Death Note as millenarian apocalyptic

This is so stupid

In the course of his banger essay Against Truth, Sam Kriss tossed off a recommendation for The Pursuit of the Millennium,¹ Norman Cohn’s study of End Times revolutionaries and mystical anarchists in the Middle Ages, originally published in 1957 and revised and updated in 1970. It is a deeply fascinating account of how a population’s dissatisfaction with material conditions can combine with eschatological dreams of a better world to come to form, under charismatic leadership, explosive movements that sought to radically reorder society and usher in the thousand years of Christ’s reign on earth promised in Revelation. It demonstrates how the same fundamental narratives of decline and renewal persist over thousands of years as well as the human capacity to remix and reinterpret them for a given historical moment.

The Pursuit of the Millennium is a pleasure to read and a fantastic work of scholarship. I’m going to use it to talk about a fairly dreadful anime from 2006.

Ever since I got so obsessed with Neon Genesis Evangelion that I watched it three times through in less than six months (shoutout BDM) about a year and a half ago, I’ve kept some anime in the queue to watch when Liz goes to bed early. Some of these have been other Hideaki Anno projects—Gunbuster (so good), Nadia (bad), His and Her Circumstances (good but DNF). Some are new stuff like Delicious in Dungeon (need season two immediately), Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End (I love to cry my eyes out over a cartoon elf), and Jujutsu Kaisen (I honestly respect how unapologetically this is just “YuYu Hakusho but make it Naruto”). And some have been purported classics that I missed at the time like Cowboy Bebop and Death Note.

Death Note starts with so much promise. Adapted from a manga written by Tsugumi Ohba and illustrated by Takeshi Obata, Death Note is about Light Yagami, a Japanese high schooler who comes into possession of a magical notebook with the power to kill anyone whose name is written in it. I initially thought the show might have something interesting to say because of how instantly Light embraces his role as a god of death. The moment he accepts his power is real he chooses a path of pure evil. It is a faster heel turn than Walter White in Breaking Bad. By episode two Light is monologuing about how he will create a new world and he will be its god.

I was all in on Death Note after its seventh episode. Light begins his worldwide killing spree carelessly, relying on the news to supply him with victims, so both the Japanese police and the FBI quickly ascertain generally where he lives; since his father is the chief of police and Light could have filched police records from him, he quickly finds himself a person of interest. Cornered, he kills twelve FBI agents. Soon the fiancée-widow of one of them arrives wanting to talk to Light’s dad. Light walks her across town to where the task force is holed up, all the while trying to win her trust. The show devotes an entire episode to this interaction. The woman knows the killer—“Kira” as he comes to be known by the public—needs a person’s real name to kill. Therefore she won’t tell Light her name. Light wheedles and cajoles and slowly wins her over. In the end she gives in and tells him. He immediately pulls out the Death Note and writes her name, specifying a death by suicide. The episode ends with her walking down the street as a great gallows rises before her.

This is what a victory looks like for our protagonist. It’s chilling and unlike really anything else I’ve seen in its unrepentant evilness. If the show could keep up this commitment to such detestable ends it would certainly be a work of singular, if horrific, vision. Unfortunately it quickly lapses into tedium. What that episode did so elegantly now becomes the model for the longform cat-and-mouse story to follow. The investigation of Kira falls into the hands of L, a young supergenius who only eats sweets and never wears shoes and is instantly certain that Light is Kira. He brings Light into the investigation to better keep tabs on him and watch him sweat. Light is thus put in the position of putting on a show of trying to catch himself while endeavoring to clear his name and learn L’s real name so he can execute him.

There are various complications—a second Kira appears who turns out to be pop idol Misa Amane; Light is forced to make her his girlfriend and to take her into his conspiracy. Then Light invites L to lock up Misa and himself for as long as he deems necessary to prove their innocence, all the while having passed the Death Note to some shady corporate board so the killings will continue. When Light and Misa relinquish their Death Notes they lose all their memories involving them. There follows an arc that’s like a third of the overall story of now-good-again Light earnestly helping the investigation to catch the decoy Kira. There are episodes that consist of nothing but Light, L, and the rest of the task force sitting in their HQ talking about an investigation we know is a ruse. How did a show so twisted get so boring?

What came to frustrate me about Death Note above all was Light’s lack of vision or ideology. He chooses to become a serial killer of world-historic proportions to build his Utopia but it’s never clear what that new world is supposed to be. Light’s rules are simple: he kills criminals. He accepts the laws as they exist. He never interrogates how those laws came to be, whether they are just, whether things not on the books are crimes in his eyes.

