress – like the “memorial” (memoriaru) documentary Genya is making (4:17) – fulfills a “pseudo-memorial function,” recalling the stories, characters, and themes deemed significant not by Japan history and society per se, but by the Japanese history and society as represented and remembered through its mythological cinematic narratives (45).

IV. “The Most Important Thing of All”

Through its different expressions its filmic religiosity hitherto examined, Millennium Actress, in Kon’s words, is fundamentally a “film about a human being,” reflecting a particular understanding of what it means to be human in the new millennium (46). The question that remains for us to explore in this final section is this: exactly what vision of humanness does the film present? If we are to take seriously Ortabasi’s interpretation of Millennium Actress as an “otaku fantasy” retelling of Japanese history by an “undisputed denizen of the otaku realm,” then it becomes imperative that we understand the film’s vision of humanness within the context of otaku postmodernism (47).

Though bearing the idiosyncrasies of contemporary Japanese culture and significantly shaped by the history of postwar Japan, otaku postmodernism ought not to be regarded as an “exotic or uniquely Japanese” phenomenon (48). Rather, as “product of the late state of global capitalism that results from larger world-historical conditions,” it stands as a critical “focal point for understanding both Japanese society and the postmodern world” (49). According to Azuma Hiroki, in otaku postmodernism “the world drifts about materially, without giving meaning to our lives,” without a “grand empathy” from which we receive existential comfort (50). With the collapse of grand metanarratives and the “forfeiture of the competition of transcendence,” the only mode of existence available to the postmodern otaku, it is claimed, is that of the dehumanized “animal,” a cynical creature bereft of intersubjective desire and aspiration toward self-transcendence (51). The filmic religiosity of Millennium Actress, I contend in the face of these pessimistic pronouncements, offers an alternate model of humanness that not only reflects homo religiosus’ enduring drive toward mythic meaning-making, but also represents a form of existential wisdom par excellence. Given that Chiyoko’s precious key is in fact the key to an artist’s supply chest (surely a metaphor for cinematic myth-making), it will be argued that Millennium Actress points allegorically to the profoundly (re-)humanizing nature of the experience of filmic religiosity, a religiosity marked by the practice of faith, hope, and love (52).

 

Faith

In Millennium Actress, cinematic myths play a vital role in sustaining the capacity to live – and thrive – before the facticity of death. Amidst the myriad vicissitudes that buffet existence, Chiyoko’s mythic movie-making cultivates faith: neither in a deity who supernaturally intervenes in earthly affairs, nor in blessed escape to some other-worldly pure land, but in humanity’s own potential to transcend its finitude through creative action in this world:

The true function of mythical ideas is to present and interpret events in terms relative to spirit…. Myth is expression, it is not prophecy. For this reason myth is something on which the mind rests; it is an ideal interpretation in which the phenomena are digested and transmuted into human energy, into imaginative tissue (53).

The inevitability of death is symbolized by the old woman spinning a wheel, who appears mysteriously at various junctures like the witch in Kurosawa Akira’s Throne of Blood (1957). Near the end of Millennium Actress, in a point-of-view shot of Chiyoko staring at a framed portrait of her girlhood self, the reflection upon the glass reveals the old woman to be none other than her own projection of her older self (see figure 8), of her existential fears and anxieties toward death and decay. The old woman’s spinning wheel, though, signifies the nonlinearity of time; as Kon explains, the body may perish, but the “spirit, or thoughts” of a person can persist beyond time (54). Linking this wheel to the projection reel of the camera, we might plausibly read the old woman’s declaration that “what may not be in this world will be in the next” as intimating how the soul can attain immortality, in a real sense, through filmic creativity. For Chiyoko, fideistic surrender to cinematic mythmaking is the means by which she sets herself “free from merely automatic actions (without sense or meaning), from change, from the profane, from nothingness” (55).

Figure 8

In Throne of Blood, desire and delusion lead to carnage. The witch’s prophecies have a supernatural element to them, but more than anything else, they are self-fulfilling prophecies around which Washizu’s own vainglorious ambitions crystallize. While the same psychological structure is at work in Chiyoko’s entrusting of herself to cinematic asobu, in Millennium Actress cinematic desire – a delicious delusion of sorts – is instead a medium for humanity to attain rebirth through death. Just as Chiyoko’s birth continued the family line after her father’s death (“He was killed, and it was as if his life had been traded for mine”), the devastation wrought by the Great Kanto Earthquake brought renewal and vigor to the Japanese film industry, spawning the pre-war films through which Chiyoko would express her ontic vitality (56). And in Chiyoko’s recollection that “wanting to make good films was all that kept [them] going” after the war even in the absence of food and clothes, we hear – to the faint background whirring of a film projector (53:50-54:39) – a moving testimony to the strength and consolation that filmic fideism can bring to reconstruction efforts in the wake of collective trauma.

