Joseph Christopher Schaub
Kusanagi's Body: Gender and
Technology in Mecha-anime
This article comments on the increasing significance of the action heroine
in media entertainment by focusing on Mamoru Oshii's animated film,
Ghost in the Shell. The author argues that the body of the film's protagonist,
Major Motoko Kusanagi, serves as 'a battleground for conflicting
representations of power in an era of global capitalism...' and represents
'a desire to preserve the feminine and the human in the midst of an
increasingly mechanized modern world where patriarchal capitalism reigns
supreme.'
article in a recent issue of Time magazine entitled 'Go Ahead
AnMake
Her Day' states that American audiences are beginning
to see more and more women playing the part of the action
'heroine' in their media entertainment. Along with popular television
programmes such as Dark Angel and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the
article mentions hit cartoons such as The Power Puff Girls, video game
heroines such as Lara Croft of Tomb Raider fame, and of course, the
recent spate of female martial artists in such films as Charlie's Angels
and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Given the present climate for
screen representations, icons of masculinity such as Arnold
Schwarzenegger seem to be holdovers from a previous era where
power could only be represented by the pumped up bodies of strong
male heroes. It seems as though popular culture has finally begun to
account for the shift in power dynamics brought on by the information
age, where the signifiers of strength, efficiency, and speed need no
longer be gendered in stereotypically masculine ways. Finally,
mainstream American popular culture is catching on to what has
been a standard feature of less visited genres, such as Japanese
animation.
'Anime', the Japanese word for animation, has a long tradition of
representing power in the bodies of women, skinny teenage boys and
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girls, and even the bodies of cute, furry little animals. The sub-genre
that I would like to discuss in this paper is 'mecha-anime', or
mechanical animation, because mecha-anime explicitly take on
technology, power, and gender as subject matter. Mecha-anime have
also been criticized for their violent and sexual content, but a closer
look shows that the violence and sex in mecha-anime is far from
gratuitous. Instead, sex and violence become the tools for representing
conflicting visions of power distribution and deployment in rapidly
changing technological and economic conditions. After a brief
introduction to the mecha-anime subgenre, I will focus on Mamoru
Oshii's animated feature film, Ghost in the Shell, which gained wide
popular distribution in 1995.l Although dismissed by some critics for
its appeal to prurient interests and teen-age bloodlust, Ghost in the
Shell actually presents a protagonist whose body serves as a
battleground for conflicting representations of power in an era of
global capitalism. Far from thwarting the values of feminism and
humanism, the blurring of boundaries between masculinity and
femininity or machinery and human flesh in mecha-anime often
signifies a desire to preserve the feminine and the human in the midst
of an increasingly mechanized modern world where patriarchal
capitalism reigns supreme.
• Mecha-anime, and the techno trip from robots
to cyborgs
Mecha-anime are primarily science fiction narratives, often taking
place in dystopian futuristic cityscapes where advanced technology
figures prominently. They cover the full spectrum of screen narratives,
from broadcast television programmes to feature films, and even
what are known as OVAs (original video animations) which are
released directly for sale as VHS cassettes or DVDs. It is impossible to
speak of mecha-anime as an exclusively Japanese creation, because
the genre itself is a hybrid born amidst the intense competition and
cooperation which have characterized economic and technological
relations between the United States and Japan in the postwar era, and
reached a fever pitch in the 1980s. The literary equivalent of mechaanime is the genre known as cyberpunk. Both present a relationship
with technology which is fundamentally different from that found in
the science fiction narratives of the previous era. Where the SF
[] 1. Ghost in the Shell was released in Japan as Kokaku kidotai in 1995.
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narratives of the early 1960s depicted technology as separate from
human beings, either decrying it as our downfall or celebrating it as
our salvation, such judgements were no longer possible in the 1980s,
when new consumer technologies such as the personal computer and
designer drugs were introduced into the cultural landscape. Technology
in cyberpunk is, in the words of Bruce Sterling, spokesperson for the
cyberpunk movement, 'utterly intimate. Not outside us, but next to
us. Under our skin; often, inside our minds' (1986: xiii). Both cyberpunk
and mecha-anime are also provocative and problematic in terms of
their treatment of gender, and it is particularly this intersection of
gender and technology which makes the comparison of the two forms
interesting.
Cyberpunk writers like Sterling and John Shirley made overt claims
to cyberpunk's revolutionary potential. The values of the free spirited
hacker heroes in cyberpunk narratives are placed in opposition to the
trickle-down conformity of the Reagan era. According to Peter Fitting,
'The defenders of cyberpunk saw the correlation with punk values in
terms of both social resistance and punk's aesthetic rebellion against
the overarranged and commodified music of the 1970s' (1991: 296).
Critics of the cyberpunk movement such as Nicola Nixon fail to see
any real opposition in these value systems. For Nixon cyberpunk has
more in common with Reagan era Republicanism than its authors
care to imagine:
For all its stylish allusions to popular culture—to punk
rock, to designer drugs, to cult cinema, to street slang and
computer-hacker (counter) culture—cyberpunk fiction is,
in the end, not radical at all. Its slackness and apparent
subversiveness conceal a complicity with '80s conservatism
which is perhaps confirmed by the astonishing acceptance
of the genre by such publications as The Wall Street Journal,
The Washington Post, and The New York Times... (1992: 231)
The real problem for Nixon is cyberpunk's gender politics. Far from
revolutionary, Nixon sees cyberpunk as a reactionary movement
attempting to undermine the efforts of Utopian feminist SF writers of
the 1970s, such as Joanna Russ and Ursula K. LeGuin. Mecha-anime
are similarly conflicted with reactionary and revolutionary utopian/
dystopian visions, but that is part of their appeal. Neither cyberpunk
nor mecha-anime present an agenda for change. What they do show
is where the culture wars are being fought. One particularly active
battleground depicts the struggle for masculine and feminine
representations of technology. In mecha-anime the change in gender
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representation begins with the transformation of characters from
what are essentially robots to what are now cyborgs.
