Ghost in the Shell (1995)

Soon after Ghost in the Shell starts, we see Major Motoko Kusanagi jump out a window after completing a sordid and violent assignment.  As she falls in slow-motion, she activates a cloaking device that turns her invisible; her body dissolves, giving way to the sight of the glowing, futuristic cityscape below her.  For me, this is one of the weightiest images in the film: a person, augmented by technology, subsumed by the city lights.

 From trash floating in the water to mannequins in storefront windows, Ghost in the Shell provides us with signs of life at every turn.  At the same time, its images are irresistibly suggestive, offering themselves up to any number of interpretations, encouraged both by the film’s montage and the characters’ conscious attempts to analyze their own anxieties.

This is appropriate, as Ghost in the Shell is concerned with more than the questions which its characters raise, or which might occur to audience members.  It’s concerned with the how and why of philosophy, the way questions arise from experience.  The characters have computer-enhanced brains and live in a world of artifice, so it's natural for them to talk how they do.  And it’s very important to note that it’s concerned with this as it occurs in practice, observing this phenomenon only as it applies to the relationship between people and technology in a new world bound by wires.

Motoko Kusanagi works for a security force charged with protecting Japan from cyber-terrorism. She, like the other members of Public Security Section 9, is a former soldier.  Right off the bat, it’s clear that the reason Section 9 is staffed by people with military experience is that its work consists, in essence, of military operations.

It’s worth noting, then, that since World War II, Japan’s military has existed expressly for self-defense rather than international conflict (which is not to say it hasn’t acted at all in international conflict since then).  Even so, it’s obvious that Japan still managed to command international influence in the later decades of the 20th Century, and part of the reason for that was the globally marketable technology produced there.

In Ghost in the Shell, international affairs are entangled with technology, and the characters – veterans of a third World War that took place before the events of the film – are Japan’s agents on an international stage.  Their cybernetic bodies (“shells”) are technological commodities: at one point, the Major sees a stranger whose appearance is identical to hers, presumably because her shell is only one instance of a model that’s available to anyone on the market.

The instrumentalization of people doesn’t stop at their outward appearances.  The story of Ghost in the Shell centers on Section 9’s pursuit of a mysterious criminal known as the Puppet Master, who hacks into people’s minds (“ghosts”).  One of the most disturbing concepts in the film is introduced through one of the Puppet Master’s victims: a man whose memories were entirely wiped out, replaced with false memories of family life. 

From this to the Major’s brutal precision in combat, Ghost in the Shell creates a vision of a connected world which functions equally well as a speculative character study and a piece of social commentary.  The Major’s connection to the world affords her special skills and knowledge, but in some ways it restricts her, threatening to trivialize her subjectivity by channeling all her actions through assigned roles.

These circumstances are a source of some anxiety for the Major, which she airs out to Batou, her friend and a fellow agent of Public Security Section 9.  In this scene, she launches into one of the film’s handful of long, cold, and heady philosophical monologues. She questions the nature of her consciousness, whether it even means anything to claim an identity in the world of Ghost in the Shell.

But really, in Ghost in the Shell, the act of philosophizing itself is more important than the content of these monologues.  They depict the way people talk in this setting.  This scene is immediately followed by a wordless and digressive sequence documenting the film’s setting.  We see an environment that has been engineered down to the last detail, which works to suffocate rather than fulfill its nominal purpose of service.  Just witnessing the Major in contact with this place does as much for the audience as hearing her monologues.

This scene is accompanied by the signature track on the film’s score, “The Making of a Cyborg”.  It’s an austere, ritualistic song with the lyrics of a wedding chant recited in Yamato, an archaic form of the Japanese language.  The first time we hear it is during the film’s opening credits, when it plays over a sequence depicting the creation of a cyborg body which may or may not be the Major’s.  When we hear it again over an omniscient portrayal of the film’s world, it suggests that the marriage between human and technology goes much further than mechanical prostheses.  It pervades the fabric of modern society. It’s almost as basic and second-nature as language.

The trouble is the effect this is having on the Major’s psyche.  In a world like this, it’s important to ask whether technology is being used to dominate, deceive, and manipulate.  If it is, the Major would be both an agent and a victim, and susceptible to losing sight of herself as anything more than a machine.  Maybe the reason Ghost in the Shell comes off as cold to so many people is that the pain it addresses isn’t dramatic so much as devastatingly boring: it insinuates itself into everyday life and slowly suffocates your belief in the world’s capacity to change.

Eventually, there is a resolution to this intractably-networked agony.  Ghost in the Shell reaches a turning point, and we begin to receive imagery that challenges assumptions we have as members of a culture and a society that exerts influence through technological connections.  Without giving too much away, it reaffirms the possibility that our subjectivity might reach the outside of this sphere.  It resurrects agency by finding a new sense of identity, not in freedom from relationships, but in seeing the uniqueness of the nexus at which any individual stands.

The relief that comes with this is portrayed as a miracle.  At the film’s climax, we see an angel descend from the network to the Major.  In the final scene, the Major looks down on an overwhelmingly vast expanse of connections and is able to smile.  It doesn’t forget the modern network’s complexity or the difficulties it presents us with, but now we see it with the added factor of the Major’s newfound resolve and influence.

Ghost in the Shell‘s use of religious imagery is similar to that in director Mamoru Oshii's 1985 film Angel’s Egg, which is much more abstract than Ghost in the Shell.  That film suggests, almost paradoxically, that a loss of faith is needed to truly bring meaning back to a fallen world.  In Ghost in the Shell, faith in miracles also arises from a loss in credulity.  We grasp this when the Puppetmaster says "as a sentient life form, I hereby demand political asylum."  A line that shows us a miracle through ice-cold realism.  What other film has lines like that?  

The original version of this review is posted here.  The version that appears here is modified.