Even though this is a comment on Death Note, I make mention of other series, all of them with spoilers. Those series are Bleach (anime, not comic, very brief spoiler of a filler episode) and Evangelion (nasty End of Evangelion film spoilers)
I probably should write this after re-watching the series (as I was planning to), but after the emotional effect that the end of Death Note had on me I will give it a few years, as I did with The End of Evangelion (7 years).
Probably the best way to describe what happens in the last third of Death Note is the concept of building up upon anticlimax and confounded expectations. We all knew L was likely to die in the series, but also that he would die with the series. The fact that Death Note outlives L, goes on and twists without his physical presence, is what I would call the initial anticlimax that we are not really meant to overcome. Another one, from a more personal perspective, is the fact that a devastatingly clever (as most of L) come back from a fake death is a hope that I had up until the very very end of the series. One of the reasons why L’s death shocked me but failed to shake me emotionally is because I was quite sure that it was an act. And here I might point out a potential weakness on the plot or another amazing risk taking by the writer that only works for some. Let’s recall the moment in which L hears for the first time the work Shinigami: he jumps off his chair, looks unusually shocked, and wonders about the very existence of Death Gods. At that moment, I speculated with the possibility of L having an undisclosed connection with the Shinigami World, as I suspected that by reacting like that L was playing an act. I didn’t think a lot about that until later.
But no: I was wrong: L was genuinely shocked at the idea of Shinigami existing, he was killed by one of them and it took me the rest of the series to accept it. And I couldn’t. I wonder if the writer didn’t have that in mind. I wonder if that wasn’t a fine stroke of evil genius: make things happen in a way in which you create not only expectations, but hopes…you wait for L to come back…until the end. Now I can say that even though I don’t think we were prepared for L’s death by the time it happened, we were prepared to see L’s painful preparation for his own death. When we see him standing along under the rain, we can see that even though he hasn’t given up, he is quite convinced that he wont make it. Shinigami’s powers go practically beyond human control and he found the idea of his efforts being neutralised by the whims or a capricious Shinigami very upsetting. That was the sadness of a guy that had prepared himself to die many times, but now for the first time he knew he would. Imminently. The scene that follows, with the very melancholic camaraderie between him and Light (plust L’s “farewell”) confirm the fact that L knew about Light’s plot and couldn’t find a way to neutralise it.
I think some of the magic of Death Note is that jumps from the completely unpredictable, to the obvious, making both redefine each other and swap places: let’s compare L’s completely unexpected revelation of his identity to Light to his farewell to Light and subsequent death. It’s so obvious that it’s unpredictable: we never expect L to be predictable to when he announces something obvious (like: I know I will die soon, goodbye) we don’t care about the obvious and start making speculations on what he would come up with next that will shock us: well….nothing. Convinced that Light was Kira and having Shinigami around observing him, he made himself extremely vulnerable by testing the validity of the 13 day rule. A character that surprised us all the way by doing what we never expected him to do, gives us the final shock by doing the obvious when we are all making speculations based on the expectations that he had made us build around him. We might even argue that he realised that he needed to die to catch Kira: as Near and Mello would take over with the advantage of knowing a lot of what he knows and being unknown to Kira. I am very convinced: doing the 13 day test at that time in that place with those people was suicide. Otherwise we can argue: why didn’t he take action sooner to protect his life right after he confirmed the existence of death notes and shinigami? He did think about it when he remembered Misa’s “look at each other’s notebooks”. There was no doubt he would be killed soon, and still decided to go on working next to Light and the Shinigami. Basically I believe that he didn’t do anything because he believed there was nothing he could do: the Shinigami had already read his name; he could only die in way that paved the way for his successors.
It’s amazing: so much happens after his death, so many new (and not very inspiring) characters come up, and it’s still all about L. I would really like to know the specifics of how this was written. There might have been money constraints that made the series shorter or longer than what it should have been. If not, the plot twist in Death Note is either a brave stroke of genius, or a case of naïve ambitious, or both. A way of manipulating the audience and to encourage it to get involved with the series by making it spot inconsistencies.
We can make a brief analogy. Something (very) vaguely like this happens in The End of Evangelion: the film never ends, as you are likely to spend years thinking about it, finding different explanations for the things that happen, different meaning to certain facts and symbols, etc, with renewed enthusiasm every time you re-watch it. Some people thought that too much stuff happens and by the time the black moon of Lilith is formed the audience has to idea what’s going on. Also, there was massive disappointment when the expected “all or nothing” vicious war involving EVA 1 never happened. We will have no active EVA 1 until the very very end of the story, when Shinji rejects the instrumentality project. And even then, its actions are symbolic. In Bleach, Kariya just disappears and we don’t know why or how.
