Some months ago, I took a great number of hours and watched all the visual media (except for the recent VR Noh-inspired play, which I desperately want to see…) from the Ghost in the Shell franchise. It was a learning experience and I very sincerely intended to do the same thing with the manga.
I made my way through Ghost in the Shell, Ghost in the Shell 1.5 Human Error Processor, Ghost in the Shell 2 Man-Machine Interface, Ghost in the Shell Standalone Complex and Ghost in the Shell Global Neural Network (but not yet Ghost in the Shell The Human Algorithm) and find…that I cannot do the same for the manga. These links lead to Global Bookwalker for the purposes of today’s musings – it can’t really be considered a review of any of these books, it’s more like an overview of all of them.
I was going to do a deep dive, as I said, but almost immediately, it was obviously impossible. Despite the pretension to profundity, there is very little depth to any of the manga, as both plot and protagonist are forced to do spins and turns so we can see the sexy parts, without the qualities of a person – or narrative – that might make those parts sexy.
Shirow’s manga is not truly a narrative…or, if there is narrative, it’s only by accident. Technological innovation to some extent has rendered his notes ridiculous, but even by 1997, “external memory” was not a complicated idea and his notes serve to distract, rather than reinforce. They explain in excruciating detail things not shown, irrelevant to the story, or merely random off-shoots of his thought processes.
Overall, Shirow’s manga is a technical manual of Shirow’s internal world-building told while flashing us with a constant ass-crotch-tits sequence. It’s like trying to learn the quadratic equation with someone waving a porn magazine in your face. You can’t concentrate on either properly. The audience for all this was, clearly, people who were enamored with Shirow’s world-building and had little to no chance for sex and were therefore satisfied by the constant disruption of “Network” world-building to enable multiple angle panty shots.
Tezuka sometimes popped little SD characters up of himself to make comments in his manga – it worked for him, not so much for Shirow who, we are frequently told is a great artist, who should not do manga. I posit that he is neither a great artist (although he is a competent draftsman) nor a good story teller, but is instead merely an “idea guy” so enamored of his ideas, that he can’t stop getting in the way of the story to tell you about them.
After the initial volume of Ghost in the Shell manga Kusanagi is, like the lesbian sex scene in that original manga, entirely performative. She never exists, except as our impressions of her existence. These impressions are reinforced by the strictly story-telling aspects of Gits 1.5 Human Error Processor, reinforced by our memories of those specific episodes from the animation.
In GitS 2 Man-Machine Interface we can see that she is almost literally the only woman in the story, by virtue of being almost all the women in the story. In Standalone Complex, she is the sum of our memories of her, drawn by Kinutani Yu as a comic version of the television series. By the the time we reach Global Neural Network, we are seeing the memories of those impressions as their own stories…and, frankly, better for that than some of what passes for narrative in GitS 2.
The future in Ghost in the Shell is already obsolete. Cyborg body parts exist, and they get decked out with paint and stickers, our rainy neon-lit city streets are dystopian in multiple ways and also horrifically banal. We put on masks to block out a pandemic and facial recognition as we head out to get our fast food takeout and we’re bluetoothed into our podcasts, not wired through ports in our necks. Shirow’s network teeters precariously between being a religious philosophy and a technological phenomenon. The only thing he got right is the proliferation of dangerously absurd conspiracy theories.
The takeaway from the Ghost in the Shell manga is that we’re not going to get flying cars or peaceful utopian societies, but maybe we might at least hope for cuter tanks.
No Ratings
If Kusanagi’s cyborg body weighs so much that she’d sink in water or crush a car by landing on it, how does she wear high heels?
Saeki Sayaka would probably not, if you asked, consider herself nostalgic. Nor would she likely think of herself as capricious, I don’t think she’d go far as to say that she was any more logical than anyone else. I am confident, however, that she would agree that she is a thoughtful young lady, who considers her choices carefully…and considers the consequences of those choices very deeply.
The entire season is focused on Steven coming to grips with a future that he helped build, but which may not actually include him. Like every hero returning from their journey to the underworld, he’s paid a price and like all the heroes before him, that price is normality. Or…is it? Sure Frodo couldn’t stay in Hobbiton, but…he was oozing out of that place long before he left. We all do. I liked the community I grew up in, but I’ve never wanted to return. Part of growing up in the USA has traditionally been leaving your home behind. And just because you’ve returned from the heroes journey doesn’t have to mean you’re done. Maybe journeying is what you’ll always be doing, and maybe a hero could make an amazing psychopomp because they’ve been there and done that.
