DOUBLE FEATURE: METANARRATIVES AND CREATIVE DESTRUCTION IN POMPO THE CINÉPHILE AND FIRE PUNCH

BLAKE MORRISON - Writer, 3rd Year, English and Japanese

When I die, my hallucinating brain will probably make me think that the afterlife is a library.

SPOILERS FOR CINEMA PARADISO, POMPO THE CINÉPHILE, AND FIRE PUNCH

Near the end of Cinema Paradiso, the protagonist Salvatore, now in his middle-age, returns to the movie theater of his youth, now in disuse and disrepair. The shot of that grand, old, crumbling theater about to be laid to rest by a wrecking crew reminds me of my problem with the term “pathetic fallacy.” As an identifier for a concept, pathetic fallacy is perfectly serviceable. Attributing emotions to non-human things that scientifically do not have emotions is something human things do, a lot. But if viewing life from an emotional lens is a “fallacy,” then you might as well stick fallacy at the end of every other literary and poetic term: metaphorical fallacy, alliterative fallacy, symbolic fallacy, ironic fallacy, and so on and so forth, etcetera etcetera. If the attribution of emotions to the non-human is fallacious, then it follows that the attribution of meaning to a movie theater, a film, a story, other people or anything other than oneself is fallacious as well. After all, how can you be scientifically sure of anything or anyone’s emotions other than your own? Can you even be sure of your own emotions? The words “pathetic fallacy” imply that any belief is a mistaken one, which is technically true. It is also technically unhelpful, boring, and makes me regret majoring in English. Pathetic is also a word that is now less than ennobling, although it once was exactly that. The Oxford English Dictionary tells us that pathetic now usually describes something as “inadequate; of such a low standard as to be ridiculous or contemptible” or “expressive of failure, inadequacy, or alienation,” but it used to simply mean pathos. It meant emotion. As it did four hundred years ago, pathetic still technically means “Arousing sadness, compassion, or sympathy, esp. Through vulnerability or sadness; pitiable,” but now no one uses it other than to insult or degrade something or someone. I get the feeling that the words “pathetic fallacy” are snarkily whispering to me “the categorically non-human does not and cannot have emotions; only individual humans alone have emotions; in this regard, humans live and die alone,” and that makes me want to punch pathetic fallacy in its figuratively fallacious face, however scientifically and unimaginatively accurate it may be.

Beyond the fallacious emotions I feel at seeing it alone and abandoned at the end of the film, the movie theater in Cinema Paradiso is still a character unto itself. It acts as the hub of Salvatore’s Sicilian hometown, bringing all of its residents together and crucially bringing Salvatore and Alfredo together. In a sense, the movie theater is the town, or at least it is the audience’s main view of the town. It is the setting that brings the characters together, without which we would not be able to see these characters as we do. In the pre-digital age that the film depicts, the movie theater was a much more human institution, one that required a projectionist to crank the film into the projector manually. Although in the film the projectionist is clearly a metaphor for the artist, one who is always apart from the audience of their work but able to uniquely enjoy the audience’s enjoyment of it, the projectionist could be a metaphor for anyone. Sitting in the little projection booths of our skulls, we may think we are viewing a three dimension world through the lens of our eyes, but we are actually viewing a film of two dimension images processed by photoreceptors, rods, cones, and a bunch of other things that I learned (and have already mostly forgotten) from a cognitive science class I took for my biological sciences breadth requirement last year. Everyone is the protagonist of their own story. Everyone is also the author, or more accurately, the filmmaker of their own life. You could call this a pathetic fallacy, the fallacious attribution of emotion to a concept, to one’s life, because without the attribution of emotions, what is life other than a biological process? On a nobler note, you could also call this creativity. Not creativity in the sense of a particularly talented artist or problem-solver, but creativity in the sense of simply believing there is a point to something, to your own life. By believing, you are creating something.

One anime that particularly encapsulates the creativity of belief is Pompo The Cinéphile, a delightfully meta movie about making movies. One manga that also explores the creativity of belief is Fire Punch, an equal parts despairingly and hopefully meta story about storytelling (living). Opening in a picturesque anime version of Hollywood called Nyallywood, Pompo the Cinéphile is certainly more optimistic than Fire Punch. It is also not a direct meta-narrative like, say, Shirobako is, which is a TV anime about making a TV anime. Rather, Pompo the Cinéphile is an anime movie about making a live-action film. Although the film that the characters create, Meister, ultimately and predictably sweeps the Nyallywood equivalent of the academy awards, a hypothetical full live-action version of that film, based on the selective scenes from it that we see acted, filmed, and edited, probably would not be anything special. Naturally, what lends the creation of this formulaic fictional film pathos is the context of the characters creating it, but it is also the medium of animation that lends it an emotional depth. There is a glorious use of match-cuts between the in-universe film and the film’s present action. Director and storyboarder Takayuki Hirao uses these meta match-cuts so frequently that one might wonder how they stay meaningful and not become a gimmick. One reason is that the match-cuts always match shots on a visual as well as an emotional level. The match-cuts between Gene and Meister’s protagonist as he edits the film are particularly well-done, paralleling the creative frustrations of one fictional character with another and in so doing constantly reminding us that we are doing the exact same thing with ourselves and fictional characters as we watch this or any film. Interestingly, many of the creative scene transitions in Pompo the Cinéphile would not work as seamlessly as they do in a live-action film. Just to name a few of these transitions: the reflections in various bodies of water warp into a character’s recollection, windshield wipers sweep away the rain and the preceding scene, the two lines dividing a shot into four triangular images turn into a chain link fence that a character then grasps onto, and falling papers flip by, obscuring the current scene to reveal the next one. Another nice meta-narrative nod is that, if you exclude the opening publisher and production studio logo credits and the ending credits, the movie’s runtime is exactly ninety minutes (ninety minutes plus five seconds, to be exact, but it is still close enough to be impressive).

