“Angel's Egg” (pt. 3)

Alright, there's about twenty minutes left of this movie, so this should be the last part.


The floodwaters continue to rise. Across the city, there are either statues of men, or men holding as still as statues, that don't show any sign of awareness let alone reacting. Are these the same people who were fruitlessly trying to spear the umbral coelacanths before? Maybe, it's hard to tell. After a minute of this, we return to Boi watching over the sleeping Mindy, and this lasts for a substantially longer minute. I think I might be seeing a pattern here.

I mean it though, this goes on for a while. Even by Angel's Egg standards, this is feeling kind of excessive.

Like it's just a musical intermission meant so the old school movie theatre audience can get up and go to the bathroom. Some old movies used to have that. Trufax.

After fully two minutes and ten seconds of this, something finally happens. Namely, the fire burns itself out, and the room goes dark.

Can you guess what happens after that?

So yeah, early feature-length cinematic productions. Did you know that before colour photography, they had artists carefully hand-paint the film to add some to key places? This was one of those weird technical jobs that ended up being female dominated, for whatever combination of socioeconomic reasons.

Things start getting much more dramatic when Mindy rolls over in her sleep and faces the other direction.

The world's first-ever dedicated film school was the Gerasimov Institute of Cinematography. It was founded by Vladimir Lenin in 1919, as he saw film as a new, proletariat-accessible modern art form that could define the modern age.

Boi gets up and stands over Mindy again, and then waits a shockingly brief period of time before picking up the egg from under her blanket. She's evidently come to trust him enough that she doesn't have her body tightly coiled around it in her sleep in his presence.

He picks it up, cautiously, almost reverently, and turns it in his hands a few times. Then, with a sad, serious expression, he sets it down on the floor and raises his crucifix, maneuvering the end of the staff directly over the egg before bringing it down.

Shell shatters. Everything goes black.

Have we done it? Have we woken her up? The power of Christ's cross broke her free of this world of sin and illusion?

Looks like it. For the first time since the scene with the robotic tree and the egglike eyeball spaceship, sunlight glows through the windows of the ruined city.

Outside, the floodwaters continue to rise. The city is underwater now. Bubbles of air caught under the limbs and chins of the statues shake loose and flutter up toward the ever-rising surface.

Back in the ark, Mindy wakes up. Her face and hair are as pale as ever, but it seems like the colors of her clothing are much more vibrant than they were before. More *real.* So too do the colors of the room around her, if more subtly. She notices that her egg is gone, and then sees the shell fragments on the floor. She runs to it, dropping to her knees, frantically grabbing at the shattered egg. Amidst the fragments, she finds...nothing.

No fluid. No blood. No bits of feather. It's not that her egg was murdered. It's that it never had anything inside of it to begin with. It was always just an empty shell.

She stares, disbelieving, into the empty shell. Lips trembling. Then, she releases a truly heart-rending scream of anguish and despair, and collapses, crying uncontrollably, amidst the scattered bits of shell.

You know, I'm starting to develop a pattern of rating character voice acting by the quality of their tortured screams. I think this is a good gimmick for me to have. I will now formalize it.

Very nearly tied with Ichise losing his hand. That's pretty dang respectable.

Mindy runs back down the stairway lined with water flasks. There's some kind of root or vine growth covering the steps now which I don't believe was there before. When she makes it out of the structure, we see why that is. She doesn't notice it, but it would be pretty obvious to anyone who wasn't as preoccupied as her.

The transparent alien avian egg from the beginning has grown on an umbilical stalk from roots permeating the ark. It's creepy leitmotif returns along with it.

Hmm. Perhaps there WAS something in the egg after all. Something that has now been allowed to reach its next stage of development. Dang it grew fast.

As the spooky egg music plays over Mindy's own tragic gothic overture, she charges across the landscape after Boi's footprints until she spots his retreating back ahead of her. She runs after him, either to attack him in revenge, to demand an explanation, or to beg for comfort. Maybe all three at once. Unfortunately, in her haste to catch up with him, she misses the deep ravine that he somehow crossed over without having to adjust his trajectory at all.

With a final cymbal clash and wild flurry of violin notes, Mindy falls. In the water filling the bottom of the canyon deep below her, her reflection looms up. It looks a little off, though. Paler and more ghostly, like how Mindy herself looked up until this scene, only even more extreme than that, with an actual fluorescent glow. Additionally, her hair is longer, and her face looks both older and more serene.

When Boi was following Mindy in the early part of the movie, he saw glimpses of this other version of her peeking out through her flailing hair and billowing robe. This is what we were seeing part of, back then.

