There are a great many emotionally poignant moments in Evangelion 3.0+1.01: Thrice Upon A Time that stopped me in my tracks, that immediately compelled me at the computer where I watched it to pause or even take the moment back and let it bombard my senses. It’s Evangelion, so that’s expected—it’s as spiritually arresting as it is visually so, even more so than at any point in the franchise or even at any point in the already technically impressive Rebuild films that preceded it. As is often the case with the franchise, even when something is obviously and irreparably broken, even when something is rendered jagged and grotesque by the events of the series, it is a sight to behold, something that stops you and stirs you for a moment as you gaze upon it.
The moment that made me get up and briefly, blankly, stare at my monitor and whisper, “it’s finally happened,” doesn’t come until well into the action, just as the plans of the film’s antagonist—Shinji Ikari’s father Gendou—are finally gaining momentum. Shinji has regained control of Evangelion Unit 01, the mecha that has gotten him all through this journey from the beginning, and squares off against his patriarch, each man wielding a spear, clashing in the metaphysical spaces where Shinji’s trials as an Eva pilot began: the rubble of Tokyo-3, the cluttered dining room of Misato Katsuragi’s apartment, an empty classroom in his school. Each time their mettle clashes, they are evenly matched. Gendou confesses that even though their goals, and their weapons, are different, they are fundamentally alike in purpose.
And then Gendou says, “Violence and fear are not the criteria upon which our conflict can be resolved.”
Shinji pauses, his focus flashing to memories of the previous week, of spending time with people who actually like and wish the best for him, being free from the trauma of being a pilot, a pawn in his father’s long game, a catalyst for world-ending violence. Then, he drops his spear. And the two men just…talk.
This franchise spans a little over twenty years in total, among thousands of frames of film and television, hundreds of panels on hundreds of pages of manga, and a veritable universe of games, toys, figurines, and more. There are people like me who watched the series in their teens, when it was more than ten years old, who are turning deep into the pool of their thirties now—people who, for good or for ill, grew up as Shinji had.
And this is…the first time his father legit just talked to the kid.
There is a theory of Evangelion that endures the longest in my heart. It is not only a story about mental illness (although it is that, as director Hideaki Anno speaks at length about how his depression before and during production of the series shaped its story). Nor is it only a story about violence (although it is that as well, as Anno has also spoken at length about how the Aum Shinrikyo sarin gas attack of 1995 influenced both the production and his own relationship to the work).
It is that Evangelion is a story, at its very deepest core, about masculinity.
After all, it’s literally the story of a teenage boy, struggling to reconnect with his father, tasked with gaining mastery over a hulking, brutal humanoid form, told that the stakes of failing to do so well are cataclysmically dire, and then given no further instruction even when the act of piloting it causes him emotional and physical anguish. A puberty metaphor any more deliberate would gain its own sentience and start writing angsty poetry in a high-school composition book by now.
The impact of that metaphor has different significances to different people on different paths. If you were a young queer person, for instance, this obviously hits in totally different ways for each of us: a rich allegory for the trans experience, where Shinji knows that piloting the body of a man grants no fulfilment while struggling to discover why forging relationships with other young women is so frustrating; or a similar one about the gay experience, where Shinji’s most emotionally fulfilling and earnest relationship is with Kaworu Nagisa, an entrancing young man with no issue confessing his somewhat similarly stunted but poetic and intense fondness for Shinji, and saying in plain language that the boy deserves better. I love both of these readings with all of my heart; to me, like many similar fan observations, they are neither exclusive to each other nor limiting in scope.
But for my money, I think Shinji is just a straight teenager struggling to make sense of even what his body would mean under those circumstances. I don’t think that’s a limiting or mundane reading, either—in fact, I think if more cishet men really sat with some of their feelings about Shinji for more than an afternoon in any of the more productive digital spaces of fandom, the franchise has the potential to unlock a lot of really deep and impactful things about the ways in which men are asked to think about themselves, their bodies, their emotions, and their desires. I think there is room for real healing through that lens.
