Monsters and Mirrors: The Doors of Perception

Last post, we looked at some of the unpleasant realities an enemy like the Invid invite the heroes of the New Generation – and through them the audience – to face. Today, I continue in that vein, offering my theory as to how this third round of Us vs. Them plays into the larger lessons of the series.

By the end of New Generation, we've known for episodes that “Marlene” is an Invid, even if she and her friends are ignorant of it. When, at the end of “Reflex Point” it's made clear to everyone what she really is, the heroes are faced with a weighty decision: do they abandon their friend or abandon their most basic beliefs about the Invid?

I remember watching that episode for the first time, waiting for Scott Bernard to draw his pistol and blow her away – a rage-fueled act of revenge for all his dead comrades, for his lost love, for his own sanity. Considering how close to the end of the series it was, and considering that Robotech kills off major characters regularly, I had no way of knowing he wouldn't.

You can see the wheels turning in his head. Unable to deny what he's seeing, he's forced to choose between everything he's ever believed or the life in front of him. History shows, to our shame, that humans make the less enlightened choice more often than not, and considering the depth of Scott's hatred of the Invid and dedication to his mission, I was sure that was the end of Marlene.

But Scott doesn't strike – or speak – or do anything other than keep Rand from running after her. Then, after a shocked silence, he remarks to the mortally stricken Sue Graham that Marlene “proves that what a person is made of doesn't determine their spirit or the love they possess.”

Really? The same Scott Bernard who probably keeps Wagner in his Alpha for hive raids?

I rewound the tape to watch again just to be sure.

Scott's existence for the past two dozen or so episodes had revolved around killing as many Invid as possible on his way to Reflex Point. Yet neither he nor any of his comrades was willing to lash out at Marlene for what she was, and this is everyone's salvation.

Had Scott put a bullet through Marlene's head, any chance for redemption on his part – or his friends' part – would have been lost, but what we see here is the beginning of a critical shift in his character that will take him from revenge-driven killer to something else entirely.

Having led us down an all-too familiar path, Robotech subverts the entire traditional paradigm in an instant, and we find ourselves questioning our preconceptions of the Invid right along with the characters. Once they're people, these “monsters” have lives, loves, fears, dreams. You can't just consider yourself the Intergalactic Orkin Man anymore. The game changes forever.

Still, it's not enough to stop the war, even if the feelings of our heroes are genuine. Later at Reflex Point, the Regess, for all of the pleading of Sera and Marlene – now in full possession of her identity as Ariel – refuses even the possibility of compromise. She condemns the humans as incapable of rising above their nature. They are genetically predisposed to destroy what they don't understand, she asserts.

“Forgive me, Regess,” Sera retorts, “but I’ve begun to doubt whether we are any better than they are. You say this species is guilty of murdering and making slaves of their enemies, but how is that any different from what we are doing on this planet?”

And there it is. More than the Zentraedi and their fabricated memories, more than the cowed clones of the Robotech Masters, it is the Invid race who are most human. The Zentraedi ask us to scrutinize our past and what we know of it, while the Masters call into question our future. The Invid, however, indict the here, the now, the face in the mirror.

I am reminded of Zarathustra, who chides his audience because “you have evolved from worm to man, but much within you is still worm.” How true.

Yet there is something that moves through all heroes in the greater Robotech saga, as we have seen. This force upends decayed notions of good and evil. Like Nietzsche's three beasts of the metamorphosis, it exhausts those old trappings of faith, slays the self-damning dragons of the mind, and somehow manages to salvage the love, hope, and primal innocence to make a new start.

The only force flowing commonly through the entire Robotech universe with that much potential is Protoculture itself, and I've often wondered if this power to cleanse the doors of perception, as Blake would say, is not its ultimate manifestation.

Yes, I'm aware that the term Protoculture is originally an artifact of translation. In Macross, it simply refers to human culture (or, more specifically, universal elements of culture shared by Earth and an original, primal humanoid culture), so when Miriya holds baby Dana aloft and bids her old allies bow before the awesome power of Protoculture, it's less a declaration of metaphysical prowess and more psychological warfare.

Viewed in the larger context of Robotech, however, Protoculture is something different altogether. It's a power source, a narcotic, a food supply, an object of worship, a blessing, a curse. All these things are true. However, in every instance where Protoculture is in play, we have the opportunity to see old, narrow ways of thinking overturned and swept away, and the heroes of each Robotech War are, regardless of initial allegiance, those who see their world in a new way.

