San is the sun: Princess Mononoke, Macbeth and Images of the Sun, Severed Heads and Green Forests

  

Two main characters: Mononoke Hime and Ashitaka (heroes who put the head back on the Shishigami)

“In all things, it is the Beginning and End that are interesting.”---Yoshida Kenko, from Tsurezuregusa (1330-2)

•  What started the fossil fuel-based economic system and how could it end one day? (no timing for this---decades----centuries---millennia---??)

• Miyazaki and Shakespeare are both interested in this question.

• The issue for both is the environment and the sun.

• The natural limits to growth: planet, sun, nature

SUN (San); forests; & cut-off headsMononoke Hime(1998) is one of Miyazaki Hayao’s most famous and successful films, while Macbeth(1606) is one of Shakespeare’s most famous and successful plays. It would seem that two works so far apart in time, one an environmental fantasy, the other a tragedy about an ambitious king, would have not much in common except that they both start with M, but Miyazaki and Shakespeare are both environmentalists and systems thinkers as well as entertainers and writers. A comparison of some techniques and imagery in both Mononoke Hime and Macbeth helps to understand just how similar their strategies and artistic aims are. Both works feature much attention paid to the sun. Both have spreading green forests. And both have severed heads.

Let me be clear that Miyazaki DID NOT (I think) get the ideas for using these images from Shakespeare

• The images are used in different ways.• Each artist developed the 3 images

independently.• However, the images seem to have some

similarities in meaning stemming from their natural definitions.

• Therefore the comparisons are useful. Comparing shows how the artists can skillfully use natural objects to quickly show deep ideas.

The severed head in Mononoke Hime

•  In Mononoke Hime, the severed head belongs to the Spirit of the Forest (called the Shishigami), who resembles a large stag but has many more antlers than a usual stag (the extra antlers look like the sun’s rays). His head is cut off when Lady Eboshi cries “I’m going to show you how to kill a god!” as she fires her gun at the Shishigami’s neck. Leading up to this episode, in the background of the action is the desire of Lady Eboshi to do away with the Shishigami in order to cut down trees in the forest and expand the town of Tatara Ba and its wealth:

• After the Shishigami (also called Didarabocchi at night) is beheaded---and thus zombiefied---, this dead, headless god turns everything to a deadly black slime which is fatal if touched. The climax occurs when San and Ashitaka put the head back on the dead but walking (zombiefied) headless Didarabocchi in order to save the whole forest and all the people in it.

Lady Eboshi: “this is how you kill a god” (and she shoots off the head of the Shishigami)

• Eboshi shoots the Ishibiya again.• The bullet hits the half-transformed Shishigami in its neck. 

The head of Shishigami falls onto the ground.• The headless body of Shishigami turns into black tar-like 

slime and explodes. Everything it touches dies. Great trees fall down, and dead kodamas fall like snow.

• Eboshi grabs Shishigami's head, and throws it to Jiko Bou, who puts it in a container and runs off with his men.

• Suddenly, Moro's head, detached from her body by the black ooze, flies and bites off Eboshi's left arm. Moro's head dives straight into the slime, and dies.

• Ashitaka and San hold Shishigami's head up. Golden liquid drips down from the head, and leaves red-black marks all over the bodies of Ashitaka and San. Ignoring the pain from the mark, Ashitaka shouts at Didarabocchi: 

• "Shishigami! We shall return your head. Please be calm!"• Didarabocchi stretches its neck towards its head. As Didarabocchi 

bends over them, Ashitaka holds San tightly. And Ashitaka and San are enveloped in golden light...

• The body of Didarabocchi changes its color from dark gray to gold, then its usual blue. Having regained its head, Didarabocchi slowly stands up.

• Then, the first light of morning strikes it.

The severed head of the SHISHIGAMI in the sunshine. Mononoke Hime and Ashitaka have to put the head BACK onto the Shishigami to

prevent the deadly slime from covering the forest and killing everything. The head could represent the “control center” or the

“idea” to keep a nature god intact. A plan, an idea to maintain “the forest”, the nature around us.

The SUN is seen at the SAME time as the HEAD is returned and this implies that the sun is involved in the idea.

• They must put the head back before the sun rises or the action to replace the head will have no effect. (Thus the focus is on the sun.)

