Written by Q. Le Sugiyama for Sam Gurry’s CTXA 540 course on 13 Nov 2024
“Ghost in the Shell” (1995) is obviously a huge inspiration for a lot of Hollywood films, most notably “The Matrix” by the Wachowski siblings, and it's also a particularly distinct and important film not only in the context of opening up Hollywood doors to anime at large, but also as an important piece of cinema because it taps into the post-World War II, post-atomic anxieties of Japan on the cusp of having an economic collapse after extreme economic growth.
After World War II, Japan was in this rebuilding mode in the context of global capitalism. As a country, Japan was looking to set itself to become the most capitalistic economic tank in the world, and this was particularly notable because Japan rebuilt quickly not just in terms of infrastructure, but in terms of its economy with a hyper emphasis on modernization. A lot of Japanese civilians attributed the country's loss during World War II in the Pacific region with the country's social and cultural hesitation to modernize, so this hyper modernization was almost in response to the severe loss, which lends itself to larger critique critiques about Japanese civilians pushing back against Meiji-era traditionalism. Extreme capitalism was also the only avenue as to how Japan could rebuild because the country’s entire military was dismantled and there is the US occupational forces that still linger there today.
It's important to consider this context because the original “Ghost in the Shell” manga between 1989 and 1991, which is around the time that Japan’s economy completely stagnated after extreme growth due to the asset price bubble – so the manga and subsequent film adaptation really touch upon the existential crisis that Japanese civilians were feeling after an atomic world war and now an atomic economic collapse.
As a character, Motoko Kusanagi is remarkable not only as a female protagonist, but also because her existence muddles the line between human and automaton. She is openly homoerotic in the manga, yet also is part of Japan’s military industrial complex. I would argue that her very existence is a subconscious aspiration of Japanese society at the time: autonomous with military capacity, and identity elevated from the constraints of organic material.
The notable sexuality of the original story, and specifically homosexuality of the original manga, is pretty absent from the film due to rampant homophobia (aka hetero-washing) that dominated Japanese animation studios at the time, but as a result, the film actually opens bigger avenues of interrogating gender identity. This is pretty notable in the final scene where Motoko switches bodies with the Puppet Master who they've been tracking the entire film, and the hacker – who has a male presenting voice – is now in her body and they're both speaking to each other through this cyber network, through their respective vessels that are both female presenting. This transgender exploration definitely resides in the DNA of “The Matrix”, which many audiences the Wachowski siblings’ exploration into transgender identity when there wasn't any popular discourse about transgender identity being to begin with during the 90s. (In 2020, Lilly Wachowski later confirmed that the film was intended to be a trans allegory, but the world wasn’t ready at the time.)
What “Ghost in the Shell” really interrogates is the idea of how do you present yourself physically versus digitally, or your non-physical identity? That dynamic is really present in the final scene when Motoko and the Puppet Master who switch cybernetic bodies while maintaining their respective female and male-presenting voices.
Negative space and negative dialogue is so important because it forces us to consider the various philosophical, political, and existential questions that goes in the show fundamentally raises, such as: What is identity? Nationalism? Borders? Security? Terrorism? Acceptable violence? Acceptable physicality? What is an acceptable amount of modifications of our bodies, and when do we cease to become more or less than human? What is human?
Having the ability to take in the silence to really let these serious questions sink in are what make “Ghost in the Shell” so much more notable (and economical too because it was cell animation, it takes a lot of time and labor) compared to its Hollywood descendants like “The Matrix”, which rely heavily on constant dialogue and don’t trust the audience to simply absorb what is being interrogated on screen.