The precursors to mecha-anime narratives of the 1980s were the
robot narratives created in Japan and imported into the US in the
1960s. The first of these to be featured as a television series in Japan,
and then later in the US, was Osamu Tezuka's Tetsuwan Atomu, better
known in the US as Astroboy. Like many anime, Astroboy started out
as a manga, or comic book, created for an audience of postwar
Japanese baby boomers. Tetsuka was a great admirer and imitator of
Walt Disney, so much so that he is often called 'the Walt Disney of
Japan' [Levi, 1996; 19). He pioneered many of the animation techniques
which are still widely used in Japan today. In 1951, when Tetsuka
created the character for Tetsuwan Atomu, he was already aware of
the growing mechanization of Japanese society. 'He had created Atom
to be a 21st century reverse Pinocchio, a nearly perfect robot who
strove to become more human and emotive and to serve as an
interface between the two very different cultures of man and machine'
(Schodt, 1996: 245). In the US the programme was also very popular,
running 104 episodes. When asked the reason for the success of the
programme, Fred Ladd, the NBC supervisor of rescripting, responded,
'It succeeded for many of the same reasons Pinocchio succeeded
and Home Alone succeeded—there's an empowered youngster
outperforming the adult bad guys' (Schodt, 1996: 248). By endowing
Astroboy with human emotions Tetsuka was creating a character
ahead of its time, one that foreshadowed the coming of cyborgs in the
1980s. By contrast, some of the other programmes which the US
imported from Japan in the 1960s featured a young adolescent male
hero who was the exclusive commander of a piece of very advanced
technology. Typical examples of these types of programmes were
Gigantor (1965), about a boy who controlled a giant robot using a radio
wrist watch, and Speed Racer (1968), about a teenage driver of a hightech racing car. In this early period technological mastery became the
factor which gave these young male heroes their advantage. These
narratives of the 1960s place high technology in the hands of young
boys—something that still had a fantasy element to it in the era before
Bill Gates and Steve Jobs.
The view of technology represented in these proto-mecha narratives
is essentially an industrial era view. Technology is seen as 'gigantic'
or as the product of an assembly line. Although Astroboy himself
doesn't fit this description, many of his adversaries in the show do.
The animated shows of the 1960s express resistance by placing
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technology where it ordinarily wouldn't be—in the hands of young
boys. Although there are a few exceptions, predominantly the
representations in these programmes belong to an older view of
technology. They are all essentially robotic. In Electronic Eros, Claudia
Springer points out that 'robots belonged to the age of factories and
mills, when machines forcefully announced their powerful presence'
(1996: 101). The same degrees of ambivalence which characterize
contemporary views of technology were present during this earlier
era. According to Springer, during the:
Industrial Revolution, when people's lives were radically
transformed, widespread optimism that machines would
bring progress was accompanied by anxiety about
technology's potentially destructive powers. The fear evoked
by machines was exacerbated by their sheer magnitude;
they were often huge and loud, and they thrust, pumped,
and turned with an aggressive persistence. Their power
was palpable and visible (1996: 99).
The SF representations of this era were correspondingly large and
masculine. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is a classic early example of
technologically created life. Films like "The Terminator (James Cameron,
1984) perpetuate and even exaggerate the anachronistic industrial-age
metaphor of externally forceful masculine machinery' (Springer, 1996:
111). This view of technology has not disappeared from the cultural
landscape, but it has been challenged by an alternate view.
By the 1980s, animated programmes had left the industrial age
where giant machines served as representations of enormous power.
Now power is digital and small; a laptop computer with 500 megahertz
of processing power can crunch numbers faster than an entire room
full of ENIAC tubes. Where the heroes that appealed to the generation
of TV watchers in the '60s were usually solo boys (even if they were
robots like Astroboy) in control of powerful technology, gradually the
gendered perception of power begins to change as technology becomes
smaller and closer to human scale. We see the introduction of the
cyborg into popular culture, and as technology and the organic human
body become interwoven, the bodies controlling the technology are
less likely to be male.
The 1980s were the decade when anime took off in the US. New
imported Japanese programmes like Star Blazers (1981), Voltron (1981),
and Robotech (1982) were attracting a new generation of fans who
were accustomed to Japanese products such as VCRs, TV sets,
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Walkmans, and of course, fuel-efficient economy cars. Differences in
these programmes reflect changes in the popular perception of
technology. The robots of the previous era are gradually replaced by
cyborgs, and the bodies that are becoming cybernetic are more and
more often female.
Mobile Suit Gundam (1979) and Robotech build upon the giant robot
theme of 1960s programmes like Gigantor by immersing the pilot
inside the robot. While still looking like giant robots, the tech-weapons
in these programmes are more like armored suits. In more contemporary
programmes like Genocyber (1993( and Neon Genesis Evangelion (1995),
female characters are as likely to pilot these giant armored suits as
men or boys. With the change in the perception of power from giant
machines to microcomputers comes a change in the way that
technology is gendered. It no longer is seen as an exclusively masculine
realm. There is also a new mutability associated with technology. It
allows for merging between people and machines as well as the
merging of masculine and feminine roles.
By the 1980s, in both Japan and the US, technology was no longer
visualized as something external to its human controllers. As Bruce
Sterling has pointed out in the Preface to Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk
Anthology, 'Technology itself has changed. Not for us the giant steam
snorting wonders of the past: the Hoover Dam, the Empire State
Building, the nuclear power plant. Eighties tech sticks to the skin,
responds to the touch: the personal computer, the Sony Walkman, the
portable telephone, the soft contact lens' [1986: xiii). As previously
stated, Sterling's promotion of cyberpunk as a revolutionary movement
is part of the optimism that accompanies any major shift in technology.