For all his revolutionary spirit, he exercises absolute deference to the world as it is. He never considers why people turn to crime in the first place. Someone breaking the law is proof of an evil, irredeemable soul, not an emergent phenomenon of socio-economic conditions that marginalize entire classes of people and exclude them from legitimate enterprise. He leaves intact all the political structures of the world—he never even contemplates writing a politician’s name in the Death Note. I could never quite decide if Light’s lack of guiding principles was a feature or a bug. Is his vacuousness an intentional critique on the part of Ohba, is the series about the peril of trying to be a visionary without a vision, or is it a failure of Ohba’s imagination to go beyond “crime = bad”?

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The common feature across every propheta and social movement Cohn describes in The Pursuit of the Millennium is the double consciousness of a population whose understanding of the world is shaped almost wholly by their religion yet also hates the Church with unrivaled fury. As a worldly body, the Catholic church was necessarily incapable of living up to the expectations it had set for itself. Living conditions were extraordinarily harsh under the old feudal systems; the rise of mercantilism led to that system breaking down but it can hardly be said most people’s standards of living rose as a result. As people flocked to new urban industrial centers circa 1100—weaving was suddenly a huge economic force and weavers guilds play a significant role in almost every millenarian sect—there arose a new class of urban poor who, excised from old kinship systems and the noblesse oblige of their feudal lords, experienced poverty of an all-new sort surrounded by a city of indifferent strangers. It was a constant source of indignation that the clergy lived in comparative luxury. Given Christ’s teachings on the blessings of poverty, it was hardly a leap of logic that the poor came to see themselves as the truly devout and the Church as a bastion of luxury and avarice.

One of the core tenets of millenarianism, again inherited from Revelation, is that the final days before Christ’s return will be a period of great darkness, in which Antichrist will rule the earth from Babylon. This seed found fertile ground in the public’s widespread resentment of the clergy. Many groups identified the pope as Antichrist and Rome as Babylon. Since it was the job of the righteous to inaugurate the battle against the forces of evil that would culminate in Christ’s return, very often millenarian movements would go from city to city with the primary purpose of beating, humiliating, expelling, or killing the resident priesthood.

We can see how these itinerant preachers drew on local animosities to fuse their eschatological message with the political aims of the peasantry in the early case of Henry of Le Mans, a former monk who came to his eponymous city on Ash Wednesday in 1116. The bishop of Le Mans gave Henry permission to preach and then quickly left on a journey to Rome:

As soon as the bishop’s back was turned Henry—a bearded young man, dressed only in a hair shirt, and endowed with a mighty voice—began to preach against the local clergy. He found willing listeners. The people of Le Mans were very ready to turn against their clergy, for these were a venal and loose-living lot. Moreover, the bishops of Le Mans had long been active in local politics, and in an unpopular cause—they had lent their support to the counts, from whose overlordship the burghers were struggling to free themselves. All in all, it is not surprising that after a short course of Henry’s preaching the populace was beating priests in the streets and rolling them in the mud.

In place of the priesthood the prophetae inevitably substituted themselves. Some wasted no time claiming for themselves the titles of Messiah or Christ while others began more humbly as simple speakers for God’s intended manner of living. Those less grandiose preachers often claimed their legitimacy from a purported divine letter they held, which contained instructions written by the Virgin Mary. Either way, nearly all wound up denying the Church any power or legitimacy—its priests were not fit for any of their holy duties. Instead only the preacher had that authority. To stick with Henry of Le Mans, Cohn writes:

In later years, when he was active in Italy and Provence, he rejected the authority of the Church altogether, denying that ordained priests had the power to consecrate the host, to give absolution, or to preside at marriages. Baptism, he taught, should be given only as an external sign of belief. Church buildings and all the trappings of official religion were useless; a man could pray anywhere as well as he could in a church. The true Church consisted of those who followed the apostolic life, in poverty and simplicity; love of one’s neighbour was the essence of true religion. And Henry regarded himself as directly commissioned by God to preach this message.

Others put their own bodies on par with those of Christ and the saints. One named Adelbert, active in the mid-1200s, distributed his hair- and nail-clippings among his followers, who treasured them as sacred relics. Another, Tanchelm of Antwerp, gave his followers his bathwater, some of whom drank it as a substitute for the Eucharist.

