Trying to appraise art and media tells us more about the reviewer than the artist. I once read that Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism was a work which (paraphrasing) “was deeply tied up in the roots of his personality”. I didn’t understand this at first. In school, they teach you to try to be objective, to present argumentation about the facts of the external world. Philosophical works, accounts of history, debates regarding political and civil life – without knowing it, I’d taken these things as articles of fact. As distilled units of the truth that one could collect, and one who was able to collect all of them would understand the world in its fullness.
I see now how naïve this attitude was. Artists, poets, and writers, in creating their work impart a reflection of their inner world on the creation. Consider Genesis: the account states that God made Man in His image; yet how impoverished humanity is compared to the description of God. But our essential likeness shines through – in our own acts of creation, we assemble little impoverished miniatures of ourselves for presentation into the world of ideas. My report of this movie will be just that – an impoverished reflection of myself.
With such an intro, one might expect some profound philosophizing about the work of these two great artists. In truth I was just blowing off hot air. But Satoshi Kon and Katsuhiro Otomo really are undoubtedly great artists. Magnetic Rose (written by Satoshi Kon) captures the feeling of everything that I ever wanted to be, everything that I ever thought was cool. The first few seconds of the film are all one really needs. The screen pans through abstract industrial imagery assembling into the title Memories, presented in CRT TV quality visuals. Watching the images flash across the screen takes me back through the images of my own life: staring at tube televisions, feeling jealous over my cousin’s N64, renting videos from the local corner store. Then, later, looking out the car window on long drives, seeing the massive bridges, dirty cities, power stations, and plants of unknown purpose with their characteristic look – the look of human industry, the signature of their creators. Nostalgia in this form, especially as the impetus of modern aesthetics, has been panned over and over. But what can I tell you? This is how Thoreau remarked about his quasi-biographical Walden (paraphrasing): “I wrote about myself only because I know myself best”.
There is irony in feeling nostalgic regarding a film written about the far future. The future presented in Magnetic Rose is a sort of “memory of our future”, if you’ll permit me such pretension. I mean only that the opening scene is so reminiscent of Star Wars, of Alien, betraying the same hopes for our ventures in space that the artists of decades past felt, that one is struck immediately with the sense of an antiquated future, a future that has been retired. But Magnetic Rose differs from those depictions in an important respect: it depicts the “trashcan future”, an outer space full of junk, ships held together with tape and bubble gum, shirtless ship captains garbed in overalls. I am fond of these depictions of regular, blue collar, working class, shirtless space captains. Somehow it brings space closer to us. After all, look at what we’ve done to this Earth: do you truly believe that crisp white sliding doors, stainless steel, and reflective surfaces are in the cards for us? We can’t achieve that down the street from the Earthbound factories where those things are made. Our future will yet be full of rust. We will never escape the mediocrity of this life.
Satoshi Kon, true to form, did not ignore this. He did not ignore the weakness of men living in this future, either. There is no “Darth Vader” of Magnetic Rose, no superhuman feats or acts of extreme courage. There is class; the “redneck” captain of the ship chafes against direction from the comfortable, remote, and suited company boss directing him over the computer. There is depravity and womanizing on the part of Miguel (one of the ship's crew). There is human weakness on display in the harshness of space. Miguel is nearly killed while “redding out” from lack of calcium when shifting gravity suddenly causes him to collapse under his protective suit. But more than anything else, it is human loneliness which is the weakness at the core of this film.
Due to “maritime law” (I’m hoping this was just a nod to Alien because I hate this trope) crew members Miguel and Heintz must depart from their scrapping ship to investigate an unidentified S.O.S. emanating from an abandoned space station. Ejected into the unknown, they enter station to find extraordinarily large European classical architecture, a ballroom adorned with numerous statues and artworks, and a spectacular green field stretching off into the distance crowned by a beautiful, solitary, red-dressed woman. Miguel rushes immediately to her, and upon stepping into the romantic, sunlit green fields, he begins to sink and is then drowned in them. Heintz reaches through the shimmering green to pull Miguel back – they share a look of confusion – indeed, they are alone here. The field was merely a hologram.
