Issue #319: I Know Rose Glass Has Seen the End of Evangelion
Issue #319: I Know Rose Glass Has Seen the End of Evangelion
I was so focused on Akira Toriyama last week, I didn’t get a chance to write about my Super Bowl — the Oscars. It was a tough year. Very competitive. And the movies were largely deserving. Between Oppenheimer, Killers of the Flower Moon, Poor Things, The Zone of Interest, Anatomy of a Fall, and The Holdovers, I would hate to be a director or actor with their first — and perhaps only — at bat for a major award. But some underdogs did take home highly contested categories. American Fiction won for Best Adapted Screenplay over Oppenheimer, Barbie, Poor Things, and The Zone of Interest which is frankly remarkable. Despite my enthusiasm for watching the Oscars, my trust in them as a critical assessor of film is nonexistent, so the win for American Fiction actually makes me like the movie a little less. I certainly put plenty of 2023 films over the sweeping ceremony winner, Oppenheimer. But what’s valuable about the Oscars as a cultural event is trying to understand what the voters are rewarding when they cast their votes.
A win I have nothing but enthusiasm for is Godzilla Minus One, however, winning Best Visual Effects in a category full of films with budgets orders of magnitude greater. Maybe “Best Visual Effects” was “Best Picture” all along.
Nolan took home a lot, his first Oscar wins. Robert Downey Jr.’s win was also his first. But the most shocking win of the night was Emma Stone for Best Actress, a category I think most people all but assumed Lily Gladstone had locked up. I was as surprised as Stone as she stepped up to accept the award. And it seems to me she accepted it with a profound amount of guilt winning over Gladstone. She discussed “taking [herself] out of it” and accepting the award on behalf of the tremendous effort collectively undertaken to create Poor Things, advice from director Yorgos Lanthimos. One could easily read her remarks as an endorsement of the great performances of everyone nominated in the category. But I unquestionably think they are pointed, with Gladstone in mind.
To whatever extent Stone’s win over Gladstone reflects systemic problems and oppressive structures, it is all the more interesting when read alongside Stone’s 2023 TV role on Nathan Fielder’s The Curse. As Whitney Siegel, Stone plays a real estate developer who “virtue signals” quite spectacularly despite her generational wealth accumulated through her father’s tenement buildings and barely legal slumlording. Siegel’s surface level benevolence covers over incessant self-aggrandizement. If Siegel were truly as naive as she presents herself, one might pity her bumbling through the events of The Curse, but as with all the characters in the show, none of their motives are what they appear today. If anything, Stone’s inadvertent complicity in the “robbery” of Gladstone’s award makes her a bit more like the outward facade of Siegel. But, Stone isn’t a TV show character, so “the audience” doesn’t see the inner life that is available for judgment in The Curse.
I don’t mean to be down on Emma Stone. And nothing against her. I would have voted for Lily Gladstone, and I think she deserved it on the merit of her performance, but Emma Stone was no joke in Poor Things. Oscar voters might have been subject to conscious or unconscious biases in their voting, or they might have been biased to favor a performance less grounded in human psychological realism but nonetheless convincing on the screen. It was just a bad year to be up for an Oscar.
This week, I wrote about Love Lies Bleeding (2024) among other things. Some spoilers for the movie ahead, though I tried my best to keep them light and contextless. But there’s no getting around the fact that I talk about the ending.
The Craterous Feminine in Love Lies Bleeding
Love Lies Bleeding begins with two symbols — a canyon and a crater.
One might call these dual symbols “yonic,” as in the opposite of phallic, but a yonic symbol has a whole host of connotations that Love Lies Bleeding rejects. The Hindu Yoni, from which the word “yonic” is derived, symbolizes fecundity, reproduction, and birth. At the risk of being accused of making an obvious point, this vision of femininity imposes all the hegemonic logic of patriarchy. This is exactly the logic that Love Lies Bleeding opposes.
For those reasons, it might be better to describe the canyon and crater, for the purposes of this film, as “concave” — though this is less evocative. The crater is crucial to the foundational logic of Rose Glass’s film. It is a reaction, the desolate aftermath of an impact. A meteor or bomb might leave a crater in the surface of the Earth, a gunshot or punch leaving a facsimile of one on the human body. It is a space of absence, the mark of annihilation. Within the crater, there is nothing but ash. The land within the crater is often ruined. A canyon is a natural formation, one without the necessity of destruction as cause, but rather the slow work of erosion. The two might collapse or overlap when up from the canyon arises a plume of smoke.