Mindy touches the water face first. For just a moment before the ripples and splash mar the surface, her lips are pressed perfectly against those of her angelic reflection. Time stops for a moment so we see her kissing her true, adult self. Then momentum resumes, the splash happens, and Mindy plunges deep into the water. Sinking like a stone even after the energy of the fall should have been balanced out.

She sinks deeper into the water, hair drifting around herself like pondweeds. The prophecy she had by the creek at the beginning coming true. Perhaps this is even the very same creek. In the end, holding onto the egg couldn't save her from the floodwater. It just gave her a false hope.

Her final breath escapes her body in a cloud of bubbles. Bubbles which then rise toward the surface in a bizarrely unified, deliberate, and seemingly self-propelled fashion. I was wondering if maybe the shadow fish were about to come back and start chasing them, but no, it's even weirder than that. The bubbles swell, brighten, and then by the time they reach the surface they're eggs.

Just a whole bunch of eggs, floating on the water. They drift on down the river until they're floating over the flooded city streets.

The clock's bell chimes again, but this time each stroke sounds like the cracking of an eggshell. Then, a new theme plays; an uplifting choir accomponied by the spooky key notes of the eggstalk, now in harmony, as the camera pans up to show a subsequent development.

Either breaking the egg caused these to start growing all across the land, or (more likely, going by the visual framing) each of the eggs created by Mindy's dying breath just eventually turns into another of these.

Also, it occurs to me that the image Boi described earlier when he saw the carving - a tree breaking the black landscape, draining life from it, and grasping at a bird - fits this scene much better than the spaceship/machinetower intro. Perhaps he, too, was having a premonition. I was thrown off a bit by him describing it as a tree GRASPING at a bird or egg. It really looks to be the opposite here, with the eggs having grown on those stalks, but that could just as easily be down to poor translation of his line earlier.

Boi, heedless of Mindy's fall to her death(?), walks to the seashore. The path that he followed Mindy along earlier is clearly marked with a trail of dove feathers, and there are many other trails alongside it. Putting the lie to her claim that she didn't fill all of those water bottles herself; she's been making that trip over and over again for who even knows how long. As Boi reaches the seashore, a wind comes in from the water and blows the feathers up in a great cloud. A bright light shines upon the sea. He watches it, silent, grim-faced.

The light becomes a full dawn (I guess that earlier shot of light coming in a window was just a preview or something), the water swells, and from it rises the ship.

The seawater falling off of the ship makes it look like its "eye' is crying. Not sure if intentional or not.

That wasn't another world. It was before the flood that covered most of this one.

As the ship rises, our attention is brought to one statue in particular on its exterior. It's not clear if this statue only just now appeared, or if it was there all along, but Mindy's eggs aren't the only thing immortalizing her.

The ship rises. Boi looks up and stoically watches it leave. It rises higher and higher, ourselves watching as if from the POV of its great eye. The seashore gets smaller and smaller below. The landmass they're on proves to be an island, and then a...huh.

Either a weird half-deflated seed pod in space, or a capsized ship floating on a black ocean. A capsized ark, with everyone and everything in it petrified to its hull? Or...to the UNDERSIDE of tis hull. For some reason. Maybe. I don't know.

That's the end of the movie.


Well, it obviously isn't the simple gnostic Christian allegory that I initially mistook it for. Granted, I'm pretty sure the movie WANTS you to make that mistake. It's all very heavyhanded and (mostly) consistent symbolism until about the two thirds point. After that, it almost seems to be trying to weaponize Christian symbolism against the core Christian beliefs. Or else just reframing the little girl as the devil keeping humanity locked in her egg-hell or something, but that doesn't feel right to me.

I usually try to at least attempt a death of the author analysis, but with this movie I just REALLY wasn't really sure what to make of it on my own. So, I did a little bit of googling, and learned two things about this movie's production that shed a lot more light on it.

1. Creator Mamoru Oshii is on record saying that he doesn't actually know what the message of the movie is. He took some aesthetic details he'd been working on for a couple of cancelled projects, and put them together with the sort of "vibe" that he was feeling at the time.
   

2. The vibe that he was feeling at the time revolved largely around a falling out with his native Christianity, and existential anxiety about coming to terms with atheism.

The overall narrative is still hard to get a coherent statement out of, but many of the individual pieces make much more sense knowing this.

The egg that will never hatch can represent unwarranted faith in general, but it's also very easy to connect it with Christian millenarianism in particular. Every generation for two millennia has had priests assuring their congregations that Jesus will return in their time. Any day now. Just keep having faith. Keep doing the rituals. Any day now.

