The Hypernatural and Supernatural in Madlax -- Episode 3

Episode 3: Cutback and Synchronicity "Blue Moon ~moon~": 蒼月 (Sogetsu) In the avant, there is a little girl sitting on a bench holding a doll. She is wearing a red shoe on her left foot, but her right foot is bare. A blond boy is seated at the other end of the bench. In the background, there are a group of buildings of the night city illuminated by the moon, quite different from the mountain view in the episode 1. The girl mutters, “The past won’t come back. I can’t see the future. I’ve only got the present, this moment. I can only see the blue moon. I can only see the flowing red blood. How boring now is!” Next scene reveals Margaret, the girl who appeared in the episode 2, watching TV in her living room. The TV is reporting the news of a distant Asian Kingdom Gazth-Sonica, that a hardline Army Commander, Guen McNichol has issued a statement on their strict measures against the armed resistance organization Galza. A mission is told over the phone from SSS to Madlax, the girl who appeared in the episode 1. The mission is the assassination of Guen McNichol who is going to attend the kingdom ceremony. However, SSS says that the client of the assassination is McNichol himself. Madlax undertakes the mission and goes to the shop of an informer to gather the details of her target Army official. The commander, who leads the kingdom army as the forefront against the rebels, seems to have had his wife murdered by the enemy organization Galza 11years before. As the commander the TV was reporting is the only link between Margaret and Madlax, it is expected that the new appearance of this person, introduced in the story juxtaposed with a cutback technique, is going to play a definitive role to build the specific fictional perspective of the story as one of the meaning construction axes. Madlax seeks for a valid sniping point, looking down the square of the planned ceremony site from the roof of a building. There appears a woman officer of the Guard in vigilance patrol. She is also checking the possible sniping point, for the personal protection of Guen McNichol. Asked to present her ID certificates, Madlax holds out a card with the name of Laetitia Lune, citizen of Nafrece, printed on it. Madlax tells the officer she is traveling in this country for a vacation. The nationality she pretended, “Nafrece”, seems to be an anagram of France. The Asian country Gazth- Sonica Madlax is living in is reminiscent of Vietnam, which had been colonized by France. The streets on the background, showing specific characters on the signboards, bear the impression of Chinese culture. The country may as well be Hong Kong, the leased territory of the United Kingdom. Ambiguity in the background information that will not allow immediate verification of the identity of the country seems to overlap with the work’s representational strategy that will not reveal any definite genre characteristics in this anime. The assumed name “Laetitia”, Madlax had in her passport, is going to function as an important intersection of meaning axes which will determine the peculiar fictional perspective, to be confirmed afterward when full examination of the deployment of the story is attained. Madlax exchanges words with the Guard officer in a familiar manner, but after she has gone Madlax murmurs, “The way the muscles of her right arm are built up... Her right index finger and the base of her right thumb, and ... She’s a scary person.” The audience is able to guess that Madlax, as one skilled in the art of sniping, measured the ability of the Guard officer from her own peculiar knowledge and experience, and sensed extraordinary menace in this person. However, as for the specific physical characteristics possessed by the woman officer, her judgment must have based on, are not given in any concrete details. This is the typical example of the hyper-real directing method introduced in this anime, where intentional lack of information has been deliberately accomplished, reflecting the chaotic nature of the real world just as it is. Both the young boy Pete who appeared in the episode 1 and the woman officer Madlax met on the roof of the building in episode 3, were endowed with dense personal modeling, and it is not easy to discern central figures from small roles in this anime. Pete seems to have ended up in the episode 1, but it is not easy to determine whether his presence might in any way come to be involved in the meaning construction of the story or not. The outstanding concreteness of personal modeling applied to each character in this anime, together with the intentional lack of information superimposed on it to make it difficult to guess the density in the narrative perspective, are also applicable to other various characters as well. Madlax has undertaken quite mysterious a mission, but her interests and suspicion seem to be harbored in a different place than the outrageousness of the contents of the mission the sponsor requested. Madlax murmurs, “You lost, so you steal. You couldn’t protect, so you avenge. Guen McNichol, someone who will waste his own life. Tell me. What should people who have nothing do? What should they do?” Her own mystery, that seems to be hiding in the background of her presence, is going to determine her behavior from now on, establishing the basic axis that forms the genus quality of the fictional world depicted around her. But the details of her current state, together with her upbringing are not revealed to the audience as yet, that might be associated with her mysterious words. It is only after the story has progressed further into the core, that the audience is able to understand the meaning of the strange