• But they are in time• Replacing the head comes at the same

time as the return of the sun. The head is back, so is the “brain” and “thinking” or the “idea” about how to proceed with a better way of life than the ideas of Lady Eboshi.

Shishigami in the sun

How about the head of Macbeth?

Macbeth’s head= the end of the old system, the old order that was based on fossil fuels (it can also be

called capitalism)

• [Re-enter MACDUFF, with MACBETH's head] • Macduff. Hail, king! for so thou art: behold,

where stands The usurper's cursed head: the time is free: I see thee compass'd with thy kingdom's pearl, That speak my salutation in their minds; Whose voices I desire aloud with mine: Hail, King of Scotland!

• All. Hail, King of Scotland! • [Flourish]

The new king speaks in metaphors of the sun (“planted”)

• Malcolm. We shall not spend a large expense of time 2550Before we reckon with your several loves, And make us even with you. My thanes and kinsmen, Henceforth be earls, the first that ever Scotland In such an honour named. What's more to do, Which would be planted newly with the time, 2555As calling home our exiled friends abroad That fled the snares of watchful tyranny; Producing forth the cruel ministers Of this dead butcher and his fiend-like queen, Who, as 'tis thought, by self and violent hands 2560Took off her life; this, and what needful else That calls upon us, by the grace of Grace, We will perform in measure, time and place: So, thanks to all at once and to each one, Whom we invite to see us crown'd at Scone. 2565

• [Flourish. Exeunt] • The “exiled friends” are the ways of life exiled by capitalism and fossil fuels

So the head of Macbeth…• Represents the plan, the idea of the old order…• In this sense, as a representation of an idea or

a plan or order, it is similar to the head of the Shishigami.

• However, Macbeth is NOT (obviously) the same as the Shishigami. Macbeth (coal) is the OPPOSITE of the Shishigami (sun as sacred spirit, nature as sacred).

• The two severed head images are used in different ways but with similar purposes.

How about the spreading FOREST images?

In Mononoke Hime• The Didarabochi without a head

wanders over the forest and the black slime follows him, instantly covering all the green and killing all the trees.

• When the Didarabochi gets his head back, the sun comes up and the Shishigami is whole again. The forest turns green and beautiful at that point.

Didarabocchi stretches its neck towards its head. As Didarabocchi bends over them, Ashitaka holds San tightly. And Ashitaka and San are enveloped in golden light...The body of Didarabocchi changes its color from dark gray to gold, then its usual

blue. Having regained its head, Didarabocchi slowly stands up.Then, the first light of morning strikes it.

Didarabocchi slowly falls down on the lake. It flashes with a bright blue-white light, and disappears instantly.

As it disappears, a wind blows through. It blows out the fire at Tatara Ba, and blows off everything, such as buildings, trees, horses, and Samurais.

After the wind, plants start sprouting all over. The earth burned by Didarabocchi is now covered entirely with green.

“…the earth is covered in green...”

In Macbeth• The spreading forest image (caused by

Malcolm’s soldiers disguised as bushes) signals the return of the SUN’s importance to people

• The SUN can direct the movement of forests and plants

• Macbeth, totally out of touch with the sun, gets the riddle wrong (“who can impress the forest, bid the tree unfix his earth-bound root?”)

In both Mononoke Hime and Macbeth

• The spreading forest image is linked to the SUN

• The spreading forest image in Mononoke Hime represents the new and acknowledged power of the Shishigami.

• In Macbeth, this image represents the END of the power of Macbeth.

• Shakespeare guesses that coal will someday be depleted and distills this difficult transition back to a sun-based economy to an ingenious image, a child carrying a tree, as a solar-powered world moves back into human view and calculations.

• Macbeth’s denial and desperation toward the end of the play, (“Liar and slave!” (V.4.34) he shouts at a messenger bearing bad news; “Hang those that talk of fear” (V.iii.36), he orders) symbolize the strategy complex civilizations adopt as they come up against critical natural limits: they attempt, with more and more difficulty, to maintain the status quo. In his book The Collapse of Complex Societies, Joseph Tainter describes this process:

• Sociopolitical organizations constantly encounter problems that require increased investment merely to preserve the status quo. This investment comes in such forms as increasing size of bureaucracies, cumulative organizational solutions, increasing costs of legitimizing activities, and increasing costs of internal control and external defense. All of these must be borne by levying greater costs on the support population, often to no increased advantage. As the number and costliness of organizational investments increases, the proportion of a society’s budget available for investment in future economic growth must decline.

