The Quick and the Undead: Visual and Political Dynamics in Blood: The Last Vampire

In the films of Oshii Mamoru, political struggle is not only palpable-it is positively sensual. Oshii's films chart the efforts of people to make a difference or leave a trace in a politicized, mediated world where the importance of the individual is increasingly uncertain. The threat to individual agency is represented by political or technological networks that are ubiquitous but also invisible-power structures governing individual lives so completely that the structures themselves escape detection. They can script an individual's actions, rewrite memories, even substitute their own simulated reality for an individual's lived life, all without leaving a mark.

Opposing the tyranny of these structures is a longing for individual significance that is often expressed as a sensuous desire for the individual body. Time and again in Oshii's films, it is romantic and carnal desire that assert the worth of the human. We see it in Patlabor 2 (1993), whose mecha pilots must strip off their claustrophobic mechanical suits in order to make human contact; in Oshii's script for Jin-Roh (2000), where factional politics are momentarily suspended by a fairy-tale love story between a terrorist and a secret policeman; and in Ghost in the Shell (1995), where the ambivalent narrative about networked, disembodied consciousness is countered by the shapely physique of the cyborg heroine.¹ All this produces an interesting paradox in Oshii's films: his characters are sometimes described as ghosts in the machine-the last traces of resistance haunting these political and technological networks-but, in fact, his human characters are the films' most reassuringly tangible features, while the machinery and technology of these invisible, inescapable networks are often far more ghostly and far more haunting.

A noteworthy example is Blood: The Last Vampire, directed by Kitakubo Hiroyuki and a team of young artists working under Oshii's tutelage.²Blood is a vampire story set on an American air force base in Japan during the Vietnam War. Released in 2000, it was one of the first anime to make heavy use of photorealistic digital effects, though at many points it preserves the stylized quality of conventional animation. While the vampires and human characters are largely two-dimensional, the planes taking off and landing in the background are rendered as more photorealistic three-dimensional forms. At one level, the planes disrupt the film's fantasy by evoking the realities of Vietnam, realities that are in many ways more frightening than any ghost story. But at the same time, the planes have a ghostly quality of their own that makes them much more complex signifiers. They represent not only the reality of politics but its unrealities as well.

These unrealities include the cracks and contradictions in the national identity that was forged for Japan after World War II. Japan became a newly pacifist nation that renounced the militarism of the thirties and forties, but it has also supported and profited from American wars in Vietnam and elsewhere. Japan's ability to formulate an independent defense policy has been hindered by fears in Japan and in the rest of Asia that Japanese pacifism is only a thin veneer and that prewar militarism could reassert itself at any time. In Blood, the planes visually represent the weight and solidity of present realities, as well as the illusory quality of Japanese politics and the country's suppressed but still-haunting memories of its own wartime aggression.

At the same time, the film's two-dimensional vampire heroine Saya seems at first to be a cartoonish fantasy-a camp parody of anime vixens. But Saya's sexiness and violence have a reassuring physicality that promises an escape from the intangibility and uncertainty of politics. In this sense, Blood is a film that could only have been made as an anime: it is the work's strange admixture of fantasy and photorealism that comments most provocatively on Japan's present historical moment. This essay begins by examining political dynamics in Blood's plot and then links this to the film's physical dynamics...