Kira, Pop Sensation: the Ironic Urban Landscape of Death Note.

[bookshop]

Note: This essay is a revision of an essay I wrote for death_note a while back. (Okay, like, 3 years ago. What.) It is a commentary on the manga, anime, and both films of Death Note, and contains major spoilers for all of them.

Death Note is one of those iconic, apocryphal stories that it feels like everyone's read or at least heard of by now and

Comments

[dybji]

Aaaahh, Death Note meta omg, and has it really been five years holy cabooses. :/

I have never thought of the idea of DN creating and feeding into its own commodification/mass-culture "cult," but actually it makes all the sense, especially given that horrifying gaze of hope beaming at you from the final page of the manga. I think that's why I found the climax so satisfying, though - you know "The Wave," when the students finally realize in horror who their "leader" was. The DN climax provides the basic satisfaction of seeing Light recontextualized outside of his own megalomaniacal world, sure, but it also throws you a philosophical lifeline. It throws you Near, taking the whole can of worms and justice and Kira and right and wrong and morality and mortality and power and the supernatural that everyone else (readers included) had been struggling with for so long, and shelving it all with something as simple as "This that you've been doing is insane, and it's stopping now."

Because I actually disagree about Light manipulating the shallowness of everyone's ideology - that is, I mean, okay, that's exactly what he's doing, but I think he does it without any real self-awareness re his own half-baked new-age morality ideas or his own megalomania and narcissistic personality disorder and psychopathic behavior. I think he buys into his own con from the very first episode - it just takes longer for reality to bring down his con act than it does to bring down L's purism, which is appropriate and telling for this universe.

So I think Light starts this whole labyrinthine cop chase, and underneath it he gets a philosophical discussion going in a world where nobody has anything to contribute beyond weak, half-baked, half-soundbyte ideas, readers included. But what Near does is to expose Light as a phony, not just logistically but as an idea. The justice excuse for the death note is just more smoke and mirrors; what matters is that all we've got is this society and the rules we make up, and we've got to uphold them. Near, ironically, is as close to a symbol for "action" as we get in this series. And I think that's what Matsuda embodies in that scene, too: the one cop who, conceptually speaking, sympathized with the Kira concept, is also the one who hears Near loudest. He's the one who cuts the Gordian knot and just. stops. playing. the game.

Because I've heard people say that regardless of how gripping it was, "Death Note" was just plumb irresponsible writing for a series aimed at Shounen Jump's audience. And I don't think the climax fixed that - not least because that was a lot of inferring I did from one text bubble - but it certainly helped a bit, imo.