When the Machines Stop: Fantasy, Reality, and Terminal Identity in Neon Genesis Evangelion and Serial Experiments Lain

Napier, Susan J. "When the Machines Stop: Fantasy, Reality, and Terminal Identity in Neon Genesis Evangelion and Serial Experiments Lain." SFS #88 29.3 (November 2002): 418-35. On line except for Abstract here.

From the Abstract (p. 435): This article examines two major works in recent Japanese anime, the science-fiction series Neon Genesis Evangelion (1997) and Serial Experiments Lain (1999) in terms of their exploration of the human subject vis-à-vis an apocalyptic vision of technology and the real at the end of the twentieth century. While a number of popular anime have dealt with this subject since the 1970s, Evangelion and Lain are characterized by a unique approach: a concern with what happens to human identity when the machines stop - i.e., is there still subjectivity outside of technology? Evangelion answers the question in ambiguous fashion, highlighting the artifice inherent in animation itself to suggest a world of infinite possibilities, where the "real" is simply what the imagination creates. Lain seems more pessimistic, giving its protagonist no choice but to erase herself from reality in order to save it. [...]

Essay opens with a headnote quoting E. M. Foster's "The Machine Stops" (1909) and soon moves to a reference to Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (1932), stressing Foster's work and its critique of "a world in which technology has rendered direct interpersonal contact unnecessary and [...] slightly obscene, and [...] the explicitly apocalyptic dimension" of the story. In Forster’s view, however, when the machines stop, reality — the untainted sky — emerges. In the two Japanese anime TV series, Shinseiki evangerion (1997, Neon Genesis Evangelion) and Serial Experiments Lain (1998, 1999 in US) [...] this is not the case. In these works, reality itself becomes part of the apocalyptic discourse, problematized as a condition that can no longer be counted on to continue to exist, thanks to the advances of technology and its increasing capabilities for both material and spiritual destruction. The two works also pose an insistent question: What happens to human identity in the virtual world? Does it become what Scott Bukatman calls “terminal identity” [in Terminal Identity: The Virtual Subject in Postmodern Science Fiction], a new state in which we find “both the end of the subject and a new subjectivity constructed at the computer screen or television screen” (9)? And does it then go on to become part of what Bukatman refers to as “terminal culture,” a world in which reality and fantasy fuse into techno-surrealism and nothing is ultimately “knowable”? (Napier p. 419)

See also for comments on the television and film animated series that we have cited as SPACE CRUISER YAMATO, "the 1988 film masterpiece Akira (p. 420), and "the mecha sf genre" generally and deconstruction thereof in these later works (p. 426).

RDE, Initial Compiler, 30May19