[COLUMN] The Dehumanizing Horror of Chainsaw Man | by Darren Mooney (Patreon)

Note: This piece contains spoilers for both the first season of Chainsaw Man and The Movie: Reze Arc. If you’re looking for a quick recommendation, I had a really good time with both.

Central to Chainsaw Man – The Movie: Reze Arc is the question of whether the young protagonist, Denji (Kikunosuke Toya, Ryan Colt Levy) has a heart.

This is perhaps a more literal question than one might expect. Denji is a young boy who was murdered by the yakuza and resurrected by the devil Pochita (Shiori Izawa, Lindsay Seidel) with the ability to physically transform himself into the eponymous Chainsaw Man. Denji is subsequently recruited by the Public Safety Organization and given an ultimatum. As long as he works for them, he will be allowed to live. So Denji is not entirely human.

Early in Reze Arc, Denji’s boss Makima (Tomori Kusunoki, Suzie Yeung) takes him on a movie marathon. The pair catch a number of films over the course of the day. It is in some ways a celebration of the extremely postmodern and pop literate sensibility of Chainsaw Man as a franchise, with opening titles of the anime series including shoutouts to Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, The Big Lebowski and Fight Club, while Reze Arc includes allusions to films like Taxi Driver and No Country for Old Men.

At the cinema, Denji notices the other patrons sharing an emotional reaction to the films in question. “Everyone’s laughing,” he opines at one point. “It wasn’t that funny!” Later, he observes of another film, unmoved, “Everyone’s crying.” Denji remains detached from the communal experience. Later, he asks Makima, “Makima, do you think I have a heart?” Reze Arc explores this idea thematically, through Denji’s romance with the eponymous coffee shop waitress (Reina Ueda, Alexis Tipton).

In some ways, this central thematic question that drives Reze Arc is an extension of an idea broached quite late in the first season of Chainsaw Man. There, following a spectacular and unexpected battle against a powerful foe, the Public Safety Organization retreats to lick its wounds. At the hospital, Denji observes his colleague, the usually reserved and professional Aki (Shogo Sakata, Reagan Murdock), breaking down in tears.

Their team had suffered the loss of their colleague Himeno (Mariya Ise, Katelyn Barr), who was Denji’s first kiss and perhaps his first friend. However, while Aki is devastated by this loss, Denji feels nothing. “Why do I have no tears at all?” he asks himself. He runs through his teammates, wondering how sad he’d feel if each team member dies. “I'll be happy as long as I have three meals a day, a bath and a good sleep. Did I lose not just my organ heart, but the heart of a human too?”

In some ways, Chainsaw Man is a classic coming of age story. It is about a teenage boy figuring out one of the most quintessential questions that every teenage boy has ever wrestled with: can this young man love another person and can he be loved by another person in turn? For all its demon-derived spectacle, Reze Arc can be read as a big operatic metaphor for the experience of early teenage love: passion, devotion, affection – and the inevitable violent and horrific dissolution.

However, Chainsaw Man is also more specifically a story about coming of age in this particular moment. It is a show about the dehumanizing and disaffecting qualities of this hyper-postmodern late capitalist world that is designed to rob individuals of agency, autonomy and actualization. It is about what it means for people to be seen as economic objects, as literal tools employed in service of some greater cause rather than human beings. He is a literal chainsaw man, after all.

Chainsaw Man is not subtle in this recurring preoccupation. In the first episode, Denji is introduced in debt to the yakuza. He had inherited his father’s debt, and so was working to pay it off. In the opening moments of the series, Denji rhymes off the various body parts that he has sold off to pay back some of the money: an eye, a kidney, a testicle. The human body becomes a commodity that can be leveraged and traded. This is a consistent motif across the show.

Denji is killed by the Zombie Devil (Kōki Miyata, Linda Young), which turns the greedy yakuza into mindless shuffling slaves – a familiar metaphor for capitalist consumption. Throughout Chainsaw Man, characters trade with their flesh. The characters are informed that devils and demons like to make trades. The show places a very heavy emphasis on “contracts”, and it is made explicit that these contracts are not abstract – they are binding and enforceable.

Himeno wears an eye patch because she traded her eye to the Future Devil (Hiroki, Landon McDonald). Aki has an ongoing relationship with the Fox Devil (Yūko Kaida, Natalie Van Sistine), which he seals by slicing off his own flesh. Their colleague Kobeni (Karin Takahashi, Bryn Apprill) explains her career choice by suggesting that the alternative was a more literal sort of flesh-based trade. “It was become a devil hunter or a sex worker!” she sobs.

Indeed, the women of Chainsaw Man often trade in their own bodies. Denji’s co-worker Power (Fairouz Ai, Sarah Wiedenheft) manipulates Denji into saving her cat by promising to let him touch her breasts. Makima gets Denji to take on a risky assignment by promising to do whatever he asks her to do. Himeno manipulates the younger recruits by promising to kiss those who impress her. There is a sense that body parts are just commodities to be bought and sold.

