Ghost in the Shell

The most horrifying aspect of Mamoru Oshii's Ghost in the Shell is an almost incidental detail within the film itself: the idea that a human's soul, here referred to as their ghost, is a detectable and quantifiable variable when dealing with cyber crimes where people are hotwired as easily as cars. When examining these puppets, be they flesh and blood or artificial constructs, the pulsing green systems of this near-future spit out interlaced, three-dimensional maps that describe the circumference of sentient identity. Bootlegging these private wavelengths, and the natural decay that occurs during this duping process, is also casually discussed. Naturally, in this setting, these analog appraisals are no big deal. A fact of life both understood and internalised. Human augmentation is, after all, endemic in the urban sprawl of New Port City. Off-the-shelf (and idealised) bodies are everywhere and staring straight back at each other; even the middle-age spread of a windy bureaucrat is, we learn, threaded with black, coiled cabling. 

That mechanical reproduction has sunken into this most sacred of spaces should, naturally, prompt some unusual behavioural patterns in those born out of these processes. Oshii's film doesn't just account for these strange, suicidal eccentricities, it's premised on them. Major Motoko Kusanagi, voiced by Atsuko Tanaka and Maaya Sakamoto, is a cyborg working for a particularly amoral internal security agency that specialises in murderous, interdepartmental in-fighting. The Major, and her colleagues, are so heavily customised that their bodies are no longer their own property. We are told, almost in passing, that these leased people are physically and psychologically dependent on their continued participation in government black ops. They have next to no agency. Resignation or retirement would mean that they would need to be dismantled. That their memories would have to be wiped. Who or what then would be left? In Oshii's film the deeper co-mingling of the flesh and digital realms is a lopsided relationship; one that demands that human beings give up ownership of not just their physical appearance, and any ego attached to that, but the very personal, individual essence that makes them who they are. This shock permeates Oshii's film, detectable in depressive, dehumanised interludes where dolls glimpse their doppelgangers and the resignation with which our heroes subject their gleaming outer shells to grievous mutilation.