The Zentraedi are transformed in our minds from soulless giant war machines into men and women. The Tiresians are no longer an appalling hive of mindless tools, but people. Both are saddled for the first time with the powerful burden of their own destinies, and both must discover what it means to live in the perpetual shadow of their equally uncertain conquerors-turned-keepers.

The Invid, too, stand upon this precipice, though only a rare few of them cast their lot with humanity. The majority, led by the Regess, instead depart the planet in search of a place where their journey toward self-actualization will remain uncomplicated. Granted, it's a better fate than the near-genocide the Regent's forces suffer, but I've always had my doubts as to whether they really took the high road.

On the one hand, we have Sera and Ariel willing to acknowledge the brutality of their people's actions. Even Scott, deeply conflicted over his feelings for Ariel, is willing to admit the meaninglessness of the conflict when Rand points out that the Invid are nothing more that yet another scapegoat for human aggression. Like it or not, the heroes are willing to take their medicine, even if in the case of characters like Scott, the effects will take a while to set in.

The Regess, however, remains in denial. She dismisses the paradox of her people's deeds and, using the so-called “taint of the Robotech Masters” as an excuse, prepares to leave like a bully who, when faced with her own inadequacy, peppers the air with profanity and skulks home. On the surface, she sounds enlightened. A new world “calls” to her. Hatred and conflict are not what she seeks.

But really? I think she's running scared from a brush with the realization that she, herself, has become like the Robotech Masters. Like the Regent. Like the usurious, traitorous Zor (as she sees him), who despoiled her people and ran away, abandoning them to die. In taking all the Protoculture fuel from Earth, in fact, she's doing exactly what Zor did to her people. She has become that which she hates, and for all her evolutionary advancement, she's blind to it.

In the end, she at least does humanity a favor in that she destroys the Neutron-S missiles, but she still hasn't learned the lesson Ariel and Sera seem to have grasped: that the real expression of understanding is to stay on Earth, accept the truth of the past, and find a way together. Like Lancer, I wonder whether we've really seen the last of the Regess, or whether she'll eventually find herself guided right back to the hard lessons she's fled.

Speaking of everyone's favorite cross-dresser, it doesn't surprise me that the one human character who seems to most easily assimilate and accept a change in how he understands the Invid is Lancer – a man who seems to have lost his taste for artificial binaries long ago. I would even venture that his clear and unabashed attraction to Sera serves as a foil to Scott's agony over and callous dismissal of Ariel.

After all, Scott's reaction is the one we see more often in human history, but in the face of an alternative approach in the form of Lancer and Sera, we can see the flaws in Scott's thinking. We can sympathize yet again for poor Ariel, who still has hope that her love will find a way to escape his mind-forged manacles.

When we leave him at the end of “Symphony of Light,” Scott still has much to learn – and much to unlearn. He is, in that respect, a cipher for the audience, who have been asked to grow and change in fairly radical ways not only in the New Generation story arc, but across the whole scope of the Robotech series.

Curiously enough, I've found that Sentinels, or at least what we know of it through the pilot, comics, and novels, seems uneasy with this pattern. Before I move on to what I think of the enemy in Shadow Chronicles, I'll next take a look at the nature of the beast(s) encountered by the REF and the curiously un-Robotech-like way in which the heroes react to them.

Monsters and Mirrors: The Only Good Slug

In what may be a shocking declaration to some, I would like to state for the record that I like the Invid.

No, not in that creepy way that some people like Cthulhu because he's horrible and scary and could possibly figure into someone's stop-motion silent film hentai fetish. Rather, I mean that I have an honest sense of affection for the Invid as a group. In fact, I would argue that the Invid are worth liking precisely because they unnerve us. In my opinion, they're the most human-like species in the series.

In a phrase, they're the monster as mirror – and the mirror that reveals the monster in us.

Consider: the Invid seem almost universally despised, considered sub-human, incapable of the “heights” of culture and civilization to which humanoid races can attain. They are additionally characterized as inhuman, lacking qualities such as sympathy, emotions, independent thought, and the capacity for mercy or compromise. Exceptions to this are restricted to highly-evolved humanoid Invid such as Marlene/Ariel and Sera, who aspire to humanity and associate with humans.

Yet the Invid are no worse than Dolza, the Robotech Masters, or humans like Anatole Leonard. All are driven by a code of conduct or way of life that is at odds with the values of the heroes. All believe compromising in any way is unthinkable. What distinguishes the Invid from other adversaries is less something inherent in their culture, character, or genetic code and more in how the heroes and, consequently, the audience, think about them.