Shinji wants so badly to be loved and has no idea what it looks like. To be fair, very few characters in the franchise seem to know what it looks like, either. But the show goes out of its way to show us the consequences of Shinji in particular not knowing, struggling to find out, gaining some iota of it in small doses, and then seeing those opportunities for love wrenched from him or even destroyed right in front of him. As if to say, “a lot could have been avoided if we didn’t write off this boy’s feelings.” Anno has been bound to this tale—a story he insists is constantly repeating—as if there was something we the audience have also written off.
The first scene of Anno’s 2023 film Shin Kamen Rider opens with a desperate car chase on a mountain road that leads to an ambush where Takeshi Hongo, otherwise known as our outnumbered titular hero, is left no choice but to reduce his enemies to pools of slick red jam with just his fists. The scene that follows this is Hongo standing in the bathroom of a safe house, frantically taking his motorcycle gloves off as he laments having to do so and is in fearful shock that he even could, only to discover his hands are tough and carapaced. It is a more visceral and yet more subtle approach to the character’s core internal conflict in the early episodes of the original series—the fear of becoming inhuman, and the decision to channel duty as a means to reclaim it.
It struck me as a very Anno interpretation of the character. Kamen Rider has always been a conflicted character, and it never gets in the way of him still being cool and deliberate, but Anno not only goes out of his way to show Takeshi a monstrous self, but to portray him as so passionately afraid not of what that loss of physical humanity means for his being, but of what that self is capable of. Simply the act of grabbing someone’s shoulders makes him recoil, glancing at his hands in awe and frustration, asking, “Why am I so strong?”
When he asks why he was chosen for this power, he is told that it’s because they know that he wants power and that he will use it for good. They tell him that they know everything about him: his good college grades, his love of motorcycling, his inability to relate to other people, and most of all, the thing that motivates him to do good in the world.
And then it cuts to briefest of shots of Takeshi holding his father’s bleeding body in his arms.
What makes this so intriguing is that his father is not a character in the 1971 series that Anno is adapting in this film. The show makes a tacit implication that his morals are his own; other than a strong bond with the man who got him into motorcycles, Tobei Tachibana, who would eventually be his primary ally and pseudo-quartermaster, he has very few older male inspirations at all.
But Anno gives Takeshi a father, and just as quickly takes him away: a police officer, killed in action not during a blazing shootout, but trying to talk down an armed hostage-taker only to be fatally stabbed. As parents in the shadow of their sons’ heroic origin story go, at least it isn’t “gunned down in the alley beside a movie theatre.” It’s not simply much more reserved, but much more radical. The lesson we see Takeshi learn is that, while power is still necessary to combat violence, and while he wishes he had more, enough to have saved his father on that day, he still acknowledges that peace, compassion, patience temper the worst impulses of that power.
Power, obviously, is a core leitmotif in the very frame of the superhero drama—how does one attain it? What do you do with it? How do you maintain good in the wake of having so much power that it may corrupt you? Kamen Rider is a very potent application of that theme: Takeshi’s power literally comes from, takes the same shape of, that of his enemies, and he is immediately shaken by the notion that he will lose his humanity to it, that having that power makes him “greater than” and therefore a threat to common folk. But in the course of the original series, and the other shows in the television franchise, it has a very subtle but clarified message at the end of those questions: that power, sadly, is almost always as a matter of course hostile, even evil, but that what matters more than that is always what one does with it. You either reshape dark power by being so noble that it cannot corrupt you, or you have become corrupt even—and especially—if you never use it again. You are either always proactively good or you are always broken.
But giving him his father in the film is also powerful here. Only for one reason: Officer Hongo is trying to save a criminal. He is trying not merely to arrest him for having a knife, or to only free the woman he held at blade-point, but to bring him peace such that he would let it go. And he fails, but even in his dying moments he is still utterly full of compassion.
When Takeshi recounts the story, he is conflicted. He seems to recount it bitterly, upset that “he seemed more worried about them than the family he was leaving behind,” frustrated that he didn’t instead just shoot the man so he wouldn’t have lost his own life. He still says, “I want to be as compassionate as my father…”
But he continues: “…but unlike him, I want to use the power I have.”
There is a moment in Evangelion 3.0+1.01 where Misato Katsuragi gazes up at the infinitely young and frightened Shinji Ikari moments before his final confrontation with Gendou and says, “The only thing a son can do for his father is pat him on his shoulder…or kill him.”
