Talking anime | Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, "Android and I"
the past is present and present a memory
A common refrain about science fiction is that the genre isn’t a glimpse into the future, but a way to reflect the present. And of course it’s true, it’s true of all fiction on some level—what can any of us do but write about the present, really?—but sometimes I find myself thinking that it isn’t. Sometimes I think sci-fi isn’t about the future or the present or even the past, but rather the way it’s all the same, the circular stasis we live in, how we collectively can’t help repeating ourselves. Even in the far flung future with hyper space travel, cybernetics and autonomous robots, it’s all still the present and it’s all still the past.
Or is it?
Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, the tv anime reinterpretation of the ever mutating sci-fi franchise which follows the secretive Section 6 handling Japan’s trickiest cyberpunk crimes, is A Lot™. Each and every episode of the delightfully abbreviated SAC is a dense bomb of detail and idea, classically hard sci-fi turning theory into a vehicle for emotional expression as the skeleton of a grungy action thriller is used to build this increasingly complex interrogation of identity and body and soul. It’s a masterpiece of the genre and astonishingly prescient to boot, these stories written more than twenty years ago as reactions to their times now manifested as reflections of today.
To see SAC’s twisty relationship with the self, you hardly have to look any further than the third episode.
“Android and I” is about a man who loves movies. They are everything to him, a way to understand the world, to make sense of relationships. They are a guide and a model to living, the answer to all those questions without any. In an age of hyper real VR, holograms and replacement eyes to augment the world, he still has a projector, still has ancient film reels in ancient silver tins, taped and sharpie‘d with names long forgotten.
This is a man in the future stuck in the present and trapped in the past. But for him, the past isn’t even the past, not really. It’s a movie. It’s fiction. It’s a lie.
One of the most uniquely defining features of us humans is our rabid dedication to protecting memories by turning them physical. We write diaries, we type books, snap photos to print and film video to upload, we press flowers we think are pretty and use science to capture smells, mummify our kings and stuff our pets so they can remain with us forever. To be human is to believe that merely remembering isn’t enough. We need our past to be real, to be able to hold it in our arms; touch it, feel it, believe it is as much a person as us.
It’s tricky then, that so many of our memories aren’t real.
We’re all like the man in “Android and I” on some level or another. Who hasn’t confused a dream with a memory? Is that all that different from mistaking a film with a memory? Who hasn’t exaggerated a story of their past so often that they forget the truth (as much as the truth can exist in memories) and begin to believe their own lie? Who hasn’t gotten the names of actors mixed up with their characters or the other way around? With the ever increasing abstraction of time, all stories eventually turn into memories and all memories stories. It’s all so confused, the distinction vague.
Just look at me: my life is impossibly entangled with fiction. I’ve spent I don’t even want to know what percentage of my existence engaging with fictions. I remember watching a film, I associate moments in life with songs, emotions with poems. I, like all of us, talk about games in the first person as if I'm the one really doing them. I learn new things and try new experiences because of stories and sometimes yeah, I might even think I did something that I only ever read in a book.
But you know, it all feels more extreme somehow in the modern age (though the modern age is the only one I’ve known, so who’s to say) where art has witnessed exponential proliferation. There's never been more of it and it's never been simpler to engage with, so simple that we’ve begun to strip away the meaning of creation, call things slop that we consume like pigs with a trough, and companies have figured out the science of fiction addiction and weaponizing it in unending scrolling sites that they’ve now decided they can push to the next step by removing the human entirely with AI because what does it matter? Why not weaponize stories for profit? Why not forfeit your memories to memes and ads?
The man in “Android and I” is particularly interested in the work of Jean-Luc Godard. If you’re even slightly a movie nerd, then Godard needs about as much introduction as his debut feature film, Breathless—that is to say, none at all. Breathless is about as much of a titan as movies can be, signaling the start of the French New Wave and a dense post-modern way of telling stories through film that would alter the shape of the medium worldwide.