In Death Note, the writer decided to kill the hero before it’s time for him to die. And makes you wait for him to come back. Someone that writes something like Death Note deserves our best interpretation of his acts. But for a bit lets jump off the anime field.
Feldman talked about pieces in which the “structure” (by that he meant the intended structure) starts when “the most important” has already happened, or “right before the end”. Also talks about hermetic structures that disappear without we realising in the course of the music. Cage would suggest “getting rid of the piece and make another one based on the random ordering of the piece’s sketches”. I wonder if L was meant to die at the end of the series but the writer decided to do something deliberately inconvenient and stupid and then deal with it, just as a mechanism to substantiate the complexity and elusiveness of the plot, to the extent to which he is deliberately confusing himself. All this speculations are nice to read about but don’t always make a work of art better.
Another possibility is that the series is incomplete without an input from the viewers. Borges describes (as he never writes the amazing epics, infinitely ramificated stories, or reincarnated novels he talks about: he imagines them, pretends they have been written by someone else and then comes up with a brief commentary on them) a detective story written by an invented writer which is narrated in first person: the detective. So there is no third person narrator which knows what the detective doesn’t know or needs to know, and uses that to empathise with the reader. The first person narrator, in this case, mentions details along the novel that he never picks up upon later on or he does but in an unpredictably fruitless way. The novel has a silly end: the detective fails to solve the case and then, coming back home, he notices that in the usually deserted park next to his house there is an old man and a young boy playing chess. He goes home. End of the novel. That unusual detail at the end is just a red hearing. The really important stuff are the train times that our hero as a routine wrote down in his notebook, but used in the wrong way when trying to use them as evidence. If the readers write down the train times and look for patterns, interpretations and possibilities, a few of them not only will solve the case but also will discover something else about the detective: fact that could be either terrifying or superfluous, things about him that he never even knew…about himself. Nice…but easier said than done. And now Borges tells us why he never realises this ideas. Borges wrote that he thought it was a laborious act of irrational laziness to write long books based on ideas or plots. You are better off just exposing the idea in the shape of an elegantly finished, intriguing, desolated commentary. He knew that he was good at having ideas, at analysing them, but also that he was far too full of Borges to be a good character maker. After witnessing the effects of the massive twist in death note, I guess we might have a strong feel for what he was talking about. Death Note is far from being a ultra concise 5 page-long commentary on an idea for a series: it is a full realisation. I wonder if the process of realisation of the idea (the re-incarnation of the idea) was long enough, or, human enough, to translate into human actions and feelings the intricacies of a plot. It is here when Evangelion stand a very long way ahead. An even more complicated and elusive plot, which never (NEVER) races ahead of character development. And yes, the audience need to have an input , and is encouraged to do so by being “physically” referenced in the film. Oh….Evangelion….
Mello is an example that the plot was at times ahead of character involvement in Death Note. He is an amazing character who never really kicked in. Also, I agree with Seth that he reconciliation with Near doesn’t really feel as such because their rivalry wasn’t properly established on the first place. However, this assumption is wrong. There is no need for reconciliation, and not need for details, as Seth mentioned, as they are not enemies. Mello hates Near: he resents him greatly as he is clearly the brightest and in many aspects L’s true successor. But Near doesn’t hate Mello: he feels sorry for him and might be slightly afraid of him. Mello’s cooperation could be a return favour after Near gave Mello the picture that would have made Mello more vulnerable. However, I do agree that it is a pity that we didn’t have more Mello to enjoy, fear, feel sorry for, hate, etc, before the decisive events kicked in. The comeback of Light’s high school girlfriend was a bit too “ready made”, she didn’t feel like a character, but like the description of a character. An amazing role, but a poor process incarnation into the living world of death note. After her issues with misa, I was expecting something awesome to happen. It didn’t. Misa had no input in the ultimate ending of the story, and she should have. There was, however, an attempt to make “lighter” characters acquire unexpected relevance: the “idiot” of the group ends up having the quickest and bravest reaction when he shot Light. But then, Light’s second ally, the obsessive, bullied and traumatised prosecutor, was another disappointment. His transformation from a respectable time table orientated worker to a vicious beast, as we see him at the end, feels forced and exaggerated. I believe that they might have realised that the plot was asphyxiating the series and tried to keep it alive by over-dramatising some crucial moments and exaggerating the features of some characters, like Light dad’s death, Mello’s personality problems, and Light’s reaction when being discovered and slow death, the prosecutor’s delirium, etc. Differently from Seth, I personally agree with the Shinigami’s involvement: he just sit down and enjoyed his show, then finished Light up once it was over. And he gave us a magnificent speech: he mentions that every time someone gets a death note that person gets nothing but misfortune; Light’s dad didn’t as he died thinking that Light wasn’t Kira, but even though he acquired the powers off the shinigami, he never used them. Even in a crucial situation, he refused to kill, and Mello brilliantly picked up on that. Light’s dad is my second favourite character in the series. And yes I cried when he died.
