The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya - Introduction and Episode 1

This is part of a series of reddit posts I made for the 2021 r/anime rewatch.  The index for these can be found on the Other Essays page.

Episode 00 - Humor

Hey all, rewatcher here.  My comment got auto-deleted and I didn’t notice until now.  Lovely.

I love Haruhi.  Or, more specifically, I love S1 in Broadcast order (I’m one of those people you were warned about).  It leapt over long-time favorites to my #2 when I first saw it ~two years ago, and although I wrote a rather lengthy essay at the time there’s a lot more to say.  Consider it an insatiable need to explain, and so share, how utterly brilliant S1-Broadcast is in tying together its primary theme: What we observe is a product of our expectations, and those are generally in the service of our self-esteem.  As a result, we miss the obvious and devalue that which is genuinely remarkable to our own detriment.  I know this isn’t what many people get out of it, but I hope to offer reasons for thinking that’s what it’s after.

To start out, I also hope people will forgive me for this very long first post.  I’ve found that a lack of context makes just pointing out what Haruhi is doing and why unenlightening.  And unfortunately for all of us, this starts with the task of dissecting humor.

Defining humor in its entirety is hopeless, but a manageable chunk is to talk about the ingredient of “harmless surprise.”  This comedy begins when something happens which we do not expect, or two (or more) elements we would not normally associate are juxtaposed.  The result is surprise and reevaluation, but in a way that is not harmful.  Take for instance the lowest level: the slip-and-fall on a banana peel of slapstick.  Being sudden and out of cadence with continued walking it is surprising, the contrast being all the better if the person had just made a point of being dignified.  It is also strengthened if we are given a small indication it may be coming, as completely random surprise isn’t very satisfying; some link has to exist between what came before and the “twist.”  However, once they’ve fallen, shocking or not, they need to be relatively unharmed; if they remain on the ground with blood seeping from their skull, it is suddenly not funny.

Now, art can have humor in it as well through similar means.  A simple example is Picasso’s Bull’s Head.  A book I once read described it as a “visual pun” and I think that is quite apt: bringing together two things that you do not normally associate, whether it be different words with similar sounds or different materials with similar shapes, you find there is a small bit of consonance.  They surprise you by not being all that different in a strange way, emphasized by how little the “found art” bicycle parts had to be altered to immediately elicit the effect.  It is a joke.  Not a very deep one, as most puns are only worth a chuckle, but it still gets to be classified as humor.

Now jokes in art become far more complicated than this, and they do this by relying on knowledge of what came before them.  Homage, because it lacks any real surprise or contrast, isn’t comedy, but parody, with its mockingly exaggerated depiction of the original, is.  People generally recognize parody.  But Haruhi isn’t parody, which is why I’m having to do so much explanation to avoid misunderstanding  However, like puns, parody is usually pretty basic; you can only exaggerate so much before it becomes unwatchable and the message is limited to undercutting what is being mocked.

An example of a more sophisticated art joke is a villa I once read about (I apologize, I’ve lost the reference) full of “architectural jokes.”  How does an architectural joke even work?  Well, when Classical (Greco-Roman) architecture began columns were, of course, the weight-bearing mechanisms.  They had to be in certain places because the physics of lintel-and-post construction demanded it.  In time, however, improvements in engineering removed the necessity of every building looking like the Parthenon… yet people continued to put pillars (vertical elements which do not necessarily have to hold anything up) and pilasters (pillars sunk into the wall with a purely aesthetic function) in the same locations as columns due to convention.  An architectural joke in this context is one that knows where a pilaster would be commonly found and then puts something else there, like a free-standing column in a specially-prepared alcove so it stands out underneath a spot of the wall that obviously doesn’t need additional support.  That’s absurd… but a type of comedy because there was an expectation, it was defied, but it was defied in a way that was harmless (the building isn’t going to be condemned due to unsoundness) but related to the nature of the convention it is defying (pure randomness is weak/non-comedy).  Obviously you don’t need a real column there, what with all the effort it took to insert it, so why did you feel that this “fake column” was supposed to be there?  The joke isn’t just funny, it taught you something.

“...that’s not very funny, though.”   

Yes, but that’s because you don’t “get” it.  I don’t mean that in a condescending way (I don’t “get” it either), but to point out the nature of humor: you can’t just have it explained to you, you have to have internalized the ideas enough that you can perceive the expectation and the surprise simultaneously.  To find the villa funny you need to be intimate with Classical architecture to the point that it no longer requires you to reflect on your knowledge before coming to a conclusion.  Which now, with all this, I can actually get back to Haruhi spoilers (sorry first-timers if you read this far).

