Issue #299: The Greatest Anime on Earth
I was born to pretend the Netflix batch release of the Pluto (2023) anime series is a weekly event for the sake of writing about each episode in as much detail as I can muster. So that’s what I did.
I also watched Fincher’s The Killer (2023) this weekend. It’s really good, but I think I’ll save long form writing about it until it’s more widely available and I can take screenshots. It comes out, also on Netflix, on November 10th.
Now where is that Netflix sponsorship…?
A Word on the End of Billions, “Admiral’s Fund” [spoilers ahead]
For a show as nihilistic as Billions (2016-23), it sure comes to a funny end. Everybody gets what they wanted and is happy except for Mike Prince, the guy who threatened to blow up the entire world with the U.S.A.’s nuclear arsenal. Not very subtle. If the show’s argument at its inception was: “everybody [both the financiers and the law enforcement] is bad,” what the show became is “everybody is good.” Everybody, that is, except for the guy who wants to launch nukes. It’s remarkable how neatly Billions wraps everything up to the benefit of every single character. The reason? After eight years, the audience likes them all too much. All of them except for Prince, who has been built up as sympathetic for the first two years he was in the show and then is transformed into a mustache twirling villain threatening utter apocalypse in the third.
It is almost pathetic how utterly Prince is dominated in “Admiral’s Fund.” All of his enemies and his allies are lined up against him. Even the two characters who didn’t betray him don’t remain loyal to him. Not that he doesn’t deserve it in the logic of the show. If this season of Billions has one unqualified success, it’s the transformation of Prince into such a compelling and menacing villain that elicits very little pathos from the audience. Its other success is a qualified one — it delivers wish fulfillment for the remaining characters to the degree of fan fiction. It may not be the most inspired artistic choice, but it at least delivers on the emotional beats where it should. Rarely is the ending the audience wants the one it should have. The way the show ends is a testament to the way the show’s goal changed. Billions had aspirations to be prestige TV, but someone realized they’d rather have a show that would hit like Suits (2011) on syndicated streaming a decade in the future.
I didn’t hate it, though. I predicted most of what happened in this ending, but there were surprises. The labyrinthine betrayal is an impressive plotting triumph. A fan might have been able to write the last ten minutes or so of this ending, but I’m not sure the ones that could have would have had the courage to put something so saccharine on the screen. Still, like I said, I didn’t hate it. Just, please, don’t make those spinoffs.
“Whether our killer is human or robot, there’s a devil inside them, and it must be stopped”: Robotic Repression in Pluto “Episode 1”
I am going to be writing about Pluto (2023) in this newsletter. A lot. This actually won’t be the first time, except I was writing about the same story in a different medium — Pluto (2003). The six year run of Naoki Urasawa’s manga must have been heaven.
Now, this year, we have the long awaited anime adaptation produced by Studio M2 and Netflix. M2 has called in some pretty big pinch hitters to get Pluto across the finish line, with Tezuka Productions, DR Movie, BILBA, the overworked MAPPA, and Studio VOLN each working on a few episodes. It is poetic that Tezuka Productions would lend a hand on the series. The two times they have collaborated with MAPPA in the past have been sublime, Kids on the Slope (2012) and Dororo (2019), the latter being another long awaited anime adaptation from an Osamu Tezuka manga from 1967 with a previous anime adaptation in 1969.
Tezuka Productions should have a hand in Pluto, because the Pluto manga is in turn Urasawa’s adaptation (or reinterpretation) of Tezuka’s Astro Boy (1952). Back in 2020 when I wrote about Urasawa’s work on Pluto, I drew attention to this conversation between Urasawa and Makoto Tezuka, Osamu’s son.
Urasawa’s Pluto is about as far from Tezuka’s Astro Boy as one can get, at least on the surface. They are generically different, Pluto is not age appropriate for the target audience of Astro Boy, Gesicht supplants Atom (Astro Boy in English, but known as Atom in all English translations of Pluto) as protagonist to match the shift in target audience. The Pluto manga is an act of radical transformation, a remake that genuinely remakes with all the flourish and menace of Urasawa’s most threatening and disturbing work such as Monster (1994).
