by Josef Steiff
To highlight the leaky distinction between human and machine, Oshii uses dolls as recurrent imagery, emphasizing our desire to replicate ourselves in mechanical form, even if only as toys for our children. Dolls have a particular place in Japanese culture, where they often signify the liminal place between flesh and spirit. The Japanese word for ‘doll’, ningyÿ, translates literally as ‘human shape,’ highlighting the possible boundary transgressions available in Japanese culture and which Oshii uses in Innocence to question once again the nature of humanity. This time, however, instead of simply celebrating Koestler’s integrative tendency, Oshii problematizes it. He contrasts the Major, increasingly comfortable in her new existence and the embodiment of successful integration, with the gynoids, which in spite of their activation by human ghosts remain machines with no assertion of individuality - only a group mind and a group voice.
Oshii might also have been inspired in his exploration of machine-to-human transitions by the symbolism of the golem. Innocence refers to the best known golem of all, Rabbi Judah Loew’s sixteenth-century version which defended the Jews of Prague from anti-Semitic attacks. Despite the wealth of literature on the golem, it’s most likely Oshii encountered it in Paul Wegener’s 1920 classic Der Golem. The golem’s influence is clear in the Hebrew word emeth (‘truth’), which appears at the entrance of the house that Batou and Togusa visit when trying to locate the source of the ghost-dubbed gynoids. The same word animated Loew’s golem, and Oshii’s use of it suggests he drew inspiration from the old Jewish tale.
Oshii’s reference to the golem highlights the gynoids’ status as manufactured. In contrast, Batou refers to the Major as his “guardian angel,” emphasizing her newfound status as a powerful yet intangible individual, totally freed from the trappings of humanity. The ethical dilemma of animate machines is heightened in the case of the ghost-dubbed gynoids, and Kawai picks up on the poignancy of this situation with a new, highly emotive theme.
Giving Voice to the Voiceless
There are many similarities between the soundtracks for Ghost in the Shell and Innocence. Bells signify the imminence of both themes, and the vocal quality is identical, as is much of the instrumentation. As in Ghost in the Shell, there are three instantiations of the Innocence theme, and Kawai’s use of them echoes his development of the Ghost theme in many ways. In Innocence, each version also occurs over scenes devoid of dialogue and versions become successively more complex. Yet Kawai’s soundtrack for Innocence does not exactly follow the model set up in Ghost in the Shell. If it did, it would reflect Batou’s journey as the film’s protagonist. Batou, however, does not undergo a similarly momentous evolution to the Major in Ghost in the Shell, as she notes on her reappearance towards the film’s end that he hasn’t changed a bit.
Instead, from its first note, Kawai binds his new theme to the renegade gynoids, those human machines which are Oshii’s response to Koestler. As in Ghost in the Shell, we first hear the theme over the opening credits, which depict the making not of Batou, but of a gynoid. The Innocence theme begins without authority, devoid of percussion: the voices start alone, sounding tentative and uncertain. The music is more melancholy, reflecting the gynoid’s status as a slave rather than an independent woman. It is clear from the outset that the world of Ghost in the Shell has evolved into something more complex. The drumming and bells reappear, and a lower voice enters as the theme takes on a slow and measured rhythm. Halfway through, the theme suddenly breaks into violent taiko drumming, the voices gain in strength and stridency to become a powerful chorus, and the synthesizer adds a resonant bass line. So powerful is this particular ensemble that the Yomiuri Online ran an article by Kenichi Yorita on January 13th, 2004, on the unprecedented size of Kawai’s minyo chorus for this theme—seventy-five singers multi-tracked. Embodied by the music, the dolls are at first powerless, and then empowered, from the very outset of the film.
The lyrics to the Innocence theme are also from an ancient Japanese song, “Kugutsu uta uramite chiru”:Through day and night, the moon not coming,
In grief, Nue will sing.
When I look back,
Flowers will fall away,
The heart of solace having withered.
In a new world, Gods will descend,
The dawn will break and Nue will sing.
Flowers in bloom pray to Gods,
Lamenting over their being in this world of life,
Their dreams having faded away,
Flowers grieve and fall.
With their focus on death and passing, these lyrics are both more nostalgic and more melancholy than those of the Ghost theme. The lines, “Flowers in bloom pray to Gods / Lamenting over their being in this world of life / Their dreams having faded away,” highlight the pitiful state of the captured girls and their doll bodies. There is a magic synchronicity between these lyrics and the Ghost theme’s lyrics, with the Major now included in the descending gods, the power that will release the captives from their state of bondage.
Just as in both films we first hear the theme against images of a cyborg’s construction, both films use a cityscape alongside the theme’s second instantiation. In Innocence the scene is a parade, in which a variety of images suggests the doll festival Hinamatsuri. At this festival, families pray for the happiness and prosperity of their daughters and to ensure they grow up healthy and beautiful. This is a gentle irony considering the sufferings of the young girls kidnapped and ghost-dubbed onto the gynoids.
