Re: FMA 47 - Sealing the Homunculus

On Sun, 19 Feb 2006 21:20:00 GMT, elsie <lcubbison@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
If you post any spoilers for episodes following the one named in the
subject line, please indicate which episode is being spoiled and add
additional spoiler space.
Episode 47- Sealing the Homunculus

"Death is a possibility-of-Being which Dasein [existence, being-there]
itself has to take over in every case. With death, Dasein stands before
itself in its ownmost potentiality-for-Being. This is a possibility in which
the issue is nothing less than Dasein's Being-in-the-world. Its death is the
possibility of no-longer-being-able-to-be-there. If Dasein stands before
itself as this possibility, it has been fully assigned to its ownmost
potentiality-for-Being. When it stands before itself in this way, all its
relations to any other Dasein have been undone. This ownmost non-relational
possibility is at the same time the uttermost one." [According to the note,
"... in death Dasein is cut off from relations with others. The term has
accordingly been translated as 'non-relational', in the sense of 'devoid of
relationships'."]

Martin Heidegger -- Being and Time, 251(294)

Wow. Reminds me why theory courses always drove me nuts: half the
important theorists weren't natively Anglophone and the texts always
sounded as if they'd make a lot more sense in the original language
(Derrida's puns take up half a page's worth of footnoted explanations on a
good day). German is great for building hyphenated concepts, isn't it?
But as a more-text-than-theory person, I found myself rereading John Donne
after this episodes. He's a little too aggressively English Christian to
map exactly on to a Japanese text, but his sense of the paradoxes of human
existence and the way in which the mind undermines itself (not to mention
his awareness of the way Renaissance science was remaking perceptions of
the world) are quite apposite. Holy Sonnet 15 ("I am a little world made
cunningly") bounces in interesting ways off this episode up till the
theological turn in the closing couplet. Then there's this bit in one of
his poems for the Countess of Bedford:

O! to confess we know not what we should,
Is half excuse; we know not what we would.
Lightness depresseth us, emptiness fills;
We sweat and faint, yet still go down the hills.
As new philosophy arrests the sun,
And bids the passive earth about it run,
So we have dull'd our mind; it hath no ends;
Only the body's busy, and pretends.

The episode opens as Sloth approaches Al. "Now, come with me, my Alphonse,"
she says to him, her voice dripping with fake concern. "I know it must have
hurt, the doctor using you like that. But you're going to be fine. See, it's
just like when you were little."

Al flashes back to himself as a small child and having a boo-boo kissed by
his mother. "Mom?" he says uncertainly.

"Yes?" she responds.

Okay, between Aaron Dismuke's broken delivery and the dissonance between
Sloth's seductively motherly behavior and villainous intentions, this
scene just had the hair on the back of my neck standing up. All it needed
was for Sloth to kiss Al's broken armor and I would have been under the
couch.

<snippage>

After the opening, we find Sloth leading Al past Nina's tank.

Now this is a finely judged image. Sloth has Al by one finger. He's not
holding her hand, but allowing her to hold his -- i.e. he's consenting to
this situation, but not actively willing it. They're not walking side by
side, but as leader and follower, and there's a significant distance
between them -- Al's body is lagging well behind his hand and Sloth's is
well forward of hers. (This stands out even more on a second viewing,
after all of the forced body-contact you get later in the episode.) Her
control of him is tenuous; she holds him by one finger only, barely enough
to maintain the contact. He could shake her off in a second if he chose,
but he doesn't (yet) choose. She could be frog-marching him along or even
holding him closer, but she doesn't (yet) need or desire to do so. This
is a speaking three seconds worth of animation -- bravo to whoever thought
it up.

<snippage>

Hearing something, Al looks up suddenly, and he says, "Brother."

How does he guess?

Nearby, Ed uses a gun to repair his damaged hand. Al and Sloth enter. "I
should have known," Ed says angrily. "Step away, right now!"

