Why the Ghost in the Shell 2017 remake was actually profound

By MultiverseWarrior6 May 3, 2017 December 10, 2022 culture critique

(to skip intro find “Spoiler Alert!”)

Contrary to the current trend of bashing the Ghost in the Shell (2017) remake for it’s accused “whitewashing” and failure to deliver the depth of philosophy of the original, my personal favorite anime of the same name (1995), I’m setting out here to actually defend the live action film, which I am happy to call a success in “translation” of one of the greatest science-fiction stories ever told (even watered down). I also plan on critiquing it, to explain why it succeeds, and what changed in this film that makes it great.

First off, GITS should be the most important American science-fiction “epic” since the Matrix, which by the way for those who didn’t know had already built off influences from the original GITS franchise. The criticisms start off an angry reaction to apparent “whitewashing”, an understandable concern though the accusation falls short for me. Coming from a radical leftist tradition myself, I see the current push towards identity politics as valid up to the extent that it doesn’t fall into tribalism, and anti-left politics to be used as a distraction from the economic issues which plague our society. When I hear accusations like this I take them seriously, and I evaluate them carefully so as not to trivialize or unfairly judge the situation.

When I first heard about the film and the casting of Scarlett Johansson (as Major), my initial reaction was somewhat cynical, mainly because Hollywood has a way of destroying powerful art, and because I had never imagined Kusanagi as Scarlet Johansson. Having now seen her play the role, I can’t imagine anyone else doing it. My cynicism was lessened after seeing a trailer. Having now experienced a bit of the visual universe, which was quite spectacular, I could at last feel a sense of style which I liked. The use of Ki:Theory’s cover of Depeche Mode’s “Enjoy the Silence” gave the trailer an intense emotional effect which was relatable, this of course accompanied by the visuals reminiscent of a mixture of the source material (the manga, show and original films) combined with new elements. At this point I was at least intrigued.

The day before I saw the film a friend sent me some of the criticisms about how the plot misses the mark and fails to deliver the depth of the original. These for me are more serious accusations than the “whitewashing scandal”. Now while it is definitely different and should be, with some of the more elaborate metaphysical questions dealt lighter, there is definitely more there than most critics give it credit for. I won’t waste my time listing the articles I’m responding to though any simple google search will reveal a slew of mostly repetitive criticisms. I attended the cinema with a nervousness. Way I see it the creators would need to do something horrible to mess up source material this strong. Perhaps it was my initial cynicism that left me so satisfied with what I ended up seeing.

As you may already be aware, the film’s original director was very positive about the casting and the filming itself, as was the publisher of the manga. I saw one accusation about how the Japanese worship the West as an explanation for why there wasn’t such an outrage in Japan. It seems more reasonable to me that in Japan generally the characters are assumed to be of the majority race as would be the case in Japan with remakes of originally “Western” franchises. Ironically the GITS Stand Alone Complex series had quite a bit of anti-Americanism in it, though the Japanese clearly focus more on nationality/ethnicity than on race. This accusation that the Japanese worship the West and that this explains why they are okay with the casting ironically ends up sounding pretty racist, the kind of stereotype you’d see parodied in an episode of South Park.

(Spoiler Alert!)

Whitewashing is a casting practice in the film industry of the United States in which white actors are cast in historically non-white character roles, which brings me to my first point, the original Major was not necessarily non-white to begin with. Though Major Kusanagi does have a Japanese name, her shell (physical body) is decidedly ambiguous, of some Japanese idealized “anime race”. In the original she has blue-gray eyes, a narrow straight nose and “white skin”. In the original film her origin is unknown so she could have been anyone of any race before her ghost was placed in it’s current shell.

Quite a bit of what I’ve seen of supposedly Asian characters in the anime world appear to me to be of some idealized, fusion “anime race” of their own, with characteristics I could easily mistake for “Caucasian”. GITS is one of the instances where that depiction really fits. This is a futuristic world where people can transport their “ghosts” (consciousnesses) into artificial bodies. Today people from around the world get plastic surgeries to change their noses, their breasts, their lips, their rear-ends, the size of their genitalia, their skin colors and even their biological sex. Japan’s neighbor South Korea happens to be one of the plastic surgery capitals of the world. It isn’t far off to imagine a future where people replace their physical appearance with more “desirable”, likely “Westernized” characteristics to meet with an increasingly globalized economy and culture. We’re talking modern dystopia after all, not some idealized racial fantasy.

