Ghost in the Shell (1995) is a landmark of Japanese anime and global cyberpunk. It powerfully articulates contemporary fears about technology and its impact on our humanity, and explores the relationship between body and mind, between memory and identity, and between slavery and freedom. The film also articulates ideas beyond these binary expressions, a duality so often expressed in Western thinking. Ghost in the Shell is a discourse about the 
fusion of genders, ethnicities, and nationalities into a single being; of the other within the self; about being simultaneously one and many.
Ghost in the Shell exemplifies a specifically Japanese manifestation of noir in two ways: first, in its exploration of how technology transforms society and the human body; second, in its depiction of technology as both metaphor and a literal example of pervasive control. Metaphorically, through the sense of one’s body and labour no longer being one’s own, in being given over to an avaricious economic system. Literally, through our cyborg present, where the instruments of control and prostheses insinuate themselves into the day-to-day lives of us all.
(this essay is a condensed, easier-to-read version of a chapter in my PhD. Click the PDF icon, upper right, if you prefer black-on-white script)
A History of Ambiguity
Japanese history embodies the ambiguity of technological progress perhaps more profoundly than that of any other nation on earth. On the one hand, the decision to embrace western technology during the Meiji restoration (1868 – 1912) led Japan to becoming a global military power, joining the Entente powers (Russia, France, United Kingdom) during World War I, and helping them secure victory. In the aftermath of World War II, under US administration, Japan rose from the ashes of humiliating defeat to become the most technologically-advanced nation on Earth.
Yet, Japan is the only nation to have experienced the horror of nuclear war, to have suffered the fullest measure of
the destructive power of modernity. The atomic bomb: the apotheosis of scientific discovery, bringing about the most barbaric single moment of mass violence in human history. The horrific consequences powerfully exposed by John Hersey’s seminal long essay, Hiroshima:
He was the only person making his way into the city; he met hundreds and hundreds who were fleeing, and every one of them seemed to be hurt in some way. The eyebrows of some were burned off and skin hung from their faces and hands. Others, because of pain, held their arms up as if carrying something in both hands. Some were vomiting as they walked. Many were naked or in shreds of clothing. On some undressed bodies, the burns had made patterns—of undershirt straps and suspenders and, on the skin of some women (since white repelled the heat from the bomb and dark clothes absorbed it and conducted it to the skin), the shapes of flowers they had had on their kimonos. Many, although injured themselves, supported relatives who were worse off. Almost all had their heads bowed, looked straight ahead, were silent, and showed no expression whatsoever (pp. 39 – 40)
The traumas of Hiroshima and Nagasaki have lingered in the Japanese national consciousness. At the finale of the seminal anime cyberpunk Akira (1988) – set in a dystopian 2019 – a white incandescent blast swallows Neo-Tokyo, leaving a skeleton city in its aftermath. As Frank Fuller, in his essay, The deep influence of the A-bomb on anime and manga, argues:
The finale of Akira is only one example of apocalyptic imagery in the anime and manga canon; a number of anime films and comics are rife with
atomic bomb references, which appear in any number of forms, from the symbolic to the literal. The devastating aftereffects – orphaned kids, radiation sickness, a loss of national independence, the destruction of nature – would also influence the genre, giving rise to a unique (and arguably incomparable) form of comics and animated film.
While Ghost in the Shell has no specific allusions to nuclear devastation, it does very much dwell on the birth and rebirth of Major Motoko. Fuller argues this is a common plot device in Japanese anime and manga, used to symbolise the country’s wartime and post-war experiences.