 

Hope  

If cinematic myths cultivate faith in the human potential for regeneration through death, in Millennium Actress their ritual reenactment provides drive and direction to this potential, galvanizing one’s being with transformative hope. The dissident painter’s poetic homage to the promise present on every night before the full moon (“After the full moon it starts to wane. But with the 14^th night, there’s still tomorrow… and hope;” see figure 9) finds explication in Viktor Frankl’s logotherapeutic wisdom:

What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal, a freely chosen task. What he needs is not the discharge of tension at any cost but the call of potential meaning waiting to be fulfilled by him. What man needs is not homeostasis but what I call “noo-dynamics,” i.e. the existential dynamics in a polar field of tension where one pole is represented by a meaning that is to be fulfilled and the other pole by the man who has to fulfill it (57).

Chiyoko attains existential authenticity to the extent that she engages in the ritual performance of chase, her “freely chosen task” of “striving and struggling” toward fulfillment. Acting first becomes her method of self-actualization during her virgin shoot in Manchuria. Initially still the timid child forgetting her lines and rendered voiceless during filming, she is suddenly emboldened by the hope of seeing her beloved again, and asserts her selfhood dramatically by performing the unfabricated role of an “I that sets out to encounter a you” (58). Her “tensionless state” of retirement and solitude without her key, thus, constitutes an inauthentic mode of being; it was as if she had lost a part of herself, she says, without the key that reminded her of the importance of living in hope.

 

Figure 9

Chiyoko’s hope, we note, is not grounded in some metaphysical covenant or metanarrative, but rather in the simple “pinky promise” she had made with the dissident painter. Still, we might draw from here an allegorical lesson on the fittingness of innocent religious belief in postmodernity: “in truths dependent on our personal action, faith based on desire is certainly a lawful and possibly an indispensable thing” (59). Chiyoko’s performance of hope carries with it the full brunt of existential risk. As indicated by the numerous film sequences where she finds him killed (see figure 10), she is all too aware that her hope may be in vain. Nevertheless, sacrificing all other romantic possibilities and indeed all that she is (at least until the younger Otaki and Eiko steal her key), she wagers that her beloved is still alive, and that they might meet again one day. Whereas postmodern cynicism might be inclined to err on the side of agnosticism or atheism, Chiyoko exemplifies William James’s description of the earnest religious practitioner who “regard[s] the chase for truth as paramount, and the avoidance of error as secondary” (60). Nevertheless, stated in terms of Pascal’s wager, Chiyoko’s hopeful chase is depicted as the liveliest and most vivifying option she has. If he is alive and she finds him, she gains everything; but if she never finds him or if he turns out to be dead (which he does), by having applied and exerted herself toward a worthwhile goal she has still filled her life with purpose. If “to be humanly existing we must wager, and enact our wager,” then even in (as Kyoji puts it) “chasing a shadow” – the trace of an imaginatively-reified presence – through her acting, she achieves a state of deep, hoping humanness (61).

 

Figure 10

 

Love

Chiyoko’s pursuit, finally, is a passionate performance of love, a self-transcending act through which she not only paradoxically attains self-actualization and humanization, but also engenders mimetic desire in others (like Genya) in their own quests towards these same ends:

[B]eing human always points, and is directed, to something or someone, other than oneself – be it a meaning to fulfill or another human being to encounter. The more one forgets himself – by giving himself to a cause to serve or another person to love – the more human he is and the more he actualizes himself (62).

An unsympathetic stance toward otaku postmodernism, on the one hand, might critique the fact that both Chiyoko’s love for the dissident painter and Genya’s parallel love for her are driven not by the commitment to intersubjective sociality, but rather by individualistic addiction to the emotionalistic rush of media consumption: in the same way that Genya is besotted with Chiyoko for the moe-elements (such as doe-eyed purity) and melodramatic motifs (such as eternal devotion to one’s first love) she embodies, it is the sheer romanticism that Chiyoko associates with the simulacra of the dissident painter that kindles in her the “fictional desire” (moe) to act (63). And though there is some kind of community formed between Chiyoko, Genya, and Kyoji in their participatory recollection of Chiyoko’s life and films, the critic might point out that their sociality is sustained by interest in “particular kinds of information” (in this case Japanese film history and trivia about an idol’s life), and are in actuality “quite distant from those of modern human beings” (64).

