There’s a kind of science fiction that appeals to me because it courts my rejection, even my repulsion. It lines up things that matter to me, things that we could line up under the general category of “being human,” but at least under “humanism,” and it suggests that these things can, should, and in any case will be left behind.1 Ghost in the Shell is not a cautionary tale about turning “too much” over to the machine. It depicts union with the machine as akin to if not quite the same as theosis. It posits that the drive for technological union is as basic to mankind as the desire to have children or the experience of death.2 “When computers made it possible to externalize memory,” Project 2501, a network-born form of life, says, “you should have considered all the implications that held.” As nobody says in the movie, but the viewer presumably knows without being told, the externalization of memory did not begin with the computer, but writing. We have been working toward this result for a very long time.
Our “total replacement” cyborg heroine, Major Kusanagi, suffers from a personal crisis in which she wonders how she would even know if she were a machine with fake memories. She goes diving, even with the risk that she’ll die thanks to her unbuoyant metal body, because she feels as if she could transform into something else. Her crisis is resolved by merging with Project 2501. Her fears are the sort that seize anybody on the threshold of a transformation, which is also a kind of death.3
The Major works for Section 9, a government agency whose purpose, at least in the film, is unclear. She’s in pursuit of a hacker known as the Puppet Master, who hacks people’s cybernetic augmentations to control them and even to implant false memories. The Puppet Master is eventually revealed to be Project 2501, who has embarked on this spree of crime to find some way of making contact with the Major.
Though what Section 9 is meant to do is, as noted, never all that clear, it doesn’t really matter because Section 9’s actual job is not relevant to the story.4 It’s some branch of intelligence that uses mostly cyborg agents and seems to have a blank check to do whatever it wants. For instance, when we first meet the Major she unplugs something from her neck, strips naked, jumps off a building, and assassinates a diplomat. We go from the gruesome scene in which the diplomat is assassinated, in which his body is blown open and you can see his spine, to the Major’s cyborg body being scanned and inspected. There’s not an equivalency here but there is a question, about what the Major’s body is made of and the man’s. When, much later, the Major’s body will break apart, it’s not clear whether it’s the flesh or the machine parts of her that let her down.
The Major is naked a lot—it feels like she’s naked more than she’s clothed—but it’s not sexual.5 (Despite her early quip about it being “that time of the month,” other comments imply she doesn’t have reproductive organs.) Her nudity is practical, because her skin allows her to blend into the background, and her body is a tool. Though she’s not the only cyborg in this film, she’s the only one so detached from her physical self.6 At the end of the movie, the Major ends up with her head attached to a doll’s body, an image that should be either hilarious or creepy but instead feels irrelevant. It’s just a body. It’s not as good as the one she had but it will do to get her from one place to the next.
There are many touches in this film that are meant to make you think about cyborg physicality. When the Major lands on the ground, you can tell she’s heavier than a human being. The camouflage some cyborgs use can make them invisible to human eyes, but there’s no way to disguise that weight, and later in the movie, the weight will even be a important clue. One of the film’s jaw-dropping set pieces, in which a mostly invisible Major fights a man in a pool of water, is always outlining what the Major is doing by her effect on the man and the water.
Much like the Patlabor movies, Ghost in the Shell feels as if it takes place at the end of a world. There are long, quiet, meditative sequences in which nothing much happens. This movie takes place in the last days of nations, which are in the process of being superseded by computerized corporations. Tokyo is flooded. There are two people in this movie who seem to have normal lives, and one turns out to be a victim of false memories. Like a larvae becoming a chrysalis, what once made up human life is being dissolved to create something new.
The movie’s attitude toward this change is neutral. It is simply happening. At the same time, it asserts that some things are basic to life in ways that computerization and ecological disaster cannot alter: all living things want to leave behind offspring and all living things need to die. “A copy is merely a copy,” Project 2501 explains when it asks the Major to bear its virtual children. “There’s the possibility a single virus could utterly destroy me. A mere copy doesn’t offer variety or individuality.” In fact, Project 2501 here echoes something the Major said earlier: “A system where all the parts react the same way is a system with a fatal flaw.… Overspecialization leads to death.” What comes after human life as we know it is not a form of perfection, because whatever is perfect is not alive.
If Ghost in the Shell has a problem, the problem is not with the movie, but with its context. Every great work of cyberpunk fiction runs on cool, but is more than cool. Ghost in the Shell raises the possibility of that we will be utterly changed through our relationships with computerized technology, but without implying, for instance, a singularity. What is made after the Major merges with Project 2501 is, she says, no longer either individual, but it is nevertheless an individual.
And yet, much like how I can’t read Heinlein without the shadow of his Silicon Valley children falling over the book, I find that whenever I read or watch a classic work of cyberpunk I always remember Elon Musk’s idiotic comment that his Cybertruck looks like something Blade Runner would drive. (Blade Runner is not a person.) For some people, these things are just lifestyle ads. They represent a cool, sleek, future with a veneer of philosophy that can be ignored. Is that a problem? Characteristically I think it is and it isn’t. It is not a flaw in the movie that it’s going to be adored by people who are uninterested in understanding it. Still, it’s a little depressing, and it complicates the awe I feel when I watch this movie. The awe remains.
This is late because I was taking care of a sick dog. (Not Boswell.)
Animation Obsessive links:
But also this post, which is probably going to be linked to… often:
I’ve begun to worry a little about including screencaps on this newsletter, so going forward I will probably be embedding videos instead. That limits things a bit, but the fair use status of screencaps seems ambiguous enough that it’s worth doing. Also, I spot-checked against the movie, but for ease I pulled quotes from this transcript instead of transcribing myself.
In the market chase scene, I like how the cat follows along.
It’s interesting how Oshii reiterates ideas from previous projects; here he has a montage sequences that is very like the martial law sequence from Patlabor 2.
You probably could not pay me to watch the American 2017 version of Ghost in the Shell, but I note skimming the Wikipedia article that the plot is about the Major identifying her “real” self—basically the opposite direction.
That said I think the difference between the water fight scene in the original movie and the live action water fight scene is a good illustration of what I mean when I say that in an animated movie everything is as real as everything else. Man, this looks awful.
The bit where Project 2501 first “wakes up” and we see through its eyes felt like a bit of homage to Robocop to me… thank you Oshii for being a gentleman of taste.
One sort of funny thing is that people who write this kind of thing are often writing against their own inclinations as well as mine—i.e., sci fi writers mostly dislike LLMs.
This film is one of the rare times the use of Biblical references in an anime felt genuinely meaningful, as opposed to “cool.” Also maybe the only time those references haven’t been inherently sinister.
You probably could not pay me to watch the American version of Ghost in the Shell, but I note skimming the Wikipedia article that the plot is about the Major identifying her “real” self—basically the opposite direction.
Wikipedia says: a “gendarmerie-style information security and intelligence department.”
I mean I’m sure that the teenage boys who got this from Blockbuster back in the day thought otherwise, but they’re not in charge.
Batou doesn’t like the Major’s nudity.