Harmony is a work of speculative fiction in the traditional mold one that engages heavily with philosophy and social theory in developing the world of the text and framing the events that occur within it. It presents itself as predictive but really its much more about the present than the future. Meanwhile the theory its engaging with elucidating and expanding upon is 30+ years old namely I suspect the work of Michel Foucault quoted by Miach at one point and Gilles Deleuze discussing discipline surveillance and control. I can understand why people dont like this film. Its exposition heavy the setting is built up rather quickly through this condensed expository world building detail even the dialogue can be a bit dry and heavyhanded. These are problems Genocidal Organ suffers from too. Its much too short to present everything the novel seems to contain and its full of examples of dialogue that sound a lot more noticeably stiff and unnatural when youre hearing it out loud than when youre reading it off the page. Also I personally am not a big fan of the art and character designs though Im sure I differ with many there. In my view the promotional art and posters dont give an impression of what the tone and world presented are going to be like at all. This is not just some saccharinesomber diaphanous bromance between two elegant bijin. It is a rigorous bleak cultural and sociopolitical critique and at times its shockingly violent. The main thing I want to stress is if you approach anime like it doesnt mix with intellectual discourse if you get mad at shows for trying to be smart please just put that ridiculous bias aside if youre going to watch this. In the first place I dont get whats wrong with trying to be smart. The theory this film is engaging with most people probably would not hear about outside of a University setting. Theres nothing good about that. Complicated challenging ideas especially social critiques shouldnt be sequestered to these gated communities where no one can see them. Popular fiction by all means SHOULD engage with theory. Michel Foucault didnt spend his lifetime writing and lecturing just because he was trying to be smart. He took his views and the world seriously. I think Itou takes his and Foucaults views and the world seriously too. Hes not quoting him and engaging with his ideas for credit or to pat himself on the back but so you know who Foucault is if you didnt before and perhaps see society with a new clearer perspective. Itou just wants to try to illustrate his views and his concerns through a compelling story. Whether he succeeded at making something compelling or not is up for debate obviously but please dont scoff at this film just because its trying to be smart. Its not trying to make you feel stupid and it definitely isnt insincere. Overall I think this film is a bit more clear in terms of its intentions and vision than Genocidal Organ but theyre concerned with basically the same things and make use of similar tools. Dark research transforms harmless disciplines like linguistics and cognitive science into bastions of mind control techniques though when you consider the impact media theory and psychoanalysis had on marketing advertising and psyops this isnt exactly farfetched... Its just exaggerated a bit for effect. People have HUDs Heads Up Display implanted in their eyes. Bodies are controlled and tampered with for their own good a sort of totalitarian transhumanism. The rest of the review will contain spoilers. These are the societies of control which are in the process of replacing the disciplinary societies. Control is the name Burroughs proposes as a term for the new monster one that Foucault recognizes as our immediate future. Paul Virilio also is continually analyzing the ultrarapid forms of freefloating control that replaced the old disciplines operating in the time frame of a closed system. There is no need here to invoke the extraordinary pharmaceutical productions the molecular engineering the genetic manipulations although these are slated to enter into the new process. There is no need to ask which is the toughest or most tolerable regime for its within each of them that liberating and enslaving forces confront one another . . . There is no need to fear or hope but only to look for new weapons. Gilles Deleuze Postscript on the Societies of Control 1990 Miach is the figure at the heart of Harmony. When were first introduced to her we recognize that she and Tuan her lover and the protagonist takes issue with the social order of civilization. Well lots of people feel that way. People give up a bit of their individual freedom to benefit from civilization but everyone has their own views needs desires standards. Sometimes were a little dissatisfied with how civilization is organized and we think it could be a bit better. So far so good The exemplar for civilization is Japan. Japan is run by admedistrative bodies now. Its a nation hinged on values of social obligation and compulsory wellbeing. Its citizens proudly chime about how they offer themselves as social resources for the benefit of others around them. Meanwhile everything about citizens bodies is monitored and protected with a substance called WatchMe. WatchMe keeps them healthy and sane but its administered before individuals are capable of consent when theyre children and the tradeoff is their freedom and privacy. People are not ALLOWED to get fat or die Miach explains with her characteristic cool fury echoing Kierkegaards idea that despair is entangled with our inability to die. If we could die from despair it wouldnt be so miserable. A server records and beams back directly into your field of vision your mental state heart rate bmi temperature medical advice diet advice and so on. Citizens of Japan are willful enthusiastic participants in the panopticon that monitors them. But who monitors the people that monitor the publics information and wellbeing? Therein lies the trouble. WatchMes use becomes pervasive after a briefly described cataclysm puts the fear of God into the civilized world. For western viewers this may immediately remind you of the Patriot Acts passing following 9/11 and the beginning of the war on terror. Itou seems to hold the view that underlying every social contract is this transaction of freedom for security. When people are afraid they view their security as a much more precious and precarious treasure than when they already feel safe. By that logic fear can be sown and manipulated in order to barter with citizens buying their privacy and freedom in exchange from protection from threats which may or may not exist. I dont know if Japan has had its own PatriotAct/War on Terror Im not that knowledgeable