"No one seriously believes it will happen, but they can't deny that it might."
Everyone preparing for "worst case scenarios" they're afraid to name. Commuting to work past troops in the streets. A false peace shattered by foreign wars brought home. After checking for news about National Guard deployments a few too many times, it felt like a good night to wallow in my emotions and rewatch Patlabor 2.
The movie opens during an ill-fated UN peacekeeping mission "somewhere in Southeast Asia". Gleaming white labors get bogged down and ambushed, only for their pilots to perish helplessly because they've been ordered to wait for reinforcements without engaging. A few years later, a series of terrorist attacks on Tokyo draws tanks into the streets and jets into the skies, yet with no one claiming responsibility for the bombings, military and police units start to square off against each other as everyone wonders if this is the start of a coup. Troops are cut off and baited into high-stakes confrontations, dared to think of their self-restraint as paralysis, goaded toward sparking an inferno.
"And then there's the SV2's extralegal exploits."
It's time to get the band back together. The Tokyo Metropolitan Police have their own unit of labor operators to deal with the proliferation of heavy equipment-based crime during Tokyo's building boom. 80 episodes and another movie later (you don't need to have seen them), the economy has cooled and the Special Vehicles Unit has been downsized -- but there's always seemed more to Commanders Nagumo and Gotō than meets the eye. For one thing, a military intelligence officer knows to ask them to investigate the primary suspect in ways his office can't. For another, the primary suspect is Nagumo's former teacher and lover. The commanders have to buy time for gumshoe detective work while evading their leaders' inflammatory political maneuverings. All the while, bridges are bombed, communications are jammed, and the threat of American intervention is looming.
Most people these days probably come to Patlabor 2 because it's described as the practice run for the Ghost in the Shell movie. Both are directed by Mamoru Oshii and written by Kazunori Itō, and both are political thrillers that have as many philosophical digressions and meditative montages as they do tense war-room meetings and brutal gun battles between cyborgs mecha pilots. They share anxieties about the relationship between man and machine, post-Cold War imperialism, and a security state so sprawling that it's gone to war with itself. Production I.G lavishes detail on cityscapes and computer displays, suffusing everything in their characteristic backlit glow, and Kenji Kawai provides a striking musical score. But unlike Ghost in the Shell, characters appear more haunted than they do stoic; haggard and pale-faced, they're often drawn distorted as through a fisheye lens. Ghost in the Shell ends with the mystery of a new world, while Patlabor's characters know they must move forward while still reckoning with the past.
"This war has been going on for a long time."
It feels strange for a person like me to be so invested in a franchise about cops, militaries, and the security state, enough to tell you it has one of the most accurate modern air combat scenes put to screen.1 But Patlabor 2's major players realize, one way or another, that the imperial boomerang is coming for them and there's no guarantee they can catch it. That the game they thought they were playing has gotten away from them, or that even if they're so self-aware that their conversations are didactic, no one in a hybrid war knows who or what they're really fighting.
What I admired on this rewatch is that the production team doesn't resolve these tensions for the characters, but nor does it absolve them. Even though the cops choose several times to protect their "unjust peace" -- because even if the peace is illusory, the people of Tokyo are not -- they despair that trying to do the right thing can lead to situations just like this. In that context, it's strange that the story never examines what role the civilians should, or even can, play in their own destiny. Maybe that's the original sin of a cop show.
"Do you suppose that I come to bring peace to the world? No, not peace, but division."
One last parallel to Ghost in the Shell. This is the first example of Oshii and Itō transforming what's basically a police ensemble comedy (but make it cyberpunk) into a brooding tone poem that narrows its focus to a couple of characters with mysterious backstories. They're good at that! But it's jarring to work your way backward into Patlabor the series, which I came to love for its own sake, then return to this movie. The rambunctious misfit family of Section 2 reunites to save the day, but times have changed, and it's clear they will continue to move on once the story ends. People have taken new jobs, retired, or had kids. Even Noa, the tomboy pilot who loved her mecha so much she named it after her old dog (and cat), has settled into a job testing labor prototypes down the street from the warehouse where her Alphonse gathers dust. Everyone is growing up and, in their own ways, making peace with an uncertain future.
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Every day for the last week, the dull roar of a Border Patrol helicopter with no transponder has come and gone from my neighborhood, rising over conversations and TV shows, falling away, rising again as I lie in bed. The helicopter flies wide circles around the city's ICE building. If it stays long enough, I know it will somehow manage to blend into the skyline, like even a bright yellow blimp labeled Ultima Ratio2 can. It's here because of a carefully crafted illusion; its electronic eyes search for validation in the streets below; and the spectacle it creates is designed to drive perception toward the reality its commander wants.
I wonder who they think they're fighting, then I wonder if that matters.
"An empty, hollow peace that only defines itself as 'not war' will eventually be replaced by something that is a state of war in all but name."
1https://taskandpurpose.com/culture/realistic-aerial-combat-movie-patlabor-2/
2"The last resort." Three such blimps had been hovering over Tokyo for weeks before the movie.