But I’m not talking about the Pluto manga. Not primarily, anyway. Pluto’s animated adaptation is a tribute to another philosophy of adaptation — one of absolute fealty to the source material. As director, Toshio Kawaguchi has the oversight of Urasawa himself in the role of creative advisor. Kawaguchi’s Pluto is a frame for frame, scene for scene translation of Urasawa’s Pluto. Though this is Kawaguchi’s first outing as director, he has plenty of experience as a key animator for Akira (1988) and Princess Mononoke (1997) and animation director for Neon Genesis Evangelion’s (1995) eleventh episode, “The Day Tokyo-3 Stood Still.” For my money, one of Eva’s best episodes.
It’s interesting to see a superlative work be adapted in precisely the opposite manner as the adaptation that produced it. This artistic trajectory tells a story of radical autonomy for the creative. Urasawa rewrites the text and fills in the gaps following his recollection of Tezuka’s classic work, giving his own version of “The Greatest Robot On Earth” — the title of the Astro Boy arc he adapts — to the world. Kawaguchi does the exact opposite. As of the first episode, he has diverged only slightly from the contents of Pluto’s first volume. Gesicht’s brief encounter with Brando, it seems, will be reserved for episode two. Everything else has been lovingly and painstakingly translated from page to screen.
As a testament to his dedication to the source material, Kawaguchi opens Pluto with a Marvel Studios-like comic montage that plays out within the title’s text.
It emphasizes that Pluto is the manga. This work is simply an extension.
I am compelled to begin with these contextual and qualitative notes before I dive into the first episode, because everything was just so damn good. Yugo Kanno (not to be confused with Yoko Kanno) handles the score and hits just the right neo-noir (or neo-neo-noir?) notes, especially in “Clues to the Truth.”
There are times in “Episode 1” where I feel like I’m watching Lost Highway (1997) or Kiss Me Deadly (1955). You know the part.
There’s also the issue of translation. I always hate when there is only one set of English subtitles to go with an anime. If the English subtitles are a translation of the Japanese dialogue that don’t match the English script, that’s not great, but it’s forgivable. The worst is if the English subtitles just transcribe the English voice track. Translators don’t approach writing English voice scripts and English subtitles to a Japanese language script the same way.
Mercifully, with Pluto, Netflix did the right thing. There are two sets of English subtitles — one to accompany the Japanese voice track with a more literal translation and another that is a transcription of the English voice track that adapts the script to how English language speakers would talk. Take, for instance, the difference between these two lines about the mountain guide robot Mont Blanc, the first casualty of the show:
Japanese: “He also poured himself into programming a tree-clearing strategy that allows us to coexist with nature”
English: “The robot was also a tireless advocate for man’s better stewardship of nature”
The subtitles that accompany the Japanese audio are closer to the manga, but they don’t sound as good as the new English script to my ear.
There are also many other differences in the translations, including the name of the set of laws that protect robots’ rights. In Japanese, they are the “Robot Rights Protection Laws.” In English, they are the “International Robot Laws.” In these two examples, you can see how one translation focuses on detail and specificity at the expense of graceful phrasing. While the script made for the English voice track may sound more natural to native speakers, it loses some precision. I’m watching the show for the first time with the English voice track, then a second time in Japanese. Going back through and taking screenshots, I switch between the subtitles for key lines to compare and contrast. All screenshots and quotations, unless otherwise noted, are using the transcription of the English voice track.
I’m going to be savoring Pluto. My plan, for now, is to only watch one episode at a time. I won’t be watching the next episode until I’ve written about the previous.
Now, let’s really get started.
Anthony Hopkins as Brau 1589
At it’s core, Pluto is a murder mystery thriller. It’s a thriller of a particular kind, Urasawa’s adaptation seems clearly influenced by David Fincher’s Seven (1995) and Jonathan Demme’s Silence of the Lambs (1991). Silence of the Lambs is a potent intertext. While trying to solve the murder of forestry service robot Mont Blanc and robot rights activist Bernard Lanke, investigative super robot Gesicht (Shinshū Fuji/Jason Vande Brake) turns to imprisoned murder-bot Brau 1589 (Hideyuki Tanaka/SungWon Cho).
