The Hypernatural and Supernatural in Madlax -- Episode１

Episode １ main: Battle in a party dress

"Gun Dance ~dance~": 銃舞 (Jubu)

The opening section of the main story described with the hyper-natural direction technique full of extremely concrete details will be conceptually rearranged as follows.

There is a military unit of the resistance organization, trying to pass the enemy region camouflaging a truck as a civil car. The nature of the load they are trying to transport has not been yet clarified. The second lieutenant who is driving the truck warns Pete, a youth sitting in the next seat, of the dangerous sharp agent who occasionally appears in the battlefield; but cuts his words just before telling the agent’s name, sighting the inspection check point in front of their car. There is the military unit of the kingdom forces that is waiting for the truck to trap them at the checkpoint. The second lieutenant notices abnormality outside, and suddenly takes off breaking through the checkpoint, but it is not particularly shown to the audience what was the real nature of the abnormality he sensed. Anticipating the chase of the enemy, the second lieutenant commands Pete to hide in the gallery and leaves him a ROM containing data. Just then, a tank of the kingdom force, which ambushed them, pours a cannonball on their truck.

The girl, somehow having landed safely in the forest, confirms that her mission is the retrieval of the data, which armed resistance organization Galza obtained. Getting down on the ground, the girl starts her duty uttering, “When I get home, I think I’ll have pasta,” in a calm voice. Her words are to function as a foreshadowing of the nucleus subject of the anime, suggesting the existence of innumerable perspectives that form the dense fictional reality as a peculiar possible world.

Skillfully gathering information, she gets in the gallery ahead of the government troop and secures the fugitive youth successfully with the data. The rescue of the youth was not the original purpose of the duty she was assigned, so viewers are somewhat worried about the manner of the girl who indicates a strangely kindly attitude for him. No explanation about her motive or feelings is given, but the psychic meaning linkages hidden behind the actions of the girl are going to form peculiar, detailed reality of the anime, functioning as ingenious under plots. When she just opened her mouth to tell her name to the youth, the headquarters inform the transceiver of the soldier she killed, that they require communication at the appointed hour. The girl readily gives him orders to deceive the headquarters cleverly, but she had lost the opportunity to tell her name to the boy. Here ends the first part, and the eye catching indicating the end of the A part is displayed. It is the figure of the third girl who appeared in the opening, dodging the bullets. The figure of the girl accomplishing the mission is used for the eye catching indicating the start of the B part. Pete tries to go to the enemy position to rescue his friends as soon as he escaped from the crisis. But the girl warns him, “You’ll die.” The audience is required to gain a deeper understanding, laminating various latent information, about the phase of human existence, that deviates from the notion of phenomenal world view generally accepted, before attaining full grasp of the fictional meaning of the girl’s warning lines repeated here, that actually suggest a peculiar fictional perspective.

In the eyes of the girl seeing Pete off returning alone, the back figure of the youth changes to a different man in military uniform, and the scenery around him also changes in quality and reveals a ruined town destroyed by war. There are a book and red shoes lying on the debris. A piece of paper seemingly a page of a book is fluttering in the air. These mysterious visions are revealed without any suggestion whether they are actually sighted by the girl or recollected scenes of her own experience, or they might even be no other than symbolic images introduced for the sake of fictional expression. Nothing is sure except that they construct some sort of personal experience phase in the mind of each individual watching the anime.

The girl takes out a dress out of her rucksack and begins to change clothes. It is an elegant party dress unsuitable for the heavy duty to be accomplished in the jungle that the girl is now wearing. The girl repeats the soliloquy again. “When I get home, yes, I think I’ll have pasta. Yeah pasta.” Her next action is a battle, unnecessary for the performance of her duty. The girl in her dress attire blocks the enemy troop that was going back to the head quarter to attack the youth, and annihilates the whole military unit alone in no time. Furthermore, she shoots down the formation of helicopters that comes for reinforcement without difficulty. Most impressive is the pose she assumes, looking away from the objects to shoot at, and firing the gun without careful aim. As though dancing, most stylistically the girl goes on fighting with a subject music piece drifting in the background, but the shoulder strap of her dress comes off extremely realistically when she fires her machine gun at the helicopters. The battle ability she displays in annihilating the military units and shooting down combat helicopters all alone is clearly unnatural, but no trace of supernatural power is indicated. The attack that the girl resorts to is only shooting. Every bullet aimed at her misses, and all her shots hit the mark. It is not until this anime approaches to the end that a clue clarifying the meaning linkage is gained, between the gesture of the girl dodging the bullets of various hues in the opening and the battle scene enacted in an elegant evening dress.

In the following scene, the girl is driving a car with Pete in the next seat. Pete asks her to go out with him, and she promises to have a date and about to tell her name to him, but there is no answer from the youth. He had been charged with a fatal injury before he was rescued. Pete’s expiration is indicated through the eyes of the girl reflected in the rearview mirror. The girl tells her name to Pete who is already lifeless, for the first time now. Her name was Madlax. The name the second lieutenant was going to tell Pete in a truck in the opening scene, is at last told by her own mouth after many twists and turns. The strange appellation of the heroine is given to the audience in this way, having passed through a detour of various degrees reflecting the characteristics of the phenomenal world filled with contaminants, which do not have any semantic unity. However, this episode itself functions as one of the meaning axes suggesting the existence of a meta-perspective which defines the psychic characteristic of the girl, and suggests her destiny that will not allow her to build any substantial relationship with others.

In the room where the girl returned, a telephone calls from Three Speed (SSS) who agents her missions. However, the screen shows only his lips in this conversation scene. His features or figure are never provided to the audience afterward. The screen shows the dish of pasta Madlax cooked, and something like a piece of paper is pinned on the wall of her room. Even at the end of the first episode, the audience is not able to judge what sort of established genre concept the fictional world this anime is constructing might belong to. The perspective in this animated film, indicated as fictional meaning axis, seems rather to lie in the mechanism itself the work endlessly keeps demanding the viewer to contemplate what kind of fiction one is watching.

In the ending clip, Madlax is drifting in water with another girl. It is the girl who was dodging the bullets in the opening together with Madlax. There are innumerable figures behind them, but all are either one or other of these two girls’. In the final shot, those girls are sitting on the opposite ends of a cocktail glass. There is the doll that the little girl carried in her arms in the avant, at the right corner of the elegant room. However, in the latter half of the ending, the screen changes to a symbolic picture of battle and destruction. Those two girls must be the chief characters of this animated film, but the relationship between them is not revealed yet.

A girl’s voice other than Madlax’s takes up the narration in the notice of the next week episode. It is the other girl appeared in the ending together with Madlax who is focused on the notice screen. The narration is not an introduction of the next story, but seems to be a monologue uttered by one of the characters. The voice says, “Continuing to be does not mean existing. Living does not mean being alive. Therefore, in this world I am dying.”

The contents of the duty that Madlax achieved as a freelance agent was not clarified except for the securing of the ROM. As for her choices of action during the mission, especially changing clothes for a ball dress and the rescue of the fugitive youth together with the promise for a date, were clearly deviated from the purpose of the duty. But there was no trace of explanation for her feelings or motive for her strange actions at all. It seems to be the coherent directing strategy of this anime, to present characters’ actions without any background information supplying the story with explicit meanings that may confer inherent perspective, just only embodying hyper-natural scenes as if they were accidental events.