The general aims and career trajectories of the various prophetae remain remarkably similar across the approximately 400 years surveyed—almost all end up beheaded or burned—but they differ in their priorities. Some were focused on the world to come much more than others who thought the path to the Millennium ran through material improvements in the world at hand. But one stands out for dreaming of enacting his reforms by drowning the world in blood.

This figure, known only as the Revolutionary of the Upper Rhine, hardly deserves to be included in the book—he does not appear to have ever preached in public and his book, The Book of a Hundred Chapters, was never printed. However, Cohn counters, “his treatise is the last and most comprehensive expression of the popular eschatology of the Middle Ages.” His are typical fantasies, infused with megalomania and taken to grandiose extremes. He predicts the arrival of a messiah that pulls in traits inherited directly from Revelation as well as traits connected to local German traditions regarding the return of the martyred Emperor Frederick (not really worth going into). This messiah will rule a thousand years during which every need of the people will be amply met.

However, this bounty will not be given until the world is ready. And, further, it won’t be long before God loses patience with the sinful world and unleashes his retribution. Therefore, anything is justified to cleanse the earth:

The route to the Millennium leads through massacre and terror. God’s aim is a world free from sin. If sin continues to flourish, divine punishment will surely be visited upon the world; whereas if sin is once abolished, then the world will be ready for the Kingdom of the Saints. The most urgent task of the Brethren of the Yellow Cross is therefore to eliminate sin, which in effect means to eliminate sinners… To achieve that end assassination is wholly legitimate: ‘Whoever strikes a wicked man for his evildoing, for instance for blasphemy—if he beats him to death he shall be called a servant of God; for everyone is in duty bound to punish wickedness.’ In particular the Revolutionary calls for the assassination of the reigning Emperor, Maximilian, for whom he had an overwhelming hatred. But beyond these preliminary murders lies the day when the new Emperor from the Black Forest, together with the Brotherhood, will ‘control the whole world from West to East by force of arms—an age of ubiquitous and incessant terror, in which the hopeful prophecy was to be amply justified: ‘Soon we will drink blood for wine!’

“An age of ubiquitous and incessant terror” is precisely what Light brings about in Death Note. And just as Light appoints himself God of his new world of fear, so too did the Revolutionary of the Rhine believe himself to be the avenging messiah capable of dealing out retribution against the whole sinful world and its eventual benefactor, providing every necessity during the Millennium. Into this mix he infuses some sinister nationalism:

Clearly in this phantasy the Emperor from the Black Forest and the returning Christ have merged together to form one single messiah. This makes it all the more striking when the publicist lets slip, as he does from time to time, that he expected this messiah to be no other than himself… It was the Emperor—the Revolutionary himself, triumphant and glorified—who was to stand at the centre of the future religion, who would be ‘the supreme priest’ and whom ‘one must recognize as an earthly God’. The future Empire was indeed to be nothing less than a quasi-religious community united in adoration and dread of a messiah who was the incarnation of the German spirit.

I’ll say this for Light: at least he’s not a nationalist. The fact of his being Japanese is entirely incidental. Dude does not care about his homeland.

And yet even the Revolutionary has a structural critique compared to Light. He is sure that it is systems of wealth and property that produce the abuses that so outrage him:

The Revolutionary is utterly convinced that God has ordered the great massacre of clergy and ‘usurers’ in order to remove such abuses for ever, the holocaust is to be an indispensable purification of the world on the eve of the Millennium. And one fact about the Millennium which emerges with great clarity is that it is to be strongly anti-capitalist. Church property is to be secularized and used by the Emperor for the benefit of the community as a whole and the poor in particular. All income derived either from landed property or from trade is to be confiscated — which amounts to an abolition of the principalities and an expropriation of all the rich.

Damn, what can you say except

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Is there a point here? Without being too grandiose, I think what I try to do with this newsletter is demonstrate how reading widely can enrich the most unlikely parts of our lives and allow us to redeem otherwise lacking bits of cultural ephemera with some galaxy brain comparison. I was lamenting Death Note’s shallow treatment of a rich premise and through pure coincidence I found a weirdo who lived half a millennium ago who shared the same fantasies and fixations as Light. The world sucks these days, it feels like everyone is struggling badly, and it’s hard to stay positive. For me, making silly little connections like this reminds me there’s value in thinking deeply and imagining widely. Or to put it another way

1. I can now confirm the claim that Laurentius Clung is referenced to be another outrageous lie by the perfidious Sam Kriss. He says he’s referenced in the second appendix but the book only has one. Good gag honestly