The irony of the cross-bearing savior coming to destroy faith rather than reward it is somewhat amusing, but with how deeply ingrained Christian symbolism is throughout global society there's really no reason NOT to use it like this. It's not sin that the movie's cross-bearer comes to save the world from, but faith itself.

I still don't quite grock all the intricacies of the umbral coelacanth sequence (like "why coelacanths, of all fish?") but I do grock some of it. There's the empty egg that never hatches no matter how much you brood over it, and the real, fertilized eggs that can grow and develop as soon as you let go of the fake. Throughout the bible, fish are used as symbols of life and fertility, of plenty and providence, and as an evangelical totem with the New Testament's "fishers of men" mandate. Just like the girl brooding the empty egg, the fishermen are trying to get at the blessings and bounty that have been promised to them, but it doesn't work. The fact that they're also damaging their city in the process, and the tense, militant aesthetic of the fishermen overall, might be a nod to sectarian warfare.

If the movie has a "central" allegory, it's probably the ironic association of the Noahs Ark story with the problem of faith in a world that appears to be godless. In the story, Noah sent the dove out again and again until it finally returned with the olive branch. But what if the dove DIDN'T return? What if there never was any land, or - if there was - the dove just never saw any reason to come back from it? How long can you expect someone to keep sending doves and waiting for olive branches before they conclude that they're just yelling into the void? Most people don't get olive branches, no matter how patient and pious they are. How long is too long?

I'm not sure exactly what was up with the giant statue-covered eyeball virus ship. The way it seemed to add the girl and her egg to its collection of icons at the end could mean a lot of things. That she's become one of its victims, perhaps? That feels a little too petty and derisive for this movie's overall approach, though. Maybe it's that, in her faith and fall, she's been added to the milieu of religious narrative? A "goddess statue" of atheism? Like I said, I'm not sure about this part. The eye rising from the sea definitely feels like "awakening from a dream" symbolism, but its downcast stare and weeping could also suggest the eye of a God being rejected by the once-faithful. I don't think it could be both of those things, but it could be either of them. Or something else entirely.

Once interesting detail is that the christ-saviour figure didn't end up being a sacrifice in the end. The girl did. She had to die for new life to emerge. It also strikes me as interesting that the new life in question would have such sinister framing; the alien hideousness of the huge eggs on their stalks, with their musical lietmotif that's straight out of a scifi horror movie. I wonder if this might tie in to the "anxiety about embracing atheism" part of the creator's existential angst. The alternative to a faith-based worldview isn't pretty. It isn't comforting. It means accepting a world that isn't made for humanity, and where human sensibilities mean nothing beyond our own power to enact them. There's not a paradise awaiting; there's a capsized ship on an endless sea. The potential to make something better of it exists, but that "something better" isn't going to look like Heaven even in the best of possible worlds.

There's one line from the cross guy, about how he thinks that he, she, and the fish might be phantoms in the mind of a people who no longer exist. I'm not sure if that's referring to the mind of a person losing their faith, or a commentary about how far out of time and out of context many religious beliefs are. With the way that the New Testament is written, the most obvious reading is that the authors believed Christ would return in their own time, and that they had to prepare their own world for this in immediate terms. How different does the world look now from how it did then? Are we interpreting ANY of these old stories correctly, absent their original cultural provenance?

The big example of this that always comes to mind for me is the Adam and Eve story, or rather, how it's written in Genesis/B'reshit. The story never explains what the tree of knowledge and the tree of life ARE, exactly. They're so frankly alluded to - and then never mentioned again - that one gets the impression that the reader is expected to already know about them from other (presumably oral) traditions. The implications of this are that we might actually not know what the writers of that story intended to be taken from it at all. In fact, it's entirely possible that the original mythological context of Eden and the two trees was forgotten before the religion we know today as Judaism fully coalesced and bits of older belief systems got grandfathered into it. The people who built the first Temple of Jerusalem three thousand years ago might not have known what that story was originally supposed to mean.

I might be reading too much into that very short, cryptic statement of the cross-bearer's. This is just where my own mind went with it in light of the later googling.

The overall tone and genre of "Angel's Egg" is tragedy. The girl who represents faith might have needed to die in order for a new way of life to develop, but she isn't the villain. She's the victim. Of an uncaring world. Of false promises. Of herself. The movie is sort of a eulogy to her. The statue of her on the ship at the end, a memorial. And, I think that really captures the headspace that this movie seems to have been dredged from.

The state of losing faith. Not discarding faith, or rejecting faith on your own terms; those are much more comfortable roads to the same destination. Losing it, the way you'd lose a prized possession, or a loved one. It's something that life does TO you, and it's not pleasant.