Railroads, Isolation, Love And Pop

Photo Credit: IFC Center

Abstraction, mess, railroads, and incoherence are the closest we have to understanding the life that we live in in the eyes of Evangelion director, Hideaki Anno. His 1998, live-action film, Love & Pop — a deeply introspective piece defined by a search for self — is perhaps one of the greatest abstractions of a society of loners that we have. In the space in between its space-time jumping visual storytelling and its contemplative narration, Anno leaves with us a bittersweet examination on our lives that still finds itself holding true 30 years and 7,000 miles away.

I found out about the IFC’s screenings of Love & Pop from a bartender that I bonded with over the Gregg Araki tattoo on my arm and Japanese Breakfast. He had seen the film earlier that week and recommended it to me. He bought me back a drink, I tipped him 10 dollars, and went on my way knowing that I likely wouldn’t be able to see the film or him anytime soon because of work. That Monday, coming off of a 12 hour long film set, I found the big, bold letters of the IFC’s sign towering over me at the West Fourth subway exit. Before I knew it, I found myself nestled in the seats of the IFC with bags under my eyes and all of my gear tucked safely underneath my legs.

This is the story of a girl who has no direction in life, who is alone despite the friends that she has, and who craves for some sense of worth in something that she doesn’t really have the money for. This is the world where material and transaction fulfill our connections and the empty spaces in our lives — where a girl and a bartender become closer with the implicit “help me with my money” underneath and where men pay teenage girls to go on dates with them, a practice known as “compensated dating” in Japan. Anno forces us to consider whether or not experiences are additional manifestations of that materialism. Life and Love & Pop are both cycles. There are consistently harrowing and tragic events happening that have become the normal for our main character, Hiromi, and her three best friends. The beauty of both of these things are the moments that are contained within them. In between repetition of lovers and let downs that Hiromi’s older friend, Chieko, finds are the moments between them where Hiromi and Chieko are able to open up to each other. In between the cycles of compensated dating are the moments where Hiromi is able to sit and look at the world and people around her. In the midst of Hiromi’s journey to get enough money to buy herself a ring that she views as giving her a sense of worth, Anno presents these beautiful things as natural. They are the few experiences in the film that are not driven by or involving money. The folly of compensated dating, aside from the obvious danger of it, is that you can not buy these experiences.

So why do people try?

It is within the nature of individuality that it makes us lonely. Especially for those who refuse to conform to society or are still unsure of their place within it. Love & Pop shows us a society that is comprised of the loners that feed off of each other. But Anno observes a unique difference in the experience of the young generation — especially teenage girls — and the older generation in their loneliness. The older generation is cynical. In their desperation and unwillingness to believe that they can connect with other people otherwise, they buy dates with schoolgirls. Many of the men that Hiromi comes across are too jaded by their own lives and experiences to believe that a woman could ever be nice to them. The younger generation, however, is apathetic. They enable the practice of compensated dating because they live in a world and film wherein sex has become meaningless. Even their own feelings about what they are really selling through the practice of compensated dating — their time – are indifferent in the face of money. Perhaps it’s more accurate to say that they are apathetic to their worth in a world that has conditioned them to find their value material.

This is a hard film for me to talk about. The outline of this review has stayed with me for almost two months now, initially just a messy sprawl in my scrapbook of disjointed thoughts and feelings on a page because I never quite knew how to connect the pieces together. It wasn’t until I saw this film for a second time that I began to realize how important Anno’s fixation on railroads in both this film and his other live-action feature, Shiki-Jitsu, are.

The next time I saw this film again, I was sitting underneath a bridge next to the Metro-North railroad tracks. As in the IFC theater, I was alone and I wasn’t alone. There was another man who quietly sat on the other side of the tracks. He didn’t talk to me, even as he watched me approach from a long walk down the Hudson River coastline and sit down, exhausted, on the rocks underneath the bridge. As I watched a train pass by, a sequence from the beginning of Love & Pop passed by my mind — one where we, the camera, travel on a railroad line through a series of locations and underneath the legs of our main characters for no apparent reason.

Love & Pop doesn’t present a clear answer to the problems that it depicts. It presents a world that is so contradictory that it renders finding a solution to it impossible. The solution then, is individual. It’s the railroad tracks that connect us to each other and remind us of how far away we are at the same time. It’s the gap between two people on opposite sides of the tracks and the bond they create when they find a way to reach out to each other anyways. Love & Pop is a cynical film — but one that emphatically calls out the need to find those beautiful moments and people within the cycles of our daily lives. It’s in the paths that we already have to reach each other with. Don’t float away. You just have to find your way there without buying a ticket.