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“Later, Buddy”: The Politics of Loss and Trauma Representation in Gurren Lagann
Vyshali Manivannan, Montclair State University
Graphic Engagement Conference, West Lafayette, IN
September 4, 2010
Although chiefly a comedy action series, the 27-episode mecha anime Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann presents viewers with a complex politics of loss through its depiction of peritraumatic and posttraumatic experience following the narrative’s central traumatic event, the combat-related, in-theater death of Kamina in Episode 8. Produced in 2007, Gurren Lagann is Gainax’s most recent contribution to the mecha genre, defined by its use of giant piloted robots, here called Gunmen. The series’s predominant characteristics are comic mischief and highly charged, unrelenting action, described by director Hiroyuki Imaishi as (quote) “full-on, balls-to-the-wall, guy-oriented drama.” However, despite its excessive slapstick comedy and innuendo, Gurren Lagann is fundamentally a war narrative that chronicles two phases in the diegetic conflict between Spiral beings, namely humans, who are endowed with tenacious willpower and a limitless capacity for evolution, and Anti-Spirals, who suppressed these abilities fearing they would one day annihilate the universe. While the series relies on the explicit verbalization of positivity and Heidegger’s concepts of authenticity and resoluteness to represent trauma as temporary and surmountable, visual-verbal combinations indicate that the reverberations of trauma, particularly war trauma, are lifelong.
After delineating Kamina’s assumptive world and catastrophic death, I will focus on the peritraumatic and posttraumatic experience of primary protagonist Simon as both visually and verbally representative of major diagnostic symptoms of trauma. I will then discuss Simon’s premature abreaction, or false catharsis, following his acute grief response as marked by gradually divergent meanings within visual-verbal elements, as well as the subversion of Simon’s repeatedly positive verbal assertions of self-identity through imagery that recalls Kamina’s pre-trauma assumptive world along with the circumstances of his death. Finally, I will discuss the series’s reliance on a trauma paradigm that privileges combat trauma as most enduring and insurmountable.
Kamina’s core assumptions—the strength of human willpower, resilience, and personal invulnerability—are proclaimed through complementary visual-verbal combinations in what I will call an assertion-subversion dichotomy: where we are first invited to view Kamina and all he embodies as heroic (FIGURE 1) –seen here posturing self-assured “badassness”—and then encouraged to view him as ridiculous (FIGURE 2), marked by flying spittle and nonsense words instead of heroic profundity. Our last impressions of Kamina inevitably are that he is a well-meaning idiot with considerable good luck. As such, we doubt the validity of his assumptive world until he earns our belief through his confrontation with mortality, which takes place during his attempt to commandeer Gurren. This confrontation constitutes the first substantial challenge to his assumptive world, and ends up reversing the assertion-subversion dichotomy in his favor. First, his parodic bravado is depicted through visual-verbal collusions: he poses on a rock, chin high, arms crossed self-assuredly as enemy Gunmen wreak havoc nearby, and impulsively declares he’s going to steal Gurren because he (quote) “likes [its] face”—this after engaging multiple Gunmen on foot and surviving only through sheer luck. Our expectation is that this hijacking attempt will be treated like his previous comical endeavors, but comedy is suspended as Kamina seats himself in Gurren’s cockpit. Its viewing monitors opaque to red, flashing Kamina’s crossed-out face as his shades, the omnipresent signifier of his “badassness,” are flung to the ground, revealing his vulnerability just before the viewing screen clears to reveal a half-buried human skull, the universal symbol of mortality.