Still, the claim that cyberpunk—and by extension any movement that
places technology within the human grasp—is somehow liberatory is
difficult to substantiate. What is easier to see is that the narratives
serve as a battleground for conflicting representations. As cultural
barometers these battles are well worth observing.
Mecha-anime combine science fiction and animation, and are
therefore ideally suited for narratives which depict escape from
oppressive gender roles as they reimagine the human body merging
with-technology. They also provide Utopian ways of visualizing a
harmonious global society in the midst of dissolving national barriers.
In the 1980s, the animated series Robotech featured a crew that was
divided equally between males and females, while also being composed
of different ethnicities and nationalities. Premised on the notion that
peace can be established on Earth once a common extra-terrestrial
enemy appears, Robotech tells the story of the crew of an interstellar
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battle cruiser who fight a race of technologically advanced aliens
known as the Zentraedi.
It should be noted, however, that the mecha-anime narratives
focusing on this techno-organic merger are not the exclusive site of
gender transformation in Japanese animation. In Rumiko Takahashi's
animated series, Ranma 1/2 (1990), Ranma (the main character)
completely collapses the boundary between masculinity and femininity.
Approximately half of his appearances in these episodes are as a girl
(Ranko) and the other half are as a boy [Ranma). The series draws
heavily on Hong Kong martial arts films, but has little connection
with the mecha-anime subgenre that primarily treats the merger of
technology and organic life. The point of Ranma's transformations
seems to be to show the constructedness of gender and the limitations
placed on individuals in a society which strictly enforces distinct
masculine and feminine roles. It also emphasizes that there is a
market for narratives depicting gender in flux beyond the science
fiction oriented mecha-anime subgenre.
One of the most interesting series of the late 1980s which featured
four female principal characters and was extremely popular is the
OVA, Bubblegum Crisis (1987). Bubblegum Crisis was released in eight
40-50 minute episodes spanning from 1987 to 1991, and then followed
by three sequel episodes called Bubblegum Crash. The narrative is set
in a MegaTokyo of the future in the year 2032, seven years after 'The
Second Great Kanto Earthquake'. It is typical of many contemporary
mecha-anime narratives in that it takes place in a setting dominated
by corrupt multinational corporations. In Bubblegum Crisis the Genom
corporation surreptitiously rules over the political and economic affairs
of the entire Western World. Their enemies are the Knight Sabers, the
four teenage girls whose bio-mechanical armored suits make them
invincible, as well as somewhat gender indeterminate.
Bubblegum Crisis is just one of many mecha-anime OVAs that
features a female lead character (or characters). Others include
Appleseed and Dominion Tank Police, both derived from manga created
by Masamune Shirow, who created the manga upon which Ghost in
the Shell is based. Genocyber, another popular mecha-anime, features
a prepubescent girl cyborg named Laura, who must destroy a superweapon invented by the United States navy. Annalee Newitz has
suggested that the mecha-anime genre is about generating new beings
from the combination of technology and humanity. 'Female bodies
and sexuality are therefore "best suited" to mecha—and male bodies
and sexuality are disfigured by it—precisely because it is related to
reproduction and birth.' (1995: 9) Newitz' astute observation
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undoubtedly has merit, but another reason for the switch to female
lead characters in '80s era mecha-anime may be to account for new
gendered perceptions of power. We need to consider the possibility
that the female body makes a better vehicle for representing resistance
to patriarchal power than the male body, even if the male body is
adolescent.
Like most science fiction based genres, mecha-anime reflects a
great deal of ambivalence concerning technology—a tendency to both
celebrate and decry its potential. This ambivalence has been embodied
in the cyborg, the character that is part organic human and part
machine, and figures prominently in both cyberpunk and anime.
Since the Socialist Review first published Donna Haraway's 'Cyborg
Manifesto' in 1985, the term has also grown in popularity with
academics as a useful constellation of ideas for describing the radically
decentred and fragmented subjectivity that postmodernism ushers
into human consciousness. The term has been adopted by various
disciplines, including film studies, in order to investigate the many
representations of man/machine combinations in cinema and popular
culture. Haraway established the paradigm for future discussions of
the cyborg by making her essay, 'an argument for pleasure in the
confusion of boundaries and for responsibility in their construction.'
(1991: 150) Theorists of the cyborg following Haraway can either
support or refute the optimistic claim of her manifesto, but they
certainly cannot ignore it. Along with the cyborg's status as a hybrid
of cybernetic technology and organic matter, there is also a hybrid
nature to the cyborg's gender. Although they may be amply endowed
with sex characteristics, cyborgs do not have stable gender
identifications. According to Haraway, The cyborg is a creature in a
post-gender world.' (1991: 150) To the extent that gender identity and
the fixed roles that gender creates for people are oppressive, then the
cyborg's refusal to fit into a fixed category for gender is liberatory.
Other feminist theorists such as Anne Balsamo have pointed out
that 'cyborg identity is predicated on transgressed boundaries.' (1996:
32) It is this ability to transgress gender boundaries, as well as the
boundaries defining the organic and technological origins of the human
body, which give cyborg characters their potential for critiquing the
commodification of the body in the era of global capitalism.
Transgression provides the cyborg with a kind of agency which is
never present in the robot character. It is, of course, human agency,
which has always been problematic in machines. HAL 9000 of Stanley
Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) serves as a good example of
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this. HAL's sole concern is survival, which places him at odds with
his crew, but the cyborg is never completely at odds with humans
because it is part human.
