AFTER SILENCE, PT.2
Exploring silence in the post-human worlds of Wall-E and Angel's Egg. Part 2 - Angel's Egg.
Read part 1 here.
All works of art whose presentation involves the passage of time must come to an end. The credits roll, the last note rings out, the inked pages suddenly turn white.1 The churned foam of silence closes back over. The static arts escape this fate, and have about them a kind of stately and stable melancholy – as of a well-preserved Grecian statue or a Raphael hung in the Louvre – the melancholy of immobilised immortality, awe-inspiringly still. But in the transient arts the melancholy of time’s passing itself is felt – the melancholy that underlies all human existence, our first and deepest sorrow.
There are artists who address this sorrow head-on, striving towards transcendence by making the substance of their work its subject. We already mentioned in Part 1 The Caretaker’s dementia-themed opus Everywhere at the End of Time. There is also Quartet for the End of Time, composed and performed by four musicians while captured in a WWII prisoner-of-war camp. There are William Basinski’s Disintegration Loops, which, similar to The Caretaker’s music, consist of decomposing tape reels. Basinski completed these recordings in Brooklyn as 9/11 happened, and the final pieces are paired with footage of the smoking New York City skyline filmed on that day from his rooftop, the sky gradually darkening with the onset of night as the loops continue to break apart.
Then there are films like Interstellar, in which astronauts experience the time dilation of a distant planet and have to reconcile with living many earth years in the space of several hours, or Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, where a man relives memories of a past relationship while they are being systematically erased from his mind, or Charlotte Wells’ recent directorial debut Aftersun,2 which situates us in the memory of a woman looking through old VHS footage of a childhood holiday with her 30-year-old father on the day that she herself turns 30.
Yet for all the artists who try to reconcile their devil’s bargain with time by calling the beast by its name, there are those who instead approach it in silence. These are the artists who consciously integrate silence into their work, who understand that silence is time’s redeemer.
Mamoru Oshii’s 1985 film Angel’s Egg is one of these artworks. An animated enigma by the creator of the better-known Ghost in the Shell, it is a film teeming with silence, and one whose ending only expands the dream which it ostensibly draws to a close. But before diving straight into this rather obscure movie, let’s first embark on a short whistle-stop tour, and dip our toes into the silences of some other works more universally considered to be “timeless”.
Our first exhibit is Moby Dick. Though its narrative does reach a prosaic halt, the great whale-endowed dream of a world that the novel casts us out upon seems fathomless. Melvillian visions of the sea multiply. The book is like a map which becomes in the mind of each reader a new territory, of which we ourselves are sighter and scribe – when will we ever again see the spouting of a whale or the frothing of a wave without some inheritance from Melville in our gaze? Without some memory, however buried, of:
‘…that one serene and moonlight night, when all the waves rolled by like scrolls of silver; and, by their soft, suffusing seethings, made what seemed a silvery silence, not a solitude: on such a silent night a silvery jet was seen far in advance of the white bubbles at the bow. Lit up by the moon, it looked celestial; seemed some plumed and glittering god uprising from the sea.’
A conjuring. A sibilant summoning of a ‘plumed and glittering god’. And something so deliberately invoked is not put away again easily. The language of Moby Dick inheres in its images, and vice versa. Its scattershot chapters are like vantages – of the mind or of the eye – briefly adopted, and once we find ourselves aloft in the masts of its sails there will always be some part of us there, enlisted in Captain Ahab’s crew, clambering up and down, craning and keening our necks to spy what we can of the endless ocean. Melville’s ocean, whose silences are as vast as its sightings are monumental.
Spirited Away is another artwork bemedalled with the acclaim of timelessness. I must admit I find it hard to recall its actual ending, despite having seen it several times, because before the ending arrives we are given a scene in which the illusion is planted, in my memory at least, of a never-ending moment. Surely by now one of the most beloved scenes in cinema, when Chihiro rides the train with her otherworldly companions the deep, silent space that opens up forces out the parts of the story that follow it from my recollection, because in one sense the story has ended, or ensured its never-ending, here. I don’t mean to disparage the film’s real conclusion, but it seems as if there are two tracks that open ahead of the train at this point, one which the film – being after all an object in time – is obliged to take, which leads towards its resolution and its end, and the other – which my imagination can’t help but embark upon – which continues on forever. A part of me is still on that train.
