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The third act still rips harder than almost any that has come since. All the money and spectacle and explosions in the world can never match just the absolute daring, uncompromising and spectacular ARTISTRY that this one bursts with in its third act. Almost forty years on it still feels so ahead of its time for that and its highly unsung soundscape. The music does the most to modernize it than any of its contemporaries, and that becomes clear as crystal when you take note of just the music’s scale and oomph in the soundscape compared to the many stock sound effects. And when the music goes quiet, the film deploys its absolute master stroke: silence. Eerie, supernatural, this-shouldn’t-be-allowed-or-thought-up kind of pin drop dead silence. S p e c t a c u l a r.

I feel that most films or fiction don’t really hit as hard the older I get and I don’t think it’s some problem with modern movies, being out of tune with my emotions or needing the familiar. I think it’s that life just keeps compounding them in such a way that anything that doesn’t ring potent and true to me specifically on a raw visceral level will just not affect me like I’d like every piece of art to.

It’s why I often avoid stuff like Castration Movie because I know it will feel alien to my own experience as someone who shares the same colors on the flag. I fear it will put me at odds with the reception of peers who DO connect to it and I will feel a sense that MY trauma doesn’t match their trauma and thus mine will seem not as real or valid (plus growing up as a kid and teen in the most conservative and hostile-to-outsiders part of the country I can’t deal with more feelings of not having a queer community to rely on or connect to).

But I know it’s not just because my experience makes me seek out myopic art, it’s simply that I have less and less room to take on MORE emotions that carry that unbearable weight of being. I have too many experiences and emotions and the experiences and emotions born of THOSE and how they all compound and grow on top of one another or fester or explode. The more emotions I experience, the less capacity I have for emotions that are born of or facilitated of fiction and art and play. I have to be careful about what I let in not just for the sake of limited time, but for the sake of limited capacity to take too much in at each time and losing out on what WILL talk to me.

And I find returning to the things I know and have found me and spoken to me in some unknowable but highly potent ways throughout the years like this film will help me sort through the emotions I have built up and accumulated between watches.

These days at my job (in customer service) I am increasingly burned out, probably severely so. It’s not just having worked two full time jobs for a year, one of which is STILL not out despite completion, it’s also how the burnout brings forth the repressed emotions and memories and strongest negative feelings. I have grown to resent my customers to such a degree that I have started to become a more hateful version of myself that I don’t recognize. I feel like I have become a worse person being ground down this way and still squeezed and threatened with financial, reputational or verbal violence if I so much as dare step out of line in a line of work that increasingly keeps changing the rules and keeps rewarding the worst people on the planet.

There are so many people to hate right now. The corrupt politicians, the fascists, the ‘normies’ who empowered them, the customers who have gotten worse since the pandemic, every infrastructure, and overbearing ad and- there is just an endless supply to fuel that flame.

And I hate that I hate. I hate that I want to enact violence against those who have created and fueled that hate, to get revenge on those who wronged me enough to break who I was growing up, who I have had to battle at every turn to be a good human being despite how the world is structured, those who keep making the world a worse place ON THE FUCKING DAILY.

So seeing this one, where Tetsuo is given the power to enact revenge and do as he pleases and just indulge in power and escape from his emotions… it hits too close to that vein of hatred that grows and grows beneath myself and society at large right now.

But

I also happened to see it on the same day that I found that internal solution.

I thankfully have a perfect girlfriend who keeps grounding me when I am down as much as I ground her when she’s down. I’d plant seeds of a better world all over if it only meant to see her live in a better world than the one we live in now.

And I believe most seeds of facilitating a better world start from changing a perspective. And changing hearts and minds. And the first one I can bring back is my own.

Kaneda in this is a savior, not by definition but by action. Increasingly throughout the film he goes from his selfish self to having his increasing concern for others guide him toward becoming a person who always seeks to help. The people who end up on the side of life by the end of the film mostly comprise of those who have either helped or tried to help others throughout, who have acted to save, assist or stand up against that hatred and thirst for power and control.

I believe punk is the future so long as that punk is not self serving. I despised James Gunn’s Superman last year and I think the message rings hollow, but there is a kernel of truth to it (it’s just wrapped up in self-serving bullshit). I believe in radical action for the greater good of others and not for the greater good of one. I came to the thought today that I should treat every single person on this planet, like family, because that will give me the guidance, patience, empathy and heart to actually do better and show understanding in this world that our structured world is currently not facilitating. I believe and started to act today as if every person is my family. I can reject and outcast those who show they only serve themselves and wish ill on me and my family, but in most cases for interactions and looking at the people who occupy this world with me… they are family.

And I’d like to treat the people around me, strangers or no, as if they are the people I have cared for the most in my life ’til now. I believe that the world is better if everyone were to share that perspective and pass it on. If everyone was treated the same way I’d like to talk to and treat my late grandma for example, the world would just turn in the right direction all day every day.

I want to believe that’s like Kaneda grabbing the light that is the Tetsuo’s soul. That small piece of light. That small piece of others who can help us be thankful we are here, that the people around us are here, and that we are here, despite it all falling to ruin around us.

We just have to grab it and nurture it.

We are all each other’s family, so we should show that understanding, patience and benefit of a doubt that we’d give to our most cherished family members.

Akira is an excellent film. It is one of a kind. It is a vision of something grander than any one person. Be excellent to each other, be one of a kind, be that vision.

I want to believe this is the light. That this is the birth of a new universe.