The first time I saw this 1988 Japanese manga-movie, I was very much under the influence of XTC. Or Molly, as I believe you weird American people also like to call it. You know, that stuff that makes your brain get flooded with massive amounts of things like serotonin, dopamine and other nice things. Just imagine, then: you’re a 17-year-old boy, living in a tiny room, placed right outside the biggest church of the little village in the south of the Netherlands, where you were born, you’re using great amounts of XTC every single weekend, and then one day you’re parents ask you if you would like to watch their house when they are away for the weekend, and you think: ‘uh, duh, would I…?’ Yeah, that was a really long sentence. Here are some more:
So, you do. You watch their house, all weekend long, and you think, ‘My room, next to the church, is so much smaller than this whole house!’ And you also think, ‘I should buy a lot of pills from my dealer for this special weekend and rent a cool movie…’ So, you do. You buy a lot of pills, and on Saturday morning you go to the video shop. You wander around for a bit, and finally you settle on ‘Akira’. Mainly because you think the picture on the cover looks cool. You take it home, and when your parents are finally gone, you take three pills at once and start this movie.
Now, understand this, Americans: we Dutch people, we actually make all that Molly that your scornful youth of today is taking, alright? We produce it, ship it over there to you, and watch your whole country going to shit. So trust me when I say that those XCT-pills I took, that fateful evening way back when, were the real deal. Oh, yeah.
So then, Akira starts. I am alone in my parent’s house, I’m 17 years old, and my head is full of XTC. A gong is being struck. A picture comes into view: at first you think it’s a bloodstain, because it’s red, but then it turns black, and the camera zooms out, and you recognize the outlines of a city: Tokyo! As the digital representation of this limitless city expands before you, a white ball suddenly appears, and you find yourself thinking, ‘Hmm, wait, this is strange… that white ball isn’t supposed to be there! What IS this?’ And then you watch, horrified, as the white ball blows up to apocalyptic proportions and swallows all of beautiful Tokyo, right there in front of your 17-year-old, XTC-filled eyes…
This movie was the first, people. You know, the first. The first kiss, the first dance, the first fuck… The First. The First Movie I saw whilst under the influence of a LOT of XTC. And holy Jesus Christ.
I didn’t understand any of it. Not at first. Not at second, either. Or at third. But that didn’t matter, like, at all, you know. Because it made an impact. Yes, sir, it did. Such an impact, in fact, that I watched it many times since. So many times, in fact, that I know it by heart, by now. I’m actually looking at a framed movie poster of Akira that’s hanging off my wall right this very second, out here, in the very real world. Because this IS the real world, is it not? Is it? IS it?
And here we are. 31 years later. I’m still drunk, I’m still stoned, but one thing DID change: I understand it now. I finally understand this movie. It’s about ultimate power. Ultimate destruction. Ultimate love. Ultimate sacrifice. Ultimate, just about everything. I watched this movie when I was 17 years old, with a head full of glorious XTC, and no matter what: if or is not the world we all live in just some unfathomable dream of an intergalactic multidimensional being that some of us call ‘God’ and others call ‘I don’t believe in God, so much, but I DO think there is something, out there…’, that this, this one single memory in all the stream of time, of me, a single person, watching a movie that would forevermore blow my literal and figurative brains out for many years and dimensions to come, is stored there, on that particular branch of the tree of life that forevermore guides all of our collective being, history and brief moment in the sun, to that I say: ‘yes, sir, I’de like that. Please give me more of this. MUCH more.’
So, to sum up: if you are out there, right now, you 17-year-old boys (and girls!) who are, just by some incredible amount of coincidence, about to ingest a massive amount of some wildly dangerous, untested, undocumented chemical that totally messes up your brain chemistry to such a degree that just about any reasonably weird movie you watch while under the influence of a significant amount of those aforementioned chemicals that can and very likely WILL fuck you up for the rest of your life, you will want and go watch this one. I guar-and-fucking-tee you.
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