The Flesh Revolts

How Akira’s sci-fi horror explores body, artifice, and exploitation under capitalism

by Meabh Cadigan

To become something more than—or other than—human is a terrifying proposition. We don’t know where we come from or why we think, and so we hold on to this mystery of human identity with desperate, clutching hands. And it’s this fear of the abandonment of the sanctity of human identity that lies at the heart of much of cyberpunk.

In much of cyberpunk media, the loss of humanity is framed as a choice. Humanity can be abandoned for power, either physical or informational, and the inhabitants of cyberpunk worlds constantly rub up against that boundary. In the original Cyberpunk 2020 tabletop game, this sacrifice of identity for power is mechanically represented by “cyberpsychos”: people who have augmented their bodies so heavily with cybernetics that they literally forget how to be human. In The Lawnmower Man (1992), greenskeeper Jobe Smith literally leaves his human body behind to enter a digital mainframe that will grant him immeasurable psychic powers. The political divides over the ethics of cyborgs and cybernetic enhancement also underscores much of the conflict of the Deus Ex series, such as Deus Ex: Human Revolution (2007), in which main character Adam Jensen constantly debates his own humanity after being forced to recieve innumerable cybernetic “augments.” Cyberpunk divorces the body from its nature as a holistic, autonomous unit to explore inhuman humanity. The cyberpunk body is an exploration of the uncanny valley, pushing the boundaries of what a “human” can be to unnerving conclusions.

Within the genre, however, there is a singular film that stands out in its discussion of this Theseus’ Ship of the Self, and its exploration of what it means to lose our humanity in a future where we can swap out parts of ourselves for better, more efficient ones.In Katsuhiro Otomo’s 1988 masterpiece Akira, the loss of humanity is not a choice, but a newfound form of capitalist exploitation within a technocratic, militarized society. By interrogating the question of what happens when humanity and autonomy are taken from us by force rather than by choice, the film interrogates the human-machine divide in a deeper way than any of its counterparts. It also asks, and the difficult question of why we assume that the “inhuman” figures of  cyberpunk dystopias are that way by choice.

The film opens with disaster: a nuclear explosion that creates the ruin from which Tokyo-3 will soon rise, a microbial metropolis in a crater of death. Following this apocalyptic death and rebirth, Akira introduces us to its main characters and story elements in quick succession: orphaned lifelong friends Tetsuo (Nozomu Sasaki) and Kaneda (Mitsuo Iwata) are members of a rambunctious bike gang that has a run-in with a strange, psychic-powered child being recaptured by the military forces of Tokyo-3, led by Colonel Shikishima (Tarō Ishida). The encounter hospitalizes Tetsuo and leads him to discover his own newly-awakened psychic powers, which two government functionaries (Colonel Shikishima and the scientist Dr. Onishi) soon fret could rival the power levels of the titular “Akira,” a former test subject believed to be the cause of the original explosion.

As Tetsuo’s power grows, he becomes consumed by it, obsessed with the idea of finally stepping out of Kaneda’s shadow.

As Tetsuo’s power grows, he becomes consumed by it, obsessed with the idea of finally stepping out of Kaneda’s shadow. However, by the end of Akira his now fully-awakened powers are too much for him, causing him to transform into a horrifying mass of flesh that shifts form without rhyme or reason, one moment a screaming baby and the next a mass of fingers. Tetsuo’s transformation is Akira’s defining moment, the first explosion of bubbling, malformed flesh from his arm eliciting a full emotional range of shock, terror, and awe. As his fleshy hand falls from beneath the folds of his ragged red cape, Tetsuo is revealed to be more than a human: the melding of machine and man is quickly accelerated until Tetsuo’s original form is unrecognizable. He has become the inhuman that all cyberpunk fiction fears. We might initially be tempted to read Tetsuo’s transformation in much the same way as other hubristic meta-human transformations in the genre, as an individual whose reach for power exceeds the grasp of their body and leaves them inhuman and robbed of identity. We must remember, however, that Tetsuo’s transformation is not by choice—instead, Akira posits his horrific transformation as the last step in human exploitation, in which his bodily autonomy has been stripped away by functionaries of an inhuman system, even as his own flesh turns against him in open revolt. 

It’s worth noting that Akira is not set in some distant future, as exemplified by its now-retro-futuristic aesthetic. In much the same way that Blade Runner moved into the past tense two years ago, Akira’s future is also 2019—and indeed the film, with its underfunded education system, police violence and protest in the streets, overt militarization of everyday society, and a bureaucratic government that turns a blind eye to the suffering of their people to line their own pockets—feels even more present now. Even the most “progressive” of Akira’s bureaucratic functionaries, Mr. Nezu (Hiroshi Ohtake), tries to escape the city with a briefcase full of bonds when the going gets too rough for him. Individual power in Tokyo-3 is a rare thing, one not easily found and even more difficult to maintain.

