Class resumes after seeing the film and taking a break
Marc: Okay, well, how much time do we have left?
Pam: About six minutes (class laughter)
Marc: I'll go fast. Rush, rush! Now that you've seen the movie, I want to tell you a bit about how the manga ends. I won't go all the way to the very end, I don't want this to be a complete spoiler, but I want to show you how Miyazaki worked out some of the themes and conflicts. As you know, you've only read the first quarter of the whole story. It took him almost 14 years to write the whole thing. And over the period, the story changed as Miyazaki himself changed. He started out as a leftist as young man (well before he started working on Nausicaa), a Marxist, someone who believed that, with the proper social conditions, humanity could achieve a perfectly peaceful and just society. Some of that idealism was still in him when he started the manga. But his opinions changed overthis time. Ironically, given the current war in Kosovo [remember this lecture was done just after the NATO attack began in March 1999], one of the major influences on him was watching the old Yugoslavian republic, which had supposedly transcended the racial and ethnic hatreds, descend back into sectarian fighting as the country disintegrated. So the story in the manga took on a darker and more morally ambiguous tone.
Of course that moral ambiguity was there in the manga from thebeginning. You can already tell how much more subtle and complex the characters and the dilemmas are in the manga compared to the movie. In the movie he had to force the story to an end and he had to streamline the plotline.) So he got rid of the Dorok Empire altogether, in the film it's just a fight between Torumeia and Pejitei with Nausicaa and her people caught in themiddle. And the sides are simple black and white in the movie: Nausicaa and nature = good; Kushana and technology = bad. (And he himself has complained that he wasn't happy with the oversimplified black and white conflict and the deux ex machina happy ending he finally came up with to resolve the story in the film.) But as the manga progresses the lines become very blurred until its reaches a very ambiguous and uncertain ending, You're left to decide whether the final actions and decisions of Nausicaa were right or not. And, as I mentioned last week, when you see Princess Mononoke later on, you'll again be seeing a very ambiguous and shades of grey presentation of the Nature vs. Human dilemma with no clear "good guys" or "bad guys" presented.
What I want to do here is quickly show you three segments from the latter parts of the manga story to show you how Miyazaki finally set up the concluding conflicts in the story. The first part I want to tell you about is what happened to the God Soldier. You just saw what happened in the movie where Kushana activated it and it fell apart, but in the manga, you only see it in its "larval" form there at Pejitei and then it disappears from the story. That is the last you see of it until the beginning of Perfect Collection vol. 4. Trying to give a quick synopsis of the manga is like trying to give a quick "recap" of War and Peace, but I'll try.
I'm leaving out huge chunks here. After PC 1, Nausicaa goes off to fight with Kushana, but sort of as a free agent. She goes off on her own and ends up visiting some of the Dorok regions and peoples, takes a young telepathic boy named Chikuku under her wing (a young boy who may or may not be the next greatreligious leader) and is ultimately captured by the Doroks again. This time she discovers that the Dorok priests are using secrets of genetic engineering they have gotten from the Crypts of Shuwa to create a deadly fungus which they use as a weapon of mass destruction and to engineer the diakaisho. You are also introduced to giant (and stupid) monster creatures of genetic engineering called "hedra" which are used as troops by the Doroks and are also part of the booty they have stolen from the Crypts of Shuwa. Nausicaa's purity of spirit converts one of the priests and he allows her to go free, then he goes back to oppose the Dorok Emperor. Come to find out, there are two brothers whoare Emperor, both using the secrets from the Crypts of Shuwa to rejunvinate themselves and prolong their lives. The older one (who has stayed in a suspended state while the younger one ruled and became old) takes over when theyounger one can no longer be rejuvinated. Nausicaa has gone deep into the forest to find the secrets of the Ohmu. Shesee the ohmu going off to die and tries to go die with them, but ends up in a coma when rescued by a young man named Selm. He is a member of the forest people, descendents of the worm handlers who have learned how to live inside the toxic forest in harmony with the insects and plants. While in the coma, her spirit goes off and (like Moses) sees the promised pure land. But during this she is attacked by the evil spirit of the just dead Dorok Emperor. She resists and manages to break the power of the spirit and, in an act of kindness, redeems it and shows it the way to the the pure lands of the afterlife. But Nausicaa decides her lot is still with the living and does not enter the pure lands of the afterlife. Once she is awake, Selm explains to her that his people have also discovered the secret of the toxic forests and ask her to come live with them in their peaceful existence. But Nausicaa also turn him down knowing that her destiny is back where the battles are still raging.
