People are highly reductive about the final ‘message’ of Neon Genesis Evangelion. This might be a symptom of how the relative confusion of the show sits alongside parts that are clearly brilliant: they want to reduce it to some sort of takeaway point that it’s all building towards because they’re either scared that it’s so good that it justifies what looks like chaos if you pay enough attention- this is the truth- or they’re so overwhelmed and frustrated that they want to believe that it’s not actually that great, and that it’s ultimately making a basic point.

This ‘basic point’ in question is to do with Instrumentality. The moral dichotomy that people think is being set up is:

Either live with everyone in perfect theoretical harmony where no one has any differences and everyone fills each other’s flaws and there can be nothing but total understanding and happiness i.e. Instrumentality

Or

Choose individuality and accept that the best course of action is to be kind to one another, even though everyone has the choice to be mean too

So they think that it’s just about the hedgehog’s dilemma, that AT fields are just a metaphor for the barriers we put up against one another and that all the personal issues in the show, all the parental and sexual stuff, can be reduced to “Come on guys, just be nice to each other”. This is obviously wrong.

This understanding emerges because lots of people don’t want to challenge themselves or to let a TV show be complicated. Evangelion became a meme, and people always assume that once a piece of art becomes a meme it must be in some way hollow or adolescent. However, to paraphrase Bloom:

“A diminished Evangelion is a critic’s creation”

That is, if you can find it in the show, it’s there and it’s real, and there’s no reason to theorise about how the show isn’t as complex or as good as it appears. Most people are bad critics though, and they tend to think they are smart for having realised a universal message. In fact, universal messages are such a prerequisite of common art that I think one possible definition of art would be that it has a universality to it.

So saying that the instrumentality-problem (the dichotomy mentioned above) is a universal problem, and ‘solving’ the show in that way, is symptomatic of reductive criticism, which is most people’s first mode of criticism. What about an expansive criticism of Evangelion? What would that look like?

Well, firstly, suggesting instrumentality as a potential end all solution ignores what happens in the show. Instrumentality is actually Seele’s final plan, which a lot of people overlook, and it’s a partisan effort to either lock all the members into Eva 06 and become like one of the first ancestral race, or to just eliminate humanity and return to liquid. Gendo’s version of instrumentality is either a very specific one where it’s just him and Yui, or one where he becomes a God alongside Yui in some sense. Seele here is clearly evil, and Gendo is endorsing hyper-solipsism. Shinji is solipsistic in his worst moments, the moments when he doesn’t care about saving people by piloting Eva, when he just cares about his own emotions, and as we see from 3.33 Gendo is willing to trash the world, trash Nerv, and live out his life as the king of a broken castle just to get Yui back, because as soon as that happens nothing else matters, only his own stream of consciousness matters.

We should learn a lot about the nature of instrumentality from its actual presentation and how it is suggested as a thought experiment when contrasted with the other big questions of the show. One of these begins in the clip show with Rei, and it is “Who is the real me”: is it the me that I perceive, the me that is real, or the several mes that exist within the minds of other people? There’s a Rei that Shinji knows, a Rei that Asuka knows, a Rei that Gendo knows- so when Instrumentality occurs, which of these enter the LCL? The transition might be traumatic because Anno is putting in the characters with the “real” versions of the other characters, not just the ones that they know. In fact, we get a glimpse of this happening when Shinji does his Instrumentality trial period and gets sucked into 01 after the Zeruel fight. He’s able to meet other people in there, so presumably he has full versions of them in his head. I think Anno is offering us a full vision of solipsism: that instrumentality with an individual focus is a hell of self-punishment, that every human being can be their own universe.

Episode 25, when Instrumentality does occur, is accordingly pretty dark. Anno is certainly not playing the trope of “instrumentality is a tempting paradise which you must resist”: it’s a kind of torment. Maybe it was only going to be a torment for the first few days, before everyone’s differences became resolved once they’d yelled at Shinji enough. But what I’m seeing is that the “hell of other people” in the universe of solipsism isn’t actually much different to “other people” in the universe of instrumentality. It seems less like people are so far inside each other that they understand each other perfectly, and more like those people can’t now run away because they’re with each other in the LCL. They have no choice but to be berated until their differences are resolved.

Evangelion is really a show about parenthood, in large part, and I think it’s a show about parenthood because that’s the best way to show that some people just do prefer people to other people. Shinji cares about Gendo’s approval even though he’s a dick because that’s his father, Yui is attached to Shinji even from within the Eva, Shinji is attached to Rei because she’s his mother, Misato loves Kaji because she’s reminded of her father- there’s also the Ritsuko/Dr.Akagi angle, and the fact that to pilot an Eva you basically have to have your mother’s soul in it. It would be fine if we could return to an instrumentality state where there are no differentials, where everyone is equal to everyone, but I feel that this option is weighed against the idea that human interaction is made complex because parents always mean more, because you can’t just reduce human relations to “let’s all be nice to one another”. There’s a lot of beration because, for instance, Gendo refuses to care for Shinji like he cares for Rei, and it’s hard to see how the LCL might fix that.

My point is not that we should think that instrumentality is good before we realise it is evil, my point is that Anno is showing that instrumentality is bad by demonstrating what humans are really like, which leads us to his central point: a unique, stunning note that is struck by the show and which, as I see it, appears in no other piece of literature, film or music that I know of:

What motivates you is what you hate in other people

There’s a lot of talk about morals and messages in literature, but I don’t think anyone ever really learns from those things, they just enjoy them, but I feel like the above point is actually carried out so fully and so subversively that it really elevates Evangelion to being quite a great piece of art, it actually comes to form such an apocalyptic, nihilistic view of human interaction that it stays with me beyond the credits rolling. Let me explain.