However, theorists have also pointed out that the feminine
appropriation of the cyborg is not necessarily progressive. Again, a
comparison with the cyberpunk movement of the 1980s reveals an
almost reactionary tendency in the male writers of these narratives.
In 'Cyberpunk: Preparing the Ground for Revolution or Keeping the
Boys Satisfied?' Nicola Nixon demonstrates that many of the
'progressive' turns taken by the predominantly male cyberpunk writers
of the 1980s were actually appropriated from female science fiction
writers of the 1970s, in particular, the idea of the strong,
technologically-enhanced female, a staple of the cyberpunk genre
beginning with William Gibson's best selling novel Neuromancer (1984).
Ghost in the Shell offers a vision of the future that owes much to the
influence of William Gibson's cyberpunk fiction, particularly
Neuromancer. Both feature a beautiful but deadly female cyborg and
a global corporate technocracy that is only vulnerable to highly
sophisticated computer hackers. In Neuromancer and other novels,
such as Mona Lisa Overdrive (1988), Gibson provides a dense network
of Japanese corporations, with names like Ono Sendai and Fuji Electric
to stand in as representatives of patriarchal capitalism.
Others have pointed out that while feminist theorists like Donna
Haraway present a Utopian view of the union of technology and
humanity, cyberpunk fiction presents its dystopian alter ego. According
to Peter Fitting, the cyberpunk fiction of William Gibson offers:
a violent, masculinist future, one in which feelings and
emotions seem to have disappeared along with what I have
been calling the "human." Donna Haraway offers us a
more hopeful way of reading the cyborg as the posthuman
figure of our uncertain future, an analysis that renews the
possibility of political action even as it acknowledges the
cyborg's origins in the worst features of contemporary
capitalism (1991: 308).
If we regard both the Utopian and dystopian futures as equally
possible, it is clear that what cyberpunk and mecha-anime narratives
achieve is a presentation of both possibilities in a battle for
preeminence. They provide visual representations of the struggle to
find humanistic values in a landscape dominated by high-tech corporate
power and mechanized military might.
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In spite of the trend to include more female main characters in the
mecha-anime narratives of the 1980s, the biggest release of that
decade, Katsuhiro Otomo's Akira, an international hit in 1988, featured
two adolescent males as its protagonists. Akira takes place in a
dystopian future where high-tech machinery and weapons overshadow
human endeavours. The film opens with an image of present-day
nuclear holocaust in Tokyo, and then quickly flashes forward to NeoTokyo in 2019. Susan Napier, in her analysis of the film, describes
Neo-Tokyo as 'a place of overwhelming aesthetic and social alienation,
a decaying cityscape that is physically fragmenting, at the same time
as its political centre is only barely held together by corrupt politicians
and enigmatic military figures' (1996: 245). Built around the bombed
out crater of old Tokyo, Neo-Tokyo is home to cults, militant groups,
and motorcycle gangs such as the one to which the two main characters
belong. Thanks to a scientific experiment conducted by a group of
quasi-military researchers one of the boys, Tetsuo, begins to develop
technologically enhanced telepathic powers, which he ultimately uses
for purely destructive ends. Telepathy itself is often associated with
female characters in Japanese popular culture, particularly in science
fiction fantasies. Many of the Godzilla movies feature a heroine who
can communicate telepathically with the monster, and Mothra (Inoshiro
Honda, 1962) featured two miniature twin girls called the 'Cosmos'
who could summon Mothra through song and control her telepathically.
With that in mind, Tetsuo's telepathic powers could easily be seen as
an exploration of his own feminine side. The subsequent loss of
control he experiences is symbolic of his loss of male ego boundaries,
By the end of the film Tetsuo has evolved into a monstrous semiorganic blob which bears no resemblance to his original adolescent
male body. But the film is far from being a lament for this loss. It is
closer to being a celebration of new possibilities. Napier states:
This sense of exhilaration has to do with the ambivalent
attitude toward the monstrous and towards power in general
embedded in Akira's subtext. The film is both a subversion
of traditional power and authority and a celebration of a
new kind of power, one that is linked to the issue of
identity in the form of Tetsuo's astonishing metamorphoses
... Tetsuo's mutations epitomize the "subject [which] has
disintegrated into a flux of euphoric intensities, fragmented
and disconnected" (1996: 248).
From Astroboy all the way up to Akira, sharp distinctions can be
made between patriarchal power and the varying shades of masculinity
88
which mecha-anime offer up. Patriarchal power tends to be represented
by large robots with heavy mechanical or pumped up bodies, whereas
the resistance to it takes the form of youthful boys and girls. In the
cyborg, mecha-anime found a hybrid which could blur the distinctions
between masculinity and femininity even further. I will now turn my
discussion towards a film which shows the battle over representations
of technology, gender, and power as part of its narrative, and discuss
what can be gleaned from the study of mecha-anime.
• Ghost in the Shell and the critique of
global capitalism
Ghost in the Shell (1995), like Akira, is one of the very few mechaanime to gain international theatrical release. Like most anime it is
based on an original manga, compiled as a graphic novel, by Masamune
Shiro. Set in Tokyo in the year 2029, Ghost in the Shell paints a world
which is as dystopic as Akira's, but in a far more controlled and
systematized way. My discussion of this film is rooted in the conflict
of visions which characterizes many complex narratives in the era of
global capitalism. For Ghost in the Shell, the premise for a conflict of
visions begins with the two major artistic talents behind the
construction of the narrative. The director, Mamoru Oshii, is as
accomplished at presenting fully realized futuristic worlds in the
medium of animation as Masamune Shirow is in the medium of
manga.2 Usually their respective visions and treatment of humanity's
place in an advanced corporate capitalist setting are complementary,
but there are occasional discrepancies which, like the tension between
alternative views of the interaction of gender and technology, succeed
in making the narrative more compelling.
