Akira and the Creative Power of Absence – Unsettling Futures - Issue #16
I was about 12 or 13 the first time I saw any clips of Akira, the Katsuhiro Otomo anime that would crack open the North American market and allow in the flood that would follow.
I wouldn't actually see the movie itself for five years. In between, there was a creative process, one based on a brief glimpse and long absence, that I think is common to a lot of people, but seldom spoken of.
When it comes to Akira, I remember the Siskel & Ebert review in particular, a 1991 video pick of the week by Ebert. The clips included a brief glimpse of motorcycles winding through glowing city streets, and one of the child psychics unleashing his powers in a panic after witnessing a bloody shooting by the Tokyo police.
There were a few other reviews or clips that turned up around the same time, but few of the brief items I saw in newspapers, magazines, or on TV, were interested in trying to unpack the plot or even naming the characters.
So while I was fascinated by the art style, the violence in a cartoon (anime was not a word in common use at all yet), and the sheer science fiction weirdness of it, I didn't know much about Akira for several years.
So my mind had to spin up some ideas of its own.
Those few minutes of footage were a strangely profound influence on me. Like an archaeologist with a few bits of broken pottery and some tarnished grave goods, I had to extrapolate a world from random pieces. I was, obviously, wrong about a lot of things, but the mood and the aesthetic had imprinted on me immediately. Grim, violent, urban, but also colourful and kinetic.
Okay, what else could I find that gave me the same feelings as Akira while I waited to get my hands on it? That drove me to seek out books and comics and movies that I wouldn't have looked for, otherwise.
Akira, when I finally saw in in 1996 (drifting on a codeine cloud after having all my wisdom teeth surgically removed; not recommended for ideal viewing) it did have a big impact on me. But I'm not sure which was more formative – the movie itself, or the period of creative ferment caused by the movie's absence.
Older nerds have, in recent years, generated a minor industry of snobbery and gatekeeping based on how hard it was to find the good, weird stuff back in the day.
You couldn't just stream or download anything you wanted! There wasn't Amazon and a hundred other online stores where you could buy the book, the DVD, the boxed set, the PDF, whatever. We had to walk to and from school in the snow, uphill both ways, etc., etc.
Patton Oswalt got into this with a fairly grumpy WIRED piece a few years back, bemoaning both the infinite discoverability of modern pop culture and its explosive dominance of mainstream tastes.
"There are no more hidden thought-palaces," Oswalt wrote. "They're easily accessed websites, or Facebook pages with thousands of fans."
To which I say – good.
"It was tough for me when I was young, so it should be tough for kids now" is more than a little bullshit.
For a kid from a pretty white bread outer suburb, the era from the late 1980s through to the early 2000s was like a nova of access. Even before the internet went mainstream, video stores suddenly had dedicated anime shelves. The library started carrying graphic novels and comic book collections thanks to the prestige of Maus, Watchmen, and Sandman. The dinky little chain bookstores that had dominated the retail landscape were replaced by massive big boxes, where the science fiction and fantasy section was as large as whole store had been before.
Even then, there were gaps between the glimpse of the thing and the ability to actually read or watch it.
Prisoners of Gravity piled together so many interviews with writers and artists that it would have been impossible to follow them all up immediately. That's where I got my first glimpses of Sandman, where I heard about books by authors ranging from George R.R. Martin to C.J. Cherryh. Of course I couldn't absorb it all at once, even the stuff I could find. Like those glimpses of Akira, bits and pieces of comics and novels were seeded into my brain, cross-polinating in unpredictable ways.
I don't know if this sort of creative fill-in-the-blanks process is important for anyone else, but it was huge for me. (The adult version is trying to remember if that weird movie/TV show/book you half-remember from childhood was real, or a fever dream, and letting that fertilize your creative brain.)
And I know that creativity born of lack of access is not dead, regardless of what Oswalt or anyone else thinks.
You want to read that book? Sorry, out of print. Want to shell out $150 to the only seller on Amazon? You want to watch that cult show? Good luck, it's on some obscure streaming service/scoured from YouTube/locked up in litigation for thirty years/the DVDs are out of stock. You want to see that movie? Sorry, the last known print went up in flames in 1965.
From John M. Ford's novels to the Macross anime franchise to Prisoners of Gravity itself, death, legal issues, and entropy are always going to make some pieces of art, including science fiction and fantasy and horror, hard or impossible to find.
A lot of definitions of nerd or otaku or geek focus on the cataloguing impulse, the drive to find and watch and know, to exhaustively list trivia. It's a limiting, reductive view of why people like what they like, even if it's true for some.
The flip side is the discovery that comes during the search. It's not grasping the grail, it's the idea of the grail in your mind after a brief glimpse that keeps the search going. The real thing may or may not measure up to what you imagined; but in the spark gap between sighting and capture, there's light and heat and power.