The Cathode Ray Mission: Akira

I wouldn’t consider myself an anime fan at anything beyond a cursory level. In the past year I’ve started to engage more with the medium, watching Revolutionary Girl Utena (which is great and honestly deserves so much more recognition), Neon Genesis Evangelion (which is… less so), and currently on an ongoing quest of the Dragon Ball and Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure series, but compared to the seemingly exhaustive knowledge of self-defined fans of the medium, I’ve barely dipped a toe in the water. The reason I’m saying this is because I want to make it clear that in discussing and analyzing Akira, I don’t really have a formal framework to operate from in the same way that I do something like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. I don’t know what anime movies are like, how they differ from one another, what the recurring techniques are, what the decisions behind it are, none of that.

“So, Jake, why bother writing about it then if you don’t have this knowledge?” Good question, imaginary audience. I think the answer lies in the fact that Akira, while certainly operating within the context of the formal techniques and generic expectations it shares with similar work, kind of just… blows everything up, and that’s fascinating. I’ve seen this movie three or four times, and every time, even with the foreknowledge I have, it remains thrilling, and explosive, and shocking, and unexpected. It is an unbelievably singular movie in the energy and vision it presents. It’s no wonder that the author of the manga series also serves as the film’s director. It’s also no wonder that the movie opens with a massive explosion, or that the marketing promises you that “Neo Tokyo is about to EXPLODE”.

At the visual level, it’s incredible to consider that Akira was made over thirty years ago. Not only are the action scenes still exciting, and the animation still manages to rival some of the best animation that’s been made in the time since, but the vision of the future that Akira presents is unbelievably tactile and transfixing. Where Blade Runner takes on a cyberpunk dystopia at the level of law enforcement and bureaucracy, Akira, rather than being pastiche, is a gutter-punk level of Blade Runner’s vision. There’s a tangible sense of grime and decay to just about every frame; even the scenes set in the ostensibly higher strata of society are shot through with corruption and incompetence and even pseudo-fascism. Neo Tokyo looks pretty from a distance, rising like a mountain over the destroyed highways on the outskirts with its garish, screaming neon, but inside it always feels like something could give way, like the walls keeping the apocalypse out are quickly crumbling, as evidenced by the ever-present popular protests and the militarized response they provoke. Blade Runner, to continue the comparison, is only ever rainy and dark; with a few exceptions, it’s difficult to imagine the Los Angeles of Ridley Scott’s film as a place where people live and exist, a difficulty that Akira is able to circumvent from its very first shots, showing us a grimy little biker bar where teens and adults drink, pop pills, and play pinball.

This difference in perspective that Akira has extends beyond the visual qualities to the textual. The main characters aren’t cops or bounty hunters, they’re teenage delinquents, driving cool motorcycles and getting in skirmishes with other gangs. There’s no apparent reason for this, it’s not like there’s an ongoing war between different factions or territory is being fought over. Violence is a thing to do to pass the time. This entire society is one that is the result of violence, catastrophic violence, and continues to preoccupy itself with violence, in both an instrumental and recreational way. Fighting is just a thing people do to pass the time, to feel alive, at the same time that people break into police checkpoints with grenades hidden on their bodies to try and disrupt the mechanisms of the state. This is of course not a one-way relationship with violence: the police are an actively suppressive force in the film, as are the military. The psychic children at the heart of the story are the culmination of this obsession with the idea of violence, and humanity, as a regulated instrument.

The notion that society is in constant state of violence that is foundational to its very being was not a shockingly original one when Akira came out, but the way that Akira approaches this question of a society’s relationship to the violence it is founded upon is one of the most enduringly breathtaking aspects of it. Those psychic children, the eponymous Akira and his peers, remain one of the most intensely striking pieces of the film’s puzzle. They are the natural endpoint of the human need for violent control: they are human children that have been weaponized, turned into instruments of destruction under lock and key of the oppressive state. They are also the reason for the destruction that befell society, in a sort of modern incarnation of a classic “man’s hubris” story, wherein the efforts to control this great power that has been unlocked/uncovered only lead to the downfall of society. But in this case, it’s important to remember that the text is not displacing that power onto an object or a process, but rather keeping it firmly tied to people, to human bodies, and specifically children. The beginning of the film is a shocking entry into that idea: one of the psychic children has been rescued by a terrorist cell, but in the process of escape the police gun down the rescuer in a brutal and excessive manner while the child looks on, eventually restored to captivity by the military. Nothing is sacred, and nobody is off-limits from the methods of control that are willing to be exercised.

