Spirited Away by The Placental Other-Self

David Titterington
11 min readNov 13, 2024

--

Artists bring to expression repressed parts of whole communities. They spend time in the dark so their eyes adjust and become sensitive to patterns and agencies hiding in the margins.

Baby and placenta superimposed over Chihiro and No-Face.
Bunraku puppeteer; Chihiro’s magic purple hairband made by No-face et al.

No-Face, the popular character from Spirited Away, is a blobby gender queer drag clown made from spectral black goo and other important Japanese symbols. “He’s Miyazaki’s alter ego,” someone from the studio said. “I think there’s a bit of No-Face in all of us,” Miyazaki replies.

This abjection incarnating phantom wears a mask inspired by Noh theater and a body inspired by silkworms and Bunraku puppeteers. This makes him a repository or complex hieroglyph indexing Japanese arts, sericulture, and the possibility for transformation. The purple hairband comes from threads that No-Face spun. Silkworms are also historically tied to women.

Layered like a musical chord, these higher notes are rooted by a bass note of repressed postwar Japanese anxieties; the faceless ‘demon’ becomes possessed by a rampaging, insecure, greedy child embodying US imperialism and, as Ayumi Suzuki puts it, the nightmare of capitalism. People run from No-Face like he is Godzilla; in both we see echoes of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Butoh co-creator Kazuo Ohno, 1986.

In No-Face there are even echoes of Butoh masks, characterized by their mime-like, surrealist, frozen screams. No-Face’s subtle gestures recall the spooky Butoh performances of Kazuo Ohno.

Butoh is Japanese post-war anti-art mysticism. Ohno said the rope in this performance represents an umbilical cord.

This layered character externalizes cultural anxieties as well as repressed stages of personal growth. No-Face’s comically large mouth and disgusting, scatological body point to oral and anal stages — more overtones and harmonies — yet No-Face goes back even further, to the “time before time,” to Chihiro’s placental ghost, or what analysts might call her placental programming. Probing our own relationship to this long-lost sibling shines a new light onto No-Face and his comforting gift, as well as on any schism he is attempting to heal: Can you even imagine meeting your adult-sized, long lost womb-mate today? Could you recognize them? Would you embrace them, or run away in terror?

When the cord is cut, we are severed not from our mothers, but from our placentas. We have placenta complexes, explored directly in postnatal psychologies and expressed indirectly through surrealist fiction like Spirited Away.

Reading Peter Sloterdijk’s commentary on placentas in Requiem for a Discarded Organ, these suspicions about No-Face seem well-founded:

“A first amorphous other has appeared, with neither eyes nor voice.”

“…like an intrauterine butler, it stays close and on the fringe discreet and nourishing.”

“…an archaic, unpopular organ whose task is to make itself available to the fetal pre-subject as a partner in the dark.”

“It is like a dark little brother placed by our side so that the fetal night would not be too lonely…”

Arriving at the end of the line, Chihiro et.al meets the light.

All of which is to say, everyone’s a little bipersonal. Central to this thesis is the fact that No-Face and Chihiro are attuned from the beginning. The scene most crucial to understanding this is when they first ‘meet’ on the bridge. Both are invisible to the other characters — is No-Face holding his breath, too? — yet they can see each other, acknowledging one another with a little bow and head turn.

Why can No-Face see Chihiro on the bridge? He’s pulled into the story the moment she enters the threshold; Chihiro conjures him somehow. Or is it the other way around? More, we find out both are unwanted “others”, lost, “in the world but not of it,” searching for family. This leads scholars to posit No-Face as Chihiro’s animus, sub-self, id, “other half,” shadow, existential sense of isolation and abandonment, and co-star “Hulk with a hug” best friend trope. Another clue Spirited Away centers on Chihiro and No-Face is his connection to the shite main narrator in Noh theater, the spirit who always meets you on a bridge. We encounter No-face on the bridge twice, at night and during the day, further associating him with liminal spaces and threshold guardians.

