watching Revolutionary Girl Utena: 7
In which I pick the series up again after a two-year-long break.
The other night I went to Scarecrow with the intent of - let’s be honest here - renting some cartoon porn. While I was there, I also borrowed one of their Utena DVDs. It was the beginning of the second story arc, which was where I left off last time: episode 14, The Boys Of The Black Rose, which introduced the titular evil gender-swapped versions of our heroines Utena and Anthy.
The DVD had four episodes - 14, 15, 16, and 17. So many of the rituals of the show came back to me as I watched them, even though it’d been two years, and this arc is determined to break half of them. It quickly established its own rhythms with its first episode, and hammered them down in the next three: a character with some amount of history with one of the Student Council members goes to an interview with the Black Rose Boys, which seems to be held in an elevator going down. As they do, a picture of a butterfly on the wall reverts to a chrysalis, then a caterpillar, then a leaf; they’re prompted to “go deeper”, and break down into an angry confession of Why They Have A Beef With Utena. And then they’re brought into a room with coffin-sized drawers scattered irregularly around the walls, given a duellist’s ring that has turned black, and sent off to duel Utena. With a sword they’ve pulled out of the heart of the Student Council member they’re associated with, the same way Utena usually uses one pulled from Anthy’s heart.
The duels still take place in the same arena, but now it’s got a hundred desks arrayed in it, with a hundred red silhouettes on the ground next to them. These desks are associated with a hundred student duellists who committed suicide, as are the black rings they’ve been given. At the end of the duel (always ending when Utena slices the black rose off the lapel of her posessed opponent), the desks move of their own volition into the four corners of the arena, and Utena’s opponent falls so as to land exactly into one of the silhouettes. Their ring crumbles, and in the underground room with the coffins, the one they were given the ring from is pulled into the wall, where it falls into a firey abyss. Over three of these four episodes, these scenes are quickly edited down to shorter versions: you know whats going on here, Be-Papas is saying; you know this show is about ritual and repetition by now; we only need to show you the full ritual once, we trust you to fill it in on subsequent occurences.
(It’s interesting how they do this: the first iteration of the Interview Ritual contains a bunch of very puzzling shots of the ends of the coffins of the Hundred Duellists set into the corner of a wall, whooshing up past the camera. Are they ascending or are we descending? We don’t know at first, but these are intercut with the interview in what we conclude is an elevator going down. And then we go into the room full of coffins, and Evil Boy Utena tells us what they are. So we’ve gone from being curious about these enigmatic objects to knowing exactly what they forbode by the second time - and we’ve been primed to notice them by staring at them for a few moments and wondering just what the hell am I looking at here on the first appearance. The second time they show up, we know what they portend instantly.)
Each of these duels, it should be noted, seems to be Ritually Correct: Utena climbs the endless staircase with the Absolute Destiny Apocalypse song playing, and fights in the duelling version of her uniform.
And alongside all of this, we have the mystery of Anthy’s relationship with her brother, which may or may not be sexual. They do things in the dark and have pet names for each other, that’s all we really know, and as always, Anthy reveals very little of her feelings.
Anthy really never reveals her feelings. To anyone. She just smiles placidly and does what she’s told. I won’t be surprised if this facade cracks at some point in the series. There’s a lot held in.
There’s also a comedy episode to break up all of this backstory, of course. Mean Popular Girl gets a designer cowbell; wearing it slowly turns her into a cow. Once she’s completely a cow, Utena plays matador with a red sweater Anthy’s been knitting throughout the episode, slices the cowbell off of Mean Popular’s neck the same way she slices roses off of lapels, and everything’s back to normal.
The Shadow Chorus girls are still around. Now they’re always shadows on a rose window, usually with characters in front of them. And now they seem to be increasingly incoherent; the only shadow play that really felt related to the main story at all was the one in the comedy cowbell episode, and that only tangentially at best.
I didn’t watch these while taking notes, like I did the first arc. So this is all I have to say about these episodes: some comments on how the repeated elements of the overall show change for this arc. I assume that these elements will also fall apart over the next few episodes. Because why else does a storyteller create patterns, if not to break them?
(Also worth noting: Evil Boy Utena and Evil Boy Anthy are just as queer for each other as Utena and Anthy. Boy Anthy is angling to become the new Rose Bride, and there is a conversation where the idea of him becoming the Rose Groom insetad is explicitly dismissed. This show is SO QUEER.)
Originally published at Egypt Urnash. You can comment here or there.