Deidara: The terrorist who demanded applause for his bombs

A white clay bird crosses the desert sky toward Sunagakure, the Village Hidden in the Sand. Below, a sleeper agent has already taken out the guards at the gate. Above, the rider, a young man with blond hair, bangs covering his left eye and a scope, drops small bombs on the lookouts watching the sky and remarks, as they fall, that the poor fools have no appreciation for art: that art must be felt, and that true art is an explosion. Gaara, the Kazekage, intercepts him at once: that bird belongs to no species native to the Land of Wind (chapters 247 and 248 of the manga). The rider is Deidara, the youngest member of Akatsuki, the criminal organization that hunts the jinchūriki, ninjas who carry a tailed beast sealed inside them, in Masashi Kishimoto’s manga Naruto and in its second animated part, Naruto Shippuden. He is an S-rank deserter from Iwagakure, the Village Hidden in the Stones, where he served in the Explosion Corps. He has a bloodline gift, Explosion Release, and a forbidden technique he stole from his village gave him a mouth on the palm of each hand and another on his chest. With them he chews clay, infuses it with explosive chakra, molds it into birds, spiders or dragons and detonates it with a single word: katsu. He calls each bomb a work.

// The theoryCrime as a work

(Spoiler warning: this case file reveals how Deidara dies.) Most theories explain crime from the outside: poverty, family, strain, calculation. Cultural criminology also looks at it as what it is for the person who commits it: a practice with style, with emotions and with an audience. In Seductions of Crime (1988), Jack Katz called for attention to the foreground, what it feels like to cross the line, and in 1990 Stephen Lyng gave the name edgework to the voluntary pursuit of the edge. But the book that best fits Deidara is a different one. In Crimes of Style (1993), Jeff Ferrell studied Denver’s graffiti writers and showed that what mattered most to them was neither the damage nor any loot, but style: form, the signature and the recognition of others, and that the campaign against graffiti was also a fight over who decides what is art and what is crime. Ferrell and Clinton Sanders gave the field its name in 1995, and in 2004 Keith Hayward and Jock Young summed it up as the study of crime and its control as cultural products: acts loaded with meaning that are displayed, watched and told.

// The subjectThe artist who needed to be watched

Three moments capture him. The first is the assault on Sunagakure (chapters 248 to 250; episodes 3 to 7 of Shippuden). Gaara crushes his left arm with his sand, and Deidara responds by dropping an enormous bomb on the village: he knows the Kazekage will spend his strength protecting the villagers. Meanwhile, the clay he had mixed into the sand that tore off his arm goes off inside Gaara’s shield, and Gaara, exhausted, uses the last of his strength to move the sand away from the village before he falls. Deidara carries him off, and Akatsuki extracts the One-Tailed beast, Shukaku, which costs Gaara his life (later, the elderly Chiyo brings him back). The second moment comes when Kakashi’s team catches up with them: even with the enemy in front of them, Deidara and his partner, the puppet master Sasori, argue about art. For Sasori, who makes puppets out of human bodies, true art is eternal beauty, the kind that lasts into the future. Deidara answers with his creed (chapter 264).

The third moment is a memory (chapter 359; episode 123). Itachi Uchiha, Kisame and Sasori came to recruit him, Deidara refused, and Itachi proposed a fight: if he won, Deidara would join Akatsuki. He won with an illusion cast by his Sharingan, and Deidara, looking into those eyes, thought that this too was art. He never forgave it. He trained his left eye against illusions and designed his most powerful bomb, the C4, to kill Itachi. He never got to use it on him, only on his brother. After Sasori’s death, Deidara and his new partner, Tobi, go after Sasuke Uchiha, who has just killed Orochimaru, a prey Deidara wanted for himself (chapters 356 to 362; episodes 122 to 124). Sasuke sees the C4’s cloud of microscopic bombs with his Sharingan and neutralizes it with lightning chakra, to which the clay, being earth-natured, is vulnerable. When he finally collapses from exhaustion, he does not look at the work: he only asks where Itachi is and deactivates his Sharingan. Deidara erupts in rage at those eyes that ignore his art, opens the stitched mouth on his chest, swallows the clay and announces that he will blow himself up and that, in death, he will become art (chapter 362). The blast reaches a radius of ten kilometers. Sasuke survives by shielding himself behind the snake Manda (chapter 363).

// The crackArt as an alibi

Cultural criminology is criticized for romanticizing crime and forgetting its victims, and Deidara is proof of that risk. His story has a work, an aesthetic and an audience, but it has no dead: not the Sand lookouts, nor a Kazekage he hands over to have the beast inside him torn out. The line he signs with, “art is an explosion,” is not even his: it belongs to the avant-garde painter Tarō Okamoto, who made it famous in a 1981 television commercial. Kishimoto puts a slogan of modern art in the mouth of a terrorist, and with that he touches the ground Ferrell studied in graffiti: the border between aesthetic transgression and crime. But the comparison has a clear limit. A graffiti writer marks a wall; Deidara kills people. That his style is real does not make the harm any less real.

Hayward and Young also insist that the culture of crime never stands alone: it is also produced by those who make use of it. Deidara joins Akatsuki by force, after a defeat, and the organization turns his aesthetic into a tool for hunting jinchūriki. When he dies, Pain mourns him as a heavy blow to the group (chapter 363). Explaining Deidara is not excusing him. That he sought admiration rather than money does not subtract a single victim, and the series gives him an ending that proves him wrong: the great scar on the earth by which he wanted to be remembered kills only him and a snake. In the Fourth Shinobi World War, brought back to life by Kabuto with the Impure World Reincarnation, he is still arguing with Sasori that true art is a fleeting blast.