I recently watched Evangelion again for the first time in several years. Eva has aged well, although there were certain things that surprised me about my own reaction.
The first thing that struck me is that the series continues to be, for lack of a better word, impressive. It’s awe-inspiring, and makes you take it and its universe seriously no matter how silly it can be at times. I still like the soundtrack, particularly the weird, borderline-atonal piano solos. And I still really love the constant use of glaring, backlit scenes—Evangelion stares into the light even if it’s blinding.
Knowing where the series is heading, it’s all the more fun watching the little clues that get dropped, as early as the first episode. One of my friends had also seen Eva before, and for us, part of the fun was working out a system of glances and gestures by which we could communicate our excitement without spoiling anything for the newcomers.
I appreciated the characters much more, this time around. I really really like Asuka now. She and Shinji form a duality—both disappointed by their role in the universe, but Shinji because of confirmed low expectations and Asuka because of disappointed high expectations—and I’m vastly more in Asuka’s camp. Rei’s behavior throughout the series makes much more sense once you know who she actually is, and it’s wonderful to watch how this develops. And then there’s Gendo. You know, I’m on his side now. It’s not just that his goals are horribly appealing to a part of me that I generally do a good job of repressing; it’s that there’s something refreshingly healthy in his approach to life: everyone in Evangelion is dismayed by their relation to the cosmos, but only Gendo is doing something about it. And the backstory episode, seen without the haze of “Project X,” raised my sympathy for him tremendously. (In general, the backstory was much more coherent this time through, and I picked up more delightful bits of Eva-babble, like ”metaphysical biology.”)
Now here’s where I was astonished: I enjoyed the series finale much more than I did the first time. (By “finale,” I mean the last two episodes, of course.) That I enjoyed it at all is surprising. But I really liked it, I thought it was significant and powerful despite its obvious flaws. Further, I think I enjoyed the movie a little less than before. I still like the movie very much—on the whole, it’s still a better ending than the series finale—but I think it has certain weaknesses that reveal themselves on repeated viewing. Let me try to break down my reactions a bit…
I disliked the series finale, originally, because I found it incoherent and depressing. I still find it depressing, but I understand why; and I now realize that it’s not incoherent. It is vague and allusive in places, but I think that much of that allusiveness is deliberate and controlled, and also narrower in scope than I had first thought. (There’s nothing wrong with allusive weirdness when done well; that’s one of the appeals of, say, Lain.) For instance, I was astonished to see just how precisely Gendo explains what the Third Impact is, and how his version’s outcome differs from that envisioned be SEELE. We’re explicitly told that Rei will play a role in the events, and there are some pleasantly cryptic clues as to what that role is, for example in the early scene in which Rei welcomes “herself” home.
Not having to guess frantically what was happening, I was free to appreciate the artistic aspects of the finale. The title cards and montages and “subliminal” flashes are really quite effective in conveying emotional turmoil. The music here is at its most delightfully unnerving. And the dreamlike, abstract nature of the events and images does not come out of nowhere, but is simply the climax of a series of dream sequences we’ve always had, most notably the various points at which Shinji’s identity is absorbed to one degree or another into Unit 01. The total emotional effect, of course, is that, well, we feel sick. And we’re supposed to. This is utterly a success. What’s not a success is the “triumph” at the end. It’s simply unconvincing. Anno tries hard to make it convincing, and almost succeeds. For the whole series, Shinji has been telling himself “I mustn’t run away... I mustn’t run away…” and it is this determination which saves him in the end. And when he realizes that his self-hatred is, in and of itself, the problem, this is a natural resolution to the sequence of self-discoveries he has made throughout Evangelion—for instance, his self-hatred has been constantly on his mind ever since the dummy plug incident which initiates his, and the series’, final emotional plummet. But when this resolution finally comes, it comes too suddenly, surrounded as it is by the darkness of the last episode, for us to believe it, and the “applause” scene at the very end is simply too self-congratulatory to be taken seriously. The reason the finale is so depressing, to me, is that it’s meant to be a triumph over depression, but the former is conveyed much less convincingly than the latter. And Asuka’s personal crisis is forgotten entirely.
In The Classical Style, Charles Rosen observes that the first-movement climax of Beethoven’s Hammerklavier sonata is ”so brutally abrupt as to resolve none of the tension at all”. I think this description applies to the Eva finale as well. Beethoven, of course, knew exactly what he was doing and got precisely the effect he wanted; Anno seems to have miscalculated, or perhaps simply run out of time and money to do what he wanted. (The sheer number of still images in the finale support the latter hypothesis—the ”subliminal” montages are an effective use of stills; the jerky transitions in the “theater” scenes, less so.) So I now believe that the series finale is actually brilliant, although seriously flawed.