Control, I think, is an important concept to keep in mind throughout Akira. The film’s plot is all about maintaining control at varying levels— the state attempting to control the populace, the military attempting to control the psychic children, Tetsuo trying to control his body. Some people exist outside of this dynamic of controller/controlled. Kaneda and his bike gang live on the margins of society, to the indifference of the state, and the terrorist group is devoted to wrestling control of the children away from the military, but these are exceptions. Nearly everyone is coerced to stay under someone else’s thumb, and if they don’t they will be met with violence, as the protests at the start are evidence of. However, control is a fragile thing. One crack can spread to many, and before long the whole structure comes crumbling down beneath its own weight, which is exactly what happens in Akira. This explains the need for violence as a coercive technique, but it also shows violent repression to be an untenable substitute for structural change. Tetsuo is the next evolution of the psychic children, but he’s too strong, he can’t be shackled and instrumentalized like his younger counterparts, and when he begins to exercise his own autonomy, it’s only a matter of time. A last-ditch Hail Mary to fascism is employed to try and preserve the civil order, but it’s no use: the cops are killed, the military is ineffective, society has continued to unravel to a pre-modern level, and Tetsuo is still out there. There is no immovable object to counter the unstoppable force of Tetsuo.

Tetsuo himself is a character worthy of a lot of unpacking, more than I’m probably willing to give myself here. He is symbolically the worst fears of the order of control made manifest, a person from the margins who has awakened to his incredible power and directs that power against the state. It’s easy to see how a different story would unfold from this point: Tetsuo becomes a popular hero, a rallying point to galvanize around, and leads the charge in a righteous revolution. Akira refuses to follow this comfortable narrative, but I don’t think it does so in a centrist way, where the actors of oppression and the resisting oppressed are equally bad as one another. Rather, it uses the figure of Tetsuo as an extension of its criticism of power and control. He is an unimaginably powerful individual, but exercises that power indiscriminately, creating destruction everywhere he goes and against everyone he crosses paths with, and in this way it seems the film is making an argument about the nature of power itself, that wherever there is great power to be instrumentalized it will always be used as violence. The answer to the problem of one form of violent and repressive power is not another, equally violent and repressive power, it’s a reconfiguration of the concentration of power itself. Pre-Tetuso, power is concentrated in the state, and specifically the martial arms of the state; post-Tetsuo, power is concentrated, obviously, in the individual body of Tetsuo.

The end of the film serves as a sort of infamous/legendary (depending on how you feel about a messy conclusion) sequence that also serves as a logical conclusion to the film’s arguments on control and power. Tetsuo has essentially transcended humanity, literally incorporating metal into his body at this point, and nothing has a legitimate chance to defeat him. The only thing that can put an end to Tetsuo, is Tetsuo himself, which is exactly what happens, and exactly what does happen to these isolated centers of great power: they grow too large, too unwieldy, and collapse in on themselves. He loses control of his body, losing his form and becoming amorphous, growing, spreading, consuming all that comes within proximity to him, even those he presumably loved. It is a lashing out in all directions that threatens to destroy everything, and arguably it does, but in the process that energy is redirected away from destruction and towards production. Michel Foucault wrote that power is not repressive, it is productive; he was talking about discourse, but Akira blows that up into a very extreme and literal conclusion, where power and its collapse create entirely new universes. Neo Tokyo does explode, as was promised, and in its wake are the shattered remnants of society, but there is also the promise of something new. The explosion of Tetsuo is a literal big bang, creating a new universe that falls into Kaneda’s hands amid the destroyed city, a new universe with limitless potential that is born from our own. The futures of these new parallel realities are unknown; maybe the same mistakes will just be repeated and thirty years on another Tetsuo or Akira will emerge. But the important thing is that with this explosion, with a society and universe that are forced to start from square one again, we have the power to shape it however we like. Though it is violent and often bleak, Akira resists the nihilistic impulse of complete destruction for the sake of complete destruction, and instead offers the characters and us a challenge to build a future that is different from the horror of the present. After the credits roll, the real work begins.