“Angels of Death” follows Rachel Gardner, who woke up in a basement without her memory. On her way out, she is pursued by a bandage-covered, scythe-wielding serial killer. In her attempt to escape, though, she finds herself in the hands of another psychopath who wishes to kill her. The first killer attacks the second and promises Rachel that he won’t kill her until they make it out of the building. As the two make their way to the top, they are confronted with a number of other killers who they have to thwart in order to escape.
In order to analyze this anime, I will be using semiotics, which is the study of signs. According to Danesi, “a sign is anything … that stands for something other than itself.” In other words, a sign is a symbol which represents either another symbol or an abstract idea.
The primary sign that I found in “Angels of Death” is that of eyes. Eyes signify “windows to the soul.” In other words, by looking at someone’s eyes, you are able to learn about their character. Typically, this would refer to looking at how someone’s eyes express, or don’t express, the way that they feel about something. This is the case within the show when characters are talking about Rachel.
Throughout the series, people tell Rachel that she has eyes that are alive, yet dead at the same time. It is later revealed that this is because Rachel is a murderous sociopath who kills people and sews them back up. Her eyes, like her personality, are dead because she doesn’t give a second thought to murdering people, but alive at the same time because she still desires close relationships, which causes her to sew the bodies back together.
Another prominent example is Isaac “Zack” Foster, the first serial killer that Rachel encounters and the one she eventually befriends. Originally, Zack appears to be a heartless killer bent on causing chaos. However, it is later shown that his murder spree stems from the pain caused in his childhood. Zack’s father hated him and tried to set him on fire when he was young. Instead of accepting his fate, Zack ran towards his father so they would both die together. But Zack survived. This caused his mother to hate him, so he was sent to the orphanage.
He was eventually adopted but his foster parents were abusive and turned out to be murderers, as well. They killed kids and forced Zack to bury the bodies. Ultimately, Zack killed them in their sleep and ran away. Afterward, he started killing people who looked happy because, to him, happiness equated to evil.
This same idea is present in his eyes, one of which is a black, the other yellow. This can be traced further to darkness and light. The black eye represents darkness and, therein, the side of him that only wants to kill. The yellow eye represents light and, further, the side of him that wants to do good. Put together, his eyes are the representation of his internal struggle with good and evil. While he wants to do good, the only way he knows how to do so is by killing the people he perceives to be bad.
Thus, in “Angels of Death” a character’s eyes serve purposes beyond giving them a unique physical appearance, even so as to reveal what sort of emotional and mental struggles are going on beneath the surface.
No comments:
Post a Comment