we did the right thing, right?

end of evangelion (hideaki anno, 1997)

To the extent that I’ve cultivated a particular approach to Evangelion, it’s that I’ve tried to stay text-focused. We are “naive watchers.” There are a few places this approach shows its limits, and End of Evangelion is one. That is because this movie primarily (only?) exists because people simultaneously loved Evangelion so much they propelled it to a Star Wars–level ability to print money and they hated its abstract, surreal finale.¹

I don’t think you can just bracket that out, because that Anno is partly reacting to the backlash to the ending of the show is in the text.² He puts fictionalized versions of emails he got in the movie. The movie itself suggests that it exists to punish you—yes, you!—for being so annoying.³ End of Evangelion comes aggressively out of the gate with a scene where Shinji masturbates over Asuka’s comatose body, which I again feel is Anno saying: Oh, so you, a creepy little nerd, wanted an Asuka body pillow? That’s what I think of you. Are you happy now? I hope you die.⁴

So whereas I view Evangelion, the show, as an open-hearted and warm piece of art, End of Evangelion is so embittered it’s often hateful. All the baggage people bring to the show is really there in this movie. And I do think the absolute peak expression of this embittered aggression is the scene with Shinji and Asuka in the hospital—which is the second scene in the whole movie.⁵

Then suddenly things are fun again, we’re following Misato doing her spy stuff, the bridge gets to do things, they let Ritsuko out of jail so she can code.… It’s like, OK, that moment in the hospital was weird, but let’s move on. And then SEELE, in concert with the Japanese government, invades NERV HQ and starts killing everybody.

This violence begins not with the clean, cinematic violence of guns and explosions, but with somebody meeting a painful, slow, and bloody end from a knife to the back. People are set on fire with flamethrowers (we don’t see this, but we do hear it, which is enough). A surrendering soldier gets shot in the head, then two more times in the face for good measure. By the time Misato gets to him so she can get him to safety, Shinji’s so traumatized⁶ he doesn’t even move when a soldier puts a gun to his head.⁷

But that’s okay because you know who’s back? Asuka. She’s figured out where her mom is and she’s better and she’s that special Asuka mix of euphoric and pissed off. She doesn’t even know what’s going on. She just starts smashing helicopters. These are the best five minutes of her entire life. SEELE sends their own “dummy plug” type Eva units after Asuka and she kills them all. It rules. It rules so much.

Unfortunately, they get better.

Gendo goes to use Rei to reunite with Yui, but Rei, at the last moment, rejects him and instead merges with Lilith. As Lilith, Rei gives Shinji the choice of what to do with humanity, and Shinji basically decides everybody should die. This initiates the Third Impact and a haunting sequence where Rei appears to everybody as the person they love most and who now loves them in return. As they embrace their loved ones, they melt into LCL.

Now that he’s in the LCL world, though, Shinji realizes this is not what he wanted. He wants to be back with people, even if he remains trapped in a cycle of doing the same idiot things over and over. He returns to his body and Unit 01 drifts off into space as a final and eternal testament to the existence of mankind.⁸ Only Shinji and Asuka are left alive on the beach by the sea of LCL.⁹

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I have mentioned a few times… possibly, several times… that I do not like this movie. Surprise surprise, I did actually like it more this time, as often happens.¹⁰ I think it worked better for me because I decided to lean into the ways in which this movie is a commentary on the ways in which Anno views Evangelion as a failure,¹¹ rather than viewing it as a straightforward installment of the story.¹²

Thus, the scene where Shinji runs up to Asuka and says “let’s be together forever, you’re the only girl for me”—only to be told by Asuka that he’d say all that to anybody, she’s just the girl he’s least afraid of—and then starts to strangle Asuka when he says “help me” and she says “no”… that scene functions on a few levels.

• First, the violent rejection of the existence of another person whose life is different from yours initiates the Third Impact.

• Second, Shinji’s aggression toward Asuka, which shows up many times in the show in less frightening ways, and which is an aspect of his attraction to her, finally explodes.

