You Called for Me: Masculine Pain and Isolation in Akira (Patreon)

The first time we see Tetsuo (Nozomu Sasaki), the troubled teenage antagonist of Katsuhiro Otomo’s legendary 1988 animated sci-fi film Akira, he’s marveling at another boy’s motorcycle. We know it’s not the first time, either, because when daredevil punk Kaneda (Mitsuo Iwata) shows up to find Tetsuo bent over in the bike’s seat, the first thing out of his mouth is, “Is that you again, Tetsuo?”

That Tetsuo lives in the shadow of boys like Kaneda isn’t even subtext. Every seething look he throws at the other punks speaks volumes about the sense of inadequacy cultivated both by his own insecurity and their constant teasing. The rough camaraderie shared by the rest of the gang seems somehow to elude his grasp, held away by unspoken consensus. Nor is force enough to seize it, as even with his psychic powers awakened he remains an object of scorn and derision, unable to match Kaneda’s natural charisma and skill.

It’s not just the gap in ability between the two that stymies Tetsuo’s power trip, though. A lifelong victim of bullying, his emotional faculties are so damaged he has no idea why he’s in pain, much less what might relieve it. His one flicker of self-awareness comes when he asks his girlfriend Kaori (Yuriko Fuchizaki) to run away with him, but the moment is fragile, and circumstance and his own self-loathing conspire to crush it. What he wants, what he tries to pull out of the equally damaged and unloved Kaori, is a return to a place of safety and warmth.

The masculine urge to dominate is often used to drive stories, but popular art seldom digs into the psychological motivations underlying it. When, at the climax of Akira, Tetsuo’s out of control powers transform him into a gigantic infant like something out of a Clive Barker story, skinless and oozing, it’s a revelatory moment. What he wants, although he doesn’t realize it, is what so many men have wanted and lacked the words and self-awareness to reach for. A second infancy, loved and comforted without a need for introspection or communication. Indeed, Tetsuo’s fetal form takes what it requires even against his conscious will, his childlike Id engulfing the rest of his psyche even as his body engulfs his girlfriend and protector turned rival.

Tetsuo’s great power ensures that no one can comfort him or ease his pain, just as the frightening physical and emotional changes of puberty deprive young men of connection and intimacy. In the space of a few months it becomes a sign of sissyish weakness to rely on one’s mother, an unforgivable sin to hold another boy’s hand, a grave transgression to cry. At the same time, boys’ bodies become stronger, larger — unwieldy vessels for confusing new emotions. When his fetal form seizes hold of Kaori, perhaps seeking solace in her touch, it crushes her to death.

He has the power to take what he needs, but his lack of empathy and insight ensures that any attempt to do so will end in misery. As Kaori’s body cracks like an egg between the enveloping walls of his own shifting, warping mass, he pleads with Kaneda to help her, to help him. He’s a victim of this awful transformation, too. The key to understanding Akira’s incendiary thesis on the emotional mutilation undergone by young men lies somewhere in that seething hill of flesh.

It’s a far different look at troubled masculinity than the kind of narratives we see built around adult men, but the skilled violence employed by the Tony Sopranos of the world goes hand in hand with Tetsuo’s directionless fury. Both stem from the trauma of emotional cauterization during childhood, which then congeals during the stress of puberty into a dysfunctional and antisocial personality.

The espers, the film’s other juvenile psychics, are tellingly presented as wizened children, their physical maturation arrested by the heavy medication to which they’ve been subjected. We have no way of knowing exactly how old they really are, but their compound is a kind of armored nursery suited to children even younger than they appear. Tetsuo rejects their cloistered lives immediately, ripping the compound and its staff and guards apart in a psychic tantrum and even using his new powers to hurt and intimidate his would-be rescuer, Kaneda.

The prolonged childhood of the espers offers Tetsuo no relief from his turbulent inner life. It’s a prevention of the processes that will eventually lead to his self-destruction, not a cure. His fight against their psychically animated playthings, which ooze milk like thick streams of semen, is one of the movie’s most upsetting images, a rancid conjunction of infancy and adolescence embodied with particular virulence by the towering teddy bear which sprouts foot-long claws and fangs.

Too weak for Kaneda’s gang, too scornful and adult for the company of the espers, Tetsuo is alone no matter who’s around him. The film’s entire final action sequence — a haze of laser beams, motorbikes, and roiling meat — is, in a way, his struggle to find connection. His attempt to murder Kaneda, a symbolic destruction of his old life and place in the social hierarchy, leads directly into his engulfing Kaneda and Kaori, which in turns leads to the envelopment of nearly half the cast by the returned Akira, an unspeaking avatar of destruction and creation.

Pressed mind to mind with Tetsuo and the others within the void of Akira’s power, Kaneda is immersed in the childhoods of the five psychics. In this moment he revisits the foundation of his relationship to Tetsuo, an incident in which he stood up for the abandoned and bullied boy against a gang of older kids. Did this act of kindness make him the perverse focus of Tetsuo’s inferiority complex, a constant reminder to the younger boy of his own weakness? However badly those emotions curdled over the years, they remain bright enough to flare one final time between the two of them before Tetsuo is gone forever.

When Kaneda returns to the physical plane, it’s Kei’s voice that draws him safely back. “You called for me,” he says to her, standing in a flooded mirror to the black, desolate crater on which the film opens. And however much the exchange has devolved into a slew of memes over the years since the film’s release, Tetsuo and Kaneda spend their last moments together crying out for one another, each shouting the other’s name again and again as the world disintegrates around them, two boys clutching at the last frail line connecting them across the gulf of their inability to show each other love.