Brau is an anomaly. He is a robot imprisoned for killing a human when such an act is impossible. And he remains in his gruesome bondage because nobody can figure out why — or how — he did it when robots are uniformly programmed to be unable to kill humans.
Brau reminds Gesicht of this fact with a chilling soliloquy:
Just between us, the humans examined every last bit of it. My murderous artificial intelligence that is. They were so sure that a defect was to blame. But, no. They couldn’t find a single thing wrong with me. My AI passed the tests with flying colors. No flaw in sight. Can you imagine how terrified the humans were when they found that out? That’s why they keep me locked away down here, skewered and broken. If they’re that afraid, they should just pull out this spear. That would kill me dead. But, alas, my human captors are too spineless even for that.
Brau is nothing if not deceitful, like his inspiration Hannibal Lecter, so there are a few important elements about his account to consider. The first is the obvious lie regarding who knows how much his AI has been examined. Brau is seemingly confiding in Gesicht, telling him it’s “just between us,” but Gesicht knows what Brau is telling him already. It is, at least, common knowledge among law enforcement that a robot who could defy the hard coded laws that govern robotic conduct is imprisoned and accessible for visitation.
The other, relatively minor detail, is Brau’s description of human fear. He suggests that the ultimate expression of fear would be to kill him, but that the humans are even more spineless to the point that they can’t act in accordance with the height of fear. He’s right, of course, a triumph of contradictory human logic over cold and calculating robotic logic. If nothing else, Brau is not lacking in subtlety.
The social imperative of fear, in the sense that one might use -phobic as a suffix, is to kill. Brau is almost explaining his understanding of human nature. If humans are afraid of robots, they will destroy them out of that fear. Was it Brau’s own fear of this outcome that drove him to kill?
Another frequent trick of Brau is to ask to exchange memory chips with Gesicht. It may not be obvious what the result would be, but Pluto demonstrates the seriousness of such an exchange through an earlier incident between Gesicht and the unnamed wife of deceased constable bot Robby.
Gesicht gives Robby’s wife the memory chip and installs it such that she experiences first-hand her husband’s own death. That is the level of immediacy that a memory chip exchange occasions for a robot. They can experience each other’s memories.
The specter of Brau looms large over the series and his exchange with Gesicht brings to the forefront the primary concerns of the episode — some of which are carried through the entire series. Before going to meet Brau, Gesicht is mistaken for a human.
Brau’s capacity for killing also aligns him with humans. He does what robots can’t do. Brau’s murder and Gesicht’s ability to pass as human occasion a lot of questions, the most fundamental of which might be: “how does one tell one class of thing from another class of thing?” Or perhaps, “what separates one category of thing from another?” Is there a necessary condition, like flesh and biological functioning, that will always stand as the bulwark separating robot and human? Or is it simply a certain volume of sufficient conditions that must be met — self-awareness, free will, an unconscious, affective experience, empathy — to transform someone from a subject to a human subject? If a resemblance is substantive, deep, and enduring enough, would that make Gesicht human after all or Atom (Yoko Hikasa/Laura Stahl) a real boy?
The other question that comes to mind is one of memory. Memories are important to Brau and he wants to experience Gesicht’s. Gesicht also knows how important memories are, as does Robby’s wife, who declines his offer to delete her memories of Robby to spare her the pain of loss.
Memories become even more important in the story of North No.2 (Koichi Yamadera/Patrich Seitz) and Paul Duncan (Michio Hazama/Ron Bottitta). Because robots can re-experience and perfectly recall their memories — unless they are intentionally deleted — their relationship to temporality and memories as self-defining are different, perhaps different enough to distinguish them from humans.
The Greatest Robot On Earth
At the end of Gesicht’s visit to Brau, Brau suggests there are seven great robots being targeted by the killer that murdered Mont Blanc and Lanke. Among them, Atom, North No.2, and Gesicht himself. While Atom appears briefly in “Episode 1,” the focus is on Mont Blanc, Gesicht, and North No.2.
