this is my heart inside your heart

neon genesis evangelion (episode twenty-five, "do you love me?")

all images from fancaps dot net

A while ago I was trying to describe the Evangelion phenomenon to a friend of mine, and I said something like “imagine if Twin Peaks was so popular and such a huge success that we were having Twin Peaks commemorative happy meals decades later. But also, it’s still absolutely Twin Peaks! It’s not even slightly less odd.”

The last two episodes of Evangelion are where it really and truly merits this comparison. This is where the show is really trying to communicate, as directly as possible, an internal experience. In whatever triage of available time and resources created these episodes, a decision was made to value character and theme over satisfyingly closing the mechanics of the story. I think this was the right call.

And to me, the TV show is a complete object that does not require any of the rest of the stuff that came later. But it is true that I never had the experience of watching these last episodes without knowing a huge amount of other material was out there if I wanted to read or watch it. The people who watched this show when it aired did not have that and they… felt… differently.

I decided to watch this episode solo—that is, I wanted to try and really view it by itself, so I haven’t rewatched the finale yet. I did this mostly because in my memory the two episodes really blend together, but obviously, they are different episodes, and they will each have their own logic. As Asuka says, this episode is one possible ending.

“Do You Love Me?” is pretty hard to summarize, because it is, in a very literal way, completely self explanatory. A true summary of this episode would just be the script. This episode of Evangelion (along with the next one) is basically “what do you call the stuff that’s above the subtext” for its entire runtime:

As there is no way to really resolve “the plot” elegantly at this late stage, the episode’s script just spells out the highlights. Instrumentality is the return of all human life to nothing (or, as Gendo prefers to put it, “the beginning”). Gendo is doing this to create a world without death or loneliness and also to be reunited with Yui. As Ritsuko explains to Misato, human hearts have holes in them. Instrumentality, by melting everybody together, will end this situation.

The first part of the episode depicts Shinji and Rei and Asuka’s states of mind before Instrumentality begins; in the second, we are seeing what it’s like to be on the inside during this process of everybody slowly merging into one. So, unsurprisingly, in the pre-meld, Shinji is in a self-recriminatory loop over killing Kaworu and Asuka hates herself; Rei’s state is more ambiguous, and I think this episode is probably the clearest look we’ve ever had into what it’s like to be Rei. (More on that below.) But then Gendo summons her to begin Instrumentality, and she goes with him, and that’s that.¹

At the end of the episode, Shinji is told all of this information straight up and told that because he wished for a world in which he was alone he wished for all of this to happen.² He destroyed the world through his self-hatred. But it doesn’t have to be this way. He can still make a different choice. But since the next episode will, as I recall, really be the Shinji show, I want to focus on some other characters below.

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raison d'être, one's reason for being / the reason it's okay to be here

The dissolution of the individual person in this episode leans heavily on shame. Shame, as opposed to guilt, is a social emotion: you can feel guilty alone but you can only feel shame before another. Shame can also involve things that are not actually wrong being put in an inappropriate place: Misato having sex with Kaji is not something she feels ashamed of having done in and of itself, but she’s extremely ashamed when Shinji and Asuka can both see it during her “case study.”³

Misato’s journey into the depths of her self hatred, the almost deranged spite with which she tells the “dream” Kaji so you’re telling me to take care of myself?,⁴ the level of sexual shame—the point is to reinforce that “Misato” is a sham, an act that the real Misato puts on to gain the respect of others or as an act of revenge on her father. The “real” Misato is something deep and unknowable and bad. And to me part of what makes this episode powerful is that it’s all at least half true. Misato’s personality is very much an act of will. There is something in all of us that is deep and unknowable and even perhaps ungovernable. We might be afraid of this deep core of ourselves because we are afraid of losing what we have built on top of it if we get too close. The part that is false that runs through it is the part that says that all of these qualities make somebody bad rather than make somebody human.⁵ In other words, the sort of cruel, prosecutorial voice that says wasn’t it only this, weren’t you ever only that, is the voice that wants to kill you in a very deep, essential way.⁶

What runs through this episode is the real way each of these characters has rendered human connection a vice and a weakness while also knowing they need it, not only to be human, but simply to be who they are. And, like, it’s easy to talk a tough game about the need for human connection, but there’s a reason they all hate it and want not to need it. Other people can really hurt you, and that includes the people whose fundamental job is to take care of you when you are at your most dependent and vulnerable, i.e., your parents. When Asuka’s stepmother says, of Asuka, “I can stop being her mother at any time,” she is right, but she’s wrong to think that Asuka’s father can’t essentially do the same thing if he wants to (as, indeed, he has). One reason parent–child relationships are so central in this show is that while, on the one hand, one’s family is inherited ground which one cannot choose and the importance of which is woven into you before you have the chance to understand it, your parents can in fact simply refuse to be your parents in a way that is not really true the other way. For Misato, Shinji, Asuka, Rei, and the rest, their parents are facts that they try to live with but emotional realities that they cannot stand to think about for very long.

