Fenzel on Dragonball #5: The Passage of Time

(Just in case you need to catch up, since this series hasn’t had an update in more than a year, ON THE LAST EPISODE OF FENZEL ON DRAGON BALL…)

Let’s say I sit you in a room and give you a bouncy ball. Since this is a thought experiment, you don’t have a cell phone or anything, the room has no windows, there is no temperature variation, and I’m protected by a force field, so you can’t bum rush me with your incredible fighting skills and steal my watch – or, better yet, knock me out with an energy blast from your palms and fly out the door (which is of course the answer a lot of us would prefer for such hypothetical quandaries).

Your challenge? I’m going to come back in an unspecified “later” and ask you how long you’ve been there.

Every human being faces challenges of this nature – marking time does not come naturally to humans, despite its usefulness and, perhaps, psychological necessity. Different cultures have approached the question in different ways at different times. Goku, Vegeta and the gang from Dragon Ball and Dragon Ball Z, Akira Toriyama’s sex farce turned kung-fu epic turned sci-fi stakes-raising extravaganza — by way of comic book turned TV show turned endless cavalcade of remakes, remastering spin-offs, and franchise video games — have some interesting things to say about marking the passage of time. Why does the passage of time matter, how do we measure it, and why that also matters.

So, let’s power up, because the barbecue is over and it’s time to find out who is trying to destroy the Earth, and, more importantly, when!

Lest We Forget

Why do I want to talk about a TV show from decades ago? Dragon Ball is one of the most popular and enduring works of fiction of the last 30 years, with unique global cultural influence and ubiquity. Its innovation in character design, structure, motif and pacing have influenced many successors can be found in many places in the popular culture. What Dragon Ball has to say about how we think matters, especially for the generation about my age, give or take, say, ten years.

Back to the bouncy ball

Let’s go back to the timekeeping thought experiment from the intro, where you’re alone in a room with just a bouncy ball trying to keep time. In this little hyperbolic time chamber, how would you mark the interval, with so few external markers — no day, no night, no stars? Maybe you’d try counting Mississippi for a while. Maybe you’d listening to your body’s internal rhythms, probably with limited success, since the environment is so disruptive and your heart rate so variable over time. My guess is you’d eventually realize a repeating external cue is easier and works a lot better. You’d count the bounces of the bouncy ball — not rolling it from one side of the room to the other at constant speed and gauging time from distance, but specifically counting repetitions.

Credit to The Drawing Empiricist

Almost all ways human beings track time involve observing periodic repetitions — things that have happened before with regularity. While I can’t speak for your own subjective experience (as again, marking time and “feeling” the passage of time are difficult things for people to do), I would wager watching the above graphic can open your mind to a cognizance of the passage of time that is much harder to achieve without external indication. “Look at that! Now, look at that again!” — we build our clocks and calendars around this stuff.

This is not just emergent from our use of units of measure either (as Dragon Ball famously teaches us, numerical units can be pretty useless if you never question the assumptions on which they are based) – nor does the desire for a repeating interval cause us to search for corresponding phenomena — the phenomena precede what we decide to do with them; the rising and setting of the sun and the cycle of seasons had schedule-like effects on our perceptions of reality before we articulated a need for such things.

“Timekeeping” isn’t just a practical concern, it’s a fundamental element of how humans relate to and frame reality — and, as many storytellers discover when they eschew repetition because they think it is boring, it is not the only way human existence and relationship with reality might play out. You can write stories in which there is not repetition in people’s lives, in which people do not keep routines that make them cognizant of time. Sometimes you have to. But they feel very different from our reality.

This is for the ladies

One TV show that always exemplified this for me is Sex and the City — part of the point of Sex and the City is the girls were always discovering new things — new men, new outfits, new feelings and thoughts about themselves and each other, new situations. If there’s an event that isn’t fresh for them, it generally either isn’t shown is glossed over or is truncated and made to look as such. While there are of course recurring characters and long-run situations, there isn’t a ton of repetition, with a result that it is very difficult to know in a given scene how much time has passed for the characters.

The relationship that embodied this for me more than any other (other than the way Miranda’s and Steve’s relationship went through a lot of off-screen development and change as they raised Brady) was Carrie and Aidan. How long were they together? How did their relationship progress on a day-to-day basis? Because the show kind of glosses over the boring parts and/or presents them 0nly when they are new or very changed, the sense of familiarity, comfort and routine in the relationship is diminished (which is probably by design, since the characters only connect so much), and you don’t get the sense that these two people spend time together.

Take this scene:

In real life, the conversation at the beginning of this scene about the dress and the closet would probably happen in shorter sub-conversations spread out over three or four weeks. This could have been shown in a montage of short cuts that would have given the sense of the passage of time, but the writers decided not to handle it this way. The dog eating the shoe, and the comparison between the boxes of stuff, the reveal of the hair tonic are a contraction of a series of arguments that would happen over the first few months of living together. The show goes through all these events on a tear, coming to huge realizations almost instantly — that’s fine, it’s efficient storytelling, it’s what the show is trying to do. But it is cutting out something essential about the human experience doing so.

