Harmony

Harmony is a work of speculative fiction in the traditional mold, one that engages heavily with philosophy and social theory in developing the world of the text, and framing the events that occur within it. It presents itself as predictive, but really it's much more about the present than the future. Meanwhile, the theory its engaging with, elucidating and expanding upon is 30+ years old; namely, I suspect, the work of Michel Foucault (quoted by Miach at one point) and Gilles Deleuze, discussing discipline, surveillance and control.

I can understand why people don't like this film. It's exposition heavy, the setting is built up rather quickly through this condensed expository, world building detail, even the dialogue can be a bit dry and heavy-handed. These are problems Genocidal Organ suffers from, too. It's much too short to present everything the novel seems to contain, and it's full of examples of dialogue that sound a lot more noticeably stiff and unnatural when you're hearing it out loud than when you're reading it off the page. Also, I personally am not a big fan of the art and character designs, though I'm sure I differ with many there. In my view, the promotional art and posters don't give an impression of what the tone and world presented are going to be like at all. This is not just some saccharine-somber, diaphanous (b)romance between two elegant bijin. It is a rigorous, bleak cultural and socio-political critique, and at times it's shockingly violent.

The main thing I want to stress is if you approach anime like it doesn't mix with intellectual discourse, if you get mad at shows for "trying to be smart," please just put that ridiculous bias aside if you're going to watch this. In the first place, I don't get what's wrong with "trying to be smart." The theory this film is engaging with, most people probably would not hear about outside of a University setting. There's nothing good about that. Complicated, challenging ideas, especially social critiques, shouldn't be sequestered to these gated communities where no one can see them. Popular fiction by all means SHOULD engage with theory. Michel Foucault didn't spend his lifetime writing and lecturing just because he was "trying to be smart." He took his views and the world seriously. I think Itou takes his and Foucault's views, and the world, seriously, too. He's not quoting him and engaging with his ideas for credit or to pat himself on the back, but so you know who Foucault is if you didn't before, and perhaps see society with a new, clearer perspective. Itou just wants to try to illustrate his views and his concerns through a compelling story. Whether he succeeded at making something compelling or not is up for debate, obviously, but please don't scoff at this film just because it's "trying to be smart." It's not trying to make you feel stupid and it definitely isn't insincere.

Overall, I think this film is a bit more clear in terms of its intentions and vision than Genocidal Organ, but they're concerned with basically the same things and make use of similar tools. Dark research transforms harmless disciplines like linguistics and cognitive science into bastions of mind control techniques (though when you consider the impact media theory and psychoanalysis had on marketing, advertising, and psy-ops, this isn't exactly farfetched... It's just exaggerated a bit for effect). People have HUDs (Heads Up Display) implanted in their eyes. Bodies are controlled and tampered with "for their own good," a sort of totalitarian transhumanism.

The rest of the review will contain spoilers.

'These are the societies of control, which are in the process of replacing the disciplinary societies. “Control” is the name Burroughs proposes as a term for the new monster, one that Foucault recognizes as our immediate future. Paul Virilio also is continually analyzing the ultra-rapid forms of free-floating control that replaced the old disciplines operating in the time frame of a closed system. There is no need here to invoke the extraordinary pharmaceutical productions, the molecular engineering, the genetic manipulations, although these are slated to enter into the new process. There is no need to ask which is the toughest or most tolerable regime, for it’s within each of them that liberating and enslaving forces confront one another . . . There is no need to fear or hope, but only to look for new weapons.'

• Gilles Deleuze, Postscript on the Societies of Control (1990)

Miach is the figure at the heart of Harmony. When we're first introduced to her, we recognize that she (and Tuan, her lover and the protagonist) takes issue with the social order of civilization. Well, lots of people feel that way. People give up a bit of their individual freedom to benefit from civilization, but everyone has their own views, needs, desires, standards. Sometimes we're a little dissatisfied with how civilization is organized, and we think it could be a bit better. So far, so good!

The exemplar for civilization is Japan. Japan is run by "admedistrative bodies," now. It's a nation hinged on values of social obligation and compulsory wellbeing. Its citizens proudly chime about how they offer themselves as social resources for the benefit of others around them. Meanwhile, everything about citizens' bodies is monitored and protected with a substance called WatchMe. WatchMe keeps them healthy and sane, but it's administered before individuals are capable of consent, when they're children; and the tradeoff is their freedom and privacy. People are not ALLOWED to "get fat or die," Miach explains with her characteristic cool fury, echoing Kierkegaard's idea that despair is entangled with our inability to die. If we could die from despair, it wouldn't be so miserable. A server records and beams back directly into your field of vision your mental state, heart rate, bmi, temperature, medical advice, diet advice, and so on. Citizens of Japan are willful, enthusiastic participants in the panopticon that monitors them. But who monitors the people that monitor the public's information and wellbeing? Therein lies the trouble.

WatchMe's use becomes pervasive after a briefly described cataclysm puts the fear of God into the civilized world. For western viewers, this may immediately remind you of the Patriot Act's passing following 9/11 and the beginning of the "war on terror." Itou seems to hold the view that underlying every social contract is this transaction of freedom for security. When people are afraid, they view their security as a much more precious and precarious treasure than when they already feel safe. By that logic, fear can be sown and manipulated in order to barter with citizens, buying their privacy and freedom in exchange from protection from threats which may or may not exist. I don't know if Japan has had its own Patriot-Act/War on Terror, I'm not that knowledgeable about Japanese politics, but at the very least, it's clear that WatchMe is just an exaggerated, speculative riff on the sort of devilish exchange that can and does happen in contemporary society between citizens and their governing bodies.

