Urusei Yatsura Episode 87 Discussion

glassknuckles said:
While watching it, I felt it was a kinda dumb episode. Still, some thoughts have occurred to me after watching it.

The only people cooking are girls, and the the men sit around and wait to be fed, along with Shinobu, Ryunoske and Lum for whatever reason. There's a real ironic humor here in that the boys ignore the girl cooks who keel over from the poison, and Ataru of course says their incapacitation means more food for him. Or maybe it means nothing.

Lum didn't seem to be visually affected by the magic mushrooms, but instead seems to be a real agent of chaos this episode, apparently bringing in more people to be infected rather than resolving the situation lol When she fetched Sakura I thought,' oh, here comes the resolution'...then nope. Another 'mass bad end' episode where only a continuity reboot resolves the problem for the next episode lol

I guess we already got Ryunoskue stripping, but I was really hoping Ataru's mother would do something crazy. Instead, she just cleans the floor while her husband reads the paper in imitation of his commute, and might as well sum up his interactions at home. Thus, the Moroboshis,when called upon to perform, can only perform their social roles as picture perfect stereotypes of Japanese husbands and wives. This might be brilliant if we never saw much of Ataru's parents, but we already know some things about Ataru's mother (eg. Ataru gets all of his bad traits from her, and she has unfulfilled dreams of her own) and it's disappointing there is no new facet of Mrs. Moroboshi revealed here.

In fact, all of the characters are simply reduced to stereotypes of themselves in this episode when called upon to "perform." Shinobu throws desks; Mendou is claustrophobic; Ataru eats and makes a big show of it; Onsen is silenced. All of us in our daily lives can be reduced to a stereotype when a situation calls upon us to "perform"- life itself is nothing but endless performance: Shakespeare's "poor player" strutting upon a stage; the dramaturgical theory of society proposed by sociologist Erving Goffman; in this way, all of life is entertainment. And a life of entertainment, as Ian Buruma has written in Behind the Mask (1983), is what the ancient Japanese gods expected from the Japanese people. Just as the lives of mortals are entertainment for goddesses and gods, the lives of Urusei Yatsura's cast is entertainment for us, the audience.

The story, and the way this episode ends, with everyone is trapped in a mutually enforced need for constant performance, and desperate search for a new entertainment, is maybe a cry for help from from the animation staff lol