• Third, this is a scene about a man asking a woman to give him life, definition, and meaning and reacting with murderous rage when she refuses. It’s directly parallel to Rei rejecting Gendo’s plan at the last minute and telling him “I’m not your doll.”¹³

• That is—we’ll call this one “three and a half”—you don’t really want Asuka to be your waifu, you just want somebody to be your waifu, and when you’re told there is no waifu, there are only other people, you get mad.

• Fourth, this is a scene about fans asking Hideaki Anno to fix their lives by providing a satisfying dreamworld in which they can live forever and not taking his refusal to do so very well.

The first two levels fit within our usual “naive reader” approach, the others don’t.¹⁴ Similarly, I think you can’t really understand the live action section, with its pans over theater audiences, without viewing it as a commentary on—a direct quote from that section—“avoiding the truth by escaping into a fictional world.”

And when this all works—and the scene with Shinji strangling Asuka really works—you know, it’s great. It is as good as the best parts of the show. But sometimes the metanarrative can’t really sync up well with the actual narrative, because Shinji cannot always function as an audience surrogate. That was not his real role in the show, and so it does not always work for me here. After all, part of why he was (for some) such a loathed character was that it was no fun at all to treat Shinji as a self-insert, because Shinji’s life sucked.

And partly for that reason, I don’t think that the actual way that the ultimate emotional resolution plays out, with Shinji rejecting the merged world of the Third Impact and restoring, is nearly as moving or satisfying as it is in the show. It certainly makes more sense, and visually it’s very beautiful… but it’s less earned. It doesn’t move me the same way. I don’t feel brought to tears.

It is also a little less sincere. Having failed so spectacularly to get his point over the first time, maybe it feels a little, to me, like Anno can’t quite believe in it this time. It’s more like—life is beautiful and worth living, but some of you are just really annoying. So End of Evangelion doesn’t close with Shinji’s reemergence from the sea of LCL, or Yui’s explanation of how she’ll be alone for all time so that mankind will continue to exist. It doesn’t end with their goodbye. It ends with Shinji trying to strangle Asuka, but for real this time, then crying and giving up as Asuka comments “disgusting.”

When Misato’s trying to snap him out of his passivity earlier in the movie, she describes her life to Shinji as a cycle of “false elation and self-loathing,” which I think is also a good characterization of the way the movie itself unfolds. But… she also says to Shinji that she does learn as she goes through the cycle, that there’s still worth to them, and here I find the movie perhaps more dubious. The moment Shinji comes out of his transcendent state of acceptance of being a person and is face to face with human differentiation, he tries to kill it. Then he stops, yes, but it’s still his first instinct.

There’s a third narrative (as opposed to metanarrative) question here which End of Evangelion raises in a much blunter form than the show ever did, but doesn’t answer: there are no doubt moments in life when it’s truly a matter of “kill or be killed,” but how many of these moments really exist? When humanity met the Angels, it killed them, because it could not co-exist with another version of itself, but whether or not that could implies a harsh but fixed reality or rather a fear that humanity should be able to overcome… we don’t really know.¹⁵ When NERV is invaded, the people on the bridge are stuck fighting back to stay alive, even though they don’t know if they’re even on the right side anymore. The soldier who is about to shoot a child in the head says “nothing personal” right before he means to pull the trigger.

It’s true. None of this is personal, which is what makes it so terrible and so vicious. This is how it did happen, but was there another way it could have happened? A world when you turn left instead of right, refuse to kill a child in cold blood, accept death as a fact of life? A world where you didn’t run away from your child, didn’t run away from your mom, didn’t run away from love, didn’t run away from your own distorted evolutionary reflection? Maybe, maybe not. You don’t know and you won’t ever know. You just did the best (or the worst) you could with the knowledge you had. You have to live with whatever you chose.

