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I I MJ TORONTO PRESS
THE CYBER SUBLIME AND THE VIRTUAL MIRROR: INFORMATION AND MEDIA IN THE
WORKS OF OSHII MAMORU AND KON SATOSHI
A uthor(s): WILLIAM O. GARDNER
Source: Revue Canadienne d'Études ciném atographiques / Canadian J o u rn a l o f Film
S tu d ie s , sp rin g ■ p rin te m p s 2009, Vol. 18, No. 1, A SPECIAL ISSUE ON CONTEMPORARY
JAPANESE CINEMA IN TRANSITION (spring ■ p rin te m p s 2009), pp. 44-70
Published by: U n iv e rsity o f T oronto Press
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WILLIAM O. GARDNER
Résumé: L'influence des médias et de l'informatique sur les sociétés humaines con-
stitue un des principaux thémes faconnant les stratégies visuelles et les orientations
philosophiques des animes de Oshii Mamoru et Kon Satoshi. L'analyse des Ghost in
the Shell et Innocence d'Oshii révéle ainsi que le développement d'une esthétique du
sublime cybernétique se trouve simultanément fondé sur un univers hiérarchique et
animé par un reve de transcendance. L'étude des films de Kon, tels Perfect Blue,
Millennium Actress et Paprika, dévoile quant á elle une approche tres différente des
questions de représentation : celle du « miroir virtuel ». Dans ces oeuvres, la réalité
quotidienne est saturée de portails ressemblant á des miroirs, et menant á des lieux
identitaires alternatifs oü l'on se préte á des jeux intersubjectifs ; des espaces non-
hiérarchiques qui, contrairement á la visión d'Oshii, suggérent une vue immanente
de l'univers.
ability to reproduce and die. Significantly, the merging with Kusanagi will not
result in the Puppet Master obtaining material form, but rather entails Kusanagi
giving up anything but provisional material embodiment, and, like the Puppet
Master, existing as a life form in the fluid realm of puré information.
In Ghost, I would argüe, there is a fundamental rift between the world of
humans (and cyborgs), which can be depicted on the screen, and the realm of puré
information, sometimes referred to as the Net, which is beyond depiction. Any
attempt to bridge this fundamental gap entails a certain awkwardness or even
violence in the film’s visual representation. For one example, we can recall the
cyborg data assistants that are used for Section 9, whose hands burst open to
reveal more fingers that are capable of typing on a Computer keyboard more rapidly
(fig. 1). On the one hand, it stretches credulity to imagine that a society as tech-
nologically advanced as that of Ghost would reinvent the hand to better intégrate
with the interface of the typewriter or Computer keyboard, rather than develop a
new interface altogether (in fact, other characters in the film jack straight in to
the Net through wires in their neck). However, in its very awkwardness, the
visión of the hands popping open to reveal more fingers effectively illustrates the
extremity of the gap between human and informational—and the imperative to
stretch or break the limits of human anatomy to try to bridge this gap. Indeed,
the flesh of humans and cyborgs is often breached or subjected to violence in
attempts to interface with the informational—whether the splitting apart of the
data assistants’ hands, Kusanagi’s jacking into the Net by plugging wires into
sockets at the nape of her neck, or the more severe tortures of her flesh as her
cyborg body is torn apart in the prolonged effort of reaching and diving into the
cyborg housing the Puppet Master during the climactic scene.
The world of the Net itself, in which the Puppet Master has been born, is
essentially beyond the reach of visual representation in the film. We are only
46 WILLIAM O. GARDNER
city. Nearly every frame of the sequence is packed with detail—countless layers
of the city extend from the canals to the heavens, and mysterious birdlike aircraft
float across the sky (foreshadowing the angelic visitation in the film’s climax, dis-
cussed below). Shop signs, advertisements, and posters cover many of the walls,
the Chinese characters extending vertically as well as horizontally in a complex
mesh (fig. 2). It is as if, in the richness of analog information presented in this
visión of the city streets, Oshii is hinting at the even richer and vaster realm of
digital information on the Net, transcending the watery human world.
