Anime Pilgrimage RTT

Black Lagoon – episode 6

June 4, 2006 on 11:42 pm | In Black Lagoon | 5 Comments

“Moonlit Hunting Grounds”

There’s a line between berserk violence and cold violence.When you go berserk, your general aura is one that can only be transcribed as “GYAAAHEERRRRGHHHHAAAAHHH!” (or, depending on who you ask, “KANEDAAAAAAAA!”). The cold route, on the other hand, involves eyeing people, then indiscriminately killing them. Of these two paths, Revy takes the latter. She is infinitely scarier for it.

Kind of a spoiler inside

Revy and Dutch infiltrate the Aryan Socialist Union boat. Revy’s job is to crate a distraction by killing as many Nazis as she can. Problems arise when she runs out of Nazis and all that’s left are the independently hired crew …

In the hands of someone infinitely lamer, the “Revy shoots everyone” scenes could have involved incremental close ups of Revy’s face, each cut punctuated by a bullet shot and constant yells of “Kono, kono, kono, kono, kono!”. Revy already does some posing in this episode, and that kind of horrid turn – like something I would write – would have destroyed the series.
So what we’ve got instead is an unnerving psychotic killer who can switch to a “normal” sardonic killer in seconds. This sort of tension fuels the episode and makes the role of Dutch as both peace keeper and deal maker stronger than it has been thus far. The unworkable trust that they’ve got going on is a sight to behold for sure.

On top of this, we’ve got interesting takes on racism – because it boils down to a black man working for a Nazi – with Revy and Dutch’s favourite gamble. Or, more accurately, a pointless gamble because Revy always wins. This is the fun and “challenging” part of the episode.
The requisite foolishness comes from the fact that Revy is anything but economical with her ammunition … and the door-bursting, monologuing Neo-Nazi. It’s stuff like this that you can’t help but love, and I was surprised only that Revy gave the stupid bastard so much air time.

Black Lagoon goes from strength to strength, despite suffering from the same problem that Spike Lee’s recent film Inside Man did: one can’t really make films dealing with Nazi War Criminals who live to this day, simply because it’s getting to be too far in the past. To be anything like a culpable Nazi, you have to be at least seventy something. Let’s have another big war with multiple villains so that we can make popular culture featuring their motives.