A Gen X Guide to Ghost in the Shell

If you’re an American over the age of 35 with any sense of the personality of Major Motoko Kusanagi, protagonist of the Ghost in the Shell franchise, your mental image almost certainly comes from Director Mamoru Oshii’s 1995 animated feature film. That version of the character Motoko bears little resemblance to Motoko Kusanagi of Masamune Shirow’s original GitS manga.

I first encountered Oshii’s film on VHS — Japanese dialog, English subtitles — as a philosophy grad student who’d lived in Japan twice and was convinced that strong AI was just about to walk through the door of history, just as soon as the technical wiz kids played out the necessary formality of actually inventing it. Ghost in the Shell, being a Japanese tale of cyborgs, brain-hacking, and spontaneously emergent network intelligence, was right up my alley.

Then Dark Horse Comics published an English translation of the original manga. Visually, the Motoko Kusanagi of the comic is recognizably the same character as the film’s protagonist, but their personalities are like night and day — the film’s Motoko presenting as the morose, cyberpunk night to manga Motoko’s bright and vibrant day.

The original comic is bonkers. It mixes Byzantine geopolitics, philosophy of mind, gear porn, fourth wall breaks, technical notes, slapstick humor and egregious pin-up eye candy, sometimes all on a single page. While the film’s Motoko seems to exist in a perpetual, unblinking fugue state of world weariness and self-doubt, the manga Motoko is brash, irreverent, and vivacious. She has a boyfriend and a social life outside of work, and the one time someone mistakes her for a robot, she flips them the middle finger.

Masamune’s art style shifts from stylized realistic anatomy when he wants to leer at Motoko’s breasts-he’s definitely a boob man-to simplistic “chibi” cartoon illustrations in humorous moments or when she gets angry. A stylistically faithful adaptation of the original manga would look more like K-Pop Demon Hunters than like Blade Runner.

Both comic and movie take place in 2029, but the setting of the comic is replete with exotic technology. The world of the movie is much more grounded in real world aesthetics. In addition to Motoko’s human and cyborg team members, spider-shaped, robotic mini-tanks called Fuchikomas are central to her adventures in the comics.

The movie nods to the spider form in Motoko’s final battle with a walking tank in the deserted science museum, but where that tank is menacing and devoid of personality, the Fuchikomas have bright, child-like personalities and idiosyncratic obsessions that they can’t stop chattering about. They can operate independently or be driven by a human occupant. The brooding Motoko of the movie would have had a hard time keeping up her perpetual ennui with the Fuchikomas scampering around.

Shirow Masamune, the writer and illustrator of the original Ghost in the Shell manga was born in 1961. Mamoru Oshii, the director of the 1995 film adaptation was born a decade earlier in 1951. In Western generational terms, we’d call them both Boomers, but American generational archetypes don’t map cleanly onto their Japanese counterparts.

Like the US, Japan experienced a post-war baby boom, but their baby boom generation, the Dankai no Sedai, consists of people born in a short two-year period (1947–1949) immediately following the end of the war. The US Baby Boom generation consists of people born between 1946 and 1964, a much longer period.

The USA was the only industrial powerhouse nation standing untouched at the end of World War II. Japan lay in utter devastation. The nation would rise to commanding economic heights over the next few decades, but in the immediate aftermath of the war, conditions were unspeakably austere.

Born in 1961, Shirow Masamune (pen name for Masanori Ōta) is a member of the Shinjinrui (New Breed) Generation. Born in the 60s, they came of age in the 1980s and never knew the post-war hardships that shaped the Japanese work ethic and company loyalty. The Shinjinrui archetype focused more on individual expression and personal interest. They were the first generation who took television in the home for granted, and they could afford to occupy themselves with fashion, travel and consumption during Japan’s economic boom in the 1980s. Every generation contains a mix of personality types, but it’s in keeping with the Shinjinrui archetype for Shirow’s manga to flit from one obsession to another without fear of clashing tones or seeming unserious.

Born in 1951, Mamoru Oshii is among the earliest of Japan’s Danso (fault line or wedge) Generation. They were the bridge between the prior Danko generation, whose memory of post-war austerity gave rise to a fervent devotion to their corporate employers, and the later Shinjinrui generation, born just in time to come of age at the apex of Japan’s economic trajectory.

Early Dansos like Oshii retained much of the dedication to the lifetime employment covenant between Japan’s salarymen and its corporations, regarding it as the key to Japan’s sustained economic dynamism. For all of Oshii’s life, that cultural compact coincided with GDP growth and rising standards of living.