Ghost in the Shell is also a Japanese-British coproduction with
Kodansha, Bandai, and Manga Entertainment supplying the near $10
million in funding for its release. According to Roger Ebert, ' "Ghost
in the Shell" was intended as a breakthrough film, aimed at theatrical
release instead of a life on tape, disc and campus film societies'
(1996). As a breakthrough film, Ghost in the Shell was intended to
capitalize on the success of Akira and the growing popularity of anime
in markets outside of Japan, particularly the US. The complex
D 2. Masamune Shirow's previous manga, Appleseed and Dominion have already been
mentioned. Along with Ghost in the Shell Mamoru Oshii has directed feature film
versions of Patlabor (1990), Patlabor 2 (1993), and written the screenplay for the
animated feature Jinroh (1998).
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multinational economics which factor into the film's production are
also apparent in its narrative line.
Ghost in the Shell investigates the possibilities for a merger between
the bodied cyborg and the disembodied collection of data. The hacker
antagonist in Ghost in the Shell is known as the Puppet Master, a
'ghost', an identity in search of a 'shell', a cyborg body. The heroine
of the film, Major Motoko Kusanagi, and her partner, Bateau, are
agents assigned to the case of catching the Puppet Master, who has
been hacking into the minds of top level secretaries and attaches.
Their assumption is that the hacker is a master criminal who
manipulates the stock market, commits high-tech terrorist acts, and
indulges in illegal data gathering for personal reasons. But the Puppet
Master has never been a person. It was a computer program created
in the United States which becomes self aware and now declares itself
'a sentient life form, demanding political asylum.'
The plot of Ghost in the Shell is remarkably complex, especially for
American audiences which still tend to regard animation as a children's
medium. It is derived from specific volumes of Shirow's manga, yet
it is also transformed. Invariably, movies made from manga need to
condense storyline into very brief visual sequences. For Ghost in the
Shell Oshii takes certain themes which are explicit in Shirow's dialogue,
such as the exploitation of workers by omnipotent corporations, and
suggests them visually. Shirow wastes no time in doing this for his 82
minute narrative. The first three sequences, one of which is the very
dense and ingeniously constructed credit sequence, provide the
foundation for a critique of global capitalism.
An epigram which precedes the film reads, 'In the near futurecorporate networks reach out to the stars, electrons and light flow
throughout the universe. The advance of computerization, however,
has not yet wiped out nations and ethnic groups.' Along with giving
us some information about the setting, this statement reveals the near
limitless range of capitalist corporations in this narrative. Corporate
control now extends outward beyond the global to the stars. But as
the input jacks in the necks of the film's characters suggest, it also
extends inward to the human body. When we first see Major Kusanagi
she is standing on a rooftop, pulling these wires from the back of her
neck, preparing for an assassination of a high level bureaucrat. As
part of her preparation she removes all of her clothing so that the
'thermoptic camoflage' she wears will make her invisible. It is, no
doubt, this initial sequence, showing Kusanagi bare-breasted and big
chested (no genitals are visible) which prompts many critics to see the
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film as part of the sexploitation subgenre of anime, which typically
shows 'Barbie' doll-like females performing a variety of sex acts with
their animated male counterparts. However, Oshii seems to be using
Kusanagi's over-developed body for other purposes.
This point is driven home during the opening credit sequence
during which we see Kusanagi's mechanical construction. By the
opening credits of the film we learn that Kusanagi is a cyborg. With
the exception of a titanium shell containing her brain and spinal cord,
Kusanagi's body is completely mechanical; only her mind contains
the ghost of her former organic self. Where cyborgs blur the boundaries
between technology and humanity they show similar ambivalence
towards the boundaries which separate masculinity and femininity.
Here we see, interspersed with the names of the production crew and
staff, scenes from the construction of Kusanagi's body. The sequence
echoes with self-reflexivity, because it not only shows the process of
Kusanagi's construction within the diegetic world of the film, it also
gives us the names of the real world producer, director, writers and
artists responsible for her construction as an animated character on a
movie screen. At first we see the skinless, electronically laced,
mechanically reinforced muscles and skeleton into which a small
piece of the original, organic Kusanagi's brain has been placed. Then,
through varying stages which gradually refine the mechanical cyborg
interior by applying coatings of latex-like skin, we arrive at a version
of Kusanagi which cannot be distinguished from an organic human.
The juxtaposition of Kusanagi standing naked on the rooftop with
the credit sequence showing her construction creates a tension which
permeates the rest of the film. The first scene gives us what appears
to be the natural body of a fetishized nude female, but the very next
sequence ruptures that fetishized surface by showing us the hard
mechanical interior of that body. By juxtaposing the fetishized body
with the image of that body's construction, Oshii establishes the
possibility for a critique of global capitalism. Unlike robots, which are
completely mechanical, cyborgs are a hybrid of humanity and
technology which, as has already been established, also disrupt the
binary separation of masculinity and femininity. Oshii works with
these ideas, as well as the notion of fetishism, to make his critique.
The point is to emphasize technological augmentation, whether it
conies in the form of steroid-induced pectorals, balloon-like breast
implants, or circuits and wires attached to a cyborg's torso. While she
is obviously meant to be female, Kusanagi is presented in a way
which also highlights her androgyny. Kusanagi appears in the nude
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several times throughout the film. From the very first scene where
she stands on a rooftop, and strips in order to activate the cloaking
device that makes her invisible, we see Kusanagi's ample breasts and
narrow waist. This initial depiction of Kusanagi prompted reviewer
Kirn Newman to speculate on why Kusanagi had 'been constructed to
simulate a punkette babe' (1996: 39). Newman's conclusion is consistent
with the usual critiques leveled against mecha-anime: 'further excuses
for animated breast-jiggle'.