Take Leonard. I know almost no one who likes him, but if you look at the world through his eyes, he seems to honestly believe he's doing the right thing. As far as he's concerned, he's protecting Earth from an iteration of monolithic, possibly Satanic, evil. Certain politicians, insurgent leaders, and other modern historical figures have similar attitudes.

Even if you think Leonard is an irredeemable asshole fit only for keeping Hitler company in one of the more nasty sub-circles of Hell, few of us would lump Dana, Bowie and friends in with him. He's just one man, after all, and he doesn't speak for all of humanity. More than that, he's still a man, and we're willing, at least to some degree, to try to see the world through his eyes. The low-ranking Zentraedi and civilian Tiresians receive similar treatment and are shown to have the potential to be moral entities in their own right.

Can we say that about the Invid? In all the comics, novels, episodes, and supplementary material out there, is there one instance of an Invid portrayed as anything other than A) an unthinking slug; B) a calculating creature fit only for extermination; or C) a sentient being awakened to love, emotions, and humanity only because of extended (and possibly romantic) contact with humans?

Even in the Waltrips' Legend of Zor series, which is about the best treatment the race ever gets, the primal Invid are little more than animals, and their efforts to use the knowledge Zor gives them are shrugged off as laughable attempts to emulate “a culture they didn't understand...and never could” (LoZ #5).

Consider that if you replaced the Invid with any group “uplifted” by colonial powers in the past 200-300 years you could never get away with the broad generalizations made about the them. The Invid plight also contains shades of the Israel-Palestine conflict, the displacement and attempted extermination of Native Americans and Australian Aboriginals, and just about any other scenario in our history where conquest and race have played a major role.

From that angle, the things they do start making sense. First, they're happy to help the visitors. Then they're brutally exploited but survive, swearing to avenge themselves upon the monsters who destroyed their world. They become driven, and when they find what they want, they do what they have been taught is the way of the universe: they take it, just as everything was taken from them.

(I guess the Tiresians expected the Invid to have a flag or something.)

Curiously, the Tiresians – who arguably caused the nightmare by callously defoliating Optera – get far better treatment with the singular exception of the Masters and their immediate subordinates. Nobody on the Pioneer mission that we know of rounds up responsible (or at least knowledgeable) parties like Cabell for an inquest. Then again, we humans are egocentric. We tend to see differences as defects, and we sometimes will give the other guy a pass for terrible deeds if he looks like us.

This kind of thing, sadly, isn't without precedent in our own history. One of the many resources I encountered in my graduate research was a book by John Dower titled War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War, which makes a pretty damning assertion: that while World War Two in Europe was a war of ideologies, the war in the Pacific was a race war.

Mentioned early on is the myth of the Good German: that a German during the war wasn't necessarily to be considered a Nazi by default. As long as he demonstrated certain qualities in common with Allied forces, he could be a morally acceptable human being caught up in a terrible situation that turned him into a tool of the ideological evil at the heart of the conflict.

By contrast, there was no equivalent in the Pacific. You couldn't be a “Good Japanese” because everything about Japanese culture was portrayed as irredeemably evil. Propaganda films such as Know Your Enemy: Japan cast the Japanese as a brutal, primitive people bereft of individual thought – a bestial, inscrutable, alien race:

“Japanese were perceived as animals, reptiles, or insects (monkeys, baboons, gorillas, dogs, mice and rats, vipers and rattlesnakes, cockroaches, vermin – or, more indirectly, 'the Japanese herd' and the like) . . . . At the simplest level, they dehumanized the Japanese and enlarged the chasm between 'us' and 'them' to the point where it was perceived to be virtually unbridgeable.” (Dower 81-2)

Consider the Invid in that light. Much moreso than the other bad guys, who bear enough superficial resemblance to us to forgive some of their sins, the Invid are at first glance deliciously unlike us in every way. Simply put, they are easy to hate. They have all the hallmarks of a great Evil Other: they don't look like us or act like us, and even when they somehow do, it's just a facade. Cut them and they will still bleed green. Try to help them and they will turn on you. The only good slug, says conventional wisdom, is a dead one.

However, before the story can devolve completely into the usual proxy genocide, the unifying theme of Robotech kicks in, calling on the heroes and the audience to reject that thinking by exploding the assumptions upon which the old, destructive model depends. As we shall see, this uncanny glimpse in the mirror, rather than any military display of force, is the ultimate salvation of humankind.