As an essential phenomenon of every birth, the placenta, “seat of the soul”, “bundle of life”, still full of mysteries, used to be received with great esteem and even religious awe. In pre-industrial cultures, people taught their kids about it and everyone grew up knowing where their “twin” was. The second birth, they could psychically integrate its presence, because placentas were honored and personal and sacred. Hospitals today label them “toxic waste” and dispose of them or sell them off immediately; the child never hears of their womb-mate again. This new, cross-cultural “placenta-denying” attitude influences our separate self-sense, establishing, according to Peter Sloterdijk, “an imaginary solitary confinement of individuals in the womb.” Placenta rituals become “anxiety releasing mechanisms,” operating all over the world to counter narcissism. In The Shadow of Life, anthropologist J.R. Davidson says these rituals “delimit a portion of reality” and are essential for our well-being. At an unconscious or subconscious level, Chihiro — and everyone else — is anxious because she doesn’t know where her placenta is: her parents did not practice the ancient Japanese custom of burying it with gifts in a clay pot under the house. And even if they did, they’re all moving. The modern tradition of migration for economic opportunity divides us from the spirits of place. Everyone has been unmoored from the world of the known.

“Like a nourishing shadow and anonymous sibling…”

No-Face is a personification of the missing placenta for a few other reasons. He wants to nourish Chihiro, protect her, give her anything she needs. When separated, he calls out to her; he even aggressively seeks her out. Y.W. Loke in Life’s Vital Link points out that, compared to other mammals, the human placenta is the most intrusive to the mother, even destroying her blood vessels in its quest to obtain the optimum supply of nutrients for the baby — “a kind of aggressive behavior usually only associated with cancer.”

Even though he is gender-queer, taking on both masculine and feminine voices, No-Face goes by he/him pronouns which might mean something. Jungian psychology asserts that every body has an opposite-sexed soul, Anima/Animus, similar to Yin/Yang. We are all bi-gender. (Yet, Plato’s and Hedwig’s origins of love perfectly refute this: there are three (or more) types of spiritual pairings). The point is that No-face would probably do anything for Chihiro, just like a life partner.

We all grow into this world next to a purple partner made just for us, who sleeps with us, wakes with us, and follows us out of the bathhouse only to suddenly vanish and be replaced by a comfort object. In light of this, our childhood fascinations with stuffed animals and blankies makes an expanded kind of sense — not just an adaptation to the trauma of physical separation from the mother (who might be more like a hyperobject to a fetus, an ever-present but invisible environment) but from the first legible other-self we ever meet. Primal companion, “imaginary” friend, ultrasounds at five months reveal fetuses “petting” it, for lack of a better term; when we curl up with a blanket and pillow at night, we learn more about this pre-personal friendship than if we study it with a microscope or supernatural cosmology. Sloterdijk, again: “As soon as we prepare for the night, we almost always slide into a state in which we cannot help disposing ourselves towards a self-augmentation in the dark in which an appropriate With-successor will play its part.” Interestingly, beds, bedding, bedrooms, and pillows are all enlarged and play important roles in Spirited Away. (I can’t stop thinking about how Kamaji turns a pillow into a blanket for Chihiro when she falls asleep on the floor).

Egyptian Narmer Pallet, c. 3,200 BCE; Hildegard of Bingen’s “The Creation of the Soul,” 1175.

Some pharaohs mummified their secret helpers, believing the placenta plays a protective role inside as well as outside the womb. The 3,400-year-old Narmer Pallet depicts a person carrying “the royal planeta” and umbilical cord in front of the pharaoh like a flag. See also Hildegard of Bingen Scivias 5, “The Creation of the Soul,” that depicts a diamond-shaped entity full of eyes connecting to the fetus through a golden cord. According to Egyptologist Aylward M. Blackman, “While in one aspect the placenta-ghost is a protecting genius, in the other it is the force that controls and suggests a person’s thoughts and actions. In short, in the latter aspect it is his personality.” And in fact, the size and weight of the placenta does have an effect on the child’s mental health later in life. Moreover, doctors always examine the placenta for signs of disease, especially if the child is sick. Placentas reveal secrets; they may have no face, but they’ll still tell on you. Women who smoke or drink lots of soda give birth to blackened placentas, as do women who live near toxic wastelands. As a placenta ghost, No-Face therefore protects and reflects. He makes visible the invisible parts of the person, like a toxicology report. No-Face is the placenta of the postwar Japanese psyche.