Love Lies Bleeding presents a vision of femininity with all the ruination and sterility of the crater. The principal characters, Lou (Kristen Stewart) and Jackie (Katy O’Brian), a lesbian couple, share in part the differentiating logic of gay male sex. Namely, what is threatening about queer sex is it has no reproductive possibility or alibi — as if heterosexual sex is fundamentally different in a world of condoms, birth control, and the widespread cultural recognition of elation when a man hears the words “you are not the father!” on daytime television. In “Is the Rectum a Grave?” (1987), Leo Bersani attributes sexual threat, vis-á-vis HIV, to both gay men and all women. He writes, “Women and gay men spread their legs with an unquenchable appetite for destruction” (211).
Bersani’s elaboration of sex in the 1987 essay describes the sex in Love Lies Bleeding. After narrating Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin’s opposition to pornography and association with broader sexual life, he describes, “the inestimable value of sex as—at least in certain of its ineradicable aspects—anticommunal, antiegalitarian, antinurturing, antiloving” (215). The alibi of productivity and procreation is essential to the maintenance of the fantasies that sustain heterosexual sex as an acceptable part of social life. Lou and Jackie’s relationship, and sex, never uphold that fantasy. The description of sex by Bersani, derived from the condemnation of it by MacKinnon and Dworkin, is a fitting account for the relationship between Lou and Jackie that is simultaneously violent, indulgent, self-destructive, and criminal — in a word, queer.
As Lou sheds her smoking habit, Jackie picks up a steroid habit. Lou offers the steroids to Jackie and facilitates their use. Jackie, on the other hand, has never used them — she describes her physique as “au naturel.” The administration of the injections by Lou stand in for sexual penetration. Likewise, the horrific result of the drugs, distended and distorted musculature under Jackie’s skin, makes Jackie more desirable to both Lou and the abstract gaze of the bodybuilding competition judges Jackie intends to subject herself to.
If this description comes across as at all “phobic,” or “problematic,” rest assured that Glass’s treatment of the subject matter is as novel as one can be within the generic strictures of romance and crime thriller. Lou and Jackie’s modes of relating to one another are by no means endemic to their lesbian coupling, but are in fact defiant of the outcomes to which each would otherwise be consigned. Lou, as the daughter of a career criminal, Lou Senior (Ed Harris), and Jackie, as a homeless hitchhiker, are profoundly imperiled in the normal course of their lives. Their mutual love is not productive, but it is protective, suggesting the possibility of Lou escaping her father’s shadow. Glass subverts many of the tropes of queer relationships and tragic crime thriller romances.
The unproductive vision of queer femininity in Love Lies Bleeding draws from myriad cinematic antecedents. Titane (2021), Blue Velvet (1986), Lost Highway (1997), and Kiss Me Deadly (1955) among them. One can’t help but see Gabrielle (Gaby Rodgers) from Kiss Me Deadly as a queer icon upon whose shoulders the curious Jackie stands. And while Love Lies Bleeding has obvious body horror elements, the Cronenberg film it has the most in common with is the one that hasn’t got any — A History of Violence (2005).
In Cronenberg’s most idiosyncratic film, Viggo Mortensen’s Joey Cusack lives under the assumed name Tom Stall. Unlike his cinematic antecedent, Jeff Markham (Robert Mitchum), Cusack is a dangerous, malignant, and irredeemable social force. The name is a bit on the nose, of course, for a movie about a hitman’s past catching up with him. Not for nothing, Ed Harris, who plays Lou Senior in Love Lies Bleeding, is cast as the antagonistic Carl Fogarty in A History of Violence. Stewart’s Lou mirrors Cusack in her attempt to eschew criminality and live normally. Though she is an out lesbian, what she covers over is her own history of violence and her relationship with Lou Senior. Cusack’s masquerade as a husband and father also implicitly entails a mimicry of his own straightness, denaturalizing what is ostensibly the way he understands his sexuality. A History of Violence may not involve any gay or lesbian characters, but it is a queer text by way of its interrogation of the heterosexual nuclear family.
Examination of Love Lies Bleeding and Bersani’s commentary wouldn’t be complete without a connection to the Lacanian non-relation. When Jackie desperately calls her younger brother on the phone and advises him “don’t fall in love. Love hurts,” the pain she is describing is the pain of enmeshment in a contradictory sexual-political nexus. The non in the Lacanian non-relation is the source of love’s pain. This non-relation can be described in a distorted fashion, without the complexities of sexuation, from Freud by way of Bersani, “[in Three Essays on the Theory Sexuality, Freud] suggests not only the irrelevance of the object in sexuality but also, and even more radically, a shattering of the psychic structures themselves that are the precondition for the very establishment of a relation to others” (217).