Throughout the show, Denji is consistently dehumanized. He is often described as and treated like an animal. “From now on, you're in my care, Denji,” Makima warns him. “I expect ‘yes’ or ‘woof’ for answers. I don't need a dog that says ‘no.’” In Reze Arc, when the eponymous waitress meets Denji, she observes, “Your face looks like my dog that passed away.” Denji is defined by his utility. He is literally a tool. On his chest, where his heart would be, there is simply a pull start.

The characters of Chainsaw are defined by their work. Denji doesn’t accept the job hunting devils for any personal motivation. He hunts monsters for the yakuza to clear his debt and for the Public Safety Organization to stay alive. “Is Public Safety, that place you work at now - is it really a good place?” Reze asks. Denji replies, “I get to eat three meals a day. And I get to sleep on a futon.” Reze counters, “But that’s the bare minimum for everyone in Japan. It’s something that’s normal for everyone.”

Aki’s new partner, the Angel Devil (Maaya Uchida, Casey Mongillo), spends most of the movie complaining about the fact that he is immortal and yet has to hold down a job. “I’d rather die than work,” he complains. “I want to die soon too. As long as I’m alive, I have to work hard. If I die, I won’t have to work hard anymore.” That is a rather bleak way of looking at the world, imagining that the only two possibilities are endless labor or the sweet release of oblivion.

It is really not that difficult to see why Chainsaw Man has resonated in the way that it does. It speaks to a generation of viewers who have grown up understanding that, like Denji, they will likely never know basic economic or social security. For young people today, home ownership, career satisfaction, marriage and even sex seem impossible. They are drowning in debt. While these themes are universal, these pressures are particularly acute in Japan, where child suicide rates are soaring.

It is telling that a lot of the concerns about these younger generations tend to focus on their economic contributions rather than on their happiness or fulfilment. These younger generations are constantly asked why they are not producing value or children. There is no real attempt to figure out what they want and how to provide for their needs. Instead, these conversations treat the members of this younger cohort as if they are not being as useful as they should be as economic units.

It feels somewhat pointed that the first shot of Reze Arc after the opening credits is the familiar red circle of the Japanese flag, flying above the headquarters of the Public Safety Organization. At the end of the movie, when Reze is executed by the Angel Demon at the behest of Makima, this shot is mirrored; a red circle of blood spills out under Reze. Chainsaw Man feels like a series very cynical about what Japan has to offer its youngest generation.

With all of this in mind, it’s no wonder that Denji is confused and stunted, that he has difficulty parsing his own feelings. Denji is in some ways trying to climb Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, a model of psychological aspiration towards self-actualization that argues that such growth is only possible where an individual’s physiological, personal and social needs are met. Those needs have never been met for Denji, and so he has never been able to become the person that he should be.

Chainsaw Man suggests that it is not simply capitalism that his holding Denji back. It is a broader structure of postmodernism, a world in which concepts and ideas are abstracted. Within the world of the show, this is reflected by the devils that embody specific concepts, but it is also reflected in the language of the show, where so much of the series is repeated and recycled imagery, suggesting a culture that is stuck in place.

The series is trapped on the cusp of “the End of History.” Japan is an economic powerhouse caught in the middle of the Cold War between the Soviet Union and the United States. It is suspended in the Japanese economic miracle right before the country’s lost decade. Midway through the first season, the team find themselves trapped in an unending perpetual hotel, a liminal space that never actually ends, simply doubling back over itself. It’s the eighth floor, reflecting the Japanese idea of ubiquity.

In such a world, building meaning is impossible. Denji is openly contemptuous of characters who harbor some deeper purpose for their work. “Everybody wants to trash-talk my plans,” he complains, cycling through a host of cliché motivations for other characters. “It's revenge this, protect my family that, and save a cat too! Blah, blah, blah! I guess your fancy dreams make you guys hot shit, huh?!” Denji is just an ordinary kid, but he can’t even dream of anything wanting more than the basics.

As much as Chainsaw Man is set in the middle of an ending Cold War, there doesn’t seem to be much ideological difference between any of the parties. It is eventually revealed that Reze is the Bomb Devil, a Russian operative. However, she has lived a very similar life to Denji even in an ostensibly communist country. She was dehumanised in many of the same ways that Denji was. In her dying moments, she confesses that she lied to Denji about going to school.

“There’s a fairy tale that mothers in the Soviet Union tell when scolding their children,” veteran operative Kishibe (Kenjiro Tsuda, Jason Douglas) tells Denji. “The story says that there’s a secret room in the military’s munitions storehouse. And the secret room is filled with orphans. The kids who live there don’t have any freedom. They’re not allowed to go outside. They’re treated like objects. And the military uses their bodies for experiments until they die.” That doesn’t sound too different to Denji’s life.

With all of that in mind, it makes sense that Makima and Denji should escape into the movies at the start of Reze Arc. When the world in which they live fails to provide emotional stimulation, cinema offers escapism. Although the first few movies have no real impact on the pair, the final film in the marathon does. It is the 1959 Soviet film Ballad of a Soldier. It is a film about war, but it is also a film about love: about love between individuals, and between the self and the larger community.

It is a film about soldiers who are allowed to be people as well rather than serving as tools of a larger purpose. It’s no wonder that it resonates with Denji in ways that he cannot articulate.