Devilman reflection

Just finished watching the wonkily earnest DevilMan, and am still trying to digest its complex melange of poor-acting/melodrama and its half-revealed social concerns. It's a story (based on a comic by Nagai Go) about a war between humans and 'demons' which turns the world into a barren, blasted wasteland. The protagonists are highschool friends who straddle the boundary between human and non-human, and must choose between sides. . . as the movie site queries: "Is this the existence necessary to save humanity"?

But behind the standard genre devices like highschool friendships, male-male bonding, childhood flashbacks, there is something dark and unnerving straining for expression. The violence begins with school bullying and domestic abuse ("barbarism begins at home") and the more bizarre elements almost appear to be metaphorical manifestations of this fundamental cruelty. Then when humans turn on one another, with lynch mobs and fascistic police squads summarily executing humans suspected of being/becoming demons, the story moves into more universalistic territory by dismantling the intial dualism of the conflict. It's quite a cliche actually, but somehow representative of an earlier era of idealism. There's no simple enemy, and there's no simple hero. . . simple judgments are disrupted by the presence of a third term. The interstitial role of the human-demon hybrids shows the cruelty of humanity, layered on top of the more obvious villainous role played by the demons.

And in a sense, my own research is a never-ending search for such third terms, a position to judge the limitations of comparisons. A position that allows me to criticize both America and Japan; rather than being trapped in "you can't say that, your country did worse". What I'm trying to say is that most of our judgements are constructed on the assumption of a simple linguistic comparative: "it's small" = "it's smaller than this (presumed?) standard". Zhuangzi (of the famous butterfly dream) made the same argument. If you define "big" from the perspective of something very very small, then of the myriad things, there is none that is not 'big".

Another example, given to me with far too much vitriol by someone I know:
"American men can cook"
"I see. I don't think most American women think so, because mac-and-cheese don't count."
"No, what I meant was that compared to Japanese men, American men can cook."

The addition of the third term of "American women" immediately changes the equation. The complex positionality of the speakers is revealed, and the processes whereby we make judgements is rendered transparent.