22nd of April, 2020
This piece was originally published on the website RateYourMusic.com. The site only offers the ability to review music and film, but since all my work was already there and I had found friends and a very small audience there I decided to carry on posting my written work there.
Kamina's savant skill in motivating those around him produces sentences like these rather often in Gurren Lagann. Within the scope of the narrative the characters learn not to take their meaning literally, and just instead absorb the sentiment. What would it mean to take this literally though? Drilling upwards through the ground is a familiar aspect of tunnelling but it takes only the first episode for this familiarity to evaporate. Once Simon and Kamina leave their pit they have to start drilling upwards through the air, or more accurately, through nothing.
The scene where they first emerge from underground and take in the majesty of the surface is beautiful not because we can finally take in the majesty of the surface, but because the characters feel that it is beautiful. The scene symbolically embodies the wonder felt by the characters, and the moment manages to endear itself to us in this way, but it surely means something other to us than to the underground villagers. Gurren Lagann largely lacks an audience surrogate, and the buffer between our own expectations of how the characters will go on in the future to realise their cosmic endowment and their own blind struggle against the immediate forces constricting them in the present happily denies us the opportunity to overthink. Their essential nature is mythic simplicity. In fact, the panorama shot of their new frontier reveals the extent to which the setting of Gurren Lagann is physically empty. The surface is barren, and we get no sense that this is fertile ground to be explored or conquered. It isn't, and the blankness is important. The continent of dull sandstone upon which the campaign against the beastmen is played out is less a setting than it is a field or a medium.
The conceptual power of the spiral motif in Gurren Lagann is that it suggests that from an infinitesimally small point, motion and drive can produce infinity. Little by little, we advance with each turn. When this motif is coupled symbolically with the drill as a weapon we get a physical and visceral image of a tool boring through a surface, but dwelling on the abstract spiral shape without this symbolic coupling instead provokes the mind into extrapolation. Extrapolation from what we have is what drives the wonder in Gurren Lagann—the immediate impulse of resistance without the spirit diluting influence of pragmatism forms the objective ground from which we extrapolate the ultimate destiny of the characters. We yearn for the destruction of the Malthusian menace of Father Magin / Lordgenome / Rossiu / The Anti-Spiral, the impossible liberation from evil without concession and compromise. The path ahead is totally open and dreamy, and only the path behind has any concrete grounding in the logic of material law. Once Simon traverses the ground it becomes trivial and earthly—it reveals itself as simply more dirt that had to be scooped away. The path ahead always seems like heaven.
Gurren Lagann never tries to be more than human. When the scope is as large as we apes can possibly understand, the dizzying expansion has to break. You can't get to the infinite by thinking about the spiral spinning. Like a Zeno's paradox you have to skip ahead conceptually, over arbitrarily large regions of contiguous space or actually achievable action, straight to the end. When we eventually have to make that jump, signalled by the flashing of infinity, the blankness of the setting feels like a stage as, from out of the impossibly massive golem, steps a man who has done the impossible and need do nothing else.