The eternal problem of the doll and the soul, of life and the perception of life, of feeling and the illusion of feeling are at the epicentre of Mamoru Oshii’s anime film Ghost in the shell (1995) and the later sequel Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence (2004). Both are about the plight of automata policeman, who at turns find themselves in dilemmas considered typical to humans and not machines.

A raft of films and TV series have come in the wake of these anime classics, including a 'real-life' remake in 2017. Yet, these films continue to speak to us in many ways. They also skillfully incorporate many historical references to dolls and automata, effectively creating a bridge between past, present, and future.

Still from Ghost in the Shell. 1995. https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/film/2016/02/ghost-shell-over-two-decades-old-remains-our-most-challenging-film-about

Am I a Man or a Clone?

The confusion of the automata regarding their deeper selves has to be carried out in secret as there is no prevailing way to account for the nature of effect in something that is not bona fide human.

While all animated and fictional, the films avoid the anxiety that surfaces from the Enlightenment onward over whether machines will surpass humans by insisting that this relationship is far more manifold and confused, with the cyborg and the robot now a central component to society and sociability.

Writing at around the same time as when the first manga series from Masamune Shirow bearing the title The Ghost in the Shell was aired (1989), the French sociologist Baudrillard presciently points out that 'The cybernetic revolution, given the equivalence of brain and computer, places humanity before the crucial question, "Am I a man or a machine?" The genetic revolution that is taking place at the moment raises the question, "Am I a man or just a clone?".[i]

Ghost in the Shell tells of a world that is a vast electronically connected network to which humanity has access through 'shells', artificial, cybernetic bodies. The main protagonist is Major Motoko Kusanagi, who has been charged to lead an assault team to hunt down a hacker called the Puppet Master.

Still from Ghost in the Shell. 1995. https://www.polygon.com/2020/9/8/21427354/ghost-in-the-shell-4k-release-director-mamoru-oshii-anime-making-of-art-style

Lines Between Human and Cyborg are Shattered

It shortly becomes clear that the lines between human, part human, and cyborg have all but been destroyed; everything is filtered with technology one or another degree; there are robots, there are cyborgs, and there are ' ghosts hacked humans’.

Kusanagi is a cyborg imbued with effect: she even sleeps. Her life is steeped in lonely melancholy.

However, as a technologically enhanced being, Kusanagi is capable of superhuman actions. One suspect is a garbage man brainwashed to make him believe he has a wife and child when in 'reality' he had been living alone all along.

Human memories are just so much information, which is just a 'drop in the bucket' in the scheme of things. Somewhere near the middle of the film Kusanagi asks her off-sider Batou, ‘How much of your body is original?’, after which she gives him a small lecture about her superiority to humans, including her ability to process alcohol, enabling her to knock back liquor endlessly without adverse effects. 'I suppose an occasional tune-up is a small price to pay for all this'.

But this technological bliss is at the price of being at the behest of the state. To retire is to forego ‘augmented brains and cyborg bodies. There wouldn’t be much left after that!’[ii] This suggests that humans and machines have found their integrated complement.

Dialogues such as these raise the suspicion, that rise as the film unfolds, that the inventive, lush animated tableaux, and the plot itself, is itself a visual and narrative apparatus that is a meditation on what this integration of human and machine actually means, and how this cybernetic ontology, or philosophy of being, is systematically defined.

In another bout of soul-searching, Kusanagi asks Batou if he thinks that he saw a similarity between her and a robot, admitting that 'cyborgs like myself tend to be paranoid about our origins. Sometimes I suspect I’m not who I think I am: like maybe I died a long time ago and someone took my brain and stuck it in this body. Maybe there never was a real me in the first place I’m completely synthetic like that thing.’

Batou replies that she is treated like other humans, 'so stop with the angst', a curious word to use, even if in translation, since it is so often applied to describe the quintessential existential conflict. But it is only how she is treated, she replies, that is the only thing that makes her feel human.

The robot, suspected to be inhabited by the puppet master, challenges a human over the proof of his existence, 'how can you? When neither modern science nor philosophy can explain what life is'. He explains that he 'is a living thinking entity created in the sea of information', not artificial intelligence.

