“That Was the Night I Died”: Reading Trauma Narratives
“That Was the Night I Died”: Reading Isao Takahata’s Grave of the Fireflies and Darren Aronofsky’s Mother! as Trauma Narratives
Isao Takahata’s Grave of the Fireflies and Darren Aronofsky’s Mother! might be two films that, at any rate, seem to have nothing in common. While the former engages with the theme of the destruction of World War II through the sorrowful fate that two siblings—Seita and Setsuko—must endure, the latter boasts a dramatic depiction of the lives of a couple that ends with the man figuratively consuming his wife’s energy, life, and heart. Grave of the Fireflies is a war-time tragic drama that investigates the social, economic, and psychological effects of the war on the Japanese people. Mother! is a film that refuses to be confined to any specific genres[1], however, Google Play Movies & TV, for the convenience of its users, categorizes it as horror/thriller. According to the director’s interview with the Time, the film is written to be “an allegory for climate change told from the point of view of Mother Earth” (Dockterman). A tear-jerking war story and an eco-friendly horror, then, seem to be a mismatch to study together. In this essay, however, I intend to draw a connection between these two films. My argument is that both Grave of the Fireflies and Mother! manifest the use of a specific form which Jean-Michel Ganteau and Susana Onega term “trauma narrative”. In the case of Grave of the Fireflies, its subject matter might already be self-explanatory, since it deals with the outcome of the war that the unfortunate Seita and Setsuko—the protagonists—must suffer. Still, the examination to find out how the story works structurally would help us understand the animation more as a trauma narrative. Having Grave of the Fireflies as an archetype of trauma narrative would also help us in the investigation of an unusual film like Mother!
- Reading Grave of the Fireflies and Mother! as Trauma Narratives
Before examining the films themselves as trauma narratives, the question of ‘what are trauma narratives’ and ‘why these two films can be labeled as trauma narratives’ should first be addressed.
Grave of the Fireflies is a collective trauma narrative that concerns how the destruction of war affects the lives of two particular children—as an embodiment of Japanese youth as a whole. The film is an adaptation of Akiyuki Nosaka’s autobiography. Nosaka is said to lose his father and two sisters during the war and “live much of his adult life as a haunted person with survivor’s guilt”, while the director, Isao Takahata, also personally experienced the horror of war as he is a survivor of American bombing (Jia). The animation then can be seen as an outlet for both men to make sense and come to terms with the war and its destructive force. Grave of the Fireflies seeks “to perform the alterity of trauma” through the character of Seita. He refuses to bow down to his aunt and chooses to move out and live with his sister alone. The war destroys his home, takes his family away, and severs the bond between him and his relatives. War-time inflation also rapidly drains all the money his parents left for him. Without any means to live legally, his tie with society is cut. Seita, then, has to resort to committing a crime by stealing food for his sister. It is this broken sense of belonging that the film aims to perform as the alterity of trauma. Through the experience of Seita, the audience clearly “open themselves to the violence of experience” and has to attend and respond emotionally to his tragic fate. This animation is also undeniably sad and it results in a lower number of enthusiastic audiences, as Takahata himself acknowledged:
It wasn’t my intention to give people the catharsis of crying. Yet, many people say “I cried so much,” and some even say “I cried so much, and I don’t want to see it again.” I tell them, “it would be more fun if you watch it one more time.” -laughs- (Toyama)
This is an example of “favoring risk taking over non-involvement”. In order to express the trauma truthfully, the film sometimes risks emotionally overwhelming the audience and alienating a certain group of potential watchers.
