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Saturday, November 18, 1995

shell games

Originally this was to have been a review of the Ghost In The Shell movie, but then it sort of metastasized into a much longer piece weaving together cyberpunk, Masamune Shirow, Mamoru Oshii, and Japanese culture. Just as a note, this was written several years ago and some parts have dated a bit (VHS tapes?), but otherwise I still enjoy how it reads.

Japanese culture has long had a tradition of paying lip service to conventional social values in public while indulging its fetishes in private: from the choreographed after-work social gatherings designed to release the intense pressure of a salary man's daily grind to the stalls outside of every pachinko parlor in the country where recently-won stacks of neatly bundled calculators are exchanged for money, Japan hides its fascinations in a way that contrasts with America's jittery glorification and Europe's jaded apathy. And, more often than not, much of this fascination has focused on the not-so-secret thread of modernization.

In the 1600s, Japan was unified under the rule of the military Tokugawa Shogunate, who then exiled the Emperor to Kyoto and instituted a period of isolation from the outside world that lasted for more than two hundred years; however, when Commodore Perry's "black ships" cruised into Tokyo harbor in 1853, the Imperialist forces saw an opportunity to reverse the balance of power by manipulating the entry of Western culture and technology to their advantage. After a quiet civil war, the Emperor was returned to the throne of Japan in the Meiji Restoration of 1868 -- but the (by definition) traditionalist Imperial supporters were now compelled to cope with the "progressive" Western forces that they had unleashed on their country, creating a dichotomy that exists in Japanese society to this day.

Anyone who has ever been to Tokyo can see this split image, the Japanese appropriation of the future on its own suspicious terms, in the Buddhist temples bristling with television antennas and the automatic sliding doors that work oddly like their manual counterparts (requiring the patron to actually grasp the handle and pull before the door will open). And much like the Rokumeikan, the "Deer Cry Pavilion," where the most affluent Meiji-era Japanese would go to practice the latest fashions in speech and dress, the Tokyo ward of Akihabara is an infamously bustling monument to the newest and best in modern technology: a warren of stalls beneath the train tracks of the local station selling all manner of electronics, a place that has enchanted and appalled writers from Gibson to Sterling.

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But an hour or so to the south of Akihabara by train lies the grave of another writer -- Yukio Mishima -- the last man in Japan to commit public suicide according to the form of ritual seppuku, and who, among his other sometimes radical and overly militaristic notions, voiced the fairly-common Japanese fear that in all this hustle and bustle, they were losing their essential uniqueness.

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Which is why it's interesting to examine The Ghost in the Shell, a Japanese theatrical animated movie that was co-financed by Manga Video, an American distributor of Japanese animation. Movies often open closets of secret fetishes, parading our own horrors and hopes before us not only for the sheer public spectacle of it all, but also precisely because they do touch on those issues that obsess us -- but which we frown upon voicing in polite company. A movie that can quite easily be categorized within the genre of cyberpunk, Ghost in the Shell lyrically touches on many of these obsessions in a way that has been lacking in the majority of mainstream films, either Eastern or Western, and while its execution may be peculiarly Japanese, its questions of uniqueness and technological consumption are endemic to modern society.

Ghost in the Shell was originally a manga (Japanese comic) written and drawn by Masamune Shirow, the pseudonym for one of Japan's seminal comic artists and writers. Since Black Magic, his earliest work, Masamune has shown a penchant for creating worlds of high-technology that even at their most absurd or fantastic exhibit a certain logical self-consistency: he then sets his characters loose in these worlds and watches as they struggle within the machinery to solve whatever problems his future societies give rise to. Masamune is also an extremely physical artist whose work often focuses on the interrelation between body and mind and whose characters display an almost Hellenistic perfection in their physiques which is complemented by the occasional grotesqueries of body modification that parade up and down the avenues of his cities -- in a world where perfection is a commodity, the concept of aesthetics has become diluted to the point of absurdity. Unfortunately, despite his mastery of the art, Masamune's overall vision generally exceeds his talent as a writer or storyteller -- but the vision itself remains a penetratingly strong one that explores the related themes of evolution and survival in the face of an increasingly complicated technological world, one where the line between the hardware and software of intelligence (or between the body and soul) has become indistinct, one that we may be forced to occupy sooner than we like, or are prepared for.

