Highschool of the Dead Exegesis #12: All Dead’s Attack

This week’s episode is how the world ends.

Anyone expecting a moment of reflection or erudition at the end of Highschool of the Dead to set the whole thing in context might be disappointed- as the heroes walk away into the sunset (or rise, it’s difficult to tell), we see a familiar epigraph: ‘This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but with a whimper’. The final lines of T.S Eliot’s The Hollow Men in case you weren’t paying attention at any point ever. (‘Hollow Men’ was also the title of the ending theme of the last episode).
We open on four ICBMs gliding silently through the sky. Three are intercepted by AEGIS anti-missile cruisers, one gets through- the cruiser assigned to shoot it down has been overrun by the Dead. This missile detonates in the sky above Japan, causing an EMP burst that fries every piece of electronic hardware in the land of the rising sun- Gundams fall lifelessly from the sky, Astro Boy lies dead, remote control vibrators in the underwear of women on trains fail to respond. The EMP also disable’s Shido’s bus, sending him crashing through the makeshift barrier and allowing a vast horde of Them to break through the Takagi Mansion’s defences.
Being the final episode in the series every character is given the chance to do what they do best- even Nurse Marikawa gets to do more than jiggle (she dials a phone, slowly- ‘This is one… that’s two…’). The Takagi family take centre stage though. Saya is the first to work out that the bright light in the sky and all electronics shorting out= EMP, and plans accordingly. Her parents lead the defence of their home with a charge directly into a mass of the undead, and though we don’t see them die on screen we can be fairly sure of their fate. This, we will see next season, becomes a running theme for the Highschoolers- everyone around them gets the death they deserve but they, like the Dead, just seem to keep on living in spite of everything.
Oh, look at that, turns out the Hollow Men reference had something to it after all.
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Highschool of the Dead Exegesis # 11: Dead Storm Rising

This week’s episode of Highschool of the Dead is about innocence and exception.

At the end of last week’s episode we saw that Mr. Shido had designs on the Takagi compound, as this week’s episode begins we take a MTV-Cribs style glimpse behind closed doors at the Shido-sensei love bus. To a soundtrack of bass guitar and heavy breathing Shido explains his doctrine, whereby the handful of freshmen he saved are pure, innocent souls who will redeem this fallen world. He comes across as Charlie Manson and David Bowie all at once, and fakes tears as he begs his fuck-addled followers to show him the way. Oh, and one of the freshmen has been thrown out of the bus for ‘talking back’ and is so desperate to get back into the bus (and into that girl from third period Biology) that he ignores the approaching zombies until it’s too late.
The episode is centred around the mildly signposted confrontation between Rei and Shido, which you might have noticed coming if you hadn’t been distracted by all the jiggling in earlier episodes.
You see, Shido, in addition to being an underachieving cult leader (having spectacularly failed to convert even a school nurse who often genuinely forgets to wear clothes) was once an underachieving teacher with mommy issues and a Senator father. Senator-daddy caused his mother’s suicide, but didn’t leave Shido bitter enough to refuse him a request: flunk the daughter of an ‘annoying’ police officer, one Rei Miyamoto. Her being left behind a grade caused her to be separated from Takashi, leading to the emo-storm that began the series. After Shido and his bus-load of followers arrive at the Takagi compound Rei attacks him with her bayonet, leading to the predictable tense stand off in which Mr. Takagi declares that Rei is free to decide whether to kill Shido or let him live, and Rei, again predictably, decides to let him go. Perhaps because she was going to end a human life for holding her back a grade.
This episode was both an exception (few zombies, only one notable instance of fan-service) and about exception, as defined by the Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt. For Schmitt, in a line of thought that borrows from both ancient Rome, Nietzschaen post-Christian morality and an anti-pragmatic, even Romantic, strain in German philosophy and politics, defines authority not as the enforcement of laws (which is the task of police) or their creation (which happens through courts) but as the ability to decide upon a state of exception in which the law need not be applied. This may be permanent and unlimited, as it is in a dictatorship, or limited in both scope and time- the current suspension of numerous national and international laws to fight ‘terrorism’ being the best example today.

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Highschool of the Dead Exegesis #10: The Dead House Rules

This week’s episode of Highschool of the Dead is about survival and anti-theism.