Trauma is widely associated with a personal or collective experience of something incredibly horrendous like “Nazi camps, nuclear weapons…rape, incest, and gender violence…” (9). Mother! as an allegory to climate change might not be seen as a trauma narrative, but as Ronald Granofsky pointed out, “the catastrophic environmental pollution” is also the main subject with which contemporary trauma literature concerns itself (9). Apart from the subject matter of the film, the film presents the story through the eyes of “Mother Earth herself” (Dockterman). The film frames Mother Earth as a traumatized victim in her relationship with her husband. According to the director’s interpretation, the husband is an embodiment of God who keeps bringing humans into the world—the house he shares with Mother Earth—and welcomes the destructive force that accompanies them (Thompson). To convey the trauma of Mother Earth, Aronofsky has to closely be in touch with strong feelings toward the subject matter:
“I’ve been very frustrated and filled with a certain amount of rage about how much inaction is happening on my other cause,” he said, “which is how do we treat our home, our world.” (Thompson)
This can be seen as his effort to engage in an ongoing dialog of this collective trauma, so that he, as a filmmaker, has done his part by pointing out the problem of global warming and allowing the audience to process Mother Earth’s trauma and eventually become active in this conversation.
In the film, Mother Earth is alienated from society—her house—by her husband and his guests. Her wants are unheard and her warnings unheeded. She loses her authority within her own home—the home that she builds and decorates with care. In the end, she loses her house and her life to the mayhem brought about by the people her husband insists on bringing in more and more. Through the character of Mother Earth, as well as her alienation and suffering, the film seeks to perform the alterity of trauma. Mother! with its graphic scene of violence and its absolute state of uncomfortableness permeating in every scene forces the audience to interact directly with ‘the violence of experience’. The way the director refuses to let his film be confined to one genre, the gory promotional poster with Jennifer Laurence’s heart cut out, and the cramped atmosphere throughout the length of the film are testaments to the fact that the film favors risk-taking over non-involvement.
- Life in a loop: The Nature of Trauma and its Reflection on the Structure of the Films
Marita Nadal and Monica Calvo point out the certain temporal structure of trauma which concerns “unfinishedness and repetition”: “The survivor experiences trauma “one moment too late,” s/he is forced to confront the primary shock over and over again” (3). They quote Dori Laub’s view on the topic that the traumatized subject has to “live in its [trauma’s] grip and unwittingly undergo its ceaseless repetitions and reenactments…The trauma is thus an event that has no beginning, no ending, no before, no during and no after…” (3-4). Derrida sees this “unfinishedness and repetition” as a ghost: “it remains always to come and to come back” (quoted in Nadal and Calvo 4).
Both Grave of the Fireflies and Mother! can be seen to utilize the unfinished and repeated nature of trauma. In Grave of the Fireflies, the story starts with the ghost of Seita greeting us: “September 21, 1945. That was the night I died.” His ghost takes the audience on a journey by a train to his past to learn of his life during the war. The story concludes with the scene of Seita and Setsuko’s reunion after their death. They sit on a hill looking at the cityscape of a modern Japanese city at night. The structure of the film reflects the nature of trauma itself in that Seita and Setsuko’s lives are shown to be in a circle, ceaselessly unfinished and forever repeated. The film begins with ghosts and takes us back at the end to the same ghosts. Moreover, these same ghosts of Seita and Setsuko stay the same, while the city changes completely. It is not anymore a war-torn Japan but a prosperous country full of skyscrapers that boast wealth and technological advances. Still, silently, on the hill, sit the ghosts of the past. Seita and Setsuko are forever there. They do not move on to the afterworld. Like trauma, they are bound to come back and remind us of their tragic lives again and again.
The theme of “unfinishedness and repetition” is clearer in Mother! The film begins and ends with the same scene although it is obvious that it is a new cycle with a different Mother Earth. By doing so, the film emphasizes the repeated traumatic experience of Mother Earth. She has to suffer man-made crises times and again. She has been disregarded in her own home and ravaged for mankind’s benefit every day. Their actions become more serious each day to point that Mother Earth can no longer endure, so she explodes and burns everything down to the ground. The endless cycle may also point to the hopelessness in the possibility of improvement in human nature. It also suggests that the trauma has not been properly acknowledged and addressed by the people responsible for the destruction of Mother Earth. Therefore, like the festering wound that Mother Earth sees in her house, the trauma is always there, omnipresent, and bound to come back again unless there was a considerable and constant effort to break the cycle.
