Nothing is too tragic to fail
Spoilers about the 90 minute Studio Ghibli animated movie: Grave of the Fireflies. I think the movie loses no quality from being spoiled, this reading is likely better appreciated by those who've seen it. The movie can be viewed on popular streaming platforms.
Grave of the Fireflies is a profoundly sad movie about two Japanese siblings failing to stay alive amidst the resource scarcity at the end of the second world war.
Seita and Setsuko
It is a story about the cruelty of disempowerment. Seita, the protagonist, a boy of 14 years old, becomes the sole guardian of his 4yo sister Setsuko after they've lost their house and mother from US firebombings. Their father, a marine, never writes back. They find temporary shelter at their aunt's, but she succumbs to the pressure of feeding two additional mouths and takes that out on them. The siblings leave with everything they have and settle into a nearby abandoned bomb shelter. There, attrition slowly takes them. At first they can live off the savings their mother left them, then Seita resorts to begging, then stealing and then Setsuko starves to death. Seita leaves with the ashes of his sister for the city and meets the same fate some weeks later.
I had watched the movie with my mother, and I felt by social convention the strong pull to put a positive spin to it and found none.
Seita got dealt a very bad hand, maliciously bad, since Seita could not know his effort was in vain in advance or even afterwards. He exhausted his life — his young brain and body, his public reputation, his mother's savings — for giving a future to his young sister — his responsibility and his love — and it was not enough.
She did not die an immediate death, nor one over the span of a few days like his mother, but a slow death over the span of weeks that he was in a all-encompassing, losing fight against, one he could see going wrong gradually but never really know he'd lose until past her last moment.
He was never given certainty. He was too new to this world to know his options (he has family in Tokyo, but does not know their address) and his source of knowledge, his mother, is taken from him by US bomber pilots [1]; he could never know whether he could retain his sister and afterwards he cannot know whether he could not have done anything different; he only learns at the end that his father, his primary hope for restarting a life, has died long ago.
He doesn't tell his sister about their mom's passing and we see him cry for the first time when he learns that his aunt told her. It seems that somewhere in him, he chose not to accept, to know that his mom, childhood and possibly their futures, were gone.
This all is heartbreaking to me.
Me
It felt wrong for me to do anything else for a while after the movie, and that night I dreamed of being responsible for a young sister who continually clung to my chest. She did not die in my dreams, but I did fail to win some train coach ventilation design contest for her, because the contest took place at a different station than the one I got my friends to drive me to.
My brain makes silly little mistakes, like misremembering the place I need to be, that have real consequences. The mistakes are so silly that I cannot seriously consider them to be part of me, yet so persistent that I sometimes fear I cannot rid myself of them. Our world is so tumultuous and rapidly changing that I desperately need competency. Existential risks are popping up like buboes and I have never tackled those before, or know what I can do about them. Even on smaller scales I do not know whether my loved ones suddenly collapse due to spontaneous biological defects or lose their livelihoods due to sudden automation. I do not know whether I should slow down or quicken, burn my resources or build them, whether any of this is knowable, or salvageable, or not.
And AI
Nearly all people I know, blind themselves against the possibility that they are utterly disempowered.
In AI discourse for example, there must be a positive spin: superintelligence cannot arrive in 2027, alignment must be possible and attained before then, we will collectively pause AI development before then, not literally everyone will die but if we do, it is because of misuse, not because we fail a coordination problem that is magnitudes harder than anything we've faced before; but if it is, it happens because that is right, we deserve it; otherwise there must be a good afterlife, or we're in solipsistic simulations, or we'll be reincarnated, or we'll mostly only exist by logic of anthropics magic in surviving timelines (that last one sometimes is my choice of escapism).
It cannot be otherwise. There cannot be such a true, giant tragedy we fail to prevent. It just absolutely cannot be and it must be a character defect to think there will be one [2].
Perversely, but at this point I'm speculating [3], I think this flinching from true tragedy fuels it. Because our disempowerment can be so heinously cruel, we need to progress as fast as is physically possible. We don't consider the downsides because those are so bad that they cannot be looked at, it is unethical to ask us. Extinction is too tragic to happen: let us focus on more tolerable inconveniences instead [4].
The movie is based on a semi-autobiographical short story of the same name by Akiyuki Nosaka. Tragedy sometimes happens.
[5]
Endnotes
[1]: It is salient to me that the tragedy is not from force of nature, nor by detailed human intent. Setsuko and Seita were a rounding error in the US's plan to win the war in part by means of plausibly-ineffective firebombing. The US is barely an agent from Seita's perspective. The side-effects of the army's plan wreak a catastrophe it doesn't quite know how to, and care to, and can prevent. (Genocide does happen in reality. I don't know about the degree of genocidal intent in this instance. Feel free to elaborate on this, just mind that the magnitude of the tragedy is no argument in and of itself.)
[2]: Let me be specific: part of the tragedy in the movie is that Seita does not know whether he can do anything. I too am not resigned, that's not a rest we are granted. We must try.
[3]: And also, I am trying to find meaning from this tragedy. A concerted effort to find a positive spin.
[4]: I hope it is clear I think these, and the list of statements in the previous paragraph are fallacious.
[5]: That's the end. This movie, short story and the real world events could definitely fill far more pages and stay interesting throughout. I might do that if I think I can gain more from that, but for now I do not know that that is my most dignified course of action. If I learn this review prevented someone else from doing a review on this because I already did it, I will regret having shared this.