Monsters and Mirrors: Master of Puppets

If you thought the last post ended on far too sappy a note, never fear. Today we're talking about weird old men in robes and the immoral things they do when handed too much power. (The men, not the robes.) The Robotech Masters come across as truly despicable villains, and while I'm sure there's someone out there who digs them (just like I'm sure there's a vigorous little contingent of Anatole Leonard devotees), I don't know many folks who remark, on a regular basis, “Golly, I sure wish three creepy old dudes would control my destiny.” Then again, it's the internet, so you never know.

But I digress.

What I'm looking at today is the way in which humanity relates to the Robotech Masters in the second season of Robotech and why these particular foes present a different kind of moral-ethical challenge to Dana and company than did the Zentraedi to the heroes of the SDF-1.

Just as with the First Robotech War, at the beginning of the Second Robotech War, the Army of the Southern Cross appears largely unaware of the nature of the foe. Remarks made suggest there is a strong tendency to believe that bioroid pilots aren't human, but that's the extent of it Whether this says more about characters' personal opinions on the humanity and personhood of extraterrestrial life forms than it reflects a force-wide ignorance of the enemy isn't clarified in the show itself.

Ultimately, though, the heroes seem shocked that the enemy is human-sized and generally humanoid in appearance, which suggests to me that they expected the Masters to be similar in stature to the Zentraedi. As we discussed last time, the Zentraedi were easy to initially dehumanize on account of their size. Lumbering giants bred for war don't make a great case for universal humanity at first glance. Human-sized foes make that process a good bit more difficult, though, and we see a lot of head-scratching and puzzling as soon as this revelation is made.

On top of this, the Masters have something else the Zentraedi never did: a contingent of civilians aboard their ships. For the Zentraedi, culture as a concept first had to be learned, then accepted. Only then was there any possibility of mutual understanding. But the mere presence of non-warriors in possession of some form of culture strongly suggests a universality or kinship with humans, and as a result, the gap between the Masters' civilians and the people of Earth is potentially easier to close. We see an excellent example of this in the interaction between Bowie and Musica. Both are musicians, and they find a commonality in this that eventually overcomes culture and language barriers of a most extreme sort.

What remains, then, that is truly alien about the Masters? As we discover, their social structure is remarkably unsettling. Clones bound to live and die as units of three, stratified into inescapable social castes, manipulated from “birth” to death by a cabal of techno-oligarchs who use their own people as tools in a cold, calculated quest to outrun the consequences of their actions – a sordid parade of interplanetary atrocities to make the misdeeds of our Tellurian tyrants pale in comparison.

I remember being particularly unsettled by the Masters when I first watched the series on television, yet I was curiously sympathetic toward the regular clones. The civilians – and even the bioroid pilots – weren't despicable. They weren't even driven, honorable foes from an alien way of life like the Zentraedi. They were just...unspeakably pitiable. Living tools, no more responsible for their own actions than the hammer or the rifle in the hand of the craftsman or soldier.

They were even more pathetic when viewed in light of the fact that the Tiresian civilization had not always been – and was not entirely, back on Tirol itself – such a perversion of science. Then the details regarding the defoliation of Optera, the rise of the Masters, and the pursuit of the Matrix became apparent, it struck me that they're no worse than human beings in that regard.

That, it struck my teenage brain at the time, was the creepiest thing of all.

As I got to thinking about it, the Masters were shockingly human in their ambition, the only difference being that they were fueled by godlike power and allowed to run wild. They were Huxley meets Megadeth. Who among our planet's current leaders, after all, wouldn't be tempted to take an awesome power source like Protoculture and pervert it to his or her own purposes? I need only reference nuclear energy to make clear our tendencies as a species to weaponize first and adapt to peaceful purposes later (and then only if it'll make a buck).

And as to the clones, how alluring indeed it would be if you could guarantee that every soldier would fight to the death without complaint, that every worker would placidly and fastidiously perform his or her function, that no policy would ever be questioned or opposed. Perfect, manufactured harmony in a world populated by perfect, manufactured people. I'm reminded, of course, of Brave New World and its neatly divided castes, the ever-present mind-numbing drugs, the coldly engineered alien sterility of the society, and the fact that everyone's grown in a vat – all here on Earth.

Seriously. Read it if you haven't. It's a mind trip.

What is truly frightening about the Robotech Masters, then, is our potential to become them. We can look at their corrupt, soulless society and all the horror it has sown in its wake, and we see an amplified reflection of humankind. Defensively, we draw ourselves up and declare that we're free, independent, and able to control our own destinies. We're informed and aware. We're better than that.