lines Madlax voiced here. The screen suddenly mirrors the battlefield of a village. There is a figure of a little girl holding a doll. Turning around, the girl utters a voice. “What? Dad, where are you? It’s me, I'm here.” An identification tag with a bullet hole in it is lying on the ground. Some woman’s voice overlies in answer to the voice of the girl, but her figure is not shown on the screen. “I’m scared, Dad. I don’t like being alone.” “That’s what you desire.” “Read me the picture book, like you always do.” “That’s the future.” “If I were with Dad, I’d die. I’d die...” “That’s...” Here, the screen changes suddenly to a night landscape, showing the moon illuminating the trees through the window. It is the bedroom of Margaret. Margaret is sleeping in bed with her face on the pillow, and she mutters in sleep. “Why... that...” It is suggested that there is some unknown relationship, which connects Nafrece and its ex-colonial country Gazth-Sonica, and that Margaret is sensing something unconsciously across the far distance. But no organized information is offered to the audience arranged for the conceptual grasp other than visionary insinuation, as if the fictional world should be experienced just like the phenomenon of real life, according to our own subjective viewpoints. Next screen shows the figure of Madlax infiltrating in the hotel, disguised as a hotel maid. Someone stops her in the passage. It is the blond young man who had dropped the artwork “amber” in the auction house in Nafrece. “Oh, you there. Have we met before?” It seems that he had left Nafrece where Vanessa and Margaret are living, and now has come to Gazth-Sonica where Madlax is living. Madlax answers, “No, I don’t think we’ve met.” The young man responds, “I see. It seems I was mistaken.” It is expected that this young man is going to play an important role to connect Nafrece and Gazth-Sonica, and Margaret and Madlax also, although his identity remains unknown still. It is not until after a variety of meaning construction axes have been accumulated piecemeal, that the coincidence between the fact that he called out to Margaret in the passage of Book Wald Company in the episode 2, and that he addressed to Madlax in the hotel passage in the episode 3, generates peculiar sense as a fictional perspective. Madlax sneaks into the room of Guen McNichol, and dares to expose herself in front of the man, who requested the assassination of himself. Her posture is most impressive, hiding herself in the windowsill curtain and exposing her face only. “Nice to meet you.” “What are you doing here?” “I wanted to meet you.” “And who might you be?” Madlax discloses her identity to the commander. “I’m the person who’s undertaken on your assignment and will be sniping you.” “A young lady like you, I can hardly believe it. Or, does this mean I’m dreaming?” “No, this is all reality.” “I see. Reality, huh?” Without representing any expression of surprise, McNichol moves the glass of whisky calmly to his mouth to ascertain it. “Yes, it is reality.” He invites Madlax to a drink. Madlax answers. “No.” “But why did you come here? You’re quite ahead of the assignment’s schedule, you know.” “I wanted to try having a talk with a man who’s preparing to kill himself.” “You’re saying you ran the risk of coming here just for that?” “Is that strange?” “No. It’s a lot more reasonable than a man who prepares to kill himself.” In this way, a bizarre conversation unfolds between Madlax and the Army Commander. Guen McNichol starts talking about the absurdity of the world, and the unreasonable emptiness of military service, to a strange girl who contracted the assignment to kill him. The Army Commander of the kingdom is aware of his presence, like a puppet dancing on top of a stranger’s palm. “But I was being manipulated by some large, unseen force. Just like a marionette. Even my wife’s death may have been planned.” McNichol confesses his dying wish to a strange girl. Madlax reaches out her hand to McNichol in an intimate manner as if starting to dance with him. McNichol murmurs, “You’re quite the romanticist.” Madlax answers, “It must be... because the moon is blue.” The reference to the blue moon gained in the line of Madlax, by the contrast with the words that had been told by the girl holding a doll in avant, forms a peculiar perspective in the anime Madlax as a fictional world that must have a specific meaning configuration axis. In the real world, any occurrence of remote events not connected with mechanical causal chain should be deemed as coincidence, because the relation is impossible, and if some relation is manifested the occurrence should be regarded “supernatural”, as departing from the natural laws of science. According to the scientific worldview, where every phenomenon is supposed to occur in linear local-mechanical chain of causal action relationship, it is not allowed to discover any meaning more than a physical phenomenon described as the motion of a mass in accordance with the laws of physics. Any similarity perceived in the event that is observed outside of the system of inevitable mechanical action is a mere coincidence, and it is impossible to find an inherent meaning associated with it. Any miraculous event received by the subject of consciousness as some sort of revelation, or impactul phenomenon that shake the spirit of the people as a mystery, can be no more than a false “analogy”, the deluded projection of the mind. It is the function of consciousness to read a concealed meaning other than the mechanical action in the correlation of natural process of event generation. But the characteristic nature of the detailed description in a fictional work that is portrayed as accidental