One of the themes of this movie is that the urge to destroy is the same as the urge to merge, the urge to run away the same as the desire to be engulfed. Real life can only be cultivated in the tension of refusing the desire to be nothing and the desire to be the only thing. There’s a similar line drawn here between dreams and reality: both of these involve something out of your control, whereas a fictional world exists only at your control. You have to reject the world that only you control, which paradoxically requires you to assert the kinds of control that you do have. These themes are also in the TV ending, but they stand out more here both because they’re so explicitly stated and because the final moments seem so skeptical about the possibility any of these characters could ever achieve this ability to live with the tension of things.

Despite this pessimism, it’s worth saying that one character does achieve something in this movie. That’s Rei. She faces her predestined end, the entire reason that she’s alive, and she realizes that she gets to choose. She chooses something else. Rei, who we were told was born from despair, tells Shinji the fragment of her that lives in his heart is “hope.” The ability to believe things could be otherwise. The ability to choose otherwise. Even if most of us go on choosing the same things.

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• I made a line of Maya’s the title of this post because I enjoyed how much nobody is in a position to answer her question. (Aoba says: how should I know?) Everybody at NERV is now stuck fighting to survive without having a clue what was ever happening. That’s part of why the mass slaughter of everybody inside is so horrifying. None of these people have any idea why they’re being killed. They were never in on any grand scheme. It was just a job. At best, like everybody outside the innermost circle, they thought they were helping to save the world.

• However, as I fortunately am not in Maya’s position, I did finish this feeling like actually… End of Evangelion answers most of the plot questions lingering from the show. There are some unanswered questions but it mostly does resolve the plot. In general, I think a big takeaway, for me, from this rewatch is that if you focus on the “text” and ignore the surrounding mystique and drama, the show is a very solidly and intricately constructed piece of work that never actually “goes off the rails,” and its refusal to do a more plot-centered finale is (probably) not because the creators didn’t know how to answer the questions they’d raised but because a more traditional ending wasn’t what they wanted to do.

• Something the movie makes explicit and then triple underlines is that Shinji, if he doesn’t change his life, is very much on track to become his father, who is so walled-off and who views himself as so fundamentally unlovable that during the Third Impact, the reappearance of Yui doesn’t even affect him. He does not turn to LCL. I think he actually just… dies?

• Ritsuko getting ready to blow up NERV and being betrayed by her mother’s “woman” facet.… Shinji and Asuka both get heartwarming moments with their moms. But not you, Ritsuko! You slept with her man!

• Gendo’s final words to Ritsuko being muted also feels like a bit of aggression toward the audience to me: “Oh, you like mysteries? Have fun arguing about this one until we all die.” I don’t mind this one though, partly because I think that what Gendo says here actually doesn’t matter all that much. What matters is Ritsuko’s face and that she calls him a liar.

• The guy who looks up at Rei-Lilith and says, completely deadpan, that Mission Stop the Third Impact has not worked out is a great moment. Ditto the conversation about what to do with the blown up NERV HQ, whether or not the government should farm out the job to foreign contractors etc. Seeds of Shin Godzilla there.

• Misato’s always relatable but perhaps never more so than when she’s saying to herself, if I’d known the world was going to end and I was going to die, I would have spent the money on a new rug.

• I’ve planned the manga post for June 28. After that we’ll do the Rebuilds at the “every other week” post rate. If I blow through the manga faster than expected, I might put it up earlier, but I won’t put it up later.

1. The idea here is that End of Evangelion shows us what is happening in the real world, while the TV show shows us what is happening in the soul. However, End of Evangelion’s commitment to “showing us what is happening in the real world” only lasts for so long.

2. That said, these people do not agree with me.

3. I get it, if I made something as beautiful and from the heart as Evangelion and received the rage of thousands of horny nerds as thanks, I would want to strike back too.

4. Hideaki Anno to his fans:

5. I don’t hate this scene just because I’m some kind of Shinji apologist—I mean, I am, but that’s not why. When Shinji acts violently toward Asuka in End of Evangelion, including the scene(s) where he’s strangling her, it’s a lot darker than anything in the show, but it fits with their relationship. It makes sense. The kid we spent twenty six episodes would not whip it out in the middle of a hospital room, a space into which anybody could walk at any time, and start jerking off. I can only understand this scene as a big middle finger to the audience. That it was originally set in his bedroom and moved to the hospital kind of deepens this feeling!

