10/10 Assignment: Spirited Away and Greed

I know I just wrote about a Studio Ghibli film for the last blog, but I couldn't pass up an opportunity to talk about Spirited Away (one of my favorites), which I think contains a very cool and unique example of how excessive greed can create a monster. To get the most out of this analysis, some background information is required first. The main protagonist of Spirited Away is a girl named Chihiro. Through a series of supernatural events, her mother and father are turned into pigs and she becomes trapped in a world inhabited only by spirits. She is then forced to work at a huge bathhouse (a place where the spirits come to relax and replenish themselves) where she must figure out a way to save her parents and escape back to her own world.

The character I want to focus on is an entity referred to as No Face. This character, appearing as a cloaked figure with a simple white mask, is usually silent and very mysterious. No explanation is given about where he came from or exactly what he is (I assume he’s some sort of spirit), but he plays a big role in one of the movie’s main themes: greed. The bathhouse that employs Chihiro is a place saturated with greed. All the spirits that work there are obsessed with money (gold in the spirit world), and becoming rich is what they all seem to care about most. In the beginning of the movie, No Face is first seen outside of the bathhouse. A that time he is quiet and harmless, appearing to be a calm and rather gentle being. Believing him to be a customer, Chihiro lets No Face into the bathhouse and that’s when things start to get weird.

No Face undergoes a noticeable change in behavior. He becomes obsessed with trying to give people things and somehow acquires the ability to create gold. He also gains a voracious appetite. His real transformation begins when he offers a handful of gold to a frog spirit and instantly swallows the frog when it tries to grab the gold from his hand. Everyone in the bathhouse, unaware that No Face had eaten someone, excitedly feed him an endless feast since he has a seemingly limitless supply of gold to give them. No Face gets bigger and bigger, as well as more aggressive, with every dish he ravenously consumes. After trying to give Chihiro gold, which she rejects, he becomes angry and starts eating people in a rage. Everyone naturally runs away, calling him a monster.

From this drastic transformation, it can be deduced that No Face is a being that seems to absorb and personify the qualities of people and places in his general vicinity. He absorbed the overwhelmingly materialistic mindset of the bathhouse and became a huge, gluttonous monster whose only desire is to greedily eat everything that is put in front of him. He started out as a relatively normal spirit, too, as far as I can tell. I don’t think the other spirits would have dubbed him a monster in the beginning. He was quite literally turned into a crazy monster by the greed that surrounded him. No Face is eventually fed medicine and led out of the bathhouse by Chihiro. As he gets further out of the bathhouse, he reverts back to his normal state.

What No Face’s transformation represents is that excessive greed can very easily create a monster out of an initially benign individual. We have seen this happen countless times, both in fiction and history. A person can start out looking to make money for what they think is a noble cause, such as in the case of Breaking Bad’s Walter White (as a few blogs have already pointed out). As wealth is gained, however, that person can start to lose sight of their purpose for making the money in the first place. They instead become obsessed with getting more and more and that becomes their new goal, now considerably less honorable in nature. Usually from there the person only continues to get more twisted and monstrous as greed takes over.