Haruhi S1 in Broadcast order is a structural comedy about the viewer.  You have to be able to catch yourself in the very moment of reacting to the show.  This is why Haruhi thrives on the tropes of anime; not because it is parodying or criticizing them, but because it is relying on the viewer to be conversant in them… so much so that our reactions are predictable and inflexible.  That’s the first part of the joke, and also the theme it is trying to teach us: we think in categories that we don’t even know we have, and they are so ingrained that we don’t try/can’t get outside of them.  It is a rather dire aspect of life, actually.  You wouldn’t expect humor to be the tool of choice to tackle such a tough topic.  But as has been observed, great comedians are both intelligent and serious people.  Haruhi is absurdly funny.  And it is dead serious.

Episode 01 - Where did that money come from?

Mikuru runs past the camera five times, crossing the same background repeatedly as she becomes progressively more tired.  On the fifth pass, the payment she received for advertising in the market appears between her breasts.

The first thing we instinctively ask ourselves when we watch a show is, “What kind of anime is this?”  Is it a drama?  A comedy?  A romance?  We want to categorize it so we can set our expectations, and we do this by looking for the indications that we know must exist.  We also know that no matter what type of show we’re watching, the first episode has to fulfill certain functions: introduce us to the characters, establish the setting, and give us enough to entice us to watch the next episode.  The Adventures of Asahina Mikuru is a Super Ultra Miracle Excellent Trick Introduction: it does none of this and all of it at once.  And more.

For a first-time viewer, it is disorienting and tantalizing.  Adventures is possibly the most unique opening episode in anime and it is impossible to have expected anything like it.  More to the point, it is impossible to “read” it in the normal way.  There is no genre that opens with a twenty-two minute bad home movie.  It can’t be a drama because it’s too goofy, but it's also just a bit off for what a comedy usually does.  And forget romance; that whole part is obviously a farce.  The fact that it just keeps going (we’re only halfway?!?) only to end without any payoff seems like a prank rather than a joke

Now, of course as rewatchers know, it becomes clear that Adventures tells us a great deal about the characters and supernatural setting.  The hints were everywhere and in retrospect it was funny in how clearly it explained things.  Indeed, after the first reveal that Nagato is an alien, we can’t help but look back at it reflexively to try and piece together and anticipate the rest of the series (Haruhi is counting on it), although there is just enough random noise that we keep begging for more hints (Haruhi is counting on this too)

But, and I feel a little frustrated with myself because I never feel like my writing captures the real brilliance, this isn’t what makes Haruhi, Haruhi.  Tricking ignorant first-time viewers once is a weak joke.  Showing repeat viewers that there was hidden information here is more clever.  Adventures, and all of Haruhi, takes it one step further: the first episode will show you its trick, then watch you fall for it for the rest of the series, demonstrating you are easiest to mislead when you are most confident you have the answer.

To start, we are told in no uncertain terms: there are discrepancies here.  You can use these discrepancies to create a narrative.  And you do.  You create a narrative of a bad home video.  You do so so swiftly and so effortlessly that you don’t even reflect on it, thinking that is the given and the genre is the question.  Therefore, you don’t look for meaning in the scene jumps because they’re evidence of amateurish editing.  It doesn’t make you think anything is unusual when Mikuru talks to somebody behind the camera, because you know the rest of the gang must be standing nearby.  And it’s not even worth pausing to wonder why the actors suddenly change their behavior, because that’s just breaking character.  None of this is surprising because we know we are in the universe of bad home movies.

Yet, and this is how Haruhi shows wannabes how to really break the fourth wall, if you pay attention you will realize that you also know this is an anime episode and not a bad home video.  In fact, it even tosses in demonstrations to that point: it has an OP (that is 1:30 long no less), an eye catch in the middle, a few commercial breaks, and a narrator who only comments on what is happening in front of the camera.  Everything is where it should be.  As such, this isn’t a poor-quality production at all; if anything it took superlative skill to create this facsimile of a bad home video that is also full of reminders that it is an episode.  It even winks at us the whole time with its almost-ostentatious display of skill in accomplishing both at once