Kamina’s ensuing confrontation with mortality, typical to the psychic trauma of armed confrontation, is represented through wordlessness and sensory imagery evocative of combat physioneurosis: Kamina’s panicked breathing and pulse is juxtaposed with close-ups of his wide eyes and shrunken pupils, his body and skeleton fluorescing as the cockpit is swallowed by blackness. Rapid intercuts between Kamina’s terrified eyes, the flashing “No Kamina” signs, and the skull’s empty eyes further stress the severity of Kamina’s psychic trauma. Despite this authenticating struggle, the use of reflexive imagery—such as the red light that recalls the sunset glare of the surface when Kamina’s father abandoned him, and the parallel between the half-buried skull and his father’s skull charm bracelet—magnifies our sense of Kamina’s assumptive world as inauthentic, predicated on what Heidegger terms the “they-self,” whose choices are modified by external influence. The possibility of death, however, which nullifies the import of other possibilities and external influences, compels the individual to reassess and choose based on the authenticity of the “I-self,” free from external influence. As such, the experience of Angst generated by the recognition of the possibility of death impels Kamina to reevaluate his core assumptions and relinquish the inauthentic values of the they-self, retaining only the genuine, personally significant assumptions of the I-self. His ultimate decision is that his operating assumptive world is authentic: out of all the possibilities available to him, he chooses to retain his assumptive world despite the risks it poses to his life. For the first time, our lingering impression of Kamina is of strength, courage, and resoluteness, not of exaggerated stupidity or bravado, so that when he pronounces the signature phrase, “Who the hell do you think I am?!,” we register it as the authentic, resilient assertion of self and self-belief, as his assumptive world emerged intact from his experience of Angst.
The shattering of this assumptive world, then, is all the more genuine and painful when Kamina is unexpectedly killed in battle, after—literally—punching sense back into Simon, who initially fails in the mission to commandeer the enemy’s mobile base. This moment not only sets up Simon’s survivor guilt, a key feature of combat trauma, but also violates our belief in Kamina’s personal invulnerability and resilience in the face of impossible odds. For the first time his assumptive world is belied by the divergence in meaning between visual and verbal elements, where verbal expressions of positivity are disrupted or altogether elided. The moment of his death is frozen, wordless, and intrusive, as we are shown four quick still images of the fatal attack, drawn in thick, smudged lines that speak to the moment’s unbearable unspeakability. When Gurren is pierced through its midsection, visual elements simplify and disintegrate, the lines of Kamina’s body smearing into thick blotches of blood that nearly obscure his face. He screams for the first time as Gurren partially explodes, unlike his usual show of defiance when Gurren takes heavy damage. The killing blow pierces Gurren’s cockpit so forcefully that the frame itself is split by it, thick, dark red fountains cascading on either side of the enemy’s spearhead as Kamina is impaled. Strings of blood fly around his face as his scream dies, and the frame pulls back to reveal the gray, smoky desolation of the battlefield, the prostrate Gurren, and the stunned, horrified faces of Team Dai-Gurren. The frame zooms in on Simon’s eyes as we see the first instance of the visual signifier of peritraumatic dissociation: his eyes dissolving to three trembling concentric bands of black, dark gray, and light gray encircling a black pupil before all inner color drains away, leaving only the iris outline and the pupil itself, depicting what combat survivors colloquially term the (quote) “two-thousand-year-stare[:] the anesthetized look, the wide, hollow eyes of a man who no longer cares.”
The intense pain of this moment invalidates positive imagery prior to Kamina’s death, such as the severely damaged Gurren posed in Kamina’s typical heaven-pointing stance, in addition to shattering the assumptive world that gave rise to such positive images. Even so, due to cognitive conservatism, or the resistance to change fundamental core assumptions such as personal invulnerability, we latch onto hope as Simon does when Kamina revives himself in time for the big battle, resiliently inventing multiple attacks once Gurren and Lagann, Simon’s Gunmen, combine: the unnamed multi-drill attack that prefigures Simon’s later, inadequate Giga Drill Maximum attack, and the Giga Drill Break, which leads to victory and becomes an enduring signifier of Kamina and his core assumptions. However, our renewed belief in Kamina is subverted once more as the triumphant overture is abruptly punctured by silence and Kamina becomes a pencil sketch on a white background, literally drained of vitality, his eyes closing and head and mouth slowly going slack as he whispers, “Later, buddy.” This recursive use of his father’s final words to him is significant in that it is the first time a signifier of trauma has not been successfully integrated and made positive. This also marks the first verbal-visual disjuncture, as the words juxtapose with Simon’s happy, illuminated face, the light swiftly fading as comprehension dawns on him and he utters, “Bro?,” the sound slowed as if spoken through water, and the frame cuts to blackness.
