It took me awhile to finally get into FLCL, and only recently have I finished the acclaimed six part anime OVA that inspired the creators of the series Avatar: The Last Airbender. The first few viewing tries were unsuccessful, mostly because I couldn’t get past the ten minute mark without growing impatient or irritated. For some reason, whatever made the series so appealing to so many people I know was making me feel like I was developing a hernia in my brain.
Then one day, as if the hernia had decided to develop somewhere else besides my brain, I realized what made FLCL work: it’s a modern take on gnostic suspense, where narrative logic and consistency is suspended and imagery and aesthetics take a front row. This runs contrary to circumstantial suspense, where regardless of what is not happening at a given moment of time, you are confident something will happen soon after.
Take Alfred Hitchcock, the master of classic circumstantial suspense. Known for his mastery of the genre film, Hitchcock knew exactly what and how to keep his audience in a continuum of suspense, where at any given moment sequences of silence, calm or non-violence would be interrupted with something jarring. A perfect example would be the shower stabbing scene from Psycho:
For a quick scene dissection to further demonstrate how Hitchcock creates a (relatively short) circumstantial suspense in this scene, here are a few screenshots to tip us off:
As Marion enjoys her shower, Hitchcock positions her on the (lower) left of the screen…
Then slowly zooms in as it becomes apparent that someone has entered the bathroom without her knowledge (we know she’s oblivious because she doesn’t turn around when Mr. Bates casually sashays in)
The camera has zoomed in even more, and now Mr. Bates shadow against the curtain is even more evident. For the virgin viewers, we’re not sure what exactly he’s going to do (Hitchcock has been mindful to highly eroticize Marion’s shower scene to perhaps suggest Mr. Bates is interested in her sexually…)
… and then we have the famous curtain-drawing plus dagger holding silhouette, thus dispelling the possibility of sexy time and letting us viewers watch a full on murder assault, with the famous music to accompany it as well!
Another masterful example would be the introduction to Fritz Lang’s M, where we are introduced to the murder of a young girl with Lang’s ingenious use of diegetic sound, light/shadow, and mis-en-scene/props:
A classic monster example of circumstantial suspense is the all-knowing Jaws, where little miss skinny dipping gives us a preview of mister fishy-fish as she gets dragged to and fro:
For a example involving prehistoric reptiles (?) with fangs and claws, we have the rather remarkable scene in Jurassic Park where Tim and Lex do their best to elude the velociraptors:
So basically, circumstantial suspense is a classic component of the traditional narrative, where the audience’s expectations are suspended just enough to keep us on edge, either in fear, anxiety, or excitement.
On the other spectrum, gnostic suspense is a auteur’s and surrealist’s wet dream, and is a fantastic way to test your patience with cinema. A master of gnostic suspense is Jan Švankmajer, the Czech filmmaker who made the famous short film Jabberwocky in 1971 and (the insanely grating) Alice in 1988 (arguably, he’s influenced modern filmmakers like Tim Burton and Henry Selick, and maybe even Wes Anderson to an extent). For a taste of what I mean when I say “a fantastic way to test your patience with cinema,” try and get through these six minutes of Alice without wanting to shove a chair in your eye:
A less testing but equally surreal clip comes from Jabberwocky down below:
Here’s the experimental short film Photographs by the talented Krishna Shenoi, brought to my attention courtesy of Mr. Roger Ebert (and I dare to say we may be seeing more of him in the future of filmmaking)
Now if you’ve been brave and watched the above clips, you’re probably asking yourself why anyone would sit through more than a minute of a film like Alice or Jabberwocky. That’s where the magic of gnostic suspense comes in: unlike circumstantial suspense where you know something must happen at a given point in time, with gnostic suspense you’re left hanging, and the only thing keeping your attention is that small, minute hope that after all of the inanity, all of the surrealism there will be something, anything to clear up what is otherwise a clusterf**k that’s messing with your sense of (and grasp on) reality. The deux ex machina-like hope is really what makes gnostic suspense appealing and infuriating at the same time.
So when it comes to FLCL, a anime that goes out of bounds in self-reflexivity, pop cultural reference and mishmashing animation styles into a greater hodgepodge, you might see why I consider it a more modern employment of gnostic suspense, though to some meager sense there is a logical (???) narrative connecting each episode into an overall story (whether you call it logical narrative really depends on if you’re familiar with how over the top some anime can go, which I won’t even divulge into here). FLCL is really an artist’s and musician’s anime, a series that throws reasoning to the wind and asks us to simply enjoy every anime cliche amplified and caricatured tenfold with non-diegetic rock music blasting in the background, reminding us that hey – it’s just a cartoon. I recommend this short series for any animator stuck in a rut, or really for anyone who likes driving vespas with a bass strapped to their back. It’ll take some patience, but if you could sit through six minutes of Alice I guarantee you can sit through this entire series – and enjoyably so (though I can’t guarantee the same for Transformers 2, Skyline, or Fantastic Four 2).
Some clips from FLCL if you’re curious for a taste of what the mini-series has to offer:
If you’re interested in watching FLCL for free, visit the Funimation youtube page here.