Malice@Doll: Konaka, Specularization, and the Virtual Feminine

The postapocalyptic setting of Konaka Chiaki's script for the 2001 OVA series Malice@Doll offers a sharp critique of urban office life and the pornographic pleasures that are supposed to make it bearable for salarymen. The characters, who live in a massive, void-suspended office complex called an "Organ," are divided into "machines" with male names like "Todd," "Joe," and "Freddy," and "dolls" with female names like "Doris," "Heather," and "Misty." Although the female characters appear to be human, we learn that they are inorganic robot-puppets created by humans to serve as prostitutes. In contrast, the male characters are not anthropomorphic. They have low-tech metal bodies suited to their functions as, for instance, janitors, mechanics, and solderers. Both dolls and machines are governed by the "Systems Administrator," Joe, and his police force, a band of "Leukocytes." Th at the police force is named for the white blood cell that attacks foreign bodies suggests that an overemphasis on protecting against computer viruses may have created an atmosphere so hostile to actual organic infections, mutations, and adaptations that human and other evolving life forms were supplanted altogether. The sense of sterility is compounded by the characters' names, which in their full form are e-mail addresses: doris@doll, heather@doll, joe@administrator, todd@repairer, chuck@solderer, devo@leukocyte. Upon meeting, characters recite the other's full e-mail name, as if running an identification program. "Kon. Nichi. Wa. Joe. Atto. Adomin." The greeting points to the inhumanity of a society in which functions, not relations, determine identity. Konaka underscores its senselessness by having dolls and machines continue to perform their jobs for humans, a.k.a. "gods," even now that humans are extinct. The servile janitor goes on literally licking the floor day in and day out, though no one cares any longer about its cleanliness. Malice, the title character, goes streetwalking every day, though there are no longer any patrons to solicit.

Konaka's dystopia is thus different from other recent Japanese anime that explore human identity in the virtual age by invoking what Susan Napier, following Scott Bukatman, calls "terminal identity." If identity before the computer age implied both mind and body, "terminal identity" drops the body from the equation, replacing it with the a-materiality of cerebral free play at, and often, as a computer terminal. The result, as Napier reads it in various anime series from Space Battleship Yamato to Neon Genesis Evangelion, is a "terminal culture" that "fuses reality and fantasy into techno-surrealism" by calling the material world into question.¹ While Napier argues that "terminal culture" is greeted with more anxiety in Japan than elsewhere, what is interesting about Konaka's Malice@Doll is that it denies the possibility of disembodied subjectivity from the outset. To have a mind one must also have an organic body, it implies. Conversely, being inorganic, Konaka's automatons are also mindless, in the full sense of the word. And although machines and dolls are supposed to have been invented by humans as service robots, there is a strong sense in which they represent humanity's own fate. The story suggests that if men reduce themselves to systems administrators and conduct their relationships entirely on the Internet, according to computer protocols, they become little more than mechanized maintenance crews for an ironically named, because inorganic, "Organ." And if they spend their office days visiting porn sites and their nights visiting sex workers, the function of women in their society becomes equally bloodless. Malice, the title character, is defined as a provider of "fleeting relief from the reproductive urges" of her patrons.²

Konaka's story opens as Malice awakens from a dream to find her creaky doll body soft, warm, and capable of both crying and menstruating. Not only has she been made human, but the kiss that she is programmed to offer everyone she meets (her mantra: "I am a doll. This is all I can do . . .") now has the power to awaken organic life in others. At the end of the film she escapes from the Organ, floating off on angel...