Tuesday, May 10, 2005

I'm horrible
I wrote all this, intending to send it to my teacher because Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex (that's an anime, HELLO!) has a lot of references to Catcher in the Rye which we're reading right now. But as I went along with my writing, it got more crazy, and is not exactly something you send to your teacher. Having no where to put it, you all get to learn about the references to CitR in GitS: STA! XD


There’s one anime movie in particular, called “Ghost in the Shell” which came out in 1995. There’s also a TV series that goes with it called “Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex.” It has to do with the future, and cyberbrains, where all your memories & experiences are kept in a digital format & can be transferred from person to person, and all that stuff. Very cyberpunk-ish.

In Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, there are some episodes that can be viewed by themselves, but there’s others that have a plot running through them, which is the main plot of the whole thing.

It starts with this mystery hacker that never called himself this, but the media dubbed him “The Laughing Man.” He was first introduced when he attempted a kidnapping/shooting, purposely, right in front of a TV camera. He was crazy, saying stuff like “you’ll never get away with it” blah blah blah. Then, the main characters work backwards to uncover the story behind the Laughing Man.

Basically, it’s this: There’s a disease of cyberbrains (along with many others, I’m sure) called “Cyberbrain sclerosis.” The main method of treatment is Micro Machines (not as corny as it sounds, I swear). But, it doesn’t work as nearly as well as something called the “Murai Vaccine.” The food & drug council in Japan vetoed the approval of the Murai Vaccine at first, even though it was more effective than Micro Machines. It later let it be used in extreme cases, but it’s not well known. Micro Machines was pushed for because of some political corruption.

The main purpose of the Laughing Man was that he was trying to bring attention to this scandal/fix it. But people in general are silly and dumb, and never bothered to really investigate his purpose. The main characters, working for “section 9” of the government that technically doesn’t exist, are working to figure it out.

The funny thing is, the Laughing Man has a lot of references to Catcher In the Rye. For one, when the Laughing Man is first on TV, well, at first he’s wearing a hat and a coat with a really high collar, so ho one can see what he looks like. But because he’s that crazy hacker, he hacks into the TV’s system and broadcasts an image that goes over his face. This: http://www.kde-look.org/content/pre1/19477-1.png
is a picture of what it says. Did you catch the Catcher reference? Holden says the same thing in chapter 25, when he’s thinking about running away, to the west.

At the very last episode, the Laughing Man is talking to the head of the unit that figured the whole thing out, in his library (yeah, he maintains an obsolete paper & ink library in the age of digital data). And he keeps quoting all these people, and she picked up on the references. At one point, he says “The world is full of phonies.” I don’t know where exactly Holden says that in the book, but he says it, of course.

Holden and the Laughing Man are somewhat in common. The best way that this has been summed up is on a website (http://www.destroy-all-monsters.com/sacepisodeguide.shtml), so I’m quoting directly from it. “The book's protagonist, Holden Caulfield, has come to represent a sort of archetypical individualism, which may be mirrored in the Laughing Man's actions. Perhaps the Laughing Man is acting out against the conformity of the society in which he lives, much as Holden Caulfield did in Salinger's book.”

J.D. Salinger also wrote a short story for the New Yorker, on March 19, 1949. And, of course, it’s called “The Laughing Man.” You can read a copy of it at this website: http://www.freeweb.hu/tchl/salinger/laughingman.html


*Grins* That’s all from insane Roxanne. It’s okay. I’m not done with my HW yet, but all I have is a worksheet, a thought-response for history & to read the preface of a book for history about the 54th black Regiment in the Civil War.

If I hadn’t typed all this up, I could have been reading Last of the Mohicans but I’m too stupid and horrible to do that. GRRRR. *is angry with self*