Angel's Egg
Faith and Doubt in a Fossilized World
It’s not hard to come to the conclusion that the 1985 film Angel’s Egg is an allegory for the loss of faith. This essay will attempt to articulate the workings of that allegory, as well as any conclusions it may come to. The main characters will be known as the Angel and the Stranger for the sake of clarity.
The Angel is a representation of blind faith. Her dedication is touching but leading nowhere. She has been living alone and performing the same rituals of worship for countless days, as emphasized by the thousands upon thousands of jugs she has carefully selected, filled with water, and placed in a mausoleum for the great bird who she believes will come again.
The Stranger, according to director Oshii Mamoru, carries a cross because he is greatly burdened. Unlike the girl, whose faith keeps her content with life, the Stranger is sorrowful and despairing. He does not believe in the promise of God for a better day, and he may not have faith in God at all—he doesn’t know if he himself is real, much less God. If the Angel is faith, the Stranger is doubt.
The setting of the film provides context for the contrast between the two characters. The world they inhabit is one without animals; all that remain are shadowy fish which strange men come to life to hunt, a metaphor for futilely chasing after something which is gone. As the Stranger explains, they are living in the aftermath of the Biblical flood, but in this version of events, the dove never returned to the ark. God is still named as the architect of the flood, but he declined to form a covenant with mankind, and so humanity lost itself.
The Angel and the Stranger have different outlooks on this state of affairs. The Angel believes her egg contains the bird, that it will be reborn, opening up a path to reconnection with God; she looks to primordial beings, the skeletons of prehistoric animals, as proof that the bird exists, and so she nurtures her egg without question. But the Stranger sees the remains of ancient beings as disturbing, as specters.
From the moment they meet, both characters know what the Stranger intends to do. The Angel senses that he is a danger to her egg. The Stranger sees the egg as a burden to the Angel—hope is only causing her to go around in circles—and so he wants to free her of it. The Angel does not want to be freed, as her egg is all she has. However, the Stranger clearly does not mean her harm, and so she lets her guard down; her childlike faith extends to him as well, and he takes advantage of it.
Their relationship is further complicated by evidence that the Angel and the Stranger are different aspects of the same person. The opening shot, where her hands morph into his, reaching up to crush the air, heavily imply this. Oshii claimed in an interview that the place they are living in is her world and that she breaks her shell to enter a new one, not the Stranger.
The Angel is a child, while the Stranger is an adult, and the Angel repeatedly asks him who he is; he only returns this question at the end of their relationship, more to get her to think than because he doesn’t know. In my reading, the Angel is the “younger self”—she represents the youth of a person who has lost their faith. She doesn’t know who the Stranger is because he came into being later; the aspects of this personality are alienated from one another.
The Stranger showing up in the Angel’s world symbolizes the difficulty of losing one’s faith. To a believer, doubt and disbelief are foreign and frightening. From the Stranger’s perspective, the Angel is a sad representation of the past, bittersweet because of her innocence. He wants to break the shell of her false belief.
Though the film is explicable in these terms, the conflict between the characters is not given a simple resolution, but rather an ambivalent one. Thus, more than one reading is necessary to describe how the film concludes.
First, let’s look at the ending this way: Though the Angel’s belief was false—the fossil was not the bird and her egg was empty—she is nonetheless reunited with God. After her horrible grief at losing her hope, her faith, and her worldview, she undergoes a transformation. The Stranger freed her from delusion, allowing her to find something true. She sees herself as an adult, possibly even as divine, and realizes that she is capable of breathing new life rather than focusing on the long dead. Her world disappears, and along with it, the desolation of abandonment. Along with the statues of other believers, she is lifted up into the heavens.
The Stranger has served his role, and though he seemed like the more mature, older self, he is left behind—once the Angel has achieved true faith, doubt is no longer needed. He belongs in the world of abandonment and can only watch as she leaves him to be with God.
A less uplifting interpretation is that the Angel is the one who is no longer needed. The Angel is stone, rather than flesh and blood, when she is raised up, like the stone animals after the flood. The self has accepted that faith is futile, but the younger self is memorialized. That aspect of the personality will be remembered fondly, but without it, all that remains is the bleakness of doubt.
Whichever reading one takes, the film captures the pain that comes with a crisis of faith. Angel’s Egg has been important to me for years for that reason.