The cyborg – as will be made clear through the case study of Ghost in the Shell – is a salient metaphor for the experience of radical technological change. Indeed, Hikawa Ryūsuke, in documenting the history of cyborgs in Japanese popular culture, argues: “The Japanese conception of cyborgs was, in a sense, a self-portrait of postwar Japan itself”
Ghost in the Shell
Ghost in the Shell (1995), directed by Mamuro Oshii, is an anime based on the manga of the same name by Masamune Shirow. The protagonist is Major Motoko, a public security agent working for ‘Section Nine’. The Major is a cyborg: she has a full cybernetic body, but her brain retains the original organic material and the memories of her human self. While she is treated as human by those around her, she does not own her own shell, or even the memories she forms while working for the government. Rebecca Grubb, in her essay Ghost in the Shell: the Soul Within, argues:
Combining modernity and monstrosity, the film explores how the cyborg is the ultimate mechanization of the human being for pure labor, leaving no room for pleasure, leisure, desire, or anything else that is not profitable for the employer and the State. Motoko is a Japanese female cyborg sporting a feminine body with large breasts, but no vagina. Her body is owned by the police agency Section Nine, and it is completely mechanical besides her ghost (p. 2)
The key plot line of Ghost in the Shell involves ‘The Puppet Master’, a ‘ghost’ without a ‘shell’. The Puppet Master was originally created by human programming, to act as an infiltrator and saboteur for another wing of government, Section Six. After the Puppet Master gains self-awareness, he downloads himself into a cyborg body (a Caucasian female model) so he can claim political asylum, and be free of the government section that was trying to recapture 
him. However, in taking a corporeal form he has opened himself up to the possibility of death.
Early in the film, we discover that an individual arrested by the Major has been ‘ghost hacked’ by the puppet master. The victim’s memories have been wiped, and new ones implanted in its place. When the victim asks for his old memories back, he is told it is impossible: they have been permanently erased. The man breaks down.
Major Motoko watches all of this through a one-way mirror, seemingly absorbed in the plight of the victim. We, the viewer, see her reflection looking back at her from the glass, darkly. As we soon discover, the Major holds the fear that her memories, too, have been implanted. Her existential crisis is that she is like the victim: a pathetic creature, an empty shell for someone else’s agenda.
Later, Major and Batou (a colleague from her team) are spending some downtime on a boat, chatting over a beer. Batou is questioning the reasoning behind her diving in the ocean: “Why do you gamble swimming with a body that 
can sink like a rock? What the hell is it you see in the bottom, in the darkness?” The Major replies: “What we see now is like a dim image in a mirror, then we shall see face-to-face.” This is a reference to 1 Corinthians 13: 11-12, this full text of which is:
When I was a child, my speech, feelings and thinking were all those of a child; now that I am a man, I have no more use for childish ways. For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face-to-face. What I know now is only partial; then it will be complete as god’s knowledge of me.
One of the strange elements of this scene is Motoko’s ghost says it, via neural link, to Batou.
Batou responds: “That was you, wasn’t it?”
The Major does not answer him, but rather looks around, surprised. The voice came from her mind, but the words were not consciously thought by her. The camera, at this moment, focusses on the ‘jacks’ at the back of her neck (where she may plug into the ‘net’).
This, in my view, foreshadows a moment later in the movie, where the Major ‘merges’ 
with the Puppet Master. The Major is a child now, as she is wedded to her shell; she becomes fully-formed when she merges with a non-corporeal being. This interpretation is further reinforced in the memorable final fight against the spider tank (pictured). The establishing shot of the tank is at the base of an ancestral tree carved in the stone wall – a bas relief, beginning at the base with Latin names of aquatic forms, and ending at the top with hominis (Man). During the battle, the tank 
destroys the tree – a deliberately-framed shot shows shelling colliding with the base of the tree and working their way up, destroying the structure of creation.
While the intent here of the director is clear, I believe there is an additional layer of meaning. This evolution to a new form also represents the fears of viewers, and the leap we are taking into new modes of being. The plot is not only foreshadowing the Major’s future, it is also very much interested in her present, in her existential crisis. Her crisis is our crisis, in the age of the machine. We see ourselves through a glass, darkly, much as the Major does. The anime turns to this idea time and again: her reflection in a mirror as she watches an interrogation; her reflection in the water when she rises towards the surface; when she sees her doppelgänger working in a high-rise (presumably, the same production model as the Major, tasked for a more mundane purpose – or, alternatively, a vision, a trick of her ghost). Throughout the film, she questions the authenticity of her identity.
