Hathaway's Flash: People are changing

[makz]

Amazingly, I have not run out of things to talk about re: the comparisons I'm drawing in my brain between what Hathaway seems to be doing with its parallels between Char's singleminded and past-facing actions and Hathaway's hesitance to let go of the past even though he knows it's ruinous.

I saw the movie a second time yesterday, which let me pay slightly more attention to the details I'd found most interesting during my first viewing, and… well, all the same warnings apply as for the last two posts, if you wanna read what I'm thinking about.

Diegetic

Let's work backwards. The end credits roll to "Sweet Child of Mine" by Guns and Roses, with a set of Japanese subtitles in the upper right corner, translating the lyrics as they pass. I was not quite fast enough at reading to catch every one; they work hard to get some of the feeling of English into a poetic form of Japanese. But the thing I did catch was that they did one of my favorite things a translation can do — they expanded the meaning on a repeated phrase.

Where do we go now?
Where do we go now?
Where do we go?

How many times does it repeat? I don't know, but they broke up the meaning between at least three variations in Japanese. (This is from memory, so it might not be completely accurate.)

僕たちはどこに行くんだ？
これからどこへ向かっていく？
僕らはどうすればいい？

"Where are we going? From now on, what will we look to? What should we do?"

This movie's main prop is not a mobile suit, but a clock. Gigi's clock marks the hours — 365 days of suffering for a single day of bliss — a bargain Gigi wants to reject, wants to overcome. This is the weight of humanity's experience of time. The suffering in anticipation of relief; the momentary relief that does not achieve anything but a momentary sidebar between suffering. The wheel of karma.

When Gigi meets Hathaway, who has just recently been framed in his cockpit, crying out that it's inevitable, if he wants to move the needle of justice towards an equitable future, that he throw away his humanity, moving his beam saber ever closer to taking the life of yet another pilot, the sound of his breaths betraying the fact that he is a mortal man, his face obscured from the viewer behind his helmet — when Gigi meets with that Hathaway, her words are "Why are you the only one covering your head!?"

Her voice had stopped him earlier from killing his opponent, and now she is angry with him. "Why are you hiding yourself!?" And so, he lifts his helmet's visor, showing eyes red from crying, and asks her to jump to him. In English, the subtitles prioritize grammar. "To you?" Gigi answers. In Japanese, she says "To Hathaway Noa?" and, leaving behind her picnic basket, in which she'd hidden the luxury goods necessary to provide for a future within the system that had both bound and supported her up until now, she jumps.

At the same time, these words echo out — Where are we going? To what will we turn? What ought we to do? — and the protective faceplate that had been hiding the face of that "Gundam-modoki," that "not-quite-Gundam," crumbles away, showing us the eyes of a Gundam.

In a pool, Gigi thinks that it is cruel of her to abandon her patron, when he has so many worries in front of him, and she is his only source of comfort. And then she jumps towards Hathaway Noa, someone who is outside of the "Father complex" framework to which she'd described herself as beholden.

In torrents of rain, in the shower, under the ocean, drowning, Hathaway considers his comfortable but shallow love life, his lingering attachments to a dead girl, his guilt over an action that he feels he must repeat in order to bring a new order into being — like the person who inspired the situation that brought him into a world of guilt in the first place, generational trauma, the passing of rites, ideology freed from the grounding of compassion, the weightlessness of zero gravity... And he stops at the sound of Gigi's voice and asks her to jump to him.

The next generation embraces ideals it builds for itself as it tries to surface above the soil of the old world and turn its face to the sun.

Chaos

Thirty-seven years ago, or maybe just last year, for Hathaway, Char's Counterattack ended the story of Char and Amuro, but, after thirteen years for Hathaway Noa, that fight has never ended. A miracle occurred in the sky; the desire of all of humanity for survival pushed back certain destruction. A single day gave reprieve to 365 days of suffering.

In the back of my head, a eulogy is read. "Here lies humanity; they were frequently late to appointments…" and then someone yells that the patient is not dead.

But that was 1962, and Char and Amuro will not be born for over a decade, or hundreds of years.

Two years ago, the Anpo Treaty was signed. In eight years, the man who wrote that eulogy will read another for himself.

Somewhere between those things, slightly before those things, slightly after those things, a bunch of men who come together to call themselves "Hajime Yatate" will attend college.

And none of this means much to me when I'm born a few months after the movie Char's Counterattack comes out in theaters. But eight years after that, I'll fall in love with a sailor-suited champion of justice and start studying a foreign language over it.

The people who are graduating college when I am twelve years old — buying my first fansub with a money order acquired through the bank and boundless faith that no one would be so cruel as to rob me — all make interesting websites, filled with blueprints of the Arcadia of their Youths. I cannot wait to be young in the right way, to have my own spaceship to board, my own robot to pilot, my own compact locket to hold aloft. I am waiting for the magic of my own autonomy to find me.

And what a wonderful Arcadia the Internet is! People taken seriously for the structure of their interiority, expressed through words. People who find one another because someone recognized in another person something interesting enough to promote with a link, people who form little clubs with tiny rectangular banner buttons, joining hands in webrings, people who drive cross-country and volunteer for the privilege of an entry badge and a spot sleeping rough on a hotel-room floor, happy to meet one another in person.

Four years before Gundam is born, five years after the eulogy is read, Comiket begins. Sixteen years after that, a company called Gainax animates a fictional account of their company's founding. Thirty-two years later, I, who watched that animated fiction twenty-two years prior, will get a terrible sunburn standing in line for Natsukomi 102.

My autonomy arrived, and came with the freedom to see a big robot in the harbor of Yokohama.

First love, Adult love

What gets lost in-between being a twelve year old sending a money order in the mail and being an adult standing at the Gundam Factory Yokohama?