But are we?

On Dana and Bowie's Earth, it's clear that Leonard's Army of the Southern Cross and the United Earth Government are no more inherently moral than the Masters. They're simply outgunned by them and lack the technology to militarily level the playing field. Adding in the xenophobic tendencies McKinney attributes to the Masters-era government and military of Earth, it's clear that there's not much difference.

In many ways, then, the battle against the Masters is a battle against the Self and its darker tendencies. It is a struggle against the species we could become if allowed to continue unchecked on our current path. Given the power of Protoculture, human beings have begun to do with it what the Masters did. Without some perspective, we will continue down their path until we have become the monsters we see before us. Maybe, the Second Robotech War suggests in its tragedy, we're already too late.

Again, as with the war against the Zentraedi, the only solution, ultimately, is to reject conventional beliefs and risk losing a clear grip on the divide between us and them. Ideology becomes the enemy – xenophobia and science run amok – and it almost seems as though our heroes contend against the ideologues of Earth and Tirol equally for the fate of everyone caught hopelessly in the balance. Zor Prime, as others have pointed out, may or may not have his own motives on top of these, but he seems to perceive that the only way to stop the death-dance of the Masters and their accidental Terran proteges is to take away the prize for which they fight.

Fate, though, seems to have other plans in mind, and despite the best efforts of our heroes to stem the doom-inducing tide of war without end, they instead light the signal fires that will bring the next wave of invaders to Earth. It is perhaps the ultimate irony of the Masters Saga that there isn't even a Pyrrhic victory to be salvaged as in the Macross Saga. There are no victors, no intact states or powers or principalities of which we know. There are only survivors who have emerged from the destruction of all they know bereft even of the hope of a brighter tomorrow.

Whatever is left of Human, Tiresian, and (perhaps) Zentraedi society on Earth will have to learn to cling tightly to one another in the days ahead to transcend the doom that wings its way across the broad cosmos. There's no confidence here, only the plaintive cries of lost souls standing on the edge of the wilderness. Some may perceive they also stand upon the brink of a vast revelation (surely the Second Coming is at hand), but it is as-yet unformed, and it will take a deeper kind of suffering to draw it out.

Monsters and Mirrors: Giants in the Earth

Little is more primally terrifying to us than the cyclopean Other who means us ill. As children we cling to our parents or other guardians, hopeful that they will succor us and shield us from the great big world because they seem big enough to contend with life on even ground. Even as adults, when we stand up for ourselves against superior force, we feel that same cold bloom of fear in our guts, and we, clinging hard to our shields and swords, do everything we can to appear bigger, faster, stronger.

In the animal world, too, this reaction is common, as my two cats demonstrated just last week. Although they typically get along, the bigger one had apparently annoyed his diminutive sister beyond the limits of all feline patience, and the living room duly erupted into a maelstrom of claws, fur, spit, and profanity until the Other Half and I were able to separate them.

During the skirmish, our girl cat, who is maybe a third the size of our boy cat, puffed up and did her level best to convince the Garfield-like blob of orange fur on the receiving end of her claws that she was a giant hell-beast bent on the destruction of his immortal soul. While that didn't work (he just sat on her while she caterwauled in vain), it did make a point that any kid on the receiving end of a swirly in grade school knows: when you're the little guy size does matter.

Little surprise, then, that what proves most terrifying about the Visitor in both Macross and Robotech is that it carried a crew of giants – fifty-foot-tall humanoids bristling with an arsenal of unknown weapons. For humanity's dysfunctional extended family, which has heretofore conducted its collective affairs like Lord of the Flies, the Visitor is a jarring wakeup call, even if with rarest exception no one has any idea what the giants aboard the ship were even like.

The shocking size disparity is sufficient to trigger a fear response, as Rick Hunter's initial reaction makes clear. Ensconced in their ships, mecha, and battle armor, the towering Zentraedi are the living manifestation of every school bully nightmare, the reversal of every overwhelming military victory. That, however, is not the extent of the threat the Zentraedi pose. They are also faceless, able to function as a cipher for all the fears of all the Earthlings caught up in battle against them.

They are God's wrath, perhaps, or Satan's army. They are a terrible metaphor for technology, militarism, and progress gone too far. They are oppressors and enemies of freedom. They are thieves come to steal the birthright of Earth. Simply stated, as long as the Zentraedi remain alien and anonymous, they are whichever boogeyman collectively scares us the most.