Lou and Jack (the nickname by which Lou often refers to Jackie, and Jackie itself already a nickname) are trapped between the poles of lesbian and heterosexual eroticism. Even through their very names, Lou seems to be the Junior to Lou Senior, but her name is actually Louise, a more demonstratively feminine name that is unlikely to be her father’s legal name. Nonetheless, she is assimilated into his patriarchal lineage as the heir apparent to his crime enterprise. Though less familially entrenched, Jaqueline gets to Jack by way of Jackie, another name trajectory from feminine to masculine. In another example, Lou is inspired with profound dread about her sexual competency and compatibility with Jack after learning that Jack is bisexual and enjoys penetrative sex. Afterwards, Lou attempts to assume the role of phallic authority to Jack, despite the penetration entailed by Lou’s administering injections of steroids to Jack. This anxiety on Lou’s part sets into motion the film’s latter half and underwrites the tense dynamic where Lou dictates to Jack precisely how to behave to avoid detection after the commission of a crime.
Reading Love Lies Bleeding as capturing the essence of the emergent social phenomenon of “girlrotting” means recognizing how both the film and this idea refuse the productive mandate of feminine embodiment. Though Lou and Jackie are anything but static, their mutual love is inadvertently self-destructive. Glass, in one of those subversions I mentioned, gives Lou and Jackie as close to a happy ending as two characters in a crime film can reasonably have. But in such a work, no one can get away clean, and the film ends with a corpse that is not yet rotting consigned to earth. Lou’s final act of strangulation of Daisy (Anna Baryshnikov) means she hasn’t been redeemed and the tragic end for the couple is only deferred. The fateful tomorrow that will never arrive on the screen reminds us that nothing exists for these characters outside of the film.
The End of Evangelion Post-Script
I couldn’t figure out how to fit this into the actual “essay” and writing the newsletter is always a race against time, but I have to draw out some similarities between Love Lies Bleeding and Hideaki Anno’s The End of Evangelion (1997). I watched the two movies back to back, and if you haven’t gotten this sense through the course of the newsletter, I have a tendency to draw parallels or argue for similarities between works that most people probably wouldn’t find similar. And, yes, in some cases, they might be a stretch. So, sitting down for Love Lies Bleeding after watching The End, I thought to myself, “what ridiculous claims will I make about the relationship between these two films simply because I watched back to back?” Well, as it turns out, I think the similarities are pretty obvious.
The “I just watched these movies back to back” argument is simple, but compelling. Lou and Jackie occupy the positions of Shinji (Megumi Ogata) and Asuka (Yuko Miyamura) with some mixture of their characteristics distributed between the two. The End of Evangelion is an extremely focused film in its attempt to resolve the anxiety of intersubjectivity. To put it another way, The End’s main tension and driver for its conflict is the question of whether absolute intimacy but no individuation is more desirable than individuals who can never truly understand one another. The film is not optimistic in this regard, and as a work of existentialism answers Sartre’s No Exit (1944) with the forceful exit from subjectivity of instrumentality. The film concludes with Shinji making the choice to embrace individuality and human interconnection, but he makes this decision too late to stop the entirety of human civilization from being reduced to primordial ooze except for his love interest, Asuka. The final moment between the two, rather than a triumph of their imperfect connection, is a solipsistic retreat into individual consciousness. Shinji tries to choke what appears to be Asuka’s corpse, conflating the life-giving act of CPR with the life-taking act of strangulation, but nonetheless is able to bring her back to life. Her last word to him, and the last word of the film, is “disgusting.”
Shinji’s final strangulation is different from an incident he hallucinates. Instead of being an act of violent resentment, it is a cathexis of the vital energy of the death drive. In the world of instrumentality, Shinji’s act is what brings life to Asuka’s corpse instead of killing her living body. Love Lies Bleeding ends on a surprisingly similar note, with some solipsism in the flight of Lou and Jack from society. They are alone now, and seemingly reject all familial and social ties outside of each other. They might as well be the last people on earth. Daisy, a woman who pursues Lou through the film, interrupts that harmonious separation from the social. While it appears that earlier in the film Jack killed her, Daisy survives. Lou restores the harmony between herself and Jack the same way as Shinji revives Asuka: with strangulation.
A slightly less substantive similarity is the turn to the absurd that Love Lies Bleeding takes in its final act. Foreshadowed by a Gulliver’s Travels cartoon, Jack becomes a giant and subdues Lou Senior. Her transformation would make an interesting side-by-side with Rei’s (Megumi Hayashibara) giant form in The End of Evangelion. The movies had enough in common that I would be surprised if The End of Evangelion wasn’t a part of Rose Glass’s cinematic history.
Why Did They Rebuild Nibelheim?
