limbamurphy

I’ve been making my way NGE over the last year or so, and its premise and abstract nature have been so dazzling it has been hard to notice the references you’ve clearly stated, so thank you for that. It really is incredible to think that a great deal of art, in many ways, acts to soothe and fully understand the damage done by war and destruction. Anime is incredible in that sense, as when first encountering it (Dragon Ball Z when I was younger) I grew up thinking it was just an insane, detached fantasy world. As I watch more and more of it, I understand how deeply it is tied to the plight of Japan, and mankind in general.

The film almost takes place in a fantasy land, or as you put it, in Ford’s emerald-tinted imagining of Ireland. What really is imagined is a beautiful land through which a violent man can stride proudly and claim anything as his own.

For me, it showed me a great deal about the American hero. When the conflict is stripped away and the guns put down, that really all John Wayne was portraying was a brutish bully. O’Hara’s performance is very memorable, and is a testament to her acting abilities, but you’re right. The context of women’s treatment in Ireland causes any positive feelings about the film to shrivel into nothing.

I think another reason for the proliferation of dystopia in literature is the unachievable and drab prospect of a perfect world. If a world is perfect, there is not much of a story to be told (unless as you wrote, it is a journey toward a utopia only reached at the end). The only story one can really plot out in a utopia is one where a perfect world is revealed to not be so perfect. But this article did reinforce that quite funny idea that we only want to read about bad stuff. If it is good, we find it boring!