The Red Fetish (a review of the RZA's "Afro Samurai" anime series)

"It is tempting to derive some kind of maturity narrative here: eventually we sober up and grow out of our rash love of intensity (i.e. red); eventually we learn to love more subtle things with more subtlety, etc. etc." - Maggie Nelson, Bluets

Under a stark-red tint, aggrandizement is the flavor of deep, human desire. A flavor who Wu-Tang Clan’s the RZA chose to embellish and luxuriate in through his revenge-fucked Afro Samurai anime series (2007-2009).

Blood is the taste on everyone’s tongue. An intrinsic precept which transcends race, gender, sexuality, and almost every other buzzword term floating around the lexicon of 2015 progressive thought, violence is one experiential platform we can’t quite seem to evolve out of.

The color red breeds immaturity. Immaturity breeds aggression. And aggression breeds bloody revenge, an aphrodisiac on the lips of every politician, gangbanger, and ninja warrior throughout human history.

A tattered and reserved protagonist, Afro, leads a rampage-journey of vengeance across the 19th-century, imperial, Japanese terrain (whose red-dotted flag maintains an anodyne grasp on this color-motif), following the execution-style death of his father. Amidst his youthful rage, he leaves a thick trail of bad blood. Namely, Sio, the sister of his former best friend, Jinno, both of whom become the Devilish antagonists in Resurrection.

“Do you remember me? I remember you, and all that you have done. Murderer, monster. How many hundreds of lives have you ended? How many thousands have you made mourn the loss of their loved ones? Now, it’s your turn.” - Sio, intro to “Arch Nemesis”

In the wake of a 5-year, 220K-grave-making political meltdown in Syria, the latest shitshow from a community college in Oregon, and Donald Trump’s borderline Holocaustic proposals, our refusal to act in collective, unquestioning and utter defiance against these horrors has really made our civilized, Western culture shine. It’s served, much like Afro Samurai, to unveil the omnipresence of an age-old, ugly fetish that society has worked so tirelessly to conceal.

The Red Fetish. Or, more tangibly phrased by a general study published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology (2010), a culturally-bridging sexual appetite for the unsuspecting color, shared innately by almost all mammals. Traditionally, this means a female attraction to the mark of the alpha-male (perhaps wearing a red t-shirt subconsciously signifies your comfortability with being thoroughly drenched in the blood of an enemy).

http://www.rochester.edu/news/show.php?id=3663

Today, in practice, we are equally as obsessed with our own archaic immaturity, though we condemn it so, in image.

“When a man wants to attract a female, the best way is to acquire a musk perfume. But when a man uses it, there are two important things he must be aware of: one, is that he will get the woman he wants, even if she wouldn’t ordinarily succumb to his charms; the other, is that his own natural smell, will change.” - Outro clip from “Take The Sword pt. III”, the climactic staple of the Afro Samurai: Resurrection soundtrack.

As socially-conscious Facebook statuses and Tweets find themselves on the incline, solution-making and action-taking find themselves on the expedient decline. We cover up an obvious lust for death and attention with an uncompromising ability to take offense to literally anything. A red-soaked lust. Welcome to modernity, denial; a war of the mind and the body.

Maybe, just maybe, the corny nature of the legendary RZA’s blaxploitation-chambara-themed anime series (and soundtracks) hold more of a relevant tone than we might’ve originally anticipated. The “thug” and the “citizen” linked in ever-spanning commonality.

The unavoidable Red should not always lead us to a despair in our own species, however. Sio and Jinno know the cold embrace of moral responsibility all-too-well, as the series’ final scene concludes with a metaphorical plea of reverence for the horrors they’ve committed. Once their beast-like creation, devised for the explicit purpose of bringing Afro to a “justified” and torturous end, completes his duty and satiates their alleged wishes, they spring into redemption, attempting to destroy their manifested hatred, dying in the process.

Just as, back in 2005, George W. Bush publicly begged for the condonation of Jesus Christ in support for the heinous plans he was preparing to enact, Barack H. Obama recently makes his polite phone-call to Doctors Without Borders officials, graciously apologizing for the accidental bombing of their hospital in Afghanistan. Where others may see fraudulence and hypocrisy, I see a glimmering ray of hope through the muddy puddles of blood-red frustration.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2005/oct/07/iraq.usa

As Ms. Nelson may have been insinuating, we have always answered, and will always answer, to our humbling conscience.

“The very demon of revenge seeks divine guidance,” Sio’s statue speaks. “Where is the cold-blooded killer you once were?”