Of course, any show needs to abridge the actual extent of such events. It can’t show the full duration of five weeks of people living together – the stuff it shows has to fit into the amount of time generally allotted for a TV show. But it’s important that by only showing things as new, the first time they happen, and then moving on makes it feel not just like it is happening quickly, but like it is unmoored from the passage of time – that maybe this scene is showing a day, maybe it is showing a week, maybe it is showing three months. And the timeline of the show reflects this ambiguity – there are lots of timeskips all over the place.

This Sex and the City scene is another example – in real life, this discussion would probably have started much earlier and taken place over months or years, and it certainly would not have finished over such short scenes. But maybe these scenes are standing in for months or years of backstory – just representing them in a more vivid and watchable way. Still, it feels unmoored from time – like we’re in the windowless room without a bouncy ball:

Ahem

But we’re not here to talk about television shows that help adults have active sex lives, we’re talking about Dragon Ball. Take a look at these two scenes, which are loaded with motif and very clearly presented in relation to one another – although they ran on TV a couple of years apart. In each of these scenes, the hero of Dragon Ball, Goku (a powerful kung-fu fighter loosely based on the monkey king of the classic Chinese novel Journey into the West) has been incapacitated, and his son, Gohan, steps up to fight a powerful alien who happens to be a distant blood relation with very nasty intentions.

Gohan vs. Raditz:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MApFNNeZhAk

Gohan vs. Vegeta:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8qss9df_bSY

Appropriately enough, I’ve written about repetition in Dragon Ball before — my first post in this series was about it. I’m not bringing them up just to point out the motifs (I’ll quickly define motif as “a meme created on purpose and used for a reason”), but some of them are trickier than others. Coming into his battle, Vegeta’s chest plate has been damaged in a very similar way to how Raditz’s chest plate was damaged in the much earlier fight. Gohan ends the second fight in the same position where his father was in the first fight – incapacitated and about to be finished off. The Demon King Piccolo – one of the series’ early antagonists, is a bystander observing both fights, albeit in different capacities.

But the point here isn’t that these repetitions exist, but that they create a palpable sense for the time that has passed between the two encounters. We see how Gohan has changed, and how he hasn’t. We feel how much he has grown up, and how much growing he still has left to go. The show ran in two heavily serialized parts, from 1986 to 1989 and from 1989 to 1996 (and I’m not including the bastard spin-off that ran from 1996 to 1997), with more than one considerable time skip — characters are born, grow up, and die during the series (and are then brought back to life again, die again and brought back to life again, but that’s not important right now).

The passage of time is important — a lot of the show is essentially about the passage of generations — about youth and age; fathers and sons; wives, husbands and children; vigor, wisdom and the imperatives, and values people ascribe to as they try to live their lives well. There is a lot of ground to cover, so it is important that these events feel like they are occurring over years and decades — they can’t just be suspended in space like a fight between Carrie and Aidan. Plus, since it is fundamentally a comedy in which almost every character is capable of flight, it can’t show the passage of time with the heavy-hearted sighs and creaking joints, like a Victorian parlor drama or a Chekhov play.

Moan of Arc

Dragon Ball uses the bouncing ball to show the passage of the time. It repeats motifs and situations, recalling the same basic relationship people have with the rising and setting sun and the passing of the seasons. Speaking of seasons, like people’s relationship with time, the Dragon Ball model for the passage of time has many small cycles and arcs (the days, hours, months, holidays, etc.), but also has what are called sagas – large, sweeping story arcs, each of which (with a few exceptions) are typically named for a villain attempting to destroy the world or universe or do something else similarly nefarious.

In the early years of Dragon Ball, time is marked by the “Tenka’ichi Budōkai” – alternatively translated as the “Greatest Martial Arts Tournament on Earth” or the “Strongest Under the Heavens Tournament.” One Tenka’ichi Budōkai happens first every five years, then every three years, and we watch Goku grow from a child into a man, periodically competing in this tournament against his various friends and rivals. Each tournament arc is pretty similar – the characters realize who they are going to have to fight in the tournament, there is some sort of major problem they have to solve, but they aren’t strong enough to do it, so they have to train or find some other way to get stronger, all while sometimes searching for the mystically eponymous “dragon balls” that have the power to grant wishes for reasons that become more and more of a formality as the seasons progress. Eventually, all roads lead to the tournament, where rivalries are settled and the fate of the world is decided.

