Most of the discussion before the release last weekend of Rupert Sanders’ live-action remake of Ghost in the Shell concerned the casting of Scarlett Johansson, who is white, to play Major, a character who was Japanese in the original manga and anime franchise. The optics of that decision fed into a long tradition of white actors playing Asian roles with results that range from cringeworthy minstrelsy to performances that raise questions about why Hollywood apparently can’t bothered to avail itself of the Asian and Asian American actors already doing great work in the industry.
It’s true both that these sorts of casting choices are a significant issue and that there’s slightly more to Johansson’s casting than simple dumbness (but only slightly more). And the strengths and weaknesses of Ghost in the Shell, depending on how you choose to prioritise the politics of casting, either precede or extend beyond the decision to put Johansson in this role.
There are at least four ways Ghost in the Shell, which does not have the same plot as the original animated movie, could have made a more serious attempt to equal the intellectual ambitions of its source material:
1. Make it about consent: One of the more interesting throughlines in Ghost in the Shell is the film’s emphasis on free will. Major believes for much of the movie that her brain was transplanted into her mechanised shell after a terrible accident and that the procedure was the only way to save her life. Whenever she goes in for maintenance with Dr Ouelet (Juliette Binoche), who performed the transplant procedure and who has come to see Major as a daughter, the doctor pauses to get Major’s consent if she has to make an alteration to Major’s data. But one of the more unnerving moments in the movie comes when Major learns that these ritual exchanges carry no power: Major can say yes, but not no.
Given how important discussions of consent are in so many areas of American life, from sex to the collection and sale of records of online activity, a movie about how consent is manufactured and manipulated, and what it means for it to be freely given, could have been rich and fascinating.
2. Explore the implications of the corporate capture of government: Some of the friction in Ghost in the Shell comes from the tension between Hanka Robotics, the company Dr Ouelet works for, and the government ministry for which Major works. The former, represented by Cutter (Peter Ferdinando), sees Major as an investment to be deployed as the corporation wishes and to be destroyed at will. Major’s colleagues in government, including her partner, Batou (Pilou Asbk), and her boss, Aramaki (Takeshi Kitano), see Major as a person. The struggle between these two positions becomes a debate over who really has control: Does the government have moral authority independent of Hanka’s wishes, or has Hanka captured the government so thoroughly that the two are inseparable?
Ghost in the Shell raises this question but doesn’t explore it beyond what’s necessary to set up some reasonably nifty action sequences. That’s too bad; science fiction has a long history of imagining what it might be like when corporations grow so large and powerful that they can effectively transcend or even eclipse the power of the state. Ghost in the Shell was greenlighted and went into production long before the presidential election, but with corporate power on the rise again in Washington, the movie is being released at a moment when those themes are highly relevant.
3. Take us through the city: After her brain is transplanted, Major loses many of her memories. The one idea from her past that she holds onto is the story Dr Ouelet has told her about how she came to undergo the surgery in the first place: Major believes that she and her family were refugees and that her parents were killed and her body was critically injured when the boat they were fleeing on was bombed by terrorists. There are so many potentially terrific things to explore even in the few brief sentences that sketch out this origin story: What is causing the present refugee crisis? Who are the terrorists attacking those refugees, and what are their motivations? What impact is mass migration having on the culture of the megacity where Major lives? The world of Ghost in the Shell is one of the movie’s biggest selling points, but the movie is so lean (something I normally think is a virtue in action movies) that it ends up with an unfortunate over-reliance on CGI to sketch in Major’s universe.
4. Examine the class politics of cybernetic enhancement: My absolute favourite part of Ghost in the Shell was the way the movie showed us the range of enhancements people have in a society where such modifications have become common, but very obviously come in different tiers and price points.
Major’s sleek shell and the blue mechanisms coursing through the skull of a representative of the African Federation are obviously top-of-the-line. The tactical robotic eyes Batou gets after his are damaged in a bombing are a step below — highly functional but less stylish. A bartender’s clanking robotic arm and the implant gashed into the temple of a hapless garbage man are working-class iterations of this technology, while the journeymen drilling into each other’s necks in a back room bar are at the lowest end of the spectrum. The body cobbled together by Kuze (Michael Pitt), a hacker who is Major’s target, has a kind of steam-punk beauty. Even a prostitute Major hires in an effort to learn more about what it might mean to feel human in one of the movie’s best sequences wears a cheap plastic mask so that she appears to be enhanced, even though she obviously can’t afford it.
I would love to see a whole movie about how these enhancements became common, how they affect society as a whole and the individual experience of that society, and what the breakthrough that is Major’s body and transplant means for society as a whole. Those questions probably aren’t the subject of an action blockbuster with a $110 million (Dh404 million) budget. But they would almost certainly be the subjects of a more interesting movie.
