Memories in Magnetic Rose
Katsuhiro Otomo’s 1995 sci-fi anthology film Memories is divided into three stories. The second is a humorous subversion of classic Japanese kaiju film in which the military is unable to stop a humble office worker who is leaking a toxin from his skin (though he does not know it). The third depicts the day in the life of a family in a city whose sole purpose is to fire large cannons at an unseen enemy. With its steampunk Prussian aesthetic, it acts as an indictment against the boredom and drudgery of factory life. However, the first story, “Magnetic Rose,” is far more visually and sonically stunning than what follows, as well as the most thematically complex.
Based off of a manga of Otomo’s, directed by Kōji Morimoto, and with a screenplay by Satoshi Kon (still early in his career), the story follows a salvage ship deep in space (ironically named the Corona). After receiving a distress signal, the crew reluctantly flies off into a graveyard of ships. They are stunned to find a large space station. Two of the crew, Heintz and Miguel, fly into the vessel to investigate the signal. They are surprised to find a nineteenth century European decor, yet much of it is merely an illusion. The green field and blue sky out the window are a hologram, the dresses are decaying, the food is inedible. The pair discover the station belonged to Eva Friedel, an opera singer from the 2030s, whose lover, Carlos, was murdered.
Both Miguel and Heintz begin to see apparitions. Miguel sees the beautiful singer, eventually leading him to a piano, the source of the signal. Eva appears and Miguel is transported into a fantasy world where he has taken Carlos’s place. Meanwhile, Heintz discovers that Eva murdered Carlos, but soon begins to fall into hallucinations of his young daughter’s recent death. Eva’s ghost has been capturing men for decades to become her next Carlos, resulting in the wreckage surrounding the station. While Heintz is nearly convinced to stay, he breaks free from the trap, shooting Eva, exclaiming that “memories…memories aren’t an escape.” “Eva” was not in fact a ghost, but a robot, a part of the computer running the station, continuing its owner’s wishes.
Meanwhile, the Corona is being dragged towards the space station due to a magnetic field. Unable to save their crew mates and hoping to keep their own lives, the vessel is forced to fire an energy blast into the station. In an incredible visual experience, a holographic Eva sings opera while Heintz is launched into space and Corona crashes into the station. Images of the real Eva (now a corpse) with rose in hand, and spectral figures from her past fade as petals circle the screen revealing the station to be in the shape of a colossal rose. Heintz awakes in the void of space still alive, but with an uncertain fate.
Thematically, the film fits right in with many of the films the Kon would himself go onto direct, such as Perfect Blue and Paprika, engaging with the thin lines between reality, memory and fantasy, and the dangers that result from blurring them. All of the film’s characters are enveloped by their memories: Heintz witnessing the death of his daughter, Miguel with the women on Earth he hopes to return to, and Eva with her killing of Carolos. Even some of the dialogue in the opening sequence discusses how salvaging used to be a far more profitable profession. The computer system of the space station is also unable to escape from it’s own “memory”. It continuously repeats its programming in a vortex of death, sucking countless unsuspecting spacefarers into its loop.
Eva is mentioned to be a member of the Italian nobility and her station’s decor is that of a bygone era. From her class to her profession to her furniture, she is of another time, one which audiences today look back to as a cultural memory. The film is somewhat reminiscent of The Shining, with ghosts from the turn of the century possessing the living for their own ends. “Magnetic Rose” suggests that the danger in such nostalgia is that one is unable to see what is actually in front of you, what is real in the here and now. This is both applicable to the cultural (Eva’s aristocratic origins) and the personal (Heintz unable to move on past the loss of his daughter). Whether private or public, the past is the past. At some point you have to move on.
For a contemporary viewer, some of these thematic positions are undercut by the film itself. The 2030s of the film’s “past” were advanced enough to launch a station into space, filled with a supercomputer and holograms. The not so distant future that is our real 2030s are unlikely to contain such wonders. Instead we’ll have the latest iPhone. Afterall, the future has been canceled. These visions are no longer the grounded scenario of a possible future, but rather the wishful thinking of a past time. The 2090s of the film’s “present” also provide problems for a modern viewer. The ship’s crew is similar to that of Alien, blue collar heroes scraping a living from the darkness of space. Early on in the film, the captain of the small ship stands up to their corporate boss when he asks them to go collect more junk. Tired from their long journey they tell the executive no and move on. This kind of working class confidence is absent from our own world. Images of a unionized working class are only found in memories and old films.
In addition, the memories of Heintz, Miguel and Eva are nearly unreachable for us today. Loneliness and isolation have become an epidemic under neoliberalism and healthy relationships are often strained by the stresses of modern life. Having a child is a seemingly impossible goal for many. The idea of having an idyllic family like that shown in Heintz’s memory is unrealistic. Even the grey factory workers and artillery men in “Cannon Fodder” the third story in the anthology starts to look appealing at some point. Their lives are dull and empty, but at least they have stability. The brain melting flexibility of contemporary capitalism offers no such reward. It’s perhaps this reason that “Magnetic Rose” resonates less today than something like Cowboy Bebop, that depicts the inability to ever really escape from our lost desires. Yet with our present cultural obsession with nostalgia, with everything from Stranger Things to lo-fi hip hop, perhaps it’s time to move on from the past and make new memories. While aesthetics such as vaporwave and hauntology can act as temporary sustainers of lost desire, ultimately that needs to be transformed into real world politics. At some point we need to stop yearning for futures that never came and live in one. Our memories of what might have been can’t sustain us forever.
As Heintz said “memories aren’t an escape.”
