As always, the shadowplayers say it best.
How to make a Student Council Arc episode of Utena:
- Introduce a member of the council as your focus
- Make sure that character has a run-in with Utena
- Optional bitch-slap
- Challenge
- Grab the handle, close-up on the water hitting the rose ring
- Begin JA Seazer’s Absolute Destiny Apocalypse song
- Climb the stairs
- Transform Utena’s uniform
- Power of Dios, Utena for the win (usually)
Previous discussion on Utena in the comments saw some people decrying this pattern as monotonous and boring, while others declared it ritualistic and symbolic in itself. Me? My design schooling kicked in and said hey — Utena is in fact a “series.”
Yes, of course, you say. Utena is a series. A television series. But there is a design trick called a series as well; it’s a group of items that illustrate the design principle known as repetition. Repetition is exactly what it sounds like. But any series, in order to avoid monotony or maybe to express a point (if you have that in mind; when designing wallpaper it seems imprudent to try to make any kind of explicit statement), usually incorporates another design principle: variation. This, in turn, creates a third principle, emphasis. The changeup in the series is emphasized by virtue of its difference from the rest.
The variation or anomaly usually doesn’t come at the end, but then again straight design doesn’t have a temporal element. When elapsed time comes into play, obviously pulling the old switcheroo at the end is going to provide maximum impact. Utena’s student council arc puts the variation near the end but not at it — and brings back the familiar Utena victory to neatly cap off the arc.
So it’s a great design tool, extrapolated across 13 episodes as a motif. Lots of fun, too. But what about that lingering possibility that there is a representative purpose to the “ritualistic” repetition? Well, I’m not sure about ritual, but the options are there:
- End of the World seems to be some sort of puppet master, and it might require (or at least desire) a degree of religiosity in order to operate. The Council’s devotion to the dueling process is certainly quasi-religious, and until Touga subverts the process with his faux End of the World letter, they seem to hold the process in strict regard.
- Dios, too, might be looking for Catholic-level ritual worship in order to fully awaken — look at his name, even.
But regardless of the purpose of the repetition, the end result (for me) was to reinforce the futility of the Student Council’s quest for Revolution. For all of their dedicated faith in dueling, they can’t keep Utena from beating them and walking away with Dios’s power, and the Rose Bride.
I have nothing much to really offer in the way of interpretation; that was just how I viewed the arc, and part of what made it so satisfying to me. I’ll say it again: it’s clear to me that Utena is something. It’s the real deal, and it’s been a while since I saw something with quite this much going for it.