I like the fact that he could be addressing either Al or Sloth with this
line.

<snippage>

"Memories," Lust replies, "of the people we were. They're subtle, but
they're real." She remembers her living self being cared for by her lover.
"It took me a long time to understand what I saw. Books say we shouldn't
have memories...." Now she remembers Lujohn, "or if we do, it's only the
emotions of the alchemist who made us that we see. " New she flashes back to
Scar in Lior. "But they're wrong. Those memories are mine. I was... I was an
Ishbalan woman, deep in love."

"No, you weren't," Ed replies.

"Sloth remembers, but she's let our master fool her into not caring about
her sons."

"She's not our mom!" Ed protests.

"Or maybe she really is, but she is not yet complete," Lust says as Al runs
over, picks up the box with Trisha's remains and throws it out the window.

Oh, dear. We really don't need to have an ontological argument at the
point, but here it comes, disrupting everything.

<snippage>

"She's our responsibility!"

"Which is why we're the ones who have to kill her!"

"No!"

"Damn it, Al!"

Ouch. So Ed wants to take responsibility for his mistake by denying its
personhood (or potential personhood) and wiping it out of existence, while
Al, less willing to dismiss Sloth's vestigial humanity (even though it's
only deceit and sham in relation to him), plants his heels and demands
another answer. But he doesn't have one himself and Ed doesn't want to
construct one. Ouch.

<snippage>

And we go to break. After the break, we find Lust slashing at Wrath. "I'll
get my way!" he yells. "I'm going to become him."

"And what exactly is the point of that?" she asks.

"What do you mean? It's the whole point of everything! Why should I exist
if I'm a creature like you?"

Theory courses do come back to haunt you, sigh. Wrath's behavior in this
episode seems to be crying out for Lacanian analysis, but I'll leave that
to Laurie once she's over her bronchitis.

<snippage>

Sloth has walked Al into an open building. Ed follows, calling for his
brother. They hear a scream, and Ed turns as Sloth uses Al to punch him.
"I'm sorry. It's not me," Al says as Sloth's face appears in the hole in the
armor. As a punch connects, Al's arm glows.

"We can't do this, Al," Ed says. "Even brushing against you could cause a
reaction."

It's taken me until this episode to realize how much of a physical
correlative the we-can't-touch thing is for the toll recent events have
taken on the brothers' relationship. Discovering the Philosopher's Stone
has quite literally driven them apart.

<snippage>

"Maybe you are right." We see flashbacks of Scar's brother's transmutation
as she says, "Where did I come from, and where will I go when I die? Maybe,
all this time, that is what I wanted." We see the boy who grew up to become
Scar. "The freedom to find out:"

Here I paused the tape, stood up, and applauded Laura Bailey. What a
wonderful scene on which to bow out of the series. The pathos of this
speech is beautifully rendered. (It also makes me think about Dante --
does her flight from death amount to a denial of her humanity?)

Wrath transforms the gunmetal on his arm to a blade and kills her. "Is that
all being human means?" he asks. "That you can die? Then why do I want to
become one so bad?" He turns his head to find Tucker standing with Nina.
"Well, can't you answer me? You're human, right?" Tucker turns and flees.

Boy, what a question. It's also fascinating to see Wrath acknowledging,
in this backhanded way, Tucker's continuing humanity. Wrath's doubling of
Ed is being carried out on many levels -- notice that now both of them
know how to kill a homunculus and neither is willing to grant the
homunculi the same ontological value as a human being. Tucker, though,
even though he's become a chimera and done some hideously inhumane things,
still gets counted on the other side of that line. And Tucker continues
to be a survivor, as y'all have been pointing out. I'm interested to see
what finally happens to him. Narrative justice has to catch up with him
at some point. Maybe Archer will reel him back in and he'll get his in
the coup that's developing.

"Mommy... that's right. That's a reason to live."

Ouch. Not a good fundamental principle of existence in an episode titled
"Sealing the Homunculus".

