Utena: Main

Welcome to my Utena pages.

Utena is one of those stories that tends to make people somewhat uncomfortable. Either that or it makes them squeal wildly and fly off into mad raptures of symbolic analysis. Both responses are quite understandable. Utena offers us an extremely, one might even say excessively, classic fairy tale story. Princes and princesses and duels with swords, battles between Good and Evil, and a setting of glass and marble strewn with roses. It's romance in capital letters and italics.

People who watch only the first arc may be forgiven for not realizing the strangeness of it, or not understanding if they do notice. Hence the complaints you can find in a some places, about the senseless repetition, in the duel scenes, and how annoying it is.

As the story goes on, though, the nature of the repetition changes, skews out of the parameters of the typical transformation sequence and becomes more deeply inflected with visuals that are clearly metaphors for something.

Whether the story is a metaphor for gender socialization, for growing up, for a disordered or traumatized mind, for religion, or, most likely, all of the above...

Well, that's where the mad raptures come in.

The pages on this site include Symbol Sets, which details the archetypes and symbols in the story, Repetitions, which deals specifically with the repeating imagery, Agency and Choice, which examines who has power and what power is in the world of Utena, and Variations, which compares the TV version with the movie and, to a lesser extent, with the manga.

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Links

Good Utena sites are hard to find. I have occasionally thought that this could be because Empty Movement has all the bases covered so well already.

If you want lyrics for the duel songs, Project Ein has them.

Utena: Symbol Sets

This show offers us a plethora of symbols and archetypes that can get downright overwhelming. Let's try to parse them out a bit.

Fairy Tales

One of the most consistent sets of archetypes, of course, are the Prince and Princess, which are title, costume and subject position in one. Utena meets a Prince and decides to be one herself; she seeks to be a Prince for Anthy, to protect and rescue her. Anthy plays the part of a Princess, flouncy dress and tiara and all, being fought over in duels. Akio encourages Utena to develop as a Prince, only to switch her to Princess so that he can render her passive and steal her active power, thus making it doubly clear to us exactly what positions are encoded by the distinct costumes of Prince and Princess we see Utena moving between. Another variable is added, however, when Akio tells us that Anthy is actually a Witch--the sister of a Prince, the one woman who can never be a Princess.

That, of course, suggests that the relationship of Prince and Princess comes packaged with romance and sexual connection, which is, theoretically, a different mode of relation that the familial one between siblings. And certainly the sibling pairs of this story, all of whom do seem to contain romance, usually in the form of the sister desiring her brother, are deeply troubled. Nanami and Kozue both want things that they only feel free to seek in very roundabout forms, becoming extremely possessive of their brothers but not quite daring to make direct romantic overtures. This suggests that they themselves consider their desire dangerous or wrong in some way.

Princes' sisters, then, cannot be Princesses, and thus do not have a place, do not have a role in the closed Prince-Princess set. They are not contained, and their desire for the Prince is not proper, as a Princess's would be, but a dangerous disruption of order. Note that desire, in and of itself, is not wrong in this system. The sister's desire itself is in no way different than that of a proper Princess; rather it is made wrong purely by circumstance, and by no fault of the sister. (Note also that all this works on the metaphorical rather than the literal level. Literally, a sister could be a princess for some other prince, who is not her brother. Metaphorically, there is only one Prince, one Princess and one sister, subject positions that any number of actual people may occupy. The sister is any woman who is outside the accepted economy of gender roles and relations.)

The fact that the sister's desire is coded as wrong, however, does not make it go away, and that reservoir of want remains. Denied a valid outlet, it turns into other things. In Kozue, ambition, a desire to possess power. In Nanami, passion directed at her brother in any form he will accept, and hatred directed at any woman who comes near him. Fortunately for Nanami, she evolves over time and escapes the sister/Witch's fate somewhat.

Anthy is the one who takes the final step and possesses her brother, never mind that it's forbidden. This turns her into a Princess, but, because she is still a sister, she takes on an incredible load of guilt (those swords, the anger of others) for having done so. Her Princess-ness winds up tainted by her transgression as a Witch and her Prince turns from good to evil, while her free, unassigned power as a sister/Witch is bound by her aspect as a Princess. And there our story opens.