event lies in its premise that it demands that some distinctive “fictional meaning” should be read out, in the very event that scientific worldview dismisses as a “coincidence”. It has some similarity to the notion posited by Jung in his presentation of the concept “synchronicity”, that the universe can be grasped in its wholeness through the meaning construction of the mind. Jung admitted the possibility that some events can be accepted by the subject of consciousness as miraculously meaningful occurrence even though it is obvious that one event is outside of the mechanical system of the other and does not have any direct causal relationship; and he called this principle that there is some kind of a sign to be regarded as a revelation that combines the complex meaning associations as if led by fate, by the term “synchronicity”. It is something like a natural law that one can read something subjectively meaningful in the events that do not have any causal relationship, as a manifestation of the hidden connection between the universe and an individual. Jung believed synchronicity to be some kind of intrinsic order that rules fate, as the law of gravity dominates the physical world, and proposed the hypothesis to understand the essence of the latent world that lies behind the phenomenal world. The structural existence of meaning that has been orchestrated in the contingency in the fictional description suggests in reverse the mind’s capability of understanding the essence of the wholeness of the universe by presupposing an unknown formula to grasp its comprehensive substance as an organic continuum of mind and material. Coincidence would be a concept that is accepted in the premise of strictly defined scientific worldview. Because the notion is referred to the occurrence of events that look as if one has some connection with the other while there is no direct causal relationship between them. Those events are irrelevant in the essence, but they are misjudged in subjective illusion as if there were some “tunings” principle to endow some meaning association over them. In contrast to this, religious concepts such as “Providence” and “dispensation” in Christianity may be taken in consideration. As is inferred from the literal meaning of the words “provide” and “dispense”, they suggest the prospect that various events are brought about from profound wisdom which is out of the measure of man’s knowledge and therefore impenetrable to human reason, indicating the limit of comprehension in the form of principle or natural law. The word “天啓” (tenkei) in Eastern thought would also belong to the same concept axis as these. In either case it is presupposed that it is impracticable to build a system to understand for human intellect although the fundamental meaning of event generation exists. In comparison with these two contrasting ideas concerning the order of cosmology, the fictional worlds developed in TV games are extremely meaningful to reexamine the implication of the event generation that we observe currently occurring. In the game world, according to a variety of experiences a player undergoes, a condition is fulfilled to start a new “event” as the forking point of the story, that enables the story line to go still further. By this repetition, pre-established “true end” will be eventually accomplished to realize a peculiar harmony in the fictional world. It is quite natural because games are pre-programmed as such. A TV game is a particular possible world where each player propels the world by making his own choices, and attains peculiar meaning in his own particular fictional world. Actually, the character’s action that triggers the event does not have any specific function to attain the end in causal chain, but each of the contingent action is indispensable for the programmed game story to be unified. The game space is established as an independent dimension where mechanical cause and effect chain has no meaning, and quite aloof from the idea that distinguishes coincidence from inevitability. Systematically, the idea of synchronicity may be interpreted like the case of the events generation in TV games that represent themselves to be something perceived in the individual mind and provided with meaningful conclusion and understandable accomplishment. In other words, the world exists as a game to play, where some kind of meaning is established. Each person is a player of the world, and playing the leading role. It was the premise of scientific worldview to presuppose that there is definite objective physical world regardless of individual’s personal intention and awareness, and there exists no such thing as raison-d’etre. According to the premise of science, the world is the same “objective” thing from everyone’s point of view, that is fundamentally “meaningless”, so everything that is derived from the inevitable chain of causality is no more than a coincidence. There is not only no true end or bad ending, but there is even no beginning or end, with time just flowing aimlessly, which is the reality of the world we live in. If we amplify our understanding of the ontology of the fictional game world, we can assert the hypothesis that the energy of the archetypal psychic field exuded by the collective unconscious manifests the conceptual existence of fictionality in the phenomenal world as a latent force to overthrow this hopeless worldview advocated by scientific principle. By affording meaning to the world, the fiction is healing the collective psyche. The ambiguous characteristics of the quantum that made it impossible to identify the manner of its presence definitely on coordinate points, quite unlike the propensities of atom which has the