Then, in 1990–1991, a speculative real estate bubble burst, ushering in a prolonged period of stagnation known as Japan’s “Lost Decade.” The country remained orderly and prosperous by global standards, but the triumphalism of the 1980s had given way to shock, disillusionment and self-doubt.

Where the younger Shirow conceived of Ghost in the Shell in the high-flying 1980s after the personal success of his previous Appleseed stories, it stands to reason that Oshii would bring a darker, more serious tone to his version of Ghost in the Shell. Where the manga embodied the manic exuberance of the pinnacle of the Japanese economic miracle, GitS’s most significant adaptation embodied the dejected spirit of Japan’s Lost Decade.

The narratives of Shirow’s manga and Oshii’s 1995 movie start in the same place, with Motoko using her thermo-optic camouflage and superhuman physicality to assassinate a diplomat and prevent him transporting a defecting hacker out of Japan. If you’ve never seen the film, you’ve almost certainly seen the image: Motoko atop a skyscraper at night, stripping off her coat to reveal her skin-tight camouflage suit, then leaning forward and stepping off the edge into the dark. In both versions she’s not fighting to defend her nation or stop an obvious crime. She’s a dispassionate paramilitary operative intervening in an internecine power struggle.

The movie maintains the complex intrigue of the manga throughout. It doesn’t spoonfeed details or hold the viewer’s hand. People who saw it in the theater probably came away from their first viewing with iconic visuals and the noir vibe but no clear understanding of the plot. The internet of the mid 90s was not the comprehensive and searchable repository of cultural memory that it is today. Google didn’t exist at the time, and a comprehensive plot summary wasn’t an easy web search away. I put the plot details together over several repeat viewings of my VHS copy.

Oshii kept the characters recognizable and stuck to the overall plot of the manga and incorporated some visual elements directly from the comic, but his generation perspective shows in how he transformed the character motivations, setting, and tone. Many of the most iconic Ghost in the Shell moments, like Motoko ripping off her own arms as she tries to open the top hatch of the walking tank, were original inventions for the 1995 movie.

Having acknowledged the faithful elements of Oshii’s adaptation, the differences are enormous.

After the assasination scene, the movie then moves on to Motoko’s team reporting to Aramaki, the head of the nebulous Section 9. The Foreign Minister’s translator has fallen victim to cyber-brain hacking, and Motoko and Batou, a senior member of her team, respond to Aramaki’s summons as if he is their boss.

In the manga, by contrast, after the opening assassination, we find Motoko and her team-including their Fuchikomi spider tanks-sitting under cherry trees in bloom, drinking saki at what she calls a “round-the-clock cherry blossom viewing party.” In fact, she’s leading her people in a work stoppage until she secures a lavish budget expansion for her team

.When Aramaki calls her and tells her that it’s time to get back to work, she responds, “‘Work?’ What’s that?” Even after they confirm that their new budget has been approved, Motoko and Batou discuss how to proceed without their team getting permanently incorporated into Aramaki’s Section 9.

Oshii’s Kusanagi reports to work without comment or delay. Masamune’s version of the character makes sure that work will proceed under terms that maintain her independence.

In both the comic and the movie, Motoko and Batou are both “full body replacement cyborgs,” but as far as I know, neither manga nor movie ever spells out exactly what that means. In the comics, Motoko drinks alcohol, takes drugs, has sex and at one point attributes the noise in her brain during a cybernetic conference with her team to being on her period.

In the movie, we see the construction of her cyborg body, and it is clearly robotic from her metal skeleton out to her synthetic skin. We get a clear view of her crotch as her synthetic body is nearing completion. She has no genitals. Perhaps this isn’t meant to be taken literally, but in a work of hand-drawn animation, every frame is a deliberate choice. Oshii didn’t have to give us that view. Motoko’s blank doll-like blank public area didn’t rotate into frame by accident.

In the comic, Shirow lavishes attention on Motoko’s body and on the body of the ubiquitous “gynoids” that populate his setting, offering no coy denials about the purpose of those images. Oshii shows us the assembly of her mechanical body, her shell, in the title sequence of the movie. Her proportions are realistic, her face androgynous and devoid of affect. She may be naked, but the clinical presentation defuses any potential erotic charge.