This is not to say that Scarlett was casted specifically for this reason, just to explain what sense it makes for the Major to appear “Caucasian” in the GITS universe, and argue against those claiming the character must be an “Asian” or specifically Japanese woman. In the development of this film’s subtext however, the Major’s race does end up serving the themes, even if unintended.

Those of you who’ve seen the first film may remember the intro text:

In the remake nations appear to still exist, however this says nothing of racial identities. A dystopia where one can chose their race (or sex), is subversive in itself and a “western” default is very telling of what a “post-racial” society might imply. In a way the use of a “Caucasian” actress strengthens the fiction, not to mention allows for that symbolism to come through in the revelation that Major Mira Killian (Scarlett Johansson) is really Motoko Kusanagi, a Japanese girl murdered by a corporation and placed into the shell of a phenotypically “Caucasian” woman. In case anyone missed it, this is a tip of the hat to the original, and also serves as a response to the whitewashing criticism, though even more so it serves to further the narrative on the growing artificiality of a post-consumerist techno-futuristic existence, the furthering of the initial concept and reinterpretation for a rapidly changing present world that speaks volumes beyond what most critics were able to catch onto.

Translating the source material

The way in witch I use the term translation is decidedly Benjiminian. When you translate a work of art, you do not simply copy from the original source as it loses it’s potency under new circumstances, instead one must reveal in the translation an aspect of the original which is inherent to the original yet less pronounced. This is to say, what was unrevealed yet present in the original should be even more evident in the translation. This is the lens I use to analyze the film’s concepts.

Anime yields itself to quite a different emotional quality than live-action cinema, the original with it’s long silent shots of the world drawn as bleak and cold, and a tendency like many anime’s towards expository dialogues/monologues (even more so in the TV series). One of my favorite scenes in the original film had no words, it was on a boat following the nighttime diving scene (about 33 minutes in). Major Kusanagi is passing through the canal, we see a big plane flying by like a giant mechanical imitation of a bird reflected in the glass of a nearby building which serves as a kind of mirror. The water is filled with trash. Kusanagi looks up at the offices to see workers in their cubicles, one of which looks exactly like Kusanagi (mirror), perhaps of the same model. A droopy faced dog adds to the emotional atmosphere of the soundtrack. A storefront reveals mannequins who like the cyborg Kusanagi were built to resemble “real people” though in lack of a “ghost” are no more than lifeless imitations, highlighting one of the major themes of the original film, that is “What defines humanity in a world where everything can be cyberised?” This question remains in the live action film but takes a new form.

While in the original the Major’s origins are left obscured, ending with a focus on a future where Kusanagi ascends to a higher state of consciousness when her ghost is joined to the villain, a rogue program/cyberterrorist named “the Puppet Master” who turns out to be a visionary of a post-human future (evolution). As Wisecrack suggests this union serves as a Hegelian sublation (aufheben). The remake on the other-hand centralizes the origin while leaving the future open ended. After all, you need to reconcile the past before you can move on to the future.

The live-action adaptation focuses on finding the “Self” within the immenent, ending in a kind of discovery or redefining of “Selfhood” in opposition (one might say) to the original’s semi-buddhistic concept of self-transcendence (Nirvana). This is a radical philosophical switch, but a meaningful, and also powerful one, more relevant for us in the West despite the trend of pseudo-orientalist philosophy dominating the mainstream (“western Buddhism” and New Ageism). As attractive as they might seem, those recent trends for me don’t live up to what I view as the true Buddhist message but have taken hold anyway along with “neo-Gnosticism” as a reaction against the perceived failures of both Secular Humanism and the mainstream Christian tradition, in spite of the more emancipatory radical messages of Christianity.