In a different and more direct way, the city is employed as a visual figure
for the Net in the final scene of the film, in which Kusanagi, now having merged with
the Puppet Master and evolved into a higher being, leaves her Section 9 partner
Batou behind to embark on her new life. Departing from Batou’s hilltop safe-
house overlooking the city, Kusanagi walks out into the night, the vast bayside
city spread out beneath her, its streets and canals like capillaries through a dense
matrix of distant towering buildings backing into the ocean and clouds. Pausing
before this exhilarating vista to ask herself “where shall I go now?” Kusanagi
replies to her own question with her final Unes of the film: “the Net is vast” (netto
wa kodai da wa). In both the language and iconography of this scene, with its
solitary figure contemplating a vast landscape, Oshii invokes the aesthetic cate-
gory of the Sublime.4
From the late seventeenth century, philosophers and critics began to analyze the
Sublime not only as a rhetorical effect (as with Longinus, the first major theorist
of the Sublime) but as a category of aesthetic or emotional experience deriving
from the observation of natural phenomena as well as works of art and poetry.
48 WILLIAM O. GARDNER
50 WILLIAM O. CARONER
These basic iconographic features are also present in Innocence (Inosensu, 2004J,
Oshii’s sequel to Ghost in the Shell This film delves further into philosophical
questions surrounding cyborgs, pondering the meaning of human beings’
propensity to create copies of themselves, and comparing the relative ontologi-
cal status of cyborgs, dolls, and dogs (elaborating on the meditative scene in
Ghost described above, in which Kusanagi encounters her various doubles dur-
ing her passage down a New Port City canal). The film also presents breathtak-
ing cityscapes rich in detail and movement along the vertical as well as
horizontal axis, especially the giant, cathedral-like manufacturing outpost of
Locus Solus.
In the original Ghost in the Shell, there is a clear visual distinction between
the occasional digital displays representing Computer technology and the subtly
modulated, watercolor-like, “analog” background drawings. However, in
Innocence the landscapes, interiors, and other backgrounds are all recognizably
rendered through digital technology—only the human, cyborg, and animal char-
acters appear to be hand drawn. This decisión to use 3D Computer animation
represents more than a technical evolution in anime production between the
dates of the two films, and has significant aesthetic and thematic implications.
In contrast to Ghost, it seems as if the informational has pervaded and rendered
virtual the very fabric of life in the world of Innocence, and as the action moves
from New Port City to the Northern Frontier home of Locus Solus, this impres-
sion becomes even stronger. In particular, as the film’s protagonist Batou and his
partner Togusa venture into the baroque mansión of a corrupt hacker named
52 WILLIAM O. GARDNER
54 WILLIAM O. GARDNER
web diary’s existence, so both are naturally concerned about the intrusión of the
stranger’s gaze into the private realm of Mima’s real-world apartment.
Immediately after this scene, Mima is shown returning to her apartment, and she
pauses on the balcony to give a worried glance at the cityscape outside.
Threats to her private home space continué throughout the next scene, as
Mima receives a prank cali and a mysterious fax covered with the word “traitor”
(uragirimono) . Mima again peers anxiously out her window, and we are treated
to a reverse “camera” shot from outside her balcony, which rapidly zooms back-
ward into the city and away from the window and balcony, perhaps to reveal the
position of an unseen stalker who is observing her from afar. This shot is linked
to the next scene—the set of the televisión drama where Mima will appear as an
actress—by overdubbing the line of dialogue she is given to recite: “Who are
you?” (anata wa daré). This line can be taken to question both the identity of
her presumed stalker, and, as Susan Napier notes, her own identity as well.15
Some of this tensión regarding the invasión of Mima’s private space is momen-
tarily relieved later in the film when Mima discovers that “Mima’s Room” refers
to a seemingly harmless web diary that someone has established to chronicle
Mima’s life and singing career (fig. 5). As Mima reads the diary further, however,
she quickly discovers that private information—such as the Ítems she bought
earlier at the supermarket—as well as her “private” thoughts and feelings, are
also being uploaded mysteriously onto the site. This uncanny doubling of Mima’s
personal thoughts on a publicly accessibly website—outside of her own con-
scious agency—provides one of the film’s most disturbing moments.
In such ways, the membrane between private and public, inside and out
side, or self and non-self, grows increasing endangered and ambiguous as the
film progresses. In particular, the new public self that Mima, with the support of her
56 WILLIAM O. GARDNER
I will use the term Virtual Mirror to refer to the opening of heterogeneous space
in the fabric of base-line narrative reality—a space both personal and medial.
That is, to some extent this space is inhabited by the self-image or imaginative
world of a single individual, but to a significant extent it is also determined by
narratives, expectations, desires, and other psychological forces that are beyond
the control of the individual concerned. Furthermore, this heterogeneous space
provides a meeting point and site for interaction between the múltiple subjective
actors. The space is often opened by a mirror or other portal such as a door or
Computer screen, but in Kon’s later works, the space of the Virtual Mirror is
woven into the film’s diegetic space, even without the presence of such physical
portáis.