It’s significant though, that Breathless is a sort of pastiche, Jean-Luc Godard's unabashed love letter to American genre flicks. It is a movie not only obsessed with the past, but with imitating it. Take the protagonist, Michel, who, in one scene, stands in front of a cinema plastered with a poster of classic Hollywood star Humphrey Bogart. He stares at the portrait of this man who is like a god in the movies, and for a brief moment, he tries to imitate him, posturing as an reincarnation of an icon. Then he deflates, gives up, looks away from the image staring back, and walks away. Pull back and that’s all he really is: a man playing pretend at his idols.
This is the man's favorite film.
Throughout the episode he recreates the events of Breathless, him as Michel and his outdated synthetic robot companion, Jeri, as Michel's messy love interest Patricia. With complete control of Jeri’s very being, he turns his own life into the story of his favorite movie, a copy of a copy, playing out dialogue memorized over an empty projector. So what exactly does that make him? And what of Jeri, his poor, tragic robot, treated as an object to contain the past and the memory of this film that was never true and always itself a container for memories of other films? What is she?
There’s this thing with the image of Buddha. What once was intended as objects of worship have become a business, commercialized into mass produced merchandise. Buddha laughs on mugs, prays on shirts, meditates for self-help videos; millions of statues of every size are produced in Buddha factories for any purpose imaginable. With time, these copies have slowly become the dominate image of the Buddha, and so they begin to copy the copy, the image shifting gradually through reproduction until people look at the original and feel nothing because that isn’t the Buddha—the statue of a statute in my home is. The original Buddha is a fake; it’s their imposter who is real.
In the end, Jeri breaks away from the man and Godard and Breathless. She improvises in the final moments of what should be the movie of them to create a new ending. She does the impossible, what a robot and a movie should never be able to do. She becomes real. Fiction becomes truth. The imitations have stacked so high that the original has been erased and the fake has been imbued with meaning.
”Android and I“ isn’t my favorite episode of Stand Alone Complex. It probably isn’t even that close. Every episode of SAC is a flurry of ideas, a largely episodic series that builds over its run into an overwhelmingly rich examination of digital life and identity that feels positively prophetic. Still, there’s something about this one episode, early and often forgotten, that remains in my head, repeating itself like a loop. It's just about all I can think about. It’s prescient, it’s present, it’s now. It’s the past, it’s fiction, it’s real.
Music of the Week | Sine Wave Solo by Sachiko M
An icon of Japanese avant-garde and specifically onkyo-kei—a genre defined by an extreme exploration of silence—Sachiko’s instrument of choice is…the sine wave. It’s about as challenging a style of experimentation as you can get in music, but once you break through, I think it’s completely intoxicating—as evidenced by the fact I might have made more than one fan page dedicated to Sachiko and onkyo-kei back in high school. A hidden world of warmth and color, playfulness and beauty.
Book of the Week | Ravens Shouldn't Wear Kimono by Chisato Abe
Chisato Abe’s Yatagarasu series has taken the Japanese fantasy world by storm ever since it first released, and for good reason. The first entry here is an ornate, elegant palace drama following the tense politicking of a group of women all aiming to be chosen as the bride of the prince. It just so happens that everyone can also turn into a giant bird. And the palace is carved out inside the top of a mountain. And what we know as horses might have gone extinct a hundred years ago?? Every drop of world building here is the most delicious food I’ve ever had, and it’s all in service of building up a narrative both small and impossibly large. Lush, enveloping and frequently thrilling, as far as I’m concerned, this represents the best that fantasy can be.
Movie of the Week | A.K.A. Serial Killer (dir. Masao Adachi, 1975)
A monolithic experimental documentary from one of the Japanese new wave’s most aggressively political minds (wiki Adachi if you don’t know—the man is About That Life) turns a true crime story into a dense and empathetic exploration of the developing landscape theory, which is too much to explain here lmao. If the idea of an hour and a half of nothing but landscape shots and free jazz sounds challenging…well, it is. But it’s also one of the most deeply rewarding experiences you can have in film. A movie that has rattled in my brain daily since I watched it.
Have thoughts about anything covered this week? Got a recommendation you’re dying to share? Want to tell me how handsome and cool I am? Leave a comment below!
oh and here’s a video essay I made if you myst it (ba-dum-tss)