The film’s unravelling (the French word denouement is frequently used in film circles) occurs with the Puppet Master merging with Kusanagi, who, in the end, exits the film like a melancholy lone gun, but one uncertain as to whom she is.

The ambiguity that she faces between her and a robot mirrors, or displaces, the relationship between her and a human. For contention is not only one of emotion or affect. It is one of control.

The word ‘robot’ was coined by the Czech writer Karel Capek for his 1920 play RUR, about a group of mechanical bodies used as labourers who rise against their makers. In Capek's Czech, the word was robotoi, which he related to the Latin word ‘servitude’, the word rab meaning ‘slave’.[iii]

At least humans can bask in the myth of the bedrock of nature, the irrational but material life source. Robots and cyborgs have some rational element immanent to them with their own mythic logic: they have been made with someone or something with the technology to do so and with some intent.

At least humans do not know whence they sprang. For a cyborg or robot not to know is a lapse in data, an omission, or the presence of some clandestine secret. Or then, there could still be some ambiguity analogous to what humans feel. But the question is whether it is genuinely comparable or arising from a wholly different order.

The Sequel

In the sequel, the song to the opening credits is a choral piece by Kawai Kenji—reprised throughout the film in three different variants—entitled Song of Puppets (Kugutsu uta) in which a ‘nue’ a chimera-like creature with the head of a monkey, raccoon dog’s body, tiger's legs and the tail of a snake bemoans the spirits of flowers ‘their dreams having faded away’ and awaits a time when the ‘gods will descend’.

Still from Ghost in the Shell. 2004. https://www.brightwalldarkroom.com/2019/11/21/ghost-in-the-shell-2-innocence/

From the outset, the song indicates the extinction of the real or organic human and a dark Miltonian Fall (alluding to John Milton’s Paradise Lost) from innocence and beauty, yet also anticipating a new framework of being.[iv]

We are returned to Batou, still an operative for Section 9 who is called upon to investigate some deaths caused by malfunctions in gynoids, female robots, specifically ‘sexoids’, sex robots.

As it transpires, the gynoids have been inserted with an inappropriate ‘ghost’. When Batou and his partner Togusa visit the robot maintenance lab, they are told that among the many reasons for dangerous malfunctions in robots is degeneration through lack of maintenance, for ‘no robot wants to be treated like a disposable item’.

The special quality of the androids and gynoids is that they had no useful purpose. They were more like pets. 'I wonder why' asks the lab worker, 'humans are obsessed with creating robots that resemble them'.

Philosophy Meets Animé

This then leads to a philosophical conversation completely unbefitting a conventional discussion among police officers. The lab worker discusses the child's use of dolls, and adults' commensurate relation to children, concluding that children are the best solution to the ancient dream of creating animate life. Batou then opens into a monologue about René Descartes, supporting the probably apocryphal story his ‘doll’ used to replace his daughter Francine after her death.

When they turn to leave, a portion of the outer membrane of the lab worker’s eye and brow raise, showing herself to be a cyborg or robot, even though she had been smoking.[v]

Amid many moody, sinister and violent moments, the most intriguing scene is when Batou and Togusa visit the residence of a former soldier now hacker, Kim, who subsists within the shell of a humanoid marionette.

His opulent mansion is filled with haunting curiosities, such as a tableau vivant of mannequins at a table, to a glassed-in room with holographic birds. The rogue company which had manufactured the faulty gynoids is called Locus Solus ('solitary place'), which is also the title of a novel from 1914 by Raymond Roussel about the sumptuous property containing all manner of wonders, including tableaux vivants and cadavers in preservative liquid.[vi] The offending company and the eyrie of Kim’s solitude are somehow enfolded into one complex organism.

When they meet Kim, he, or his mechanical shell, is feigning death. Accompanying him in the sham is a hologram that reads, ‘Life and death come and go like marionettes dancing on a table. Once their strings are cut, they easily crumble’. These already manifested on the wall of a crumbling mausoleum and will again appear painted on a wall of Locus Solus.[vii]

Kim, who has an obsession with dolls and life-forms that bestride life and death, embarks on another remarkable philosophical monologue:

I don't understand those who want to replicate humans by breathing souls into dolls. The definition of a gorgeous doll is a living, breathing body devoid of a soul. It's nothing but an unyielding corpse, tiptoeing on the brink of collapse.