We have seen the train from a distance throughout the film, skating enchantingly across the surface of the water surrounding the bath-house that Chihiro’s adventure takes place in (just like water surrounds the boat in Moby Dick – water is a great artistic tool for the evocation of silence), and when we are finally invited on board to sit patiently with Chihiro as the sparse, watery scenery rushes by, the beauty of the film balloons in the space and silence that it has now been given to resonate. It’s a tableau of eternity – almost destined from the start to be reborn as a looping gif, to be made into a truly never-ending journey – and Miyazaki, being the subtle creator that he is, achieves this impression with characteristic deftness.
Through the images that accumulate in and around the train the suggestion of endlessness is planted – the fact that the other passengers are featureless ghosts and seem already outside of living time, the submerging of the train-tracks under the water to visually uproot the train from its moorings and render its directionality infinite, the close-up of Chihiro watching the world go by in the manner of those long-distance journeys in childhood when the destination seems so far away (and perhaps so literally unthinkable) that the journey itself is its own entire event.
This scene feels like what the film was building towards – it does to us viewers what was earlier done to Chihiro when she crossed into the spirit world. We have been spirited away ourselves. We have been given a space within the film in which to sit and dream to our heart’s content. The train scene is like a moving sigil, a piece of cinematic magic. As Melville summons a god of the sea with his words, Miyazaki stretches open the plane of time with his images. And on both of these enchanted waters silence abounds. The level horizon of the sea, untrammelled by protrusion – a flat waveform – promises nothing but sheer continuity itself. A visual silence that reflects, deepens and expands. Silence lends its share in the infinite to the works that honour it.
This short back-and-forth from an interview with the film critic Roger Ebert, which Miyazaki gave just after the release of Spirited Away in 2002, makes clear that the honouring of silence is a very deliberate part of his artistic practice:
‘I told Miyazaki I love the "gratuitous motion" in his films; instead of every movement being dictated by the story, sometimes people will just sit for a moment, or they will sigh, or look in a running stream, or do something extra, not to advance the story but only to give the sense of time and place and who they are.
"We have a word for that in Japanese," he said. "It's called ma. Emptiness. It's there intentionally."
Is that like the "pillow words" that separate phrases in Japanese poetry?
"I don't think it's like the pillow word." He clapped his hands three or four times. "The time in between my clapping is ma. If you just have non-stop action with no breathing space at all, it's just busyness. But if you take a moment, then the tension building in the film can grow into a wider dimension. If you just have constant tension at 80 degrees all the time you just get numb."’
In contrast to Roger Ebert’s comparison of ma to “pillow words”, does it not simply mirror the rhythm of the heart?
Even, and perhaps especially, in music we can find advocates of silence. Mark Hollis, the late frontman of the synth-pop turned art-rock band Talk Talk said:
‘The silence is above everything, I’d rather hear one note than I would two, and I would rather hear silence than I would hear one note.’
Talk Talk’s final album, Laughing Stock, is a collection of songs so closely woven with silence that even once its run-time is over it seems to persist as some slumbering potential, as if unheard patterns and melodies of the same musical body might yet emerge given the right silence on which they could be borne. Over the music Hollis sings half of the time as if afraid to scare the silence away, as if it was one of the strange colourful birds from the album’s cover come to alight on the spacious struts of his compositions. The other half of the time he sings as if suddenly raging against its oppressiveness. It’s as if he was engaged in a kind of peacock dance with silence itself – rising up to meet it, shying at its approach. Finding sounds that might lure it down from its perch, only to scare it away again. It’s a courtly and sometimes violent give-and-take. But since it was with silence that he was engaged, its presence can be felt even during the music’s loudest moments.
