Between the Child and the Mecha

Prevalent in the narratives of anime and manga are the toylike tin men known as the "mobile suit" or "mecha," who are so compelling in their display of a mechanistic majesty and so intriguing in their representation of a complex web of desire. Mecha take many forms, but there are several constants that unite these forms through both their narratives and their visual composition. In narrative they are primarily armor for warring purposes, serving as highly technological protective suits for police or armies, as modes of transport and air travel, and, most significant, as containers for spiritual and physical transcendence for the pilots or operators who control them. As visual images, they are nearly always masculine in form: heavily decked out in idealized weaponry, with each giant muscle of the male form exaggerated and abstracted into sculptural plates of metal that are streamlined into a dynamic composition of hypostatized masculinity.

Yet at the heart of the mecha phenomenon is the paradoxical pilot: a child, or at least an adolescent person. Sometimes female but always an immature identity, this pilot holds the other half of the dual mecha character. The pilot's gender tends to determine the nature of the narrative, in that "the female body is coded as a body-in-connection and the male body as a body-in-isolation."¹ These gendered and polarized notions of the body determine the goals of the narrative and proscribe the course of the journey for the pilots and the mecha that transports them. Whether male or female, adolescent or just immature, the pilot is generally posited as a human child: a person in the formative stage of development seeking a secured identity through a bodily identification via sexual and gender-specific tactics. These manga and anime stories produce a keen sense of poignancy and yearning in the reader/viewer, as a mature secured identity is a rare item in a contemporary postmodern culture that is obsessed and stuck in seemingly endless adolescent modes of desire.

Between the child inside and the mecha outside is a gap: a symbol of a yawning sense of lack suffused with a complex of narratives that lie between the child-pilot subject and his or her mecha-ideal image of power and agency. That gap is the space of lack and the consequent production of desire, the space of conflicting drives and conflating worlds, and the space in which the sets, lights, and costumes for the performance of the transformation into maturity are set for what Jacques Lacan describes as the full emergence into the symbolic realm.² These conditions within the space of the gap play perhaps the most decisive roles in supplying the narrative with its contents, for in that gap is scripted the journey that will counter the lack of the child with the image of its desire.

RahXephon is a twenty-six-episode story of a young man's journey from childhood to his destiny through his personal coming-of-age event that is at the same time an event that transforms the world. The relationship between him and his mecha, the RahXephon, is a compelling example of how these sorts of narratives tend to speak to the issue of identity formation and the desire that fuels their performance. This anime can be read as an allegory of Lacan's landmark description of the three stages of subject development and as such suggests a potential key to the mecha anime and the fascination they hold. This essay charts the course of the anime against Lacan's description of the mirror stage, fort-da, and the oedipal complex to reveal their compelling coherence.³

The story of RahXephon is a dense interplay of interrelationships and an intertwining narrative of world histories and personal memories. It begins with the story of Kamina Ayato, a supposedly normal adolescent boy, who, after being brought to a temple at the end of a subway line in Tokyo after a train wreck, moves into a tale whose elements become clear only after the viewer has experienced several more episodes. Ayato is an "Ollin...