Humans are no match for a doll, inform, or elegance. You see, my dear Batou, the inadequacies of human cognitive ability are the cause of reality's imperfection. Perfection is possible only for those without consciousness, or with infinite consciousness, in other words, dolls or gods.[viii]

Such sentiments were already presaged in the quotation that opens the film, taken from Villiers’s Future Eve: ‘If our gods and hopes are nothing but scientific phenomena, then it must be said that our love is scientific as well.’

The policemen are transported into a parallel realm where they revisit the entry into Kim's mansion. Still, now Togusa faces not Kim's marionette effigy but his mechanical doppelgänger, who begins to taunt him.

You doubt whether a creature that certainly appears to be alive is alive. Conversely, you doubt that a lifeless object might be alive. The eeriness of dolls comes solely from the fact that they are entirely modelled on human beings. They are nothing but human, really. They make us face the fear of being reduced to simple mechanisms and matter. In other words, they make us face the fear that, fundamentally, all humans belong to the void.

Science, seeking to unlock the secret of life, also brought about this fear. The notion that nature can be calculated inevitably leads to the conclusion that humans, too, can be reduced to basic mechanical parts.[ix]

After which the otherwise calm and composed Batou, extraordinarily, adds, ‘La Mettrie said that the human is a machine which winds its own springs. It is the living example of perpetual motion’. Kim continues:

The modern technologies of robotics and electronic neurology resurrected the eighteenth-century theory of man as a machine. From the time computers have made eternal memory possible, humans have pursued self-mechanization aggressively to expand the limits of their function. Determined to leave Darwinian natural selection behind, this human determination to beat evolutionary odds also reveals the desire to transcend nature, the very things that gave birth to humankind. The mirage of life, equipped with perfect hardware, is the very source of this nightmare.[x]

Togusa’s confrontation with his mechanically activated double recalls what Freud observes of the uncanny. It can be precipitated when 'what is human is perceived as merely mechanical' as when the body convulses from epilepsy or illness or the movements of somnambulism.

The obverse is just as true for automata since 'what is perceived as human is in fact mechanical'.[xi] The film ensures that these relationships remain tightly woven and therefore, wholly confounded.

More References: Hans Bellmer

When Batou infiltrates the Locus Solus ship, he is confronted with an army of gynoids that bear a startling resemblance to the Surrealist Hans Bellmer’s ball-jointed dolls, and how they break up and distort when fired upon confirms this.

The Doll. 1934. By Hans Bellmer. wikiart.org. https://www.wikiart.org/en/hans-bellmer/the-doll-1934

He then encounters a portion of Kusanagi’s ghost inhabiting one of the generics. She assists him in confronting another battery of dolls who continue to writhe and disarticulate as if in homage to Bellmer.

Bellmer’s presence throughout the movie is strong to the point of allegorical, with references that begin with the doll in the opening sequence that commits suicide by pulling out her own innards, a direct allusion to a drawing by Bellmer of a girl opening up her torso and staring at her innards.[xii]

In the course of his investigation, Batou chances upon a copy of Bellmer book, The Doll, which Steven Brown sees as an encounter that reveals the film very conceptual fulcrum:

By situating the holographic image of the missing girl inside the book of The Doll by Bellmer, Oshii provides us with a visual metaphor that anticipates Batou’s eventual discovery of the kidnapped girls held by Locus Solus for ghost-dubbing. In effect, just as Bellmer’s book on artificial dolls [sic] contains the simulacrum of the captive girl inside it, so too, the Locus Solus gynoids have been instilled with the simulacrum of the adolescent girls held captive. In this way, the reversibility of inside and outside that so deeply interested Bellmer is reenvisioned by Oshii to critique the anthropomorphization of gynoids and other robots. Why is it necessary to make robots in our own image? Is it possible to coexist with forms of artificial intelligence without forcing them into the human mould? [xiii]

For her part, Kusanagi only imperfectly inhabits the gynoid as the machines' capacity for data storage is commensurate to its designed intention. Yet, it is through this fractured habitation that Kusanagi finds some contentment.