As we established in part 1, time, silence and memory are a trinity of human experience. If we were to transpose that trinity outside of our inner lives we might say that space takes the place of memory. Art that fosters silence expands time, widens space, and creates in our memory a vertical axis; a well of silence to which we can return, to drink from its pool and watch the clouds go by overhead like a vision of time’s passing from which we have temporarily detached ourselves. The serenity of ma. Reflection without action.
I have talked around Angel’s Egg for so long because it’s a film about which I feel I have everything and nothing to say. I don’t know where to begin. It never really comes down from that precarious peak of timelessness that is the Sisyphean goal of the artist. In talking about it I feel like Mark Hollis trying to sing to the bird of silence without causing it to flee. Art is precarious because it takes only one false step for its spell to be broken, and I want to respect the spell that Oshii casts.
The artist is a curator of moments, whether their medium is in sentences, moving images or brushstrokes, and in each moment they must carry the load of the previous, however superficially different scenes might be from one to the next.3 To persist with our metaphor of wells of silence, Oshii navigates through this film like someone carrying water to a series of wells, and we trail along, gazing down into their depths as he fills them.
The first time I watched Angel’s Egg, I convinced myself in the following days that it can’t have been as good as I remembered. Its resonance stayed with me but I couldn’t believe that I wasn’t deluding myself. It was months before I rewatched it, and my own doubt made the rewatch almost more miraculous. Oh my god, I realised – he really did pull it off. I haven’t doubted it since.
The film opens with an invitation into the darkness and the silence that Oshii will be working with. These are its base elements, and the opening scene gives us a glimpse at the starting colours as yet unblended on their palette. We see two white hands against a black backdrop. They move together as if in some arcane sign language, emblems of muteness. They are white but they are not pure white – greyed and sullied a little, though radiant. One of the hands drops away and the remaining one darkens to a dull yellow, as if suddenly cast in the shadow of something. Then it clenches into a fist with a sickly crunching sound, as if all of its bones were breaking.
The darkness behind the hands is enriched by their presence, just as the magnitude of the silence is established by the clarity with which we hear the sickening crunch. Oshii says to us right away: darkness, silence, but in order to say those things he has to break them. Otherwise we would have a blank and quiet screen, and be left to our own fathoming. But we are not – this is a silence and a darkness that has been mined and architected, and into which we are grotesquely invited by the clenching/beckoning hand.
But invited where? What register of reality can we expect to encounter? If the first scene tosses up these questions what immediately follows only asks them more urgently. We see a birdlike alien foetus sleeping inside of a translucent egg (is there anything more evocative of silence than the inside of an egg?) which is supported by a veinous tree-like structure growing from the ground. We focus in on its eye, twitching restlessly, and then fade to brilliant white light.
After this, we finally seem to land on the film’s stable plane of existence. So now do we know where we are? We see the unnamed male character standing against a sky which is the blood-orange colour of bright light looked at through closed eyelids. Are we then inside the dream of the birdlike foetus? Is the sky supposed to represent the membrane of its closed eye? Do these questions even matter? Maybe not – the images as they’re sequenced do inevitably have a cumulative effect, but not of a traditionally narrative sort. The opening pair of scenes feel to me like an artificial and an absolute beginning set side by side. First the theatrical artifice, however twisted its presentation, of the beckoning hand – an archetype of pretence, the visual equivalent of opening a story with ‘once upon a time’ – and then the image of this unidentifiable creature yet to be born, set against a grey, barren world which feels primordial in its simplicity and its monstrosity. It suggests time itself not yet begun, or about to begin.
And then the film begins over a third time, under the blood-orange sky. And a gigantic mechanical eye, whose bulk is made of metal statues, descends as the male character stands observing. I could spend this entire essay tracing the visual or thematic links from scene to scene (the closed, dreaming eye of the foetus with the open, metal eye coming down from the sky), but suffice it to say that Angel’s Egg strikes me as a work which, as Virginia Woolf said about her masterful novel The Waves, is written ‘to a rhythm and not to a plot.’ The connections from scene to scene are not necessarily to be found in a sense of narrative continuation. Oshii is attuned to the pulse of a deep and mysterious intuition.