The space created by the operation of the Virtual Mirror in Kon’s work is
primarily a horizontal space. Mirrors, as well as other portáis or interfaces such
as Windows, doors, Computer screens, etc., are generally placed in or against a
wall and open up a new space along the horizontal axis. On the two-dimensional
film screen, this newly opened space may extend to the right or left of the screen
center, or it might create the appearance of additional depth within the viewing
frame, as with a mirror placed against a wall to the rear of the figures on screen.
However, with the exception of Paprika, the Virtual Mirror is unlikely to open
new spaces above or below the main plañe of action. On a metaphoric or meta-
physical level as well, this schema is in contrast to the emphasis on up/down
vertical space in Oshii’s works, which suggests heterogeneous planes of exis-
tence (i.e., a quotidian earthly realm and an otherworldly realm of information,
associated iconographically with the ocean or sky). The horizontal openings
depicted in Kon’s films through the operation of the Virtual Mirror suggest the
existence of a virtual dimensión that is densely, vertiginously interwoven with
the existence of humans in the quotidian world, rather than removed from it on
a fundamentally different metaphysical plañe.
Moreover, I would argüe that the emphasis on left-right or right-left move-
ment within Kon’s works further emphasizes the importance of the horizontal
dimensión, which is interwoven with the virtual space that I am referring to as
58 WILLIAM O. GARDNER
60 WILLIAM O. GARDNER
Similar formal devices are pursued in Kon’s televisión series Paranoia Agent,
which first aired on the Japanese cable channel Wowwow in 2004. This series
presents a series of interlinked stories about characters who are attacked by a
mysterious assailant named Shonen Bat (a teenager wearing in-line skates who
wields a golden baseball bat). Distinguished by its use of black humor, multifar-
ious narrative techniques, and a compelling cast of characters, Paranoia Agent is
perhaps the most revelatory work in Kon’s oeuvre in shedding light on his views
on contemporary society and media. Episode five of the series, “The Holy
Warrior,” offers an especially cióse parallel to the expository style of Millennium
Actress. In this episode, detectives Ikari Keiichi and Maniwa Mitsuhiro interró
gate a middle school student, Kozuka Makoto, who is suspected of being respon-
sible for the Shonen Bat attacks. In the interrogation room, the student launches
into an apparently delusional narrative about how he is actually a Holy Warrior
(seisenshi) on a mission to save the world from an evil presence named Gohma
(goma). According to this narrative, the various victims of the Shonen Bat attacks
were all manifestations of Gohma. As Kozuka begins his narrative, through a
series of fades and matching shots, we are shown both flashbacks of the “real”
incidents and visualizations of the suspect’s “Holy Warrior” narrative, which is
represented with múltiple allusions to the visual and narrative conventions of
anime and fantasy role-playing Computer games.
Just as the documentary filmmakers Tachibana and Ida in Millennium Actress
are literally “drawn into” (represented within the diegetic space of) Chiyoko’s
personal narrative, which becomes indistinguishably intertwined with her films,
so are Ikari and Maniwa drawn into Kozuka’s narrative, in which the “true” events
of the Shonen Bat assaults are intertwined with Kozuka’s fantasy of the “Holy
Warrior” role playing game. In both cases, one of the interrogators (Tachibana
or Maniwa) throws himself enthusiastically into this immersion in their inter-
locutor’s narrative, while another (Ida or Ikari) is more skeptical and resistant.
Still, whether enthusiastic or reluctant, both pairs of interrogators eventually
become pulled into the narrative. In this context, “drawing in,” “pulling in,” and
“sliding” can be seen as key effects in Kon’s works, not only with regard to visual
effects, but also with regard to the narrative, as characters are constantly pulled into
or slide into new realms by the seductive powers of narrative and imagination.
In using the televisión series format to present a series of linked narratives
62 WILLIAM O. CARONER
zontal axis of screen space. In Paprika, Kon accelerates this playful interweaving
of unexpected space, and extends it in all six directions—left and right, above and
below, and in front and behind the screen space. As the protagonists vigorously
explore the new worlds created by the merging of waking reality with múltiple
characters’ dreams, a myriad of trap doors, ladders, elevators, and freefalling leaps
whisk them to unexpected spaces above and below as well as to the left and right
of the screen’s frame. In some scenes, such as one that captures the vertiginous
swing of a circus trapeze, Kon’s film invokes the space in front of and behind the
screen (an effect that is especially pronounced when the film is viewed on the
“big screen” of a movie theater). Nevertheless, while the vertical dimensión is
plaited into the kinetic brocade of Paprika, Kon’s film does not invest it with a
hierarchical valué as in Oshii’s Ghost in the Shell, but simply extends the logic of
the Virtual Mirror into the vertical as well as the horizontal axis.
