pale cocoon – archive of our losses
Pale Cocoon is a one-shot OVA by Yasuhiro Yoshiura. In a futuristic dystopia of rusted cubicles, disintegrating archives, and weary bodies filing along the darkened corridor of a factory warehouse, we are presented with the silhouette of a bleak reality that isn’t too hard to imagine for ourselves as a real possible future. Ura, our protagonist, is a diligent archaeologist of sorts within the “Archive Excavation Department”.
It has been many years since a group of humans retreated to an artificial colony above the planet surface. The colorful world that used to exist was ruined by human foolishness, making it uninhabitable. Much of recorded history before the move has been forgotten, despite the numerous advances in technology. The last remaining information lies in a vast archive of data, much of it in corrupted formats. Determined to recover this precious information, the “Archive Excavation Department” works specifically to restore as much of it as possible.
Ura is a zealous worker, driven by his own curiosity and fascination with the “green world” as depicted in the fragments of his discoveries. However, he is alone in his undertakings, save for Riko and another faceless coworker speaking through a communicative book [voiced by the director himself]. From bits of conversations between the three of them, it can be inferred that the department had once been quite lively and flourishing with many people eager to learn more about the past. However, the years have worn down the collective endeavor, whittling down the project until it’s just Ura sitting in front of glowing screens trying to salvage something of the old world from binary codes. And the lonely form of him bent over his computer, surrounded by the inherent wrongness of things, the distortion of a compressed reality, of dark claustrophobia and crumbling time, makes me ache in a painfully self-conscious way.
There is tension between Ura and his coworkers. They often reprimand him for doing extra analysis, telling him that it’s unnecessary, why bother? At the climax of the OVA, Riko blows up at Ura and tells him the hard truths that he probably already knew all along:
don’t you get it?
no one wants to see more of human stupidity
none of it exists anymore
She asserts that it’s better to not understand that world, to never know of the past, so that it wouldn’t hurt so much to miss it, to yearn for something that they never had. So that they could curb their regrets and cut their losses.
That is the explanation for why the department has gone to ruins. The more people found out, the more they learned about the past, they began to resent it. Because that past, with its vibrant colors and brilliant lifeforms, is so radically different from the dim reality that they live in now. And they cannot reconcile that disparity inside of themselves. So they suffer for it, for their yearning of things lost and unredeemable. And they wish that they had never known so that they could be content in their ignorance and never realize the poverty of their reality.
So what then, is the point of Ura’s work? With the department on the verge of being completely shut down, he’s faced with the desolating prospect of toil without reward. As the excavator of things happier off forgotten, he embodies the duality of the historian and martyr. And he might be onto something there. In his lonely and rewardless search for a pathway to the past, he is also looking for traces of the old world in his current reality. There is the hope that some traces of that beauty and magic might still remain, that there is something that transcends devastation and evolution, and will not be lost to the relentless flow of time.
While restoring some corrupted files, he happens upon a music video recorded by an unknown woman. In the video, she states that people leave behind records of themselves because there are things that they want to stay the same. That is why people take pictures of their loved ones, why they leave behind memoirs, and why Ura tirelessly digs through the archives for the memories of others. Because there are things that are worth preserving in the face of pain and regrets. Things that extend beyond the fallout and the aftermath, and trickle into the future to serve as memories that warrant nostalgia and quiet sighs and soft smiles.
Pale Cocoon is in itself a piece of that expansive archive. It serves to remind its audiences that they can’t forget. You can’t forget. Otherwise, what will you have left for yourself? If there is nothing worth preserving, then what will all of our efforts and strifes amount to? You can’t forget how things used to be, even as painful as it is to remember your losses. Things were different once. This current reality, as bleak and empty and lonely as it seems, can change. There are no absolutes. And there is no inevitability because the future is open-ended, full of the vastness of blue skies. Do you understand what this means for us?
You can’t forget your possibilities. Otherwise you’d fall back into the tumble and fold of things without ever knowing any better. Otherwise you’d make the same mistakes and get caught up in your own failures. You can’t forget because you have to maintain a perspective beyond the immediacy of your circumstances. So that you can still have the capacity to hope, to know that things can get better, they will get better, you can make that happen for yourself.
All the best things in life are still possible.
June 12th, 200811:11 am at
“There are no absolutes. And there is no inevitability because the future is open-ended, full of the vastness of blue skies.”
Yes, but inevitability is inevitable, or so I’d say. This notion seems rather omnipresent, and infinitely-infinitesimally-intervallically so. [I'm laughing because I can't believe I actually wrote that and had the balls to comment that on anyone's blog.]
I guess what that means is that there is no present, well, insofar as there is no “empirical” unit of time - we can divide units of time (1) infinitely, into (2) infinitesimally small (3) intervals. If this holds, then yes, there is no “present” and we only have past and future, while you could argue that present, future, and past are e infinite.