Notwithstanding the harpoon-wielding ghosts of men hunting the shadows of giant fish and the seemingly unmanned (though mobile) military vehicles, the nameless man and a young girl are the only two characters in the film. The man carries a sort of weapon in the shape of a cross. The girl has in her guardianship a large white egg. They cross paths and wander together through the dark, gothic architecture of the film’s world. They speak to each other, though sparsely.
‘It is as though everything said here aloud in words had already happened in silence, for that is what gives the words their quality of sure certainty, intimacy and sublimity. As if in a dream the words imitate the movements that have already happened in the silence.’ – Max Picard, The World of Silence.
Both the man and the girl have hair as white as ash. They are ghostly, aged and ageless, dead, resurrected – symbols as well as beings who cannot be constrained by any single origin we might postulate. They are like Cormac McCarthy’s infamous Judge Holden in Blood Meridian,4 of whom he says:
‘Whatever his antecedents he was something wholly other than their sum, nor was there system by which to divide him back into his origins for he would not go. Whoever would seek out his history through what unravelling of loins and ledgerbooks must stand at last darkened and dumb at the shore of a void without terminus or origin and whatever science he might bring to bear upon the dusty primal matter blowing down out of the millennia will discover no trace of any ultimate atavistic egg by which to reckon his commencing.’
They exist at the end of the world, or even further than this. It is as mystifying to ask where they come from as it is to ask where they are now (though some light, however obscure, will eventually be shed on the latter). Their origins are another silence. This is a world dreamed behind the sealed mouth of a gothic sphinx – even its riddles are unclear.
So when we see our characters act we can’t presume to know down to the bottom the directives of their deeds. Why the girl, for example, fills glass jars with water every day and arranges them along the walls of the vast and mysterious building in which she seems to live. Or why the man in the end destroys the girl’s egg while she is asleep. But if we are to attempt to piece together some origin story for them, our best hope is in the man’s words. When the girl shows him an engraving of a strange tree against a stone wall, he refers back to that first strange tree we saw, holding up the egg with the foetus inside:
‘“I’ve seen a tree like this somewhere. Where was it? So long ago that I’ve forgotten. Somewhere under a sky where the clouds made sounds as they moved. The black horizon swelled and from it grew a huge tree. It sucked the life from the ground. And its pulsing branches reached up, as if to grasp something. The giant bird sleeping within an egg.”
“What happened to the bird? Where is it?”
“It’s still there now, still dreaming.”’
The way that he recalls the tree is like something seen in a vision, the way that someone might claim, whether by means of psychedelics or deep meditation, that they have seen outside of the dream in which they are bound. As if he has looked upon the sleeping face of his god; his container. Perhaps this is what is symbolised by the cross that he bears – the knowledge of the limits of his world. The knowledge that his god is sleeping, that he himself is a denizen of a great, godly silence, that whenever he opens his mouth he betrays the image of his god.
The more closely the film is analysed the more it wriggles free of any singular interpretation. But in the context of our main focus, the vision of the giant bird sleeping in its egg brings to my mind this passage from The World of Silence:
‘Still like some old, forgotten animal from the beginning of time, silence towers over the puny world of noise; but as a living animal, not an extinct species, it lies in wait, and we can still see its broad back sinking ever deeper among the briers and bushes of the world of noise. It is as though this prehistoric creature were gradually sinking into the depths of its own silence. And yet sometimes all the noise of the world today seems like the mere buzzing of insects on the broad back of silence.’
What would it mean for the beast of silence to sink into its own silence? Would it dream a world like the one in Angel’s Egg? Is this film the dream of a primordially silent life-form haunted by life and noise? Is it a dream of a dying world wanting to be allowed to die in peace? (Or, in this case, to be born in peace – which might result in the same terminal fate for the world of its dream).
Just as we ourselves might find the terror of a nightmare exacerbated by an all-pervading silence, would the spirit of silence – the firstborn of the basic phenomena – be equally in terror of the war machines that loudly parade the grounds of its dreams, the cries of the ghostly fishermen on the hunt, even the quiet, contemplative man and girl, made uncanny by their voices because of how much they seem to belong to the silence itself?
