Books 2 (Chainsaw Man, The Employees, Psychopolitics)
Chainsaw Man vol 1-6 - Fujimoto Tatsuki
Fujimoto Tatsuki's earlier opus Fire Punch seemed almost tactically formed to be as brutally uncommercial as possible. It's relentlessly hellish setting, combined with a litany of transgressions and Fujimoto's almost Matsumoto Jiro-esque scratchy 'n' nasty penmanship constructed one of the most ghastly and dehumanizing mainstream manga narratives this side of Violence Jack. And yet, Fire Punch was also riotously, laugh out loud funny. Fujimoto's skill at combining nihilistic depravity and delightful human warmth would surely see him achieve significant success in a parallel universe.
The stars aligned, and of course Fujimoto has a wildly successful and popular hit in the form of Chainsaw Man, published in Shonen Jump, no less. Chainsaw Man tones down the hateful depravity just a pinch, though the story of Denji, a happy-go-lucky teenage loser who lives in a shed and is forced to sell his organs to pay back his dead father's debt isn't exactly feel-good. After forming a pact with a faintly ridiculous demon formed of a dog and a chainsaw, Denji find a starter cord poking out of his chest. When he pulls it, he transforms in to Chainsaw Man, perhaps the most prosaic superhero in existence (aside from, of course, Fujimoto's own creation, Fire Punch's Bat Man). Intensely unpleasant battles ensue, against abyssal fiends absolutely perfect for Fujimoto's delightfully naive and scratchy art style.
Rather than just present a series of violent and impressive set pieces, Fujimoto quickly gets distracted by the minutiae of the word he has created. Much like Q Hayashida's Dorohedoro, Chainsaw Man's vile fleshscapes are themselves fleshed out with delightful vignettes and a loveable cast of hellish misfits. Often, the comic reads like a 90's sex comedy. It's very disarming.
The ideas that float around the comic are often bizarre and compelling too, and in a somewhat Borges-esque touch, devils are assigned a level of threat based on a noun associated with them. The more people fear this noun, the more powerful the devil becomes. The most powerful devil of all is of course the gun devil, a threat so extreme and nebulous it is able to kill 1.2 million people in five minutes before completely disappearing. No one knows what it looks like or how to fight it. Even in this word of constantly bleeding hellbastards, everyone is still shocked at how a criminal gang could possibly get hold of guns in Japan. This blend of humour and social commentary is both deadpan and delicious.
Later devils are utterly ridiculous, incorporating bombs and sharks and all sorts of bizarre appendages. In volume two, the gang get trapped in an endlessly looping eighth floor of a generic hotel, which is somewhat Bunuelian. There is a riotous sense of weirdness. Yet it's also extremely funny. The perennially foolish Denji and Power deciding to murder their teacher through the combined power of their intellect is a stupid joke that almost caused me to spit my tea across the room
It's surreal touches like this that puts Chainsaw Man significantly above its Shonen contemporaries. It's warm, good natured and often sickeningly revolting, sometimes in the same scene. Characters kiss and smoke and drink and bleed and sweat and vomit all over the place with riotous abandon. They are truly alive
The Employees: A Workplace Novel Of The 22nd Century - Olga Ravn (2020)
I find the notion of narrative as artefact absolutely fascinating, and yet comparatively few authors have successfully managed it. Perhaps it is because of the limitations of the novel itself. Videogames such as Return Of The Obra Dinn and Paratopic, films such as The Blair Witch Project and Hard To Be A God and online collaborative narratives such as the SCP Wiki and assorted creepypastas have an advantage in that the malleability intrinsic to their media are able to make their artefact status that much more convincing. However, when Lovecraft or Shelly or Garland or indeed anyone announces "I must now ensure my account is both as vivid and accurate as possible, in order to ensure its posterity", the conceit is open, naked, functional and often clichéd. We, as an audience are forced to acknowledge the novel's status not only as a consumer product born from capitalistic practice, but also a diegetic account, as florid and lurid as it is.
Of course, there is absolutely nothing wrong with this practice, yet occasionally a novel of such authenticity emerges that it draws significant attention to the limitations of the novel itself. The Employees is one such novel. Ostensibly less of a conventional narrative, and instead a series of one sided, at times redacted transcriptions from a group of workers at some point in the 22nd century, The Employees is particularly hesitant to elucidate its mysteries. In fact the blurb provides far more explicit information than the novel itself ever does. Better instead to thrill in the drip feed of incidental information, as an increasingly hellish and truly alien narrative is eked out.
The Employees sees a group of unnamed, undescribed, undefined individuals orbiting a planet on a spaceship in the 22nd century. Their job appears to be interacting with a series of objects retrieved from the surface of the alien planet according to a rigid set of parameters. And these objects defy all human notions of what an object entails. However, the narrative does not take the form of documenting the objects, a la the SCP Wiki, but instead is a collection of wellbeing interviews, a glimpse in to the company's HR file if you will. Nothing is explicated, as why would it be? The fantastical mission is instead conveyed as a banal and increasingly fractious series of vaguely defined incidents. There are no great revelations about the far future, beyond the fact that human (and non human...) relations are just as embittered and illogical as they are today.
The transcripts are not complete, or even presented in order. Like all the best horror narratives (and the book is indeed horrific, with the same menacing ennui as the films of Charlie Kaufman or the cold existentialism of Camus), the horror exists not in what is made explicit, but what is not. One early 'statement' reads, in its entirety, "I know you say I am not a prisoner here, but the objects have told me otherwise".
To describe such a mysterious book further would be to neuter it. Best to track it down and thrill in in it's delightfully nihilistic and alienating strangeness,
Psychopolitics - Byung-Chul Han (2017)
Slim, lucid and sometimes even to the point, Psychopolitics reads like a series of vaguely connected musings and offcuts from a much larger book.
Its central thesis broadly explores how social media in particular implements a kind of self-subjugation, and how neoliberalism has essentially mutated our very conception of what freedom is. Clearly, digitally convergent technology is a hateful vampire that makes our lives a vapid, anxiety ridden hellscape, yet to posit these ideas makes one seem like a confused luddite. At last, a serious academic exploration of this very malaise! Well, not quite. For starters, there are few, if any concrete examples of how this self-subjugation manifests. At least grumpy old men like Adorno give us hilariously vitriolic accounts of how sunbathing is self-subjugation to the superstate. This lack of grounding is by no means rare in critical theory, but due to the paucity of focus here, it seems especially omissive. Every concept is fleeting, undefined, and really only there to encourage further reading.
Perhaps the biggest flaw with this book is the naivety of analysis of many of the concepts it (again briefly) flops against. A chapter on gamification cheerfully states that farming, and other activities that "slow processes of ripening and quiet growth, cannot be gamified at all". Even someone with the vaguest conception of games and gamification will know about the popularity of farming simulators as diverse as Stardew Valley, Animal Crossing, Farming Simulator, Harvest Moon and so on, not to mention accrual of real world assets in MMORPGs, and grinding for resources in approximately 50% of every game released in the last decade, you really do wonder if Han has played a game since Galaga.
This naivety is frustrating, as Han's writing style is clear and transparent. It's a joy to be able to chug down critical theory so quickly and easily. Yet even in this slim volume, he seems distracted. Psychopolitics is best read as a primer, rather than the last word.
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