For me The film Ghost In the Shell is a perfect example of an acquired taste. If it had been a food I would spit it out. The first time I saw the film I was bored to tears. Japanese animation or Anime was still something I didn’t quite get.
Sci-fi I got.
Cyberpunk I got.
Action films I got.
Ghost In the Shell I didn’t.
The film about a female cyborg who is a police officer in a special unit designed to combat terrorism and other difficulties did not reach me with its unusual aesthetics. The film seemed cold and boring and quiet to me. The characters spend a lot of their time talking about philosophy. The action was exciting enough, but I sure wasn’t sure I really cared about any characters. But now Ghost In the Shell is a welcome and familiar film that I watch from time to time and and happy to share with others.
G.I.T.S. or GITS has a distinguished pedigree, starting out as a manga by Masamune Shirow. The manga (or japanese comic) depicts a special unit of the police force called section 9 that is designed to deal with special covert operations.
One police officer, a female with a human brain but a powerful android body, Major Motoko Kusanagi or “The Major” fights various threats alongside her companions in Section 9 while trying to determine how much of her humanity is left. The philosophical concerns are woven into the story as they encounter questions of identity arising from memory wipes, artificial planted memories, and ultimately an artificial intelligence independent enough to want to become a life form. These philosophical questions are spoken aloud, pondered over and played out in the actions of the characters’ very violent lives.
But beyond the story viewers can be enraptured by the animation, the music and the directing that present these ideas in a very attractive envelope of a film. The aesthetics that struck me as cold, silent and even boring at times my first run through now strike me as being Zen-like and poetic. Violent sections of the film are often punctuated with breaks in evolving silence, music and even stillness as images stand still on screen except for minor changes such as light in the background. These moments of calm before the storm surf to cleanse the palate and prepare the viewer for what they are about to see.
My love of the film brings up the question why we come to adore things we once found boring. Why do our tastes seem to adapt? Familiarity rather than breeding contempt seems to sometimes create acceptance and even love. Perhaps we recognize a basic level of quality in an original work that is nonetheless so different than anything we’ve seen before that we want to like it but don’t. The new ideas or aesthetics are presented take time for us to adapt to. Like learning a skill perhaps sometimes it is necessary to learn the skill of appreciation and to put aside our previous prejudices and allow a new pattern of understanding to emerge. Seeing familiar patterns (like archetypal stories) in new things may be one of the reasons we find delight in novelty and claim that something new feels strangely familiar. Many people have had the experience of hearing a song and having trouble imagining that song never being in our lives before despite the fact we know we’ve never heard it.
But it is apropos that I find new patterns emerging from the strange piece of art. The film is about change and growth. One of the film’s themes is the idea that people and systems stagnate without real and central change. To be fair the film’s director Mamoru Oshii has a great deal to do with the philosophical bent of the final product, but wherever it comes from it emerges from a hypnotic film that still manages to shock and surprise me from one view into the next.
Ghost In the Shell, like a strangely beautiful twisted tree, has many branches from its trunk – the original Japanese manga comic. There has been a sequel to the original comic that has not been adapted in any form. There has been a sequel to the original film that is not connected in any way to the sequel comic. There has also been a television series that acts as a sort of alternate universe sequel to the original film. But the series, the films and the television shows never truly interact.
Some versions of GITS are more accessible than others. Fans often find themselves walking through a minefield when discussing these various versions of this universe, never knowing which fellow fans share their exact loves and hates of particular branches. Regardless, the ideas presented – the philosophy, the humanity, the ideas of where we are going and where we’ve come from – all of these things present a very dense and rich tapestry of thoughtful entertainment. There is a great deal to choose from. Like a cybernetic tree of knowledge, we have the opportunity to pick the fruits from the individual branches we find most alluring. But we must be careful. Sometimes the sweetest fruit is out on the most unusually shaped branch; a branch we might not normally consider, but one we would do well to take a second look at.
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