Dr Jacoby or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Evangelion

 By Keegan Tran

I’d like to push this blog further into niche obscurity.

                It isn’t uncommon to hear people talk about Evangelion and Twin Peaks in similar veins. Both represent hugely transformative pieces in their respective mediums, and both have a proclivity towards the cheesy, often slapstick foundations they were built on.

                I’ve tried on many occasions to watch Evangelion, but would drop the show every time. Much like the Sopranos or Citizen Kane I recognized its importance but could never get myself to enjoy it on its own merits. However, in 2020, shortly after it’s addition to Netflix (I know I know; Netflix’s treatment of the Japanese translation is considerably contentious) I decided to give it another shot. I had recently watched HBO’s Watchmen, some random re-runs of Twin Peaks, and some Gundam for good measure (it’s important later I promise).

                Somewhere during episode 16 of Evangelion the comparisons became apparent. As one of our protagonists, Misato Katsuragi is drunkenly walked home by an old flame, she professes her love and deep regret for leaving him in college, collapsing into his arms as he forcibly kisses and consoles her. The scene is bookended by: (spoilers) 1. The revelation that the giant robots our child protagonists have been piloting are sentient beings and 2. The director of the anti-angel defense force has an underground bunker where he has pinned Adam (yes the bible one) to a cross. More baffling than anything previously mentioned is how well these sequences just worked. The mixture of complex religious symbolism, quintessentially Japanese robots, and 1920’s silent film levels of melodramatic love culminate into something distinct and refreshing, an identity that Evangelion shares with no other work of art.

                For Western audiences, Twin Peaks serves as a wonderful steppingstone between the wildly digestible pop culture that inundates us and more difficult, surreal works of television and film. 

                David Lynch’s expansive filmography often utilizes two tropes: heavy surrealism and a strong reliance on American settings. His 1986 film Blue Velvet uses 1950’s hot rods, jazzy, smoke filled bars, and white picket fences to create a sense of understanding with its audience; recreating and imitating a style that we are familiar with. It shouldn’t surprise you then that the movie divulges into a dark and upsetting exploration of the horrible things that hide beneath the comfortable and nostalgic exterior. Likewise with Twin Peaks – while the image of a dead high schooler is off-putting, it was far from unfamiliar to audiences, especially in an era rife with cheesy police procedurals. While never explicitly stated on this blog, I am American, and thus my relationship with pop culture has been shaped as such. While arthouse and student films seek to be as mind-bending and thought provoking as possible, I often find myself alienated by them. This landscape presents Twin Peaks with the unique ability to combine the two worlds. From the moment I saw Bobby Brigs hitting a jukebox and peeling out of the Double R diner in his Trans Am, I was hooked. While artistic integrity should never be limited, the fact that Lynch and Frost had to report to ABC and meet strict rating guidelines meant that for every backwards speaking midget in a red room we are indulged with equal measures of soap opera syrup.

                How then did Twin Peaks enhance my enjoyment of a show that had failed to capture even the slightest iota of my interest? Much the way Gatorade and Sprite helped me consume bottom shelf liquor for five years of undergrad. The two series delicately weave their lofty, existential meanings into stories and characters that audiences are intimately familiar with. Shinji Ikari, barring some serious psychological scarring, is essentially a copy-paste mecha anime protagonist, even down to his art design. The concept of an unassuming middle school boy learning he is the chosen one who will lead humanity to victory from the seat of his armored mech suit was played out even in 1995; much like the prospect of an FBI agent teaming up with a local lawman to find the homecoming queen’s killer. Neon Genesis Evangelion is careful in how it doles out its weirdness. Shinji and friends’ prophetic nightmares are frequently offset by sequences where the group suits up to fight a monster-of-the-week while glitzy rock and roll plays in the background. We buy the idea of angels, ethereal doppelgangers, and cosmic destruction because they’re gifted to us in beautiful and unassuming pop-culture wrapping paper. By the time David Lynch and Hideaki Anno go hog wild with their narrative ideas, we accept them because we’ve been lulled into a state of comfort and passive enjoyment. The mark of these auteurs, however, is their ability to challenge the general public’s expectations of television as medium, and the stories that can only be told therein.