Even given the stakes of the franchise as a whole, it is a hell of a morbid thing to say to a young man, but she is not necessarily wrong.
The events of the Rebuild films up to this point do not endear us to his father—among the many traumas he has personally supervised his son experiencing, including the various deaths or dismemberments of his teenage peers, chief among them—at least emotionally—is the admission that he is merely a tool in a year-long fattening of ego that has cost the lives and future of everyone around him. It is a very powerful metaphor on its own: some men only see their sons as markers of legacy, as extensions of self either in identity or in object-form, and will even watch them self-destruct in the service of that legacy instead of valuing them as individuals. Because of his relationship to the EVA program, Shinji is even deprived of the ability to age—to become mature—in order to serve his father’s goals.
The tension inherent in personal relationships is the point of Evangelion more so than even the giant robots. Even when alien entities six hundred meters wide are attacking the planet, the weapon of choice seems to be psychic damage almost every time. The only example more intense than children and their parents are characters’ attempts to find romantic fulfilment, and in Shinji’s case, even then his father meddles: for multiple, absolutely Freudian reasons, Gendou literally creates a teenage girl and programs her to be affectionate to his son, only for that girl to have an expiration date, deconstructing before the boy’s eyes.
Where a subset of adult fandom mocks Shinji for being petulant or indecisive, I often find an opportunity to well up with compassion instead. One would hope that not many young men have fathers even one-tenth as cruelly demanding as Gendou, lest such a man sour their entire childhood. The truth is that youth is inherently so fragile that we would ultimately hope that more people his age are as indecisive as they can personally stand rather than rash at best or emotionally brutalised at worst.
Imagine giving Prince Hamlet, Willy Loman, or Cory Maxson a mecha. Imagine telling any of them to stop being so whiny, and then see what they would do to the patriarchs in their worlds with that kind of animus.
It’s obvious in his action works that Anno is really interested in not merely making people violent heroes, but asking more probing questions about what it means to be in a state of violence—in a world comprised of a constant state of violence, even when you’re not the aggressor. In Evangelion, the EVAs are monstrous things, often less like their more valiant-looking mecha counterparts of the early days of Japanese animation and more like ghoulish things. The EVAs bare their teeth even when their mouths were previously sealed plate; they growl in agony and hunger when provoked; even when we learn the more familial roots of their animism, they present more often as having spirits of either bitter rage or cavernous hunger—the kinds of things you’d think, and prefer, your machines to lack. Especially when you’re in its cockpit, simultaneously responsible and unable to counter it—as if to imply, via the metaphor, that your own body’s hungers must be sated, even if you would rather tame them.
Shin Kamen Rider is very much like all of Evangelion in this way. After reckoning with his fear of losing his humanity, Takeshi confides in his only ally Ruriko Midorikawa, the daughter of the scientist who made him this way, that he feels like “the energy in [his] body is screaming” for more violence from him. She coldly informs him that the very motorcycle helmet on his head is designed to make him more aggressive. He is, in the end, a body-weapon first and foremost. No matter how noble or death-averse Takeshi is, no matter the insistence that this is what they value most in him, ultimately violence is the only answer when the question is how to upend oppression.
And yet, in almost every moment of conflict save for very late in the two-hour runtime of the film, Takeshi resists combat as often as possible. He spends minutes at a time simply talking to people who he knows he can never convince. He removes his mask and surrenders to the first enemy he is tasked with confronting even when he knows that the same enemy’s choice of weapon is airborne infections. On multiple occasions Ruriko’s life is in peril and he still chooses to wait until he is confident that no other option is available before pursuing force—a tendency that makes him more timid than his original television counterpart.
I want to say that this is what Anno cares about observing foremost: the perspective of especially young male characters struggling with the realisation that violence is inevitable—that their bodies as loci of violence is unavoidable—and yet being willing still to choose to reject it, even if they may still fail. That even if one cannot avoid it, the body is still drawn to it by circumstance, that there is power simply in attempting to refuse, and in only resorting to it last and finally. We wish to be compassionate, but in the end, we cannot waste the power we have.
