A Cycle, Not a Phase Love Between Magical Girls Amidst the PDF

Preview

Summary

Article...

Description

A Cycle, Not a Phase: Love Between Magical Girls Amidst the Trauma of Puella Magi Madoka Magica Kevin Cooley

Mechademia, Volume 13, Number 1, Fall 2020, pp. 24-39 (Article) Published by University of Minnesota Press

For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/772383

[ Access provided at 12 Nov 2021 00:36 GMT from Binghamton University ]

A Cycle, Not a Phase Love Between Magical Girls Amidst the Trauma of Puella Magi Madoka Magica

KEVIN COOLEY

The specter of the mahō shōjo (magical girl) fuses the form and content of animated narratives. She gains power not from a comic book fall into a vat of chemicals, or a bite from a magic-science spider, but from the genre itself. Like the gender role she so extravagantly over-performs (and outperforms), she is, to borrow from Judith Butler’s terms to describe gender itself, a “panicked imitation of a naturalized idealized self.”1 In imitating herself, the magical girl is drawn time and again to the metatextual icons of her performance—the over-pronounced eyes, the glitzed-out sailor suit, the spectacle of transformation—that bring her into legibility. She is the idea of a human constructed completely out of human-made, but nonhuman, actants—not just formal elements of animation such as light, sound, visual icons in acrobatic conjunction, and transparent cels (whether hand-drawn or digital); but of content elements: skirts, sailor suits, magic powers, and transformation spectacles. As Kumiko Saito claims, “Although the visual rhetoric of power relies on feminine implements like frills and long hair, it is becoming increasingly difficult to equate representations of the magical girl’s gender with biological sex” because the magical girl participates in “a new configuration of gender that wields its power in its youthfulness and cuteness.”2 Both in spite of—and because of—all the otaku-baiting and the fetishizing and the heterosexualized fan service of the larger “beautiful fighting girl” category she belongs to: that of the magical girl—that evocative and evilfighting, sailor-suit-clad young woman who so often transforms from an average schoolgirl to a celestial being with magic powers—is and always has been wrapped up within a variety of queernesses. Certainly, the glamorous body modification and hyperstylized wardrobe changes invite and emit questions about the dominant imaginary of the human body and animation’s ability to reconceptualize it. But a magical girl is also so often prone to overtly falling in love with her sailor-suited companions. What is it about this mythological type that has so consistently pushed back on the heterosexual imaginary of

24

A CYCLE, NOT A PHASE 25

the body, and that so regularly produces characters ranging from the ambiguously but evocatively queer to conformity with LGTBQ+ categories? Why is the queerly saturated mythological type of the magical girl so infectious, both as part of a staple of Japanese popular and visual culture and through its transnational circulation, where the magical girl has inspired western cartoons like Steven Universe, She-Ra and the Princesses of Power, and Star vs. the Forces of Evil to enact animation’s latent inborn ability to give shape and motion to otherwise unthinkable sexualities? As visual culture so often does, the magical girl provides all of the tools we need for understanding her gendered interventions within the archetype’s own visual conventions. But if framing the precarious ontology of the magical girl in theoretical terms does anything to expedite our theorizing of her gendered intervention, it would help to say that her dynamic identity is fueled by the paradigmatic relations between units of language. In short, the cartooned visual language in which the magical girl participates is one that eschews photorealistic film’s devices, and in doing so, it prefers relations between units of language defined by absence. More specifically, we might call these different relations the present, but declined, possibility of using other signs to articulate something of language (in this case: the visualized existence of the magical girl). As Ferdinand de Saussure frames it, this paradigmatic relation “unites terms in absentia in a potential mnemonic series.”3 Certainly, as an art of fairly linear narrative storytelling, the visual languages of cartooning that write or draw the magical girl into existence also rely on that foil of paradigmatic relations: syntagmatic relations which, as Saussure writes, immediately suggest how “an order of succession and a fixed number of elements combine present elements in sequence to make additive meaning.”4 But by reveling in the paradigmatic relations of animation—as is visually embodied by the impossible transformation and anatomy of the cartooned magical girl performed by bodies that index our own but are not our own—the archetype positions itself as opposed to a semiotics of presence. Given the importance of legible “presences” in heterosexist discourses of gender—from the presence of the signifying genitals to the compulsory presence of gendered apparel in alleged conjunction with chromosomal sex—this semiotics of a confounding absence over a legible presence is one that can undermine heteronormative semiotics. To fully articulate the way the magical girl has mobilized the paradigmatic relations of cartooning for the benefit of queer sexualities, however, it is necessary to push past some of the assumptions of existing scholarship, some of which have made it possible to treat the magical girl as vacuous—in need of

