Fathers and Sons: Star Blazers - PART 1

On April 7, 1945, the flagship of the Japanese navy was sunk by US torpedoes off the coast of Okinawa. She was the heaviest and most well-fortified naval vessel the world had ever known. When she sank to the bottom of the Pacific ocean, she carried with her not only the lives of 3000 of her crewmen but also the hopes and dreams of an empire. She was the Yamato, and her fate and mine have been entertwined for the last 30 years.

I don't remember when I fell in love with stories, but I do remember when I discovered Star Blazers. I was six years old, and every day after kindergarten I would fly down the stairs to the basement, turn on the TV, fiddle impatiently with the rabbit ears, and settle back to let the sweet sights and sounds of black and white, monophonic science fiction wash over me. Though many of the plot's subtleties were lost on me at the time, I had a sophisticated enough grasp of the narrative to understand the basics:

It's 2199, and the Earth is under attack. The Gamilons, a race of humanoid aliens from distant space, have destroyed their own planet and set their sights on Earth as a replacement. From their base on Pluto, the Gamilons have deluged Earth with radiation bombs. The entire surface of the planet is uninhabitable, and the remaining Earthlings have evacuated to underground cities. In a little less than a year, the radiation will penetrate the surface, and all human life will be destroyed.

Earth's military forces have been obliterated. In fact, only one deep space battleship remains operational, and even it has been heavily damaged. Just when it seems that all hope is lost, Earth's commanders receive a mysterious message from a woman named Starsha on the distant planet Iscandar. She has a machine - the Cosmo DNA - that can remove the radiation from the planet. But Iscandar is light years away, and time is running out.

Only one hope remains. An old naval vessel, a battleship sunk in a long ago war, has been retrofitted as a starship. Starsha has sent the Star Force the technical plans for a new kind of engine that will allow them to travel faster than the speed of light. Will this new "wave motion" engine allow them to travel to Iscandar and back in time? Will they be able to defeat the Gamilons and save the Earth?

This is my story, the first epic I remember learning. It's possible that I had internalized some biblical epics by this point in my life, but they never had the visceral hold on my imagination that Star Blazers did. My sense of good and bad, of heroes and villains, of loss and honor, were all shaped by the fertile imagination of Japanese animator Leiji Matsumoto.

Though Star Blazers first aired in America (dubbed into English) in 1979, it was already well known and loved in Japan as Yamato. In 1974, audiences in Japan were thrilled and captivated by the story of the young heroes who resurrected the great battleship in order to defeat the enemy and his radioactive bombs. Though American audiences saw it as a well crated space yarn, Japanese audiences saw it as a love song for a fallen empire: the great Yamato - which, by the way, is a historic name for Japan - rises from the ashes of its destruction and soars off to glory once again. Less than 30 years after the twin bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the main cultural export from Japan to the US was the story of the Yamato, coming back from the dead and using superior technology to defeat the foe that had crippled them not long ago.

But all this cultural subtext was lost on me as a child. All I knew is that they were in space, they needed to save the world, and they only had 347 days left in which to do it. What did I care about resurgent nationalism and the ghosts of empire? Nothing.

Nothing, that is, until I introduced it to my kids last September.

More in part two.

Fathers and Sons: Star Blazers - PART 2

The trouble with me is that I can't just let a story be a good story. I have to pick it apart, analyze it, look under the hood, kick the tires, and then dismantle the manifold just so I can put it back together again. It's a frustrating habit, one born out of years of teaching students to do the same, and as much as I value this archeological approach to literary understanding, I sometimes wish I could just turn it off.

My family feels the same way.

We downloaded the first season of Star Blazers from iTunes last September. "This is so cool," I told my wife while I was forcing her to watch the first episode. "It's a show that both repudiates and celebrates Japan's imperialist heritage. By rebuilding the Yamato they are reforging their collective identity, one based on global, not national, interests."

She yawned.

"No, think about it," I continued, bouncing up and down a little bit in my excitement. "This came out 30 years after WWII ended. It's a new generation of Japanese, their equivalent of the baby boom. They've inherited their parents' pain and disappointment, and yet it's been tempered with the optimism of youth and a technology-based economy that's just beginning to thrive. It reminds me of this poem by...."

She grabbed my arm. "Did you get the mail?"

I hadn't. She sighed and got up without hitting pause.

The kids, I decided, wouldn't get off so easy.

"There are a few things you need to notice about this first episode," I told them a few days later when I'd managed to bribe them into submission. "First, notice the sense of loss permeating the narrative. Both Captain Avatar and Derek Wildstar are haunted by the loss of the son and brother, respectively. This is probably a reflection of the animators' own losses, or more likely, their parents' losses. If you look closely, the battle in which Derek's brother dies bears a striking resemblance to the final Japanese offensive at Iwo Jima, suggesting that...yes, Maggie?" Her hand was up.

"I want more popcorn."

"Just hold on," I said. She put her hand down and pouted. "Where was I? Oh yeah. The second thing you should look at is the soundtrack. While the theme song is reminiscent of a John Williams style fanfare, a style which actually dates back to the early adventure movies of the 1940s and the classic scores of Korngold, the Star Blazers theme actually predates Williams' most noted scores. Furthermore, the underscore of the show itself is a mix of disco and Wagnerian leit-motif. This is fascinating, because 1) it shows us just how much Western idioms had begun to influence Japanese art, and 2) it's all diatonic, which means that the composers rejected traditional Japanese harmonies in favor of a European chordal palette. This is especially important when considering the overall narrative similarities between Star Blazers and the Ring cycle. Specifically, the scene in which...Conor, where are you going?

