“Overspecialize, and you breed in weakness.” These are some of the most iconic words from Mamoru Oshii’s 1995 sci-fi classic Ghost in the Shell, a film as important for its political and social commentary as for its stunning visuals and exemplary writing. The film itself was based on a manga by Masamune Shirow, a work characterized by an immense eye for worldbuilding (entire paragraphs of text in the manga were dedicated to fleshing out aspects of the technology and the politics of the world). All of this is to say that the context of both works inform much of what the franchise is about, and it also explains why both the recent anime adaptations (“Ghost in the Shell: Arise” and “Ghost in the Shell: The New Movie”) and the forthcoming film adaptation (“Ghost in the Shell”) represent the erasure of the original works’ ethos, and the construction of a new, bland property.
I’ll start with the elephant in the room: Scarlett Johansson’s casting as Motoko Kusanagi. There are a number of issues with this casting choice on its face (Johansson’s box office pull is a huge question mark, and her being a white woman makes this another instance of horrific whitewashing in Hollywood films), but the one issue that I have with her casting is that it destroys the entire internal logic and context of Ghost in the Shell’s universe.
In Ghost in the Shell (the 1995 film), the world is a fundamentally different place than it is now. Japan exists as one of the last standing nations in the aftermath of a devastating World War, and its government has afforded itself a number of excesses thanks to the post-war confusion. Millions of immigrants are flooding into the country, creating a number of new economic and national security issues. Section 9 is the rebuke to this, and Kusanagi is at the front lines of what is ultimately a late-21st Century culture war. The background of Ghost in the Shell is not just a cyberized future (like The Matrix and other cyberpunk films), but a diverse one, one that resembles our modern day in its subtle leanings towards jingoism. The Japan of Ghost in the Shell is a Japan reckoning with its own national identity, and that’s why Johansson’s casting is so heinous. Motoko Kusanagi isn’t just a Japanese woman/cyborg, she’s our envoy into this world. Her being able to enter fluidly into the culture we’re observing lends the film an intimacy and access that we cannot achieve through the eyes of a foreign presence. However, there’s also a conflict of identity at Kusanagi’s core that is erased alongside her race. Despite possessing the features of a Japanese woman, she’s almost more alienated because of them. Through her interactions with non-augmented people like Togusa and through her work which finds her mostly fighting against foreigners, she’s regularly reminded of the fact that she is only conditionally human, conditionally Japanese.
Conditionally alive.
Johansson’s status as a white woman in Japan (there’s no doubt that the filmmakers are going for the same context as the original film, especially since Hong Kong is one of the primary filming locations) removes the duality of Kusanagi’s character almost entirely.
Johansson’s Kusanagi is unquestionably a foreigner in a foreign land, whereas the original Kusanagi’s distance comes not from her being not Japanese, but from the liminality of her position. She may be ethnically one with her peers and her surroundings, but the extent to which she is truly connected to other people is in question. Johansson’s Kusanagi will undoubtedly be certain of her positioning, at least to an audience unwilling to accept Johansson as a Japanese woman. She is other, she is non-human. Removing the uncertainty from Kusanagi takes away the film’s core tension, and it also negates much of the political and social context.
And speaking of the context, let’s talk about the politics of Ghost in the Shell. More specifically, let’s talk about Daisuke Aramaki.
I wrote a bit earlier about the crisis of conscience and identity that Ghost in the Shell’s Japan is undergoing. Post-war, this Japan’s government is in flux, and the system itself has become deeply entrenched, and deeply corrupt. And no one knows this more than Daisuke Aramaki, the head of Section 9. After decades of working in defense, he’s managed a few connections and built a team of class-A agents within his Section 9. Section 9’s been granted a good degree of autonomy thanks to Aramaki, but they’re still beholden to higher level government officials. In the manga and the original 1995 film (as well as the stellar Stand Alone Complex anime series), the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (a real and uniquely Japanese agency) is full of bureaucrats and paid-off corporate shills. It’s secretive to a fault, and its clandestine experiments create the Puppetmaster. This convoluted mess of cabinet ministries and Diet members, guided by a post-war haze of collusion and greed, is a unique context that both Sanders’ film and the new Arise films have eschewed. In the Arise films, the government is depicted as simply a mechanism by which Aramaki can recruit Kusanagi & Co., and in Sanders’ film Section 9 is recast as an external intelligence agency that’s hired by Hanka Robotics (a PMC pioneering cyberization) to investigate the Puppetmaster. You can see how this would be a bad decision.