26 KEVIN COOLEY only analytical, and not affective, consideration due to her own emptiness. Saitō Tamaki, author of Beautiful Fighting Girl claims the magical girl, or, even more broadly, “beautiful fighting girl,” is a being “in a state of lack,” a simulacrum of a human who “is a thoroughly vacant being”5 who “one day... finds herself in another world and, for no apparent reason, is given the ability to fight” and, as J. Keith Vincent states, “fights for no discernible reason.”6 I take no direct issue with these claims that Saitō and Vincent make here, so much as I do with Saitō’s underlying assumption that these descriptive factors of the magical genre are roadblocks to some kind of romanticized idea of good storytelling or artistic achievement. For Saitō, this “lack” within the magical girl is some kind of serious flaw or limit. Saitō claims that manga-style images (filmic or not) suffer from an “impoverishment on the syntagmatic axis,” which means that they “cannot produce narrative above a certain level of complexity.”7 Phrased differently: he bars manga and anime from making meaning out of anything more sophisticated than digested-in-a-glance archetypes. As Saitō frames it, this defect can be traced back to a kind of problem or limitation in cartooning itself—a predisposition inherent to cartooning’s simplifying function that permits it paradigmatic relations but (allegedly) bars it from syntagmatic ones. But Saitō is onto something in identifying a pointed relationship between cartooned images and paradigmatic relationships. This is because of the connection between paradigmatic signs and absence. If the relationship between two signs is a paradigmatic one, then it is a relationship that is intrinsically tied up in absence—the sign that is present gestures toward the sign that is not present by acknowledging their mutual participation in some kind of shared linguistic paradigm, the use of one sign indexing the possibility of the use of the other that shares its category. Therein lies the heart of animation’s ability to tell stories with units of absence. When absence itself is made present in the body of a cartooned image, it becomes possible for paradigmatic relations (in a very high-concept drag performance) to operate as syntagmatic ones, dismantling the semiotic binary of syntagm and paradigm altogether with their very existence. We see this happen in a wide variety of cartooned bodies: from that absence which is made presence by effaced genitals or other body parts like a Barbie doll or Bugs Bunny, or that absence which is made present in the simple everyday process of cartooning that is always gesturing toward, but never offering, what it has effaced. Yes, in a certain sense we might call the magical girl a “thoroughly vacant being” (she is, after all, composed of present units of absence), and we might

A CYCLE, NOT A PHASE 27

(though I certainly will not) dust off Heidegger and expound on the “thrownness” of her position within the absurd world she finds herself in. But we have fallen short of our duties as cultural critics if we have nothing to say when we look at the avatar of a young girl who finds herself locked into a contractual visual imaginary inherited from the dominant paradigm; who is robbed of any sense of interiority—not only by her status as a fictional character—but also by her demands of her archetype; who inhabits the world constructed specifically for her to run through like a rat through a maze. As Akiko Sugawa-Shimada argues, “the trope of mahō shōjo has often been parodied in the 2010s, providing a type of possible male femininity and subverting hegemonic gender norms.”8 Ultimately, Saitō’s “defense” of anime and manga falls flat when he concludes that “subcultural forms will surely continue to seduce and bewitch us with their uncompromising superficiality,” and one important function it falls flat on is the queer reparative work that so many magical girl stories perform upon their own genre. Saitō cannot see any political momentum gathered within signs unfixed to concrete, real-world signifiers—for him, anime can produce “fascinating types” and cannot (allegedly) produce “complex personalities.” But what of that fascinating personality that gives rise to its most complex type: the archetyped beautiful fighting/magical girl confronted with the traumatizing weight of their archetypal being?9 Therein lies the trauma that Saitō consistently holds at arm’s length from the magical girl. It is a trauma that he will not grant her because she is a fictional construct, but a trauma that so effectively mirrors the experiences of women and queers who must grapple with the objectification, commodification, and control of hegemonic sex and gender norms enacted on their own bodies. The magical girls traumatized by the weight of their own constructedness can undo the knots of their metatextual predicament by exceeding the limitations established upon their body and through love with women (most often other magical girls themselves). An examination of the development of this metafictionally magical girl will help us unpack what it is, exactly, about the intertangled queer bodily interruptions and love between magical girls that disarms the powers subjugating the magical girl, and all that she stands in for. I argue, then, that Puella Magi Madoka Magica—one entry in a tradition of many possible anime that could cultivate this argument—directly resists Saitō’s reading of the magical girl as empty, and it does so by imagining the magical girl, a being of present absences, as the right romantic archetypal partner for the [other] magical girl. Madoka Magica pretends that it is telling

