Wednesday 1 February 2017

Cracking open : Ghost in the Shell (1995) (work in progress)

Cracking open : Ghost in the Shell (1995) (work in progress)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2016 (20 to 27 October)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

1 February

Cracking open : Ghost in the Shell (1995) (work in progress)

For those who want / need it, there is a link here to a synopsis [on IMDb (@IMDb)] : http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0113568/synopsis

 There are around three parts of Ghost in the Shell (1995) that are, in terms of setting up a scenario or telling a story, very heavy on text – which signifies more, when one is reading sub-titles, and trying to work out how long one has to read each (and, therefore, whether one can go back and re-read something that one did not immediately follow – which can cause anxiety can set in…), but is still hardly ideal, if one were trying to catch all the words / what they signify.

 Unless – which simply is not the case here – someone is genuinely being told something, and he or she needs to be told a large amount of information at one time (independently of our knowing it per se), a film in which sections seem overburdened with quickly-delivered text has not been carefully thought through (even in translation from manga, where there is all the time in the world to read, to celluloid, where the reader may, as described, feel justifiably pressured*) :

We cannot even realistically suggest that a native speaker (unfamiliar with the original text) would have been expecting the first of these passages, because they do go against the pattern of the film thitherto of short, sharp exchanges, not all of the content of which seems vital – as is the way in any film with an element of action – and which, if they need to make sense, will or can do so later. Be that as it may, because one passage references Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians, and others some concepts in Western philosophy (especially philosophy of mind), some of which are familiar from The Matrix* (1999), there are shortcuts, and these are not strongly held reservations about the film.

 As to whether Ghost titillates, and does so gratuitously, one hears [from @xa329] that the full manga text is explicitly sexual in places, which both confirms and denies the perception : the film could clearly show more (as later films apparently do), but none of this takes away from the fact that a female body is depicted naked, as if this is necessary for the ambient camouflage that is being deployed, when clearly that is not true for others (males) who are likewise camouflaged. (It could have been thought to be necessary by those, on the side of the government department (Section 9) with which we are interested, but that is a feeble excuse, not even used, to show Motoko naked, which is what the film-makers wish to do – and have faux-nakedness, since this is animé, not actual flesh, but as if showing such an image cannot be for sexual gratification : no one watching this film will believe that Motoko needed to be shown in that way, or that watching the motions of her breasts, nipples, etc., as they pass through the air or water are unintended to stimulate.

 Strip away these doubts about the film, and how and why it has been made in this way, and there is still plenty to say – in a way that one doubts that one can say for Jane Fonda’s choice of appearing in Barbarella (1968). The important questions are, almost necessarily, about #AI (since Motoko is not human), and partly about the body that she ends up in, and surveys the city with and from, after declining the offer to stay in Batou’s hide-away : she is grateful to him for being preserved, but does not wish to be secreted away by someone who also has fantasized about her sexually : even that is not much of a position taken from principle, but just of not wanting to be the closet creature of anyone, i.e. the idea of free-spiritedness that has pervaded her role.

 Here, as The Wachowskis did, we will find the rogue piece of code that is Neo (as well as the nature of his activities outside his legitimately paid hours of work), the sentinels, and concepts of seeking physical destruction of something that inherently is not physical, and thus also of being able to merge completely with it, and what that might mean. In Matrix Revolutions (2003), particularly (but also in the whole Matrix trilogy – and it is a complete and necessary trilogy (albeit supplemented by The Animatrix (2003), for those who will have some of the detail alluded to fleshed out…) – that merging is often passing through, and experiencing another’s lack of substance, and here, in Ghost, there is much talk of ‘barriers’ and ‘diving into’ another being, and other key-words that delineate what separates, but could yet allow ingress…
To be continued / polished / edited



 End-notes :

 * One is told, and can see, that The Wachowskis were influenced by Ghost (as considered below).

 ** One is less impressed by an argument that suggests that dumping information on us is mimetic of what M., and her fellow agents, experience as they try to process an understanding of the cyber-enemy that they face (and whether some of them are more artifice, or have been constructed as artefact, such as The Puppet-Master)…






When someone appears to suggest that such image / still is from the film's live-action re-make... :






 Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
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