The bird is fighting its way out of the egg. The egg is the world. Whoever wishes to be born must destroy a world. The bird is flying to God. The god is named Abraxas.
—Herman Hesse, Demian
Revolutionary Girl Utena, episode 14: “The Boys of the Black Rose.” Directed by Kunihiko Ikuhara. Character designs by Chiho Saito. Be-Papas, 1997 (Nozomi Entertainment, 2011). Approx. 24 minutes. Rated “16+.”
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We return now to our irregularly scheduled, leisurely walk through that trippy classic, the Evangelion of magical girls, Revolutionary Girl Utena. This series of posts was on hiatus because of issues with my DVD player, both its increasing unwillingness to play DVDs and my sudden, inexplicable inability to take screenshots from it.
I’ve turned instead to the free and legal upload on YouTube from Nozomi entertainment. This is less than ideal, as it means a downgrade in picture quality, and I also see that they’ve cut out the end-credits animation, the bastards. But I will tolerate all of this for your sakes. Don’t ever say the Deej didn’t do anything for you.
The previous episode was a recap of the first arc, with a few tantalizing details thrown in. This present episode is the full-on start of a new arc, and thus it gives a lot of new details … creepy, creepy details.
This new arc also presents us with a tonal shift. Although the screwball humor will not entirely disappear, it will now take a backseat while the grimmer elements of Utena come to the fore. This is one case where I think less humor is a good thing, since the jokes in Utena have always felt misplaced.
As the episode opens, we learn that Anthy has a habit of disappearing on Saturday nights, because she’s going to visit her brother, the rakish and pointy-chinned Akio. He is acting director of the school and is set to marry the real director’s daughter as soon as she graduates from high school. A brief bit of dialogue indicates that he’s acting director because the real director suddenly took ill under mysterious circumstances, and if you read between the lines … yeah. I admit I missed that particular bit of dialogue on three previous viewings; Utena remains consistently clever with its use of understatement in spite of its tendencies to melodrama. Seemingly innocuous lines throughout this show actually tell much of the story.
Since Utena put the hurt on all the student council members in the previous arc, she now has new villains to face, a mysterious organization called the Black Rose Circle, which is apparently made up of the academy’s most brilliant students, students brilliant and powerful enough to offer serious assistance even to the professors in their research (the show having apparently forgotten, momentarily, that its setting is supposed to be a K through 12 school rather than a university). At the heart of the Black Rose Circle is the pink-haired high-school boy Mikage.
The building that house the Black Rose Circle is built over a chamber where a hundred duelists, apparently from a previous version of the Rose Duel, lie buried, all of them having died under circumstances not yet explained. Working with a dark-skinned and somewhat feminine boy named Mamiya Chida, who resembles Anthy and Akio, Mikage is using the Rose Seal rings from these dead men to create “makeshift duelists” for the purpose of challenging Utena in the arena in order not to win Anthy, but to kill her so that Mamiya may take her place as the Rose Bride.
Mikage explains this in a scene where he and Mamiya have apparently just had a sexual encounter, given the way Mamiya is adjusting his clothes. It would be easy to miss this, but it’s already established that in Utena, adjusting one’s clothes means “we just got it on.”
The first of these makeshift duelists is Akio’s own fiancée, Kanae. She seems like a nice girl, but she is in a panic over Anthy, whose cold, empty eyes and strange smile have convinced her she’s some kind of monster.
Throughout the first arc, we observed Anthy’s remarkable and apparently innate ability to gaslight people into emotional breakdowns, and she has managed to do the same thing to Kanae.
In response to this torment, Kanae goes to the Black Rose Circle for an “interview.” This interview involves a lot of bizarre imagery that we will see throughout this arc. She first walks down a hall full of chairs holding signs pointing the direction, and then enters what appears to be a combination elevator and confessional. Sitting in front of what is apparently a two-way mirror, she pours out her torment about Anthy as the elevator car drops deep into the Earth and Mikage’s voice repeats, “Go deeper, go deeper.”
Meanwhile, on the wall over Kanae’s shoulder, we can see a lightbox holding a butterfly. As the elevator drops, the butterfly reverts to a cocoon, then to a caterpillar, then to a leaf.
Once the elevator competes its journey, Kanae finds herself in the chamber where the dead duelists are entombed. Mamiya stabs her in the heart with a black rose, and Mikage places a black Rose Seal ring on her finger.
Shortly thereafter, Utena finds a note in her locker challenging her to a duel. She’ll find these notes in various odd places throughout the arc.
The dueling arena itself has changed: Utena finds it full of desks, on which sit vases full of white lilies (the contents of the desks will be different in each episode), while on the ground are red shapes resembling the chalk lines drawn around corpses in cop dramas.
Utena does battle with Kanae and of course wins, at which point Kanae’s Rose Seal ring disintegrates and she falls exactly into one of the outlines, asleep. When she loses, the coffin of the dead duelist whose ring she wore slides through a wall and falls into a furnace where it burns.
When she awakes, she remembers nothing of the duel or what led to it, but has apparently recovered from her psychological trauma—suggesting again that battling Utena is how the other characters reach catharsis.
The imagery surrounding the Black Rose Circle is unambiguously hellish. They have a lair deep underground where the dead reside, and those dead are literally consigned to the flames when their purpose is served. The path to their underground chamber is a sort of inverted sacrament of confession, where people claim to be victims and demand vengeance: we’ll see how important this is later when Mikage actually throws someone out of his confessional for being too pure to use as a tool.
And in addition to the Black Rose Circle, which lives in hell, we have Akio, who lives at the top of the tall tower that dominates Ohtori Academy, a tower containing a planetarium. Akio, we learn, is obsessed with stargazing. There appears to be a dualism here, Akio in heaven and Mikage in hell.
But we will learn later that, within the universe of Revolutionary Girl Utena, heaven and hell lie cheek by jowl, if they can even be distinguished at all. We already get a hint of this near the episode’s end, when we see a glimpse of why, exactly, Anthy visits her brother every Saturday night.
I’ll explain later. But given the preoccupations of this show, you can probably guess already.