Wait I’m confusing myself. So, if I picture the present as a single frame of a movie, and the entire reel is the entirety of time, then what’s before our single frame is past - after is future. Ok, that’s easy, but now you have to take into consideration movement. There are two conceptual models here: (1) our single present-tense frame is stationary, and the reel moves through it. That is to say we align ourselves with the notion that there is no present. Or we can say (2) that the reel is stationary and our single frame moves up and down it like a zip-line on a rope. This is to say that the present is infinite: I’d go by this notion, now that I’ve thought it through.
I’d explain my position on fate but I’ll spare us all on the lethal sleeping pills.
June 12th, 200812:40 pm at
NOW I know why just looking at the poster image of this OVA reminds me of Mizu no Kotoba. Same director. Actually, I haven’t seen this yet, but I would recommend Mizu no Kotoba. Cause, well, even though it’s only 9 minutes long, I think it has the same effect of making you think… whew, psychological stuff.
June 12th, 200812:51 pm at
Excellent analysis.
But there’s two fundamental flaws.
1. It’s true life is full of possibilities, but what happens at the end of the road?
You die. Plain and simple. When you reach the end of the road it’s the end. The greatest philosophers realized that and took their own lives, afraid to see what happens at the end.
2. Human-created hope is easily crushed. The best example would be the postmodern society we live in. Every time anyone wants to stand up and do something, the postmodern society swiftly crushes the person’s drive and hope, on seeing that his efforts have come to naught. Many would-be dogooders become bitter and cynical this way.
Again it’s true all the best things in life are possible, but postmodern society is a most wily and brutal enemy to fight. It teases, it tantalizes and then it swiftly crushes. The naivé quickly learn that they are insignificant and the jaded see it as another bleak, hopeless day. Riches don’t make you happy. Everything you do will be wiped out anyway so why bother? It’s better to live in the now, forget about the past, it’ll all be wiped out anyway.
Then again, who am I to lecture you on postmodern society?
June 12th, 20082:13 pm at
@Lelangir: Heh, I’m glad my entry has inspired that particular stream of consciousness. I’ll try to catch you on gtalk and you can explain your view on fate to me. I wanna hear!
@Hoshi: Thank you for the recommendation! I’m downloading it right now~
@DrmChsr0: Thank you for taking the time to consider my analysis and write out this comment in response to it. Hm, if you look at it like that, life seems rather nihilistic. Yes, at the end of life, you die. But in the mean time, while you are still alive, what will you do with yourself? If we were to forget the past, then how can we draw upon our knowledge of history to consider the innumerable accomplishments that people, other human beings, have managed to achieve? Their achievements are our possibilities. They leave behind memoirs and artifacts of the lives that they have led in order to show us that we, as human beings, are capable of such great and horrible things. I think that there is much to be gained from learning about the past, taking the time to do a little study and consider the lives of others, even if they are now gone.
I do agree with you that people have a tendency to turn into cynics when they consider their positions in the bigger picture of things. And yeah, we can look around us and point out all of the ugly and horrible shit that’s happening and validate our own cynicism by patting ourselves on the back for “knowing better” than those “naive people”, but then what would we gain from that? Being cynical is lazy. It takes so much more heart and effort to just care about something big and stand to lose a little bit for it. I’m not preaching that we should dwell on the past, but that we should take the lessons that we can glean from it and do something productive with them. Rather than just sit around and count up the grievances against us and feel sorry for ourselves.
I don’t think life in postmodern society is as “poor, nasty, brutish, and short” as people make it out to be. I think all of the cling and clatter of recent moral panics are just backlash responses to the deconstruction of a centralized society due to the globalization of our networking. New technology, ways of thinking, and foreign ideas and philosophies violate a person’s socially constructed sensibility, causing them to become anxious of the status quo and to view their future as bleak and hopeless. So they withdraw into their comfort zone and condemn society for going to hell, when really it’s just in a period of rapid change. And that process of change has a historical context, once again going back to my whole spiel on how history is crucial to our understanding of our identities as social subjects.
June 12th, 20085:15 pm at
without reading itsubun’s reponse: Drm - insofar as society is postmodern.
June 12th, 200810:08 pm at
Hmm, does anyone die? Is there any blood?
June 16th, 200812:34 pm at
Heh, can’t believe I haven’t commented on this yet.
I loved Pale Cocoon, and was amazed at how it crammed so much and gave so much in such a short space of time. On one level it’s a pretty and chilling piece with gorgeous music but it also highlighted an aspect of human nature that’s both profound and really quite straightforward.
No matter when or where we are, we as humans have to have some reminder of where we came from. It’s an extension of our innate curiosity I guess, but it was quite telling that someone would risk his very life to try to find his own answer to that huge “why?” that hovers above everyone’s heads.
And of course people are, whether we admit it openly or not, interested in other people. Pale Cocoon’s lonely and austere worldview just pulls that more clearly into focus…and does it really beautifully, I might add.
Can’t wait for Eve no Jikan now.
July 4th, 20089:31 pm at
OMG. SERIOUSLY! THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR POSTING ABOUT THIS! In my shame I have an AMV for this show and it never stated what the show was from. The AMV was done so well I started to believe that the animation was made just for the song. Now I can look it up! (I avoided reading your post for spoilers but i’ll be back once i’ve seen it :D!)
December 3rd, 20089:25 pm at
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