28 KEVIN COOLEY a fairly straightforward magical girl story (if we can say that there is such a thing). Madoka, a young girl, goes to elementary school with her trio of boycurious friends, and fantasizes about a more exciting life. Following in the narrative grooves of Sailor Moon, Madoka stumbles onto a kawaii catlike creature, Kyubey, who eagerly proposes to transform her into a magical girl under a contract that will grant her one wish. What Madoka fails to understand is that the transformation into a magical girl comes with the costs of being both a diegetic and non-diegetic magical girl. The articulations of “beings in a state of lack” in Saitō’s work weigh in here not as theoretical observations from a literary psychoanalyst, but as consequences actually played out by the narrative: in a damning take on Sailor Moon’s original premise, the magical girls of Madoka Magica forfeit their humanity to become bodies animated only by the expectations of their genre. A magical girl’s job is to infiltrate “witch’s labyrinths,” a job that is much more involved than it might seem. The labyrinths are horrifying and surreally animated spaces inhabited by paperdoll monstrosities that would be at home in a Murakami Takahashi Superflat piece crossed over with a tie-dyed Lotte Reininger film on acid. They must then kill the witches inside and replenish the “soul gem” at their heart of their new body. If the magical girl does not kill enough witches to replenish her gem, she too will die. It is revealed late in the game that this death is also a transformation, as the magical girl transforms into one of the witches she has been fighting, feeding into an endless cycle of artificially kindled violence for the benefit of a small group of overseers above, that of Kyubey’s species, who harness these girls’ rich emotional responses as an energy source. The scarce economy of grief positions magical girls into competition with one another in a nightmare that is as capitalistic as it is cartoonish, where collaboration is discouraged, and killing is surviving. And so, the magical girls (and magical girls in deliberation) are cursed to wander a world that is creepily empty. For all of the talk of the more optimistic magical girls, Mami and Sayaka, about saving people, there appears to be nobody to save. The art direction of Inaba Kunihiko, Kaneko Yuji, and Naitō Ken yields orange-soaked, sprawling cityscapes concealing rows of rustedout factories—but all of this is seemingly built for no one but these poor girls to wander. The empty world is rife with eerily vacant shopping malls, suspension bridges, city streets, and rooftops, and even most of the children’s homes are all entirely devoid of other people. It is as if the secret of their impure disembodied state keeps them at an arm’s length from the world’s business as usual that either reflects (or simply is) the queer child’s experience. They are

