I Have Held Back No Water In Its Season

*snaps fingers* That’s it!

In order to break everyone out of the stasis she is the lynchpin to, Anthy has to move.

At the end, Anthy has to reach out, has to make a choice and act on it, has to act on her own behalf, and for her own desires. That is what frees her.

I don’t think Utena understands that, quite, any more than Akio does, really. That Anthy has freed herself, and that’s why she is free–no one else could do it for her, that was the point. Dios was right that she needed someone she could trust and believe in. But that someone could not, by definition, be a prince. A prince is everywoman’s property, that’s the nature of Prince-ness; a prince defends the helpless and innocent in general, not any one particular person. Anthy needed someone who wanted her for herself. Lo and behold: Utena. This, I think, is why the words that open the gate, when Utena finally reaches it, are ‘I was happy when I was with you’. It wasn’t the prince’s heart (the sword) that could be the key; it had to be Utena’s heart–the person’s heart.

*happy pondering*

Brainwave while rewatching Utena: the Black Rose arc is all about being frozen in time and/or regressing. The elevator descends deeper into one’s true feelings, but progress is never made. Rather it is reversed–butterfly to chrysalis to caterpillar all the way to leaf. That, of course, gives us a reference point for the elevator up to the arena, in the next arc. That elevator is so chockablock with perspective-illusions that it’s hard to avoid reading its ascent as yet another spatial illusion–which it and the arena and the castle do turn out to be.

The car, in the next arc gives us another type of motion, this time one that should be progressive. Yet the road seems to have no beginning or end, just being there between stationary appearances of The Car. And during the duels the car moves in a circle around and around the arena–another highlight to deceptive appearances, which is Akio (and Dios and Anthy) all over. Reaching the final duel depends on progressing, yet Ohtori academy, and anyone who gets too involved with it, is frozen in time. The duelists who face Utena are frozen, often encouraged into that state by Akio. The car’s association with him makes perfect sense.

This besides, of course, the glaringly obvious car=sex part. The symbols surrounding Akio are heavily weighted toward sex-replacement or sex-projection, and strongly associated with glamour–which is, of course, yet another sort of illusion. The car and the camera shoots add to Akio’s aura of living the high life, living in (and I use the phrase advisedly) the fast line.

I think there’s also a certain amount of clue-bat involved. During his little seduction sequences, Akio offers to show his pigeons the End of the World. And then he hops out of the driver’s seat and let’s the car run with no steering. The normal result of that would be a crash, which we get audio cues for, and which is, in fact, what happens to the losers of these duels. As for the camera…

Well, you know the old tale about how it’s dangerous to have a picture taken because it will steal your soul, right?

Hindu mythology is just written all over this show. As if the physical appearance of Dios/Akio and Anthy weren’t enough, we’re whapped over the head with all the symbols associated with Nanami: elephants, cows, eggs. The power to revolutionize, to turn that is, harks strongly to the whole concept of yugas–well, actually, to the cycle of time in general, which has all sorts of manifestations in Buddhism. As for Dios/Akio, he rings loud Trimurti bells, only missing Brahma, which seems to be a major plot point. What is behind the Rose Gate, I would say, is the aspect of the Creator. See, I take Dios as the Preserver (Vishnu) and Akio as the Destroyer (Shiva). Dios is the one who preserves a stable condition (for all girls to be princesses, to be protected from all trouble). Akio, the Morning Star, the End of the World, well, what more do we really need to say? The Preserver’s time ended when his sister sealed him away to save his life, sacrificing and suspending her own life by doing so. The Destroyer’s time ends when Utena makes it through the gate and offers a new choice to Anthy. So it’s back around to the Creator.

Anthy represents, I think, not so much power as a chance, an opportunity to turn the ages. She is the occasion of agency, but doesn’t have any of her own except at the very beginning, when she chooses to end the Preserver’s age and take on the hatred that action engenders, and at the very end, when she reaches out to Utena, making a new choice and ending the Destroyer’s age also.

Agency is a complicated thing in Utena. Akio attempts, more or less, to steal Utena’s agency, which I expect is why he fails. He can never make it though the Gate, because he simply doesn’t have the capacity–he can’t change, he is, as Anthy says at the end, locked in his cozy coffin. I think that’s what the progression of the swords is all about. We start with normal, external swords; Black Rose moves to using the sword/soul/agency of another person, stolen; the final arc progresses to using one’s own sword/soul/agency, called forth in cooperation with someone else. That last is something that cannot be effectively stolen.

Love and sex are another tangled item here, not least because I can’t right offhand think of an example of love in this story that is not also sexual. Well, maybe Wakaba. As the story went on I started to think of the sexuality as radiating from Akio, but I wound up thinking of it as ultimately coming from Anthy. That, I think, is the witch aspect, what Kozue calls impure, the opposite of a proper princess. It’s filtered through the age of the Destroyer, though, which is what I think makes it such a tangled thing, always doubled back on itself, claustrophobic, hurtful. The three sibling pairs, Juri and Shiori, definitely Saionji and Anthy, Saionji and Touga, Mikage and Mamiya, etc.–they’re all twisted up. There is also that rather disturbing shot toward the end of Anthy riding in the car with Akio; at first she looks and sounds like she’s experiencing sexual pleasure, especially given the seductive connotations of that car, and then Akio asks if she’s in pain and we see a flash of the swords. Sex and pain are completely elided at that point, and it made me wonder if they weren’t elided all along. Another possibility for why the sexuality sourced in Anthy is so troubled, if it’s actually an expression of her agony.

The repeating motifs, on the other hand, are simply a joy: circles like the carousel, spirals like the stairs up to the dueling ground–figures of no escape. The elevator in the Black Rose arc, with the butterfly regressing until we’re left with a leaf: something drawing into itself until its nature changes completely. The gondola, which looks like it’s traveling straight up, when the outside view shows it tilted–or is it the castle and ground that are tilted?  The cameras and photographs that seem to alter rather than capture a scene–capturing souls? And, of course, the basic unit of Duelist and Bride, in which so many Duelists seek to substitute a Bride that will not put them to the test that Anthy’s imprisonment will.

Curious, that the movie focused so much more tightly on the psychological aspect, the idea of the school as, more or less, the inside of one’s head, the castle as a trap, the whole thing as a metaphor of growing up and moving into the outside world, the world outside oneself, one’s own mind, outside the stories and pretty, simple roles. It did make it much clearer that the sexuality starts with Anthy, and that Utena is the vehicle, literally, of her power and will should she choose to use them.

*happy sigh* Great series.