Body For Sale, Slightly Worn

In Masaaki Yuasa’s Kaiba, minds and bodies are just two more commodities on the market—revealing capitalism’s own dysfunctional relationship to bodily pleasure.

by Will Riley

In the first episode of 2008’s Kaiba, a sci-fi anime from Masaaki Yuasa, we find the male lead, Warp, on the run from the law for reasons he can’t remember. He is soon pimped to a wealthy female client in exchange for safe passage—at her request, he strips off his pants and turns in a circle so she can inspect his body. Finding it satisfactory, she smuggles him into a ship’s cargo hold.

At the start of the second episode, Warp’s consciousness has been taken out of his own body and placed into a mass-produced loaner, a strange inflatable robot hippo. The client, meanwhile, has copied her own mind into Warp’s body. She proceeds to have sex with herself, using his body as an intermediary. Wandering among the suitcases in bewilderment, Warp is entirely written out of the equation.

In the galaxy of Kaiba, minds can be modified, copied, cut-and-pasted from body to body.  Since society has remained fundamentally capitalist and imperialist, rather than provide universal immortality, this technology has resulted in total commodification and exploitation of both mind and body. Bodies are market goods: both products of genetic splicing or peoples’ “naturally grown” bodies, usually acquired through underhanded means. Skills and happy memories, too, are sold off. Predictably, the upper classes are filled with immortals with a compendium of knowledge and happy memories, while the subterranean lower classes are strip-mined for material and mental possessions.

Warp’s arrangement with his client does help him find some safety and does keep him from being present while participating in sex he wouldn’t have had under other circumstances. However, this scene comes across as even more degrading than the norm—it is sheer, pure, sexual objectification.

When we say “sexual objectification,” what we’re often referring to is slightly different—seeing another in a wholly sexual way, including their internal thoughts; a fantasy that the other wants you in exactly the way you want them. This adds  a problematic aspect of exploitation to sexuality, but at the very least the other’s subjectivity, however narrowly limited, is acknowledged, and a subject of interest. Sex work—be it pornography, prostitution, or a panoply of other jobs—takes a great deal of thought to create the parameters of fantasy that affirms that perceived subjectivity. Sex work is work, and all work is mental work—this is especially the case for seduction. When someone “sells their body,” a huge mass of other work—skilled work—is being silently included in that equation.

Sex work in Kaiba is stripped of all performative aspects: all elements of it that hinge on interpersonal relationships, real or simulated. 

By placing Warp in this position, mutely wandering a cargo bay with the knowledge that somewhere his body is having sex with someone, Kaiba makes sexuality alienating in more ways than one. His actual subjectivity, and his subjectivity as imagined by the client, are now total non-factors. He’s become a victim of capital’s tendency to replace labor with itself, in this case getting swapped out for an actual copy of the capitalist herself. Sex work in Kaiba is stripped of all performative aspects: all elements of it that hinge on interpersonal relationships, real or simulated.

The sexual encounter with Warp’s client and Warp’s body ends explosively—but not in the way you’re thinking. Just before climax, the double realizes that, in this hyper-transactional exchange, she will very soon be disposable to the original. Even if mentally she is exactly the same, within this power dynamic she will be an enemy two seconds from now. She pre-emptively attacks to protect her own existence. Soon, a squad of cops bursts in the room as the woman in Warp’s body sits in a daze, looking at the green blood coating the walls. This sort of thing always ends this way, they inform us.

* * * * *

As an anime director, Masaaki Yuasa is unusually sympathetic towards comically, impossibly, supernaturally horny people. To be sure, Yuasa’s work is not the domain of pantsu-hunters: his oeuvre is not erotic, it is horny; this is distinct from, and sometimes even the opposite of, erotic. Yuasa’s directorial eye is not really drawn to what incites desire. He is much more drawn to whoever is doing the desiring. He depicts their vulnerability; how they fantasize when they think they’re alone, unaware of the audience’s gaze. Yuasa’s famously stretchy animation enhances their absurd self-humiliations, leaving them one step away from a Looney Tune bulging their eyes as an “awooga” blasts from the soundtrack.

For all these embarrassing displays, Yuasa is rarely outwardly judgmental of these characters. Their horniness rarely impedes the opportunity to be good people if they so choose: there is actually little conflict between the Devilman that watches porn on the school auditorium projector at max volume and the Devilman defined by his ability to cry and feel empathy. (Hell, his horny-level is almost commonplace in his world: what do you mean you don’t know about the 100-person orgy happening downtown? Are you some kind of virgin? All the cool people are there.)

In Yuasa’s work, the genuine care that characters have for others actually harmonizes and emerges through how their sexual appetites express themselves in fantasy. In MINDGAME, Robin Nishi is crestfallen to learn that the his love/lust interest’s dreams of professional swimming were dashed by her bust size. Summarily, even his most self-indulgent dream about her creates an elaborate scenario which allows her to self-actualize as the best swimmer in all of creation—while keeping the boobs he’s obsessed with, of course. A similar balance appears in the explosive ending to The Night is Long, Walk on Girl, a product of the male protagonist’s literal fever dream: looking at the unnamed male and female leads falling through the sky, directly cribbing from Miyazaki’s Spirited Away, you would probably envision a pure and sweet romance—if you somehow hadn’t understood the sprawling landscape of “Johnny” cowboys they’d just traversed were euphemism for the male protagonist’s libido and specifically his penis. Exaggerated amounts of sexual desire are present in both fantasies, but these characters’ desire for others’ happiness arrives right alongside, even if they are in ways that are comic and unreasonable to the audience.