And the best part is, we won’t notice.  We were just shown the trick, but we will nonetheless go into the rest of the series thinking we’re “getting it” as we try to figure out references and plot puzzles.  It can tell us, in the first few seconds no less, not to worry about the setting… and we’ll ignore it.  It can draw our attention to the fact we can learn much from the discrepancies… and we’ll ignore it.  We’ll treat jumps in the episode-order narrative as uninformative pranks, take no note when the cast members stare out of the screen and address us, and disregard “out of character” behavior because of our familiarity with the tropes.  And just like Kyon in Adventures, we will confuse ourselves because we stubbornly, and unsuccessfully, try to interpret all this at one level (“Why isn’t this movie plot coherent?  I’m so smart for seeing through it.”) when there are numerous signs we ought to look at it from another (“It’s incoherent precisely so you’ll come to the conclusion it’s a bad home video that you’re smart for seeing through.  Your failures should have warned you that you were doing it wrong.”).  The joke’s on us: we’ll accept the most obvious suggestions and obediently alter our expectations.  This story isn’t just going on in front of us; we’re part of the act!

Which brings us back to Mikuru running.  Seeing her cross the screen repeatedly with the same backdrop we know what’s up: this is a cheap way of showing us that she is running far when in truth she’s being forced to jog past the same point again and again to give that illusion.  We bite on the easy answer and think we’re clever for seeing through the ineptitude.  But after the fourth pass the slip of money appears between her breasts, a location that the predominantly male audience will not fail to overlook.  Haruhi drew our eyes there on purpose.  Yet we just saw in the previous scene she received that payment for her services standing around in the market: the fifth lap cannot immediately follow the fourth one... and we won’t even bat an eye.  We have the framework (it’s a bad home movie) and the easy evidence (the background was the same and she was getting more tired) and anything that doesn’t fit with those will be ignored.

So at the end of the episode, when we leave Suzumiya’s movie and enter the “real” world of the anime, we seamlessly allow our expectations to be changed again thinking the joke is finished.  But the projector is set too low, the credits flowing across the table a flawless recreation of ineptitude.  This isn’t over yet.  Haruhi has placed columns in the location of columns, told us where to look, then watched as we spent the whole episode superciliously examining decorative pilasters.  And to prove the point, when Suzumiya tells you-the-viewer that Haruhi-the-anime is really well done, guess what?  You don’t believe her.

Right, Kyon?

Favorite details: 

• At 6:50 Nagato holds up her wand while Kyon explains what it is.  Our attention is directed to the cheapness of the prop… all while Nagato flawlessly blocks every pellet fired at her in a way that should hint she’s genuinely more than she appears.  It’s like a preview of the baseball gag (which we also won’t take seriously).

• At 9:05 Mikuru pushes Koizumi out of the way so he isn’t hit by Nagato’s beam.  Then the shot jumps to Mikuru running into a pole… which shouldn’t be possible because there was no pole behind Koizumi and he would have been in the way even if there were.  Like the money, we bought a temporal sequence of events that can’t have occurred  Then at about 9:35 a car begins to drive off behind Nagato.  The shot cuts to Koizumi and Mikuru (who is holding her eye to emphasize the pole scene just occurred) and you can still hear it driving away, reinforcing that they follow each other, but when the view again returns to Nagato walking away you can see people where the car should have just driven.

• The zoom in on Nagato’s face followed by Mikuru’s at 10:46 always gets me - it’s an action anime reaction face, where the expressions of the fighters are shown in close up to emphasize their intensity.  

• Speaking of the camera, there are great moments when the “zombies” and Koizumi are walking on that reservoir bridge and the camera view shakes in time with their footfalls.  The continuing joke is that the camera will sometimes dip out of focus in future episodes, subtly poking us that we’re still watching a film

• Finally, The whole plot is an outline of Suzumiya’s frustration.  A buxom bimbo has appeared to entice the male MC, while the rather strange and off-putting one who appears to be the aggressor offers much more (I’ll be returning to the parallels between Nagato and Suzumiya later).  That conversation between Nagato and Koizumi is in fact the show stating its point: we have two choices before us, we can think and achieve something or we can take the easy route and squander ourselves (because who are the characters talking to again?).  And when we figure out this key something… Koizumi looks knowingly right at that something with a grin… will change.  It is the preview of how Haruhi will unite our failure to appreciate Suzumiya (and Nagato) with our failure to see things in general for what they are.

Episodes 2 and 3→