- Romance as a Form of Trauma Expression
Why do Grave of the Fireflies and Mother! relay the topic of trauma through the relationship between two people—a brother and a sister in the former’s case and a married couple in the latter’s case. According to Ganteau and Onega, “the romance provides unparalleled mechanisms for the expression of the melancholic and elegiac drives of mourning” (5). The feeling of loss is very important in these two films. The climax in each story happens when the protagonist loses someone dear—in Grave of the Fireflies—or when the protagonist loses her life—in Mother!
In the climactic moment in Grave of the Fireflies, Seita loses his sister to famine. This changes the trajectory of his life because he solely lives for her. Throughout the story, Seita’s decision is always based on his sister’s happiness. He moves out of his aunt’s house because he wants her to be free. He steals because Setsuko is hungry and has nothing to eat. The melancholy of losing someone dear is the feeling that the film tries to relay to communicate this prevalent trauma that affects Japanese society during wartime. Although the story is not a romance per se, it is still a drama that concerns a certain kind of relationship, love, and loss.
In Mother!,by portraying the topic of climate change through the dynamics of a married couple, it emphasizes the role of ‘taker’ and ‘giver’. Mother Earth as the constant giver has always been the victim in this relationship. The climactic point of Mother! is when Mother Earth is unable to endure the struggles anymore and decides to destroy the house that she put her heart and soul into building. In her last moment, she continues her role as a giver by giving her heart, the source of her life, away. Thus, through the loss of Mother Earth, her victimhood is accentuated, and the audiences are given a new perspective of looking at this particular trauma: if we sympathize with her as a woman who has always been taken advantage of until her death, why not the earth?
Grave of the Fireflies and Mother! are different in almost every way. One is an animation. One is live-action. One deals with war. One deals with climate change. One prefers subtlety. One opts for gory and vivid details. However, both works place a collective trauma at their centers and beg the audiences to recognize the core of such trauma. Because it is something ‘collective’, the overcome of the said trauma cannot be done alone. Society must properly acknowledge and address the problems that cause the occurrence of trauma in the first so that Seita and Setsuko would escape the perpetual train journey leading to their grave and Mother Earth would be let go from the endless cycle of suffering. It is true when it is said that “film is a powerful medium”, however, if I may add, it would be ultimately ineffective, if not completely useless, if its message went unheard and unheeded.
Works Cited
Aronofsky, Darren, director. Mother!. Paramount Pictures Studios, 2017.
Dockterman, Eliana. “Mother Movie Meaning: Darren Aronofsky Interview.” Time, Time, 29 Apr. 2021, https://time.com/4951193/darren-aronofsky-mother-director/.
Ganteau, Jean-Michel and Susana Onega. “Introduction: Performing the Void: Liminality and the Ethics of Form in Contemporary Trauma Narratives”. Contemporary Trauma Narratives: Liminality and the Ethics of Form, edited by Jean-Michel Ganteau and Susana Onega, Routledge, 2014. pp. 1-18.
Jia, Oliver. “Grave of the Fireflies: Misunderstood Masterpiece.” Asia Times, 7 May 2021, https://asiatimes.com/2021/05/grave-of-the-fireflies-misunderstood-masterpiece/.
Nadal, Marita and Mónica Calvo. “Trauma and Literary Representation: An Introduction”. Trauma in Contemporary Literature: Narrative and Representation, edited by Marita Nadal and Mónica Calvo, Routledge, 2014. pp. 1-13.
Takahata, Isao, director. Grave of the Fireflies. Studio Ghibli, 1988.
Thompson, Anne. “’Mother!’: Darren Aronofsky Answers All Your Burning Questions about the Film’s Shocking Twists and Meanings.” IndieWire, IndieWire, 18 Sept. 2017, https://www.indiewire.com/2017/09/mother-darren-aronofsky-explains-mythology-allegory-bible-jennifer-lawrence-1201877848/.
Toyama, Ryoko. “Excerpts: Takahata on Grave of the Fireflies .” Nausicaa.Net, http://www.nausicaa.net/miyazaki/interviews/t_grave.html.
[1] The director, Darren Aronofsky stated this in his interview with IndieWire.
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