In the Ghost in the Shell manga, Motoko arranges to spend her downtime from work in a drug-fueled, lesbian orgy on what seems to be a sailboat in full daylight. ( Link to NSFW image.) In a manga that is often dense with information-bearing text, the author devotes two pages to gratuitous voyeuristic indulgence. The scene cross-cuts to Batou lying in the shrubbery outside an expensive home spying on a foreign military dictator seeking asylum in Japan. Aramaki approaches Batou and instructs him to contact Motoko via their encrypted channel. Batou objects that the Major is on R&R, but Aramaki insists. Batou makes the cyberbrain connection and shares Motoko’s experience. He tells her that she’s needed at work, and some unexplained protocol locks out the effects of the drug Motoko has taken and shuts down the VR simulation of the sailboat setting. We see that she and her two friends are fully dressed and lying on cushions with cables running from a central console to their heads. Motoko switches from sexual ecstasy to work mode without any hint of embarrassment, much to the annoyance of her two girlfriends.

There’s a scene in Oshii’s film adaptation that feels like the deliberate counter to the VR orgy scene. It also takes place on a boat. Movie Motoko seems to have no social life outside of work, but she does have one hobby. Scuba diving. She is dependent on special floatation gear to keep her heavy cyborg body from sinking to the bottom of the bay. When she resurfaces, Batou is waiting for her on the dive boat. She goes to change out of her wetsuit and turns away from Batou to remove it. Batou, still uncomfortable with that level of exposure, averts his gaze.

He asks her why she risks death in this fashion and it is the start of a philosophical conversation in which Motoko articulates her identity anxieties. She worries that with her full-body replacement, there’s nothing left of the original woman.

In the film, Motoko and Batou share a deeper intimacy than their manga counterparts do, but there’s a careful tenderness to it that respects a vulnerability that Shirow’s manga Motoko lacks. Oshii shows us two people who clearly care about each other maintaining careful boundaries around the body even while discussing the deepest questions of identity and mortality.

The manga featured artificially intelligent robots that could operate independently but also acted as a cross between a motorcycle and battle armor for Motoko and her crew. In the manga, they were called Fuchikomas. They weren’t just autonomous, but they had personality quirks. One of Mamoru Oshii’s first and most impactful creative decisions was to remove them from his film. Motoko and her team would get around in cars, vans and the occasional helicopter. Part of the movie involves the spontaneous emergence of artificial consciousness in the internet, and that plot point would lack punch in a world where sophisticated AI was already ubiquitous. This one change dialed down the technological nature of the manga setting and amplified the Blade Runner-style techno noir aspect of the film.

Born in 1968, I was in my 20s for all but the last couple of years of the 1990s. One wears one’s generational assignment for life, but the meaning of it changes over time. When I was young, the world revolved around the Baby Boomers. You could say that it still does in some respects, but these days, it’s fashionable to rag on the Boomers. When I was a young adult, advertisers and industry pandered to and flattered the Boomers and indulged the notion of the Gen X Slacker archetype as an explanation for why the generation to follow the Boomers weren’t replicating their material achievements.

The real explanation looks more like this:

From the end of World War II through the 1960s, productivity and worker compensation grew in near lockstep. Thereafter, they diverged with the wealth generated by productivity advances flowing to the top income and wealth brackets. The split was gradual at first, but by the 90s the people were starting to notice the generational disparities in outcomes.

William Strauss and Neil Howe, authors of ***The Fourth Turning***, identified Generation X as this cycle’s Nomad generation, the generation that is born into the high of the civilizational cycle and spends their young adult and middle years in its unraveling. That meant that we were skeptical of authority, ill-inclined to invest our identity in Establishment organizations and narratives, somewhat cynical and detached but also resilient and self-reliant.

In the West, Generation X lived in and adapted to an environment of gradual economic deterioration. We didn’t do as well as previous generations, and they blamed us for it, but Generation X still showed up to do what was expected of us.

For most generations, the iconic expressions of pop culture, from music to books, film, and later video games, are produced by members of the previous generation. Boomer artists created the media that Generation X associates with their youth.

Japan’s trajectory was different. Where the post-war years saw an unprecedented expansion of shared material prosperity in the US, times were hard in Japan for a while before they too experienced an economic transformation that raised living standards at all levels of society. That shared prosperity peaked and started to disintegrate in America while it kept growing in Japan. Then, in 1990, the Japanese prosperity machine took a massive hit. Men of Mamoru Oshii’s generation who experienced a lifetime of rising expectations were shocked out of their faith in the narrational narrative. The 1995 Ghost in the Shell movie can be seen as an expression of that wounded faith.

At the time, in my late 20s, it read as cool. Looking back on it now, it seems self-indulgently morose.

But still cool as hell.

Originally published at https://kmoptimal.substack.com.