We can add him to a long history of human placenta images. In the film, he’s sometimes animated to look like a dark, veiny, blobby “pancake,” but we read that he was designed after a silkworm, which is interesting when we consider the role a silkworm’s cocoon plays in the metamorphosis of the adult. The larva must turn to goop and be incorporated by the future self who has not-yet emerged. Silkworms also have eye-spots or false faces (masks) used to confuse predators. He is thus Chihiro’s gooey cocoon protector and larval stage, her future and her past, providing her with everything she needs to get the hell out of the bathhouse.

Modern domesticated silkworms have also lost many of the capacities of their wild cousins, relying on direct human intervention to feed and breed just as No-Face demonstrates total plasticity and transforms as soon as he enters the bathhouse. I asked artist and paleontologist Michael Garfield about this pattern, and he made an interesting connection: “As with many other organisms shaped by their dependency on the human world and its built environments, No-Face undergoes a profound transformation in size, affect, and the ability to exert his own agency. Ultimately, he needs Chihiro as much as she needs him: incapable of executive function, he becomes an oracle of the bathhouse’s plutonic forces until Chihiro “reclaims” her nonhuman shadow-self and tames the chthonic forces of an unconscious mind bent into service of the economy. Sound familiar?”

Analysts think the missing placenta plays a critical role in the development of our contemporary, capitalist, isolated and isolating narcissism. Sloterdijk claims our modern individualism could only enter its intense phase in the second half of the eighteenth century, “when the general clinical and cultural excommunication of the placenta began.” He explains that when we carelessly discard our primal companion, demons take its place. “Where, on the other hand, as in antiquity and popular traditions, a space was left open for the soul’s double in the cultural imaginary, people could — up to the threshold of modernity — assure themselves that they were not directly connected either to their mother, “society” or their “own” people; rather, they remained primarily connected throughout their lives to an innermost second, the true ally and genius of their particular existence.” The excision of our “innermost second” from our lives may be the initial lack from which all other lacks eventually follow (cue “The Origin of Love”). The gaping hole left in our psyche is the dark void out of which the ego builds its isolating case.

There is a cross-cultural belief that failure to treat the placenta with special consideration de-centers human beings. In Japan, the second birth was placed in a clay jar and buried under the floor in the house. If the child was female, a needle and thread was buried with the placenta, which further connects to No-Face who finds his purpose when given a needle and thread. His silkworm-inspired body connects to the threads in the purple hairband for a marvelous moment of correspondence. (Also in Japan, part of the placenta was dried and kept as the child’s personal medicine, resonating with the healing emetic Chihiro feeds No-Face to help him purge).

Whatever was buried with the placenta influenced the life of its other half, so people created special reliquaries, or wrapped it up like a present and buried it under fruit trees. People still do this. In some cases, as we see with the beaded turtles and lizards of Lakota cekpas, it becomes part of the child’s first toy — a talisman carried with them their entire lives, and buried with them at death.

According to Ghibli wiki, “The hairband is a protective talisman. Chihiro continues to wear the hairband after she has left the Spirit Realm through the Red gate. The hairband makes it clear that her experiences in the Spirit Realm must have been more than just a dream.”

I rest my case.

We are all haunted by a No-Face. Through this fantastical hieroglyphic language, Miyazaki hints that the secret to a human incarnation is a shadowy blob worm and carnivalesque disruption of order that delivers a special message from your missing soul double. By recognizing what we’ve lost, this monster can transform into what chaos magicians call “your holy guardian angel”: the negative space in which we can fully flower, individuate, and finally reconstitute our wholeness. Meanwhile, we surround ourselves with cords and hold close our comfort objects.

--

--

No responses yet