A charitable – and arguably more accurate – reading of otaku postmodernism, on the other hand, would find much to affirm about the love exhibited in Millennium Actress. Though there is certainly something to be said about the importance of reciprocity for meaningful human relationships, the film itself depicts Chiyoko’s and Genya’s fictive desires in a deeply positive light. Rather than being somehow sub-par or even malformed, the one-sidedness of their passion for their respective beloveds can be viewed as a form of egoless agape, a love that gives and persists independent of the other, without expectation of return (65). Further, the interaction between Chiyoko, Genya, and Kyoji actually bears the marks of healthy intersubjectivity that thinkers like Azuma (following Alexander Kojeve) uphold as essential to humanness (66). Besides reciprocity, their relationship is characterized by hospitality (she welcomes them into her home), openness (they share their life stories with each other), humor (Kyoji pokes fun of Genya), mirth (their reenactments are a source of merriment), concern (Chiyoko tells Genya not to strain himself pulling the rickshaw; Genya and Kyoji are the ones by her side when she dies), and sacrifice (Genya risks his life to save Chiyoko). However postmodern it might be, the picture of communality in the film clearly brims with optimism.

In the final analysis, corresponding to the logic of what Peter Brooks calls the melodramatic “moral occult” in secular(ized) society, Millennium Actress stands as a postmodern metanarrative of love in which transcendence and humanization converge as one and the same thing (67). This metanarrative is not some objective, transcendent systems of values from which subjects derive meaning, as modernity or traditional theology would have it. Instead, in the film’s otaku postmodernity metanarratives are mythically/cinematically generated by the subjective personality, the “source of overriding imperatives, now ‘identified with emotional states and psychic relationships, so that the expression of emotional and moral integers is indistinguishable” (68). Whereas the classical Japanese melodrama that the film alludes to (such as those of Ozu Yasujiro and his muse Hara Setsuko) “dramatizes a time in which history is perpetually lost” (69), the postmodern melodramatics of Millennium Actress “operates on the level not so much of ‘Yes, but…’ than of ‘So what!’” (70), articulating a powerful protest against mono no aware and its sad, “serene acceptance of a transient world” (71).

Figure 11

Figure 12

In the film’s penultimate sequence, the aged Chiyoko lies upon her deathbed with Genya and Kyoji by her side, giving her final words before laying her eyes to rest. From here the film’s final fades in, depicting the younger Chiyoko in a space shuttle preparing for blast-off. The close link between the two shots’ mise-en-scenes – Chiyoko’s youthful countenance squarely replaces the elderly features of her older self, while it is as if her oxygen mask morphs into a space helmet (see figures 11 and 12) – bears eloquent witness to the transcendence of mortality that can be achieved through love, mediated through the performance and consumption of filmic myth. As Chiyoko’s shuttle blazes through an infinity of interstitial space and time, the film culminates in a close-up of Chiyoko as she utters her revelatory pronouncement: “after all, it’s the chasing after him I really love.” Though the fact that Chiyoko’s beloved had long been dead could have easily been allegorized into a lament of metaphysical or socio-historical loss, Millennium Actress chooses to deny death from having the last word. Thus, upon Chiyoko’s ageless youthful face an alternative redemption history is inscribed: one of film-mythic fideism, performative hope, and self-actualizing love.

