No matter how gifted, you alone cannot change your shirt

I can’t help but notice that each succeeding Death Note medium, post-manga, is dedicated to blowing increasing amounts of warm, yellow sunshine up L’s ass.

Even the anime falls victim to this, though the anime’s work with L was so note-perfect that it’s a purely positive example.  I’m never sure that the manga writer knew what he had in this character — even though he obviously knew he had something – and the writers of the anime adaptation were the first to make L more than a wide-eyed quirk machine. But the later films and the novel, in turn, take that elaboration much too far. They actually end up exposing massive gaps in the character’s basic design, and they get confused about genre in a really unappealing way.

First of all, both of them make L the de facto protagonist, even given a relative lack of screentime — and this is ridiculous, because it effectively reverses the original writer’s clever decision to focus the story on Light rather than L. Telling the detective story from the killer’s perspective is not original to Death Note, but it’s still a good subversion. So is the subversion of distancing the reader/viewer from the quirky, Holmesian detective through the device of his enemy, rather than his sidekick.

It’s not a disaster to ignore this, provided you’re aware of why it was done. I don’t inherently see why you couldn’t do a great story about L alone. He could easily be dropped into a hundred genres. And I recognize that this is what the later writers were trying to do: the film creators tried to use him in an action flick, and then a melancholy horror movie; the novelist tried to plonk him into a ghoulish L.A. noir. In the process, they both displayed some level of genre-savviness and awareness of the challenges, the basic questions of character that they faced in uprooting such a person from his original storyline.

(In brief: who will be L’s foil, or can poignancy or plot be extracted from his lack of a foil? What does he want, even if the answer is “cake”? Why does he want it, even if the answer is “he’s hungry”? How can we take a classical Great Detective character and make him act like an action hero, or a noir dame, or a directionless youth, without sacrificing the essential traits of that character type — extreme brilliance and a horror of the social — without which he is almost nothing, unless further work is put into developing him?)

But they never really answer these questions, with the result that the film and novel are pornography. There’s nothing here but a popular character being put through all the usual motions and all the expected scenes, with special focus on depicting his greatness and/or kindness. Yes, all of this was gussied up with a couple of big twists, some more openly autism-inspired characterization points, moderately interesting narrative layers involving Mello — but essentially, these stories are about L saving runaway planes and hugging smaller detectives. Which is to say they were about Sherlock Holmes kicking cocaine and undergoing analysis with Sigmund Freud. It can be realized well, but it requires expert hands to humanize the Great Detective. Archetypes are strong, and writers are small.

(Disclaimer to the link: I haven’t read The Seven-Per-Cent Solution since I was a teenager, and do not know if it’s aged particularly well. I do remember it being pretty good, though.)

Like all one-character spinoffs, the film and book have a propagandistic, eulogizing flavor, a tendency to reduce everyone to physical type — much like the ways we represent historical politicians to children.

They’ll need a chart in here

I took a break from thinking to watch Death Note, which, on the face of it, is one of the most astonishingly misanthropic, hateful pieces of art imaginable. I’m not really talking about the fact that the main character is a murderous eugenicist with fantasies of godhood; the villain-hero is a storytelling device, a bit of a slow finger-breaking for the audience (“Do you empathize now? How about…now?”) — not a pulpit for the creators, and  I think we can all recognize that.

No, the shock comes from the series’ disgust with humanity. It is impossible in the world of Death Note to be both brilliant and entirely good, and as such the “good” characters are fairly ineffectual — while the brightest and most competent are deeply compromised extremists at best.  In sum, it’s one of those hell-series where you flip open the creators’ skulls and see nothing but dubious people doing things to dubious people; sympathy for these characters is possible, but empathy for any of them is slightly subversive. And I have an awful suspicion that the creators explicitly mean Ryuk — the observing demon with his frozen grin endlessly open for more “interest!” and “entertainment!” at the cost of the remotest moral investment — to represent the viewer.

Of course, there are pockets of optimism — within the series’ profound misanthropy, there lurk a few moments of kindness, fondness, genuine love between characters; a good deal of surprisingly lighthearted humor.  We are not meant to understand this as redeeming, of course.  Almost the opposite.  But there’s enough humanity that the viewer can empathize, and there are real rewards in that empathy.

For one, a series like this, which closely examines the minds of the major players in a massive historical turning point, offers a striking perspective on precisely why international history is so full of horrific tragedy, despite being largely made by well-intentioned geniuses.  That sounds like a cold reward, and so I should clarify that I primarily watch Death Note for the funny detective, but it’s true.

Of course, I didn’t see any of this at first, because the wish-fulfillment is too staggeringly appealing. True, like anything that appeals to everyone’s fetishes at once, parts of it can’t help but appear silly to nearly any viewer. It might be the extremely unsubtle media satire; it must be the presence of far too many detectives; it might be the pure organizational porn of headquarters and aliases and acronyms and charts and a helicopter (actually, sorry, two helicopters).

For me, the problem is generally with the anime’s disinterest in particularly considering the emotional ramifications of characters surveilling each other, or torturing each other, or being chained together, or whatever. I can buy most of the general grotesquerie, or a-ten-year-old-boy-wrote-this-erie — even the scene with the skyscraper and the ten million dollars, which has the additional excuse of actually being a prepubescent child’s idea onscreen. I just have a problem with the scenes in which the characters apply all of this spy-stuff to each other, while hanging out. That would have subtle personal consequences. Often we see them, but that only draws attention to the times when we don’t.

But despite all of these complaints, this is the first anime to really engage me for years; the first story to engage me for months. (I’ve had a bit of a dry spell.) The premise is cosmically brilliant, the execution perfect enough that its horrifying flaws really don’t come up on a first viewing. And then there’s L.

He do the police in different voices

If I were a few years younger, I would’ve cracked like an egg on my first encounter with L, because it turns out that every private fantasy I’ve ever had about myself, especially the ones I’ve actually tried to act upon, is a ripoff of this character.

Within reason, of course.  My quirks are not his. I wear different clothes every day. I’m not a curiously obvious Christ figure.  But I am a somewhat isolated, tic-ridden person.  And of course, that’s the dream — an isolated, tic-ridden person who is consistently listened to and understood to be a competent adult, who is allowed to pursue his single-minded aesthetic of anonymity and falling off of chairs — and who doesn’t even seem to notice that he’s received this consent, because he has more interesting things on his mind. Social permission is not his priority — neither getting it nor caring enough to defy it.  This is my very obvious fantasy. If it’s slightly childish on my part, it’s only because it’s so unrealized.

And it turns out I’m not alone, obviously, because L is the fan favorite.  Men throw themselves at him; women want to be him; androgynes copy his favorite refined sugars; animals snuggle his feet. This fact taps into something interesting and disturbing: this is a lot of people’s fantasy, apparently — some in one sense, some in another — and yet very few of us act on it in any meaningful way, even though all it implies is the most basic level of acceptance and self-acceptance.

Yes, I know:

Humans are so interesting!

Get out of my mind.

Anyway, Death Note is an outstanding diversion.  You should really watch it.  During the first part, you’ll enjoy watching displays of raw intelligence foaming from the mouths of the leads; by the time they reach the kind of intellectual deadlock which this situation would realistically demand, you’ll just be emotionally involved — even though there’s not much creator effort to make the series emotionally involving.  In fact, it’s a bit like watching 10 Spocks collide, only some of them are Mirror Universe Spocks, others are alternate-universe human Spocks, still others are little blond boys, and so forth.