A meet-cute, in Hollywood parlance, is the moment of charming serendipity that two characters destined for romance first encounter one another. It can be playful, awkward, funny or sappy, but it’s the foundation for almost every mainstream love story.
The anime Durarara!! (DRRR) also bills itself as a love story, albeit a twisted one. The conflicts are driven by its odd cast of characters getting caught in pathologies of obsession and perversion. The meet-cute moments of DRRR are traumas. The child of a doctor is forced by his father to dissect an immortal Dullahan, the woman he becomes entranced with. A boy obsessed with a severed head attempts to kill his stalker who discovers his horrible secret. The leader of a youth gang meets a girl who seems to believe everything a shadowy info-broker tells her. All these characters eventually end up together in committed, if unusual, relationships.
The world of DRRR isn’t so different from our world. Set contemporaneously from 2010 to about 2013, it’s the urban jungle of Ikebukuro, Tokyo, enmeshed into our burgeoning cyberspace. Traditional folklore of cursed Japanese swords or Irish Dullahans are seamlessly blended into the mystery of urban legends and our cultural fears about just who we might be chatting with online. In fact, it’s not even these supernatural forces that we truly have to fear manipulating reality from the background – it’s the multinational corporations, the Yakuza, and those clever operators who are in their employ. These operators, by the way, are not exempt from the same perversions and obsession that everyone else suffers from. Much like our actually existing professionals, their drive to do their duty is the result of their own unattainable desires being abstracted into ever more convoluted and bizarre pathologies.
The main character of the show, Mikado Ryugamine, is an exemplar of the kind of boys that have come of age in the digital age – alienated from the mundane world around him he creates a double life for himself, first in cyberspace and then in the fantastical and dark underworld of his adopted city Ikebukuro. He is cautious, timid by nature, but cannot resist the urge to find a way to escape the boring reality of his lower-middle class existence. To do this, he creates, almost accidentally, a color-gang, but one that seemingly has no color. Based around a password protected forum, this gang is known as the Dollars, and is composed of the ordinary people of Ikebukuro. It’s the kind of virtual/IRL hybrid identity which has come to define mass movements that were born on social media, whether it be 4chan’s Anonymous or the masses involved in the Arab Spring.
Much like those groups which were the source of much cyber-optimism, the Dollars were first mobilized by Mikado to disrupt what he saw as a fundamental injustice – a big pharmaceutical company performing illegal human experiments and possibly covering up a murder. It’s this mobilization, the revelation of the power of ordinary people against this shadow realm and his role in making it happen, that fully hooks Mikado on his second life.
Mikado’s love is for his two friends, Masome and Anri. When the dark underworld begins to threaten them, his obsession becomes using the Dollars to fix this world; replacing it with a place where they can be together again, where they’ll be safe, and free to be their authentic selves. But the obsessive nature of this desire is exactly what prevents him from fulfilling it. He refuses to share the secret of his second life, for fear of disturbing the ideal world he has in mind, even as this secret begins to destroy his relationship with the both of them. In the end, his twisted love destroys the Dollars, and almost himself.
The lesson of DRRR is twofold.
The first side is about eros. There is no real romance without obsession and perversion. Love is, as philosopher Slavoj Zizek puts, a deeply evil, irrational and violent thing. A catastrophe rippling through people’s lives from the point of encounter – the traumatic meet-cute. This is a rare moral – Hollywood, and the romance industrial complex of dating apps, want us to believe we can have love, casual sex and flirting, without the traumas of falling in love.
The second is about agape. The idea that we cannot fix the world by creating a second, more weaponized virtual identity to act out our fantasy of authentic love for one another. The Dollars, much like Anonymous and the Arab Spring, appeared as though they had a potential to change things but quickly ran up against real power structures in society – the Adults who were prepared to put to bed such childish antics. Protest, and even revolution, finds itself caught in an obsession of the virtual utopia, a method of making everything right without actually changing our IRL relations. If Mikado and his friends came out with their secrets, it would have changed the thing they had – and this was the fear that none of them could overcome until it was too late.
Could present day radicals find a way out of this trap by understanding our obsession for the virtual utopia, as well as our, not unrelated, fear of obsession in romance? Maybe, maybe not – the real world is often not so easily analyzed with the neat symmetry of a psychodrama – there are material tendencies that often defy human intuition. As one of DRRR’s characters aptly notes, “This isn’t a scripted show written by some hack. You’re playing for real now!”
Nicolas D Villarreal 