Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of Patlabor 2: The Movie
1993 · Mamoru Oshii · Patlabor 2: The Movie on Sightlines
Tanks idle under cherry trees. Nothing is happening. The blossom does what blossom does, and the machines sit there burning fuel with their crews inside, waiting on an order that hasn't come. Oshii holds the shot past the point where it's useful. He does this all through Patlabor 2: birds turning over a canal, a bridge in winter light, an expressway emptying under a curfew nobody voted for. Each time, you wait for the image to convert into information, into the next beat of the thriller you thought you'd sat down to. Sometimes it does. Often it just stays an image, while Kenji Kawai's electronics move underneath it like weather.
The premise could not be cleaner. A missile hits a Tokyo bridge, the strike gets blamed on an Air Force jet, and a police unit that drives giant robots is pulled into a fight between the civilian government and the military. Every clause of that promises a sortie. The robots stay in the hangar. That is the first thing to notice about this film, and the thing most often mistaken for a defect: a mecha movie in which the mecha is mostly parked.
Deleuze's account of cinema turns on a break, and Patlabor 2 sits directly on it. In what he called the movement-image, a character perceives a situation and acts to change it, the action resolves the situation, and every cut serves that chain. Mecha anime is one of the most efficient engines ever built for this. Threat appears, pilot suits up, force settles it. What Deleuze noticed in postwar European film was a new kind of character who could no longer close that circuit, someone who sees far more than they can answer, whose response is always out of scale with what is in front of them. He called it the crisis of the action-image, and he did not mean a failure of nerve. He meant a discovery. Oshii imports that crisis into the genre least equipped to survive it, and the film's own argument explains why. Japan, as Patlabor 2 has it, lives inside an unjust peace, insulated from the wars fought elsewhere in its name. A citizen of that peace perceives a great deal and can act on almost none of it. The stillness is not Oshii running short of money or interest. It is the form of the thesis.
Deleuze's name for the figure who replaces the actor is the seer, the voyant, one who watches and endures instead of intervening. Around such a character the film fills with what he called pure optical and sound situations: images that hand you no task, that you can only take in. Stretches where nothing advances, dead time, stop being filler and become the substance. Oshii gets this from Tarkovsky. The patient duration, the water and the reflections, philosophy carried in the atmosphere rather than by anyone explaining it. Stalker, retimed for a winter city.
When martial law comes, Tokyo stops being a place where things get done. Checkpoints. A helicopter over an emptied district. Armour under the blossom. Deleuze had a term for this kind of location, the any-space-whatever: a space that has lost its coordinates as a setting for action and turned into pure affect, a field of possibility with nothing left to actualise it. The move bites harder in animation than it would in live action, because an animated Tokyo is normally the most legible city imaginable, every landmark placed for use. Oshii drains the use out of it and leaves the city standing there.
The war itself never appears. Deleuze separated two kinds of off-screen. There is the relative out-of-field, the next room, the space you could pan to. And there is the absolute, an outside the frame opens onto that is not anywhere you could point a camera. The wars that pay for this peace are Patlabor 2's absolute out-of-field. They are not next door. They are what everything on screen is standing in front of.
None of this holds for ninety minutes without the invention Oshii made with Toshihiko Nishikubo and their artists: the layout system, in which the animation drawing is drafted the way a cinematographer sets up a shot, with a lens, a distance, a position in a real space. Deleuze calls the frame a closed set, a composition treated as a system carrying a determinate quantity of information. Animation makes that literal. Nothing in the frame is found, every blade of grass is a decision, so the frame is a system whether you admit it or not. The Headgear team admitted it and pushed toward telephoto realism, compression, long lenses, the sense of a camera standing somewhere specific and far away. The debt runs back to Akira, whose dense photographic layouts and truthful light made animation-as-cinematography thinkable, and further back to Gundam, which first treated mecha as hardware with logistics, chains of command and fallible operators instead of magic. Oshii's addition is the difficult one. You can only make dead time out of an image the eye accepts as a real place. Otherwise a held shot is just a drawing you are stuck with. The layout system reset the standard for realism in Japanese animation and shaped everything from Evangelion onward.