For one thing, someone will eventually steal your money. There's no mechanism by which that money can be retrieved, and not all fansub distributors are honest. From the twelve year old's perspective, the money disappears, and with it a tiny bit of hope in humanity's inherent goodness.

For another thing, the Internet evolves, and not necessarily for the better. Algorithms aimed at engagement over substance, corporate-backed web platforms built to encourage lock-in, and new generations who have neither institutional memory nor training to build their own gardens all cause an erosion of norms that had felt concrete and immovable.

The technology underpinning the Arcadia itself chases capital rather than freedom. Computers, which had been an outlet for pure expression, have made a lot of adults a lot of money, and why should children be given a voice in building out the future when they have no capital to spend? The idea of "meritocracy" is hollowed out as an excuse for the status quo to replicate itself, rather than lending itself to the spread of new and unique ideas.

An explosion of interest in "nerdy man" hobbies pushes the entertainment sector away from the transformation locket, the generation that built the Arcadia retires, and an old man who built a robot many years ago excuses himself from the conversation by calling himself "the enemy."

"Maybe you're right, old man," the former twelve year old thinks, having just reached the age-of-majority, sitting in the back of the Javits convention center. "Maybe you are the enemy, but I'll figure out some way not to be. I've got the rest of my life ahead of me."

And then that twenty year old, over the course of a little less than twenty more years, experiences two more apocalypses, surviving somehow, and turns towards the world and screams that it's all messed up. It's all messed up! The adults messed it all up!

So why shouldn't I kill my heart and become a machine, if it's like this?? If the only way to push the needle of justice is to just stop caring and accept that my first love is behind me, to look only to the beauty of that which is lost and spite the present moment, to believe that my single day of bliss has already passed, and all that remains is 365 days of suffering, then why should I keep trying??

Unlike you, twelve year old, I'm more than just a pilot!

Wow, bro, are your problems really that petty?

The above is just an example, but it doesn't require you to think too deeply on the big problems facing the world if you limit the scope of your frustration to something that doesn't matter that much.

It's obvious that there are much bigger problems in the world than one weirdo who isn't happy with the shape of modern fandom on the Internet. There are all sorts of other problems that the shape of the modern Internet has contributed to, and those are the actual issues that concern me, way more than the above silly example, which is tangentially tied up in the same problems. The machine that should have been a tool for connection instead became a tool of capital, to isolate, dissect, monetize, surveil, propagandize, and entrap.

What is there to do with that? I'm working on the fringes of tech. It's not the same as holding a beam saber to someone's cockpit, but it's uncomfortable to not have any answers and to need to feed myself nonetheless.

As a kid, I was waiting to have my own robot, and now that I have one, I'm wondering when I get to take off this helmet.

The main thing I can do, while waiting for something to jump towards, to ask something to jump towards me, is look to the past not with eyes that idealize the whole thing, but with eyes that consider it in an even manner.

Where do we go now? Where do we go now? Where do we go?

Is it literary or historical?

If Gigi's clock is the wheel of karma and my first love is the idea that the internet would create a bridge to increased human understanding and compassion, then what is the time that humanity will one day be able to overcome, in Lalah and Amuro's final conversation in 1979?

I mentioned Yukio Mishima's Beautiful Star in yesterday's post, while I was trying to briefly summarize every thought I've had on the topic of what's informing Tomino's imagery throughout Gundam up to Hathaway. I really do think those works are in conversation regarding "time."

In short, Beautiful Star is the story of ordinary humans who are also aliens. The extent to which that is true and the extent to which that is the flawed perception of people who are at the fringe of human experience and need to see themselves as special is left up to the interpretation of the reader.

There are bad aliens and good aliens, and the entirety of their interactions are much more mundane in nature than mobile suit battles would be. They simply meet around a table, discuss philosophy, argue whether humanity deserves to survive its own foolishness — and regardless of whether they deserve anything at all, whether they are capable of it — and then they go their separate ways.

The good aliens, all of them a nuclear family who are nonetheless from different planets, cannot fully understand one another, and this lack of understanding causes them to hurt one another in various ways. Ultimately, the villains' logic wins, even if no judgement is ever visited upon humanity, and the good aliens are left without a place in the world. They are implied to go off to the mountains to die away from society at the end of the book.

There are many things that happen in between those events. Each character has his or her own arc, exploring the decay of society along the lines of spiritual and philosophical life, domestic life, political life, and romantic life. No one is spared social disgrace. Ultimately the main character's human body betrays him, even as society also finds itself crumbling.

What a hopeless book! But what a beautifully written book!

Like the author himself, it is a beautiful despair that one would be foolish to digest uncritically. And so, when Mishima cries out that only humanity, who are evolved to such a degree that they can reach out to one another but are stymied by their perception of time, could build such a thing as the atomic bomb, it is easy to get caught up in his logic.

Humanity can only see the present moment. The future is unknowable. The past fades into a sense of unreality. In the face of that, the only certainty that can be had is destruction in the present moment. The only way to express love fully is to dismantle everything. The only thing to be done about the beauty of humanity is to destroy it utterly and leave the memory of the thing as a beautiful star in the universe, free of its contradiction and ugliness. Because of that, humanity will surely press the button and destroy itself. That is the ultimate form of the machinery of human society.

Hearing this, Tomino rejects it. "One day, humanity will overcome even time. You were just impatient, Mishima." That's what he says backwards in time to a man who died when he was 29, at the age of 37. That's what he has Amuro say to Char again when Amuro is 29, and a miracle occurs, and even so, Hathaway carries the same grief that bound Char down.

That's what the story of Gundam looks like to me. But the helmet lifts, the Gundam's eyes are unveiled, and we move with autonomy towards a future that we have the ability to choose.

People are changing. We won't press the button.

Do you believe that?