The music for the parade scene also offers increased complexity from the theme we hear over Innocence’s opening credits. Kawai shortens the vocal introduction, and bulks up the theme’s accompaniment, starting the synthesizer when the percussion enters and thickening the chords. He then adds a lengthy but sparse percussion break, a vague reference to the structure of the Ghost theme, before repeating the powerful and energetic chorus. As in Ghost in the Shell, Kawai uses the added harmonies in the theme’s second instantiation to indicate greater emotional depth and psychological complexity. But this time, the music combines with the many images of masks and dolls on the screen to give voice to the voiceless, conferring emotional capacity on the gynoids. This further blurring of boundaries between doll and cyborg, human and inhuman is Oshii and Kawai’s nod to Haraway’s leaky distinctions, which by Innocence’s end will be so fluid as to be inseparable.
Who Wants to Be Human Anyway?
The Innocence theme’s third and final instantiation is where all boundaries finally break down. Probably to avoid what happened to his final theme in Ghost in the Shell, Kawai incorporated the theme’s last appearance into the obligatory climactic fight scene. Batou has reached Locus Solus, the corporation which fronts the ghost-dubbing operation. While trying to shut it down, he is faced by a gynoid army. The position of these creatures is uncertain: they are dolls animated by the stolen ghosts of young girls. One might expect possession of even the shadow of a soul to convey some kind of individuality, but instead the gynoids act collectively, as if following orders from some higher power. In contrast, at this point the Major—the film’s ultimate individual and renegade—returns to fight at Batou’s side by downloading a part of her consciousness into one of the gynoids. Could any of these entities be called human? The Major admits to Batou that she is not really a separate entity any more, and no longer refers to her ghost, only to her consciousness. Yet she still thinks and acts like an individual, while the gynoids, imbued with real human souls, operate only as a pack. What is Oshii saying about the ghost in the machine?
This is the theme’s final instantiation, and in it Kawai brings everything together. Even the music has leaky boundaries - motifs from both the first and second film mix it up with phrases from the Innocence theme. The lyrics (found in translation again on Kawai’s website) also change, now suggesting hope for redemption rather than only grief for lives past:The Ghost awaits in the world beyond.
Flowers in bloom pray to Gods,
Lamenting over their being in this wo
rld of life,
Their dreams having faded away,
Flowers grieve and fall . . .
In the everlasting darkness of grief,
Inert in shells, praying to Gods for the reincarnation.
Above a pulsing, repeated bass note, bells herald the Innocence theme’s percussive chorus. Phrases from this theme alternate with passages of urgent and continuous taiko drumming with menacing synthesizer. Each time the Innocence theme’s chorus returns, Kawai adds more lines beneath it, usually on the synthesizer, and tension mounts. The pattern is briefly interrupted by a snatch of the music-box style score heard during one of the film’s earlier scenes (and which includes a doll’s house). The track concludes with the soaring motif from the Major’s dramatic fight scene at the end of Ghost in the Shell. As the Major returns to the net, the final phrase of the Ghost theme, the phrase which was so gracelessly cut from its US release, sounds once. This time it is sung in chorus rather than as a solo, a final farewell to the Major from the girls she has freed, the collective voices calling the blessing down upon the individual. Koestler has been subverted: Oshii has made machines human and turned one human into a machine to be envied. The Major is moral, powerful, generous and introspective, yet she no longer identifies as a human with an individual ghost.
As much as Oshii’s gynoids contradict Koestler, the Major still stands as an embodiment of Koestler’s theory: every living holon has the tendency to preserve its individuality while operating as part of an evolving and functional whole. This is exactly what the Major does. We imagine she must have surrendered all her individuality on merging with the net, yet in Innocence she is able to separate a part of herself from the whole to aid her old colleague. And she is still, recognizably, the Major, to us and to Batou alike. Through connecting with the net, the Major has not only evolved herself, but has aided the evolution of the whole to which she belongs without being subsumed by it. In this way, Kawai and Oshii have cast the Major as an Everyman-Everywoman figure, undergoing a quest for self-knowledge in the kind of technoscientific age and embodiment which may well be humanity’s future. Anne Kull suggests we’re already living this reality:We are cyborgs because we are the instruments of a powerful technological, medicinal, scientific, and military system that appropriates and reshapes the world at an ever-increasing rate . . . The cyborg myth acknowledges our technicized natures.
In giving us cyborgs involved in differing existential crises, Oshii not only acknowledges our technicized natures but gives us a philosophical framework by which we might be able to accept them. Without Kawai, Oshii’s attitude towards cyborg evolution would not be so clear. In Ghost in the Shell, Kawai’s music celebrates the Major’s attempts to transcend her humanity, leading us to question not only what human identity is, but whether, given the opportunity, we too should cease to be concerned with it. Innocence also forces us to question the nature of humanity, and whether it is worth clinging to, by showing us our capability to do inhuman things. Kawai emphasizes this with his themes, giving the gynoids emotions with his haunting music, which their doll-faces can’t express. In writing cyborg soundtracks which are complex and emotive, Kawai shows us that the distinction between human and machine can be very leaky indeed.
As Innocence draws to a close, and before the Major disappears into the net, she comforts a small girl rescued from the Locus Solus operation, who wails, “I never wanted to be a robot.” The Major wryly replies, “If a robot had his own voice, he may cry ‘I don’t want to be a human.’”
