Undergarments Unite!

On a very special episode of Panty and Stocking with Garterbelt this week, a pair of angelic boys come down from Heaven to spank the titular fallen angels and their demon sister housemates, culling half the population of the city in the process. It was impressive.

This week's primary pop cultural reference seems to be John Carpenter's They Live, a movie in which Roddy Piper finds a special pair of sunglasses that allow him to see a significant portion of the world's population are secretly sinister aliens who keep humanity enslaved with media and bureaucracy. In the new Panty and Stocking, the characters get similar glasses allowing them to see that many of the people in town are really ghosts of the variety they're charged by both Heaven and Hell to execute.

Normally, every episode is made up of three vignettes but this story takes up the whole twenty-two minute run time, similar to the first season episode which introduced the demon sisters. That one frankly featured a much more impressive action sequence but this new episode was plenty interesting. The boys from Heaven are given a theme reminiscent of the Backstreet Boys' "Everybody (Backstreet's Back)" and are clearly meant to capture the boy band aesthetic which remains intensely popular in Japan to-day.

Not to be outdone, Panty, Stocking, and the demon sisters also get an ultra-sexy new transformation sequence (not yet available on YouTube).

It was around this time I started thinking seriously about Panty and Stocking. The They Live stuff could be seen as basically just a reference without substance and yet . . . We have denizens of Heaven killing half the populace to settle a bet--Panty and Stocking, whose angel names, we learn, are Pantiel and Stockiel, make a bet with the angel brothers that they can kill more ghosts than the boys can and the winner gets to be the official overseers of Daten City. Anyone who's accused the Book of Job of making God look petty for taking a bet with Satan would have no trouble seeing this Panty and Stocking as a true criticism of religion. But in terms of Japanese morality, the angels working hard, putting in the extra hours and effort to actually do their jobs, there should be nothing wrong with them having personal motives that don't necessarily align with Heaven's creed. Though, of course, the makers of the show are relentlessly critical of Japanese morality, too.

This is only the latest example of the Gainax crew simultaneously invoking Christian symbols while criticising Japanese sexual hypocrisy. But the world has changed since the alien attacks on Neon Genesis Evangelion were construed as a war with Heaven. I was watching some '90s music videos this morning, thinking again how amazing Mark Romanek's videos were for Nine Inch Nails and Fiona Apple. But what meaning do "Closer" and "Criminal" have for people to-day in the U.S.? I've noticed that, as fantasy movies have become increasingly chaste, to where the modern version of pulp babes are Florence Pugh's androgynous look in Thunderbolts or the downright masculine portrayal of Peggy Carter in the What If series, portrayals of women in music videos have become decadently kinky. Compare Madonna's "Express Yourself" to Cardi B's "Wet Ass Pussy". That's not just expression, it's secretion. Sorry.

That's Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion, the latter of whom guest starred on She Hulk so she could twerk with the title character who, like the other Marvel heroines, was dressed and shot in a doggedly asexual manner otherwise. I guess possibly the difference is that She-Hulk was meant for a primarily male audience (I don't buy that) and "Wet Ass Pussy" for a primarily female audience (I don't buy that either). Of course, when I first saw the "Wet Ass Pussy" video, the first thing I noticed was the apparent Twin Peaks influence of the chevron patterned floor. But those sets bear the influence of Tim Burton, Stanley Kubrick, and we could even go all the way back to Jean Cocteau's Blood of the Poet. The makers of the video wanted to invoke a sense of awe--the pussy may be wet but it's not easy and the ladies who are calling the shots should be regarded as distant, unknowable goddesses. So it makes sense the filmmakers would reach for some of the most arch, sepulchral, and unnervingly cold, imagery of Lynch, Kubrick, Bergman, or Cocteau, even if they were perhaps only subconsciously inheriting cinematic tradition.

But then you have Sabrina Carpenter and her controversial submissive chic.

In any case, the sense of conflicting guilt and desire for liberated sexuality present in songs like "Closer" and "Criminal" crossed a barrier the younger generation only know the resulting effects of. In the '90s, they said let's fight the old sexual morality, to-day they only know it's gone, replaced by new contradictory, half-assed, poorly considered but stridently enforced, morality.

But back to Japan and Imaishi Hiroyuki, the Gainax alum who created Panty and Stocking. If you look at Kill la Kill, Evangelion, or FLCL (which featured an ode to South Park, a series whose satirical portraits of Jesus and Satan used to push more buttons), you can see the idea pushed again and again: Japan needs to be less ashamed of sex. This is a message that seems even more pertinent now as Japan deals with a worsening population crisis due to young people not having sex. Of course, there are plenty of people who blame that on porn, as plenty of people have blamed porn for all sorts of things. Maybe the old Gainax crew was somewhat in agreement with this when they made their "Me Me Me" short film in which a young man gets so wrapped up in porn that he neglects his beautiful girlfriend. The end of the Rebuild of Evangelion movies seemed to drive the message home that young men ought to pay attention to the perfect, beautiful, brilliant, and carefree women in their lives, a sadly far more simplistic message than the brutal and complicated character of Asuka in End of Evangelion who mercilessly took Shinji to task for his simplistic, selfish conception of the girls and women in his life.

In any case, there's more going on with Panty and Stocking than crude humour, perhaps more than was intended by its creators. It's tempting to read a lot more into what it could mean that the horny, unabashedly self-serving babes declare war on the shadow cult of They Live ghosts infiltrating society. Can rampant sexual liberation really save everyone? As with so many things, it feels sort of like Japan is just catching up to 1960s American culture.

Panty and Stocking with Garterbelt is available on Amazon Prime.