The real life parallels don't end there. Think of the scandals that arose around social media platforms like Facebook and Tik Tok in the past couple years. That "enthusiastic participants in the panopticon" line is one I think I nicked from Byung-Chul Han, from either an interview or documentary about the Burnout Society on youtube. He was talking about our use of social media and services like Amazon. The internet is populated with massively profitable websites that mine our data and use it to shoot back curated content. Is this not reminiscent of how harmony (the protocol that supplants our will and decision-making processes via WatchMe) replaces consciousness in the film? Everything we consume is decided for us, and catered to us. Perhaps we are already living in Harmony, or in other words, unconscious and not really living. And simultaneously, we're happy to let people monitor what we're doing if it frees the innocuous daily tasks like socializing and buying products of the minimal conflict and strain they could sometimes present.

Little do we and Tuan know, Miach takes issue with Japan not just because it's a dystopian control society. She takes issue with it because she thinks she sees through the spectacle. Everyone in Japan is so fake, pretending to be happy with the social order they grow fat and lazy on (though not literally, thanks to WatchMe monitoring their diet and activity levels). They don't really care about one another more than they care about themselves. Human beings are savage. Miach knows because she is a war orphan and a survivor of military sex trafficking. She knows how savage human beings can be. The error in her reasoning though, which is perhaps distorted by her trauma, is that it's not really one or the other. Humans are not savage or civilized. These traits coexist. Civilization isn't phony just because people are monstrous at times. We are equally beholden to our impulses to love and cooperate, as we are to our impulses to destroy, to take, and jealously protect what's ours. The question is, can we channel our impulses productively, and recognize them for what they are?

That's where our control society comes into play. Foucault delineates how institutions like family, school, and the factory function as disciplinary and regulatory spaces, and connects a person's power in society to their access and control of knowledge. Deleuze revamps this picture. It's no longer about knowledge, it's about information; and we're not disciplined by outside forces, we're disciplined by the imagined/real presence of regulatory bodies watching us wherever we go. We seek therapy and medication to regulate our mental activity. We work from home and perpetually educate and train ourselves to remain up to date. We've already discussed phones and the internet. First the government tapped our phones to keep us safe from terrorist threats they invented, then private companies tapped our phones to keep our eyes locked on their ad-driven websites and buying products they invented.

In Harmony, the HUD is in your head, via a high-tech contact lens, connecting you to a governing body at all times (although Tuan, as an employee of the World Health Organization, can sometimes turn hers off). Ordinary citizens are locked out of access to information based on their social score, which seems tied to their behavior and profession. Tuan can switch the locks at a moment's notice, as when she blocks Miach's foster parents from accessing information about the WHO's investigation, just before she probes Miach's foster mom's memories. Tuan is an agent of control, who's using her exclusive access to information for her own private ends, and for no greater purpose than that. She might be the protagonist, but she's no hero, per se.

Miach's formative experiences draw attention to another problem that is a common thematic thread through both Harmony and Genocidal Organ: one country's peace depends on imperialist conflict and strife elsewhere. The meaning of this is twofold. Japan's peace is relative to horror elsewhere, i.e. the old notion that light is defined by the presence of darkness. Additionally, though, every developed country literally flourishes on the back of war profiteering, unethical outsourcing of labor, conquest of resources, and so on. I don't know that Itou believes this to be a universal, necessary truth, but it's certainly true right now. Liberal civilization depends on the suffering of others outside of our purview. This doesn't necessarily mean we have to give up, or destroy civilization, because it's all been one huge failure and sick lie. It just means that civilization has huge problems and must be reorganized.

A final, important point: We really don't know what Tuan would be like if she never met Miach. Tuan is hopelessly in love with and obsessed with Miach, and Miach becomes her conscience, her Big Other. She judges good, bad, right and wrong by asking herself what Miach would think. She never even knew the true motivation behind Miach's ontology until just before the climax of the film. What makes Miach a living, conscious person is her madness, and what makes her special and magnetic to Tuan is her madness, even while Tuan is unaware that what she's seeing is madness.

Miach's goal becomes to force the initiation of Harmony, which is this films version of the Human Instrumentality Project. One way to look at it though, is that she is eliminating her own madness. Miach's gambit, the casting off of her madness, is one she's ostensibly making in exchange for the free will underpinning the savage behavior that scarred her as a youth. Meanwhile, Tuan's first and final acts of madness are from the moment she disobeys WHO to the moment she disobeys Miach by murdering her, because she loves Miach too much to see her give herself up to the society of control. By then, it's too late. By the beginning of the film, it's too late, judging by the emotional markup text cascading along the face of the giant iPod.

I don't think Harmony is a film that provides answers. It is offering a bleak rendering of how things are, and perhaps how they might become. Critique is one of our weapons, the weapons Deleuze is talking about, but it's not enough to depend only on the critiques of others, like Foucault, Deleuze, or Project Itoh. I think this is something Itoh wants us to do. At the risk of madness, look hard at the world in our own way. Miach's fascination with printed books takes on a different significance when you acknowledge that Harmony was originally a novel. Yet she still burns them, and then Tuan shoots Miach.