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Brain Diving - Short Term Memory

I can't claim that I get GitS. I think I've started the movie 3 times without watching the whole thing.

It'd also be great if Brian could give us a broad overview of the field in terms of who the major players are, where things get published, and what sorts of things people are studying. But I guess that's sort of the point of the column.

I've only watched the first movie, though I've seen it twice -- once about 10 years ago, and then again a couple months ago. I don't remember what my first impression was anymore, but my recent impression is much like my impression of other Oshii films (Sky Crawlers, Patlabor): amazing visuals, great core philosophical ideas, and vast frontiers of nothing much happening. That last part may be an Eastern cultural sensibility though, an appreciation of space and openness?

The way I interpreted both Ghost in the Shell and The Sky Crawlers was that Oshii was trying to recreate the emotional states of the characters in the audience - except instead of doing it by having the characters be very expressive and relateable, he does it through pacing, music, and atmosphere. ...

Of course, this is just my opinion, and I have no idea if it remotely reflects Oshii's artistic intent, but I like it and I'm sticking to it.

...instead of doing it by having the characters be very expressive and relateable, he does it through pacing, music, and atmosphere. It's a different approach, and I like it, as well as Oshii's gift of evocative imagery.

The Sky Crawlers is very slowly paced with "vast frontiers of nothing much happening" to represent the limbo of fighting in an endless war.

On the other hand, I feel like the rambling, long-winded dialogue he writes doesn't actually say that much ...

... it's hard to judge what regular people do.

For instance, how do you administer an exam to students when they literally have computers in their heads? Do they know the information, or was it stored on a hard drive?

but he holds so much promise for me, and his storytelling is so inline with my own worldview that i keep ... hoping.

I always wondered why the fans had such a hard time translating Tsubasa: Reservoir Chronicles so it's interesting to hear that CLAMP was messing around with the language as well as everything else. Now that I know that's even possible in Japanese it would be cool to see other manga-ka do it for all sorts of weird interpretation.

gartholamundi wrote:

but he holds so much promise for me, and his storytelling is so inline with my own worldview that i keep ... hoping.

If you are not averse to sharing it, might I ask what this worldview involves? More relevantly, how might it be compared to Oshii's storytelling, as opposed to the content of the premises implicit in several of his films?

It seems somewhat odd, prima facie, to suggest that a set of beliefs and practices can be markedly similar to a manner of expounding a fiction. The two things — in the broadest sense of the term "thing" — seem to be of quite dissimilar sorts.

I wrote a paper a couple of months ago examining the nature of reflection as a means of examining reality versus the vision of reality we produce in our minds. In that sense, the body become even less important, literally vanishing in many scenes of the movie. We know that it's there, particularly in the water fight scene where Kusanagi's shadow is clear even. Here the body is only seen through the unforgiving reflection of reality in the water, whereas without this reflection (i.e. through the viewer's eyes) the character's form has effectively vanished. One could argue, as has been done above, that this is due to the irrelevance of the body due to its mechanic and inhuman nature.

I wrote another paper that deals with how the technique is used across 6 different manga magazines (each in a different genre and totaling 123 different works), if anyone's interested.

THAT is a fascinating way of seeing it. Is your reflection paper available to read online?

I'm reminded of the 1-minute long Satoshi Kon video where the woman wakes up "twice" in the morning and ends up looking into the mirror before saying "hello." (I saw it for the first time earlier this week and it keeps "echoing" in my waking consciousness.) There's a way of viewing that piece in which we can then imagine our own lives are full of the "ghosts" (or reflections) of ourselves at earlier times.

An example with clear boundaries might be how we perceive ourselves at various ages -- those being one type of "ghost" self, or another example might be how people sometimes think and feel differently about themselves before and after a traumatic event. Afterwards the earlier version of the self is like an echo or reflection inside the new or current self, but the current self may feel very different or even alienated from the earlier self after the trauma. (A victim of extreme violence, say, may feel the person they were before was naive, yet the "naive self" is still a part of the current one.)