Masamune's touchstone, and his most well-known work, is his in-progress magnum opus Appleseed: set on a post-apocalyptic Earth, Appleseed details the trials and tribulations of those noble souls trying to build a utopian model for the future out of the wreckage of the past. But whereas the conflict in Appleseed is provided by a few snakes in the Garden, Ghost's ruthless amorality presents a whole nest of vipers that have turned the world into their private reptile house. Within the world of Ghost in the Shell (set for the most part in the fictional city of Newport, based approximately on Hong Kong), technology is not a tool, as in Appleseed, but an all-consuming plague that has turned much of the populace into appliance addled extensions of their jobs, where even memory and reality are up for grabs. This dystopian future of perpetually rainy streets, easy violence, and gratuitous body modification is fairly familiar territory for anyone acquainted with the cyberpunk genre, but it's handled with a panache and eloquence that its many imitators have rarely mastered.

The main character within Ghost is Major Motoko Kusanagi and her team of operatives, a freelance mercenary group that is employed on a more or less regular basis by the government's nebulous Section Nine to solve any "problems" that require solving, greasing the wheels of bureaucracy with a battery of tools ranging from artificially intelligent mini-tanks to "thermoptic camouflage" which renders the wearer invisible. The Major (as she is called) and the majority of her team are also cyborgs, humans who have had their entire bodies replaced with high-maintenance computerized extensions that, though they may appear human, render them faster and stronger than their "factory original" bodies, and also give them the ability to interface directly with the "net" of computer information that surrounds them, and through that, with each other.

But within this exuberantly adolescent playground of spies, sex, and paranoia, the Major becomes aware of another presence that touches her innermost personal "ghost" -- roughly analogous to a human soul, and the single distinguishing feature between robots and "true" humans in Masamune's world (the title, "ghost in the shell," is most likely a riff on the philosophical argument concerning whether the human soul is merely a "ghost in the machine"). The Major eventually finds herself embroiled in a maelstrom of politics and violence, at the center of which is the mysterious Project 2501 and the role that both it and the Major may play in the future evolution of the human race.

Cyberpunk, at least in the form templated by Gibson et. al, appears to hold a twisted fun-house mirror up to our expectations for the future -- one that, in many ways, is just as valid as the 1950's visions of jet packs and rocket cars -- and then guides us through its own mad labyrinth with very human (and very film noir) fables of fallibility, madness, betrayal, and the inevitable bittersweet minor victory. Many of the characters have a recognizable love/hate relationship with their world, its hi-tech gizmos providing the fulfillment of their every fantasy and, at the same time, the source of their eventual downfall -- much like, say, the Maltese Falcon, Case's burnt-out myofilaments, or a horde of other narrative McGuffins. But the humanity of these stories is evident, and whether it be the destruction, augmentation, modification, or creation of some other kind of humanity that is involved, it is precisely what is lacking in the countless pale imitations that litter the genre like so many dead jellyfish on the beach, and it is the roots of what Ghost in the Shell returns to.

Those very themes are eventually what undoes Masamune as a storyteller, though, for while Ghost provides a day-glo trip through the cyberpunk gutters, its eventual climax becomes a lesson in biophilosophy that is, while extremely articulate and interesting, somewhat at odds with the vivid Sam-Peckinpah-on-speed vision that has gone before.

But in the hands of Mamoru Oshii, the director of the theatrical animated version of Ghost in the Shell, the story has been streamlined to emphasize many of the themes of Masamune's original work, while at the same time recasting them within the director's own rather unique aesthetic. Oshii, an eccentric character who began his career with Rumiko Takahashi's popular animated series Urusei Yatsura (and who went on to direct the supremely odd movie Urusei Yatsura: Beautiful Dreamer that in many ways established his atypical style), is best known for his trademarks: long character-oriented monologues; elegiac, dreamy stretches of images; an apprehensive appreciation of technology; and the presence of his mournful basset hound somewhere in each and every one of his films.

