Why Is Anime Obsessed With Power Lines?

It should be noted though that the creators have been historically unreliable about the interpretation of the show, and there is an undercurrent among the fandom that this answer may not be wholly truthful.

Yes the Christianity/Jewish mysticism is in part about exoticism, but the accuracy with which they have deployed some of its concepts and symbols also appears to go beyond mere "spicing up."

I can't believe you interviewed him. That is amazing!

The rest of this post isn't directed at you specifically, you probably know this and much more. Evangelion perhaps popularized this kind of shot, but there's an interesting broader history and context.

In general, this kind of shot is called an establishing shot: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Establishing_shot

    [An establishing shot] establishes the context for a 
    scene by showing the relationship between its important 
    figures and objects.[1] It is generally a long or 
    extreme-long shot at the beginning of a scene indicating where, 
    and sometimes when, the remainder of the scene takes 
    place

Some directors like Yasujiro Ozu used a more enigmatic or abstract sort of establishing shot (or quasi-establishing shot) dubbed "pillow shots" by one film critic: https://dangerousminds.net/comments/yasujiro_ozu_and_the_eni...

    A "pillow shot" is a cutaway, for no obvious narrative reason, to 
    a visual element, often a landscape or an empty room, that is held 
    for a significant time (five or six seconds). It can be at the start 
    of a scene or during a scene. At a minimum, in Ozu’s work, these pillow 
    shots inject a sense of calm and serenity and contribute to the elegant 
    and stately pacing of his movies.
    
    The term “pillow shot” was coined [...] by the critic Noël Burch in his
    book To the Distant Observer: Form and Meaning in the Japanese Cinema: 
    “I call these images pillow-shots, proposing a loose analogy with the 
    ‘pillow-word’ of classical [Japanese] poetry.” 

At least several of Ozu's works feature power lines in these shots: http://www.davidbordwell.net/blog/category/directors-ozu-yas...

This context is something I feel a lot of people miss when discussing those shots of power lines in Evangelion, perhaps ascribing to them more symbolic significance to them than Anno intended -- they are a stylistic hallmark of Evangelion, but aren't unique to Evangelion.

I couldn't quickly find a link/reference, but I remember reading a couple years ago that, when shown images/photographs, in the West we spend most of our time looking at the foreground objects, while in the East (might have been Chinese specifically who were tested?), they look at the background more than westerners (which is not to say that they look at the background more than the foreground)

IIRC Cowboy Bebop was developed explicitly with western audiences in mind. It’s success informed later shows (in a similar way to how thr Chinese market is influencing Hollywood movies) so it really is a landmark show, even if it wasn’t as well received in Japan.

The best way to understand Evangelion's uniqueness is to become familiar with all the tropes in anime/manga. Then it becomes obvious how Evangelion turned them all on their heads in some of the darkest possible ways -- and became one of the biggest hits of all time in Japan; something truly "generational" like Star Wars.

Anime and manga had long excelled at high drama; the space operas and melodramas and such.

And the creators of anime and manga were certainly not lacking in self awareness; there were lots of parody and comedy in anime and manga over the years, much of the light parody focusing on other works in their own genres or the general tropes found in those works.

But Evangelion was arguably the first major work in which those worlds collided. It never breaks the fourth wall, but the subversion of anime's tropes and conventions is utterly central to its drama.

1. The protagonist is a teenage boy. No surprise there -- the protagonist of any show is usually representative of the target audience. But instead of a simple "boy becomes a man" narrative, he more or less descends into depression and PTSD. The act of piloting a robot in bloody combat against incomprehensible is not healthy for him (because it wouldn't be, for anybody) and he is simultaneously loathable and also incredibly sympathetic because god damn is he put through hell. He responds to these traumatic events in ways that we might - imagine if your abusive father abandoned you and then forced you to become a child soldier? How screwed up would you be? He's probably the first anime protagonist to say: "Wait, this isn't fun. This is seriously fucked up." (And going further down the rabbit-hole of self-awareness, Shinji is painfully aware of how messed up he is)

2. Giant robots. They are a staple of anime for a number of reasons, chiefly because they sell toys, and toy sales help to finance these shows. Evangelion give you "robots," alright, but they are utter nightmare fuel in ways both visual and psychological.

2a. A trope in anime is when the pilots of giant robots "feel" their robots' pain. Evangelion takes this to the darkest and most literal extreme possible, with damage to the robots resulting in physical and emotional damage to the pilots.

3. Weirdest. Love triangle. Ever? It would be spoilers to say more, but it makes Game of Thrones look wholesome by comparison. Romantic tension is a given in... just about anything... but maaaaaaan does Eva make it weird. Another expectation, subverted, darkly.

4. Misato is something of a surrogate mother to Shinji. That gets, uh, interesting.

That said, Evangelion is not good just because "it's dark." There are lighthearted moments, and happiness, and some characters grow and become better people. It never feels "dark for the sake of being dark" in the way that some series like Game of Thrones are, where you almost dread the happy moments since those happy moments because they are immediately followed by some sort of gruesome tragedy, as if the viewer themselves is being punished for daring to be happy.