The whole previous (very incomplete and rushed) analysis is just to give the last third of death note a chance of being great on its own right as an intended outcome, rather than a series of amazing moments and the amazing end of an INCREDIBLE plot, spoiled to different extents by not as good (compared to the standards of the first two thirds) characterisation and dramatic continuity. (But, again, it could be that the writer intended someone like Mello, of whom we know near to nothing about, to have a decisive influence, and for him and Near never to really feel as equals to L, because he wants us never to forget about L – what makes memorable heroes eternal is the time they never lived so they need to die before their time)
What happens to Light at the end actually makes sense, the problem is that the way we got there was a bit inconsistent. We saw Light going mad a few times, from the very beginning, when his God-like vanity drove him out of his mind. So it is expectable for him to finally completely lose his mind as he did. In the last third of the series Light’s image, power and stability becomes weaker and weaker, whereas L’s presence feels stronger and stronger. I also believe that even though I agree that by the time I saw the penultimate chapter I was quite sure that things were not going to work for Light, the actual work behind Near’s strategy was impressive, so I don’t think Light’s downfall was that easy. But yes, if feels like it as we didn’t see much of what N was up to, just rhetoric. Giovanni is this amazingly skilful guy but we get to know how good he is when Near “explains” why the note book didn’t work. I don’t want a crucial moment like that to have to be “explained” to me in a way in which it creates arbitrary influences. Again, not enough dramatization of the plot and insufficient characterisation. Borges’ account of the “lazy laboriousness” of plot-dominated stories becomes more and more real as we approach the end of the series. But the writer might have had his own obscure reasons. For now, I am happy to be on the wrong regarding my criticism of the last third of the chapter. It would be arrogant to say I don’t like it when I just need to understand it (and feel it) more fully. Having said this, it is also true that the last 10 minutes are extremely powerful and violently touching. And, more specifically, the last 3 minutes, with the Shinigami’s final sentence, Light’s running away and death, L’s image vaguely seen, and the final shot showing the Shinigami sitting on the “top of the earth” on the way up to space, and some of the best incidental music that I’ve ever heard (the orchestral crescendo being the very last sound, finishing the series with the end of the soundtrack-not viceversa), makes it one of my favourite ends ever.
At the end, when you see the magnificent scene of Light’s death (50% credit to be given to the breathtakingly beautiful, clever and superbly judged soundtrack), I was crying. Now, about 17 hours later, I can very confidently say that I wasn’t crying Light: I was crying L. I had waited, as I mentioned before, for him to come back to me and make me jump with joy having faked his and Watari’s death just to keep himself away from Shinigami’s eyes. Light’s death confirmed L’s death. And that make me cry.
When it happened, L’s death was a shock. A shock which I could only suspect a few minutes before but refused to admit. It was handled in a very dramatic and painfully symbolic way (we see some the landmarks of L’s unique image die with him: a tea-spoon, his sitting posture, and his wide open round eyes – L eyes closed didn’t look like L at all - ), but still it happened too fast and in a relatively (compare to Light’s, or Chief Yagami’s death) unprepared manner that it really doesn’t let emotional reactions from the audience to properly kick in. Also, it is also worthwhile mentioning (and to argue the case that that kind of audience manipulation was 100% intended) that the chapter didn’t end with L’s death. Even though he’s not there, the last third of Death Note is all about L. Would we feel like this had L lasted until the end? I believe so, but this was a way to immortalise him not only as a hero but also as a martyr. Near’s looks are there to reinforce this in a symbolic way, with his more unambiguous ways and his death note finger puppets.
VIVA L! |