Perhaps inadvertently, Newman is relying on a somewhat dated
and restrictive view of the female body, as well as the notion of the
fetish. The titillation model for critiquing representations of the female
body is largely derived from Laura Mulvey's 1975 essay, 'Visual
Pleasure and Narrative Cinema'. In this essay Mulvey defines woman
as image, and man as bearer of the look, because of the way the
passive female on screen serves as the object of an active 'male gaze'.
Mulvey's later work, which explores the Marxist view of the fetish, is
more helpful when discussing representations of the body in mechaanime narratives. In this view, the body of the cyborg can be explained
not as an integral component of the Freudian, view of fetishism, which
defines it as an idealized phallic substitute for the female's missing
penis. Instead, Mulvey's later work takes a Marxist turn, supplementing
the Freudian concept with a discussion of the fetishism of commodities.
According to Marx, the value of a commodity is nothing more than
the amount of abstract human labour congealed in it during the
process of production. Labour is an expression of a social relation
among human beings, but this social relation is never apparent in the
commodity itself. Consumers of commodities disavow the human
labour that went into its production, preferring to believe that the
commodity has innate value. This is what is meant by the fetishism
of commodities, where relations between human beings take form as
the relations between the products of their labour.
Closely tied to the concept of commodity fetishism, is the concept
of reification. Reification is what happens when capitalism penetrates
every aspect of the social sphere. 'Social forms, human relations,
cultural events, even religious systems are systematically broken up
in order to be reconstructed more efficiently' (Jameson, 1981: 63). In
other words the social sphere becomes commodified. In the epigram
we observed that Ghost in the Shell takes place in an era beyond global
capitalism. It is an era where the process of reification is almost
complete. In the setting of Ghost in the Shell capitalism has penetrated
every aspect of the social sphere.
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Capitalism depends on reification to continue functioning smoothly,
and more importantly, profitably. The industrial era of capitalism
ushered in the mechanization of the work place in order to increase
productivity. With the mechanization of the workplace, the life of the
worker also became mechanical, doomed to perform rote tasks in
precise time intervals. Ghost in the Shell shows us an era of such
advanced capitalist reification that the worker's body itself has become
a mechanical object. Kusanagi has been created by a company called
Megatech, specifically so that she can perform assassinations and
other covert operations for a government agency called the Bureau of
Internal Affairs. At one point she argues with her partner Bateau
about the amount of control the Bureau has over their lives. When
Bateau tells her that she is free to leave if she wants, Kusanagi says,
'If I leave the Bureau I have to give back my body and all the
memories it holds.' Reification has completely eliminated her organic
body and replaced it with a more dependable and manageable
mechanical one. Yet her ghost expresses a humanistic desire for
liberation.
Reification is nearly complete in Ghost in the Shell, but reification
must function in tandem with fetishism. Capitalist ideology depends
upon the worker's perception that the conditions of capitalism mirror
the conditions of the natural world. Notions like the nuclear family,
the patriarchal breadwinner, and the nurturing female have each
been reified under capitalism so as to appear natural and historically
transcendent. To transcend history in this way, the actual processes
of reification must be erased, rendered invisible. This is the work of
fetishism. In the opening sequence of Ghost in the Shell we are shown
Kusanagi's fetishized body. All the marks of production have been
rendered invisible so that she appears to be a natural female. Even
her breasts and waistline, though perhaps exaggerated, function to
further the illusion that she was born rather than made. But in the
credit sequence this fetishism is immediately destroyed. We are
shown the process of Kusanagi's construction. Her body is revealed as
a product of human labour. Her status as a commodity is made overt
just as it is at the end of the film when machinery literally bursts
through her surface. Laura Mulvey has written that 'a commodity's
market success depends on the erasure of the marks of production,
any trace of indexicality, the grime of the factory, the mass moulding
of the machine, and most of all, the exploitation of the worker' (1996:
4). Initially, in the rooftop scene Kusanagi appears to be a perfectly
fetishized commodity with no marks of production, but the very next
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sequence shows the process of her construction, thus rupturing the
commodity fetishism of the previous scene.
Kusanagi, then, obviously does not function as an object of male
visual pleasure, since the marks of her production are too obviously
foregrounded. Instead, she succeeds in revealing the process of
capitalist reification. It is useful to compare Oshii's sequence, which
is interspersed with the opening production credits of the film, to
Shirow's original manga depiction of the same sequence in Volume 5
of his graphic novel, 'Megatech Machine 2: The Making of a Cyborg.'
Shirow's rendition shows Kusanagi witnessing the creation of a cyborg
similar to herself while she receives information about the process
from another cyborg. The frames are full of detailed drawings and
notes which are both informative and imaginative, but not necessarily
critical. The effect is quite different in the film. Oshii draws attention
to Kusanagi's creation in the diegetic world of the film narrative,
while also giving the extra-diegetic details of the film's creation. The
effect, like so many aspects of the film, is contradictory. On the one
hand, there is an almost Brechtian 'alienation effect' distancing the
viewer from the narrative, while on the other hand, the viewer is
being seamlessly sutured back into the narrative. The viewer is being
asked to keep a critical distance and to suspend disbelief
simultaneously.
For his part, Shirow provides a very practical explanation for
Kusanagi's body in the author's notes which accompany his manga.
He writes:
Major Kusanagi is deliberately designed to look like a
mass-production model so she won't be too conspicuous.
In reality, her electrical and mechanical system is made of
ultra-sophisticated materials unobtainable on the civilian
market. If she appeared too expensive, she might be
suddenly waylaid on a dark street some night, hacked up,
and hauled off to be sold. (1995: 103)
His mention of Kusanagi's body as 'a mass-production model' no
doubt provides the seeds for Oshii's foregrounding of her commodity
status in the film, but the critique is certainly amped up a notch by
Oshii.