In case you forgot that you were watching a show that has sacrificed any semblance of plot or character at the altar of Boobulon, the imaginary breast god worshipped by series creators Daisuke and Shōji Satō, episode ten of Highschool of the Dead opens with a busty highschool girl being covered in oil by a well-stack airhead nurse. And that’s it: whereas previous pre-credit sequences have showed other angles on the zombie apocalypse today’s goes boobs, oil, rubbing, end.
The Highschoolers have sought refuge with Saya Takagi’s family, who own a heavily fortified mansion and have organized a small army of fellow refugees armed with Katana and water cannons (gun laws in Japan would make it difficult to acquire actual firearms). Out amongst the Dead the Highschoolers were ultra-efficient commando badasses who must have despatched hundreds of Them in the past few days, in the Takagi household they are treated like children by family patriarch Souichiro Takagi’s fascist lackeys. Yesterday Takashi was facing down thousands of bloodthirsty corpses with only a baseball bat, today he can’t even be trusted to lift a box. He faces a similar problem to Cpt. Willard in Apocalypse Now- he is stir crazy after only a day without action; he has so radically altered himself as the Subject of a Truth, a Zombie Apocalypse, that he cannot easily return to ordinary life. He may never have an ordinary life. In a genre obsessed with the mythical safe-haven (the Mall in Dawn of the Dead, the theme park in Zombieland) Takashi’s attitude is refreshingly honest about humanity’s addiction to conflict.
Saya, the group’s tactician, is acutely aware that things will never go back to how they were. She points out that the world they knew, with its electricity and running water, was maintained by tens of thousands of trained professionals who simply aren’t there any more, and the power plants and water treatment works will only be on auto-pilot for a short time. Saya’s (busty) mother says the same thing to Takashi, and reveals that their ultimate plan is to take buses out of the city and, presumably, start a new life in the countryside.
Presuming some kind of Long Emergency type scenario is forthcoming this will be an increasingly common scene as this century progresses- but as every peak-oil theorist points out a global population of eight billion or more cannot be sustained without petrochemical-based agriculture and infrastructure. Humanity is going to be forced through a pretty harsh population bottleneck and not everybody is going to make it. There is plenty of information out there on likely survival strategies but, as humanity knows from experience, not everybody acts in their own best interest. The question facing humanity right now is the tagline from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: ‘Who will survive and what will be left of them?’
As always, Highschool of the Dead has the answers.
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Highschool of the Dead Exegesis #9: Sword and the Dead

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This week’s episode of Highschool of the Dead is about sadism and anal.
Looking hard for meaning in the morass of gun-wank and fanservice that is Highschool of the Dead has caused me to miss something quite obvious: one of the character’s names is a cheap, obvious pun. This isn’t uncommon in anime- every character in Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei has a name that is a complex, multi-level reference to their personality, often incorporating the fact that Japanese words have different meanings when read from right to left instead of top to bottom. This time the pun is in English: Saeko Busujima is violent, manipulative (often sexually), emotionally shallow and prone to throwing herself into dangerous situations purely to relieve her boredom. She’s a psychopath in other words. Saeko, Psycho.
Episode nine, Sword and the Dead, is her episode, and she get’s wet.
In episode eight she and Takashi were separated from the rest of the group in the most unnecessary and gratuitous fight scene ever committed to animation. Together they are trying to reach Saya Takagi’s fortified mansion, though they are desperately outnumbered and the noise from Takashi’s shotgun attracts more of Them than it can possibly despatch. They reach a motorcycle store, completely ignore the fact that motorcycle leathers would be the best type of body-armour a person could possibly wear in the event of a zombie apocalypse, and secure for themselves a six-wheeled ATV which, much like a Humm-vee apparently, can travel across open water. The latter fact conveniently allows Saeko to be soaked with water. Transparency ensues. Saeko is under the fanservice-hungry audience’s grubby glare more often than all-purpose moe-blob Rei or hyper-developed Id-driven medic Ms. Marikawa. Oddly in a genre that sexualizes childlike women (if not children themselves) she is the most mature of the female characters- she is a women and is referred to and refers to herself as such.
And she’s a psychopath, medically speaking.
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Highschool of the Dead Exegesis #8: The Dead Way Home

This week’s episode of Highschool of the Dead is about technology and narrative.