Within the context of a developing New Age spirituality one could view the tendency of Ghost in the Shell back in 95 as a spiritualization of materialism, or a materialization of spiritual idealism. I prefer to stick with a materialist analysis though there is definitely a blurring of each in the process of transfusing both (synthesis). The only major theme missing in the live-action is the commentary on gender identity which in the Japanese context takes on a very specific significance though still relevant to the remake:

The film depicts Motoko’s identity and ontological concerns, ending with the evolution of a being with full subjectivity, through a new form of reproduction with the Puppet Master.[51] Austin Corbett commented on the lack of sexualization from her team as freedom from femininity, noting that Motoko is “overtly feminine, and clearly non-female.”[53] In describing Motoko as a “shapely” and “strong [female protagonist] at the center of the story” who is “nevertheless almost continuously nude”, Roger Ebert noted that “an article about anime in a recent issue of Film Quarterly suggests that to be a “salary man” in modern Japan is so exhausting and dehumanizing that many men (who form the largest part of the animation audience) project both freedom and power onto women, and identify with them as fictional characters”.[14]”. – Wikipedia Ghost in the Shell (1995) – Themes

This all serves to demonstrate the “universal” potential of the cyborg as something beyond our current human condition.

Ironically, the “whitewashing” criticism only truly works under the philosophical conception of this adaptation since in the original the transcendent is beyond the physical form, essentially making discussions of “race” irrelevant. The whitewashing scandal is resolved following the logic introduced in this remake. Here Mira must first become free from mind control, this false reality they installed, before she can discover who she “truly is”, or who she was originally. Contrary to what I’ve seen suggesting that Johansson was a racist attempt to subsume, erase and appropriate the “oriental” Japanese female hero, I see it rather as the “oriental” Japanese female hero assuming this artificial identity that was forced on her in order to subsume the power of “whiteness” belonging to the corporations who confine her reality. Ultimately she is more than a human, fated to transcend both the past and present, much like her counterpart from the original but with different implications. Mira is in effect subverting an inhuman machine of class oppression to use it as a tool of her own liberation. It isn’t her former luddite philosophy which saves her but precisely the technology she was fighting against, what is left to overthrow the oppressor. The subtext ends up serving as a compliment to the critique of the very mechanism of “whitewashing” as an extension of it’s identity politic. The corporate elite controlling and dictating the racial norm of our market (along with other norms) appear in this film in the form of the villain, Hanka Robotics.

The film introduces the root of their concept in the first fifteen minutes with Major Killian’s (Johansson) daring lone assault on the “terrorists”. Her boss Aramaki (Takeshi Kitano) reprimands her later for taking such a dangerous risk because she is after all his responsibility as Hanka Robotics property. The fall/leap into action also works beautifully as a metaphor for the Majors confrontation with the immanent. More on that later. At this point she sees herself as a free actor, able to exercise free action within the confines of the directives given by her anti-terrorism unit though this supposed freedom is based on a lie. Through this illusion of being free she loyally serves her “makers” effectively becoming a tool of an oppressive system which works against her own interests in secret, though the duplicity doesn’t end there. Throughout the film Major believes her brain was transplanted into her mechanized shell after a terrible accident and that the procedure was the only way to save her life. Whenever she goes in for maintenance with Dr. Ouelet (Juliette Binoche), sort of her surrogate mother at Hanka Robotics, Ouelet pauses to get the Major’s consent before she has to make an alteration to Major’s data. Later the Major learns that these ritual transferences of power were simply empty gestures designed to maintain a mythic belief in her own free choice, the Dr. never needed Major’s permission (“We never needed your consent, yours or anyones”). Talk about “manufactured consent”.

