The Hypernatural and Supernatural in Madlax -- continued

Double-layered avant and delayed effective under plots

A little girl with a doll in her arms is sitting on a bench in piled up ruins of buildings. She was the fourth figure in the opening whose face was overlapping with the third girl’s. She mutters to herself, “Can you find it? The place people don’t like. Where humans can be humans?” When the camera angle shifts in the opposite direction, idyllic scenery of mountains and river is stretching behind the bench. As the space this girl is occupying reminds of something like a theatrical cardboard that distorts the perspectives of nature, it seems that she exists in a different dimension where spatial arrangement is transcended from the phenomenal world. This girl appears almost every time in avant, and often in the middle of the story regardless of the place and occasion, speaking mysterious words to the people in the show or o the viewer. But viewers are forced to wait until the last round of the 26 stories of this anime, to grasp this girl’s psychical substance and the essential relationship between her and other characters, and moreover, her final role to be enacted in this anime, before attaining metaphysical comprehension of the spatial phase of the dimension she occupies.

A screen switch, a helicopter is flying over the jungle. Voice of a girl is reporting to the headquarter, “This is newscast 2021. Although we arrived at the point of the information, evidence of the battle is not seen”, and ends the communication. The girl was the first character in the opening, who had dodged the bullets showing various colors in the trajectories. She is giving an instruction to the pilot of the helicopter, pointing a gun. She seems to have hijacked the helicopter with some purpose. But except for a momentary projection of the characters “CNM2021” drawn on the helicopter airframe, no detailed information is given about the identity or the affiliation of the pilot. The audience is allowed to have only a glimpse of the cross section of the world of Madlax, as a bystander who has no more than a limited authority in the fictional world. The pilot asks the girl, “What are you plotting to do? Which side are you”? “Not Either one.” “Then, let me interview. What is your purpose? And your name?” The girl answers, “You'd better not ask. Or, you’ll die.”

Their conversation gives the viewer an impression of minute concrete reality, all the more as it leaves a lot of informational voids such as the identities of the two forces fighting, and generates the feeling one is witnessing an intersection of dense incidental information axes, implying the presence of huge background details. Her line “You’ll die” appeared to be just words of threat here, but similar phrases are to be told repeatedly by this girl to different persons further in the story, and the audience is expected later to understand that these are intended to be important indicators suggesting the psychic aspect of this peculiar character. Main characters’ identities themselves are going to function as important perspective components to determine the meaning of the anime, and being presented as riddles to be solved, they provisionally construct a perspective of mystery aspect in this fictional world. Thus, a question is to be harbored in the mind of audience, relating to the convention of fictional world adoption, which way these information disclosures are going to progress finally to determine any genre characteristics. Such reflective awareness of the semantic linkage mechanism that makes the fictional world an establishment equipped with peculiar meaning for the viewer, functions as “meta-perspective” that actually confers the fictional world of Madlax its own specific meaning. And the particular reality as a “possible world”, that is materialized through the complex multi-dimensional perspective manipulations, is to be convinced by the impression that rather miscellaneous meaning information groups are scattered with no direction of context in the fictional world.

The girl, abandoning the helicopter, jumps in the air with a parachute on her back. But the parachute does not open, and she seems to fall headlong into the forest. Although the viewer is abruptly forced to witness this strange scene, no information that talks about the meaning of this occurring is given, and only after completing viewing all the episodes of this feature, it comes to be understandable that the mysterious event was proposed as a subtle under plot to imply one of the most important perspectives of this fictional work.
Then, the first episode title “銃舞” (Gun Dance) is displayed, accompanied by a subtitle “-dance-” in English notation underneath. The title of each story is basically given as a double feature of coined two Chinese characters and English notation. As coined part suggests the double meaning structure of Chinese characters and the Japanese reading of them imply, each story title has a superposition of triple meaning structure in conjunction with the English notation subtitle. (note)

note:
The font “ruby” is usually utilized to represent Japanese reading of Chinese characters in “Kana” letters, attached on top of the character. In the game Fate/stay night, the use of ruby is most effectively introduced to establish a meta descriptive method that reflects the central perspective of magic principle through its parallel representation, reflecting the metaphysical subject that the essence of personality should be grasped as conceptual existence.

Ref. https://www.academia.edu/106632362/Existence_Phenomenon_and_Personality_Summoning_Magic_and_Individuality_in_Fate_stay_night


As ingenious meaning expanding manipulations can be attained in this sort of text description, a meta-perspective structure corresponding to this method is realized in visual representations in Madlax. Up to this may correspond to the part that is commonly referred to as “avant”. Rather rare two-parts structure avant had been presented.

The words the girl in the ruins murmured in the first half of the avant, seem to be addressed to someone beside her, presumably to the doll she was holding in her arms. However, the contents of her speech fulfill the alternative function of narration that is intended for the recognition of the audience who are watching the anime. So, as a monologue, her words play a function close to the “aside” used in the theater, being spoken directly to the ears of the audience watching the show. It is clearly different from the narration used by the omniscient author in a novel, being a limited statement of a character, whose field of vision is restricted. However, as this girl doesn’t belong to the drama space the audience is watching, it is implied she has a bird-eye view looking down the scene as if from a higher dimension. This girl’s speech is not given in the way that convey the overall meaning association, but as an arbitrary discourse uttered by one of the characters without any background information. Her lines seem to function as superposed narration, which reflects her personal genus quality. On the other hand, the exchange of words made between the girl and the pilot in the helicopter is definitely different from the organized narration which is provided as the disclosure of information for the convenience of the audience, as it forms just one cross-section of a fictional world, implying the presence of the unknown background. The audience is never allowed to have a chance to get the definite commentary by means of asides or narration, and has no choice but to glimpse the cross-sections of a fictional world composed of various hyper-natural depictions, as if they were accidental passers-by who are witnessing the scenes without any prior knowledge.