Angel’s Egg (1985)
Jade and Alex review…
Watch the film here!
JADE
‘Keep precious things inside you, or you will lose them,’ the man tells the girl when he returns her egg to her. She quickly wraps it up under the folds of her dress again. With the egg wrapped under her dress she appears hugely pregnant. That image of a pregnant yet virginal girl brings to mind the biblical immaculate conception: there’s a Virgin Mary aspect to her character. A pregnant woman is herself an egg, for the baby she carries. When the girl holds up her round glass water bottle to the image of the city, she sees the city through the water–when she drinks in that water, she drinks in the entirety of the place. Her integration of the shadow world is for her as natural as quenching thirst. The girl holds disparate things together: she drinks in the shadows of her world but she emanates her own light. To contain so much at once, she seems to be the entire world.
ALEX
‘Since when have you been here?’ the man asks the girl. ‘As many days as there are bottles?’ She has no answer. I think this experience of purgatory is a naturally occurring feature of the human psyche. Adulthood’s commitments and the rhythms of stability often cast an uncanny Groundhog’s Day flavor over your experience, and the mind sees that it is trapped. In Angel’s Egg we see two different attitudes taken toward the purgatory experience. Of course, the one to model yourself after is the girl’s. Purgatory is the state of being imprisoned eternally and seeing only the projections of your own mind. The girl instructs us to meditate on a divine image (in her case a loving devotion for an egg), and then with all the time in the world to draw upon, slowly adjust all your reactions to better reflect the awareness of this divine image. Perhaps she only learned to line the halls of her house with beautiful water bottles after long centuries spent doing less creative things. Perhaps she only learned to be conscious, and not a blind and dumb shadow as the fishermen are, after deciding to focus on the egg.
JADE
These images of the girl wandering through her darkened city remind me of John Bauer’s illustrations of Princess Tuvstarr, in which the young long haired princess appears glowing in the shadows of a dark forest, under the fearsome stares of trolls. The Alice In Wonderland archetype: in the fearful place, she moves with a surprising grace. She does not freeze in fear; there is an innocent curiosity driving her onward. For the girl in Angel’s Egg, her action is primarily defined by her care for her egg and her routines, rituals really, which begin to appear as a kind of worship. Does her inner light arise from her care of the egg? When her egg is destroyed, she discovers that a multitude more precious things literally do reside within her. Care and love transcend the particular object then, and are revealed to be her elemental driving force.
ALEX
In a film made mostly wordless by its intense focus on the girl’s rituals, the man’s dialogue about Noah’s ark falls with a dramatic weight into the inscrutable and silent city. It’s a wise filmmaking move, then, for the man to phrase his story as speculation only. ‘Where did [Noah’s dove] land? Or maybe it weakened and was swallowed by the waters.’ ‘The bird I saw, I can’t even remember where or when, it was so long ago. Perhaps it was a dream. Maybe you and I and the fish exist only in the memory of a person who is gone.’ Exposition is just as necessary in an art film as in any other, but the genre of ‘art film’ invites the exposition to suggest, rather than declare, the shapes which the film is meant to take. This is exposition as an invitation to the audience to engage personally with the content of the movie, instead of its typical use, which shuts down all a film’s mystery with crystal-clear explanations. The man’s choice to destroy the egg is an example of this more common kind of exposition.
JADE
The man destroying the egg is no doubt a metaphor for Oshii’s own curiously penetrating mind, which destroyed his belief in Catholicism. In the context of the film, Oshii condemns this figure to wander purgatory eternally alone, trapped in a world of shadow monsters. But I disagree with this ending. Curiosity is a good thing; curiosity created this film! It is not some original sin to wonder what lies within. The man’s error was in his violence: breaking the egg open instead of discovering a way to aid its hatching. The girl has left behind a whole forest of eggs in which he may attempt to correct the error. First, he will have to integrate the girl: Now it is his turn to wander through the city drinking in the beauty and the darkness of the ruins. He must hold something precious within himself now: the memory of her. She will cause him to glow from within. And eventually he will discover another use for that cross he bears. As he glows from within, the red gem of his cross will begin to glow too, filling that dark world of water and shadow with brilliant red warmth, that same light which filled the sky to announce the arrival of the ark.
ALEX
You said in our video that the man’s cross is meant to nurture eggs to hatch in its branches. Using it to smash the girl’s egg is a distortion of his purpose, and he is punished for his failure by a continued purgatory past the film’s running time. As an exploration of Oshii’s post-religious mindset, projected into both the man and the girl, the man is more obviously aligned with the director himself. It’s a dark and hopeless picture. Art is alchemistic though, and it’s easy to see that in Ghost In The Shell Oshii is redeemed, in the form of The Puppetmaster. In Ghost In The Shell, the man (Puppetmaster) plays a crucial part in the woman’s development, not by violation this time, but by union and revelation. Openly and honestly articulating the man’s failure via Angel’s Egg enabled the alchemistic development of Oshii’s animus in Ghost In The Shell.