Spirited Away

The Bathhouse Is a Factory: Labor, Name, and Appetite in Spirited Away

Miyazaki's 2001 masterpiece is usually sold to Western audiences as a fairy tale about growing up, a lushly animated coming-of-age story dressed in Shinto iconography. That reading is not wrong so much as it is politely sedated. Watch the film again with clear eyes and you will see that Chihiro does not wander into a spirit world at all. She wanders into a workplace. A gorgeous, steaming, lantern-lit workplace, yes—but a workplace, with a boss, a payroll, a bunkhouse, a boiler room, and a contract that costs you more than your signature. What she encounters, in other words, is the thing every ten-year-old in a deregulated economy will eventually encounter: the discovery that the adult world is organized around the extraction of your labor, and that the price of admission is a piece of yourself you may never get back.

Begin with the parents. The film opens with a family in transit between two suburbs, the father at the wheel of a German car he is visibly proud of, mother in the passenger seat, daughter sulking in the back. When they stumble onto the abandoned theme park—itself, note, a ruin of the Japanese bubble economy, a monument to speculative capital's hangover—they find food laid out and immediately, unthinkingly, begin to eat. "Don't worry," the father says, patting his wallet, "I've got cash. I've got credit cards." And then he keeps eating, and eating, and eating, until he and his wife are literal pigs. It is the single most compressed visual gag about consumer capitalism ever put to film. You do not become a pig because you are hungry. You become a pig because the structure of purchasing power convinces you that appetite is a right, that the world is a buffet whose only limit is your solvency. Miyazaki does not moralize about gluttony in some Christian register; he shows us the precise mechanism by which the commodity form transforms a human being into livestock. The flesh follows the relation.

Now the bathhouse itself. It is presented as enchantment, but its social organization is banal to anyone who has ever punched a clock. There is an owner who extracts rent from every transaction, Yubaba, perched in her penthouse office counting gold. There is a managerial layer of toadying foremen. There is a floor of workers—Lin and the yuna—who perform emotional and physical labor on demanding clientele for tips and scraps. Beneath them is Kamaji, the boiler-room engineer, a six-armed figure of pure proletarian dignity who commands an even lower tier: the soot sprites, a casualized sub-workforce who will literally cease to exist if not kept busy. When Chihiro gives one of them her shoe to carry, the others down tools and demand the same treatment, and Kamaji, exasperated, explains that if they stop working they revert to soot. This is not a whimsical detail. This is the reserve army of labor rendered as slapstick. Their being is their working. Take away the work and they dissolve.

To get employment in this place, Chihiro must sign a contract, and the contract takes her name. Yubaba literally lifts the characters off the page; Chihiro becomes Sen. Haku warns her: forget your real name and you will never leave. Every essayist who has ever tried to describe what wage labor does to a person has been reaching, clumsily, for this image. The worker signs away not merely her hours but her self-description. She becomes the function she performs. She is Sen because Sen is what the bathhouse needs. The old name, the name her mother gave her, the name that indexes a whole life outside the transaction, has to be buried somewhere safe or it will be overwritten entirely. Haku, we eventually learn, is the cautionary tale: a worker so long in Yubaba's service that he cannot remember who he was before he was hired. He is the middle-management careerist who wakes up at forty-five and realizes he has no idea what he wanted when he was a boy. The film is merciless about this. It understands that the theft of the name is not a metaphor added on top of exploitation; it is exploitation, seen from inside.

And then there is No-Face, the film's most brilliant and most misread figure. He is usually described as a lonely spirit who learns to behave. Look again. No-Face produces gold out of his hands. That is his entire pitch. He offers gold to the workers, and the workers, who a moment ago were ordinary exhausted service employees, transform into a shrieking mob of sycophants, feeding him whatever he wants, laughing at his non-jokes, serving him feasts fit for an emperor. He grows monstrous on their eagerness; he eats them, in fact, their subjectivities absorbed into his swelling body. No-Face is money. He is capital in its purest and most naked form: a faceless thing that has no content of its own, that becomes whatever the social relation around it makes it, that is only valuable because everyone agrees to treat it as valuable, and that will consume anyone who treats accumulation as a substitute for being. Chihiro alone is immune, and she is immune for the simplest possible reason: she wants something gold cannot buy. She wants her parents back, and she wants her friend to live. Use-value trumps exchange-value and the spell breaks.

What makes the film radical rather than merely diagnostic is its insistence that escape is possible, and that the route of escape is work of a different kind. Notice that Chihiro does not defeat the bathhouse by refusing to labor. She labors ferociously. She scrubs the enormous, reeking River Spirit clean and pulls a mountain of human garbage out of him—a gorgeous and unsubtle image of ecological labor, the uncompensated work of cleaning up what industrial production has dumped into the watershed. She feeds the emetic dumpling to No-Face and walks him, gently, out of the bathhouse's intoxicating circuit of accumulation. She rides the train—one of the most haunting sequences in any animated film—through a flooded landscape populated by translucent commuter-ghosts, workers so spent by the daily ride that they have become literally transparent, and she does not look away from them. The film's ethic of labor is not anti-work. It is anti-alienation. It draws a sharp line between labor that reconnects you to the world and its creatures, and labor that severs you from your own name.

The ending has been criticized as too easy, and it is worth saying why it isn't. Chihiro remembers Haku's true name—Kohaku, the river that once saved her life as a child, a river since paved over for an apartment complex—and in the act of remembering she frees him. This is not a wand-waving magical resolution. It is the film's thesis, stated plainly. The antidote to reification is historical memory. The river was here before the condos. The worker was a person before the contract. What capital wants you to forget is precisely what solidarity consists in remembering. When Chihiro walks back out through the tunnel, her parents restored and oblivious, her hair tie still shimmering with the labor of her spirit-world friends, she carries with her something her parents will never have: the knowledge that the world they are returning to, the world of German cars and easy credit and abandoned theme parks, is itself a kind of bathhouse, and that somewhere underneath its glittering surface a boiler room is burning, and someone is being paid in names.

That it took a Japanese animator working in a deeply specific vernacular to give us the clearest cinematic parable of commodity fetishism produced anywhere in the twenty-first century should tell us something. The critique of capital does not need to announce itself. It can arrive dressed as a dragon, as a soot sprite, as a little girl holding her shoe. It only needs to be seen.