52: Trigun

New York City: I will be at the IFC Center on Wednesday, May 17 for a screening of James Cameron's Aliens, followed by a conversation between me and critic Matt Zoller Seitz and a signing for my book Becoming Alien. Tickets are available here. Hope to see you at the movies!

I first got into Trigun spring of my senior year of college. I lived in a house with a handful of other people who'd grown up watching anime, and they were all more than happy to introduce me to a variety of shows from Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood to Kids on the Slope to Princess Jellyfish. I hadn't really grown up watching cartoons, let alone anime. But I was curious, and my housemates were more than willing to introduce me to the shows that they loved. I'm bad at watching TV now, but back then it was easy to squeeze in episodes of whatever I was obsessed with at the time in between homework assignments.

My housemates had wide-ranging taste, but I always gravitated toward character-driven science fiction. Trigun was an easy sell. It's set several hundred years in the future, with human beings trying to scrape out an existence in a hostile environment after their interstellar ships crash landed on a desert planet. The main character's an outlaw with wild blonde hair, a long red overcoat, the improbable name of Vash the Stampede, and an unmatched gunslinging ability. Unlike most other anime protagonists of his genre, he's also a raging pacifist.

I fell hard for the show because I liked its sci-fi/Western aesthetic, and because I loved the bundle of contradictions that it's made of. Vash is a gunslinger who'd much rather not fight; he's hypercompetent and determined, but he presents himself as a joyful buffoon. He looks hypermasculine–and the anime's opening titles would have you believe he's a badass all the time–but his appearance is belied every time he opens his mouth to either complain or to repeat his mantra of "love and peace." The dust and grime of the show's setting is cut by its colorful villains, who are wacky enough to put the B-side Batman lineup to shame.

Trigun became a comfort show at the end of my senior year. There was a shooting at my college the day before what would have been the last day of classes. The following weeks were numb and strange; we all grieved while we celebrated graduation. I passed my finals, finished watching the show, got an internship, became a bike commuter, moved to a different house with most of my housemates. I didn't allow myself to feel the full horror of the event until years later. It's been nine years and I'm still angry about it. Gun violence has only gotten worse since then.

I think I kept watching Trigun–and reading the manga–at the time because I didn't know what else to do. There's no pat lesson to be learned after violence shatters a community. It's disrespectful to try to shove a lesson into such an event. Trigun didn't teach me anything I didn't already know. It's a story about a contradictory character who keeps pushing through the pain because, despite all evidence to the contrary, he believes in the inherent goodness of humanity. The manga in particular grapples with the aftermath of violence; it doesn't give any easy answers, and the story itself seems baffled by the cheerfulness of its own protagonist. I suppose I needed something to muddle with, while I was muddling though myself. It's not satisfying. The contradiction never resolves itself. It's just there, and I can't stop thinking about it.

What I wrote:

I've been writing this newsletter for a full year now. Thank you all for reading!

What I talked about:

For Seeing & Believing podcast, Kevin and I reviewed Nida Manzoor's debut feature Polite Society. We both came away mixed on it, although we still ended up fighting about the reasons why the movie didn't fully cohere–a rare occasion for us!

What I'm reading:

Still procrastinating Infinite Jest (I swear I'll pick it up again this summer). In the meantime I'm making rapid inroads on the Trigun Maximum manga. I've been in a bit of a reading funk (see also: Infinite Jest), and working my way through an elaborately drawn graphic novel has helped with that, I think.