Confused? And that's the short version! She flies back to the thick of the battle where the new Dorok Emperor has captured Kushana and offered to make her his queen. As a "wedding present" of sorts he shows off his ultimate weapon: the larval God Soldier which is about to wake. Throughout the story, the control jewel (remember the jewel Rastel gave Nausicaa way back at the beginning and that she passed on the Asbel?) has been passed around and now, just as the God Soldier wakes up, guess who happens to be carrying it?
(English version here copyright by Viz Communications)
So here you see Nausicaa once again presented as a mother figure, only now as a mother to a monster. So the final quarter of the story deals with this irony, that Nausicaa, who has been striving to stop the warring and fighting suddenly has been given the keys to the single most destructive weaponever created: a God Soldier. So what does she do with the unwanted power? How does she stop it from its natural tendency to destroy everything?
After she does that, she uses takes it with her to the final showdownat the Crypt of Shuwa. This is the source of the evil and she wants to seal it and shut down its influence forever. But using the God Soldier has its price. It gives off a "light" that sickens Nausicaa and ultimately kills Teto. Again you see that the Soldier may be a metaphor for the power of nuclear weapons there. But on her journey, just before she reaches Shuwa, she encounters a beautiful garden where many of the cultural treasures and plants from before the Seven Days of Fire are kept. There is a Keeper there who guards these treasures and almost persuades Nausicaa to abandon her fight in order to live in this peaceful bubble. However, just as she's about to be swayed, Selm reappears telepathically to support her. Nausicaa then begins questioning the Keeper. Here is the section from that discussion where Nausicaa learns the truth about her worldview.
So that is the horrible truth behing everything in Nausicaa's world. She has committed herself to fighting on the side of the "natural" world, only to learn that there is no natural world left! The world of the Ohmu and the regenerating forests are as man-made as the God Soldiers and the technology which destroyed the world in the first place. And worse, all the humans alive in the world now are artificially modified to endure the polluted world. None of them will survive once the world has become cleansed again. After she has escaped from the garden and she is preparing for the final leg of her journey to Shuwa she thinks back to the old Holy Emperor going off with the Hendra on what he thought was a noble cause. Just then Kesh, one of the creatures from the garden (who looks a lot like Yakkul from Princess Mononoke), comes to her camp from the garden to return the clothing she left there:
Now I tread the same path with the wormhandlers and the God Warrior....For all I know, I may be going to destroy humanity. And that is exactly what she is going to do one way or another. When she reaches the Crypt, she discovers that within it are the seeds to bring about the rebirth of genetic humans from before the Seven Days of Fire who will be able to live in the newly cleaned world. Both both the old humans and the new humans cannot live together in the same world. Does she throw her lot in with the pre-Seven Days of Fire humans? After all they are more"natural" than she and her world is. But of course these are the descendents of the people who nearly destroyed the world in the first place. Should they even be given a second chance to destroy the world completely? Or does she throw her lot in with the "natural" world as it is now, with all the humans now living? Of course, if she destroys the old humans, it's just a matter of time before new humans like herself die out completely as the forest complete their work of cleansing the world. So this is the painful, no-win choice that she must make, which part of humanity is she going to condemn. Which "natural" world will she ultimately allow to survive?
I won't tell you what she finally does. It takes the last half of thelast PC volume to explain that, but I will tell you that it's a decision thathas had Miyazaki's fans going around in heated debates about it since the final installment was published in 1994.