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ABSTRACT
Rupert Sanders’ American live-action adaptation of the Japanese franchise Kōkaku Kidōtai (The Ghost in the Shell) was highly anticipated by fans around the world. Beyond the pleasure of viewing another version of their favourite story, it was also celebrated as reflecting a wave of contemporary Japanese anime-inspired American live-action movies. Unsurprisingly, even before premiering, it received critical reviews due to some production decisions, mostly related to casting. These missed, in my opinion, the more significant discrepancies between the original franchise and the adaptation. I contend that whereas the Japanese franchise offers a philosophical existential exploration that is developed all the way to new frontiers of posthumanism, Sanders’ movie resorts to a eulogy of the physical human body and human existence as we know them, thereby duplicating the American Robocop formula. I interpret these discrepancies as revealing a return to an anthropo-centrism prevalent in American science fiction, and argue that they have implications beyond the case at hand.
Notes
1. The title of the franchise in Japanese is translated into English inconsistently as The Ghost in the Shell and Ghost in the Shell. Since it was inspired by Arthur Koestler’s book The Ghost in the Machine, all references in the article to the Japanese franchise, or to one of its products, use the title The Ghost in the Shell. The American live-action adaptation was titled Ghost in the Shell, and the article follows this usage.
2. In this interview, Sanders explained that he envisioned the story in his film but let scriptwriters write it. I therefore refer to Sanders in this article as the author of the film.
3. For convenience I refer to the official translation of the manga to English by Kodansha Comics (Shirō, Citation2009) rather than to the original publication in Japanese.
4. For a fuller and more complex discussion of Marvel’s economic rehabilitation, see Johnson (Citation2013).
5. Sanders was asked about it in an interview, and he said that none of the original Japanese creators – Shirō, Oshii, Kamiyama and Kawai Kenji, the composer of the original music score of Oshii’s anime – were involved in the film (Lambie, Citation2016).
6. See Brown (2008, p. 248, endnotes 7 and 8) on the etymology of the term “gynoid” and how Oshii gave life to the concept in his film. Gynoids kill themselves because they have violated the first of the three laws of robotics (Asimov, Citation1950) that stipulates that a robot must not harm humans.
7. In Oshii’s director notes on Innocence, he writes about the composition of vertical lines in the film, a tool he used for portraying the omnipresence of Kusanagi in the otherwise great solitude of Batō. He begins his explanation with something akin to an epithet: “That which is created by the overlapping of vertical lines; heaven and hell; a world in which birds live and a place where fish hide; a departed woman and a man left on earth; and then, a space of pretending” (2004b, p. 40; my translation).
8. Existentialism emerged in the 20th century from a realisation of the meaninglessness of the world, in which humans nevertheless strive to find universal meaning. The realisation of this meaninglessness that creates anguish and anxiety was referred to as the philosophy of the absurd (see Camus, Citation1942, interpreted in Copleston, Citation1948, p. 22).
9. In the next manga instalments, which are not discussed in this article, Kusanagi continues working with Section Nine from the net.
10. As we have seen, in the Japanese creations under discussion, Kusanagi has no interest in her history, not even as a means to ascertain her humanity. In this monologue by the American version of Kusanagi, she denies the importance of memories to defining subject-ivity. It is by restoring her memories that she regains confidence in her humanity and an idea about who she is at present. The only way in which her declaration that it is what we do rather than our memories that defines who we are is consistent with the plot is by understanding it as “applied existentialism”. Her declaration echoes Sartre’s (1946[1989], p. 8) existential humanism, in which he does not argue that a person’s history is not important but rather that a person’s past is not the testimony of an unchanging inscribed character over which they have no control; nor is it an excuse for a person’s lack of achievements or failures – a person was and is always responsible anew for their choices and actions.
11. The Declaration of the World Transhumanist Association (1998) begins by stating: “Humanity will be radically changed by technology in the future. We foresee the feasibility of redesigning the human condition, including such parameters as the inevitability of aging, limitations on human and artificial intellects, unchosen psychology, suffering and our confinement to the planet earth” (cited in Bostrom, Citation2005, p. 21).
12. The Cyborg Manifesto was an explicit influence on Oshii. In Innocence, Oshii even introduces a forensic scientist named Haraway who reiterates some of the scholar’s ideas.
13. Also in prewar Japan, a period of rapid technological development, the possibility of the merging of machines and humans drew different interpretations. Nakamura (2007) offers an analysis of the “mechanical uncanny” in Yumeno Kyūsaku’s (1935) Dogura magura (Trickery). She argues that machines became a dominant image in the era’s texts, and while some praised their beauty, others explored their darkness – namely, the threatening invasion of the human conscience and body by science and the mechanical.