Within the lineage of Kon’s Virtual Mirror stories, the character of Chiba/
Paprika is an especially interesting one. Like other inhabitants of the Virtual
Mirror, Paprika has a dual nature as both personal and medial. On the one hand
she is the avatar or alter-ego of Chiba; unlike the rather stern and restrained psy-
chologist, who is often shown walking solidly on the ground, the playful Paprika
seems to embody movement—running or flying in all directions, in some cases
soaring on a cloud or fluttering with Tinkerbell-like wings—seemingly free to
explore Chiba’s every repressed impulse. On the other hand, as the image of Chiba
who appears in the dreams of the male characters who surround her, she appears
to be the very embodiment of their desires—constantly retailored according to the
fetishes of the male character controlling the dream sequence, and appearing in
a variety of guises evoking the “cute” and widely fetishized heroines of Disney
animation and Japanese anime (fig. 8). In this respect, Paprika is an entity much
64 WILLIAM O. GARDNER
CONCLUSION
Unlike Perfect Blne’s Mima or the troubled characters of Paranoia Agent—or even
the blithe Chiyoko from Millenninm Actress, who seems satisfied merely with the
“sliding” sensation of movement through the Virtual Mirror—Chiba is able to
tactically master the realm of the Virtual Mirror and successfully intégrate that
experience into her personality in the “real world.” However, while this may sug-
gest a formula for growth or empowerment, it is not a narrative of transcendence
equivalent to that achieved by Ghost in the Shells Kusanagi. Indeed, as surely as
Oshii’s vertically oriented cosmology is invested in the dream of transcendence,
Kon’s horizontally oriented universe is committed to a visual and narrative elab-
oration of immanence.21 The experiences of the Virtual Mirror—those narrative
episodes which are dreams, delusions, expressions of altérnate identities, role-
playing games and Computer simulations—are not removed from the level of
physical reality. Physical reality cannot be separated from the mind (ñor can one
be subordinated to the other); the individual self cannot be separated from inter-
subjective forces; the natural cannot be separated from the technological. Rather,
each of these elements is immanent in the other, and their interplay comprises
the complex weave of Kon’s fictional world.
66 WILLIAM O. GARDNER
NOTES
1. For the seminal model of digitally encoded information transmission, see Claude E.
Shannon, "A Mathematical Theory of Communication," originally published in The Bell
System Technical Journal vol. 27 (July, October 1948): 379-423, 623-656. Archived at
http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/ms/what/shannonday/shannon 1948.pdf (accessed 15
November 2008). On the concept of meaningful difference, or "a difference that makes
a difference," see Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press), 457-459. Regarding the vast amounts of information stored through con
temporary digital technology, the pocket-sized Apple ¡Phone made available in June
2007 could store up to 8 gigabytes of information, or 64 billion bits, the smallest unit in
digital information theory representing a meaningful difference of 1 or O in the binary
numeral system. As a Communications device, of course, the ¡Phone can readily access
even more vast networks of stored and transmitted information.
2. In this essay, I am using revised Hepburn romanization except in a few cases, such as
when an author has a preferred non-standard romanization for his ñame, as with Shirow
Masamune (Shiro Masamune), or when there is a commonly accepted romanization
within the English-Language critical and fan community, such as the character Batou
(Bato) from Ghost in the Shell.
3. While making it clear that this is only a matter of convenience, the Computer scientists
and government officials who created the Puppet Master program, originally for the pur-
poses of cyber-espionage, refer to the Puppet Master with the male pronoun. Although
the Puppet Master borrows a female cyborg body to materialize in New Port City, its
male voice in the film, as well as its role in proposing reproductive marriage to Kusanagi,
also seem to mark its gender as male.
4. The iconography of the scene, featuring an individual on a hilltop or promontory over-
looking a vast landscape, identifies it with such Romantic paintings as Casper David
Friedrich's Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog (Der Wanderer über dem Nebelmee, 1818),
which are closely identified with the development and popularization of the sublime
aesthetic. Livia Monnet has also discussed the sublime aesthetic in Ghost in the Shell in
her article "Towards the feminine sublime, or the story of 'a twinkling monad, shape-
shifting across dimensión': intermediality, fantasy, and special effects in cyberpunk film
and a n im a t io n Japan Forum 14.2 (2002): 225-268.
68 WILLIAM O. CARONER
70 WILLIAM O. GARDNER