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Oshii's films have always been somewhat controversial, particularly considering the glut of empty OVAs (direct to video animations) that have characterized the Japanese animation industry for the last several years. Since the late '80s, Japanese animation has been generally characterized by reasonably slick production values, but a creatively bankrupt adherence to the twin pillars of giant robots and demented sex romps (with a few exceptions, of course). Despite this, Oshii's films -- inexplicably -- seem to have found an audience, and he appears to be gaining wider acceptance both at home and abroad.

Oshii's best known work is his own take on the giant robot genre, the theatrical Patlabor movies, which despite postulating a future Tokyo where "labors" (the, um, giant robots) have become as common as construction equipment, provides one of the most realistic depictions of the possibilities and limitations of near-future technology in day to day life that has yet been presented. Both Patlabor 1 and Patlabor 2 show a better grasp of the dangers inherent in the computer networks of the future than any Hollywood film has yet managed, but invariably it is the human beings of damaged conscience at the core of each film who have perverted the technology to their own use.

In Ghost in the Shell, it is the humans who have become their technology while technology returns to become their conscience. The Major and her cohorts are little more than tools to Section Nine, to be used to solve problems in much the same way as a hammer is used to pound down a nail -- their bodies literally owned by their employers, and beholden unto them for the maintenance which sustains their clockwork hearts. In such a society, a criminal figure known as the Puppet Master poses a deadly problem -- a master hacker who is seemingly able to bypass any computer defense and dive into the very ghosts, the most private thoughts, that live within their metal bodies, he is a problem that must be solved at any cost, and the Major is assigned to the task.

Her mission is somewhat complicated, however, by the Puppet Master's preferred method of working through intermediaries, humans whose ghosts have been wiped and replaced with artificial memories suited to the Puppet Master's hidden agenda, empty photographs of a moment in life without any past and an uncertain future. They are treated as pitiable wrecks by the Major and her team, but they create unsettling questions without answers: if the person they were is gone, who are they know? If identity is not attached to the body, if it is the experiences and memories that mold a person, and if even those can be fabricated...what then? The puppets and the puppeteers become indistinguishable, and the clay of identity becomes malleable to the point of insignificance.

When the Major eventually begins to question her own claim to humanity, her no less unsettling answer is that the only reason she believes that she is human is because she is treated that way: her body is an artificial construct, one of a thousand of that same make and model, while her brain is sealed behind a titanium box in her skull -- or so she has been told, for she's never actually seen the container of her own ghost. The single thing that is left to distinguish herself from her hardware are her own singular thoughts and memories. For a culture where conformity is taught, and private moments of uniqueness hoarded, it is a sobering thought.

The Major soon becomes obsessed with the Puppet Master and his or her connection with the mysterious Project 2501, as they may hold the key to defining her human identity in a time and place where the convenient definitions of history have become outdated. Quite unlike Bladerunner, which examined the point at which humanity begins, Ghost in the Shell becomes preoccupied with the precipice where it ends, and the Major very quickly finds herself dangling over it.

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Ghost in the Shell features all the hallmarks of Oshii's previous films, employing a wide variety of narrative imagery and state-of-the-art animation to create Masamune's dank, technology-encrusted future of political corruption and data thievery. In a shift away from the typical focus of similar works, however, Oshii ignores many of the high-tech toys that populate this world, treating them as the throwaway items that they generally are, and instead chooses to deliberate on the city that functions as the backdrop for most of the story. A character unto itself, Newport City is a teeming hive of people, but also a living, breathing entity, whose daily activities -- the commerce and cargo that feed it, the planes and ferries that are its vessels -- occur unheeded throughout the film, a backdrop against which the trials and tribulations of the main characters appear microscopic. In one of his trademark sequences, and one of the highlights of the film, Oshii turns an eye on the rhythms of the city, a wordless pastiche that vividly illustrates its emotional character. The final image from the film is a long shot of the city itself -- the first and only time that it is ever shown as a whole in the film -- its towers lit, its highways filled with traffic, and the din of its population barely audible in the background: from a distance it appears to be alive, a new kind of organism not composed of bone and blood, or simple glass and steel, but of a million human voices linked in a web of information…a sly answer to the lingering question of "what next?". Our definition of humanity and consciousness may need to expand to keep up with the entities we ourselves have unwittingly created.