A CYCLE, NOT A PHASE 29

“growing sideways,” to use Kathryn Bond Stockton’s term to describe resistance to heterosexist narratives of growth which are “relentlessly figured as vertical movement upward... toward full stature, marriage, work, reproduction, and the loss of childishness.”10 And the specific contingencies of their having grown sideways function (within the narrative) as an insidious part of Kyubey’s overall scheme: as Daniel Elisha Rachovitsky writes, in Madoka’s world the magical girl’s “feelings of estrangement from society and her overwhelming sense of nihilism are implicit axioms designed as a failsafe in perpetuating the entire system.”11 It is only when the mundane topics of school come around—the world that Madoka and Sayaka’s nonmagical girlfriend, Hitomi, is associated with, that other people seem to filter into and shake the magical girls out from their deep isolation. When Madoka, Sayaka, and Hitomi walk to school, Madoka expresses a fanciful desire to receive a love letter: “So you want to become a beautiful popular girl like Hitomi, Madoka? Let me show you what happens to bad girls like you,” teases Sayaka, as both girls gleefully laugh and lean into one another, “But I won’t allow you to go off and become popular with the boys. You must be my bride, Madoka!” It is on these exact words that Hitomi, the popular girl who remains blissfully outside of all the transformations and hardships of the magical girl, coughs gently and grabs the attention of Madoka and Sayaka. The girls stop laughing with startled looks on their faces, and the camera pans wide to a crowded schoolyard. And that quickly—we are in the orderly space of the school, one of the few locations where crowds (or background characters of any kind) appear, and one of the few spaces where the girls are not left in complete isolation to ruminate and dwell on the daily death, body horror, and trauma they must face by the nature of their graphic identity. While the othering effects of the straight world are made manifest on the young magical girls as absence and isolation, there are three modes of embodied desire akin to heterosexuality that exist as decided presences in Madoka Magica’s visual schema, which is so largely barren of bodies that are not magical girls. The first and most obvious is represented in Kyubey’s exploitative relationships with each of the girls. Though romantic interests are alien to him, the most extreme policing of the girls’ bodies and agency (and, by extension, sexuality) comes from Kyubey. If men, as they say, only ever have one thing on their minds, then magically cutesy cartoon feline creatures in anime are only ever thinking about how they can transform doe-eyed shōjo into magical girls. Like the corporate interests behind much anime production and the exploited laborers who help make that production possible, Kyubey’s sole motivation

30 KEVIN COOLEY (and the only element of existence the creature finds comprehensible) is producing more magical girl content. Kyubey frames the economic exchange of magical girl powers as a fair and reasonable trade: a wish that can perform miracles for the sale of one’s body and its ability to produce. While he claims to take no malice in the act and to respect a firm “no” from the potential contractees (which he receives at many junctures), Kyubey has a magically uncanny knack of being present at traumatic moments, and his counsel always seems to implore another of the uncontracted girls (specifically, Madoka) to sell her body and become a magical girl. The moé cutesiness that Madoka and her friends are styled into (and that the first three episodes of the anime pretend to be reproducing at face value) guarantee the girls’ participation in a certain set of paradigmatic relations associated with the magical girl—which is both the cause of their oppression and the eventual condition for their escape. As the in-narrative totem of the real-world industrial demand to produce and reproduce, for Kyubey, the yield is more magical girl content, and consequently reflects the real world’s linked demands of compulsory heterosexuality and capitalism in a country plagued with declining birth rates. The girls are groomed from their inception (literally, within their moé designs) to produce with their bodies until they are used up like the batteries they are, at which point their sole purpose is to exist as witches, and guarantee the system reproduces itself ad infinitum. Any use of their emotional and bodily energies that violates this sexualized economy is marked as so deviant that it is unthinkable—like the romantic love between girls which has no place in Kyubey’s economy. When heterosexualities in Madoka are not predatory or deconstructed, they are dying, and can only manifest themselves as forms of decay. This mode of heterosexuality is most humorously addressed in the girls’ teacher, whose lectures frequently drift off into tirades about her failing relationship with her fiancé and her befuddled, but didactic, lessons for her female students (“of course women over the age of thirty can marry for love,” she tells them, and herself, in the midst a math lecture). The least prominent (but markedly present) manifestation of heterosexuality is the only one that survives, and this might be attributed to its looking nothing like the others; that is, the relationship between Madoka’s parents as the only heterosexual relationship that (1) breaks away from the patterns of power and policing established by the others, and (2) is actually coded as healthy. Madoka’s mother, a fierce businesswoman, is the breadwinner, while Madoka’s apron-clad father performs the domestic work.

A CYCLE, NOT A PHASE 31

By failing to perform (and sometimes actively resisting) their assigned roles within predatory, progressive, and doomed heterosexuality (as commodity, future reproductive agent, and lovestruck schoolgirl), the magical girls are left with a certain absence where the machinations o...