However, Pompo the Cinéphile does make liberal use of the trope of the lonely and suffering artist with Gene, although it thankfully does not take the trope at face value. Although Pompo claims that Gene’s creative potential as a director comes from his “eyes that don’t sparkle” and by extension his dissatisfaction with ordinary life as a social misfit, contending that “happiness is the enemy of creation,” the movie itself makes clear that Gene’s success as a debut director does not come from his dead eyes or having been socially withdrawn for much of his life. Instead, Meister only comes together thanks to the effort of many individuals, not just that of an auteur director cut off from social fulfillment and cooperation. Happiness is not necessarily the enemy of creation, or rather, depression is not the secret ingredient to artistic creativity. It is quite the opposite. From Dasai Osamu to Hideaki Anno, the mental struggles of many artists have been popularly interpreted as inspiration for their art. The romanticization of the suffering artist is a whole other beast of topic that I have neither the time nor resolve to delve into at the moment, so suffice it to say such romanticization is extremely reductive and liable to mislead people currently struggling with depression or even to normalize it as the default mentality of the artist, which it certainly is not. Creation, even of the darkest and most cynical art, is a positive, phenomenologically life-affirming act. Even so, one cannot deny that, as Gene says, “life is a series of choices” and “choosing one path means cutting out all the others. So cut out conversation. Cut out friendship. Cut out family. Cut out daily life. Cut, cut, cut!”

Out of context, this dialogue sounds incredibly depressing. It is slightly less so in context. Editing a film –cutting out extraneous dialogue, characters, scenes– here becomes a metaphor for life. Depressing as it is, there is a universal truth to it beyond Gene’s own situation as a “social misfit” and “film geek” who has, in his own words, “run away from reality” to the world of film. In creating something, one in a sense destroys every other possibility for what that could have been. But these possibilities are not “to be thought away. Time has branded them and fettered they are lodged in the room of the infinite possibilities they [the things that actually happened instead of remaining as possibilities] have ousted. But can those have been possible seeing that they never were? Or was that only possible which came to pass? Weave, weaver of the wind.” (James Joyce, 25). Seeing as my mind is filled with Ulysses these days from writing a thesis on it, I think I am allowed to quote it at least once even in an anime club magazine article of all things.

Even if creation requires destruction, and the creative process is inherently one of revision and excision as much as it is of vision and addition, Pompo the Cinéphile reminds the viewer that movies (and by extension all art and communication) are made for someone other than the creator. Even if the creator thinks they are creating it solely for themselves, that is simply not possible. For us social creatures, the precondition of consciousness is dependence on someone else, on the Freudian Other, on one you can talk and listen to. The “Other” does not need to be a specific person, they can be a construct of the creator’s mind, but that construct still originates from social involvement with the Other, and any movie we make or word we say is a prayer for a social connection we cannot scientifically confirm but that we have been raised to intuitively hope for. Pathetic fallacy. We assume that there is emotional meaning in our communication medium of choice. This assumption is usually correct. After all, why else would the audience laugh, cry, boo, or yawn if the medium failed to carry or at least evoke emotions.

Like Pompo the Cinéphile, Fire Punch is also about making a movie, in its first half, that is. Even when the story about making a film metanarrative runs its course, Fire Punch remains a highly self-reflexive work. Characters frequently contemplate their motivations as “acting” for the sake of the Other, and the abundance of pop culture references, although sometimes simply there for a cheap laugh, usually reinforce the manga’s hyperbolically violent and bleak world, which in light of the all the film references appears in sharp relief as an amalgamation of shock value tropes and cliches that, in their overly extreme depiction, are emptied out and divested of their original cheap entertainment value and refreshingly depicted to have real human and emotional cost. Of course, the manga is still entertaining, but through Tatsuki Fujimoto’s depiction of characters struggling with the idea of narrativization in media and in their lives, and the murky, entirely blurred boundary between the two, one can enjoy a rare kind of self-reflective and self-reflexive entertainment. The movie theater as a metaphor for life is the image that stays with me from this manga. We make movies for the Other, tell stories for the Other, live for the Other.

I wonder who I wrote this article for.