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Knowledge of Good and Evil

This arrangement also has a layer of fairly explicitly Christian imagery. Akio calls himself the Morning Star, which is one of the various poetically derived names for Lucifer/Satan/the Devil. Since he is the evil/destructive part of Dios, he certainly qualifies as a fallen angel.

The tastiest part of this, for me, is that Saito might have really known her references. The Morning Star is a name for Lucifer because Lucifer, before falling, was the herald or forerunner of Christ (the rising sun). In this formulation, Utena is the most logical candidate for the role of Christ, and, indeed, she does sacrifice herself for Anthy, and possibly for Anthy's sin. As noted on the Agency and Choice page, though, that sacrifice is not what actually frees Anthy. Instead it is part and parcel of the Prince, which is as much of a trap as the Princess. Anything that comes only in opposing pairs, in this story, is a false lure.

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Ages of the World

The emphasis on dualisms has a counterweight, however. Some themes from Hindu cosmology¹ run through this story as well, emphasizing an imbalance and an empty third space in the narrative. Interestingly, Nanami is a primary carrier for the symbols that point in this direction. Her episode with the egg, which reflects Dios' egg-prison and the egg the duelists speak of breaking, her transformation into a cow, her persistent case of elephants during her trip to find the curry powder, all of them draw from the Hindu symbol set. In conjunction with the character design of Dios and Akio and Anthy, dark with bindi on their foreheads, this suggests yet another way of looking at the character archetypes.

We can look at Dios and Akio as aspects of the Trimurti, only missing their third, which seems to be a major plot point. The power to revolutionize, to turn that is, harks strongly to the whole concept of yugas, the wheel of ages each turn of which ends with the destruction of the world preparatory to the creation of another. Of course, if this is the cosmology Saitou is calling on, she has altered and recombined it in ways not covered by any current interpretation, but that is not at all uncommon in anime and manga. The aspects of the Trimurti are not usually associated with any of the four yugas, though Vishnu, in another aspect, is. In the world of Utena, however, these aspects do set a strong stamp on the different ages we see, depending on who is free to move and act in each one.

I take Dios as the Preserver (Vishnu) and Akio as the Destroyer (Shiva). Dios is the one who preserves a stable condition (for all girls to be princesses, to be protected from all trouble). Akio, the End of the World... well, what more do we really need to say? The Preserver's age ended when his sister sealed him away to save his life, sacrificing and suspending her own life by doing so. The Destroyer's age ends when Utena makes it through the gate and offers a new choice to Anthy. What is behind the Rose Gate, I would say, is the aspect of the Creator (Brahma)--the possibility of a new world.

This set of archetypes also marches well, iconographically at least, with the sexual theme of the story. As the story progressed I started out thinking of the sexuality as radiating from Akio, who, after all, appears to be sleeping with his fiancee, his fiancee's mother, his sister, and Utena, not to mention Touga and every duelist who confronts Utena, but eventually I saw all of it as ultimately coming from Anthy. That, I think, is the witch aspect, what Kozue calls impure, the opposite of a proper princess. It's filtered through the age of the Destroyer, though, which is what I think makes it such a tangled thing, always doubled back on itself, claustrophobic, hurtful. The three sibling pairs, Juri and Shiori, definitely Saionji and Anthy, Saionji and Touga, Kagami and Mamiya, they all have relationships of desire that result in pain and death and stasis. This is a fairly classic way for Hindu philosophies to interpret lust, one of the hallmarks of the Kali Yuga, the last age before destruction. There is also that rather disturbing shot of Anthy riding in the car with Akio, when her responses look and sound like sexual pleasure, and then Akio asks if she's in pain and we see a flash of the swords. Sex and pain are completely elided at that point, and it made me wonder if they weren't elided all along. Again, we see how tangled everything becomes around a witch-who-is-a-princess.

We also see the very unfortunate ways in which the Preserver and the Destroyer are elided. Stability and death, in this story, are the same thing. Preservation does not nurture, and destruction does not clear the way for anything, as they should do. Rather, in the ultimate oneness of Dios and Akio, we see preservation that smothers and destruction that feeds on itself and never ends.

Anthy herself represents, I think, not so much power or even a particular archetype as a chance, an opportunity to turn the ages. She is the occasion of agency, but doesn't have any of her own except at the very beginning, when she chooses to end the Preserver's age and take on the hatred that action engenders, and at the very end, when she reaches out to Utena, making a new choice and ending the Destroyer's age also.