For those who remain distant from their respective foes, this model is a boon, enabling them to keep up the good fight against the alien menace. Characters like Admiral Hayes have no qualms about shooting first and asking questions later or obliterating millions of Zentraedi lives with weapons like the Grand Cannon. Even our heroes on the SDF-1, prior to their first face-to-face contact, are shielded from thinking of the enemy as much more than hostile machinery operated by faceless monsters.

However, once the two forces make contact with one another, this mental armor begins to erode. While at first the enemy's culture is as shocking as his appearance, universals begin to rise to the surface. Even if the Zentraedi know nothing of music, love, or emotion, they know honor and duty – a commonality with the RDF. Even if humans cannot fathom a people devoid of the mainstays of human culture, they know all too well the shock of encountering an alien and overwhelming threat, and they know the feeling of compulsion that comes with feeling driven to do what they believe is right at all costs.

Those broad areas of shared perspective only grow in cases of extended personal contact such as Max and Miriya or the three spies experience. Eventually, it starts to become clear, whether through cultural exchange or scientific experimentation, that we have more in common than we have differences. Ironically, I believe that's the thing that inspires the most fear in characters like Dolza and Admiral Hayes – that the much-dreaded Them in our world view is closer to Us than we want to believe. Once we accept that, none of the more superficial traits really matter.

Ultimately, then, what is most terrifying in the Zentraedi is not their stature, their status as clones, or their role as soldiers. It is not even their inability to choose their own destiny as long as they remain bound to the Imperative. Rather, it is the possibility they represent in ourselves: the entire history and collective memory of the Zentraedi race is a lie, and they must serve that lie unto death. The Zentraedi reality, then, is every military man or woman's nightmare come true. To recognize them as equals is to acknowledge that their fate could become your own – or maybe already is.

So it is as well for the Zentraedi view of Earth. If Micronians can – and do – flourish in a society that violates the Imperative on a fundamental level, and if Zentraedi and humans are more alike than different at their core, the entire framework on which the Zentraedi race has been built, once a powerful raison d'être, is nothing more than a web of chains.

This is as true for the characters in conflict prior to “Force of Arms” and those who struggle through the Reconstruction and the Malcontent Uprisings. In the war itself, though, it's somehow easier to process the misunderstandings are their tragic consequences. It's once all of that is said, done, and dispensed with that we start feeling that continued fear and loathing of this magnitude is unwarranted. And on some level, we're right. It is unwarranted, since the heroes of the story have shown through their own actions that such differences can be overcome with mutual effort.

Loath as I am to typically quote her, Minmei has this one:

Blessed with strong hearts that beat as one, watch us soar,

And with love that conquers all we'll win this battle

It's not any weapon that can overcome human-Zentraedi differences, but deliberate unity and affection for one another. Co-dependence and the recognition of that co-dependence. Weapons can be used to eliminate enemies, but as Khyron, Leonard, and the Malcontents demonstrate, continued conflict will never eliminate War itself, nor will any other ism in either civilization's arsenal (sorry, Lynn Kyle). Only the willingness to meet face to face and acknowledge the Self in the Other, accepting whatever that may bring, wins the day.

That is, after all, the definition of love – and as Max reminds us, it's the greatest thing there is.

Monsters and Mirrors: Earth Vs. Them

One of the things that stood out to me when I was younger was the dearth of information available on the Global Civil War. It seemed hardly fair to relegate the near-annihilation of humankind at its own hands to a mere still-frame footnote dispensed with in the first few minutes of “Boobytrap” and never really addressed again. This was the war we were all raised to fear during the Cold War, after all: the final, suicidal showdown between Good and Evil.

Based on what little material there is, I've settled into thinking of the GCW as what would have happened if the Gulf War had escalated instead of ending, if post-Soviet Europe had devolved into chaos like Yugoslavia, and if China had assumed Russia's mantle after its inevitable collapse. In my mind, places like Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau become flashpoints that eventually mire the globe in a decade-long orgy of violence that dwarfs even the worst of World War Two.

This continues without any hope of resolution until one night in 1999, when the Visitor comes streaking out of the blackened sky like the love child of John Milton and Judas Priest.

Kind of weird to skip it, especially in 1985, at least from a conventional perspective. Considering the popularity of films like Mad Max (1980) and Terminator (1984), American pop culture at the time had an Intercontinental Ballistic Hard-on for nuclear annihilation and post-apocalyptic misery.