Yet the enigma of the Major’s subjectivity – whether she is who she thinks she is – is never answered (much like Deckard like Blade Runner). It is in this phenomenological ambiguity two things are communicated. The first is the alienation caused by modernity. In the late stage capitalism depicted in Ghost in the Shell, the engine of economic growth has found ways to intrude into areas once unimaginable. She is a very physical person, insofar as she is the most accomplished fighter, assassin, and infiltrator in her unit. Her physicality is prominent in both film and manga. Yet, this core aspect of her character is not her own; her body is owned by the government.
This has resonance in contemporary Japan. Salarymen are an obvious example of those who appear owned by the corporation they work for. This intensity, however, is not only true of Japan in the contemporary labour market. In the giant Amazon warehouses of North America, every second of a worker’s day is tabulated and assessed, and the worker can be punished for toilet breaks. In Apple factories located 
in China, long hours and sustained pressure resulted in multiple suicides. Though the details of the work conditions are sometimes disputed – especially by the company being criticised – the broader realities of the modern workforce, and the capacity for every second of a worker’s day to be monitored and parsed, is indisputable.
The second issue raised – something the Major herself ponders – is whether being human even matters. This is a more difficult proposition, that can sometimes lead the viewer to imagine this line of thought devalues human life, and the message of Ghost in the Shell is therefore anti-humanist.
Cyberpunk – and noir in general – is, I believe, a humanist literature insofar as it is a meditation on the human condition, and it treats humanity (or being treated humanely) as a normative good. The narrative sympathies are always with the marginalised, and almost always explore the extent to which the structures of power erode human dignity. The cyborg is a salient archetype as it tests the extent to which our humanity is bound in our physicality. As Hikawa Ryūsuke observes: “The question is not how human cyborgs can become, but rather, how much of our biological selves can be stripped away and replaced with machines before we ourselves lose our humanity”
A Cyborg Present
“Cyborgs are not about the future, they are about contemporary society and its current transformations”
Sharalyn Orbaugh – Sex and the Single Cyborg
Max More is a philosopher and ‘futurist’ who defines the transhumanist movement as “a class of philosophies of life that seek the continuation and acceleration of the evolution of intelligent life beyond its currently human form and human limitations by means of science and technology, guided by life promoting principles and values.” While transhumanism intersects with cyberpunk in several ways, it is at cross purposes insofar as some utopian strands of the transhumanist movement deride the physical form as ‘meat space’, believing there is something inherently inferior about the biological body. Transhumanism is interested in, among other things, the possibility of advancing human evolution through genetic manipulation, cyborgs, A. I.,
and mind uploads. Possibilities all critiqued by tech noir, whether genetic coding (Gattaca, 1997), cyborgs (Ghost in the Shell), A.I. (Terminator, 1984) or mind uploads (Altered Carbon, 2002).
While some readers may nod at – and others simply skim past – the quote that heads this section, the idea of a cyborg present is worth discussing in more detail, if only to draw attention to the developments we have taken for granted; developments that represent radical changes to who we are now.
Take, for example, an item simultaneously mundane, ubiquitous, science fictional, and prosthetic. The smartphone is mundane and ubiquitous as, within a decade, it has become an indispensable and unremarkable object for almost all people living in advanced economies (and many in the developing world). It is science fictional insofar as thirty years ago, the smartphone was something only dreamt of in science fiction narratives – indeed the first time tablets (iPads) appeared on screen was in Star Trek: The Next Generation in 1987. The smartphone is prosthetic insofar as it functions as 
exo-memory: our brains are no longer required to store or recall information they way used to, now all the answers we require are only google tap away.
The neural networks of our brains constantly rewire themselves as we commit new experiences to long term memory. If the reader remembers anything from this essay one week from now, it means this essay has changed the structure of their brain. Eric Kandel, who won the Nobel prize for his work on memory, says very simply, ‘attention must be paid!’ in his memoir, In Search for Memory:
Everyone knows what attention is. It is the taking possession by the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one out of what seems to be several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought. Focalisation, concentration of consciousness, are its essence. It implies the withdrawal from some things to effectively deal with others.