Within a world like this, noise would be anathema. Not the obtaining of knowledge, but the breaking of silence would be the crack through which its original sin would seep. It would be a ponderous world with a guilty countenance, like some demiurgic dream-satellite creeping around the house of its god’s slumber, but unable to help sending objects tumbling and crashing as it went. Every sound a sin, as in the world Max Picard talks about when discussing the proliferation of words sent forth without their silences:
‘Words that merely come from other words are hard and aggressive. Such words are also lonely, and a great part of the melancholy in the world today is due to the fact that man has made words lonely by separating them from silence. This repudiation of silence is a factor of human guilt, and the melancholy in the world is the outward expression of that guilt.’
So, fittingly for a world whose ideal condition is silence, Oshii’s world exists under the aspect of stone, as our earth does under the aspect of nature as we know it (ours being more multifaceted than this petrified vision). We need not ask who built the gothic city Angel’s Egg takes place in – it is a fundamentally architectural world. As for us mountains and forests form, here cavernous buildings, stairways and fountains arise. The building through which the girl leads the man when she is taking him to the fossilised remains of a giant bird (the remains of his once-living vision?) has struts and supports of stone whose joints resemble the joints of bones. One passage along which they walk is neatly enclosed by the overhanging of a huge ribcage, either familial to or part of the very same creature embedded into the wall a little further on, under whose imposing span they sit to rest. It is almost as if the world grew from the bones of this creature, as fungus might grow on a decomposing body. It mirrors not the vitality of life but the rigidity of dead bone, as if whatever life force caused this world to sprout arrived at its source only in time to imitate dead forms. It is a world fitting of the philosophy of Philipp Mainländer, whose metaphysical premise was that the life of our universe is essentially the rotting body of God, a God who once existed in a condition of unity but is now decomposing into foul proliferation on its course to eventual disappearance.
But rather than any explicit alignment with such a philosophy, the one extended monologue that we get in this film reveals that the central anchor of its vision is in fact the biblical story of Noah’s Ark. It comes when the man and the girl are sitting beneath the gigantic avian fossil embedded in the wall listening to the rain outside, and, like one compelled by silence, the man suddenly starts to speak:
‘“I will wipe from the earth man whom I have created, man and beast, crawling creature and bird of the air as well, for I regret that I made them. I will send rain on the earth for forty days and forty nights, and I will wipe from the ground every living thing I have made.” And after seven days the waters of the flood came upon the earth. On that very day all the fountains of the great deep burst forth, and the floodgates of the heavens were opened. And rain fell on the earth for forty days and forty nights. But the ark floated on the surface of the waters. All flesh that moved on the earth died… birds, cattle, wild animals, all creatures that creep on the earth, and all men. Only Noah and those with him in the ark were left. Then he sent a dove to see if the waters had abated from the surface of the ground. Then he waited another seven days, and again sent forth the dove from the ark, but she did not return to him any more.
Where did the bird land? Or maybe it was weakened and swallowed by the waters. No one could know. So the people waited for her return, waited and grew tired of waiting. They forgot they had released the bird; forgot there was a bird. They even forgot there was a world sunken under water. They forgot where they were from; how long they travelled; and where they were going. It was so long ago that the animals have turned to stone.
The bird I saw, I can’t even remember where or when, it was so long ago. Perhaps it was a dream. Maybe you and I and the fish exist only in the memory of a person who is gone. Maybe no one really exists and it is only raining outside. Maybe the bird never existed at all.’
And so we see at last where we are – a world in which the dove sent out from the ark does not return, in which the flood does not subside. Or in a dream of that world. Or in a dream of a dream of it. Maybe this world, so long past ended, has now simply become a parade ground of dreams, dreaming its ghosts back alive. And maybe this state of existence – a dead world dreaming life – is the only viable way for such a world to ensure its own continuance without inviting encroachment upon its sacred state of silence. It needed life to exist once so that it could dream of it, in terror and safety, over the waters of the deluge beneath which it was buried. The will-to-death and the will-to-life finding harmony in a theatre of ghosts, whose stage – as is revealed to us in the gradual ascension of the film’s final shot – is the upturned ark itself. This is the one remaining site of land on which the ghostly city is erected. Alone in the vast silence of the sea, like Captain Ahab’s ship, or Chihiro’s train.