This sequence defines the parameters of Simon’s posttraumatic experience, which similarly illustrates emotional import solely through imagery while verbally insisting that “everything’s okay.” Psychiatrist Judith Herman divides trauma into 3 major symptom categories: physical hyperarousal, the intrusion of traumatic recognition or memory on the present, and the numbing response of constriction, all of which are depicted during Kamina’s death and which recur and accumulate further meaning through reflexive imagery used around Simon’s peritraumatic and posttraumatic experience.
According to Herman, the honest and detailed verbal articulation of emotional response, traumatic imagery, and bodily sensations engendered by the event is imperative to trauma recovery, as is the revision of the self-narrative to reflect post-trauma circumstances. In short, in order to recover Simon must relinquish the core assumptions and interpretive frameworks invalidated by Kamina’s death. Simon, though, resists this, constraining his emotional expression to wordless imagery such as constricting tunnels and his own haggard, color-drained figure. He is revealed to be emotionally reticent even when he is 41 years old, relating the experience through the preface narration. After Kamina’s death, he narrates, “This is the tale of a man who continues to fight against fate. This man lived a life of desire, loyalty, and extravagance, he loved his companions, and he strove for freedom. And then, abruptly, he died. But even so, Simon lives on. He must go on living.” By speaking of himself in the third person, 41-year-old Simon still displays the need to maintain affective distance between himself and the traumatic memory. Also, despite explicitly acknowledging that “this man” is Kamina, his use of the present-tense continues attests to his need to preserve the illusion of Kamina’s continued presence, even as the grainy, washed-out montage of Kamina’s life and death recedes into blackness, the ultimate message being that Kamina is dead and Simon has to “let go.” The closest he comes to doing so is with Nia, his initial replacement for Kamina who later becomes his lover, but the fact that he only does so while drilling numerous Kamina statues further suggests he can only confront the memory under the illusion of Kamina’s presence. Moreover, the memory eventually becomes so painful that 41-year-old Simon cannot verbalize it, resulting in the noticeable lack of preface narration and indicating that he has not become desensitized to the memory by properly processing and integrating it. The memory remains as vivid and painful to him at 41 as it was at 14 when it occurred.
After all this, Simon’s declaration of recovery comes across as premature, born solely of the desire to save Nia. Most obviously, this rescue attempt seems to embody Simon’s wish-fulfillment desire to reenact Kamina’s last battle with a more positive outcome—that is, saving Nia—which allows him to assert his apparent recovery. However, since we have not witnessed his coping and integration process beyond pure acute grief reaction, the assertion rings false. (Not to mention that if 41-year-old Simon is still unable to articulate his emotions, there’s no way 14-year-old Simon successfully integrated anything.) Now, Simon does verbally acknowledge Kamina’s death and proclaim his integration in all the trappings of defiant “moving on”—(quote) “My Bro is dead. He’s gone. But he’s on my back! In my heart! He lives on as a part of me!”—suggesting he has taken steps toward recovery, also implied in the renewed brightness of his coloration. However, the entirety of this sequence is couched in visual signifiers of Kamina: the triptych frame (FIGURE 5) recalls two similar frames before it, where Kamina was the central figure; the montage of Kamina’s life and death intrudes on Simon’s present reality, obscuring Lagann’s cockpit (FIGURE 6); and Simon pulls down his miner’s goggles in a gesture that coopts the “badassness” we impart to Kamina donning his shades, just before declaring Kamina’s signature phrase, “Who the hell do you think I am?!” Thus, Simon’s “new” identity is essentially constructed as a substitute Kamina. His verbal claims of recovery are therefore not reinforced by the revision of his self-narrative or shattered assumptive world, which he attempts, unsuccessfully, to validate through reenactment in order to maintain the appearance of full recovery.
The fact that this recovery is little more than an illusion is emphasized once war resumes after the seven-year time skip, as verbal components remain firmly positive while visual elements increasingly point to deep-seated posttraumatic grief as Simon appropriates more and more of Kamina’s identity (FIGURE 7) and invalidated core assumptions but with few of Kamina’s successes. When the Anti-Spirals launch their first attack, for instance, Simon recklessly engages them with self-confident, gung-ho aggression Kamina would be proud of, but when he Giga Drill Breaks the mecha, it fragments into contact explosives that destroy the city sector below, whereupon Simon’s eyes revert to the “two-thousand-year-stare” of combat trauma. Similarly, his multi-drill Giga Drill Maximum attack also fails to stop the enemy, and were it not for the intervention of newer Gunmen units, the entire city would have been destroyed. Thus, we are bluntly shown that, much as Simon clings to Kamina’s shattered assumptive world, there are parts of it that are defunct, and he cannot restore it merely through reenactment.
