Sunday, August 20, 2006

"If the dolls had voices they would have screamed, 'I didn't want to become human.'"


This is probably my favorite scene in GITS2. Not just because it's so damn pretty - when I first saw this scene, I was floored also by what it said about the central thought that the movie keeps hammering on. The thought of the first GITS (which I didn't really dig) was a kind of crossing of the line between the human and the artificial, where the human turns artificial (what is most essential about human beings becomes calculable and subject to alteration; the "ghost" can be hacked) and the artificial turns human (one of the humans' tools gains something like free will and decides that it wants to have "kids"). This isn't really something new, and in any case it's pulled off in a somewhat sloppy way - the movie is more or less structured as action scene --> talky scene --> action scene, and there's very little integration between the two.

Innocence is totally different. Far from there being more "transgression" (god, I wish I could go through the rest of my life without hearing that word again) of the line between human being and the artificial, at this point the line has for all intents and purposes disappeared. No more natural or unnatural, real or unreal. The movie constantly tries to pull the carpet out from under you on this - what looks like a regular conference between a group of people turns out to be a construct, what looks like a gunfight in a convenience store is actually a kind of psychological assault. Everything in the movie speaks towards absolute "subjectivity" and the total determination of everything in the world by technology. The beagle, for example, is completely adorable - and asking whether it's real or artificial in order to determine the beagle's "value" (so to speak), is no longer really possible.

And the height of all this is the scene linked above. Where is the true here? Where is the false? Not a trace of either to be found - just an extraordinary, terrible kind of beauty. If I can be forgiven some obscurity, this entire scene speaks to something Nietzsche once wrote: "Art is worth more than truth."

Ask me again about the ending later on, maybe I'll have understood it better by then. I have some grasp on it as it is, but it's going to take me some time to get it to a point of clarity.
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