The End of Evangelion has suffered in my estimation simply because I think there are large parts which are needlessly confusing. The series finale contains mysteries of two sorts: first, there are things which are deliberately, and rather delightfully, cryptic. Who is actually in NERV’s basement? Who is Rei talking to when she’s talking to “herself”? What did Gendo know and when did he know it? What physically happens to humanity when the whole world sort of melts into an allegory? And second, there are things which are cryptic because their explanation is either muffed or rushed: what physically happens to humanity, and specifically to Shinji and Rei, just before the Third Impact? What does SEELE think of all this? Where’s Asuka? Where’d the cheese go? The former puzzles are admirable, creating a wholly appropriate air of mystery and mysticism, and the latter are, if not forgivable, then at least understandable as blemishes on an otherwise admirable whole. But the movie has puzzles which seem to exist simply because a decision was made to take inherently simple events and present them cryptically. It’s all very nice to see (actually see—no more “audio only”) SEELE chanting ominously as the Third Impact unfolds, but what exactly are they expecting to happen? I can only assume that things turn out counter to those expectations—as best I can tell, they intended to destroy humanity completely, to return us to nothingness, and instead, of course, we end up with a collective consciousness, our “original state”—but it’s all very conjectural. We’re given to understand that Evangelion, our “new god,” has saved humanity, but what’s the mechanism, exactly? Why is Unit 01 the special one, and not 00 or 02? We see all the souls being gathered into the Egg of Lilith in one particularly impressive sequence of animation, but what happens after that is more obscure. Most frustratingly of all, what are we to make of the assertion that we can “return to a human form” whenever we want? Is that what Shinji and Asuka have done, at the very end? Or not? There just seems to be no way to tell, and there seems to be no good reason why we shouldn’t be able to tell, given all that we’ve already witnessed.
This is particularly a problem when there are visuals that are patently in need of explanation. Much of the “visionary” stuff in End of Eva is nicely done, and even awe-inspiring: I’ve already mentioned the Egg of Lilith sequence; I think the “ascention” of Unit 01 is also rather exhillerating; and of the sequences in Shinji’s subconscious, the sand-castle Geo Front, among other things, nicely conveys the sense of mind and universe cracking up. However, there is also much which is, on the face of it, simply weird without being genuinely mysterious or transporting. A lot of scenes involving giant Reis and random eyeballs are in this category for me. I don’t mean that these visuals are necessarily silly, just that they’re silly without a sort of justification which we are not given. And then there’s the silliness that can’t possibly be justified, like the gratuitous and random Christian symbolism which has appeared sporadically and meaninglessly throughout the show, but is particularly prevalent here.
Instead of this, wouldn’t it be nice to get a little more explanation as to what the various Third Impact scenarios were, and how NERV and SEELE manipulated those possibilities? In the absence of such discussion, there’s a danger that the plot of the whole series is ungrounded: if we were going to deliberately initiate Third Impact one way or another, why fight the Angels at all? I mean, sure, they wanted to cause a bad Third Impact scenario, but why couldn’t we just do whatever-it-is-we-did before the Angels even arrived? It seems that there’s essentially a cosmic game going on and these are The Rules—but wouldn’t it be nice to know a bit more? The series finale certainly leaves these questions open, but the movie practically begs us to ask, and then doesn’t answer.
This isn’t to say that there’s nothing of value in End of Eva—on the contrary, there’s another half to it, the “physical” half, if you will, which I just love. It’s truly beautiful to see Asuka pull herself together at last—her joy in battle is so wonderful to behold that it hardly matters that it’s in vain (although I’d still like to better understand her ultimate fate). Misato’s final actions in this life, while disturbing, shed light on her character. And of course, there’s the very end, the “one more final”… eek. It’s still devastating. And, unlike the “happy” ending of the series, it is utterly convincing. We get the horrible feeling that, when Anno tells us our internal and external worlds are ultimately “sick” or “disgusting” despite the apparent promise of universal redemption, he is being more sincere with us than when he says that the horror of existence can be overcome by the power of positive thinking.
I feel I now have a better appreciation of Evangelion as a whole—I’m better able to recognize and isolate its flaws, which leaves me to better appreciate its values, some of which I hadn’t noticed before. I think it still deserves its place in my catalogue of works that I admire greatly yet which I will only be able to visit rarely. There is, though, one pervasive element of Evangelion which mitigates the darkness of its vision where the unconvincing “happy” ending could not: the very structure of the series, its genre subversion and gleeful self-deconstruction, suggests that, if we’re living in a flawed world, we can at least have some fun doing so.