Mira, the protagonist of the play, is the first successful electronic "prosthetic man" of the high-tech company Hanka. Except for the human memory of his past in his brain, his physical existence is created by artificial technology. , she also has more powerful and agile skills and keen awareness than ordinary people, and even stealth "optical camouflage". As a major of the 9th Section of Public Security, she discovered that Hanka Corporation had actually used and cleaned her memory when tracking down a mysterious cybercriminal, and she had been an anti-technologist kidnapped by Hanka Corporation. The final story is represented by The righteous policeman defeated the evil Hanka company to the end. The film ends with an affirmation of human nature by the main theme of Hollywood. Although the story has logical flaws, it is as simple and clear as ever, and will not pose any challenges to the audience who are eager to come to the cinema to enjoy a visual spectacle. This is what Hollywood producers have always been good at. After all, it is almost impossible to express the huge worldview system of the original work in a commercial film, and grasping the style of Asian works has never been Hollywood's strong point.
The original animation of "Ghost in the Shell" is considered to have a unique and profound world outlook and ideological core, integrating issues in technology, philosophy, sociology, political science and even religion into the work, which is the so-called "cyberpunk" science fiction The classic of the work has influenced the Wachowski brothers, the directors of "The Matrix". Cyberpunk (Cyber Punk) was originally a genre of science fiction literature. Its style is mainly to describe the story of a de-utopian society full of electronic networks, artificial intelligence, and hackers in the near future world. At that time, society has become unprecedented. diversity and anarchy, and the protagonists are often people on the fringes of society. Cyberpunk is also a subcultural genre. It was formed in the West in the 1980s together with the genre literature of the same name. It focuses on depicting the dark imagination of the future technological world, and has also had a huge influence in Japan and other Asian countries. In 1989, Japanese manga artist Shirou Masamune created "Ghost in the Shell". With the success of the work, it was made into animated films and animated series, and the response of these animation works even surpassed the original, bringing the layer of the work to a new level. This Hollywood remake can also be seen as a tribute to many scenes in the 1995 version of the animated film and subsequent animated series. In many places, the plot of the animated film is almost restored in frames.
The world in the cyberpunk story is inseparable from those creatures that are indistinguishable from human and machine, holographic advertising images, towering buildings and endless speeding cars. These elements can be traced back to the German science fiction film "Metropolis" in 1927. In the classic cyberpunk movie "Blade Runner" in 1982, it has been fully expressed. The 95 Oshii Shou version of "Attack" designed a future city based on Hong Kong, from which you can see neon signboards with Chinese characters and dense houses similar to the Kowloon Walled City. In the movie, there are pork shops and cemeteries with obvious Chinese characteristics. Elements. The world of cyberpunk is a future world imagined by globalization and multiculturalism at that time, which is full of modern eastern imagery that is a metaphor for the contemporary western world. Just as the Japanese cities in "Gong" look like Chinese and American cities, in fact, there would be no problem putting Japan in "Gong" into any cyberpunk story world. Cyberpunk literature master William Gibson once said: "Modern Japan is cyberpunk", and he also put the story stage of his famous book "Nervous Wanderer" in the future Japan.
The setting in the movie "Attack" continues the post-industrial/post-modern setting of the predecessors, showing what can happen to our society when technology is used to the extreme without restraint. Cyberpunk writers were imagining such a world more than a decade before Silicon Valley wizards like Kevin Kelly wrote Out of Control. In many cyberpunk works, technological leaps have not brought about an improvement in human well-being, as the cybercrime-filled world of "Attack" shows, a world that satirizes the utopia of techno-optimists. Although human beings have undergone prosthetic transformation to prolong their physiological lifespan and have been endowed with the ability to connect with the virtual world of the Internet, a small virus can cause damage to the human electronic brain. The virtualization of human beings has not brought about an improvement in the moral level. For example, in the movie and the anime version of "Attack", false memories can be implanted in the human electronic brain, and the street girls have to dress up like prosthetics to attract customers. The underworld uses the electronic brain to link the network to drug addiction and so on. Cyberpunk's works regard these problems as the natural result of technological development, and those giant multinational corporations as villains just use the side effects of these technologies for profit, just as cyberpunks who are hackers use these technologies to achieve their own gray. the same purpose. In the cyberpunk world, technology is highly monopolized by multinational corporations, the broad middle class is absorbing the commercial benefits brought by monopoly technology, while the lower class is full of dirty technological activities, which is exactly the same as "Metropolis" to "Beautiful New" The settings in classic dystopian works such as The World and 1984 are in the same line.