The climax is a conversation in a car. A long one, and the most devastating weapon anybody in this film deploys. Deleuze charted a hinge-image where action is transposed into figure and discourse rather than carried out, and its sharpest form is the discourse-image, an image that poses a problem it cannot resolve. That is the car. The question inside it is whether the peace these men serve is a peace at all, or a war being fought elsewhere on their behalf and charged to their account. Nobody wins the exchange. The first Patlabor film had already built the template, an absent ideologue whose worldview organises the investigation with no physical confrontation waiting at the end of it. Patlabor 2 does something riskier with the template. It gives the ideologue the better argument.
That argument begins with a forgery. The attack is real, the attribution is manufactured, a jet blamed for a strike in order to set the state against itself. Deleuze called this the powers of the false, and he did not mean plot twists. He meant falsity made productive, generating consequences as solid as any truth. A phantom aircraft produces real tanks on real streets. What follows for the image is that it stops being self-evident. Radar returns, monitors, telemetry, pictures whose provenance is the whole question. Deleuze's word is the lectosign, the image you have to read rather than simply see. Pontecorvo is the ancestor here and the borrowing is exact: The Battle of Algiers lends its documentary grain and its clinical staging of checkpoints and chains of command. But Algiers traded on the old contract, this looks like footage, therefore it happened. Oshii keeps the grain and quietly voids the contract. And when the film steps back to think, it thinks in Chris Marker's method, essayistic passages built from held images with reflective narration laid over them, La Jetée's photo-roman logic doing the arguing.
Underneath sits the claim Deleuze reserved for modern political cinema. The old political film could address a people that already existed. The modern one cannot. The people are missing, and the film has to work in the space where they should be. Patlabor 2's Japan is a country whose citizens have been insulated from the consequences of their own peace so completely that they are not a political people at all, only the beneficiaries of an arrangement. The coup is aimed at that absence. Someone decided that if the country would not feel a war, it should be given one to feel.
What did it do to the art? It proved that a genre picture could carry a real argument without pretending it was something other than a genre picture, and that animation could hold duration, could ask an audience to sit in front of an empty street and think. Oshii carried the discovery straight into Ghost in the Shell. The industry took it everywhere else.
Watch it again for the shots nobody is in. Count them. Notice how often the film cuts away from the people who could act, toward a canal, a wire, a bird, and how the argument gains force every time it does. Then work out what you would have said to the man in the car. The film never finds an answer to him. Those held, emptied images are what an unanswered argument looks like.
Concepts in play
- crisis-of-the-action-image — A mecha film whose Labors stay in the hangar: the police unit perceives a national crisis it has no adequate action against, because the film's thesis is a citizenry insulated inside an unjust peace.
- pure optical & sound situations — The wordless passages of Tokyo under winter light and creeping martial law, scored to Kawai's mournful electronics, which offer no task and can only be taken in.
- voyant (the seer) — The unit spends the film watching and enduring a political struggle between civilian authorities and the military rather than resolving it by force.
- temps mort — The dossier's own term for the Tokyo sequences taken from Tarkovsky: patient duration, water and reflection, stretches where nothing advances the plot.
- espace quelconque — Tanks idling beneath cherry trees and birds wheeling over canals as martial law spreads: a city that has stopped functioning as a setting for action and become pure affect.
- out-of-field-absolute — The wars fought elsewhere in Japan's name, which never appear on screen yet are what the entire film stands in front of.
- the closed set (cadre) — The layout system developed with Toshihiko Nishikubo, in which animation drawings are treated as a cinematographer's setups, making every frame a constructed, information-dense system.
- discourse-image — A political thriller whose most devastating weapon is a single long conversation in a car, posing the problem of the unjust peace without resolving it.
- puissances du faux — A terrorist act blamed on an Air Force jet: a manufactured attribution that produces real martial law and a real confrontation between state and military.
- the readable image — The missile strike on the bridge is known only through mediated evidence whose provenance is the film's central question, so images must be deciphered rather than acted upon.
- people-are-missing — Postwar Japan as a nation insulated from the wars fought in its name, whose citizens are beneficiaries of an arrangement rather than a constituted political people.