One of the main questions that is repeated in the long, introspective segments is “Why do you Pilot Eva”. In Episode 25 we cycle through the three pilots, while within instrumentality, and everyone else in the LCL with them ask them a series of reductio ad absurdum questions about their reasons for doing stuff. This question arises more than would seem normal compared to other questions, and that’s because Anno wants us to realise that we only do things because of other people:

Shinji does it because he wants people to like him, or because his father tells him to, or because he’s just plain pressured into it.

Rei does it because Gendo won’t let her die (basically)

Asuka does it because she can’t get security from other people since her mother died, so she just wants to be the best instead

This is all very dark, especially for a sequence of children, but it shows you that all these moments are driven forward by the difficult and troubled relations we have with others. The solipsistic, even suicidal route is to decide that none of it matters and to let the angels win, the more motivated route is to do something about it, but this often ends up with strangling Asuka on a beach, because you can’t skip the stage where you have to test if others care about you. You need WILL to keep on going: those who want to leave the LCL, who have the will to live, can choose to, which is the shows most explicit example of the importance of self-will. In Episode 24 Misato tells Shinji that Kaworu died because he had no will to live, and that Shinji did nothing wrong: at this point, after Kaji and Kaworu’s deaths, both characters are so far into their own developments and the full tragic understanding that I can’t help but feel that the conversation ranks somewhere on the scale of great literature. Is Misato only talking like that because she has moved into a space of detachment? Or does what she say have a significance for instrumentality?

The thing about Will is that it becomes her organisation’s name (Wille) in 3.33, because at that point they’re only staying alive because they can. For all they know they’re the last humans anyway. They could give up their will, but this would just be the solipsism of the LCL, it would be a regression into death.

There are many telling lines and dialogue exchanges in NGE because it’s the greatest show of all time: but I just want to bring your attention to quite a remarkable one in episode 25, where Shinji laments that Instrumentality is “a world where everything’s already set”, to which Misato responds, correcting him:

“It’s a world where you make the decisions.”

In a world where there’s no-one to push against, where there are no qualities left to hate in anyone, Shinji initially can’t tell the difference between a world which he chooses and a world which he does not, because he has lived for so long, like all other humans, only existing and only having a will, a will to choose or to push forward or to motivate oneself, because of what he hates about others. Left to his own devices, he chooses a world around him which he hates because that’s the life he knows. There is no conception of a full life with instrumentality because there is no life without other people. There is no life without the will: Misato is proven right. The great issue of psychology in Evangelion is that you can reduce this hate-motivation to absurdity easily with the question “why pilot Eva”: the balance can be upset so, so easily within real people, and that brings us back to realising the original allure of instrumentality to both evil and good characters.

What we basically end up with is “expansive” criticism because we’ve started with instrumentality, a show concept, and widened it up in order to realise that to solve the emotional and relational problems of NGE characters is to theorise about the complexity of the human personality itself: the idea that things maybe could be simple, if it wasn’t that loving others is tough, that Misato’s love for Kaji could be real but it’s always muddied and made complex by her feelings for her father and her imposed feelings of impurity. If you look to the instrumentality-dichotomy as a solution then you miss the real fireworks, which is the astonishing psychological depth and reality of the characters and their cyclical, convincing problems.

I could write about Evangelion forever because it’s not like other shows: it’s not an “arc”, it doesn’t have character “arcs” or plotted character “development”- moreover, since when did that become a thing? How boring. It’s in the word itself: you can plot an arc on a graph. You can predict the development of Walter White and of Louie on Louie. Those are my other two favourite shows, but for the most part they’re either abstract stories in self-contained episodes or they’re parabolic stories where deep down, you know exactly what’s going to happen, and their efforts to be unpredictable ring hollow and meta-theatrical, not true-to-life. Evangelion is way ahead of those because, to me, it feels like one big crescendo: Anno gets so much out of turning up the heat on his big ideas by demonstrating how those questions come to matter for his characters in actual scenarios which show the tragedy of human interaction, and he weaves a Blake-esque web of symbolism and resonance (parenthood, religion, Gods, consciousness) which (and this is quite unique) actually feels like it matters beyond figuring it out in order to figure out the puzzle for its own sake.

I think this show is popular amongst losers not because Shinji is so alone, but because of that quite nerdy, but quite powerful and intelligent property in some rare, well-crafted pieces of art: the Will to Negation, the great drive towards total personal destruction, the fear of staring down the straight line, the crescendo-destruction where instead of arcing over, everything in the plot seems to resonate at a higher and higher frequency, like in Hamlet, until some remarkable, inexhaustibly meditatable condition is reached and the story leaves us. I can’t explain that any more than that: losers like it because of the Will to Negation, and I know that that dot is joined, but I can’t join that dot for you, I just know it to be true in the lives of people. The ‘message’ is a fullness, not an aphorism, and the fullness means more to people who are more broken than others, but I don’t know why really.

I feel like I could write endless posts about Evangelion, I feel like it’s inexhaustible to meditation. I don’t think analysis of it either begins or ends with “be nice to others” as a message, I think that it’s the product of a artist-director who, for certain stretches of the show, was way up at the height of his powers, and was showing what he thought about what life is like at a very intense pitch.

Love,

Alex