During this stage one of the earliest transcendent themes came into formation. It’s centered around Black Mirror’s Bandersnatch, Akira, and Laurie Anderson’s “O, Superman” and “Big Science.” Not to spoil any of Bandersnatch – but one of the strangest secret endings/paths concerns the protagonist’s mother, and has “O, Superman” playing in the background. It’s very much about doom, death, and fate – not just of the individual but a larger apocalyptic outlook. In Bandersnatch that theme is tied together a little bit with an overall motif of fate, and an Akira poster on the wall in one of the pivotal scenes where the reality the show exists in is explained. The poster from AKIRA is the opening image of Neo-Tokyo exploding in a psychic meltdown. In “O, Superman” there’s this strange connection if you listen carefully where “mom” is tied to the hand of fate, the hand of power – “the hand that takes.” That hand is what exists once love is gone, once justice is gone, once force is gone – all that remains is the mystical hand – the electronic/electrochemical arms that feels like mom. You can see how this mirrors a society: love is the ideal way we treat eachother, but when that is gone we have recourse to justice, and when there seems to be no justice there is violence, and what happens when violence reaches its conclusion? What kind of a feeling is it to have this sense of doom and love it? To feel that fate is the invisible hand, that you want your mother’s arms to hold you even though it means death – even though it means embracing the psychic end of the world or at least your own little world. This has been a powerful theme – and I still come back to it sometimes and construct new pieces about the transcendent idea of mom, my own mother, doom, and just how cool AKIRA is. The music video for “O, Superman” is startlingly good for how old it is – and I recommend listening to that whole song all the way through several times and seeing what it brings up when you think about the end, and about your mother, and about the hand that takes.