Endnotes

1. Stewart M. Hoover, Religion in the Media Age (New York: Routledge, 2006), 1.
2. Ibid., 3.
3. George J. Tanabe, “Religions of Japan in Practice,” in Asian Religions in Practice: An Introduction, ed. Donald S. Lopez, Jr. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 154.
4. Jolyon Baraka Thomas, “Shukyo Asobi and Miyazaki Hayao’s Anime,” Nova Religio: The Journal of Alternative and Emergent Religions 10, no. 3 (2007), 74. See also Jolyon Baraka Thomas, “Religion in Japanese Film: Focus on Anime,” in The Routledge Companion to Religion and Film, ed. John Lyden (New York: Routledge, 2009).
5. Mircea Eliade, qtd. in Gregory J. Watkins, “Introducing Theories of Religion through Film: A Sample Syllabus,” in Teaching Religion and Film, ed. Gregory J. Watkins (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 248.
6. Kon Satoshi, “Director Kon Satoshi Interview: Comments from Interview with Dreamworks DVD Producer,” http://www.dvdvisionjapan.com/actress2.html (accessed January 14, 2012). This interview was formerly available on the film’s official English website, http://www.milleniumactress-themovie.com/.
7. A. O. Scott, “To the Samurai and Godzilla, With Love,” The New York Times, September 12, 2003, http://movies.nytimes.com/movie/review?res=9A07EED6133BF931A2575AC0A9659C8B63 (accessed January 14, 2012).
8. See Melek Ortabasi, “Indexing the Past: Visual Language and Translatability in Kon Satoshi’s Millennium Actress,” Perspectives: Studies in Translatology 14, no. 4 (2009): 278-291 and Melek Ortabasi, “National History as Otaku Fantasy: Satoshi Kon’s Millennium Actress,” in Japanese Visual Culture: Explorations in the World of Manga and Anime, ed. Mark Wheeler Macwilliams (Armonk, New York: M. E. Sharpe, 2008): 274-294.
9. In this paper I adopt Viktor Frankl’s threefold definition of “existential.” The term refers to “(1) existence itself, i.e. the specifically human mode of being; (2) the meaning of existence; and (3) the striving to find a concrete meaning in personal existence, that is to say, the will to meaning” (Victor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning [New York: Pocket, 1984], 123).
10. Kon, “Director Kon Satoshi Interview,” emphases mine.
11. The reader is directed to the official Millennium Actress website for a fine, informative synopsis of the film.
12. Kenneth Turan, “Movie Review: Millennium Actress,” Los Angeles Times, September 12, 2003, http://web.archive.org/web/20071016220159/http://calendarlive.com/movies/reviews/cl-et-kenny12sep12,2,5118759.story?coll=cl-mreview (accessed January 14, 2012).
13. John Culkin, qtd. in Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1994), xi. Though commonly attributed to McLuhan, this aphorism was itself worded by his long-time friend and colleague Culkin as an explanation of McLuhan’s perspective. See Lance State, “Marshall McLuhan’s message was imbued with conservatism,” The Guardian, July 26, 2011, http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/jul/26/marshall-mcluhan-conservatism-medium-is-message (accessed January 14, 2012).
14. “Everything [in and about the film],” Kon discloses, “was derived from the concept of ‘trompe l’oeil.’” See Kon Satoshi and Murai Sadayuki, “A Conversation With the Filmmakers,” Millennium Actress, http://www.milleniumactress-themovie.com/ (accessed January 14, 2012).
15. Bert O. States, “Performance as Metaphor,” Theater Journal 48 no. 1 (1996), 25.
16. Joachim Wach, Types of Religious Experience (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951), 34.
17. Ibid., 38-39.
18. Kon Satoshi, “Interview: Satoshi Kon,” February 11, 2011, http://www.midnighteye.com/interviews/satoshi_kon.shtml (accessed January 14, 2012).
19. Ibid.
20. Scott, “To the Samurai and Godzilla, with Love.”
21. George Santayana, “Religion as Moral Symbolism,” in Religious Belief and Philosophical Thought: Readings in the Philosophy of Religion, ed. William P. Alston (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1963), 567.
22. Millennium Actress, dir. Kon Satoshi, DVD (Universal City, CA: Dreamworks Home Entertainment, 2001).
23. Scott, “To the Samurai and Godzilla, with Love.”
24. Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion, trans. William R. Trask (New York: Harcourt, 1987), 21.
25. Mircea Eliade, Myth and Reality, trans. William R. Trask (New York: Harper & Row, 1968), 6.