<snippage>

As Sloth lay in bed, she remembered Trisha's husband and sons. "I saw
children. There was a country house. And a man. Laundry on a line. We
were happy there, but also very sad. What does it mean?" she asked Dante.

It doesn't look like the anime is going to move in this direction, but
Sloth's relationship to Trisha could have been an interesting kink in her
relationship to Dante. Dante's obsession with Hohenheim would not brook a
rival calmly, I think. If I were inventing backstory here, I'd have Dante
make damn sure that Sloth's memories stayed focused on the boys.

Back in the present, steam rises from Al's armor as Sloth tries to melt the
ice. Her head emerges from Al's body as she pleads, "Please, Edward."

"Stop trying to play this dumb mom card! You don't even have memories."

"Yes, I do," she says bitterly. "What Lust said was true. Maybe it's just
your own feelings and wants that were etched into my being, but either way I
do have them."

"You're lying!" Ed yells. "Then why would you attack us?"

"To be free." She leaves Al's armor, and he falls down. "These memories are
the driving force in everything I do because they feel like chains. I
remember being a mother with endless devotion. Now I have none. It's a
fraudulent persona that's been forced on me. And I don't have the energy to
assume it. That's why I have to kill you. So I can prove this identity is
false because no real mother would kill her own sons. As long as you
children are alive, these memories will torment me, trying to make me into
this human. They're at war with my real self, and they could win. In time I
might even come to love you two. And how can I allow that? I should always
hate you for creating me."

Nngh. This speech just didn't work for me. I haven't been as impressed
with Lydia MacKay's interpretation of Sloth as I have with Laura Bailey's
Lust or <blanks briefly on the name> Ed Blaylock's (?) Pride. She doesn't
seem able to get the same kind of tension between emotions into her
delivery. This speech ought to build quietly through confusion and
vulnerability and self-loathing to a visceral disgust with the boys and
anger at the moment of her attack on Ed, and it doesn't. It's too much on
a single level. I'm looking forward to hearing the original voicework for
this scene.

"Brother, what are we supposed to do with her?" Al says through the tears
in his voice.

"It's like we both said. She's our responsibility." He claps to transform
his arm into blade and then leaps, cutting through her watery form. She
continues to whip at him.

"Mom!" Wrath cries at from the doorway. The sound of his voice causes her
to stop and turn just as Ed stabs her through the chest.

Paging Dr. Freud ... agh, would someone get all this psychoanalytical
theory out of my head? It's not like I ever really believed in it!

Sloth smiles a little. "The final proof is coming soon," she says, "when
you see how little I care." She gasps as she turns yellow. Blue sparks from
Ed's blade. She disperses into drops of water which rains down on the
others.

"Brother, what happened?" Al asks as Wrath cries out for his mother.

"I transmuted my auto-mail into sodium, just as it punctured her. The
chemical reaction with her body made her explode."

Personal story: I'm an English major, not a chemist, but I knew about
sodium and water because one of my high school science teachers once told
us about how he went about disposing of some past-their-sell-by date
cans of sodium from the school stores. With blatant disregard for
environmental regulations, he drove across a bridge and tried to overarm
them from the driver's side window across the car roof and into the river.
He failed, of course, so he had to stop by the side of the road, pick up
the cans, and lob them into the water. He was in a hurry (not wanting to
have to explain this to any passersby), so he didn't really look before he
threw. Then he watched the cans arc gracefully down to land within a yard
or so of a duck calmly bobbing in the current. Seconds later, the duck
was airborne with extreme prejudice and my science teacher was making
tracks away from the scene of the crime ...

"He fused himself with her. Combined homunculi," Al says, in case the
audience didn't get it.

And you don't even have to know much psychoanalytic theory to recognize
what's going on here as an extreme case of a common desire.