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1. It is worth pointing out that "Hindu" is a catch-all phrase that can encompass a vast array of Gods, legends and philosophies, some of them very contradictory, just as "Christian" encompasses both Catholic and Pentecostal, despite significant differences in philosophy and practice. Anyone interested in more detail on the gods and concepts noted here would do well to read the work of scholars who deal with a specific aspect rather than trusting any source that attempts to lump them all into one.

Utena: Repetition

The cyclicality mentioned on the Symbol Sets page is also displayed in the repeating motifs of this show. Each arc has new ones, adding layers of meaning as we move along.

Infinite Reflections

The repeating motifs of the first arc are fairly simple, and introduce the basic symbols: roses, rings, swords, and the Revolution of the World. Anthy's association with roses starts here, with the greenhouse full of roses that she cares for and the roses she produces, apparently out of nowhere, to mark the duelists and their victory or defeat. The Apocalypse arc goes even further. While ascending to the arena, Anthy disappears and is replaced with a rosebush that grows to fill her clothes.

Starting with the Black Rose arc, things get more complex. The Black Rose arc is all about being frozen in time and/or regressing. The elevator descends deeper into one's true feelings, but progress is never made. Rather it is reversed--butterfly to chrysalis to caterpillar all the way to leaf. That, of course, gives us a reference point for the elevator up to the arena, in the next arc. That elevator is so chockablock with perspective-illusions that it's hard to avoid reading its ascent as yet another spatial illusion--which it and the arena and the castle do turn out to be.

The car, in the next arc gives us another type of motion, this time one that should be progressive. Yet the road seems to have no beginning or end, just appearing from nowhere between stationary appearances of The Car. And during the duels the car moves in a circle around and around the arena--another highlight to deceptive appearances, which is Akio (and Dios and Anthy) all over. Reaching the final duel depends on progressing, yet Ohtori Academy, and anyone who gets too involved with it, is frozen in time. The duelists who face Utena are frozen, often encouraged into that state by Akio. The car's association with him makes perfect sense: apparent motion without actual movement.

This besides, of course, the glaringly obvious car = sex part. The symbols surrounding Akio are heavily weighted toward sex-replacement or sex-projection, and strongly associated with glamour--which is, of course, yet another sort of illusion. The car and the camera shoots add to Akio's aura of living the high life, living in (and I use the phrase advisedly) the fast line.

I think there's also a certain amount of clue-bat involved. During his little seduction sequences, Akio offers to show his pigeons the End of the World. He then hops out of the driver's seat and let's the car run with no steering. The normal result of that would be a crash, which we get audio cues for, and which is, in fact, what happens to the losers of these duels. As for the camera...

Well, you know the old tale about how it's dangerous to have a picture taken because it will steal your soul, right?

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Swords

The swords are a fascinating progression of their own. They seem to embody not only power but agency itself. We start with normal, external swords; Black Rose moves to using the sword/soul/agency of another person, stolen; the Apocalypse arc progresses to using one's own sword/soul/agency, called forth in cooperation with someone else. Akio attempts, more or less, to steal Utena's agency after she has cooperatively called it out, which I expect is why he fails. He is Anthy's mirror image in some ways--outwardly powerful but unable to generate his own agency, while she is outwardly powerless but is, ultimately, the source of all agency in the story. He can never make it though the Gate, because he simply doesn't have the capacity--he can't change, he is, as Anthy says at the end, locked in his cozy coffin.

Swords are also, however, the mark of anger and vengeance, as we see at the end when the Thousand Swords come for Anthy.

And, to round things off, swords are the mark of Princes, of action, but also, inescapably, the mark of someone who is being tricked and manipulated by Akio.

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Circles

Circular imagery also abounds. The stair up to the dueling arena is a spiral. The car circles around and around the arena during the Apocalypse duels. At the end, we see Dios on a carousel.

Along with all the sequence-repetition associated with the duelists' preparations, this emphasizes very strongly the closed nature of the Ohtori Academy world.

Utena: Agency & Choice

Everyone involved in the duels is concerned with agency, the ability to act and cause things to move. The duelists are seeking it for themselves, and Akio intends to steal it from whoever achieves it. The Brides appear to have it in their gift, but not to use for themselves. It is not until the very end that we see, through Anthy, that agency must come from oneself and must remain with oneself, not alienated or sacrificed or stolen, in order to actually work.