On the streets it’s clear there is a class-structure to cybernetic enhancements, some sleek and clean like the Major, others rougher and lower quality exposing the gritty core of it all like Kuze (Michael Pitt), bare and exposed, the truth behind the “shell” of “progress”. As Alyssa Rosenberg points out in her Washington Post article about how Ghost in the Shell “could have been” genuinely interesting “…the blue mechanisms coursing through the skull of a representative of the African Federation are obviously top-of-the-line. The tactical robotic eyes Batou gets after his are damaged in a bombing are a step below — highly functional but less stylish. A bartender’s clanking robotic arm and the implant gashed into the temple of a hapless garbage man are working-class iterations of this technology, while the journeymen drilling into each other’s necks in a backroom bar are at the lowest end of the spectrum…. Even a prostitute Major hires in an effort to learn more about what it might mean to feel human in one of the movie’s best sequences wears a cheap plastic mask so that she appears to be enhanced, even though she obviously can’t afford it.”

Technology is ultimately neutral but serves both the functions of oppression and at the same time the liberation from, as we see in the climax. The enemy of the new film is not rooted in a nationality/ethnicity, but rather in the corporate conglomerate who uses it’s power to tamper with human freedom for the sake of it’s own profit. Hanka Robotics is represented in the film primarily by Cutter (Peter Ferdinando) who sees the Major as an investment to be deployed as the corporation wishes and to be destroyed if she becomes a liability. Hanka Robotics is funded by the government itself though it’s unclear where their authority ends and the government begins. When Cutter discovers Major had risked her shell taking on the “terrorist” earlier in the film he threatens Aramki to dismantle their whole organization. When he discovers that Major was exposed directly to the computer virus spread by the terrorist, he decides she must be killed. No other government body appears to have any say.

“You want to kill me? …Do it then, do what you were programmed to do.” says Kuze to Mira. A kind of “wiseman”, Kuze starts Major’s quest towards true “Self-hood”. Her “shell belongs to them” but not her ghost, and perhaps if she can remember this, she can go on to finding her past (“remember it all”). This is to say that before she is able to discover her past, she must make the conscious decision to think for herself, and break through the false memories implanted by the corporation. It isn’t that memories are not an important aspect of identity (the Lockean premise), Kuze is still searching for his own after all. He realizes that the first step towards taking that identity stolen by “the machine” is free thought, to see beyond the programing in order to act appropriately.

Kuze serves as a kind of distorted mirror into her own past, one which reveals the truth while destroying the false reality created by her implanted memories. Without a clear causality, Mira struggled with identity and purpose beyond mechanical gestures. You’ll recall her staring down at the geisha-bot earlier in the film, seeing the bots voice transformed to reveal it is “ghost-less”, then seeing it’s lifeless body after she shoots it, reminding her of it’s artificiality, and of her own artificiality. It recalls one of my favorite lines from the GITS 2: Innocence anime – Kim’s mansion scene: “That’s why dolls haunt us. They are modeled on humans. They are, in fact, nothing but human. They make us face the terror of being reduced to simple mechanisms and matter. In other words, the fear that, fundamentally, all humans belong to the void.”. The question at hand being how to establish purpose in a world where even the human mind can be cyberized.

Mira’s struggle is portrayed earlier in the film as not feeling connected to something which she believes all humans are. She confronts Dr. Ouelet about Kuze’s claims that he was like her someone who’s life was taken as part of an experiment to create a fully cyberised being with real human consciousness to use as a weapon. Dr. Ouelet confirms Kuze’s accusations and tells the Major her memory of losing her family in a terrorist attack was used as a false motivation to fight terrorists. When Mira discovers she is in reality Motoko Kusanagi (the name of the original GITS protagonist) a Japanese girl, formerly an anti-technology opponent of the corporation the false reality she had been implanted with false apart, returning her back to a blank slate, a reboot if you will. The unspoken message is that we all need to unplug from something which is foreign to our will, as that machine necessitates the implantation of its own thoughts, effectively transforming us into shells of an alien ghost.

