Picture this: an endless expanse of water, intercut by a singular railway. A young girl and her companions sit by the window, staring aimlessly as the stops race by in technicolored lights and blurs. Everything is moving, yet through this mutual relativity, all appears stagnant. The audience stares for a minute and a half, entranced by silence in a world of noise.
Spirited Away, one of acclaimed director Hayao Miyazaki’s earlier projects, has solidified a near untouchable status in the realm of anime. Approaching its 25th anniversary, it hosts a rich expanse of characters, environments, and cultural lessons, interknit through the deceptively simple shell of a bildungsroman (coming-of-age) for its 10-year-old protagonist Chihiro. Though many try to ascribe a central theme to the film, I argue that its ambiguity persuades against explication and encourages the projection of granular more socioemotional realizations. In that vein, my own personal resonance with the film lies in the aforementioned train scene. Through utilizing liminality, the train in Spirited Away offers recognition of self, encouraging viewers to sit still amidst the speed, time, and excess of capitalist work culture.
To understand the train, we must contextualize it. This scene occurs roughly two-thirds of the way through Spirited Away. Chihiro, a human girl trapped in the Spirit World, has just fled the bathhouse––a selfish and greedy corporate entity, filled with dissatisfied workers in constant competition to fund their own departures. For its first half, the film follows Chihiro’s ascension of and assimilation into this labor ladder. Departure, we’re told, will be her ultimate resolution; yet, in the second-act climax, the film undermines this simple route. Chihiro’s goal shifts from her own salvation to helping her injured friend. When she boards the train not to escape, but to find medicine for him, the viewer experiences a simultaneous catharsis, subversion, and anticipation. As promised, we’ve left the bathhouse. Yet, instead of returning home, we’ve entered a world of greater uncertainty. What happens now?
Simply put: nothing. Spirited Away takes an unconventional approach by releasing tension. It shows long stills of Chihiro staring out the train window, humanoid shapes drifting by in blurs. Space and time feel suddenly limitless. In an interview with Roger Ebert, Miyazaki uses the Japanese word ma to describe this extension. He explains, “The time in between clapping is ma. If you have non-stop action with no breathing space at all, it’s just busyness. But if you take a moment, then the tension building in the film can grow in a wider direction… the people who make movies are scared of silence.”
Fear of silence is the most compelling description for what the train scene rectifies. The average moviegoer exists with a constant need for stimuli and “happening.” When Spirited Away denies it, however, we respond with neither fear nor aversion, but relief. The strategic use of ma enables us to soak in what we’ve absorbed thus far, and in doing so, appreciate Chihiro’s maturation, selflessness, and connection with the other characters. We may not know where she’s going physically, but we’re spiritually oriented within her growth. Moreover, it exposes the artifice of necessary “busyness” through the metaconcept of the bathhouse, which on paper exists for pause and relaxation, but bombards and overwhelms the senses with a push for progress, change, and destabilization. Both through the plot and construction of the plot, Spirited Away points out the marketed lie of consumption: if we intake, we’ll be satiated; if we absorb, then we’ll be complete; if we pursue, then we’ll arrive. These promises, vested in the hypothetical, do away with our innate ability to adapt and normalize.
While I’ve always been drawn to the train scene, I didn’t truly experience it until I came to New York City. Sitting on (an albeit empty) subway with no cell service, I realized it was the place where I felt the calmest. The incessant impulse to be productive and “do something” finally dissipated with the relief that there was nothing I could do. Before entering college, I never considered space as something I constantly had to demand for myself; or time as a quantity I could gain, lose, or waste. Rather, I abided by a more mathematical framework: spacetime is a coordinate system, and by “moving” through life, we’re simply orienting ourselves.
Quantity is the backbone of capitalism, and I believe, the indoctrination of “adulthood.” Without the incorporation of quantity in every abstract concept, we lose the incentive to produce, the instinct to compare, and all other factors sustaining the false pursuit of progress that capitalism perpetuates. We see this demonstrated in the bathhouse through its motif of gold, which quantifies the accomplishments, individual worth, and entitled happiness of every character. It’s fitting, then, to see Chihiro––in the frenzy of preceding scenes––push away a handful and say, “No thanks, I don’t need it.” The bathhouse workers’ utter dismay at this refusal highlights a secondary irony: while Chihiro, who expresses indifference to money’s false mobility, boards the train, the rest of them remain stagnant in the bathhouse, confined forever in a spacetime where they’re always going but never going anywhere.
From an audience standpoint, Spirited Away is a children’s story––the tale of a little girl maturing into personhood. It’s easy, therefore, to understand the lingering resonance of the train scene for its primary intended audience. The protections of innocence will inevitably fail: every child must enter the capitalist workforce as a means of survival. Therefore, building in silence becomes all the more necessary to retain one’s soul––for reflection, rumination, and the simple reclamation of “doing nothing.” More broadly, the film’s debut in 2001 situates it within Japan’s Lost Decades, when the post-war economic miracle disintegrated into a crippling recession. In times of crisis, unemployment rises, while labor wages drop. Capitalism becomes all the more cruel and punishing, inviting Spirited Away’s cynicism, as well as its offered salvation for the individual’s sense of self amid extreme alienation from labor.
These days, I’ll often put the train scene on loop. Even holding it to heart, I see no remedy to growing up, escape from financial burden, nor option to unsubscribe from a quantizing system. Yet there’s value in finding time rather than spending it, extending space rather than taking it up, and watching the world go by without chasing it to an end. Twenty-five years since its release, Spirited Away still invites me to sit still, take a breath, and tell myself: I’m here, I’m alive, and I’m satisfied.
Sources
Miyazaki, Hayao, director. Spirited Away. 2001; Universal City, CA: Universal Pictures Home Entertainment, 2002. DVD.