This week’s pre-credit sequence is a doozy. Rather than pick up from where we left of- the Highschoolers and their new addition Alice fording a river in their Humm-vee- we are taken aboard Air Force One. The President and Vice President have been bitten, the first lady is advocating battling childhood obesity with the three Bs: brains…brains…brains…. The Veep would like the roughly-Bushian Potus to nuke everything. Literally everything: a map shows that there wouldnt be an inch of earth that isn’t under a mushroom cloud if the Potus enacts the ‘Triple Six Delta’ plan, since, according to the Veep, they ‘need to attack those countries that could use ICBMs against the United States’. Let’s think about that. In the event of a mass zombie outbreak how likely is it that the governments of Russia and China would randomly and arbitrarily atom-bomb the United States? What would they have to gain from this? Don’t they have better things to do?
Let’s call this Inexplicable Lapse in in Logic of the Dead #1.
One of the joys of Highschool of the Dead is how nakedly and shamelessly the writers manipulate their audience, frequently casting aside emotional realism and basic common sense to provide an usually fairly cheap piece of melodrama, action or fanservice. Daisuke and Shōji Satō seem to write up a list of cool things and spend the briefest time actually justifying them in terms of the plot. It just so happens that a brain-dead school nurse lives with a crack special forces commando who just so happens to have a cache of weapons and ammo in her house and it just so happens that the female characters are barely dressed at the exact moment that they need to fight zombies. Take this week’s episode for instance- it just so happens that they bought a stash of clothes with them in the back of the humm-vee, so the girls change while the boys talk about guns, more or less a repeat of a bath-tub/gun-locker scene from two episodes ago. It just so happens that Rika Minami has a number of highschool girl uniforms in her closet. Of course she does.
This isn’t even subtle enough to count as manipulation. There’s no wink or nudge here, just a steaming plate of What Audiences Expect. There is nothing postmodern or condescending about it, since it is clear that the Sato siblings like it every bit as much as their viewers.
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Highschool of the Dead Exegesis #7: Dead Night and the Dead Ruck

This episode of Highschool of the Dead is about manliness and Self-overcoming.
Often a show will seriously shake up the status quo- Don and Betty getting divorced on Mad Men, the fleet settling on New Caprica on Battlestar Galactica, Buffy dying on Buffy. When a show primarily involves the characters moving to new locations and overcoming new obstacles on a weekly basis, as is the case with Highschool of the Dead, the status-quo shifts can be almost imperceptible. Except this week, when we learn that from now on the female characters will wear less clothes and the male characters will have more guns. This is a show that knows its audience.
When we last left them the highschoolers had holed up in a well-stocked safehouse and, though the streets were swarming with ‘Them’, they were safe. They could have conceivably waited out the zombie apocalypse whilst indulging in group bathing and nudity-induced nosebleeds. We’ll have to leave that scenario to the fan-fic writers though, because Takashi spots a little girl in trouble and decides to Be A Man.
Seven year old Alice Maresato and her father (her mother is presumably dead already) are escaping on foot. They find a house with its lights still on and try to get in- the occupants stab Alice’s father and leave her for (the) dead. They, we see, are an otherwise normal family, who apologize profusely in typical Japanese fashion before they have even drawn the knife out of Mr. Maresato’s chest and, as good Buddhists, recite the nianfo (‘Namu amida butsu’- a mantra from the Pure Land school) while they leave a seven year old to be eaten alive. Takashi sees this and, which Kohta providing sniper cover, rides his dirt bike into a mass of Them to the tune of some excruciating Japanese butt-rock.
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Highschool of the Dead Exegesis #6: In the Dead of the Night

Warning! This week’s Highschool of the Dead Exegesis is so NSFW that nobody who reads it will be able to stay in paid employment!

This week’s episode of Highschool of the Dead is about Fan Service and the Primal Scene. Or so you’d think.
I was prepared for this episode to be a lot more sleazy and exploitative that it turned out to be, though that’s a little like saying that The Exorcist was a lot less scary than I thought it’d be- I still screamed like a girl when the scary subliminal face turned up, just as I still checked that nobody was about to interrupt me through the first half of In the Dead of the Night.
Anime seasons often structure themselves around archetypal episodes. The recap episode, in which characters reminisce about their crazy adventures and the animators reuse the fight scenes they actually spent time and money on has already happened in episode four. In the ‘hot-springs episode’ the cast of an anime find themselves taking a well-deserved break in an onsen, a communal bathing area in a volcanic hot-spring. Since the highschoolers are city dwellers they hold their hot-springs episode in Rika Minami’s bathroom. There is inappropriate touching and other kinds of horseplay. Somewhere off camera Miyamoto and Marikawa get drunk.
This last point is perhaps the most significant- though they are both clearly inebriated we never see them drink, nor is the word ‘drunk’ ever used. We can see horrible violence (in one part of the episode a small child who has been bitten reanimates in her mother’s arms and tears her throat out, elsewhere there is police brutality and suicide) and gratuitous semi-nudity (the character’s modesty is protected by soap bubbles) but it cannot be stated outright that a 26 year old woman might want to drink alcohol after a stressful 48 hours.
As with videogames, the vast majority of anime has trouble presenting adult subject matter as adults experience it. The adult world is always viewed from a (young, male) teenage standpoint- drinking is illicit but comical, sex is always present though nobody seems to be having it, to make girls into lesbians just add water.
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Highschool of the Dead Exegesis #5: Streets of the Dead