Once Dragon Ball takes its giant leap over the shark and becomes about space aliens (although at this point, rather than splash into the water embarrassed, jumping the shark is where Dragon Ball learns to fly – it then jumps the shark in earnest a few years later), the tournament pretty much stops being the way time is marked, and instead time is marked by the emergence of villains who are deliberately similar to one another – they are similar because the similarity reinforces that time is passing and lets the differences show what that means.

The Sagas

The macro arcs of the major Dragon Ball villains, leaving out some minor ones and others that are important, but don’t get fully realized narrative arcs in the same way the major ones do, are as such:

The Red Ribbon Army – These guys – a combination of martial arts masters and highly trained paramilitary special forces soldiers with advanced technology are bumbling, comedic villains at this part in the series, but they set the pace for how the story arcs are going to be conducted. The Red Ribbon Army has a succession of generals named after colors – General Black is, well, appalling (there are parts of Dragon Ball, especially early Dragon Ball, that are very racist by today’s standards – mostly because of culturally insensitive visual character design. But it’s hard to gauge how much you can really hold a Japanese guy in the late 80s to today’s American cultural sensitivity standards).

Tenshinhan and the Crane School – This is a rival kung fu school to the protagonists’ “Turtle School.” The Crane School believes in strength, obedience, being ruthless and killing your enemies, while the Turtle School believes in enjoying your life and drawing strength from your desire to have fun. Tenshinhan starts out as a rival but then becomes a close ally after he is bested in battle by the protagonist but spared and encouraged to get stronger. It is a pattern that will repeat.

Demon King Piccolo – This ancient warrior exists in two halves – the good one is the Guardian of the Earth, a peaceful, contemplative dude who lives in a floating island and watches the planet far below, interceding on its behalf with other, more powerful celestial entities. The bad one is a wicked, sadistic monster who at one point ruled the planet below and begins his story arc by escaping from a magical rice cooker. After he is defeated, he is reborn again as a child. That child grows up quickly, becomes the new villain, and then he becomes a close ally after he is bested in battle by the protagonist but spared and encouraged to get stronger. See? The two halves eventually unite again, just for good measure.

Raditz – This is the hero’s long-lost brother, who reveals the hero is actually a space alien, and has come to recruit the hero into a band of cruel genocidal mercenaries. He is killed by the hero and Piccolo, but the hero dies in the process (he gets better).

Vegeta – This is the prince of the alien planet the hero comes from who comes to Earth to avenge Raditz’s death, find and retrieve the hero, and kill everybody on Earth. He takes over from Piccolo as the hero’s main rival through the series. After he is defeated, he becomes a powerful but vain and often unreliable ally after he is bested in battle by the protagonist but spared and encouraged to get stronger. Vegeta is probably the most interesting character in the series for a whole bunch of reasons – he’s the “Over 9,000 guy,” too, but that’s not why I say it.

Frieza – This guy is basically the Emperor of the Galaxy. He is a horrible, horrible genocidal tyrant and the Big Bad behind many of the bad things that have happened up until this point in the series. In the end, he loses a kung fu fight (yeah, they don’t solve their problems through negotiation or anything), and he is spared, but he refuses mercy and it looks like he dies anyway. Then it turns out he isn’t dead and comes back as a cyborg, and then he is killed one more time, but that whole return thing is kind of silly and not really part of his saga. Frieza’s saga is the most straightforward beginning-middle-end in Dragonball, and probably the best part of the series when considered on its own.

Cell (and the androids) – Cell is an artificial life form created by the Red Ribbon Army’s remnants based on a combination of genetic material from the heroes and villains of the series. You can add that process to the list of things in fiction that give people super-powers but in real life would probably just give them cancer. There is an initial sort of “half-saga,” in which the heroes fight a series of other powerful androids, but then Cell shows up, absorbs those androids, becomes supremely powerful, and challenges everybody in the world to a martial arts fight, with the intention of exterminating the planet. He is killed, then it turns out he isn’t dead, and then he is killed one more time. Familiar?

Majin Buu – By the time Buu rolls around, Toriyama is kind of tired of Dragon Ball being so serious and has begun to parody himself, leading to some amazingly bizarre story developments and tonal modulations. Buu is a primordial monster from the ancient history of creation — an enemy and destroyer of the Dragon Ball universe’s original and supreme gods. He is also, at least at first, fat, childish and silly. His plotline is ludicrously complicated and goes on for a very long time in lots of twists and turns until he is killed, but then reincarnated, bested at the Strongest Under the Heavens tournament by the protagonist, made an ally, and taken away to train and be made stronger.

The Tangled Web

Why do I mention all these guys? Because the similarities and parallels between them are pretty apparent – except for Raditz (and it’s debatable in a formal sense whether Raditz really has his own story or whether his story is a prologue to the Vegeta story), all the major villains fall into one of two camps – rivals who become allies or truly evil dudes who are offered a second chance but refuse it and are killed anyway (Buu, fittingly for the last bad guy in the series, does both).