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A Lady's Favor

The duels are a fascinating locus of choice and power. The danger of them is losing power and will, not losing life. Because, of course, while the duelists' desires, rather akin to a Witch's reservoir of free desire and will, are at stake in the duels, their lives most certainly are not. It is Anthy's life that they fight for, her right to have a life--a right that only Utena believes exists. No one else believes it's possible for the Rose Bride to have a life or desires, or, really, a soul of her own. Not even Anthy herself, who seems to believe she has paid with her soul for her one great, selfish act of desire.

This is made all the more ironic by the implication, increasingly forceful as time goes on, that it is the Bride's wishes that are made manifest in the duels. In the final arc, when other Brides appear, this becomes clearest. Ruka, for example, wishes Juri to be free of her obsession with Shiori. In Juri's duel, where Ruka stands as her Bride, Utena destroys, not Juri's rose, but her locket--the symbolic focus binding Juri to Shiori. In Miki's duel, where Kozue stands as his Bride, Miki finds himself bereft of any support, direction or power because Kozue seeks to touch Anthy's power for herself, directly. That was likely a duel doomed from the start, since Kozue, before the final Revolution, is incapable of focusing on anyone outside herself, or letting her wishes be carried out by another.

This suggests that when Utena takes on the power of Dios it is Anthy's wish and doing. And that suggests, in turn, that the place Anthy sealed Dios away, the place where no one else would be able to reach him, was inside her. And, having internalized the Prince, she had no choice but to become a Princess, and thus became obliged to giver her agency to someone else to act out. At least until she saw an option beyond pining vs. sacrifice or Witch vs. Princess.

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The One Who Turns

In the final analysis, it is not Utena who has the first and last choice, the overriding agency in this story. It is Anthy.

In order to break everyone out of the stasis she is the lynchpin to, Anthy has to move. At the end, Anthy has to reach out, has to make a choice and act on it. Has to act on her own behalf, and for her own desires. That is what frees her.

Neither Dios nor Akio have the right answer to get past the Rose Gate and/or save Anthy. Dios thinks Utena needs to be a Prince, and Akio thinks she needs to be a Princess, but neither of those things will open the door. Utena rejects being the passive Princess, and she admits at the end that she hasn't succeeded in being the Prince who saves the day either. What she hasn't seen yet, I think, is that she's done something far more profound. She opened the door and offered Anthy the choice of passing through it. Anthy takes the choice, and that is what frees her. If Utena had been a Princess, Anthy would still be the Witch, the target of the swords; if Utena had been a Prince, Anthy would only be a Princess and still wouldn't have any agency of her own. Instead they both find the third way and break out into a new age.

I don't think Utena understands that, quite, by the end of the TV series, though she may at the end of the movie. Anthy has freed herself, and that's why she is free--no one else could do it for her, that was the point. Dios was right that she needed someone she could trust and believe in. But that someone could not, by definition, be a Prince. A Prince is everywoman's property, that's the nature of Prince-ness; a Prince defends the helpless and innocent (ie Princesses) in general, not any one particular person. Anthy needed someone who wanted her for herself. Lo and behold: Utena. This, I think, is why the words that open the gate, when Utena finally reaches it, are "I was happy when I was with you". It wasn't the Prince's heart (the sword) that could be the key; it had to be Utena's heart--the person's heart.

Utena: Variations

Utena has four different versions: the TV series, Shoujo Kakumei Utena, the movie, Adolescence Mokushiroku , the manga, Shoujo Kakumei Utena, and the manga, Adolescence Mokushiroku . The different versions do not build on each other or carry on each other's plotlines, and the manga, which came after the anime, do not cleave very closely to the original. Instead, each variation retells the whole story in a different way.

With Butter

The movie is considerably more elusive, and allusive too, in its storytelling than the TV series. The uncovering of past events makes up most of the action, all bearing down on the present moment, which is merely a sketchy framework for most of the length of the movie. It isn't until the very end that much action takes place in the present.