And at the film’s end the man stands alone at the shore of the sea. He has broken the egg, and the girl has fallen into a hole chasing after him. It is not quite right to say that she has died (or that she had lived), instead we are shown her falling towards a ghost-white vision of her older self. When they collide, she disappears, and the older one sends up from the deep water she resides in a spray of bubbles, which breach the surface each as a brand new egg. Then we cut to the same landscape we saw at the beginning, in which the dreaming bird was contained in its egg atop the tree. Now there are multiple trees, each with their dreamers inside of their eggs, as if all of the eggs that emerged from the bubbles of the woman’s breath have their corresponding analogues here, on some separate dream plane. Maybe whatever has been achieved in the proliferation of the eggs is not the assurance of new life, but the promise of new dreams.
We cut back to the man standing on the shore. There are white feathers at his feet, as if he has reached some communion with his avian god – the god whose remains he may have already seen, but is he not himself a ghost? Perhaps this facsimile of life continues one rung below the living, a dead god and his dead Adam, each assuring by the fulfilment of some arcane plan that the other does not disappear.
A wind comes from out of the sea, sending the white feathers swirling up, and the great metallic eye that we saw at the beginning of the film rises from the water. The girl has now become one of the statues that makes up its body, albeit occupying a privileged position apart from the others, like an icon of the Virgin Mary. She is depicted sitting on a kind of throne with the egg in her lap – the surrogate mother of a life that never was. Or perhaps no surrogate at all, and perhaps there was no life at all, actual or potential, in herself or the egg. A mother only of dreams, herself nothing but a dream, now gone back to silence. But let’s not forget that if Oshii is stationing us on some plane below or beyond that of the living, the substance of a dream may be more actual than we would ordinarily account for.
The man watches the eye as it emerges from the sea and continues on into the sky. It would be easy to interpret the eye as God, and that might be one of any number of fruitful interpretations, but we have already been working with the premise of the bird god. Instead I prefer to interpret the eye as heaven. After all, why in this world would heaven not be some visible, steam-powered megalith who in collecting its new arrivals descends from the sky, or arises from the sea (we have now seen it do both)? Petrification is that which life tends towards in this world, as opposed to decomposition and dissolution in ours. Our earthly conception of heaven is therefore ethereal, but a metallic heaven is more consistent with the logic of a stone world – elementally speaking, this would be its higher reality. Though heaven may be too narrow a metaphor to strike – we have seen it both ascend and descend, so it could be just as much hell as heaven. Or it could be that it makes the journey from below to above continuously, incorporating hell, heaven and all points between in its transit. And just as it cycles, the time of the world of the ark could well be cyclical too. A recurring dream.
As the eye continues to rise we switch to its perspective, watching the man recede below as he stands stoically buffeted by the waves that it has stirred up. We rise higher and the shape of the land becomes clear. The extent of the silence that this final shot – this revelation – achieves as we realise that we have been on the ark all along is awe inspiring in the same way as envisioning the distance between stars or contemplating the magnitude of geological time. This is a silence layers deep. What we have witnessed is a story inscribed on the gravestone of humanity.
As with the film itself, interpretation seems endless. It’s a well of silence that throws up all manner of echoes, but which sounds out no eventual bottom. And so, for fear of encroaching any further on the silence, I will end it here, having probably already stepped too far over the boundary of Wittgenstein’s famous maxim: ‘Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.’
Or sometimes, as in the case of Wall-E, the artwork becomes something else and severs itself in two.
I’m still liable to shed a tear at the mention of this film.
See the quotation in part 1 detailing Henri Bergson’s concept of Duration.
Released the same year as this film, maybe there was something in the water.