It matters, then, that he always ends with violence utterly being ended with a rejection: in the final confrontation, Takeshi defeats the final antagonist not with a resounding kick to the chest, but with an image of the villain’s sister forgiving him. In a powerful callback to his memory of his father, when he learns that he has exerted himself so much up to that point that he will die, the big bad asks him, “You’d give your life for the soul of a stranger?”
And he says nothing. He just smirks.
In a 1999 interview in Asahi Shimbun, Anno candidly admits that he suffered abuse at the hands of his father.
It’s written less like your traditional media interview—it is only the answer to one question, and so very little of it is about the Evangelion series or his writing or directing process or anything even remotely promotional, to the point where it feels somewhat distasteful to read, like you’re merely witnessing someone sharing at a support group.
His father lost his leg in a work accident, and suffered terrible pain as a result of a botched operation, struggling with employment ever since, to which Anno seems to attribute the source of his cruelty. He recounts it with what seems on the page as remarkable patience, even when he says that it makes returning to his family home difficult.
From it, Anno confesses that a theory of art has emerged: “There is no doubt that I have been influenced by my father’s physical handicap. I cannot love anything perfect…while in elementary school, I would draw a robot in my notebook…and then I would rub out a part of the body and show something that looks like a bone.”
It is, on its face, a cruel thing to say in context, but it is still context. I am loath to ascribe something purely parallel to this anecdote—for instance, disability doesn’t suddenly make people abusive, and it’s weirder still to insist it revealed something dark in his father’s being—but Anno’s answer is still noteworthy. While working on Evangelion, if some level of this was the frame from which he consistently worked, then how would something like Gendou emerge from that frame?
Anno’s last words in the interview perhaps clarify: “Sometimes that [broken] thing is the body. Sometimes it is the mind.”
Glimpses of this do appear in 3.0+1.01—at this stage in the Rebuild series, several people have lost eyes, limbs, we even see some characters bear long witness to losing their entire bodies—but it is also telling that Anno chooses to show that Gendou, in his grand goal of consciousness, achieves it first by having a hole where his eyes would be.
But the film is also the first time the father becomes less broken. It is perhaps the bridge between Takeshi’s father and Shinji’s father—young men reconciling the images of their fathers for their own growth, gaining empathy even beyond their initial tragedy. But is brokenness the only thing in the frame? Does Takeshi not reconcile his image of his father by learning that sacrifice is in fact a noble use of power?
Is it not in a similar light that Shinji and Gendou aspire not to defeat—to break—each other, but to triumph through the opposite of conflict?
Don’t you pat your father on the shoulder and kill him for the same reason?
The very first thing Gendou learns in that final battle is just how much of his son is in him. He is so afraid of what Shinji thinks of him that the mere act of being peacefully approached by him causes him to put up a metaphorical (and, according to the laws of this world, metaphysical) wall between them. Shinji only pierces that wall by admitting their similarity first: he returns a digital audio tape player to him, and patiently allows his father to admit how “headphones cut [him] off from the outside world,” much like they had for Shinji throughout the whole of the franchise. Their young selves are cast from the same mould, hesitant to bond with others, struggling to make sense of the intensities of social interaction, longing to be loved and belong but not knowing how—until, in Gendou’s case, he finally found someone he could relate to.
Without dwelling on the notion here, one can only wonder if every father is such a shadow of their son. In so many ways, Shinji would have been better off with a father who at least saw the reflection sooner. Life is a struggle, and bonding is hard. We construct our own Anti-Terror Fields to survive its onslaught.
Through that learning, Shinji gains enough patience to make a new world—a thing that isn’t new for the Evangelion franchise in a vacuum, but now through new eyes. Shinji doesn’t have to feed his own fear or serve the fears or longings of others. He chooses instead to create a future where no one has to be tied to this cycle of violence and anguish any more. It is what both he and his father deserve.
Imagine if he had talked to his kid years ago.
So much of the experience of masculinity is a larger scale of this: young men who would love to learn that the drastic expectations put onto them by larger systems do not have to be their identity, instead left to withstand the weight of elders who refuse to shake off their own burdens because they too didn’t learn any better as young people. We get in the robot, we put on the helmet, because we are told that is what we must do—that doing it is what makes men men.
And when things begin to break down, we lament the conflict we have inherited, without anyone alerting those men to the fact that they can choose the alternative.
© 2024 Brandon O'Brien
