Death Note is the wrong way round for the right reasons
No, i'm not talking about the manga layout direction
It's kind of incredible that such a vivid and exciting thriller was born from such a static concept. A notebook. Unassuming, deadly. Whoever writes a name in this ledger, that person will die of a heart attack 40 seconds later. Other rules come into play too but at the core is a simple power over life and death. All you need is a name, a face, and the conviction to take a life.
This is the set up for Death Note, a manga series about 'ordinary' student Light Yagami's run in with the Death God Ryuk, some truly cursed stationary, and his attempt to rebuild the world in his image. Said image being one of righteousness and justice in pursuit of which he hungrily casts aside his own ethics and humanity while being pursued by the young savante detective with a terminal sweet tooth known only as ‘L’.
I have complicated feelings about Death Note. There's a sequence of nostalgia attached to these feelings, as its animated adaptation came out while I was at university. I remember my a-bit-too-eager flatmate loudly exclaim 'Boku wa seigi da!' ('I am justice!') on nights out. I remember conversations laughing at how much chocolate Mello eats, L's seating quirks, the incredibly dramatic way that Light uses the notebook.
Rereading the manga recently has reminded me that a lot of what I enjoyed about this story still holds up really well under my now more scrutinising eyes, but that its a story with its fair share of issues too. It’s quite bloated, with strange and not-that-interesting tangents that introduce unmemorable characters that don’t really fit in.
Mikasa Amane is uncomfortably male gazey, and surprisingly one note for how important a character she is, and she eventually barely features, replaced by a new character whose role could easily have been performed by her. I think the whole back half in general up until the last few chapters is a bit of a disaster.
Thankfully that finale, the brutal arrogant poetic justice of what happens, is positively Shakespearean and makes for a great full stop to a meandering, often brilliant, darkly comic fable. In spite of my grumblings it gets a thumbs up from me.
What struck me more this time round, something that I hadn't even really considered when I first encountered the story, is that it's essentially a murder mystery told the wrong way around. It goes out of its way to tell you who all the culprits are from the get go, and is steadfast in its convictions to leave mystery the demesne of the police only.
The audience is clued into almost every moment in a way that most tales of this kind of genre just don’t dare to do. It’s bold, but it’s also instructive of what kind of story Death Note wants to be.
Somewhere out there in another universe is a version of this in which the core narrative device isn't even revealed until the moment the police become aware of it. Where the implicit guilt of its protagonist is not truly confirmed until late in the game. A narrative where the mystery IS the whole story.
But of course there's a reason why I didn't write Death Note and Tsugumi Ohba did, and the decisions to craft this story the way it is are deceptively simple: it's not really a murder mystery at all, but rather a sort of 'life heist'; a portrait of what happens when someone brutally intelligent but with a complete lack of morals decides to game a system that is built from the ground up to hide and protect people like him.
Part of what makes the manga and animated series so compelling, and where Adam Wingard's not-great-but-I-still-love-it US adaptation falls short, is that at its heart it doesn't really matter what the titular notebook is, or who the shinigami are, what the central mystery is or how it unfolds.
Its a character study before anything else, of how upstanding citizens have the capacity for great malevolence, how the desire to rebuild society ‘better’ or a pursuit of a personal interpretation of justice isn’t inherently noble. Also how being the son of a cop must give you a warped concept of the structural inequalities of society.
I think this is why having the audience be aware of and exposed to Ryuk from the get go is so important. A nigh on immortal supernatural being who has no real concept of what it means to be human is the perfect cipher through which to introduce us to such a wicked and warped yarn.
We see Light’s actions, his manipulations and the cold and calculated fashion in which he recreates reality itself to match his own desires, with the same fascination we have for Patrick Bateman, for Walter White and Jaime Lannister and any other unnervingly compelling fictional bastard.
They are akin to zoo exhibits, a macabre version of the game of life in which the pot has been stirred just enough to provoke an explosive and thrilling set of circumstances in which real lives are affected, often unjustly, but it is not on us to care about the morality of such things any more than it is on Ryuk himself. The ultimate version of ‘let him cook’, a morbid fascination with decisions we ourselves could never make.
This is not to say that the tone of the series is inherently neutral, Death Note is a deeply political fable after all. It's a morality story about the intrinsic right to live without fear of judgement; how absolute power corrupts; how noone can truly know what lies in the heart of man, and that because of this no one person should ever have the power to demand their own justice on another. It’s also a cautionary tale about how no matter how smart you think you are, there's always someone one step ahead of you.
And that, I think, is far more interesting than a whodunnit.