"You shouldn't be so impulsive," Ed tells Wrath. "Did you already forget
about taking those remains into your body? And now that you're part of her,
she can't even move." "Brothers" begins to play on the soundtrack. "And now
I can just take my time." Ed's voice is interesting here. It's calm but
tainted by an unidentifiable emotion. It's almost, but not quite, clinical.
"to recompose her into a different element."

I was reminded of Tucker, and your comment back a while about the flatness
of his affect. Here's Ed beginning to go the same way and for, perhaps,
similar reasons -- pursuing a goal in the teeth of an ethical prohibition.
Ed's insistence that homunculi aren't human is his moral fig leaf, but
with all Lust and Sloth have said in this episode he's got to know at this
point that a fig leaf is all it is. Dave's right: the compromises the
pursuit of alchemy causes everyone in this series to make with their
values and eventually their concepts of self isn't psychologically
healthy. I'm more and more worried that Ed and/or Al (or possibly both of
them) is headed for a sacrificial death out of a sense of atonement or the
inability to resolve all the contradictions between what events demand of
them and what they demand of themselves.

So we have three characters having an existential crisis and responding to
it in vastly different ways. Wrath responds to his desire for humanity by
fixating on Ed, who seems to have [had] everything Wrath ever wanted. Having
acquired Ed's arm and leg, he now wants Ed's entire existence. It's not very
logical, but then wrath and rationality rarely coincide.

Lust responds to her desire to be human in two ways, wanting to become fully
the person her maker intended her to be but also wanting to have the death
that woman was meant by fate to have. That's why I pulled up the quote from
Heidegger, in which it is death as the impossibility of beingness which
makes beingness possible, which defines being.

Sloth is seeking something else, from the same quotation, the non-relational
aspect of death. Death cuts off one's existence in relation to others. Sloth
interprets the idea to mean that in order for her to have that
non-relational condition, she must kill that to which the woman from whom
she was constructed was related. [That's an awkward sentence, but this is
existential philosophy after all.]

Like I said, it would be easier to construct in German. :-)

Rather than seeking death, she seeks the
separation from her family that Trisha Elric's death imposed on her in order
to stop being/remembering the life/existence that Trisha Elric lived.

Oooh, deep!

Truly, and fascinating.

The next episode is titled "Good-bye"? Excuse me while I make sure
there's enough room for me under that couch.

Peace,
Liz

--
Liz Broadwell (username-in-header at orphco dot org), Charter Orphan
-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-
"Surely it's about time for a truce between genre fiction and the
mainstream. We've had enough bickering by critics who were frightened at
an early age by Grimm's Fairy Tales and are still nervously resentful of
magic and monsters." -- David Langford, _SFX_ 134 (September 2005)
.

Relevant Pages

  • FMA 47 - Sealing the Homunculus
    ... Episode 47- Sealing the Homunculus ... With death, Dasein stands before ... The episode opens as Sloth approaches Al. "Now, come with me, my Alphonse," ... Ed runs outside where he finds Wrath picking up the box. ...
    (rec.arts.anime.misc)
  • Re: Tonights Avatar, "The Earth King" [Spoilers]
    ... They can't have Aang & Katara actually say it. ... I think you're reading things into that episode that the writers didn't ... I also propose that because of Iroh's death, Zuko will be ...
    (rec.arts.anime.misc)
  • ©® Tshoughks Space Adventures Episode 35
    ... A few words before the episode actually begins ... Death be not proud, ... "An Elegy on the Death of a Mad Dog" ... After all Negative Universe Hussein ...
    (rec.arts.poems)
  • Re: FMA 44 - Hohenheim of Light
    ... >> Episode 44 - Hohenheim of Light ... >> Sloth looks down, a little sad. ... :-) No wonder he and Hohenheim get along so well. ...
    (rec.arts.anime.misc)
  • Spoilers for failing 90210
    ... Death Comes Knocking on 90210's Door ... Silver actually makes her exit in next Tuesday night's episode ... Donna Martin, Welcome Home: Donna Martin returning to 90210 is by far ...
    (rec.arts.tv)
Loading