Angel Beats!, the 2010 animated series, is, like many anime, set in a high school. Albeit, not a high school that is necessarily recognisable. The monotony is rarely on display, the teachers hold no power over their students and no one ever seems to do any studying. Instead this is a fantastical environment. Specifically it is a secondary fantasy world where the unfulfilled dead are given what appears to be a second-chance to resolve their regrets before moving onto their new lives. The question of course remains: what if you don't want to move on?
This encapsulates the struggle that the main characters face; the Afterlife Battlefront are a band of subversive malcontents who desire to fight against obliteration from Angel, the agent of corrections who would see them move onto the next world. That their rehabilitation would play out in a school setting is not coincidental. This secondary world is one wherein which survival (or, at least, persistence) is explicitly tied to subversive individuality and denials of conformity culture. The Battlefront, ostensibly students, mark themselves as different to the rest of the school. They rarely attend class, holding guerilla concerts and activities out of an impromptu base set up in what was formerly the Principal's office. They deem the students unlike them 'NPC's and, alongside taking on a distinct uniform, employ outlandish physical appearances; from adornments, such as tails and halberds, to hair of varying colour and styles. These eye-catching designs play off of the notion of Main Character Syndrome; a jovial attitude that is reflected in the characters themselves, who too are most often seen at play. Toying with the rules of this world, the day to day structure of the Afterlife High School seems to concern pushing the boundaries of the school, and Angel, as much as possible before returning to normality.
But, of course, high schools aren't fantasy playgrounds. Rather, they are prisons. It is a dramatic comparison, but one which gains veracity when the timespan of the Afterlife High School is taken into consideration. What may seem a fun romp on a cursory glance may actually amount to something more sinister. One of the series' recurring gags is that the main character often misinterprets the melodramatic language of the Battlefront and their conflict when the subject matter of conversation is something benign; for example, "Angel's Rampage" refers to the school's testing period and "Angel's Domain" refers to her dorm room. Through ancillary materials, such as the two special episodes released after the series' initial run and the prequel manga, Angel Beats! Heaven's Door, it is implied that many of the speciously teenage characters of the main cast have, in fact, inhabited this world for decades. They do not age, they do not grow older, but instead they persist endlessly in the bodies that they died in. In this circumstance, even the mundane would seem that much more disconcerting, that much more unsettling and that much more calamitous. With this ageless quality, it is as if the very institution of the Afterlife High School polices the bodies of its inhabitants. All the more important then, to rage against the purgatorial culture of conformity.
In perhaps the quote most wheeled out by Foucauldians, we see a similarity in the very structure of disciplinary institutions, specifically the similarity between the Afterlife High School and the model of the prison:
“Is it surprising that the cellular prison, with its regular chronologies, forced labour, its authorities of surveillance and registration, its experts in normality, who continue and multiply the functions of the judge, should have become the modern instrument of penality? Is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons?” (Foucault, 1995: 227-228)
The Afterlife Battlefront specifically defies these facets of the school-qua-prison: it flouts the regulated chronologies, as none dare attend class, lest they succumb to the dread appeal of a happy school life. Forced labour, or studying, is a similar route to obliteration. The transition of the school from a site of learning to a site of examination saw surveillance/registration disguised as education and, appropriately, the fifth episode of the series makes it clear that sincere engagement with testing is another surefire route to passing onto the next world. And it should also be stated that the Battlefront goes out of its way to incorporate neurodivergent characters, those perhaps processing trauma related to their death (T.K.), to the length of their imprisonment (Shiina) or perhaps not related to anything at all (Noda). In doing so, they are again resisting the normalising function of the prison.
Yet, for all these similarities between purgatorial school and prison, there is no clear authority governing these subjects. As previously mentioned, the teachers hold only a perfunctory power- one easily dismissed by the rebel students. Angel herself holds no centralised authority, and it is precisely this lack of knowledge-power which allows her to become erroneously known as an Angel: she is, after all, merely the student body president and a prisoner like anyone else. Yet, by series end, the characters have all resolved to put an end to their struggle, to embrace the absurd, Sisyphean proposal of being reborn into an abstract, unknowable next life and thus commit themselves fully to their rehabilitation.