One of the more curious aspects of this past-actions focus is that many characters seem to be dead. Anthy's condition is more problematic than the others, but the silhouette shown of her, when she and Utena are sketching each other, shows an empty space where her heart should be, and the video shown of her and Akio suggests that he may have been the one to cut it out. That same video, of course, shows him falling to his death. Touga, we learn after several there-and-then-gone appearances, drowned while saving a girl who had fallen into the water; rather than Dios, in this iteration it is Touga who seems to be Utena's exemplar of what a Prince should be.

The movie is also far more intensely and explicitly sexual than the TV series. One of the things that is clearer in the movie is that the sexuality starts with Anthy, and that Utena is the vehicle, literally, of Anthy's power and will, should she chose to use them.

This dovetails with the way in which several of the symbols the movie shares with the TV series have altered. The car, for instance, has become a genuine movement, a true mode of progress, and rather than being left driverless by Akio, it is driven by Anthy. The direction is hers while the motive force is Utena's, and this is sufficient for them to succeed. The driverless cars appear only as lesser incarnations of the worst-trapped characters such as Kozue and Shiori. The metaphor of the castle is also intensified. Rather then simply being an unreachable illusion, the castle is a tempting mirage that is supported and run by huge mechanical treads that seem to seek actively to destroy anyone attempting to escape. The brother who appears along with the castle is also altered; he looks like Akio, older and taller, but he wears the uniform and loose hair that mark Dios. Perhaps Dios does not exist in the movie world, and it is merely a guise. Perhaps, with Akio's death, the two are rejoined in this form. Perhaps this is simply emphasizing the fact that Dios is as much a dead end, in his own way, as Akio. What he is urging Anthy to do, after all, is remain in stasis, as if dead, which matches well with the notion of Dios as a perversion of the Preserver.

The most significant difference, of course, is that Anthy and Utena do escape together. And this suggests a possibility that was first pointed out to me by a friend, that it is possible to read the movie as a continuation of the TV series--as the next round in the spiral of repetition. If Utena did not understand Anthy's freedom, she may well have been trapped and Anthy returned to free her in turn, and both of them have to make the round of the story one more time to win all the way free. This would certainly fit with the stronger awareness and intentionality that Anthy shows in the movie. Anthy of the movie is no longer passive.

Another way to read these differences is that this is the Utena story as it would take place at a particular moment in time: adolescence, as the title indicates. This would also account for the more active and aggressive sexuality, and for the more marked and vivid metaphors.

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Domestic Trade

The manga, Shoujo Kakumei Utena, leaves me with the irresistible impression that Saito was sorry for Touga, and wanted to make it up to him. The TV series gives us Touga as a dupe, a would-be manipulator who is, himself, being used by Akio and who is discarded in the end. The movie makes him a dead Prince, which efficiently displays just how much of a dead-end Princeliness is in all of these stories. This manga, however, redeems him. He starts out attempting to manipulate and seduce Utena into the Princess role, but when she defeats him he experiences his own personal revolution. He comes to join Utena and Anthy in their isolated home and be Utena's domestic help.

More than that, he is the one who recalls her, when she succumbs to Akio's manipulations, and tells her that this (the Princess) is not what he admires and follows.

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Wounds

The manga Adolescence Mokushiroku follows the movie fairly closely, but the text makes it much clearer that the strange happenings, and the passion that motivates the duelists are all reflections of trauma. Touga drowns rescuing Utena and she denies the memory and tries to become him. Touga seeks power as a Prince and Duelist to protect himself from ever being victimized again. Anthy's sexuality as the Rose Bride directly repeats the way she shared her brother's desire for her. In fact, Akio states directly that the entire world of the academy is Anthy's creation, in an attempt to retrieve or preserve or replace her brother. The manga also makes is considerably clearer that half the cast is dead, and the fact that they are still walking around shocks Utena, allowing the audience to be surprised as well.

In short, the manga views its own content as strange, mysterious, perverse, which the movie doesn't.

As in all versions of the story, however, the roles of Prince and Princess are traps--living deaths that only repeat themselves, moving in a closed circle forever. Anthy is at the center of the world, but only in order to give her power to another. Utena could be the Prince at the center with her, but only by drowning herself in her idealized memories of the dead past. In this version, Anthy's power to begin and end the closed world is even more marked than usual, and it takes only a declaration from her to break free.

And in this manga, as in the other manga, Touga is the one who tells Utena what she needs to do to free herself.