by JL Wall

I’m not quite sure what to make of this New York Times article on “2-D love” — between a living, breathing, human and Anime characters (frequently pillowcases, frequently prepubescent) — except that it does, in its way, demand taking a step back and looking from a different angle at claims that technology — particularly the internet — make the contemporary individual more predisposed to living in a virtual world rather than reality.  It’s one thing, I suppose, to be drawn sufficiently into a virtual life that one begins to prefer it to reality, but another to bring that non-animate alternative into one’s day-to-day life.  At least when it takes this form:

He carries Nemutan almost everywhere he goes, though he is more self-conscious about it than he may seem at first. “Some people don’t find this funny,” he said, “and it also takes up a lot of room.” He treats her the way any decent man would treat a girlfriend — he takes her out on the weekends to sing karaoke or take purikura, photo-booth pictures imprinted on a sheet of tiny stickers. In the few hours we spent together, I watched him position her gently in the restaurant booth and later in the back seat of his car, making sure to keep her upright and not to touch her private parts. He doesn’t take her to work, but he has a backup body pillow with the same Nemutan cover inside his desk drawer in case he has to work late at his tech-support job.  . . .  He knows it’s weird for a grown man to be so obsessed with a video-game character, but he just can’t imagine life without Nemutan. “When I die, I want to be buried with her in my arms.”

And then there’s this:

Nisan knows she’s not real, but that hasn’t stopped him from loving her just the same. “Of course she’s my girlfriend,” he said, widening his eyes as if shocked by the question. “I have real feelings for her.”

Knows she’s not real — and from the article, that’s a near-unanimous opinion, followed by the same (or a similar) “but.”  I don’t have any well thought-out (or even partly thought-out) opinion on this; I’ve just been shifting between a deep sadness and pity on the one hand, and a slightly (only slightly!) shocked disgust on the other.

Perhaps, though it wouldn’t be my wager, these divorces from reality are not that much more frequent or exaggerated now than they have been in the past.  Even then, the true danger in them is genuinely modern: the demand for acceptance and equivalence.  Demanding acceptance of an “alternative lifestyle” is one thing; when that lifestyle takes place in an alternative existence, wholly or partly, it’s quite another.  At least if we’re limiting ourselves to talk of lifestyles (whatever one may think of them generally or particularly), we’re still discussing an alternative that takes place within shared reality.  In the other scenario — not, as it turns out (much to the chagrin of technophobes with outdated cell phones such as myself), limited to virtual alternatives dependent on digital media — physical bodies in this world, this reality, house minds focused on those “other” world and “other” realities.  And this world, this reality take an only secondary importance.

It all reminds me of the closing lines from that Leonard Cohen song:

And the night comes on; it’s very calm;
I want to cross over, I want to go home,
but she says, “Go back, go back to the world.“

     Filed under: media/culture