So when power seemingly falls into his lap, is it any wonder that Tetsuo takes it? He has, after all, struggled all his life for food, shelter, and the respect of his peers. As with so much of cyberpunk fiction, though, Tetsuo will discover that power is not granted altruistically—nor is power in Akria an equal exchange. Instead it becomes a new form of exploitation, one that allows for the Colonel to use Tetsuo in the same way he used Akira: the children are tools, not people, and Tetsuo is no different.

 Since the Industrial Revolution, the mechanization and resulting dehumanization of the worker is a common theme in both art and culture. The Futurist painters of the early 20th century created works like Gino Severini’s The Armored Train in Action (1915), which shows soldiers at war becoming faceless automatons and the glory of the armored train used as a tool for war overcoming the importance of their individual identity and personhood. Severini paints a cruelly celebratory image, ignoring the men and the lives they are in the process of taking to celebrate the machine they have become part of. Marx, on the other hand, warns of the dangers of the mechanization of the worker: “The foot is merely the prime mover of the spinning-wheel, while the hand, working with the spindle, and drawing and twisting, performs the real operation of spinning. It is this last part of the handicraftsman’s implement that is first seized upon by the industrial revolution, leaving to the workman, in addition to his new labour of watching the machine with his eyes and correcting its mistakes with his hands, the merely mechanical part of being the moving power.” 

Marx describes here the horror of having one’s own autonomy usurped by mechanization, as the hand working the spindle is transformed from artist to robot, simply providing fuel to the task taken from him. When the power of workers can be exploited by an advanced society, humans become merely bodies with which to operate machines; soldiers become just another step of the firing mechanism; children become computers, vessels yet to be programmed to serve the purposes of those who wish to exploit their labor.

In Akira, Tetsuo is one of these workers—though it is not his labor that is being usurped, but instead the body itself. The Colonel intends to use the children as weapons, to unlock their secrets and turn those secrets against a government he views as too cowardly and too weak. This stolen autonomy is further reinforced when Tetsuo finally locates Akira’s pod below Olympic Stadium, only to discover that Akira isn’t in there—instead, he finds preserved slivers of Akira’s brain and vital organs, a collection that at one point was a real, human body but has now been reduced to little more than a scientific specimen.

Even in death, Akira is not released from the grasp of the militarized world of Tokyo-3.

Even in death, Akira is not released from the grasp of the militarized world of Tokyo-3. His tissues are kept until they can be used, like a crude strip-clean of a gun waiting to be reassembled. His ultimate fate is a multi-layered twist, uncovering not only Akira’s death but serving as an indictment of the idea of “reformed” capitalism as well. Even in a world that has supposedly bettered itself following the fallout of the explosion that leveled Tokyo, nothing has changed. The powers that be are still seeking to reverse-engineer the tragedy, but this time their work takes place in far more secret locations under far more sinister conditions. There is no “reform” in Akira, only punishment, as shown by the depictions of overt police brutality that play out in the background of the film’s narrative. Even when Tetsuo attempts to escape, he is only recaptured and antagonized, drawing him closer and closer to his inevitable apocalypse.

When this power is finally unleashed—and that first fleshy, malformed hand drops from behind Tetsuo’s cape—the Colonel’s fear isn’t rooted in any real concern for Tetsuo’s safety. Tetsuo’s transformation, the body turning against itself and destroying everything in its path, was always the end goal. The Colonel, and the world of Tokyo-3, rob Tetsuo of his autonomy to the point that the weapon they was always meant for him to be becomes a mass of flesh that revolts against its would-be master. Tetsuo isn’t a “cyberpsycho,” as in Cyberpunk 2020, but rather a symbol of an exploited class of young, disenfranchised children turned into tools to be wielded for someone else’s power. To the Colonel, Tetsuo is merely a firing mechanism—one that will finally put a bullet through the skull of Tokyo-3’s weak democracy. The only real problem from the Colonel’s point of view is that the gun backfired. As such, it’s no surprise that the finale of Akira leans so heavily into body horror. There’s no better example of a body reacting to its autonomy being stolen than that of the flesh literally turning against itself. 

The end of Akira is simultaneously a cautionary tale about power and a tragedy about a not-so-distant future in which the body is no longer our own, but rather a weapon for the wars of those richer and more powerful than ourselves. In one final sacrifice, the children liberate Tetsuo from the writhing mass of viscera and gore at the cost of Tokyo itself. as a white-hot nuclear explosion again destroys much of the city, mirroring the film’s opening. The conclusion’s apocalyptic promise is not “reform,” but revolution—one in which the body is reclaimed as a sacred space for the individual.

Thus, Akira’s indictment of militarization and capitalism is accentuated perfectly by its finale, in all of its sickening, terrifying glory. It is a symphonic plea, one that uses its final measures of extremity and hyperviolence to warn us that the thing to fear is not the fusion of man and machine, but the people who benefit when such a thing happens.

Ultimately, we cannot lose our humanity unless it is taken from us. The idea that humanity can—and will—be abandoned willingly in a cyberpunk future is a distraction that we must resist, for if we must make the choice between which of us counts as man and which counts as machine, the dark future of Akira is already here. 

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