But while the images of the city may provoke the questions of identity and humanity from a macroscopic level, the Major's own body provides a more personal arena for exploration. In reviewing the film, a few people have noted the objectification of the Major's body, the extremely casual way in which it is displayed, exposed, and used (which, to be fair, was toned down from some of the far more explicit imagery in the comic) -- but these objections are besides the point, for the Major's body is an object: it is a tool, nothing more and nothing less. When the Major dreams at the start of the film about the construction of her own body, it is her birth that we are witnessing; and, later in the film, when the Major goes scuba diving (a mortally dangerous sport for an individual whose body can't float without neutral buoyancy devices), her ascent from the darkness to the light of the surface has the striking tones of a person trying to reclaim the comfort of the womb. And the same sequence that illustrates a day in the life of the city is also bookended by images of cyborg twins and storefront mannequins that reflects the Major's own vain attempt to lay claim to her uniqueness. In fact, the Major's progression throughout the film eerily echoes the stages of life, from birth to adolescence to mid-life crisis, soon followed by the inevitable acceptance of mortality in a masterful action sequence that climaxes the movie: overmatched and overwhelmed by the superior technology of her foe, the Major is forced to brutally sacrifice her physical body to reach the end of her spiritual quest, but in the process becomes something greater than she was before -- a theme whose resonance echoes throughout religion and philosophy, the universal questions of life and death. Only through the destruction of her body -- a mere physical thing, an object -- is the Major's ghost finally able to find release into the wider world around it.

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In Japan, technology has become a way of life -- a casual consumer good in America, it has in many ways been the foundation upon which modern Japanese society was built and rebuilt -- but Ghost in the Shell exploits that life to its extreme, creating an exaggerated world whose uncomfortable edges can be interpreted within the fears of a culture that praises conformity while abhorring the loss of its unique culture. In this case, the question of identity is particularly crucial, as the needs of individuals must be balanced against the needs of society as a whole -- and while technology may unify a culture in consumer desire, it also fragments it into a million market niches. How then can any one person, city, nation, society, or culture not become lost within the maelstrom of other voices? How can any individual define themselves in the modern world?

Both Masamune and Oshii seem to be arguing for a future where identity is the unalienable right of the individual, and where the concept of an individual is defined by its own thirst for that right. But they also paint a picture of cages, where the relentless pursuit of technological luxuries in the name of progress creates a downward spiral that restricts rather than liberates the systems that it infects. In Ghost in the Shell at least, escape is possible through transcendence, an acceptance of limitations and their destruction, and the vessel of that transcendence is the very technology that so entangled us in the first place. Paradox? Maybe. Or more like evolution, Masamune and Oshii might say. And just as species evolve, so do people, cities, nations, societies, and cultures. But change is painful.

And as we seek to build our own virtual realities, cities-as-worlds where our every whim is answered and our fantasies are released to roam unheeded, it might be instructive to ask how free we really are, and if instead of expanding our consciousness we've merely shrunk the playing field.

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Ghost in the Shell is one of the few movies that rewards multiple viewings, and while it might not necessarily compete with many of the classics of cinema, it shows a depth and maturity that the animated art form has seldom striven for, and seldom attained -- this essay wasn't originally written to explore many of the topics that have been touched upon, but once I began writing, I started to find themes and concepts that I hadn't originally been conscious of, so I decided to give them free rein. While animation may not have yet produced its own Citizen Kane (then again, maybe it has…), Ghost in the Shell is an intriguing and exciting step towards realizing the possibilities inherent in the animated art.

The comic Ghost in the Shell, by Masamune Shirow, is available as a collected trade-paperback from Dark Horse Comics, along with many of his other works, and is highly recommended. The theatrical release of Ghost in the Shell is now available on videotape from Manga Video in both subtitled and English dubbed versions; the subtitled version, aside from being letterboxed, also has slightly better translations and far superior voice acting to the English version -- however, your mileage may vary.

Meanwhile, I'm going to go relentlessly pursue the newest in technological luxuries, dammit.