Welcome to the NHK is, primarily, a character drama, building the psychological/emotional landscape of a single character, Sato. We are submerged in the way he thinks and processes the world, via mostly his fantasies: how he gets lost in it, and the ways they are always existing as a digression - a life happening inside one's mind, leaving the real world behind. This is a very extreme exploration of the concept, as it extends even to self-fantasy: how one views its own identity, and, most interestedly, how the image we have of ourselves is a kind of extreme realism that is also fantastic, and not what people see of us at all. It captures a way-of-being of the introverted, timid, super-ego driving that I identify myself with very deeply.
Sato's self fantasies lead him to a fabrication of his reality. It's interesting how his lies start to involve his friends and his family -- mostly because it ties to his paranoia about conspiracy: he himself is the agent of one, designed to obfuscate the truth of his own life. So, of course he is paranoid. Rightly so. The conspiracies in the series are an overall critique of, well, everything: the alienating effect of media, self-doubt, insecurity, fear of getting hurt, as well as the structures of society (and the oppressive quality of those social structures) etc. The great dynamic of the series is how those things diverge ourselves from a life of possible happiness, i.e. how we can conciliate our individual selves with an outside of ourselves/social life.
This is why this is an anime of broken people, unhappy in a intimate, core level. We get a series of lost souls searching for meaning, which can be a cult or a pyramid scheme, or any other series of life-consuming vices. But there's only two virtuous answers the anime gives: 1) the necessity of money for food and shelter forcing one to find a job and going outside, and 2) how we can actually help one another and, with this, help ourselves. Which is why the last episodes, putting the spotlight on Misako and revealing that there was a second, parallel story happening at the same time, are so brilliant. We are all waiting to be saved.
If we stop running and decide to live, there's a life waiting for us.
Loose thoughts:
- The Buffalo '66 poster in Sato's room is the most unexpected reference I think I ever saw in a anime. Makes complete sense, of course, as both are movies about how a fake relationship turns to a real one and ends up saving the lost people in them. But still. Completely out of left field.
- The most amazing subversion of the "beach episode", at the same time absurdly dark and hilarious and staring one of the sharpest, funniest, from sad-to-laughing cuts EVER.
- There's some completely unexpected nude scenes in this. I mean, not the smooth doll bodies that are usual, but ~real nudity. Can they do this? Is this normal? I don't believe I actually blushed at drawn nakedness, but it came out of nowhere!!
