Protocultural Protocontexts

I had occasion to watch Macross: Do You Remember Love for the first time with a couple of friends recently. (Let's call them Lara and Casey, for that is not their names.) It was a fascinating case study, because none of us had any Macross context or any nostalgia goggles on for 80s anime whatsoever. The following is a partly fictionalised but still morally true account of what happened :P

We started out by being incredibly cynical about the whole thing. We snarked about Minmay's first concert being this huge, about Major Focker and his major asshole, and about how ridiculously Borgy and we-have-no-emotions-y the Zentrans were. The "show us how kissing works!" scene was excellent snark fodder, and we'd heard it was the "greatest love story ever told", so when we realised that the races were gender segregated, we drew the obvious conclusion.

Casey: So it's the greatest in the sense of being a love story between two species. This is so stupid.
Everyone: [nods]

Then, about midway through, something happened. This was the Misa-playing-house-in-the-ruins-of-the-earth scene, and it suddenly hit me what the show was trying to do. I still think the time skip there was too sudden to give us proper context, but I suddenly got it—yes, the movie was treating these people like real people, affected by what they've seen and lived, trying desperately to make it right. And if the movie is allowing for that, we should extend this courtesy to the other characters, too.

Me: Oh...
Casey: What?
Me: [whispering] Normality.
Casey: Huh.
Lara: ...what.

I was onboard, now, if still moderately skeptical, but Lara most definitely was not. Casey was waffling between the two of us. Minmay returned, the stage confrontation happened (Casey: "Why would they even call the two of them onto the stage?" Lara: "There was no good way for that to have happened. There's no good ending to this story unless he dies."), Hikaru slapped her (Lara: "Apparently, bitches need to be slapped."), and...

And...

And, yea, Minmay sang the song that would save the world.

This jolted us out of it some. What. What. Okay, the movie had clearly been gunning for this, but still, what.

Lara: Seriously? Pop music saves the world?
Casey: This is kinda ridiculous.
Me: This is a bit ridiculous.
Casey: Bit, nothing. I was quite curious about what these apparently-so-important lyrics were, but it's seriously just a generic pop song. This is protoculture? This is what solves a centuries old war?
Me: It is incredibly cheesy. Very 80s, maybe? Are we just all so much more cynical now?
Lara: Even if we are, I'm sorry, generic pop does not qualify as culture.

But I, I think as the person still most positively inclined to the show, kept churning away at it. And then—

Me: Wait, hang on, this actually works. Proto culture, guys - if you were trying to awaken the latent memories of art and culture in a generations-distant species, what would you go for? The lowest common denominator -- the thing about the lowest common denominator is that it's common!
Lara: Uh...
Me: I've talked myself into this, guys. I like this arc, it's neat.
Lara: What.
Casey: I mean, I can see what it's going for... but I just don't think it's sustaining the story.
Lara: Yea. It is 'pop music can save the world', and that's still fundamentally silly.

I wasn't fully convinced yet, because I wasn't sure yet that the movie actually had this in mind. There's a subtle difference, as a writer, between having a cheesy pop song conclusion because you think cheesy pop songs resonate with the human spirit, and having a cheesy pop song conclusion because cheesy pop songs resonate with you - and the latter is easily easier and less interesting than the former.

And then. Misa and Minmay say goodbye with meaningful looks, and Misa says her line.

It was just an ordinary song, that was popular once, so long ago... Of course it was a love song.

And it clicks.

Everything clicks.

And I watch the rest of the movie with a fool grin on my face.

Me: No, seriously—this is exactly what it's doing! It is just a generic love song, and that's the entire point—because it's talking about how the human condition is oh so common, and so powerful, that it can apparently triumph over generations of genetic programming.
Casey: Hmmm.
Lara: I still can't buy pop music as the great cultural uniter, though. Maybe in the 80s that was true? Pop music has certainly simplified quite a bit since even then.
Casey: Unfortunately or not, it already is the great cultural uniter.
Me: Actually, forget the song, the song is not the point. The point is love, that fundamental primal marker of simple humanity, that one glorious reason we all can look at our fellow sentients and consider them fellows. This is what is so powerful, so beautiful, what the Zentrans are so eager to get for themselves. The song is asking them, and the movie is asking us, do you remember love?

So. Lara had just never managed to buy into the characters or the situation as anything more than narrative devices, into the climax as anything but a dumb silly oh-so-Japanese message. And I can't even say I blame her, because I really do get the sense that the movie loses some weight in the adaptation—the two timeskips in which we're supposed to assume the two relationships developed aren't even immediately obvious as timeskips, for one thing.

And it is ridiculously, unabashedly, unapologetically, cheesy. It has no truck with the kind of winking acknowledgement of its own flaws that's so in style these days. I can totally see how that could put you off the movie.

But, call me a sap if you will, but it got me. I can see what it's doing, how it's trying to do it, and why it's trying to do it. And it does it, as far as I'm concerned.

I remember love.

And that's the highest praise I can give it.