26. Jolyon Baraka Thomas, “Errata and Commentary: ‘Shukyo Asobi and Miyazaki Hayao’s Anime’” Jolyon Baraka Thomas, http://thomasresearch.org/jolyon/Shukyo_Asobi_Errata.html (accessed January 14, 2012). Also see Thomas, “Shukyo Asobi and Miyazaki Hayao’s Anime,” 76-77.
27. Wach, Types of Religious Experience, 33.
28. Mircea Eliade, Patterns in Comparative Religion, trans. Rosemary Sheed (New York: World, 1963), 32.
29. To Kon, Hirasawa’s music “is a combination of scientific and mythological images” (Kon, Director Kon Satoshi Interview”).
30. Ibid.
31. Robert P. Crease, qtd. in States, “Performance as Metaphor,” 128, first emphasis mine.
32. Bill Nichols, “Documentary Reenactment and the Fantasmatic Subject,” Critical Inquiry 35 (Autumn 2008), 88.
33. For a systematic and compelling treatment of the relationship between eros, ontology, and phenomenology, see Jean-Luc Marion, The Erotic Phenomenon, trans. Stephen E. Lewis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006).
34. Eliade, Patterns in Comparative Religion, 31.
35. See Bertolt Brecht, “Short Description of a New Technique of Acting which Produces an Alienating Effect,” in Bertolt Brecht, Brecht on Theater: The Development of an Aesthetic, ed. John Willett (New York: Hill and Wang, 1964), 136-147.
36. Richard Schechner, Performance Theory (New York: Routledge, 2003), 173.
37. Rick Altman, Film / Genre (London: BFI, 1999), 162. I am indebted to Diane Wei Lewis for genially directing me to Altman’s book.
38. Genre communities, broadly defined, are social groups formed around specific, idiosyncratic cinematic motifs. See Altman, Film / Genre, 156-165.
39. S. Brent Plate, “Introduction: Filmmaking, Mythmaking, Culture Making,” in Representing Religion in World Cinema, ed. S. Brent Plate (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 5.
40. Matthew 18:20 (NRSV).
41. Altman, Film / Genre, 162.
42. Ibid.
43. Emile Durkheim, Elementary Forms of Religious Life, trans. Carol Cosman (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 11. In relation to the collective, Durkheim defines rituals as “ways of acting that are generated only within assembled groups and are meant to stimulate and sustain or recreate certain mental states in these groups” (Ibid.).
44. Kon and Murai, “A Conversation With the Filmmakers.”
45. Ibid., 194, 188.
46. Kon, “Director Satoshi Kon Interview.”
47. Ortabasi, “National History as Otaku Fantasy: Satoshi Kon’s Millennium Actress,” 283.
48. Jonathan E. Abel and Kono Shion, “Translator’s Introduction,” in Azuma Hiroki, Otaku: Japan’s Database Animals, trans. Jonathan E. Abel and Kono Shion (Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 2009), xviii.
49. Ibid., xviii, xv.
50. Azuma, Otaku: Japan’s Database Animals, 94-95.
51. Ibid., 95, 86-88.
52. 1 Corinthians 13:13 (NRSV).
53. Santayana, “Religion as Moral Symbolism,” 576.
54. Kon, “Director Kon Satoshi Interview”
55. Eliade, Patterns in Comparative Religion, 32.
56. See Joseph L. Anderson and Donald Richie, The Japanese Film: Art and Industry (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982), 47-62.
57. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning, 127.
58. Nichols, “Documentary Reenactment and the Fantasmatic Subject,” 79.
59. William James, “The Will to Believe,” in The Ethics of Belief Debate, ed. Gerald D. McCarthy (Atlanta, Georgia: Scholar Press, 1986), 68.
60. Ibid., 64.
61. Langdon Gilkey, “Events, Meanings, and the Current Task of Theology,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 53, Vol. 4 (Dec 1985), 728-729.
62. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning, 133.
63. Azuma, Otaku: Japan’s Database Animals, 47.
64. Ibid., 93.
65. See, for instance, Anders Nygren, Agape and Eros, trans. Philip S. Watson (New York: Harper & Row, 1969) and C. S. Lewis, The Four Loves (New York: Harvest, 1979).
66. Azuma, Otaku: Japan’s Database Animals, 86-87.
67. See Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 5ff.
68. Christine Gledhill, “The Melodramatic Field: An Investigation,” in Home is Where the Heart Is: Studies in Melodrama and the Woman’s Film, ed. Christine Gledhill (London: BFI, 1987), 31.
69. Catherine Russell, “‘Overcoming Modernity’: Gender and the Pathos of History in Japanese Film Melodrama,”  in Camera Obscura 35 (May 1995), 153.
70. Gledhill, “The Melodramatic Field: An Investigation,” 33.
71. Donald Richie, Ozu (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974), 52.