And each saga follows the same general pattern:

1. There is some sort of advance tidings of the arrival of the villain or sense that something is wrong while the heroes continue training and doing hero things.
2. Villain shows up (this can sometimes take a while) and does something really bad to make it clear he is a villain.
3. Heroes try to fight the villains but can’t beat them for some reason.
4. Some heroes try to buy time as others go on a quest for what they need to defeat the villain (which often involves doing push-ups).
5. There are a series of escalating battles between various heroic characters and various either henchmen or less powerful verisons of the villain. During this time, characters often go through bodily transformations.
6. Major characters start to die in combat.
7. The hero comes back to save the day, but fails.
8. There’s a scary place in which it seems all is lost and the last few survivors try to hang on.
9. The good guys win.
10. Barbecue!

(Alternatively, you can just watch this classic video from way back in the day – I love the Napster reference at the end)

All these steps can repeat, the story can cycle back on itself at any time (like when Cell shows up and the role of the androids in the story becomes a lot different) and the saga kind of “resets.”

The stories get very repetitive – a lot of scenes get replayed in different ways across the sagas, with new characters stepping into the roles of old characters and various long-held assumptions being challenged and either bearing out or not. But because of repetition, the sweeping, huge story arcs really feel like they take time. That you are seeing the chronicle of people (or kung fu aliens, I guess) going through the challenges and crises of their lives. You expect them to age, you expect there to be consequences to people’s actions (and there are, sort of), and you don’t expect everything to reset at the end of every episode. This is a world that is moving only in one direction – into the future.

This is different from Sex and the City relationships, where you tend only to see scenes if they represent something new, or, say, Sopranos story arcs, where it is often not clear who is the villain or why at any given moment, because events blend into each other as life grinds on for Tony and crew, and the passage of time becomes a bit more ambiguous. It feels a bit more like a show like Six Feet Under, which has a repetitive framing device, but it’s not quite the same. It’s also not the same as the repetition in a sit-com, because of the cycles that stack within each other – the connections and repetitions aren’t just across individual episodes, they sometimes recur with years in between.

Time, Why You Punish Me?

So, what does this all mean? First, it means that repetition is important to “feeling” the progression of time, and if you want to give people a sense that meaningful changes are happening over time in your story (like growing up or having kids or dying), you probably want to build a superstructure into your story that includes that bouncy ball.

Second, recurrence matters more than measurement. Dragon Ball only rarely comes out and says how much time has passed between two events, but it never has that unmoored sense that the passage of time has been ambiguous. Just saying “three years later” isn’t going to be nearly as effective in communicating the passage of three years than the repetition of a key element with some evidence that about three years have passed.

Third, what recurs matters. Phenomena that inspire calendars tend also to inspire reverence. The things that recur are important. In a piece as heavily thematic as Dragon Ball, this means you should look to the things that repeat as clues into what matters to the story. In Dragon Ball, actions tend to recur, but the agency for those actions tends to pass around to various characters, and eventually from parents to children. This sets up and reinforces a metaphysics and a worldview in which the individual isn’t that important – things change, but the world goes on.

Fourth, what changes matters. In any endeavor, whenever one thing is held stable and something else is changed, not only are both those things important, but the distinction between them is important. The list of saga villains is a key example of this – they all share a number of qualities (the most notable being megalomania, sadism, and a lack of concern for the survival or welfare of other living things, as well as connections to the “legacy” of the heroes – there are lots of relationships involving previous generations, the past, and actions taken in the past – these aren’t just random people showing up wanting to fight). However, their differences are what define the story.

The Vegeta saga is about social class — about the assumptions we make about people based on their birth and upbringing versus their character and industry. The Frieza saga is about change — the difference between the established power of the hegemony that maintains dominance and always wins, versus the dynamic power of experience that tries and fails and tries and fails. The Cell saga is about genetic relationships versus family relationships and in what ways people can be said to have come from the same body, and what that means. These things can all be seen in the differences between the villains.

And fifth, it doesn’t come free. Dragon Ball is frequently criticized for being too repetitive and time-consuming – this is mostly because the TV show was trying to keep pace with the comic book (which is, by the way, tons better than the TV show), and the recent Dragonball Z Kai, which I have not yet seen, purports to fix this problem – but I doubt it can be fixed entirely. When you take out repetitions and steamline plots, the sense of time can drop away, removing a fundamental element of human experience. As is evidenced by many plastic-looking dramas where people never seem to experience what an actual week’s worth of days is like can show, this isn’t quite the same as when you can feel the time pass as events roll on, and the bouncing ball keeps tapping against the concrete wall of the imaginary cell.

Or Cell, as it were.

Any thoughts on the passage of time with this new year just starting to power up? What does time mean to you, and how do you measure it? Sound off in the comments?