• Thus while initial investment by a society in growing complexity may be a rational solution to perceived needs, that happy state of affairs cannot last. As the least costly extractive, economic, information-processing, and organizational solutions are progressively exhausted, any further need for increased complexity must be met by more costly responses. As the cost of organizational solutions grows, the point is reached at which continued investment in complexity does not give a proportionate yield, and the marginal return begins to decline. The added benefits per unit of investment start to drop.

• A society that has reached this point cannot simply rest on its accomplishments, that is, attempt to maintain its marginal return at the status quo, without further deterioration……(eventually) declining marginal returns make complexity an overall less attractive strategy, so that parts of a society perceive increasing advantage to a policy of separation or disintegration….At some point along the declining portion of a marginal return curve, a society reaches a state where the benefits available for a level of investment are no higher than those available for some lower level. Complexity at such a point is decidedly disadvantageous, and the society is in serious danger of collapse from decomposition or external threat. (Tainter 195-6)

Images of THE SUN in Macbeth• “….ere set of sun” (the end of the

importance of the sun, as coal and fossil fuels took over)

• “never shall sun that morrow see…”(Duncan, the sun figure, is killed by ambitious Macbeth)

• “I ‘gin to grow weary of the sun” (Macbeth reaches his physical limits)

San= the Sun Economy• In Mononoke Hime, we are told (but do not see it since

it happened long ago) San was thrown away by her fleeing parents and raised by wolves; the sun economy is not valued and is just thrown away and sacrificed as people ‘save’ themselves.

• In Macbeth, it’s not so different: humankind moves away from the sun economy at the start of the play, when Macbeth kills Duncan. In the play, the basic cause is called “ambition” (allegorizing people striving; in a sense, saving themselves), when Macbeth describes his motivation for killing Duncan as his own “vaulting ambition” (I.vii.27).

• “San” （さん） is pronounced “SUN” in Japanese

“a communal form of experience..”• In his work in a public arena such as the

theater, Shakespeare strove to participate usefully in “a communal form of experience” that was also “a process of consciousness shared by the audience” (Weimann 215). Macbeth could have helped to explain, identify, and artistically locate some of the forces (natural, social, historical) that functioned, through human actions, to define and shape the London of the time, including the use of coal and the many consequences of burning it.

Also a communal form of experience…

• Mononoke Hime also participates in the same communal aims and strategies by allegorizing the problems of the modern economy in a safe way. Its use of scenes of deep nature and trees, clean skies, clean rivers unpolluted by plastic bags, places with no internal combustion engines, and so forth, help to give audiences a small 2-hour escape from the modern landscape and its endless cement and asphalt.

“values more durable than those which circulate in current markets”:

• In this rather economic view of Shakespeare, I believe I can find some support in Michael Bristol’s Big-Time Shakespeare, where the author sees the extended “social dialogue” with Shakespeare as a way to keep alive and preserve certain “values more durable than those which circulate in current markets”:

From Big-time Shakespeare• “Shakespeare is a common possession, though not

ambiguously a common good. In my view, Shakespeare’s authority is linked to the capacity of his works to represent the complexity of social time and value in the successor cultures of early modern England. One of the crucial features common to these successor cultures is the way individuals and institutions must constantly adapt to the exigencies of a market economy. Our extended dialogue with Shakespeare’s works has been one of the important ways to articulate values more durable than those which circulate in current markets.” (Bristol, xii)

“articulate values more durable than those which circulate in current

markets…”• The market economy (now also known the ‘global

economy’) came about through the fossil fuels that cannot, by definition, be as “durable” as the sun, and there lies the source of an economic discontinuity, the crux of the issue. Macbeth’s rise and fall symbolizes the trajectory of human fossil fuel use, from zero to a peak and then back to zero (with the death of Macbeth).

• It is a thermodynamic phenomenon based fundamentally on material exigencies, a single wave of energy pulsing through the system.

• Miyazaki may also be using his art to circulate these “values which are more durable than those which circulate in current markets”. In fact, it is certain that this is what he is doing.

The End