determined character as particle existence, shook the conventional concepts concerning the definition of existence. But it was “depth psychologist” Jung who responded to the serious crisis of the norm of identification, and came to organize a new idea to grasp the connection between physics and psychology through discussions with physicist Wolfgang Pauli. Cutback technique in the fictional presentation has the function to irradiate the psychical characteristics of the universe by novel approach suggesting the concept “actuality” which has been extracted by the discovery of the principle of quantum mechanics, indicating the hitherto unobserved elements lying in potential state behind the phenomenal world called “reality”. Analogical representations attained by piling up the contingencies, display the effect like a revelation liberating the mind from the conceptual restraint of scientific worldview that allows no more possibility than accidental occurrences; and suggest the cosmological significance of the fictional meaning that is acknowledged in the metaphysical plane, breaking through the premise of the objective reality that has been supposed to be common to all people, and the absence of the essential meaning in it. And this ontologically reflective idea, relates to the philosophical subject of this anime as an important motif on the identity of the individual existence. The viewer is forced to witness the actions and utterances of the heroine practically, without any objective or intention revealed in her extraordinary attempt to have a conference with the target of her assassination. This is exactly the same case as for her opponent/client Guen McNichol. Extremely impressive exchange of words charged with unique reality is developed between a girl full of unknown details and a man endowed with a vivid personality modeling with whom it is hard to guess what sort of relationship might be built, quite in contrast to the norm of “engaging” conversation usually prepared for the development of stereotyped story with definite directional intention. Their extraordinary lines contribute to the establishment of a peculiar fictional world belonging to the unknown category full of uncertain basic axes that may determine the characteristic of the fictional world, avoiding the fixed semantic projection incorporated into existing conceptual category as one of many possible worlds. This particular speech modeling is going to be applied effectively in the same manner for each of other characters, as a basic strategy for building an important foundation of this anime work. Finally, the sniping is carried out by Madlax in the ceremonial place. The assassination scene of her mission is depicted by a long take of the background music “nowhere”, with the impressive refrain of “Yanmani” that had been introduced in the battle scene in the episode 1. In response to the outbreak of the incident, quickly identifying the sniper point, the woman guard officer captures the figure of Madlax hiding in the remote building in her telescope. However, Madlax succeeds in administering a preemptive shoot to the opponent who was just trying to snipe her. The bullet shot by Madlax had flipped off the beret of the guard officer. Barely escaping her crisis, Madlax mutters again. “Scary person.” Just then, the blond young man who had called out to Madlax in the hotel passage is giving a phone call to someone, reporting on the assassination of Guen McNichol. “I never even imagined that he was prepared to do something like that. Yes, it is all right; there are any number of people to take his place.” He has already sensed the intention of the Army Commander who was the victim of the assassination. This young man seems to be a person who has some relationship with the mysterious organization that controlled Guen McNichol behind, but it is not entirely predictable how he is going to participate in the main story, or he is just no more than a bit player, at this point. The woman officer of the royal guard is reporting about the details of the sniper to her boss. “I saw the criminal through my scope. It was a young girl with blond hair.” The captain of the guard tells her the name of the agent of this offense. It is Madlax. As for this woman officer of the guard who was called “scary person” by Madlax, it is difficult to judge for the present, whether she will be deeply involved in the development of the story or she bore but temporary relationship with Madlax, as well as the young blond man. Rather the existence of the man named Guen McNichol, who had been ended abruptly in the assassination, was impressive more than anything else. This is the same as the case of the young boy Pete who had been annihilated in a tragic death just about to start a tentative association with Madlax in episode 1. Various characters equipped with a rich personality profile in each of them, are going to either survive or end in sudden death without making any differences between the central figure and the small role in this anime. This trait makes the work extremely “realistic”, overstepping the convention of usual fictional works. The character modeling adopted in this anime manifests the hyper-realistic description method that reflects the eerie meaninglessness of the real world just as it is, breaking through the limits of stereotypical forged “reality”. How Madlax and Margaret are going to reveal their hidden relationship? What sort of connection the blond young man is going to make with these two girls? And how the little girl who abruptly appears holding a doll in her arms might be connected with them? The outlook is not clear, together with the roles other impressive characters are going to achieve.