Life and Death, Uninspired

The cosmic boredom of Death Note.

The manga series Death Note  (2003-2006) has a famously great premise. Light Yagami finds a magical notebook which allows the owner to kill anyone just by writing down their name. It seems like a perfect set up for a bleak tale of psychological sadism and absurdist horror—Doestoevsky meets Kafka. 

The 2017 American film (notorious for its whitewashing of the main character) does try clumsily for a bleak, noirish vibe. But the manga itself, written by Tsugumi Ohba and illustrated by Takeshi Obata, is another matter. Death Note  studiously, and somewhat incredibly, avoids all the darker implications of its premise, giving us instead 2300 pages devoted to determining which of several interchangeable banal geniuses is the most genius-like. Instead of a tale about death and power, Death Note is just about who wins.

Which is arguably bleaker. 

You do almost have to admire the grim cluelessness with which Ohba and Obata set about borifying all of their best ideas. The manga starts as Ryuk a spiky evil goth clown monster shingami, or god of death, decides to amuse himself by giving his notebook to someone in the human world. The book is picked up by Light Yagami, a brilliant high school student, who decides to use the book to rid the world of evil people. He starts writing down the name of criminals. Soon the police are trying to track down the mysterious killer they name Kira, while many in the populace start to cheer on Kira's culling of evil doers.

The manga spends barely a moment on Light's internal struggles or guilt. Nor does it seriously explore the moral questions around violent vigilante justice. Instead, it quickly spirals off into an endless elaboration and exploration of the obscure rules which govern the use of the notebook itself.

How long does it take for someone to die once you write their name down? Can you tear pieces out of the notebook and kill people with those? Usually you need to know someone's name and face to kill the with the notebook, but if you make a trade for half of your lifespan with the shingami, you can get the power to see what someone's name is when you see their face. If you relinquish ownership of the notebook, you forget all about the notebook's power and everything you did with it.

Most of the notebook rules and regulations are about as interesting as reading the instructions on an appliance, but one is genuinely creepy. If you just write down someone's name in the book, they die of a heart attack. But the owner of the Death Note can also specify cause of death. This extends to controlling the actions of the victim for 20 days or so before they die. The Death Note , in other words, gives its owner mind control power, with all the queasy sadistic implications.

Perhaps the manga's most indelible moment for me occurs early on, when Light exploits this power. After Light uses the notebook to murder a number of FBI agents pursuing him, the fiancé of one of them starts to track him down. She almost corners him, but he manages to learn her name. Then he writes down in the notebook that she will become obsessed with killing herself in a way that no one will find her body, and think of nothing else until she puts her plan into action. After he seals her doom, he even tells her he is Kira—but she doesn't care because all she wants to do is find a way to die.

Light's wolfish grin of triumph when he reveals himself to his hapless victim is almost lascivious. It's one of the few moments when he really seems to enjoy one of his murders, and there are ugly intimations of erotic pleasure in the erasure of an attractive woman's free will. The cruelty is made even worse by the fact that, just as Light commands, the woman  disappears from the manga almost completely. She's mentioned a couple of times subsequently, but her body is never found.  It's like the manga-kas and the readers are all conspiring together with Light to write her out of existence. 

Again, the 2017 film picks up on these uncomfortable hints, and has Light use his power to force others to kill themselves in disturbing ways. The manga avoids these touches of horror, though. Instead, it spirals off into an extended cat and mouse game between Light and an investigator known as L. Eventually, Light kills L. But rather than change direction, the manga simply replaces him with another virtually identical antagonist named Near.

It's difficult to believe, or describe, just how pointless and uninteresting the contest between Light and L and Near is.  Panels and whole pages fill up with giant floating blocks of text explaining and then re-explaining the complexities of heists and counter-heists, all predicated on parsing a series of intricate bylaws that are transparently being made up as we go along. It's the world's blandest game of mystical bureaucratic Calvinball.  A typical passage runs, 

Mello knows that Mogi is at headquarters. He must be aware that we could be listening to this conversation. We all know Mogi's number. So it's easy to tap the phone. And we could easily place a wire on Mogi too.

Dozens, hundreds, thousands of pages of that kind of logistical spam, until you're just about ready to beg Light to kill somebody, anybody, just to end the tedium.

Readers who are so bored they're begging for mayhem and/or death are in the position of Ryuk, the shingami. The shingami world is a place of dust and tedium; nothing happens there. The shingami gamble for no stakes eternally, not even waiting for nothing to happen. Ryuk isn't exactly evil; he's just really, really bored. Light's competition with Light and Near give him something to do. It's like watching sports. (There's a sequence in the manga in which L and Light play tennis. They are of course both experts.)

Towards the end of the narrative, Near explicitly states that he is fighting L not to restore order, or prevent extrajudicial killings, but simply to prove which of them is the best. Light claims to want to use the notebook's power to create a more just and kinder world, in which everyone is afraid to do wrong. But when he thinks he's defeated his enemies, he declares, "I win!" It's all just an exercise in dick measuring.

Light is completely uninterested in the women who throw themselves at him; his attention and lust is focused on his pursuers. He's basically the Joker; all he cares about is beating Batman. Except in this case Batman admits that all he cares about is beating the Joker, too. Hero and villain are united in an embrace of toxic masculinity, trying to prove their worth through Machiavellian manipulation in a world where victory and power are the only acknowledged moral or emotional values. 

At one point the notebook is picked up by a corporate asshole who uses it to enrich himself. This corporate asshole is presented as somehow inferior to Light. But the only real difference is that Light is motivated by prestige rather than money. Heroes, villains, and normal schlubs all scramble for status and power so they can tell themselves they're better than their rivals. Then, eventually they die. The end.

The conclusion of Death Note  is one of its few memorable sequences. Light predictably breaks down when cornered, screaming that he doesn't want to die as Ryuk writes his name in the book. "You've eased my boredom for quite a long time, haven't you? It was a lot of fun," the shingami muses. Again, he's speaking for the reader here; Light's schemes used up a lot of ink and a lot of time. We're all death gods, and a couple thousand pages of plot, no matter how shallow, at least fills up the day.

We're not really death gods, though. Instead, Death Note suggests, we're mostly ambitious jerks, scurrying around at the behest of arbitrary rules, and patting ourselves on the back for trivial, meaningless triumphs, until the day our names are written in some bored god's book.

You could see this as some sort of brutal truth about reality, or as a grim portrait of the endpoint of patriarchy. Either way, Death Note  has little to say about human morality, human psychology, or human dreams because, with Ryuk, it thinks human morality, psychology, and dreams are all just a dung heap. The game is fun for a while, maybe. But really that's just shit too. The manga is a long, dry slog because it imitates the long dry slog of life. Art can be depressing in a range of ways, but Death Note proves it is never more so than when it is resolutely uninspired.

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This appeared on Patreon some years back. No one saw it, so figured I’d repost for a (hopefully) larger audience.