If the Afterlife High School is a prison, there is no prison guard: only the phantom of one, and yet that proves to be enough. Herein lies the nature of the Afterlife High School-qua-Prison. In Discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault (1995) deploys the model of the panopticon to elucidate on the disciplinary society. In both the model and its real life counterpart, the layout is thus: that cells line a wall facing a central guard tower. Importantly, at any time the prisoners cannot see into the guard tower. They do not know if they are being watched and, therefore, find themselves under constant surveillance (whether they are actually being watched or not). In each cell, the collective prisoners have been turned into separate individualities, capable of threatening no collaboration, subterfuge or attempts at escape. The prisoners will not only behave themselves accordingly, but each will become a penal agent themselves: they will take it upon themselves to enforce the authority of the guard tower on the bodies of their fellow prisoners and their own.
A 'panoptic' style prison.
In so far as the true state of the afterlife is an unknown quantity, and that, if he exists at all, God is entirely absent, then the point of authority in Angel Beats! is always abstract and delocalised: the guard tower is always empty.
By series' end, the students no longer engage in avenues of resistance, no longer rage against their unjust fates or the cruelty of God. The students of the Afterlife Battlefront are all subversive malcontents: sympathetic, perhaps, for the unjust lives that they have lead, yet undesirable nevertheless. Their anti-theistic, nihilism ill befits a society of conformism and must be rectified in a location away from the public eye. Yet to simply correct these youths into idealised behaviours is not adequate: they would move on from their rehabilitation and, in the new world, break once more when faced again with the abject cruelty of life. So this is the true purpose of the Afterlife High School: to create docile subjects who, in the new world, will police and correct themselves. Having learned to suitably repress their morose tendencies, they will re-emerge into a new, inevitably unjust life, and face it with dutiful poise.
A happy ending, albeit one delivered on bittersweet terms, is evidence enough that this correction is successful, proving beneficial to the series' protagonists, or at least that is the myth propagated by the after-credits scene of the original series. With that being said, there was another, alternate ending that suggests something different:
Angel Beats! Another Epilogue
Whilst the original ending serves fans of the series' characters and the genre as a whole more favourably, featuring the tease of a romantic reunion and a promise that love can conquer even the boundaries of life and death, it is this alternate imagining that I find to be the far more compelling one. The difference between these post-series endings is vital: each one transforms the work into either a peddler of myth (particularly, the myth of rehabilitation) or into something more critical. For one, the former ending is far more considerate to 'God' as an abstract, higher power, whose movements in mysterious ways are fundamentally benevolent. The rehabilitation will not only decisively work, but it will lead to a new world where the struggles of old are gone and only hope remains; vindicating the process as a whole and offering comfort in the notion that we all grow out of our rebellious phase- and that that is for the best.
Yet it is the alternate ending which shows us the true apotheosis of the Angel Beats! school's mission, taking it to its full, logical conclusion: at the end of the story, the site of rehabilitation becomes again a centre of discipline and corrections as the main character of the preceding story takes on the antagonistic 'Angel' role. Attempting to rehabilitate his dissatisfied subjects, the main character becomes as much a prisoner as any of them: only now he is all the more aware of his disciplinary role. He is an arbiter of surveillance, a figure fearsome to his fellow students, yet one also in fear himself; who can only ever hope to be an arm of the abstract authority and never the authority itself. Here, the success of the school as a correctional facility is left ambiguous. But he is a truly institutionalised figure now, a character who persists in the world not because he has rejected the purpose of it, but because he believes in it thoroughly. Perhaps the willingness for fans of the series to invent and believe in a theory that the main character is, in fact, the root cause/grand designer of the afterlife is tribute to how this idea of surveillance and self-policing was effectively communicated through the series.
But, if there is one idea given more prominence, then it may well be that of divine punishment. The world itself, as fantasy, may seem fun, even desirable, but beneath that veneer it is callous and cruel. As established, this is a world of corrections, to transform the subversive, nihilist subject into an inoffensive consumer, functioning on the operative to merely 'Enjoy!', posing no risk to the grand narratives. Yet, rehabilitation, the disciplinary, is all too often only the sanitisation of the archaic punishment: the deviant must pay for their transgressions, yet we recoil from the idea of them being dealt physical pain, or even receiving their sentence in the public sphere. We erect these correctional facilities not to adequately care for and rehabilitate their inhabitants, but to absolve ourselves from any societal obligation to the condemned. That goes not only for prisons and prisoners, but for hospitals and the ill, for asylums and the insane, for factories and the workers and, of course, for schools and young people. That is why the story of Angel Beats! must take place in the afterlife; it is the one point most removed from all other gazes. So long as these miserable people are dead, we no longer have to witness their miserable lives.
Foucault, M. (1995). Discipline and Punish. New York: Random House.
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