I’m not finished with Final Fantasy VII Rebirth (2024) yet, but I’m not enamored with every part of it. It is a great game. The revisiting and revisioning of the original Final Fantasy VII (1997) is compelling. What I expected going into Rebirth were significant divergences from the plot of Final Fantasy VII. That’s not what I got. And while there are differences, some significant, and certain parallel threads to the plot that weren’t present in the original, what has really intrigued me is just how similar the game is to its source material.
So far, the sequence of events and main plot beats have been the same. Rebirth recreates parts of Final Fantasy VII I thought would certainly hit the cutting room floor, like Cloud riding a dolphin to the top of Junon and a marching performance for Rufus Shinra. These moments were silly in 1997. The Rebirth version makes them patently absurd, leaning into the vernacular of Japanese RPG games in the same way as the recently released Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth (2024).
Now, I have reached Nibelheim, an important site for the Final Fantasy VII mythos. It inaugurates Rebirth as it did a new frontier of the original Final Fantasy VII. It gives players their first and only opportunity to play as Sephiroth, certainly in FFVII and likely in Rebirth. The return to Nibelheim, following a visit to Cosmo Canyon, is eerily similar to the story Cloud recounts of the town at the game’s opening. Nibelheim has been rebuilt, presumably by Shinra, making it easy for the FFVII developers to reuse the pre-rendered backgrounds from earlier. In Rebirth, developers reuse the models from the Nibelheim flashback with the same ease.
Despite the characters being able to recognize the newness of the rebuilt Nibelheim, this capacity for recognition doesn’t include the players. Of course, we know Nibelheim has been burnt down and see it ostensibly restored. But this restored version is literally the same as the one from the flashbacks. In Rebirth, Tifa sees that the materials used for this version of Nibelheim are pristine, but the actual materials, the pixels and code, are the same we’ve seen before.
Thus, the two versions of Nibelheim cause a collapse of past and present, especially for Cloud, who is able to recall things about his past revisiting Nibelheim that he wasn’t able to previously. There’s a similarity here between the structure of the Remake (2020) and Rebirth projects and the rebuilt Nibelheim.
The return to Nibelheim marks a divergence between Final Fantasy VII and Rebirth. In the original game, the inhabitants of Nibelheim accuse Cloud and his team of lying, asserting that Nibelheim was never rebuilt and has been standing in perpetuity despite what Cloud and Tifa claim. In Rebirth, the story is quite different. Nobody denies Nibelheim’s history, but the function of the town has changed. Rather than appearing to be a normal small town, Nibelheim has been turned into a treatment center for those with mako poisoning. In both games, Shinra is responsible for the rebuilding, but only in one version of the game is there an earnest reality denying cover up.
In both cases, Shinra’s attempt to reinvent Nibelheim and either misrepresent the town’s history or create a more positive association with it fails to accomplish its goal, at least in Cloud and his party’s case. The obscuring of reality brings back memories and convictions among the team.
Instead, the rewriting, revising, or redirecting from the past draws greater attention to that past. Final Fantasy VII is always already about such rediscovery, through Cloud’s misremembering of his own personal history. For Rebirth, the signification of Nibelheim is even more rich. The game itself makes the player question their recollection of the original Final Fantasy VII. “Did it really happen this way? Is this the same as what I remember?” My experience of this game has occasioned these questions more than once, and the answer isn’t always the same.
Nibelheim’s reconstruction is important, both within the logic of the games’ fiction and for the broader symbolism of the games’ symbolism. It presents a legend by which one can understand director Tetsuya Nomura’s goals when creating an expanded, elaborated, slightly differentiated Rebirth of the middle section of one of the most beloved games of all time. Contrary to what I anticipated, Rebirth is at least as reverent to its source material as Remake, if not more so. Despite the ways the game misfires (minigames, tiresome open world bloat), the relation to the origin text defies expectations and endlessly intrigues.
Weekly Reading List
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2024/mar/16/tommy-orange-my-whole-family-has-had-problems-with-addiction-including-myself — I haven’t finished Wandering Stars (2024) and, accordingly, have actually not even finished reading this interview. I caught a spoiler a few paragraphs in. While I am usually unconcerned with spoilers, for all the time I’ve spent with There There (2018), I want to avoid them for Wandering Stars. But I am sure this is a good interview. If you aren’t sold on reading the book yet, or you have already finished it, this might move the needle.
https://www.rpgsite.net/feature/15517-a-broken-world-preserved-shin-megami-tensei-imagine-mmorpg-preservation — Game preservation is awesome. In this article, Junior Miyai recounts the lengthy preservation journey for the Shin Megami Tensei: IMAGINE MMO and the context surrounding niche MMORPGs like these. I only played the game very briefly when it was officially supported, but things like this make me want to fire up the private server and give the game another shot.
Until next time.