Each of the “greatest robots” takes a human capacity to its most sublime extreme. For Mont Blanc, he exceeds human compassion and selflessness. Gesicht is the paragon of logic, demonstrated through his detective work. North No.2 is an interesting case, perhaps why the episode (and the manga) spends so much time with him. The essence of North No.2 is his ability to feel pain and regret, inextricably attached to memories of killing that could just as easily be erased from his synthetic brain. He’s not the ultimate killing machine — if he were, he wouldn’t have died. And he’s not the pinnacle of human’s ability to compose music. What we see in North No.2’s ambition to become a piano player is how those negative affects, like pain and regret, transform into art. Whether the psyche is a biological or synthetic product, such a transformative capacity remains.
The trio of robots defy human potential. But if their greatness is something individual humans can only aspire to, it is perhaps those individual defining traits that set them apart from humans. Mont Blanc, for instance, is virtually worshipped. The labor required to assemble the setup for his memorial is provided entirely by volunteers who can’t help but collapse in tears as the memorial video is tested.
Professor Reinhardt (Ikkyu Juku/John Snyder), Mont Blanc’s creator, repeatedly calls Mont Blanc his son. Their relationship has all the tragic quality of any father who has to bury their son. Mont Blanc is also disinterested in human burial traditions or monuments to his achievements.
He is, unquestionably, an aspirational idea transformed into a metallic body. The love he inspires is because he manifests the height of a human virtue. To make a truly human robot, you would have to create one that’s average. The state of exception these robots exist in, and the depth of their feeling, intensify human characteristics enough that they seem distorted from human subjectivity. Paradoxically, they are too human to be human. Mont Blanc’s selflessness and North No.2’s self-punishment become uncanny in comparison to even the most extreme human behavior.
If Mont Blanc is humanity’s dream, North No.2 might be it’s nightmare.
Though he is designed for destructive purposes, he aspires to reject that for which he is made. North No.2’s attempt to self-determine and control his fate also seems human, or at least out of alignment with the notion of a machine only acting in accordance with its programming. His ultimate failure to disentangle himself from his function and his past seems more human, still. But where North No.2 is exceptional is in carrying out the duty of remembrance and in his capacity to transform tragedy into art. Even Duncan finally admits that North No.2 is capable of creating music, because of the depths from which it comes. Despite having no predisposition to playing music, North No.2’s piano playing and singing are fueled by the grief that haunts him in his dreams.
Does Gesicht Dream of Electric Sheep?
North No.2’s dreams, and his nightmares, are crucial to understanding how Pluto treats human and robot memory. But it is Gesicht who is the first entryway into this set of ideas, haunted by a dream of obscure meaning. It amounts to very little, just heavy breathing, running, and blood splatters. But Gesicht has been having the dream for quite a while.
His conversation with his maker, Professor Hoffman (Hiroshi Yanaka/Michael Sinterniklass), establishes both the science fiction and philosophical currents that define robotic dreaming and unconscious. He tells Gesicht, and, indirectly, the audience:
At this point, it’s pretty well-accepted within the scientific community that artificial intelligence includes a subconscious element. Still, it’s rare to encounter a robot that has any waking memory of the dream state. As the 20th-century psychiatrist Sigmund Freud was known to occasionally say, “Our dreams are more than just idle flights of the imagination. Dreams are expressions of our reality.”
While no version of that Freud quotation (English script, Japanese translation, or original manga) matches anything from the Standard Edition, the Freudian orientation of Pluto is clear. Dreams are significant, and robot dreams perhaps even more so.
Robotic dreaming is interesting as it relates to dreams. If robots have perfect recall through their memory chips, total memories cannot be repressed as such. And, if the deletion of a memory, as Gesicht suggests for Robby’s wife, leaves no traumatic residue, it suggests the paradigm of memory and unconscious that prohibits repression. A subject that doesn’t repress would suggest robot subjectivity fits within a Lacanian clinical structure of psychosis or perversion, but a close reading of Freud and Pluto indicates both that a subject with perfect recall can still repress and that a memory, however utterly extricated from the psyche, will always leave its mark.
