Hunting the Elusive

Below is a transcript of a presentation I made 2 weeks ago at an International Comparative Literature Studies class for college/university. Turns out that it wasn't actually marked according to quality (you get full marks just for presenting), so perhaps I was justified in the minimal amount of effort I put into the presentation. Due to the nature of the material (anime) and the fact that the audience probably had not seen it before, I had to mediate my presentation to shoehorn them into the concepts.

Now I know, "GiTS: Innocence? Old news! Get a life!", but the fact is, many anime viewers see the movie simply as eye candy, without much of an attempt to dive into the actual philosophical themes that it (admitted) deluges us with. That said, once you actually start seriously reading the subs and following them, the movie turns out to be almost disappointingly shallow. It tells us those philosophical ideas in long dialogue, without so much as visually demonstrating them. More fun is to be had in figuring out the intertextual relationships this movie had with other literature. I was surprised that I could almost construct the entirety of my presentation by paraphrasing quotes copied from the movie. But before you can come to this realisation, you must at least recognise the key themes of the movie itself.

I'm sorry if the presentation is kinda simplistic: there was a time limit of 7 minutes and I had to incorporate plot summary into it. I had wanted to explore another aspect of the film ("mirrors") but did not have enough material or time for it.

[start]

Good afternoon. Today I'll be talking about the themes of Dolls and Ghosts in the animated film Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence.

Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence was an animated movie released in 2004. It is the sequel to the original Ghost in the Shell, which was one of the films which lent major inspiration to the Wachowski brothers for the Matrix trilogy. It was directed by Mamoru Oshii, and after its release, many critics dubbed it a masturbation by the director, due to the amount of philosophy it contained.

That said, it was an outstandingly beautiful piece of work. It is set in 2032, when the number of humans are dwindling and cities are populated by fully mechanical androids, and cyborgs which have mechanical parts but still possess a “ghost”, which is the term used in the movie to denote the human soul or spirit. Part of the anxiety which arises in the film deals with the increasing computerisation of the world, where the “ghost” becomes increasingly manipulable and interchangeable with software.

The main character is called Batou, and he is notable as a character for his lack of feelings or emotions in this movie. He is perhaps the perfect mediator for us, as he sits astride the line between being a robot and being a human. Indeed, the main question posed by the movie, the main anxiety it addresses, is one which is most applicable to Batou: the question of “Am I real?” and “Do I have a soul?”

The main character of the first Ghost in the Shell movie was Motoko Kusanagi, but she merged her ghost with the net at the end of the first movie and does not physically appear in Innocence. Her presence and voice can however be heard as she is capable of hacking herself into almost anything.

Togusa, who plays the part of Batou’s rookie, is a fully human counterpoint to Batou, and provides the perspective of the ordinary “everyman” living in extraordinary times.

The film refers to many literary works, and some of these will be covered in due course.

Here is a summary of the properties of dolls which I will be covering briefly in my discussion of this film.

The plot of the film revolves around androids which were built as sex dolls. In order to make them more lifelike, the manufacturers kidnapped children and copied their ghosts into the androids. In order to get the authorities to pay attention to the plight of the children, sympathetic officials within the company corrupted the ghosts and caused the dolls to kill people.

Given the functions of the dolls or robots in question (that is, as sex dolls), it made sense that they were built free from pragmatism and utilitarianism. The androids or robots in the movie were modelled after the ball-jointed dolls created by Hans Bellmer, who was noted for eroticising and humanising his creations. Dolls, in general are built in the shape of humans, usually in the image of the ideal human body. Why do people spend so much effort into making something similar to themselves? Is it to play God? One of the characters muses that little girls playing with dolls might be similar to the act of parenting – that is, parenting is a quick way to realise the ancient human dream of creating an android.

In Der Sandmann and Duino Elegies, humans are positioned between the material/mechanical/dead dolls and the spiritual/immaterial/ever-living angels. The idea expressed by some characters within the film is that humans are therefore inferior to dolls due to the imperfect nature of human perception. If there were such a thing as a truly beautiful doll, it would be flesh and blood without a soul, a corpse at the edges of collapsing, yet standing precariously at the precipice. Such a creature would live the life it has to the fullest, because it has already accepted the inevitability of death.

At the resolution of the film, Batou rescues a little girl from the company which had kidnapped her and were dubbing her ghost into the robots. He expressed anger over her method of drawing attention to her plight. Interestingly, he was less concerned with the number of people killed by the corrupted dolls than the fact that innocent dolls were forced to have malicious ghosts copied into them. To this, the little girl answered, quite understandably, that she didn’t want to become a doll. Motoko’s response was that the dolls probably didn’t want to become human either – the only reason we don’t sympathise with them is because they lack voices.

Why is it that when we look at dolls, we find them creepy? The movie posits that this has something to do with the human form of the dolls, which appeals to our doubts over whether that which looks alive is actually alive, and vice versa, our uncertainty over whether things without life might actually be alive.

Ever since science began explaining the phenomenon of life, there has been a belief that nature and life itself can be quantified and calculated, leading to the fearful conclusion that humans can be broken down into simple clockwork tricks and machinery components. Dolls are the realisation of this fear. In other words, our fear of dolls is irrational and is essentially vanity. It therefore makes sense that the movie should start with a quote by Auguste Villiers de L’Isle-Adam: “If our gods and our hopes are nothing but scientific phenomena, then it must be said that our love is scientific as well.”

This human fear and uncertainty over the nature of our bodies is illustrated in the film when Togusa’s brain is hacked into and he experiences a nightmarish version of reality where his own body becomes that of a mechanised doll.

The concept of Ghosts in the film, to re-iterate, denotes the human spirit or soul. It is the core of human existence and it is possible for a ghost to be detached from a body, and exist solely on the internet as an intelligent entity. Expressing anxiety over the increasing computerisation of society, these Ghosts can be manipulated like software. They can be hacked and can also be dubbed, or copied.

If the essence of life is the information that spreads through genes, that is, our DNA, then society and culture are also nothing but huge memory systems. We see increasing trends which point toward the treatment of culture as data, from Richard Dawkins’ concept of memes, to the concept of shared cultural memories and myths. The city thus becomes a huge external memory device, functioning as it were, like the Internet does.

Of course, one of the panics over the computerisation of society is that the line between reality and the virtual will get blurred, and this is precisely what happens in the film. If your ghost is hacked, your perception of reality can become distorted and corrupted, and your actions as a person become affected. Batou gets his ghost hacked into whilst he is in a shop and ends up shooting his own arm and terrorising the occupants of the store, whom he perceived to be a threat to himself. When Togusa becomes the victim of a similar hack later in the movie, he becomes extremely disoriented, being unsure whether what he was experiencing was physical reality. Batou replies that there’s nothing that distinguishes artificial memories from experienced memories. It’s impossible to know you’re in a dream when you’re dreaming. This was a reflection of the fundamental metaphysical anxiety that has plagued humanity since the time of the ancient Greeks, but the intrusion of technology into the human brain makes this anxiety all the more acute.

Recommended accompanying film clip: opening sequence of Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence (creation of the android).

[End]