Moreover, although he witnesses several traumatizing events, such as the Anti-Spirals’ possession of Nia, the kamikaze sacrifice of Kittan, a mirror-figure to Kamina whose death is saturated in visual signifiers of Kamina, and the combat-related sacrifices of six other Team Dai-Gurren members, Simon noticeably neither grieves nor attempts to substitute for or reenact any of these traumatic losses, and he does not waver in his verbal expressions of positivity. Significantly, while most of these deaths occur in-theater, they are noncombat casualties, as Kittan and the others sacrifice themselves to save the rest of the team, and Nia dies after the war’s conclusion, though as a direct result of the Anti-Spirals’ defeat. Unaffected as he is by these losses, Simon remains visibly hypersensitive to the mention or memory of Kamina in any context. When angry citizens tear down the Kamina monument, Simon watches in flickery slow-motion as though it is too unbearable to process in real-time, his haggard gaze, accented by linear hatching, recalling his peritraumatic dissociation. And when Rossiu, Simon’s right-hand man within the New Government he founded, remarks that Kamina’s death helped propel Team Dai-Gurren forward, Simon again experiences intrusion and numbing constriction, unspeakable blackness overwhelming his present reality. (And just in case we miss all of this, Simon articulates it, (quote) “There are some things you can’t say!,” to which Rossiu replies pointedly that Simon has become exactly like Kamina and has learned nothing from Kamina’s death.)
The series’s final attempt to convince us of Simon’s recovery appears in the inclusion of wish-fulfillment alternate universes in which Kamina is still alive and is pivotal to freeing Simon and the others from the multidimensional dreaming imposed on them by the Anti-Spirals. At a glance, visual and verbal material collude to formulate a positive sense of overcoming: Simon is forced to face the pain of Kamina’s loss and affirm his own identity, as his dissociated eyes return to normal while Kamina reassures him, finally proclaiming himself, “My drill is the drill that will pierce the heavens! My drill is my soul!” This announcement pierces the gray postwar landscape with light, but the recursive dialogue, which is taken almost verbatim from Kamina’s articulated beliefs, undermines Simon’s moment of alleged self-reclamation. Additionally, Kamina does not ask Simon to choose a possibility out of all the possibilities available to him, but out of two types of Kamina that present themselves in the dream: the false, weak-willed, groveling thief, or the genuine, resilient, brash, idealistic leader. The choice seems fairly obvious. So when Simon distills his possibilities to the invalid assumptive world he continues to rely on, we see that his total potentiality has been determined not by the I-self, but by the they-self, influenced by Kamina’s prompting. Thus, while Simon seemingly integrates Kamina’s dying words, saying, “Let’s go, buddy!,” it ultimately speaks to his lingering attachment to Kamina, and not to true processing of the traumatic memory of Kamina’s death.
As such, Gurren Lagann operates on a complex trauma paradigm that distinguishes between death by enemy action on the warfront and death beyond the purview of enemy action. As a key figure in the ideological and symbolic life of the team he led, Kamina’s death leaves a vacuum that overshadows all other losses. In a series saturated with traumatic experience, his death is inarguably the central catastrophic loss that triggers the most enduring peritraumatic and posttraumatic symptoms and, notably, constitutes the first combat-related, in-theater death of the series. Where deaths by natural disaster, parental abandonment, or even sacrificial lottery are resolved quickly, neatly, completely, and permanently, combat loss leaves a lasting mark. As Herman states, resolution of the traumatic experience is never final and recovery is never complete, regardless of type. However, Gurren Lagann reconfigures trauma dialectic to exclude noncombat loss altogether, thereby emphasizing that combat death redefines the conventional trauma paradigm as one that is hierarchical, persistent, and inescapable.