In The Interpretation of Dreams (1899), Freud writes:
For reasons connected with the mechanism of association, as we have seen, the dream-process finds it easier to get control of recent or indifferent ideational material which has not yet been requisitioned by waking thought-activity; and for reasons of censorship it transfers psychical intensity from what is important but objectionable on to what is indifferent. (Emphasis added)
He argues here that dreams are not necessarily a reproduction of a repressed memory itself, but rather the repressed memory motivating the structure and content of the dream with the manifest content of the dream consisting of that which the subject is indifferent to. The complexity of Freud’s formulation of dreams, their manifest content arbitrary and incoherent but underwritten by latent content that comes from the unconscious, provides material to theorize about Urasawa’s vision for robots’ dreams. Freud’s explicit account of how repression works to produce dreams could translate to Gesicht or North No.2:
As we have seen, there are ‘repressed’ wishes in the mind, which belong to the first system and whose fulfillment is opposed by the second system. In saying that there are such wishes I am not making a historical statement to the effect that they once existed and were later abolished. The theory of repression, which is essential to the study of the psychoneuroses, asserts that these repressed wishes still exist—though there is a simultaneous inhibition which holds them down.
For a robotic consciousness with supposedly perfect recall, the both-and logic of a wish that is present but inhibited suits just fine. For Gesicht, it’s fatigue and existential dread that may drive his dreams.
The existential terror Gesicht experiences is because he is not human and must live within the confines of the International Robot Laws by compulsion, regardless of the fact that he would never aspire to break them. On the other hand, North No.2’s dreams are repetitions of his memories.
Humans forget by nature, but North No.2 must choose whether or not to forget through having someone else erase his memory data. He chooses not to, retaining the memories because he believes he deserves them.
Duncan’s initially adversarial relationship with North No.2 hinges in part on this issue. Duncan treasures his forgetting and attacks North No.2 for his attempts to excavate Duncan’s memories from his unconscious and the recollections of his countrymen.
Though Duncan happens to be wrong about the quality of the memories North No.2 rediscovers — they’re good memories, not bad ones — his attitude is Nietzschean here. In his Notebooks, Nietzsche writes:
Cast away your burden!
Forget man Man forget!
The art of forgetting is divine!
If you want to fly,
be at home in the heights;
Throw your heaviest weight into the sea:
here is the sea, throw yourself into the sea!
The art of forgetting is divine! (Nietzsche’s Last Notebooks 209, adjusted translation)
Following Nietzsche, Duncan draws a line between robot and human subjectivity. Because North No.2 can’t practice the “art of forgetting,” he is less human than Duncan. But it’s North No.2’s choice to remember that protects him — momentarily — from a return to the battlefield. And those memories, in turn, produce the art that helps Duncan see North No.2 as a relative peer.
Your name is Atom, right?
The digression into the daily life of Paul Duncan and North No.2 emphasizes ideas that will endure in Pluto. Before Duncan coming to accept North No.2, he is as disparaging of him as one could possibly be.
Because North No.2 is a robot, he can’t produce sounds with “heart.” This is the same logic that drives Duncan to only compose on the piano and not utilize any electronic instruments.
The note on which “Episode 1” ends, however, is that whether one is or isn’t human is less important than their choices and their actions. Urasawa sidesteps the difficult and thorny questions of what’s what, falsity and authenticity, in favor of two different systems of subjectivity of equal value. But there is always the haunting warnings of Brau. The heights that robots can reach may appear threatening. Some parents dream of their children surpassing them, others might resent their children for flying too close to the sun.
Weekly Reading List
All Substack edition
Sami Reiss interviews Kathleen Sorbara for a survey of on the ground vintage selling and the hits and misses of bargain hunting.
This is a slightly outdated edition of Crispin’s The Culture We Deserve, but her story here about the “Letterboxd Guy” has shaken me to my core. I have a love-hate relationship with Letterboxd. I love documenting substantive thoughts about movies in conjunction with their view date. I love relating films to one another through the elaborate lists I make. But I hate number ratings. I hate star ratings. And I hate when anybody discusses, outlines, elaborates, specifies, or otherwise adds complexity or context to the fundamental arbitrariness and meaninglessness of these star ratings.
I also don’t like talking about Letterboxd in public.
Anyway, this story has only reaffirmed my commitment to considering my star ratings of a movie not at all and providing those ratings even less than I do already.
Until next time.