Shirow's opinions with regard to global capitalism are difficult to
ascertain from his manga. On the one hand, he has a connoisseur's
love for weaponry, surveillance systems, and all manner of tools used
for systematic repression. On the other hand, his characters frequently
voice criticisms of the corporate-government conglomerates that control
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them. Interestingly, this is a point of departure between Oshii, and
Shirow.3 Shirow makes constant reference to the exploitation of
factory workers in his manga, and in particular, to the exploitation of
foreign factory workers, as when he has a factory boss shout, 'If you
don't want to work ... I won't apply for your citizenship papers for
you!' (1995: 25) In another sequence a white collar worker who is
being tortured by his employer to reveal industrial secrets warns, I'll
report you to the labor union!' His employer replies, ' "Labor union?"
With our new, unmanned factory, we won't need one of those for the
next three hundred years.' (1995: 125( Nor are the critical statements
in Shirow's manga restricted to the working class. Even agents, who
are presumably more invested in the system, find reason to criticize
it. In one of the many arguments Kusanagi has with her boss, she
retorts, 'Emphasizing a lifestyle based on consumption is the ultimate
violence against poor countries.' (1995: 307) In the film version, Oshii
concentrates the many overt critiques of global capitalism in Shirow's
manga into the fetishized bodies of the cyborg characters.
Along with foregrounding the processes of production, Oshii suggests
critique with gender ambiguity. In Ghost in the Shell the characters
who appear the most extreme in terms of male traits and female traits
are also the most androgynous. In Kusanagi's case, her heightened
femininity at the beginning of the film adds emphasis to the masculine
transformation she makes at the end of the film. The final time that
Kusanagi removes her clothes, this time to battle a tank, her bulging
muscles make her look more like a male action hero such as Arnold
Schwarzenneger than a female sex symbol such as Pamela Anderson
Lee.
The other main character, Bateau, makes another interesting case
in point. He is a head taller than the other characters in the film and
has shoulders twice as wide. Yet, even when he comes to Kusanagi's
aid, he does so like the faithful female secretaries in Mickey Spillane's
detective stories which inspired film noir movies like Kiss Me Deadly
(1955). In this classic Robert Aldrich-directed version of Spillane's
novel, Maxine Cooper played Velda, Mike Hammer's secretary, as a
strong, resourceful partner. She is obviously in love with Hammer
(Ralph Meeker), but he is indifferent toward her. Bateau is the mirror
image of Velda. He follows Kusanagi's initiative, and seems vaguely
enamoured of her. Yet, like Velda, the object of his desire, Major
D 3. For all references to Shirow's version of Ghost in the Shell, the source I follow is
the graphic novel. Masamune Shirow, Ghost in the Shell, trans. Frederik Schodt and
Toren Smith, (Milwaukie, OR: Dark Horse Comics, 1995).
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Kusanagi, shows no sexual interest in him. There is certainly ample
material for a study of the connections between mecha-anime,
cyberpunk, film noir, and detective fiction, although that is beyond
the scope of this paper. It is worth mentioning, however, along with
the behavioural resemblance between Bateau and Velda, Kusanagi, as
she is drawn by Shirow, shows a propensity for explosive violence
and often inexplicable sadism which closely mirrors Spillane's Mike
Hammer. The big difference between the two narratives is that
gender roles are reversed.
Project 2501, the only other major character in Ghost in the Shell, is
an artificial life form, 'born in the sea of information on the net'.
Project 2501 is also known as the 'Puppet Master' because of its
ability to hack into and take over the 'shells' of important government
officials. The Puppet Master is a collection of disembodied data. It is
both ironic and fitting that it should become an 'organic' life form
which originated on the net. In Ghost in the Shell the boundary
between organic life and technological AI (artificial intelligence) no
longer applies. Personality becomes data, and data takes on personality.
Throughout the movie, the Puppet Master appears in the nude torso
of a blonde Barbie-like cyborg, yet its voice is deeply masculine. Both
its sex and its gender are impossible to determine because
differentiating them no longer makes sense in the advanced capitalist
world where this narrative is set. Donna Haraway's description of
cyborg subjectivity is the new paradigm here; Ghost in the Shell is set
in 'a post-gender world'.
Aside from the opening credit sequence, there is one other scene in
which Kusanagi's fetishized commodity status is destroyed by revealing
that she is a constructed cyborg. Near the end of the film Kusanagi is
trying to get inside an armoured vehicle that protects a cyber criminal.
Again, she has stripped and donned the cloaking device as she
approaches the vehicle, and leaps on top of it. As Kusanagi pulls at a
sealed entrance hatch, she no longer looks like the soft and voluptuous
female who appears on the rooftop at the beginning of the film.
Instead, her body takes on the traits of the fetishized male body: hard
with phallic rippling muscles. This time the fetishism is destroyed not
by juxtaposing with a scene showing the machinery underneath the
fetishized surface, but by showing that machinery literally bursting
through the surface. Kusanagi pulls herself apart.
Where the opening credit sequence destroys fetishism by revealing
Kusanagi's construction, this scene towards the end does it by showing
her destruction. The Schwarzenegger-like transformation of Kusanagi's
body just prior to that destruction makes it difficult to regard her
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body as conventionally male or conventionally female. Her cyborg
status blurs the boundary between masculinity and femininity as
much as that between technological and organic matter. Kusanagi's
rapid transformation from fetishized female body to fetishized male
body works against the naturalizing effect that fetishism strives to
create. While such a blurring of the boundaries does not eliminate the
possibility for visual pleasure, it certainly complicates it, suggesting
the male gaze which fixes on Kusanagi's body as an object of pleasure
is at least partially homoerotic.