Toward the end, they both stand in the manufacturing plant, and Kusanagi falls into a trance: 'If the dolls could speak no doubt they'd scream, "I don't want to become human!"' Batou: ‘Can I ask yourself a question? Do you consider yourself finally happy now?’ Kusanagi: ‘A nostalgic value I suppose; to be happy. At least I am free of dilemma now, and that’s nice.’

In the film’s conclusion, Batou and Togusa say their goodbyes in front of the latter's house. When Togusa’s daughter sees her father, she runs to him as he hands her his gift, a doll. A close-up of the doll's face is with a mixture of innocence and menace. Batou, holding his dog, his own doll but with more visible effect than he, stares impassively on. Fade out.[xiv]

Overview of the Two Films

While Oshii’s two films allow us to embrace in myriad ways the nature of the posthuman future, when the boundary between natural and artificial has eroded to the point of providing a new horizon for consciousness and of ontology itself, it does so making use of a welter of references that, among those not already mentioned, range from Confucius to Plato to Jacob Grimm. It also contains many allusions to the venerable history of Japan's mechanical dolls or mizukumi ningyo.[xv]

Whether or not the present cannot do without the past is one matter, but another is whether the human vs. human doll binary cannot be successfully united or resolved because it is tied in a fundamental agonism that has to do, as the films articulate, the second in particular, humanity's irresolute reaction to death, and the permeability of character, human nature and being.

As Kenneth Gross poetically and enigmatically puts it,

The story of puppets becomes the story of embodied souls and ensouled objects; it insists that our souls are never perfectly our own, as our bodies are never our own. Puppets are entities smaller and larger than any selves we think we know, selves capable of gaining life by giving themselves away. The blackness of the puppet is a blackness of the spirit that is also the blackness of matter, dead preserving moulded unlighted earth, the blackness of our interior selves, the black hole that is inside our skulls yet made part of the outside world.[xvi]

This is the allure and the terror of the doll. And perhaps the desire to become the doll is also the temptation to view the existential drama from the outside and grasp Friedrich Nietzsche’s ‘thought of thoughts’ about the finite minuteness of life, with the same mute equanimity as the puppet.

For it is the puppet who manages to maintain liveliness and deathliness at the very same time. To become the doll is to want to become both the exception and the rule, thereby defying the laws of biological origin or fate.

References:

[i] Baudrillard, ‘Transsexuality’, 24.

[ii] Ghost in the shell, dir. Mamoru Oshii, Production IG, 1995

[iii] For this etymology as well as an eloquent gloss of the mechanical bodies of Greek mythology, such as the forge of Hephaestus see Daniel Mendelsohn, ‘The Robots Are Winning’, The New York Review of Books, 4 June 2015, 51.

[iv] See also Steven Brown, ‘Mechanic Desires: Hans Bellmer’s Dolls and the Technological “Ghosts in the Shell 2: Innocence”’, Mechademia, 8, Limits of the Human, 2008, 224

[v] Ghost in the Shell II, dir. Mamoru Oshii, Production I.G./Studio Ghibli, 2004

[vi] Raymond Roussel, Locus Solus (1914), Paris: Gallimard, 1979.

[vii] S. Brown, ‘Mechanic Desires’, 227

[viii] Ghost in the Shell II.

[ix] Ibid.

[x] Ibid.

[xi] Sigmund Freud, ‘The Uncanny’, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. James Strachey et al., London: Hogarth, 1955,

17: 226-227.

[xii] S. Brown, ‘Mechanic Desires’, 239. For another analysis of the ghost in the Shell: 2 Innocence in light of Bellmer, see also Livia Monnet, 'Anatomy of Permutational Desire: Perversion in Hand Bellmer and Oshii Mamoru, Mechademia, 5, Fanthropologies, 2010, 285-309.

[xiii] Ibid., 242.

[xiv] Ibid.

[xv] S. Brown, ‘Mechanic Desires’, 230-231.

[xvi] Kenneth Gross, Puppet: An Essay in Uncanny Life, Chicago and London: Chicago U.P., 2011, 118-119.

Doll and the Soul: Ghost in the Shell