The Major is right—Kawai’s score gives voice to the robots, and this is indeed what they say.
20
Cyborg Goddess
DAN DINELLO
Without a transcendental belief, each man is a mean little island. Since we cannot expect the necessary change in human nature to arise by way of natural means, we must induce it by artificial means. We can only hope to survive as a species by developing techniques which supplant biological evolution.
—ARTHUR KOESTLER, The Ghost in the Machine
Pre-cybernetic machines could be haunted; there was always the spectre of the ghost in the machine. They could not achieve man’s dream, only mock it. Now we are not so sure. Our machines are disturbingly lively, and we ourselves frighteningly inert.
—DONNA HARAWAY, “A Cyborg Manifesto”
The soul-searching cyborg of Ghost in the Shell quotes the Bible, saying, “For now we see through a glass darkly, but then face to face. Now I know in part, but then shall I know fully.” Cyborg assassin and government agent Major Motoko Kusanagi wanders aimlessly around a city. She feels lonely and trapped in her corporate-created body with its computer-enhanced brain. Confused about her identity beyond police work, Motoko wants to find her place in the world. She wants to know if she’s an autonomous person or an automaton.
In a gorgeous, visually poetic slow-motion sequence scored with haunting music and spine-tingling angelic chants, Motoko looks for clues in the crowded urban futurescape. She sees a series of ambiguous canals and streets that look like the bloodstream of an organism or the circuits of a machine. She’s startled to recognize a woman or a cyborg with the same body and face as she. A huge building under construction echoes her origins as a technological creation. A sad dog stares quizzically as if to say, “Who are you?”
Female mannikins, frozen behind a display window, mock her. Rain falls as children—all with identical yellow umbrellas—run across a bridge. They—along with the countless blinking neon billboards, the bird-like airplane overhead, and the crowds of zombie-like people—serve to show humanity’s spiritless surrender to technology, its fusion with machines, and its obsolescence as a species. Motoko sees armless, female busts behind dark glass as ghostly voices sing the beautiful Shinto chant, “Faraway God, give us your blessing,” suggesting both her own fragmented identity and her desire to transcend it and find meaning beyond the human world.
The Age of Spiritual Machines
Mamoru Oshii’s Ghost in the Shell—based on an acclaimed manga series by Masamune Shirow and followed by a television series Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex and a movie sequel Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence—transpires in a future world where the replacement of fragile human body parts, including brains, has reached a logical conclusion. Most humans have become cyborgs. Despite mental implants that provide direct access to the internet, they retain a human identity—a “ghost,” mind or soul. The most powerful people are those that have been most technologically enhanced.
Super-heroine Major Motoko Kusanagi barely exists in her original human form, retaining only a small portion of organic gray matter inside an almost totally robotic, titanium body or “shell.” She can patch her nervous system into the internet, mentally “dive” into cyberspace, and access the connected minds of others. She practically co-exists on the net. In the movie’s ostensible action, the Major pursues a terrorist hacker named the Puppet Master. The philosophical action, however, focuses on her techno-metaphysical quest beyond gender and human identity for a spiritual bond, for perfection, for transcendent wholeness, for the ghost in her shell.
With its cyborg superwoman, Ghost in the Shell raises the possibility of technology’s positive potential, not only in terms of its path to transcendence, but also in terms of its subversive undermining of gender identity. Unlike most science-fiction films that valorize maleness and prioritize the human while devaluing females and demonizing technology, Ghost in the Shell uniquely advocates a vision of the posthuman future that exalts technology and renders humanity and its gender prejudices obsolete. In this, it reflects the philosophy of techno-feminist writer Donna Haraway (whose name is given to the cigarette-smoking police forensic expert in Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence).
A Manifesto for Cyborgs
In her “Cyborg Manifesto,” Haraway espouses the liberating potential for women inherent in cyborg mythology. While aware of the role this technology plays in the maintenance of corporate social control, government surveill
ance, militarism, and patriarchy, Haraway embraces its rebellious promise: the machinic-muscled, macho movie-cyborgs—Terminator, Robocop, and Iron Man among others—should be recoded as female and appropriated as a means of subverting gender bias.
Gender is constructed socially, not determined biologically, according to Haraway and other feminist thinkers. See for instance Phyllis Burke’s Gendershock. “There is nothing about being ‘female’ that naturally binds women. Gender, race, or class consciousness is an achievement forced on us by the terrible historical experience of the contradictory social realities of patriarchy, colonialism, and capitalism” (“A Cyborg Manifesto,” p. 155).
Cultural conditioning includes the casting of male and female into oppositional and hierarchical categories: objective-subjective, rational-emotional, mind-body. These stereotypical dualities associate masculinity with the rational life of the mind and with technology; they associate femininity with the body’s irrational feelings and the natural world. In this cultural match-up, the female often loses, forced into inferior or subservient roles. This inequality reflects gender bias, social discrimination, sexual objectification, and sexist oppression, rather than something biological or natural, the possession of reproductive organs. (“Cyborg Manifesto,” p. 181).