about Japanese politics but at the very least its clear that WatchMe is just an exaggerated speculative riff on the sort of devilish exchange that can and does happen in contemporary society between citizens and their governing bodies. The real life parallels dont end there. Think of the scandals that arose around social media platforms like Facebook and Tik Tok in the past couple years. That enthusiastic participants in the panopticon line is one I think I nicked from ByungChul Han from either an interview or documentary about the Burnout Society on . He was talking about our use of social media and services like Amazon. The internet is populated with massively profitable websites that mine our data and use it to shoot back curated content. Is this not reminiscent of how harmony the protocol that supplants our will and decisionmaking processes via WatchMe replaces consciousness in the film? Everything we consume is decided for us and catered to us. Perhaps we are already living in Harmony or in other words unconscious and not really living. And simultaneously were happy to let people monitor what were doing if it frees the innocuous daily tasks like socializing and buying products of the minimal conflict and strain they could sometimes present. Little do we and Tuan know Miach takes issue with Japan not just because its a dystopian control society. She takes issue with it because she thinks she sees through the spectacle. Everyone in Japan is so fake pretending to be happy with the social order they grow fat and lazy on though not literally thanks to WatchMe monitoring their diet and activity levels. They dont really care about one another more than they care about themselves. Human beings are savage. Miach knows because she is a war orphan and a survivor of military sex trafficking. She knows how savage human beings can be. The error in her reasoning though which is perhaps distorted by her trauma is that its not really one or the other. Humans are not savage or civilized. These traits coexist. Civilization isnt phony just because people are monstrous at times. We are equally beholden to our impulses to love and cooperate as we are to our impulses to destroy to take and jealously protect whats ours. The question is can we channel our impulses productively and recognize them for what they are? Thats where our control society comes into play. Foucault delineates how institutions like family school and the factory function as disciplinary and regulatory spaces and connects a persons power in society to their access and control of knowledge. Deleuze revamps this picture. Its no longer about knowledge its about information and were not disciplined by outside forces were disciplined by the imagined/real presence of regulatory bodies watching us wherever we go. We seek therapy and medication to regulate our mental activity. We work from home and perpetually educate and train ourselves to remain up to date. Weve already discussed phones and the internet. First the government tapped our phones to keep us safe from terrorist threats they invented then private companies tapped our phones to keep our eyes locked on their addriven websites and buying products they invented. In Harmony the HUD is in your head via a hightech contact lens connecting you to a governing body at all times although Tuan as an employee of the World Health Organization can sometimes turn hers off. Ordinary citizens are locked out of access to information based on their social score which seems tied to their behavior and profession. Tuan can switch the locks at a moments notice as when she blocks Miachs foster parents from accessing information about the WHOs investigation just before she probes Miachs foster moms memories. Tuan is an agent of control whos using her exclusive access to information for her own private ends and for no greater purpose than that. She might be the protagonist but shes no hero per se. Miachs formative experiences draw attention to another problem that is a common thematic thread through both Harmony and Genocidal Organ: one countrys peace depends on imperialist conflict and strife elsewhere. The meaning of this is twofold. Japans peace is relative to horror elsewhere i.e. the old notion that light is defined by the presence of darkness. Additionally though every developed country literally flourishes on the back of war profiteering unethical outsourcing of labor conquest of resources and so on. I dont know that Itou believes this to be a universal necessary truth but its certainly true right now. Liberal civilization depends on the suffering of others outside of our purview. This doesnt necessarily mean we have to give up or destroy civilization because its all been one huge failure and sick lie. It just means that civilization has huge problems and must be reorganized. A final important point: We really dont know what Tuan would be like if she never met Miach. Tuan is hopelessly in love with and obsessed with Miach and Miach becomes her conscience her Big Other. She judges good bad right and wrong by asking herself what Miach would think. She never even knew the true motivation behind Miachs ontology until just before the climax of the film. What makes Miach a living conscious person is her madness and what makes her special and magnetic to Tuan is her madness even while Tuan is unaware that what shes seeing is madness. Miachs goal becomes to force the initiation of Harmony which is this films version of the Human Instrumentality Project. One way to look at it though is that she is eliminating her own madness. Miachs gambit the casting off of her madness is one shes ostensibly making in exchange for the free will underpinning the savage behavior that scarred her as a youth. Meanwhile Tuans first and final acts of madness are from the moment she disobeys WHO to the moment she disobeys Miach by murdering her because she loves Miach too much to see her give herself up to the society of control. By then its too late. By the beginning of the film its too late judging by the emotional markup text cascading along the face of the giant iPod. I dont think Harmony is a film that provides answers. It is offering a bleak rendering of how things are and perhaps how they might become. Critique is one of our weapons the weapons Deleuze is talking about but its not enough to depend only on the critiques of others like Foucault Deleuze or Project Itoh. I think this is something Itoh wants us to do. At the risk of madness look hard at the world in our own way. Miachs fascination with printed books takes on a different significance when you acknowledge that Harmony was originally a novel. Yet she still burns them and then Tuan shoots Miach.