But that's the point: neither Robotech nor its genetic forebear Macross has much concern for the GCW because it underscores the division that has typified human history, while the narrative of brave international heroes contending for the sake of Earth against a horrifying external threat depends on thinking of all those multinational warriors as belonging to the same team. For that model to work, you can't linger overlong on the details of how they were all probably raised to hate each other. 

We get hints of the tensions that still exist in sources like McKinney, who sets up older characters like Edwards and Fokker as GCW rivals, but the majority of the characters demonstrate more of an identity as Earthlings, not as Americans or anything else...though appearances can be deceiving.

Because Robotech owes much to Macross in this sense, it's worth observing that there's also the inescapable matter of the Japanese attitude toward nuclear war. As the only people to ever be on the receiving end of an actual nuclear attack, they have a distinctly different take on the matter. America nervously ponders what Life After The Bomb looks like; Japan has lived it. Consequently, it's at once distasteful to focus on nuclear paranoia and a refreshing alternative to focus on an actual positive result of all-out war: the emergence of a unified Earth identity.

For the Japanese, forging a new identity out of chaos and external threat is nothing new, either. This focus on a sense of contrived unity is endemic to modern Japanese history and probably exists in Macross for that reason. Prior to Commodore Perry's “visit” to Tokyo in 1853, most Japanese thought of themselves in terms of regional identities. You were from Kyoto or from the Tohoku or from Satsuma Province, maybe, but the concept of being “Japanese” wasn't very widespread. Functionally, Japan was the world, and there was no reason to think of things outside that small sphere.

Well, that is until a fleet of giant-sized, smelly gaijin from God Knows Where rolled up into Tokyo Bay in black ships belching smoke and threatening to obliterate the place with terrible new weapons that made swords and matchlocks look like toys.

The intrusion of Westerners was a strong shock to Japan, which had sealed itself off to foreign trade for about 250 years following the rise of the Tokugawa Shogunate. Plenty has been said elsewhere about this period, so I won't belabor it here. It's sufficient to say that when the Americans came calling in the 19^th century, Japan was faced with threat of being carved up and exploited like the once-proud Qing Dynasty which had been bent over a barrel by the British after the Opium Wars – a threat they answered by choosing to become predators instead of prey.

After a coup in 1868 that saw the ineffectual Shogun deposed and the Emperor returned to direct ruling authority for the first time in about seven centuries, Japan set about becoming a modern nation. This required people to think of themselves as “Japanese” for pretty much the first time ever. It took considerable propaganda, education, and government policy to shift the people's identity from regional to national. One of the most effective tools in this process was the looming specter of the West, which had brought about the need for change to begin with.

On the one hand, contact with the West was a source of vast technological and scientific wealth. It could catapult Japan centuries ahead of its agrarian arrangement in a matter of years, and it could open up doors to things people had never even dreamed of. However, it also carried the threat of destruction – whether outright by military force or through the more insidious method of cultural shift. 

To combat both of these ills, policymakers advanced policies that adapted Western technology, models, and methods for Japanese purposes while promoting a new unified concept of fundamental "Japaneseness" that sat well with some and provoked riots, rebellion, and discontent in others. It was an extremely turbulent time in Japanese history, as reputable works on the Meiji Period (1868-1912) will reflect.

Nevertheless, by the death of Emperor Meiji, Japan had emerged from its tumultuous transformation as a nation, no longer just a loose bundle of fiefs and provinces. It had gone to blows with its old mentor China in 1895 and then, ten years later, with Russia, emerging victorious from both engagements and swaggering onto the world stage as a modern nation in its own right, the chaos of the early years slowly but surely receding into the distance.

For the Macross world, which was created by Japanese writers, this would be an easily accessible model for conceptualizing how the unification of Earth might take place. Caught up in its own troubles, the Earth, which does not think of itself as a unified whole, must suddenly come to grips with an alien threat more powerful than anyone can imagine. Warring factions are able to put their differences aside in the name of addressing a greater threat, and through considerable effort we have the emergence of a whole-planet identity for Earth about a decade later.

Still, as with the unification of Japan in the wake of Perry, the wary alliance of the Big Three during World War Two, and countless other such unlikely partnerships in history, this is no unification born from sudden spiritual enlightenment whether we're talking about Robotech or Macross. Quite the contrary: it is a marriage of convenience in the face of a greater mutual threat, nothing more than a military and political expedient.