The gender indeterminacy of Ghost in the Shell is most pronounced
near the end of the film. After her battle with the tank which has
kidnapped the Puppet Master, Kusanagi's body is wrecked and further
defeminized through scarring and loss of limbs. She decides to dive
(i.e. conduct a psycho-electronic analysis) into the Puppet Master's
shell. Since both Kusanagi's body and the Puppet Master's Barbie
body are wrecked, the faithful Bateau must set up the dive. Once it
occurs, the voices of the characters switch and Kusanagi's feminine
voice emanates from the Barbie body while Kusanagi's shell produces
the Puppet Master's masculine voice. During the dive, the Puppet
Master tells Kusanagi's ghost that he has engineered the pursuit and
capture which led her to him so that they might meet. As an artificial
life form, the Puppet Master can copy itself, but it cannot reproduce
combinations which allow for diversity and originality. The Puppet
Master tells Kusanagi that it wants to merge with her so that she can
'bear [their] varied offspring into the Net', and the Puppet Master can
die. Desire for these organic functions is mirrored in the Puppet
Master's early pursuit of Kusanagi's feminine body. Gradually
Kusanagi's body becomes more masculine until the Puppet Master
takes it over and she takes over the Barbie body that the Puppet
Master previously occupied. They merge just before a rival government
agency destroys both of their bodies. Fortunately for Kusanagi, Bateau
protects her head, the one part of her that contains her organic brain,
and hides her away until he finds a new cyborg body for her. She then
walks out of Bateau's apartment saying, 'Where does the newborn go
from here? The Net is vast and infinite.'
By portraying Kusanagi as the agent of her own destruction, Oshii
also suggests that she is rebelling against the Bureau of Internal
Affairs which owns her body. Unlike Bateau, who, as previously
stated, believes he is free, Kusanagi acknowledges her reified state.
She cannot exist without her mechanical body, but to keep her body
she must continue working for the Bureau. Pulling herself apart,
then, can be read as an act of revolt against the reifying effects of
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Asian Journal of Communication, Volume Eleven Number Two 2001
capitalism which have replaced her organic body with a body that the
Bureau can control more effectively. By destroying her body Kusanagi
denies the Bureau its ability to control her. Ghost in the Shell, then,
critiques capitalist ideology both by destroying the fetishizing effect
of Kusanagi's feminized mechanical body and by depicting her as the
agent of her body's destruction after acknowledging its reified state.
What is fetishized in the body of Kusanagi and the Barbie body of the
Puppet Master is the organic impulse to procreate before dying. Like
the exaggerated sex characteristics that endow their bodies, these
organic impulses are compensatory gestures, designed to disavow the
near total annihilation of nature in a world where 'corporate networks
reach out to the stars'.
Again, there are some interesting differences between the ending
of the manga and the movie. Shirow does not have Kusanagi destroy
herself in the manga, but he does have Bateau remove her brain from
her body just before it is assassinated by a government agency. The
replacement body Bateau provides for her is male (though an extremely
androgynous male), which further emphasizes the irrelevance of
gender in this futuristic setting. In the movie.Bateau provides Kusanagi
with a child's body (which appears to be female). Where Shirow
suggests that the battle over how to represent power is still being
waged in Kusanagi's body, Oshii's ending is more optimistic, suggesting,
like the Starchild in 2001, a rebirth.
• Conclusion
Popular culture narratives are fraught with differing views on the
subject matter they represent. The subject matter of mecha-anime,
like cyberpunk, is technology and the gendered bodies that control it.
Female bodies empowered by technology in these narratives are not
necessarily serving a feminist agenda. There is certainly ample evidence
to the contrary. The sexy bodies of cyborg heroines which have been
'revamped' in SF narratives since the 1980s have been exploited to
market a variety of popular culture texts, many of them blatantly
misogynistic.
Certainly there are subgenres of anime which are primarily designed
to attract and titillate an audience of teenage male viewers, and these
subgenres have provoked a considerable amount of criticism and
charges of misogyny towards anime in general. Mamoru Oshii
appropriates some of the conventions of the titillation subgenres in
his film version of Ghost in the Shell, but its complex narrative and sophisticated presentation make it difficult to view his heroine in any
98
reductionist terms. Ghost in the Shell has none of the usual markers
which would indicate that Kusanagi's body is an object of male visual
pleasure. There is almost no erotic interaction between any of the
characters. And in many cases, as when Kusanagi's sidekick Bateau
accompanies her on a scuba dive, the male character actually turns
away, diverting the male gaze from the object of visual pleasure, as
Kusanagi removes her wet suit. While it is true that Kusanagi's
oversized breasts certainly aren't necessary for the job she performs
in the narrative, this feminizing of her body serves an alternate
purpose.
Anticipating the trend in contemporary mainstream American
popular culture, Oshii's film shows that real power looks even more
powerful when cast in the body of the most delicate looking woman.
Ang Lee's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon won an Oscar for his live
action depiction of this message. One of the things that makes Crouching
Tiger, Hidden Dragon's heroines (Michelle Yeoh and Zhang Ziyi) so
compelling to watch is that their strength and power are so
disproportionate to their diminutive size. Ghost in the Shell's Kusanagi
is far more androgynous looking than the women in Crouching Tiger,
Hidden Dragon, but that is part of the conventions of mecha-anime,
where power is rooted in gender ambiguity. Perhaps the cyborgs of
mecha-anime narratives like Ghost in the Shell have served their
purpose in popular culture, acting as a bridge to convey power across
gender lines, and now we welcome the idea of petite and powerful
feminine bodies. In our post WTO world, where capitalist corporations
appear more powerful than national governments, this idea of
dimunitive size containing overwhelming strength will, no doubt,
become more and more appealing in a growing number of popular
culture texts.
• References
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