The importance of the Puppetmaster’s origins in Foreign Affairs cannot be overstated — its origins in a government agency make it the perfect parallel for Kusanagi herself. Its model is nearly identical to hers, its purpose the same. But its rebellion and escape instills in her a necessary agency that allows her to merge with it and the Net in the film’s climax. On the other hand, for Aramaki, it’s a profound betrayal. He thought he knew everything, that he was the best connected and the best informed. There’s visible shock and disdain as the Foreign Affairs folks seize the Puppetmaster’s corpse, superceding Aramaki’s authority and trampling on the walled garden he’s built for himself with Section 9.
Without any of the government connections or societal critique of the original films, these new films lose not only narrative depth, but character depth as well. Divorcing Aramaki from the governmental machinations and power brokering that made his character so compelling renders him an empty shell, wanting for its ghost. In the orignal, he’s not just a functionary in the government, he’s a power player. He believes in the power of his agency and, by extension, the government to do good, but he’s deeply conflicted about the high concentration of power within the government. The war fundamentally changed him and his view of the world, and Kusanagi’s similar sentiment makes them kindred souls. This is wholly lost in both Arise and likely the Sanders adaptation.
But the most fundamental problem with Arise, and one that I feel that Sanders’ adaptation still has a chance to nail, is the aesthetic. In Arise, there was no visual distinction between their world and ours. The overwhelmingly bleak visual atmosphere that’s inherent to cyberpunk as a genre (an atmosphere/aesthetic that Ghost in the Shell pioneered) is absent. In its place is a generic anime palette, complete with bright-red jumpsuit for Motoko and jarringly bright CG robots.
The visual majesty of the original is lost in Arise, and coupled with its failure to even pay lipservice to the core political and social questions the original poses, Arise became nothing more than a generic sci-fi anime. My only hope for Sanders’ film is that he maintains the visual splendor of the original. The first promotional image shows promise, but industry murmurs of showy CG (including VFX to make Johansson look ‘more Asian’) and Sanders’ own history of horribly implemented tone and visuals (“Snow White and the Huntsman” is a film that flits between stone-faced grit and Disney-style humor with absolutely no real connection and no flow) make me deeply skeptical on this. But one thing I can be certain of is that the changes already made to the basic premise of Ghost in the Shell have almost irreparably damaged it as a unique narrative and cultural analogue.
From Arise’s erasure of the original works’ themes and visual nomenclature to Sanders’ rewriting of the series’ most important setting details and context, the franchise as a whole is moving in a dangerous direction. In modern anime, vaguely futuristic narratives featuring bland and uninteresting protagonists are the standard. The primary difference between Ghost in the Shell and these other properties is that Ghost’s setting and characters all have individual and unique stories to tell. The setting, specifically, not only adds context to the narrative, but it also has its own story. The forlorn cityscapes that populate the original film’s midsection speak to a nation being torn apart by the disparate identities that populate it — human or cyborg, native or immigrant, rich or poor.
This national conflict serves to accentuate Motoko’s inner conflict. The whole question of identity is central to Ghost in the Shell as a story, and it’s also the one area where Sanders’ live-action adaptation has already messed up. In rewriting not only Section 9, but Motoko herself, they expunge the context and the central question at the heart of the franchise. And what is it replaced with? More likely than not we get a film like “Lucy,” a bland sci-fi/action film that flits between half-baked philosophy (“I AM EVERYWHERE”) and poorly written plot points. All packaged in a way that will sell tickets and fit nicely with the corporate tie-ins that inevitably spawn (I for one can’t wait for my limited edition Burger King cup with Johansson’s vaguely Asian thousand-yard stare on it).
And that’s what’s so sad about Ghost in the Shell’s modern incarnations and the true malice of its live-action adaptation. A film and franchise that is fundamentally about identity in an increasingly globalized and technological world has been made a victim of its own predictions. The film industry, dead set on countering lower ticket sales and general apathy towards films, produces another generic sci-fi thriller to move tickets, erasing everything that was so poignant about the original works. The masses, fearful of a constructed other and unwilling to see anything but the purest, whitest faces reflected on screen, happily sit through the film and leave as empty as they came in. An animation studio, devoid of exciting new properties, “updates” a classic for a “new generation,” hoping to God that the Blu-rays and body pillows sell. And they do, because the proportions on the protagonist’s redesign are just sexy enough, her character reduced to moe elements that inspire internet parody and cosplay. And in it all, the identity inherent to the work is lost, the studios locked in an unending cycle of rehashing the same ideas, the same tropes. They repeat the same process over and over without deviation. No risks, no changes. The processes become airtight, the production seamless. They’ve begun to overspecialize.
And we all know what happens after that.