The fact that this arrangement evolves from and depends upon potential conflict with an alien Other as embodied in the Visitor indicates that the old ways of thinking are very much in place. Humanity is no more enlightened post-GCW as a species. The Powers That Be simply agree that, whatever their differences, they're way less consequential than any differences the human race on the whole could have with fifty-foot-tall space invaders. So really, while the premise sounds hopeful, by 2009 humanity hasn't learned anything new – just as the audience hasn't been called on to think any differently yet.

It's in what follows with the Zentraedi that the inhabitants of the Robotech universe begin to have the hard lessons of reality applied to their collective skulls. As we shall see, discovering the “us” in the enemy throws a monkey-wrench into neatly conceived models of victory on all sides.

Monsters and Mirrors

Quite often, when I think of Robotech, I think of Kipling. This may be some vestigial function of my sordid past as an English major, but for what it's worth, I find it enlightening to pursue the connection. In particular, the bit of Kipling that comes to mind is “The White Man's Burden,” a poem written in response to the US annexation of the Philippines.

The act, which followed the Spanish-American War, was ostensibly undertaken because it was believed that the Filipino people, so recently liberated from the Spanish yoke, “were unfit for self-government” and that “there was nothing left for us [the United States] to do but to take them all...and uplift and civilize and Christianize them.”

I'm not here to debate the historical implications of the poem or the war, so I'll leave that to folks with infinitely superior qualifications. What I know as a recovering grad student, however, is that it strikes an interesting chord that, at least to me, has resonance in Robotech.

Specifically, it gets me to thinking about the relationships between the different species and races in the Robotech universe, especially where those relationships are informed by war. How we see ourselves and how we characterize “the enemy” and the people we are “liberating” can often tell us a lot about who we are – or who we think we are, at least.

The majority of my research for my Thesis (available upon request) was focused on this concept. I looked at depictions of the Self and the Other (them, those guys, the enemy, etc.) in Japanese popular culture during World War Two. While the nitty-gritty details of what I found are only relevant when discussing the Japanese source material for Robotech, more general patterns, if applied even to the mostly American content of Carl Macek's creation, prove enlightening indeed.

In a nutshell, what I've found seems to indicate that in the world in which Robotech occurs, strong cultural tendencies toward the old paternalistic, racist, and even colonialist modes of thinking that defined prior periods of our history still exist. Not only do they exist, but they're allowed to play out in such a way as to let the audience see the parade of folly on all sides.

That's one of the great strengths of Robotech as a series. I can't think of any other cartoon on TV in the 1980s that so consistently pulled back the veil of gung-ho idealism to reveal that doing things the way they've always been done – allowing history to repeat itself – is a death sentence. This is as true for the “good guys” as it is for the “bad guys.”

What tends to distinguish heroes from villains (or sometimes just heroes from everyone else) is a tendency to reject that binary thinking – us/them, inside/outside, human/alien, and so forth. That, however, is no easy task, and the characters struggle mightily with a reality that challenges everything they've ever known or been taught about themselves and their place in the universe.

Over the next couple of weeks, I will be dissecting this train of thought, beginning with my thoughts on the Global Civil War and advancing forward along the Robotech timeline to 2044 and the Haydonite threat. Along the way, I will make some forays into the Japanese source material and what I suspect motivates some of its content. That aspect of Robotech's “DNA” cannot be denied, and, I would argue, is a major part of what makes it so very different from the run-of-the-mill Battle of Monolithic Good and Evil children's narrative that came out of the Reagan era.

I hope you'll join me for the ride over the next handful of posts.

Mad Science

I started the week thinking that I would use this Sunday's post to begin a comparative look into the Zentraedi language used in the Japanese Macross franchise and the very different material presented in The Zentraedi Rebellion and various comic books. However, other obligations got the better of me.

On the other hand, I have been working on material that could, with the right flavor of TLC, grow into an academic journal article of some weight. In particular, I am exploring patterns that appear to surface in Robotech over and over again concerning identity and how we relate to society.

In order to check the validity of what I think I'm seeing, however, I need input. Essentially, I can't make any generalizations unless I get feedback from other fans in a format I can analyze.

So what does that mean for you?

Well, it means that if you're willing to volunteer 5-10 minutes of your day, you could lend a hand by filling out a quick survey here.

Per the various regulations governing such research, the survey is anonymous and completely voluntary. It involves no compensation and I don't collect any information that could be used to identify who you are.

Ideally, I'm looking for as large a survey population as possible, so if you're game and you know any other fans who might be interested in helping, I would be forever grateful if you'd pass the link along. Of course, field any questions you have here or via email as you prefer.

...and yes, next week I'll be back in the saddle with my cranky opinions again.