You’ve spent three decades filing that particular scene under “intimate relations between consenting adults,” and now Hideaki Anno swears blind it was nothing more than deep-tissue therapy.
It is rather like discovering that your memory of the 1966 World Cup final actually involved a historic sporting triumph strictly choreographed tea dance: the footage remains identical, yet your absolute certainty has evaporated into thin air.
The Psychology of Misdirection
Evangelion conditioned you to expect psychological devastation around every corner. Consequently, when two exhausted adults share a private moment accompanied by cigarette smoke and heavy breathing, your brain performs instantaneous gap-filling.
You see intimacy because the surrounding context is traumatic.
Pattern recognition, however, is not the same as fact.
What the Performers Revealed
- Kotono Mitsuishi confesses that Anno’s “direction” consisted of three words: “please improvise.” That is not guidance; it is professional abandonment.
- Yuko Miyamura still requires a strong cuppa and a darkened room before she can confront her own animated disembowelment by the Spear of Longinus.
These actors bled into their microphones while the rest of us sat munching Monster Munch, projecting our own adult anxieties onto animated characters who were, apparently, simply suffering from muscular tension.
The Calculated Revision
Is Anno taking the mickey? Undoubtedly.
Yet there is a calculated shrewdness to his revisionism. By declaring innocence thirty years after the fact, he forces you to confront the baggage you dragged to the screen in 1995.
Evangelion was always a Rorschach test disguised as a robot show; Anno has merely revealed that the inkblot was never as filthy as you imagined.
How does that revision land on your thirty-year-old memory?
When a creator redraws the map this late in the game, what are you actually examining—the art itself or the artist’s regret?
And if it was truly just a massage, why exactly did the lighting department treat the scene like a Fassbinder film?
Leave a Comment