Mira flees to come to terms with the revelation that Hanka Robotics (the “They” in the DJ Khaled sense) had not saved her life but instead taken it away. This is when she goes “off the grid”, diving into the sea around her city to escape the “sea of information” of cyberspace which we are all connected to. When she arises a reborn subject, she describes the experience of being submerged in sea to her partner Batou (Pilou Asbæk), “It’s cold and dark, just a million miles away, no voices, no data streaming, just nothing”, this I take as a reference to her own core self being absent, the abyss of subjectivity embodied in that lifeless geisha-bot from earlier in the film. She sought-after this resolution in her characteristically audacious “deep dive” into the geisha-bot’s memory but was overcome by the black phantoms of the unconscious symbolizing the fear of this very encounter. What she’s truly experiencing while submerged and disconnected from cyberspace is the void at the center of conscious being. She expresses that it scares her but she does it anyway because “it feels real”. It is here where the Major finally comes to terms with what she is. If we look closer, at the center of our being, with our dreams and memories, there isn’t essentially anything different from a program. The cyberbrain hacked garbage man from earlier who was under Kuze’s control has these implanted memories though ours are not implanted and serve no superior a function, as remarked by Batou, “At least he got to believe he had a kid, what’s the difference now? Fantasy, reality, dreams, memories, it’s all the same, just noise”. In this world, the distinction between synthetic and real experience is blurry. There must therefore be something even more relevant to identity than memories.

The original ends with a shift from political-conflict and terrorism (the focus of much of the Stand Alone series and manga) to the personal enlightenment of consciousness, and this is where the new film truly succeeds. As Alex Leadbeater put it in his article comparing the original to the remake

“– but where it’s most prominent is again in the idea of nations and ethnic groups. The world is pointedly more multicultural and culturally diverse (bi and trans characters appear with minimal remark. That’s in part due to the film’s westernization, but it provides a strong backdrop for the alteration to Major’s past. As already stated, the Japan-America politics of the original are gone (the villain is a company, not a country) and immigration is a repeated reference, putting (us in) a world one step closer to the one promised in the original.”

A remake as a “translation” is not simply a copy but a continued discourse. At the end of this remake the Major is enthralled in the material conflict itself, rather than simply ascending to be a “higher life” form. It’s the struggle which binds her as a cyborg to us in a step towards the collective. As their two broken shells lie there next to one another, Kuze asks Motoko to come with him to disappear into cyberspace (“enlightenment”) as “there is no place for us here” in this flawed reality of corruption (Gnosticism), but she remarks, “I’m not ready to leave”, feeling she “belongs” and is now connected to whatever humanity is connected to that gives it purpose. This is the symbolic significance of reuniting with her mother at the end of the film. Kuze informs Motoko that he will always be there with her in her ghost as he fades away into cyberspace before his “ghost-less” body is shot in the head. The implication here can be taken a few different ways. It could be that he’s with her now “in spirit” as he’s aided her in the quest for selfhood or more literally that since he had made contact with her ghost, he remains with her permanently as a part of her “code” so to speak, the “virus” of freedom he spread into the system like the Situationists International spread theirs into our pop-culture psyche in the sixties.

“We cling to memories as if they define us, but what we do defines us. My ghost survived to remind the next of us that “humanity” is our virtue.” – Major (GITS 2017)

Having discovered her original identity, the Major opts not simply to reject the “slave name” (Mira Killian) that her makers gave her and go by Motoko as we are more than our memories. Major goes to the end with this new identity, a blank slate, embracing her humanity through her human mother while simultaneously fighting alongside her team who risked their lives to protect her and now serve as an adopted family. This is a victory for humanity over the soulless corporate shareholders. In the final sequence we see Major once again taking that leap into action. She can’t simply ascend to confront this enemy, instead she must fall. Only in confrontation can there be justice and only in justice revolution. It is important here that “justice” became an act of necessity rather than whim. It was a matter of survival and if she had not done so she would have been destroyed. In conflict she truly transcends the false ego which desperately searches for an imaginary self. As Slavoj Zizek puts it “You lose your ego not by some inner meditation but precisely you lose your ego by falling radically into the world.” Major embraces her freedom in making the humane” decision to fight for the “greater good” (the collective). Fittingly she places her hand over her face and literally becomes invisible. In the loss of her former identity she gains the power of “universality” (the universality of struggle) embodied in a kind of “post-humanism”. She redefines her purpose as one of “justice”, (“….what I was made for”), as it is our decisions/actions after all that define who we are in this world and the fate of our kind.