Phones are associated with Akio, Touga, Utena, and Nanami. These characters participate in particularly extensive parallels with each other. I think there is likely a specific symbolic meaning in tying phones to these four. Maybe looking over this catalog will help me figure it out. Besides the four, Miki makes one phone call, and Anthy makes one, on a phone in Akio’s planetarium.
Touga calls Utena to tell her that she should look for Anthy at the dueling arena. It’s part of his plot, and he disguises his voice. Utena takes the call on the dorm phone. It is green for the control it creates over her. A mysterious caller like this is obviously up to no good, and even oblivious Utena knows it. The upper-left and lower-right corners are overlaid with darkness, which I take to represent this badness. You could say the phone is in a beam of light, making it a source of enlightenment... I don’t think so.
On the one hand, it is a rotary-dial phone, already out of date when Utena was made (though not rare, and there are more below). The Academy does not update its equipment often—at least not the equipment in a dorm that hasn’t been used in a decade. On the other hand, it is a fancy business-style phone with rows of buttons. It’s not cheap stuff. The round dial is ring-shaped and symbolically female, while the rows of buttons are male. I expect the buttons represent control. Touga is pressing one of Utena’s buttons, the “save Anthy” button.
Utena has short fingernails when reaching for the handset. When she picks it up, her nails are long; she is hoping to speak with Anthy. After she is told that Anthy was spirited away, her nails are short again; she is in prince mode.
The two images are identical except for lighting. Touga smiles, pleased with his plot. Left, Touga phones Utena. It’s dark for his evil, and Touga is outlined in blue for the illusion he is creating. Right, at the end of the episode, he phones End of the World. It’s light because he’s honestly reporting in. It’s hard to see in the dark image, but in both pictures the upper-left and lower-right corners are overlaid with red. It’s Touga’s color, and I take it to represent his underlying motivation.
The phone is white because he is playing prince for Utena. It is squared-off with straight edges, making it symbolically male.
Miki sits on his bed and phones his father, who is remarrying. With buttons and a low profile, it may be the most modern-looking phone in the series. It is light purple, because Miki is being slightly corrupt. He is pretending to his father that he doesn’t mind the remarriage. He says “it’s your choice,” which is true enough, but suggests that Miki would object if he thought it would help. He says that the twins can’t attend, which is likely a lie. And he rejects talking with the new bride. Off the phone, Miki insists that he has lost trust in adults.
I suspect that the mother left because Anthy seduced the father. Kozue considers it the mother’s fault, but in Utena-world that is standard victim-blaming and no evidence, while Miki’s unfounded imaginary image with Anthy does count as evidence. Anthy dropped the father as soon as she had done her job, and he found somebody else to remarry.
Miki imagines the scene on his father’s end of the phone call. The imaginary phone is similar in design to the Kiryuu family phone, below. It is deep purple, because Miki sees his father as corrupt. He’s not only remarrying, Miki imagines he is marrying Anthy!
Is it a hint that Miki (perhaps unconsciously) recognizes that Anthy is corrupt? Or is his father somehow taking Anthy away from him? Or is it simply that Miki can’t imagine wanting to marry anyone other than Anthy? I suspect it’s the taking-away, but only on general principles.
I guess (not very securely) that this phone, and the Kiryuu phone below, date to the 1930s or 1940s—or are made to look like they do. The style with the cradle on a stalk seems to be gone after the 1940s, as far as I can tell.
The Kiryuu family phone in the hall, which Nanami answers at the start of episode 31. The call is from a girl for Touga, and Nanami is not entirely polite. When she hangs up, she talks to herself about her superiority. She seems to try hard to keep herself convinced.
It looks old-fashioned but rich, which goes with the family’s old money. But the handle, table, and background are brown for ordinariness. It’s white for the prince, presumably Touga since both Nanami and no doubt the caller count him as her prince. I think the gold colored parts are for Dios. Like the dorm phone above, it is female because of the dial and round pieces. Also like the dorm phone, there is a male element at the bottom, an empty space for a label. It must stand for information. Nanami is lacking information; she learns what she is missing in this episode and the next.
Nanami, wearing purple for corruption, steals Touga’s cell phone from where it lies on white clothing for her prince, with blue clothing because the prince is an illusion. The clothing is in a brown box for ordinariness; it’s ordinary to be perceived as a prince.
The phone looks clumsy today, but in 1997 when Utena came out it was the latest thing, stub antenna and all. It’s symbolically male. It’s Akio’s color of black for his evil. We see Touga lie to one girl on the phone while with the same words he lies to another in his arms. Nanami uses it evilly too. She spies on and strikes back at the girls who call Touga. And in the end, Akio calls her on that phone to recruit her for her car ride in episode 32. The phone is used only for bad.
Nanami gets a call from End of the World on Touga’s cell phone. When the car breaks into the Kiryuu mansion, scattering broken glass and leaving cracked panes in the background, we see Akio talking on a cell phone that looks similar to Touga’s. Akio’s car doesn’t have seat belts. Why would it?
It’s notably not the car phone that appears below. Akio usually uses older equipment, but does use modern-at-the-time electronics twice—the cell phone in this episode, and the laptop in the final episode. He is old-fashioned in many ways, but keeps up with the times. It’s part of the allegory.
The blue window represents an illusory cage. The car breaks the cage, but the hole it makes is black, which is worse than blue. It is not an escape.
Anthy phones Akio on a red phone for sex. It’s a pushbutton phone, not a dial phone; we hear her pressing buttons. I take it that the phone is Akio’s, and the buttons stand for the control he is taking over Utena. Anthy contributed, setting up the date.
Despite Anthy’s opaque glasses, she knows perfectly well what Akio is doing with Utena. It’s making her miserable, and her expression shows it. But she phoned him anyway. Was she double-checking out of hope she was wrong? Was she trying for a passive-aggressive jab that didn’t work? Akio seems to expect the call. My best guess is that she is expected or required to check in with Akio. If the seduction were not a complete success, maybe he would have instructions for her.
Akio does not phone out from the car. Anthy and the shadow girls call him. The phone is Akio’s color, black.
The car phone is expensive equipment, especially this wireless one (there’s a larger box somewhere in the car with the radio to connect to the phone network). It looks to me like it’s from the 1970s, maybe earlier, because of the classic analog handset design. By the 1980s (still before the cell phone era), car phones had buttons all over them. It fits with Akio’s old and expensive sports car.
The hotel phone appears in the preview at the end of episode 32, and at the start of the hotel scene. Then it vanishes. See First Seduction - the mysterious telephone. The phone has a (male) chinpiece that covers where buttons would be if there were buttons. Oh, a codpiece. This is a phone that Utena is prevented from using. I think the lack of buttons means that Utena is not allowed control; she is not allowed to communicate. Akio ignores everything she says and everything she tries to convey; he not only doesn’t answer, he doesn’t react at all.
It’s similar to the dorm phone above, but not the same. It is blue-green for illusions created by manipulation. I don’t know what illusions those may be; Akio removes the phone and it is out of play. We see it on a darker blue background for Akio’s big illusions for the seduction. It’s with the lamp that Utena later turns out, representing her moral decision. The phone was a potential escape from Akio’s control.
Jay Scott <jay@satirist.org>
first posted 17 November 2023
updated 26 January 2025