Even casting one’s gaze more widely, there is no such thing as a safe connection with others—even in the most trusting and mutually sympathetic understanding, one of you is going to devastate the other by dying.⁷ If you let other people into your life, they will hurt you and you will hurt them. There’s nothing you can do about it.⁸ So, angry at themselves for needing something that will inevitably be a source of pain, angry at themselves for being a source of pain to others, they turn on themselves.

In this sense, the part of this episode I find most moving is the way Misato won’t quite relinquish her love for Kaji. She concedes that he reminded her of her father; she concedes that there might have been something about a desire to make herself “filthy” at play in their relationship; but what she absolutely won’t concede is that that was the only thing going on, the truth of the relationship. I think this is very important, maybe the most important thing in the whole episode. No matter how much she hates herself, and she does hate herself, Misato refuses to reduce something complex into something simple.

In Rei’s case, it is a slightly different story. She is the one subject who doesn’t seem to regard the need for connection with others as a personality flaw. Rei II (I think) makes the case to Rei I that she is human because of the accumulation of her past.⁹ Even if Rei is a fake human with a fake soul, she has become a real human over the years of her life. But as Rei III, she also maintains that the thought of that if she did make contact with that dark and unknowable heart within herself, her accumulated personality being obliterated does not disturb her, because she wants to die. She just isn’t allowed. Much like Kaworu, she experiences being alive as the imposition of the will of somebody who wants her to continue until he has no use for her anymore.

Next episode: Rei is late for school.

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• I don’t have that much to say about Asuka in this episode—I think her scenes here reinforce what we already know, but we haven’t learned much new.

• There’s surely some sort of relationship between Misato saying “facts are facts” over and over last episode and Shinji being told you don’t experience the truth, only facts, in this one.

• The scene where Asuka’s “case” turns into a play that Shinji and Misato are watching reminded me very strongly of something. After much soul-searching, I find that the answer is…

  But even more so, it reminded me of this scene from the same movie:

  “Is Asteroid City actually Wes Anderson’s live action Evangelion movie”—a question somebody should be asking.… If I know somebody who knows somebody who knows somebody who knows Wes Anderson, please tell him I see his vision here. Thank you. You don’t need to elaborate.¹⁰

• Recently, I’ve trying a sort of teletherapy in an attempt to “deal” with “the events of the past three years” but was like, ah, is this even helpful, should one even attempt to “deal” with “things,” and so on. Watching this episode I was like… you know… who needs therapy. I have Evangelion and The Tortured Poets Department. They get me!!! Let me just get a folding chair and free associate about how much I hate myself while I go to lunar valleys in my mind!!!!

• I think I’ve figured out what I want to do after Evangelion. While I do want to rewatch Utena, I think I do not want to do another TV show right on top of this one. So I’m thinking of a series of Hayao Miyazaki, Isao Takahata, Mamuro Oshii, and Satoshi Kon,¹¹ following their available movies chronologically and starting with The Castle of Cagliostro.¹² The big pain in the movie series idea is acquiring the necessary installments of Patlabor, but that’s really only a medium pain.
  
  It will be the movie series or it will be Utena, in any case. Whatever I do next, I will probably be sticking to the every other week schedule while I’m working on the book.

1. Questions like “what is Rei’s role in Instrumentality” are the kind of thing this episode does not answer. I’m pretty sure the next one doesn’t either.

2. I have to say this seems a little unfair. Out of the thousands of millions of teenagers who yell “I WISH I WERE DEAD. I WISH EVERYONE WAS DEAD” how was Shinji supposed to know he was the one with the power to make it real.

3. Asuka’s complete and total horror at what an “adult relationship” looks like is one of this episode’s true comedy beats.

4. When it instantly cuts to Misato in the chair and she’s basically like “men are always saying that” I was like… I feel you girl… they are always saying that…

5. Though certainly the creators of Instrumentality think it’s bad to be human.

6. This is one possible moment of (almost definitely accidental) Christianity / Evangelion resonance, since you could say that this voice is essentially the voice of the anti-Christ, Christ being the advocate that pleads for you, etc.

7. Yui did that to Gendo and now he’s melting the human race into primordial soup.

8. I’m not trying to sound like Relationship Counselor Sephiroth here. There’s obviously a vast gulf between the ways people hurt each other normally and the ways people hurt each other intentionally and maliciously. If somebody does stuff that they know hurts you over and over you are probably looking at something slightly different than The Human Condition.

9. I believe it’s Rei II in the plugsuit and Rei III in the school uniform, though there is another Rei in the plugsuit who is neither.

10. I wondered “am I actually the first person to think of this”:

It appears reddit user super3ggo may have beaten me to this observation, kind of, but only kind of! I’m holding firm. I want my footnote in Evangelion studies. However I’ll share the space with super3ggo. That’s fair.

11. Why these four? Well… because I want to.

12. Probably would include Paranoia Agent just because there’s so little Satoshi Kon. So, something like this: