THE IRONIC URBAN LANDSCAPE OF DEATHNOTE, OR, Kira, the pop sensation!
I wrote this off the cuff the other day for a friend of mine. I'm not in Death Note fandom by any stretch of the imagination, but she wanted me to post it here, so I'm obliging her.
This is basically a short essay about Death Note and social commentary. I think that a lot of what the plot lacks in, well, sense, it makes up for in terms of parallelisms between L and Light and the overall thematic role that modern urbanized culture plays in the story. This is basically what makes the story for me - (even more than Light/L, which I'm not at all biased about, not at all, nope).
in a nutshell, i think Light and L are dually opposed (and parallel) commentaries on isolation in urban society. Light is from a very integrated family, his father is a part of the social system, Light himself is a completely idealized typified golden boy who has managed to succeed in every aspect of his urban landscape: intelligent, accomplished, hot, confident, and extremely adept at reading social situations and people. he knows what the normative standard is and he surpasses it constantly. he also grew up in one of the busiest, wealthiest, and most industrialized metropolitan areas in the world.
then l: grew up with no family, no integration, no urban landscape, no connection to the outside world except through a detached and highly theoretical understanding of it. again, theoretical in the sense that he has strong ideas about justice like light, but also theoretical in that unlike light he never has a chance to practice and adapt to social norms: he remains detached and aloof from society as part of his job, but also part of his personal predilection. Unlike light who actually functions better from directly within the society he's observing, L functions better outside of it. Light represents pure integration, L represents pure disconnect; Light represents the urban landscape, L the rural/suburban; Light represents societal progression, L represents traditionalism.
Yet for all that L is the alienated one and Light the fully mainstreamed one, Light is the one whose ideas ultimately disconnect him the most and who winds up presenting the most regressive ideology as a purely idealistic, futuristic one. L is the one who manages to hang on to the truest picture of humanity, along with his hope and his idealism - his disconnect from society actually aids him and maybe even allows him to stay rooted to its traditional values. Light's version of humanity is one that is warped and cynical - his idealism, too, is a warped and cynical vision of society's potential: his ideals aren't "real" ideals any more than his golden boy persona is a "real" persona. his fully integrated view of the social system has left him with no expect for it and a perfect knowledge of how to manipulate it.
And it is almost laughably easy to manipulate, and it is laughably shallow: misa and light get away with murder because they're young and hot, basically; l jerks interpol around right and left and interpol never questions his authority; hundreds of thousands of people support kira, and the funny thing is we never really see society being thrown into turmoil as a result, because the funny thing is the society isn't thrown into turmoil - the cult of kira grows and grows and society seems to function without really caring.
the police force alone is sort of staggeringly incompetent - light's dad and matsuda are the only ones whose ideals seem untarnished, and their ideals never line up with their actions. matsuda is the most idealistic of all, but he is persistently too weak to be an effective foil for kira, and even at the end he seems to be regretting the entire thing and regretting that he had to kill light, rather than looking back on his own actions as necessary.
light's dad is shown as almost too idealistic to be effective - instead of doing anything productive he's focused totally on the appearance of things. it's completely appropriate that in his last moments, he only "sees" his son as blameless and not as kira: he sees him in a kind of 'blind spot' - one he has actually had all along. He is too focused on the way things look instead of the way things actually are that all his actions are motivated by an overidealized sense of justice (just like his son) instead of being actually practical. Instead of taking effective action he responds with "MY HONOR MY HONOR MY SON AND MY HONOR LOCK ME UP TOO, L, LET ME STAGE A RIDICULOUS PLOT USING GUNS AND CARJACKS TO TEST MY SON'S IDENTITY, L" and even though he's the head of the police department he, like l and like light in their respective roles, isn't a substantive and fully formed figure in it.
He, like every other character in this show, has only the trappings and outward show of the role he is supposed to be playing rather than a fully defined and well-rounded identity. The modern society of death note is one that has left these characters with no way of understanding what real integrity, justice, honor, rightness, etc are - their understanding of social values are whittled down to sound bytes, technical wizardry (the 5 o'clock news, l's short universal broadcasts, kira's shrines on the internet) and pop culture iconography (misa misa the pop star - ryuuga hideki the pop idol - kira the international, larger than life cult figure who becomes basically another pop idol). Everything about the functionality and meaning of the world of death note is shallow. It's impossible to 'connect' because everything in this world is valueless.
Ohba/Obata understood that they were creating such a society - they deliberately didn't focus on definitions of good/evil because what was the point? The few idealistic figures within the story who do attempt to be "good" are thwarted before they even begin. They have no real framework for tapping into genuine values. The ones who come closest to being genuinely good are Suichiro and Matsuda - but they are never able to translate that goodness fully into action. This is not a society where idealism can translate effectively into action.
L and Near and Light are out of all the characters the ones who are the most pro-active, and even then ALL of them are ridiculously ineffective for long periods of time - L torturing Light for 80+ days and then still not being convinced he's Kira is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of inexplicable or contradictory action on his part - and on top of that he even admits that he wants Light to be Kira at the same time he is speaking of their friendship. The fact that he has Light and Misa prisoner while the killings stop for months and doesn't arrest them points strongly to the fact that subconsciously he does want Light to be Kira, knows that Light is Kira, and can't bring himself to follow through in terms of decisive action to bring him to justice because ultimately, he is committed more to the chase and the challenge than to the justice itself.
And that's really what gets us off, isn't it? The aesthetic, hot steamy nature of their dynamic, rather than any need to see Light brought to justice. Subconsciously L wants Light to be Kira, consciously understands that he and Light have all the outward appearance of friendship. It doesn't matter whether they really are friends or not; this universe doesn't require anyone in it to dig that deep. Just as L, just as everyone in the cast around Light buys into what Light is selling on a more personal level, so they buy subconsciously into the idea that appearance is reality - that beauty is truth: so Light, so Kira, so Misa, must be truthful, because beautiful. It doesn't matter that Light and L actually be good v/s evil - it just matters that they perform their parts.
My friend F. and I were discussing the show "House" recently and she said something that really struck me, which is that it's a show full of people who think they represent certain values but in reality they're all just simply shallow - they go through the motions of being decent people (or in House's case being an asshole) without substantively being wholly developed, self-aware versions of those type of characters. As i was writing this mini-essay, I started thinking about how that reading applies to Death Note, and that's exactly it: everything about Death Note is about the appearance of good and evil, the appearance of justice, rather than the actual application and practice of it. The Yagami family appears stable and nuclear, Light appears to be the perfect son, he and Misa appear to be the perfect couple, Light and L appear to be steadfast friends, on the surface Kira appears to be powerful but ultimately his power is borrowed from another source, L appears to be a brilliant detective but ultimately can't act on his brilliance.
And even then, L is as affective as he is precisely because he is able to stand outside that social structure - he hides his appearance from the world, and it's partly because he deviates from that standard (letting the world see him and letting himself engage with that social system to an extreme degree) that he fails: his judgment is compromised and the game is lost for him the moment he sets eyes on Light - because ultimately even he is duped by a society where appearance is reality: Light's appearance of goodness fools him against his better judgment, just as it fools everyone else. (Not that L ever thinks Light is innocent, but that L's self-doubt is predicated on his inability to line up what his gut tells him is true with what he sees in front of him: he falls through the cracks of Light's personality, between reality and the semblance of it, and ultimately loses focus and faith in himself.)
Light is able to succeed so well at being Kira for as long as he does (please assume the implied vast amounts of post-9/11 commentary inserted here) because he is able to manipulate reality. He understands the system so well that he renders the function of good versus evil completely meaningless. But ultimately he is the biggest dupe of all, because he fails to understand that his ideals are themselves meaningless. The very qualities of the society that enabled him to succeed in that society are the same qualities which deprive his ideals of any meaning. If he has exploited its shallowness, its hollow idealism, its short attention span, its relentless focus on the appearance of virtue without the substance of it, then he has also played himself: he buys into the image he's selling, of kira as a virtuous and righteous god, rather than understanding his role as a master manipulator working for his own ends. He believes his own lie - and that is ultimately why he fails: his sense of invincibility and his pursuit of fake ideals can no more stand being put to the test than can L's passive-aggressive action and ambivalence about his prey.
This is a post-modern world that loves Kira more than it fears him, a world where the good guy isn't 100% sure he wouldn't rather be fucking the bad guy, a world where the bad guy spends half the time pursuing himself, a world where arbiters of justice raise serial killers, and a world where everything ultimately is an elaborate, Enron-sized house of cards.
And ultimately, when it all comes tumbling down, society hasn't even changed. There is a cult of Kira, sure: but wasn't there always? The society that built that house of cards to begin will just reconstruct another variation on reality with another sham set of ideals, and another sham cast of characters to carry them out, and the show will just go on and on and on.
Ultimately, the real cult of Kira, in Death Note, is society at large - as lacking in self-awareness and as desensitized to itself as the monster it created. In a postmodern world where good and evil no longer exist, we have no need for "real" heroes and villains, and indeed are happy to accept all substitutions. Light is frequently ridiculous, but his very sexuality, Obata's fanservicing of him, the way he is drawn, presents him to us as an idol: and we idolize him to our heart's content. We idolize him because we have no real, meaningful heroes to take his place; and our idolization perpetuates the shallow ideals that created him to begin with.
And that inescapable, bleak crux is where Death Note, at its blackest and most cynical, becomes truly terrifying: because through the very act of reading and enjoying the story, we, the reader, have become implicit, willing participants in the cult of Kira ourselves.
This is basically a short essay about Death Note and social commentary. I think that a lot of what the plot lacks in, well, sense, it makes up for in terms of parallelisms between L and Light and the overall thematic role that modern urbanized culture plays in the story. This is basically what makes the story for me - (even more than Light/L, which I'm not at all biased about, not at all, nope).
in a nutshell, i think Light and L are dually opposed (and parallel) commentaries on isolation in urban society. Light is from a very integrated family, his father is a part of the social system, Light himself is a completely idealized typified golden boy who has managed to succeed in every aspect of his urban landscape: intelligent, accomplished, hot, confident, and extremely adept at reading social situations and people. he knows what the normative standard is and he surpasses it constantly. he also grew up in one of the busiest, wealthiest, and most industrialized metropolitan areas in the world.
then l: grew up with no family, no integration, no urban landscape, no connection to the outside world except through a detached and highly theoretical understanding of it. again, theoretical in the sense that he has strong ideas about justice like light, but also theoretical in that unlike light he never has a chance to practice and adapt to social norms: he remains detached and aloof from society as part of his job, but also part of his personal predilection. Unlike light who actually functions better from directly within the society he's observing, L functions better outside of it. Light represents pure integration, L represents pure disconnect; Light represents the urban landscape, L the rural/suburban; Light represents societal progression, L represents traditionalism.
Yet for all that L is the alienated one and Light the fully mainstreamed one, Light is the one whose ideas ultimately disconnect him the most and who winds up presenting the most regressive ideology as a purely idealistic, futuristic one. L is the one who manages to hang on to the truest picture of humanity, along with his hope and his idealism - his disconnect from society actually aids him and maybe even allows him to stay rooted to its traditional values. Light's version of humanity is one that is warped and cynical - his idealism, too, is a warped and cynical vision of society's potential: his ideals aren't "real" ideals any more than his golden boy persona is a "real" persona. his fully integrated view of the social system has left him with no expect for it and a perfect knowledge of how to manipulate it.
And it is almost laughably easy to manipulate, and it is laughably shallow: misa and light get away with murder because they're young and hot, basically; l jerks interpol around right and left and interpol never questions his authority; hundreds of thousands of people support kira, and the funny thing is we never really see society being thrown into turmoil as a result, because the funny thing is the society isn't thrown into turmoil - the cult of kira grows and grows and society seems to function without really caring.
the police force alone is sort of staggeringly incompetent - light's dad and matsuda are the only ones whose ideals seem untarnished, and their ideals never line up with their actions. matsuda is the most idealistic of all, but he is persistently too weak to be an effective foil for kira, and even at the end he seems to be regretting the entire thing and regretting that he had to kill light, rather than looking back on his own actions as necessary.
light's dad is shown as almost too idealistic to be effective - instead of doing anything productive he's focused totally on the appearance of things. it's completely appropriate that in his last moments, he only "sees" his son as blameless and not as kira: he sees him in a kind of 'blind spot' - one he has actually had all along. He is too focused on the way things look instead of the way things actually are that all his actions are motivated by an overidealized sense of justice (just like his son) instead of being actually practical. Instead of taking effective action he responds with "MY HONOR MY HONOR MY SON AND MY HONOR LOCK ME UP TOO, L, LET ME STAGE A RIDICULOUS PLOT USING GUNS AND CARJACKS TO TEST MY SON'S IDENTITY, L" and even though he's the head of the police department he, like l and like light in their respective roles, isn't a substantive and fully formed figure in it.
He, like every other character in this show, has only the trappings and outward show of the role he is supposed to be playing rather than a fully defined and well-rounded identity. The modern society of death note is one that has left these characters with no way of understanding what real integrity, justice, honor, rightness, etc are - their understanding of social values are whittled down to sound bytes, technical wizardry (the 5 o'clock news, l's short universal broadcasts, kira's shrines on the internet) and pop culture iconography (misa misa the pop star - ryuuga hideki the pop idol - kira the international, larger than life cult figure who becomes basically another pop idol). Everything about the functionality and meaning of the world of death note is shallow. It's impossible to 'connect' because everything in this world is valueless.
Ohba/Obata understood that they were creating such a society - they deliberately didn't focus on definitions of good/evil because what was the point? The few idealistic figures within the story who do attempt to be "good" are thwarted before they even begin. They have no real framework for tapping into genuine values. The ones who come closest to being genuinely good are Suichiro and Matsuda - but they are never able to translate that goodness fully into action. This is not a society where idealism can translate effectively into action.
L and Near and Light are out of all the characters the ones who are the most pro-active, and even then ALL of them are ridiculously ineffective for long periods of time - L torturing Light for 80+ days and then still not being convinced he's Kira is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of inexplicable or contradictory action on his part - and on top of that he even admits that he wants Light to be Kira at the same time he is speaking of their friendship. The fact that he has Light and Misa prisoner while the killings stop for months and doesn't arrest them points strongly to the fact that subconsciously he does want Light to be Kira, knows that Light is Kira, and can't bring himself to follow through in terms of decisive action to bring him to justice because ultimately, he is committed more to the chase and the challenge than to the justice itself.
And that's really what gets us off, isn't it? The aesthetic, hot steamy nature of their dynamic, rather than any need to see Light brought to justice. Subconsciously L wants Light to be Kira, consciously understands that he and Light have all the outward appearance of friendship. It doesn't matter whether they really are friends or not; this universe doesn't require anyone in it to dig that deep. Just as L, just as everyone in the cast around Light buys into what Light is selling on a more personal level, so they buy subconsciously into the idea that appearance is reality - that beauty is truth: so Light, so Kira, so Misa, must be truthful, because beautiful. It doesn't matter that Light and L actually be good v/s evil - it just matters that they perform their parts.
My friend F. and I were discussing the show "House" recently and she said something that really struck me, which is that it's a show full of people who think they represent certain values but in reality they're all just simply shallow - they go through the motions of being decent people (or in House's case being an asshole) without substantively being wholly developed, self-aware versions of those type of characters. As i was writing this mini-essay, I started thinking about how that reading applies to Death Note, and that's exactly it: everything about Death Note is about the appearance of good and evil, the appearance of justice, rather than the actual application and practice of it. The Yagami family appears stable and nuclear, Light appears to be the perfect son, he and Misa appear to be the perfect couple, Light and L appear to be steadfast friends, on the surface Kira appears to be powerful but ultimately his power is borrowed from another source, L appears to be a brilliant detective but ultimately can't act on his brilliance.
And even then, L is as affective as he is precisely because he is able to stand outside that social structure - he hides his appearance from the world, and it's partly because he deviates from that standard (letting the world see him and letting himself engage with that social system to an extreme degree) that he fails: his judgment is compromised and the game is lost for him the moment he sets eyes on Light - because ultimately even he is duped by a society where appearance is reality: Light's appearance of goodness fools him against his better judgment, just as it fools everyone else. (Not that L ever thinks Light is innocent, but that L's self-doubt is predicated on his inability to line up what his gut tells him is true with what he sees in front of him: he falls through the cracks of Light's personality, between reality and the semblance of it, and ultimately loses focus and faith in himself.)
Light is able to succeed so well at being Kira for as long as he does (please assume the implied vast amounts of post-9/11 commentary inserted here) because he is able to manipulate reality. He understands the system so well that he renders the function of good versus evil completely meaningless. But ultimately he is the biggest dupe of all, because he fails to understand that his ideals are themselves meaningless. The very qualities of the society that enabled him to succeed in that society are the same qualities which deprive his ideals of any meaning. If he has exploited its shallowness, its hollow idealism, its short attention span, its relentless focus on the appearance of virtue without the substance of it, then he has also played himself: he buys into the image he's selling, of kira as a virtuous and righteous god, rather than understanding his role as a master manipulator working for his own ends. He believes his own lie - and that is ultimately why he fails: his sense of invincibility and his pursuit of fake ideals can no more stand being put to the test than can L's passive-aggressive action and ambivalence about his prey.
This is a post-modern world that loves Kira more than it fears him, a world where the good guy isn't 100% sure he wouldn't rather be fucking the bad guy, a world where the bad guy spends half the time pursuing himself, a world where arbiters of justice raise serial killers, and a world where everything ultimately is an elaborate, Enron-sized house of cards.
And ultimately, when it all comes tumbling down, society hasn't even changed. There is a cult of Kira, sure: but wasn't there always? The society that built that house of cards to begin will just reconstruct another variation on reality with another sham set of ideals, and another sham cast of characters to carry them out, and the show will just go on and on and on.
Ultimately, the real cult of Kira, in Death Note, is society at large - as lacking in self-awareness and as desensitized to itself as the monster it created. In a postmodern world where good and evil no longer exist, we have no need for "real" heroes and villains, and indeed are happy to accept all substitutions. Light is frequently ridiculous, but his very sexuality, Obata's fanservicing of him, the way he is drawn, presents him to us as an idol: and we idolize him to our heart's content. We idolize him because we have no real, meaningful heroes to take his place; and our idolization perpetuates the shallow ideals that created him to begin with.
And that inescapable, bleak crux is where Death Note, at its blackest and most cynical, becomes truly terrifying: because through the very act of reading and enjoying the story, we, the reader, have become implicit, willing participants in the cult of Kira ourselves.