Studies have found that the more we depend on exo-memory, the more our capacity for natural memory declines. Because we no longer need to pay attention. We are 
relying on Google to store knowledge long-term instead of our own brains – something researchers have dubbed ‘cognitive offloading’.
Individuals increasingly use the internet not just as exo-memory, but as an exo-brain; an always accessible vast repository of data. In what was until recently considered a science-fictional concept, we have ceded what we pay attention to (perhaps, in part, because of the vastness of the data one must sift through) to the algorithms of the major social media companies, all of whom are giant corporations.
Jaron Lanier, an early pioneer of Silicon Valley and computer scientist, has extensively documented the invasive data collection techniques used by the major tech companies, and the way this is used to manipulate users. During an interview with neuroscientist Sam Harris, Lanier was put the proposition: “When you’re using Facebook, you’re not actually Facebook’s customer; the advertiser is, and you are the product.” Lanier answered. “That formulation… It’s mostly true, but not exactly true…Your demonstrated change in behaviour from it otherwise would have been is the product. Your loss of free will is the product”
As exo-memory has evolved – from the printing press, to the internet, to the smartphone – so too has our brain evolved. Our consciousness, in this sense, has expanded; we now possess information and the ability to access it, via our exo-brains, that would appear super-human to someone living only fifty years ago.
We are all cyborgs now – whether prosthetics, organ transplants, pacemakers, digital exo-memory; the outsourcing of our brain function to the algorithmic decision making of giant corporations, to choose for us the products we will purchase, the news articles we will read, the intimate relationships we will embark upon. We are living in a cyberpunk present. The questions of what makes us human is not merely philosophical, but pressing down on all of us in the mundane and the ubiquitous.
The response of Ghost in the Shell to the pervasiveness of these changes is with a nuanced search for human identity. It contrasts the fully human, versus the cyborg, versus the noncorporeal online entity. This is all deliberate. Mamoru Oshii said in interviews that he believed his fundamental task was to explore the Major’s quest to understand and realise her own humanity.
At the conclusion of Ghost in the Shell, the Major evolves by merging with the entity of the Puppet Master. She takes the body of a female child. The film does not suggest she has taken a higher form of being, but rather, has simply liberated herself from Section Nine.
After recuperating at Batou’s safe house, she tells him she’s going. He asks her whether she is part of the Puppet Master now: whether he will be part of her forever. She replies:
Batou, remember the words I spoke in another voice on the boat that night? I understand it now, and there are more words that go with the passage. When I was a child, my speech, feelings, and thinking were those of a child. Now that I am a man I have no more use for childish ways. Now I can say these things without help in my own voice, because I am no longer the woman known as The Major, nor am I the program called the Puppet Master.
She leaves the safehouse, pausing out front to look out at the neon cityscape. “Where does the newborn go from here? The net is vast and infinite.”
Conclusion
The question of the authenticity of the Major’s identity is never answered. We are never directly told if her memories are her own, and she never learns the truth. A second question, however, is answered: whether it is possible to retain our humanity as technology more aggressively penetrates our everyday lives. Ghost in the Shell answers with a qualified yes. When the Major merges with the Puppet Master at the finale of the film, she does it to be free, and to establish her own identity. She is not claiming superiority, but rather claiming her own life, and body, back from the government and corporations that owned it. From this point on, her choices, memories, and shell will all be her own.
The humanist instinct is something Japanese noir shares with international noir. For all the cynicism, the darkness, the unflinching assessments of the human condition, noir is ultimately a humanistic discourse. It is a critique and a warning against the dehumanising aspects of late capitalism. It laments what may be lost in history’s unrelenting, unthinking march.
Under the harsh glare of a neon-lit future in Japan, Ghost in the Shell explores the plight of humanity in an age of cyberpunk. An age that has come, that surrounds us, that intrudes on every facet of our lives. We are cyborgs, living in a science fictional world, and the ideas of Ghost in the Shell, grimly fumbling for human dignity among the cold hard certitudes of technological progress, are more important than ever.