In Kaiba, one of Yuasa’s few own non-adapted screenplays, something is clearly amiss. Even as Yuasa’s round cartoony designs bounce their way through pratfalls, comic mugging, and sex jokes, a barrenness pervades the atmosphere. A melancholy wind whooshes through the ambient soundtrack. Kaiba’s posthuman-dystopia-by-way-of-Astro-Boy ruptures Yuasa’s usual harmony of desires by design, just as it has broken the harmony between body and mind: Kaiba is also one of the few Yuasa projects to acknowledge political economy. Whenever sex becomes a topic in Kaiba, and it does frequently, capitalist society just keeps getting in the way of getting one’s rocks off in ways that will not hurt the people around them. 

Whenever sex becomes a topic in Kaiba, capitalist society just keeps getting in the way of getting one’s rocks off. 

While still told from a male character’s perspective, the sensation of being the object of another’s desire, not the person desiring, is given considerably more examination than in MINDGAME or Walk On Girl, both of which emphasise a man’s desire for a woman. As he moves between various bodies of different genders, Warp becomes an object of desire for male and female characters—and due to the in-built inequality of this world, these characters are often in positions of power over him. Across the multiple episodes he occupies the body of Chroniko, a young girl, Warp is constantly courted by Vanilla, a rotund fish-lipped security guard. Comedy is derived from Warp dodging his advances, but he can never reject him outright—because, as we are shown, Vanilla’s job allows him to kill with near impunity. Since people’s minds and bodies are materially distinct and separable, state and corporate violence is even greater than in our world: as long as their quarry’s chips aren’t damaged, cops are able to casually liquify—literally, liquify—any resister. As a hopeless horndog, Vanilla has some qualities present in other Yuasa protagonists—and there are even moments where he develops a sort of pathos—but the power vested in him by society instantly changes how the object of his affections must acknowledge and react to him. Vanilla can roleplay a small part of his fantasies in the real world, while other Yuasa characters’ rarely leave their own heads.

Yuasa demonstrates that the idea that a body can be a source of pleasure is only meaningful to the people with the power and funds to maintain one. Returning to Warp’s wealthy client: her body modifications are never fully established beyond a collection of neurally-connected floating, continuously groping, hands. But as whatever’s happening under the sheets grows larger and larger, and her commands to her double get stranger (“Fold me! Trim me! Boil me!”) it’s clear that she’s had the power and resources to modify her body to achieve pleasures well beyond regular human possibility.

If you only have enough cash for a chip, bodies become hindrances to yourself and others. We’re introduced to a poor family who’ve saved the costs of food, housing, and the like by uploading all their consciousnesses into a single storage unit, a big box that spins to a different face depending on who is talking. This is played as a source of comedic family squabbles, akin to fighting over a shared beater car. But two seconds of analysis demonstrate its uncomfortable implications once the teenage daughter shouts, “Shut up! I want to fall in love!” Being permanently stuck in the same box, with her parents hearing everything she says and thinks, means that any pleasure or intimacy having her own material body would provide has been closed off to her.

The idea that a body can be a source of pleasure is only meaningful to the people with the power and funds to maintain one. 

One could treat Kaiba just as sci-fi hypothetical, albeit with a fairly anti-capitalist thrust; a demonstration of how capital would exploit this kind of technology if it existed. But Kaiba is better understood if these examples are extrapolated to how inequality is already prefigured into our own bodily perception. A wide variety of health products and treatments are readily available to the wealthy—personal trainers, health retreats, personal dietitians prescribing the newest boutique superfood. Some of it is doubtlessly goop-style quackery, or insipid Instagram pages that call banks “financial gyms”—but a correlation between financial and physical health has been a prominent undercurrent for years now. While the Dickensian archetype of the roly-poly bourgeois gorger still rings true from time to time, you must admit that Jeff Bezos is pretty jacked for his age (even if he is probably juicing.)

Meanwhile, on the other side of the class divide, bodies are things you maintain just enough to retain productivity—usually with cheap corn syrup. Hands aren’t for feeling, they’re for steering the Uber you’re driving. And if you’re not in the gig economy or forced to endanger yourself at one of the remaining in-person retail and food service jobs, ordinary work has become even more virtual, and the body is increasingly just a vessel for a brain at a keyboard—so its needs and wants are increasingly irrelevant to capital.

As lucrative work is harder and harder to find for this generation, more people are in the position of the teenage girl, stuck in the same box as their parents for longer and longer, and “falling in love” is rarer and rarer. The impulse to actually exist within the world, to feel its pleasures and exert influence in the wide field of human experience, is deferred and deferred again, all in the name of saving the set of resources that comprises what is deemed necessary for subsistence—a quantity whose social definitions has been continuously shrinking—and placing as much of yourself onto the market as you are able. No wonder so many conspiracy theories about the elite eventually veer toward the sexual (what do you mean you don’t know about the Eyes Wide Shut party? Are you some kind of virgin? All the cool people are there.) When capitalism denies so many bodily needs and desires, narrative logic would assume it all went somewhere: may as well go to the same place all the surplus goes! In Kaiba, that’s precisely what happens. Yet, as the green-blood-soaked encounter shows us, all this accumulated sexuality becomes cheap to the upper class—even Warp’s client’s own mind becomes, she realizes, a disposable tool for totally fleeting pleasure.

While we aren’t yet at the stage that our own bodies can be cut out of the social equation of subsistence, Kaiba presents a wilder form of the world we already live in—where work has turned us into the computers we were always warned we’d be replaced with.

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