Living to Die: Spacial Observations
When stripped down to its essential aspects, End of Evangelion is fundamentally Freudian. Not only because the characters often exhibit defence mechanisms and have strange relationships with their fathers. Instead, the physical spaces—the EVAs, the dummy plug tank, etc—are often symmetrical to their owners, reflecting their instinctual desires.
Perhaps before the Third Impact, a melancholy blanket enveloped the Evangelion world and settled gently within space. Lonely wide shots linger over mangled electricity poles and empty hospital corridors bathed in milky light; fully occupied apartments somehow feel empty. The way Anno structures his world unlocks humanity’s death drive because Evangelion’s spatial-temporal constraints are already devoid of life. A regressive sort of space foreshadows the Third Impact. Space conditions man, not the other way around.
“Those instincts are therefore bound to give a deceptive appearance of being forces tending towards change and progress, whilst in fact they are merely seeking to reach an ancient goal by paths alike old and new.”
From the beginning we understand man desires to restore some previous way of life. NERV’s technology is mainly defensive, aimed at fortifying Tokyo-3, and SEELE wishes to merge humankind into a primordial life force. Even individual scientific experiments communicate the wish to regress.
Gendo, for instance, erects an LCL tank storing hundreds of Ayanami clones for his Dummy Plug System. But he engineers the first Ayanami and all subsequent clones from Yui’s salvaged DNA. He admires the current Rei (with or without clothes, mind you) for resembling Yui; before dying, he visualizes an imaginary Rei standing behind an imaginary Yui. And so Gendo’s seminal experiment largely “seeks to reach an ancient goal” through methods of “change and progress” because his true purpose in human cloning is to restore the dead. The close-ups involving Gendo and his tank—staring at it, pacing in front of it, mournfully contrasting his silhouette with its pulsing orange ambience—illustrate the psyche of a man ruled by instinctual desires far more eloquently than any scene in which Gendo explicitly concedes he misses Yui.
If the Dummy Plug tank represents Gendo’s pursuit of scientific breakthroughs, it paradoxically nudges Gendo closer to his Thanatos, or death drive. The more he visits his tank, the more he begins to feel his experiments are frivolous. To truly reunite with Yui, Gendo eventually concludes, he must die.
“The aim of all life is death.”
Gendo’s tank isn’t the only physical thing that encapsulates regressive urges, eventually foreshadowing death. Consider Shinji and Asuka’s EVAs. To climb inside their robots, the pilots must submerge themselves into a sea of LCL. The inside of the EVA thus appears dark and moist, yet strangely comfortable, with a hint of familiarity for the pilots. Anno coincidentally shows both pilots (in numerous cases) fantasizing images or conversations with their dead mothers. Perhaps entering the EVA is a sort of deterritorialization, then? Yes, but the pilots must ‘synchronize’ with their EVA while it wraps them into a warm, protective cocoon. Everything from the physical interior to the prerequisite of a bond between the EVA and its pilot mimics re-entry into the womb.
Despite the EVA’s futuristic design and its myriad of technological abilities, which may seemingly represent “change and progress,” its “ancient goal” endures: to reunite with Mother. It’s hardly surprising when Anno reveals the souls of Shinji and Asuka’s mothers are imbued into their respective EVAs. He already contrasts how safe and comfortable the pilots feel inside their robots compared to their naked anxiety in the outside world, like nascent lifeforms yearning for maternal protection.
The logical conclusion of encouraging womb regression, however, is that EVAs inadvertently strengthen their pilot’s Thanatos. To reunite with Mother, its users must die, travelling back to a time in which they did not exist. And the closest alternative to non-existence is the Third Impact, where EVA pilots can outgrow their physical frame and merge into a primordial ocean connected with everyone else.
Physical spaces in Evangelion serve a purpose beyond mere utility. They are reflections of their users, owners, and creators, revealing the guarded and unspoken. Far before the Third Impact, spatio-temporal constraints already reveal humanity’s path to doom: the desire to regress, and, underlying that, the desire to die.
