'Ghost in the Shell' Is a Meme Machine

"Cinema is always reality's ghost" Manoel de Olveira

Let's be self-reflexive for a moment. What is this thing we call The Tyee?

It's an online magazine, plus a website; it has lots of articles about different subjects, some cartoons and people posting their thoughts. But is it anything more than words and images? After all, it isn't a concrete thing; you can't hold it in your hand, (unless you pick up your computer monitor which isn't advisable), but does it exist? Yes, of course, but does it do anything more than that?

What?

While watching Ghost in the Shell: Innocence, I found myself thinking about the Tyee, and whether, like the characters in the film, the Tyee or something like it, will eventually slip its line and swim away into the great big sea that is the internet, and become conscious entity unto itself. Perhaps not in this lifetime but eventually it might happen. In a recent interview with Mamoru Oshii, the directer of Ghost in the Shell, was asked whether he thought the human form was out of date. He answered:

"I'm not sure what you mean by that, but people are definitely losing their human forms. Animals have always stayed the same, and will continue to do so in the years to come, but humans are always changing, and they need to change, with the development of technology. However, they should not fear the change or evolution, but rather accept it and learn to live with it."

The characters in the film are trying to do just that, just not always easily.

Sex, violence and the meaning of life

This film (the second installment based on the manga by Masamune Shirow) begins pretty much where the first film ended. In the year 2032 Batô is an augmented agent working for the anti-terrorist unit Public Security Section 9. Having lost his partner, Major Motoko Kusanagi in the first GITS, he lives alone with his dog and is questioning why he does what he does. Anachronisms are all over the place. The robots may look like humans, but all the cops drives Studebakers. Section 9 Department Chief Aramaki has charged Batô's new partner Togusa to watch over his mental state, which is tenuous, even before his e-brain is hacked and he shoots off his own arm. Batô and Togusa are assigned to solve a case in which a sex robot has murdered its master, and a few other people that got in the way.

The route is long and looping. The pair travel to the Northern City to track down a hacker, board the factory ship that is anchored in the harbour and do battle with killer sex dollies, but this is merely the beginning of the story.

Along the way, the two men trade quips back and forth about the meaning of being human. If you've seen the first GITS, you have a sense of what it's all about: At what point do we lose touch with our humanity in an entirely technological and mechanized society and when does the technology gain that illusive thing called consciousness? Is one type of consciousness any more valuable or important than another?

He's a dog person

It is in this indefinite place that Director Mamoru Oshii likes to play. In a recent interview with Midnight Eye, Mr. Oshii said, "I personally prefer my companionship of dogs, but it may be different to some people. Since people are all starting to lose part of or all of their 'bodies', they need to associate themselves with something else to identify themselves. It could be dogs like myself, or it could be cats or other animals. It does not need to be living things. It could be machines, cars, computers, cities, just about anything but yourself. That's how you find your lost 'bodies.'"

Dogs play a principal role here, along with dolls and deities, and what level of consciousness they possess: dolls none, dogs some, and deities all. In between these are robots, AI, and cyborgs. Robots have been showing up a lot lately in films but no modern retelling has yet managed to match the pathos of Frankenstein. GITS with its direct links to Fritz Lang's Metropolis, Blade Runner and the Golem, touches lightly on these ideas as it does the work of cyborg theorist Donna Haraway, who shows up as a character in the film, poses weighty ideas, then splits open her own face to insert a microscope. You can't say that Mr. Oshii doesn't have a sense of humour.

Unlike most stories about AI which are primarily cautionary, GITS is different. The ghosts that do manage to escape into the machine are hunted by the government. But their escape is the important idea: the spirit can remain free inside technology, which enables them (and us) to slip this mortal coil.

Wet and wired

"An ocean wide and an inch deep," is one apocryphal saying about the internet. The metaphors also fly fast and thick in Ghost in the Shell and many of them have to do with water. Indeed, why do you feel heavy, saturated with too much information, the same way you might feel if you've been reading all day long in the house and suddenly stop, wanting to breath some fresh air? When you connect to the internet, there is a sense of being immersed in something, enveloped by a foreign substance.

This sense also occurs throughout the movie, where the presence of water means multiple things (birth, death and transformation) but it also seems to signify this other place, an area of mass consciousness at work. It begins in the opening sequence, with its parallels to birth, in which a robot is made from the dendrites up, and the water imagery continues from the narrow bridge over water-reflected clouds to the hacker Kim's palace, to Batô hitching a ride on a shark-inspired submarine, to the final blowout on a factory ship. Part of the film's appeal lies simply in its beauty. One sequence of an ornate Chinese parade, which supposedly took an entire year to animate, is stunning. All of the people on the parade route are wearing masks, impassively watching the huge junk sail by. Whether they are robots, dolls or some combination thereof doesn't really matter. Humanity is thoroughly mixed with machine, but there is a sense that it is all simply information.

But hey, if information is the sea where we originated, live and into which we will merge, which is more important to human evolution, the gene or the meme?

What's in a meme?

The definition of the term 'meme', according to Wikipedia, (another useful internet place) is "a unit of information that replicates from brains or retention systems, such as books, to other brains or retention systems... The term was coined in 1976 by Richard Dawkins in his controversial bestselling book The Selfish Gene. Memes can represent parts of ideas, languages, tunes, designs, skills, moral and aesthetic values and anything else that is commonly learned and passed on to others as a unit."

So is the information contained and corralled here on the Tyee more real than bones and skin and hair? Is the Tyee, like any of us, merely a vessel for containing and continuing information, much like DNA itself? Will the Internet, or whatever system of carrying the most amount of information, eventually cast us off as inferior vessels and find a new and better means of continuing?

No, The Tyee isn't a physical thing, but it is a creation of connections which somehow exists in this thin ether called cyber space. If DNA is simply a means of retaining information, and information seeks to replicate itself, perhaps, in the end, we are all a collective memory, a collective consciousness, however divided and fractured. Director Oshii describes it this way "I started to think that the 'I' is not just one person, but the sum of everything you love - your dog, your wife, your child, your computer, your doll. This led me to the conclusion that the self is empty. What is essential is this network of connections."

This network of connections is already drawing us and closer and sending us further than we could ever have suspected.

Dorothy Woodend reviews films every Friday for The Tyee.