Ghost In the Shell Narrative – Short Writing #2
Gender Construction and Societal Implications
In the film, Ghost In the Shell, the idea of “the self,” is thoroughly examined as the main character, Major Kusanagi, battles to define who and what she is or is not, while also dealing with the conflicts that plague her identity: character vs. self, man, society, and machine. While the film as a narrative lacks coherence, it holds fidelity in understanding the moral implications that riddle the story’s foundation. In Ghost In the Shell, Haraway and Silvio’s ideas that society constructs the elements of gender, are depicted accurately in the intimate construction of characters, including Major Kusanagi and Batou, while in a modern society, one struggles to define originality within the self when being besieged by societally and technologically manufactured ideas pertaining to sex, gender, and formal identity. Can a post gender, post-modernistic world truly exist?
In contemplating the feminine and masculine roles that society dictates so clearly, one can’t help but notice something said by one of the commanders talking to the Major in the opening scenes of Ghost In the Shell. He says to her, “What’s with the noise in your brain today?” Her response, “It must be a loose wire.” This is an obvious comment to the way women’s thoughts are viewed by a masculine world and how it is acceptable for a man to speak to a woman in that way. It is doubtful he would have addressed such a question to a male colleague. In a patriarchal society, men thought women to have unorganized, meaningless thoughts, preferring them to be quiet, and this is how the comment made by the commander can be looked upon. The simple fact that she has a lot on her mind, and those thoughts could be heard in the film rather than them remaining silent, indicates that in a man’s opinion there is too much going on in her female brain. Haraway states, “The cyborg is a kind of disassembled and reassembled, postmodern, collective and personal self. This is the self that feminists must code” (205). This thematic element is highlighted throughout Ghost In the Shell, as the cyborgs, Major, and Batou, seem to be exactly that. Major doubts herself, her existence, her relevance, and her validity in a scene where she is on a boat tossing back beers with Batou and they are discussing this exact premise. Haraway also makes the statement “…gender, race, and class cannot provide the basis for belief in the ‘essential’ unity. There is nothing about being ‘female’ that naturally binds women” (197). This ideology lends truth to the argument that gender roles are socially constructed as in the scene mentioned previously, Major, who is a source of knowledge and power in the narrative and also holds a masculine position in her career, is sitting on a boat drinking beer with a male coworker. This seems like something that would be a “manly” endeavor, yet in the film it is marked with a female shell. Here lie some examples as to how the coherence of the film as a narrative did not hang together in a very constructive way. Seeing as how the film was based on animated cyborgs fighting a technological crime, it is obviously far fetched. The underlying theme of sexism, reliance on technology, and fabricated gender roles does hide underneath the fiction, just not on the surface.
As far as the fidelity behind the ideas that emerge in Ghost In the Shell, they ring true as there are good reasons to understand the moral implications that are conveyed in the story. A cyborg is attempting to defend something they believe in, to fight for their survival, only to see in the end that what they were fighting may have been what they were actually seeking all along. There is substantial value in the messages in the film and also in Silvio’s writing. He makes a good argument to the role society plays in establishing gender roles and sexism by making clear that the film challenges the traditional role of feminism by depicting the extremes of both the masculine and feminine qualities in Batou and in Major. By the end of the film, Major is less confined to her identity and eventually lets it go completely, while Batou takes the risk of offering what he has to give to Major-although she does not accept. She speaks of the “sense of me,” which confines her within a set of limits she is not comfortable with in the beginning of the movie and also struggles with until the end. At that point in Ghost In the Shell, Major is left with no specific role or identity, only the “self” that most struggle to identify with in reality, truly lending the narrative fidelity and truth. She leaves behind the shell and the function it served to progress to a post gender, postmodern world with an understanding of her innate qualities as well as the social ideology defining gender. It is typically not that simple in the “real world,” but more social implications define that simplicity.
As a culture, the masses mostly depend on society to give instruction or to encourage direction in order to gain acceptance. Social construction defines the identities that most harbor to be their own, original selves, and society depends on technology and outsourcing of information to define everything else that is seen as culturally relevant. Haraway, Silvio, and Ghost In the Shell, confront the argument that gender roles are constructed, thus making it impossible to find a genuine, original self without the weight of normative societal construction manufactured by technology weighing down on a sole identity. This idea thereby makes all who exist in society cyborgs-humans who act as robotic offspring to the overload of information available at their fingertips and the wealth of superficial ideas behind what it means to be masculine or feminine.
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