6. One thing about this movie is that Shinji is legitimately traumatized by everything that has happened to him in a way that never quite happens in the show. There, what he has to work through isn’t really about what’s happened to him during the show, but what happened to him before. In End of Evangelion, you do feel like you’re looking at an averagely depressed fourteen year old who suddenly became a child soldier and has reached his limit and just shut down. The part where Misato gives him an adult kiss almost seems like she’s doing the one thing that’s so crazy it will at least make it possible to shove him into an elevator.

7. Misato rescuing Shinji is one of this movie’s truly awesome moments, up there with Asuka’s reawakening and fight. Unfortunately when I tried to find a usable clip I just found this fan edit:

8. Once again, I do find myself asking if the function of Christianity in Evangelion is to be an anti-Buddhism—Shinji rejects the world without ego boundaries, struggle, and pain while looking at Misato’s cross. I dunno.

9. We are told that as long as somebody can visualize themselves they can return to human form, so I think the implication is that they are the first of humanity to do so, not that they are the sole and only survivors.

10. I should say somewhere that End of Evangelion is an extremely beautiful movie with some indelible images, and that its being a movie allows it to reach a sophistication of animation the original show could never have achieved. Even when I don’t care for it, it is nonetheless an impressive achievement and attains a real beauty and power.

11. I recently read Moyoco Anno’s Insufficient Direction (a cute comic about the Anno marriage), which has an afterword by Hideaki Anno in which he discusses this feeling of failure:

What’s amazing about my wife’s manga is that she doesn’t create any “out” from reality. Most manga these days are no more than a device to provide readers with a refuge from reality to satisfy them out there. The bigger fans they are, the more likely they’ll become one with the fantasy and have difficulty accepting anything else. My wife’s manga leaves a bit of energy to readers as they return to the real world. Instead of making you want to dwell in yourself, her manga makes you want to go outside and do something, it emboldens you. It’s a manga for tackling reality and living among others. My wife lives like that and I think that’s why she can write like that. Her manga accomplished what I couldn’t do in Eva to the end.…

After Eva, there was a time when I wanted to stop being an otaku. I was sick of the stagnation of the anime industry and fans. I was filled with self-hatred back then. I was desperate.

Insufficient Direction was originally published from 2002 to 2004, though I’m not sure of the date for when Anno would have said the above. He’s still pretty clearly brooding about the reception to the end of the show, though, and it certainly seems like he kept brooding about it because he eventually made the Rebuild movies.

A friend of mine who doesn’t want to watch the show but reads all these recaps opined to me that there should have been a very brief post-credits scene in the TV show where you saw that Shinji, Asuka, and Misato had resumed a life in Misato’s apartment. I kind of agreed, but while on the one hand I do feel like such a scene would say “they’ve returned to reality and so should you,” the reality is that people would have spent thirty years arguing about whether or not it was supposed to be “real.”

Also the only Moyoco Anno manga I’ve read (other than Insufficient Direction) in In Clothes Called Fat and I… have basically no idea what Anno (H) is talking about here vis-a-vis that specific manga, unless it’s just that it’s dark and unhappy and you wouldn’t really want to live there.

12. A point of comparison would be when Audrey finally shows up again in Twin Peaks: The Return and it feels kind of like David Lynch is punishing you for 1) liking Twin Peaks 2) liking Audrey and 3) wanting to see her in the show again.

13. But Gendo, kind of hilariously, just stands there because he doesn’t know what to do.

14. You could make a case for option three fitting in the normal narrative… but I personally would not as I think that makes the mistake of not treating these characters as confused fourteen year olds. You don’t know these things are not things another person can do for you at fourteen. But give me purpose, save me, you’re the only girl, etc—this is all absolutely true of (for instance) Gendo’s relationship with Yui. (Fuyutsuki’s too.)

15. The right to defend yourself is also invoked by Asuka, back when Shinji asked “why exactly do we fight Angels?” in the show.