He was hopping up and down, legs crossed. "I really have to go. Don't start it without me."

He ran off.

We waited. 45 minutes later I put in a Spongebob DVD for the little ones. By the time Conor emerged from the bathroom Maggie and Lucas were thoroughly engrossed in Spongebob and I was online, trying to find chat thread about non-linear narrative and its implications in post-colonial criticism.

It's a disease, I tell you.

So here's what I've learned about myself:

You know that dad who tries to live his football dreams through his kids? That's me. The mom who pushes her shy daughter into trying out for the cheerleading squad because that's what her mom did to her? Yeah, that's me, too.

I want so badly for my children to see the interconnections between art and culture. I want them to recognize that the creative act does not take place in a vacuum, that all art is bound by place and history, although great art transcends those bounds. I forgot, though, that what drew me to Star Blazers in the first place was the story. It's fun. Imagine that: a story can be fun. It doesn't have to be analyzed or dissected. It can just be enjoyed.

We did eventually watch Star Blazers. And you know what? They loved it. Absolutely loved it. Once their father stopped hitting pause to remind them that the clothes worn by the female characters both contributed to their objectification and served as emancipatory agents by freeing them from the bondage of 1950's gender roles, that is.

Bikes and Books, Part 5: New Criticism

There are few things as depressing as a shower full of motorcycle parts.

Eventually, these parts will be scrubbed and cleaned, scoured free of rust and dirt. They'll be repainted and reassembled, pieces of an overgrown model kit for slightly older boys. All that's missing is the smell of the glue.

But for now, they're just filling up the shower.

I've got to admit, it's hard for me to see how it's all going to come together. Though I theoretically understand that the knee bone is connected to the leg bone, it's hard for me to visualize how all these seemingly random parts are going to come together to make a coherent whole.

This might be because I'm not a New Critic. New Criticism, in case you don't remember, is a mode of literary criticism that reached its zenith in the 1950s. It is, in essence, a positivist approach to literary analysis. The idea is that literary study is an objective endeavor, a hard science, like math or chemistry. Proper literary interpretation comes from a close reading of the text and the text alone. A text that sits on the library shelf for 100 years and is never read still "means" something, because the meaning is embodied in the lines and dots of ink printed on the page. Meaning, then, does not derive from historical context, authorial intention, or even the response of the reader. In fact, in 1954 Wimsatt and Beardsley coined the phrase "the intentional fallacy" specifically to refute the notion that what the author intended a work to mean should have any bearing on what it actually does mean.

For meaning comes from the text and only from the text, sola scriptora style. We can't know what was going on in Shakespeare's head, but we do know what he wrote down on the page. And so New Critics study literary devices such as meter, rhyme, metaphor, syntax, diction, and the like because they're the building blocks of meaning, amino acids to a literary protein. And, because words on a page are static and quantifiable, the entire process of literary analysis is rendered objective. Furthermore, because of the sanctity of the text itself, it is unthinkable to separate meaning from the form in which it is packaged, a particularly egregious sin known as "the heresy of paraphrase." Form and meaning are inextricably intertwined in what New Critics call "organic unity." And so the method of analysis known as "close reading" (which is the method taught in nearly every high school in America) is a New Critical method; to understand what a text "means" it must be taken apart, analyzed piece by piece, and then carefully reassembled in order to construct meaning. If the job is done correctly, the pieces will come together, merging into a revelatory mass of form and meaning. This is what constitutes "good" literature: a perfect marriage of packaging and content.

There's a certain elegance and beauty to the New Critical approach, and as an English teacher I find myself daily indebted to the New Critics for their contributions to the field of literary analysis. Of course, New Criticism as an end in and of itself died a spectacularly fiery death in the 1960 and 70s with the advent of feminist, post-colonial, and other contextually-focused modes of analysis, and this is probably for the best. It has a tendency to promote the interpretations of a select few (read: white, male, educated, European) as the "proper" interpretations, and its internal logic doesn't hold up to serious scrutiny. But the tools given us by the New Critical establishment are good tools, very good tools, indeed. It is a rigorous and demanding approach to literary interpretation, and that rigor is now an integral part of the discipline.

But what does this have to do with the manifold in my shower?

If my motorcycle were a text, a New Critic would say that the literary elements - the pistons, the suspension, the wiring harness - all work together to create the "meaning," which is, I presume, to ride the darn thing. Without all elements working in harmony, the bike doesn't do what it's supposed to do. It is a very poor motorcycle indeed that won't take you from point A to point B, and it's a very poor text that doesn't have all its parts working together to mean something. I get that.

But is the purpose of a motorcycle to get from A to B, or is it something more? Is the meaning of a text merely a function of its constituent parts, or is it something more, something greater? What the New Critics can't account for is mystery and joy, or the wind-in-your-hair, sheer terror acceleration of a good book. They can't account for the hope and freedom of the open road, the searing loss of coming to the end of a multi-volume series, the quiet beauty of an open book, spine up, waiting for you on the kitchen table. And while none of these things are possible without the marriage of form and meaning, neither can any of them be so reduced.

So when I look at the pile of motorcycle droppings in my shower, I don't know exactly how they're all going to come together. What I do know, however, is that when they do, it's going to be more than any Yale educated, stuffy, uptight New England critical theorist could ever imagine: it's going to be magic.