In this castle, beset by adornments, tempted by holograms, the crew is set adrift into the world of illusion. As they explore further reality begins to break down around them. An opulent dinner set on a massive dining table is revealed to be mere imitation as Miguel indulges in spoiled wine – here consuming the illusion in body as well as mind. And from here Miguel in particular is drawn deeper into such traps, falling into them alone as Heintz remains stable. Is it because of his hunger for companionship? His want? He is, after all, revealed to be a womanizer, a “ladies-man”, unafraid to sit at a table which is not his. He is the sensualist, he is Dostoyevsky’s Mitya – a scoundrel, an adventurer, in this context perhaps a pirate. I have long reflected on the sensualist… their brazen embrace of life’s mysteries, their capacity to act as the sovereign, their courageous egotism. Surely you understand – I am now sitting bathed in computer light alone in my room, here. Of course Miguel is wrong. Of course we see him falling prey to his own weakness. But what can a desk jockey say in the shadow of a space pirate. I see in Miguel more than just stupid lust for the world. I see in him the inevitable pitfalls of saying yes to life. But will you then say no?
In Miguel’s hallucinatory sequences we find the primary symbolism developed in the ever-present rose. Everywhere the rose appears – in the hallucinatory field, on the table, presented to Miguel during an imagined party scene (quickly withering as the stout and grounded Heintz enters). Moreover, the presence of red- Satoshi Kon’s signature- indicates a departure from the real whenever it appears. The red-dressed woman expresses this best of all: her beauty, her allure, her danger, yet all of it completely immaterial. She does not even pose any real harm to the crew, as each time she is encountered she dissipates into thin air. In this sense, she herself is the magnetic rose, manipulating the plot and its characters from the center of an intangible force field, making them act as if by their own accord.
Heintz, at any rate, is not immune to these illusions either. In an especially dramatic scene, he is abruptly stabbed by the illusory red-dressed woman after wandering onto a massive opera stage while tracking the SOS signal. He descends into his memories, painfully reliving leaving his family, his little daughter, to work in outer space. At the end of this dream sequence the world around him begins to shift and warp – the red-dressed woman appears in place of his wife, invading even his recollections – and he abruptly wakes up covered in dust on the opera stage. Bursting into rage, he fires his machine gun into the surroundings, destroying pitifully little. But it is too late – his sense of reality has been broken, he is alone, and even his transmitter back to the ship begins to malfunction. The pain of loneliness and the attraction of illusion here touches the reserved man, too.
Meanwhile, Miguel enters the deepest part of the space station, experiencing increasingly intense hallucinations involving the red-dressed woman. She seduces Miguel into believing he is her lover, and that he will stay with her forever. She reveals in these hallucinatory sequences her fall from grace as an opera singer after the mysterious death of her lover – a death that she caused, murdering her to-be-husband after his refusal to marry. Miguel is the latest in a line of men she has hypnotized, molded, and coerced into being “Him”. This is the worst and most treacherous form of illusion presented in Magnetic Rose. We see in Eva (the red-dressed woman) knowing participation and active creation of illusion. We see the tragedy of believing one’s own lies; sedition played out on others, reckless and destructive egotism blossoming from loneliness and self-delusion.
Heintz follows Miguel into the stations belly but is again assaulted in a similar fashion to the incident on stage – he is forced to relive the death of his daughter. Eva offers Heintz the opportunity to live in her illusion – her as his wife, and his daughter resurrected through hologram. But Heintz is the hero here: he accepts the real, dead body of his daughter over the illusory resurrection. He is the foil to Eva’s self-deception – he accepts tragic fate in preference to romantic illusion. By choosing to live in the real world, he overcomes Magnetic Rose’s primary moral quandary: the challenge to accept the mundane, the painful, the real, over the illusory – even when the illusory is ideal! Even when, as Satoshi’s red floods the scene, the illusory has permeated everything.
In the final moments of Magnetic Rose, struggling under the space station’s mysteriously increasing magnetic field (some heavy-handed imagery there), the ship’s captain fires a charge into the space station creating a massive explosion. The ship does not survive – while Eva preforms a final opera over the chaos, the films environment is progressively destroyed. We are left, in closing, with a shot of Heintz opening his eyes, still alive, while floating in black of space. Eva’s rose petals float with him still – a reminder that we can never escape the urge to escape the real. As the scene pans out towards darkness, we find the entire station transformed into a massive magnetic rose floating alone through the abyss.
I love to be captivated by a film like this. It’s portrayal of life in the unknown feels honest and relatable. It’s depiction of human weakness, suffering, and ignorance feels truthful. It reminds me of the thrill of adventure and the fear of the deep. While I wouldn’t consider it a masterpiece, the direction touches on a variety of interesting and pertinent topics useful in the regular course of life. It is as if, like Plato, the film is asking us to look at the sun, even when it hurts our eyes. And perhaps too it urges us to be aware of the dangers of the magnetic rose.
Diogenes
Staff Writer at The Papermaker