This week’s episode of Highschool of the Dead was about Anomie and Satan.
We start off in media res- an airliner is taking off from a floating airport, similar to Tokyo Bay’s ‘Mega Float’. Before it can do so the runway must be cleared of obstructions- moaning, cannibal obstructions. On clean-up duty is Rika Minami the (fabulously busty- this is still HOTD) room-mate of the similarly stacked school nurse Shizuka Marikawa and ace anti-terrorist sniper. For Rika and her spotter the struggle against the living dead is a game of whack-a-mole with none of the urgency, potential for self-realization or orgasmic thrill of being on the streets. This is the weakness of the therapeutic, scientifically managed state- it’s just not sexy.
As in the last episode, Takashi and Rei are in the streets and Busujima, Saya, Kohta and Marikawa are in he bus with Mr. Shido, who’s a couple of Beatles songs short of the full Charlie Manson at this point. He, unlike the faceless autocrats Rika reports to, is directly engaging the libidos of his followers- as he makes extravagant speeches about unity while wildly gesticulating (remind you of anyone?) his followers go glassy eyed, blush and become insensate- they come, in other words.
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Highschool of the Dead Exegesis #4: Running In The Dead

This episode was about mass insanity and the lumpen-proletariat. Well, it’s mostly a recap episode showing scenes from episodes 1-3, narrated by Takashi in an incredibly pompous emo-register. Normally a clip show occurs mid-way through an anime series’ run, say at episode thirteen of a twenty-six episode season, but H.O.T.D’s animators have enough on their plates meticulously rendering firearms and imagining how 36FFF breasts would move if physics had been invented by fourteen year old boys.
In the fifteen minutes or so of new footage we catch up with Saya and Kohta on the schoolbus as they are stuck in traffic. Everybody who isn’t dead is leaving the city, the police are trying to maintain order but are being overwhelmed by increasing numbers of zombies and Mr. Shido is already using his authority as King of the Bus to hug freshman girls. Takashi and Rei are riding the motorcycle they found in the last episode through the city, they find a gun on a dead police officer and stop to get gas. While Takashi is finding cash for the self-service pump Rei is attacked by a partially unhinged thug (in true anime style he combines clothing from American street culture- doo-rag, gold chains- with stereotypically Asiatic features – relatively darker skin and smaller eyes whilst the good characters are essentially race-less- the four ostensibly Japanese women amongst the highschoolers have natural blonde, red, purple and pink hair.)

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Highschool of the Dead Exegesis #3: Democracy Under The Dead

Part of the ongoing Highschool of the Dead Exegesis.

This week’s episode of Highschool of the Dead is about Democracy, which, we are told, is the worst form of government except all other forms of government that have been tried. Given the chance many exceedingly ill-informed and unimaginative people will trot this quote out whenever the possibility that Western-style liberal capitalism may not be sustainable or permanent comes up. It’s one step up from ‘well if you like North Korea so much why don’t you go live there?’ Advocating anything else is either ‘totalitarian’, ‘utopian’ or, primarily, ‘unrealistic’. This is ideology at work, defining the parameters of what can be said and thought.
The third episode of Highschool of the Dead opens… with a shot of the female character’s panties. You really have to admire the cartoon steadicam operator who crawled on his hands and knees to get the precious upskirt shots that have defined the show’s singular, pathological cinematic vision. The Highschoolers are watching television news in a fit of Sartrean Bad Faith, desperate for someone to relieve them of their responsibility for their own well-being- the government, the police, the military. A newscaster is devoured live on air and the broadcast cuts to a well-ordered newsroom, where an only mildly panicked host informs the viewing public to stay in their homes, even though the US is considering nuking Manhattan and Beijing is on fire. Recall Iraqi information minister Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf during the fall of Baghdad- once the tide turns the absurd, hysterical nature of institutional authority is revealed. Fascist know-it-all Saya Takagi defends the dangerous media response- they don’t want to start a panic after all, since ‘fear leads to chaos (and) chaos leads to anarchy’ (in much the same way that self-justifying statements lead to tautology) and how is the government supposed to do it’s job with a big lot of anarchy all over the place? Despite Big Daddy Government’s forthcoming swift and effective response they still need to rely solely on themselves. Here Saya is embodying the contradiction at the heart of conservative thought: the state is God’s instrument on earth that must be deferred to in all things but each individual has a responsibility only to themselves. Hegelian nation-worship meets libertarian individualism and all kinds of wacky antics ensue.
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