On the other hand, the protagonists are often portrayed as anti-establishment heroes, which is reflected in the true identity of the heroine in the film. In reality, cyberpunk is a kind of counterculture, just as the characters it shapes are often anti-system anarchists, its influence has always penetrated into the hacker subculture circle, and grew up under this influence in the 1980s. Well-known figures include WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. The movie’s depiction of Suzi as an anti-technical Lutheran may be oversimplified. In fact, cyberpunks, including Assange himself, believe that the decentralization and democratization of technology is the direction of the future society. In short, technology should not be used by the government. Or monopolized by certain companies, the open source and crypto culture popular in hacker circles is based on this subcultural idea. Unlike the cyberpunk identity described in the movie, Motoko has never been tampered with in the original work, and is a completely Japanese woman who was transformed into a prosthetic person due to an air crash when she was a child, which can be said to be a perfect fit for the government. Agent background settings. The heroine appears as a defender of the system from beginning to end. The nine police departments she belongs to are government agencies that combat illegal and criminal behavior, and the characters that can be called cyberpunk are precisely those who were hunted down at the beginning. The villains, such as In the animation, the super hacker Laughing Man and the self-proclaimed "revolutionary" refugee leader Kuze Hero.
The protagonists in traditional cyberpunk works are often free from the gray area between good and evil, full of inner struggles, which add a layer of noire to such works. This makes the tone of many works quite dark, and the setting is like a remake of a black police and gangster film, and the ending is not as positive and optimistic as in the film. Unlike the movie where Suzi finally finds his "self", humans in the future cyber world are confused and lonely, and need to find the positioning and value of their identity, which is also the core issue to be discussed in "Attack". As the protagonist Motoko keeps asking, since her body is completely artificial and only her memory is real, can only the existence of her soul define her as a human being? If she doesn't have a soul, is she just a robot? In other stories of "Gong", this question is viewed from the perspective of robots: the bodies of robots are completely artificial, but when they have autonomous consciousness and disobey human orders, are they considered to be souls with intelligent life? We can even ask, can an artificial intelligence without a body originally, such as the puppet king born by the program in the network self-learning in the animated version of "Attack", can be regarded as a life with a soul? The correct translation of the original "Ghost in the Shell" should be "Ghost in the shell", which roughly refers to this ultimate problem. One of the charms of cyberpunk works is that they borrow the current metaphors of advanced technology to raise philosophical questions, providing people with a thought experiment field to try to answer real-world problems. Just like Neo's hollowed-out philosophical masterpiece "Simulation and Simulation" in "The Matrix", "Attack" is full of direct references to literary, historical and philosophical allusions. It can be said that the police and bandit stories in the play are for Discussions on this topic cannot be overemphasized to provide context.
Earlier, some people criticized the white actor Scarlett Johansson for playing the Asian role of Motoko. After watching the film, it was found that the heroine was still an Asian woman, but was transformed into a prosthetic person with a white image. The film tells the story of the heroine's transformation from a prosthetic person who is confused about her identity into a seemingly "independent" human being, which seems to imply the process of female self-awakening. However, in the film, this process is achieved through the heroine's retrieval of her memory. After she understands her past, she immediately starts killing as if she has entered the role of "major" that she should play. The confusion of the division was swept away. According to the setting of the movie, an originally extreme anti-technical element will definitely hate the fact that he has been transformed, and it is even less likely that he will continue to cooperate with the government to maintain the system.
Perhaps the greatest charm of the role of Major in the original work is its setting that transcends the duality of humans, machines, gender, and even the physical and spiritual duality, just like the heroine in "Super Body". Although the major in the original book is set as a female, in fact, it can be said to be asexual, and it can completely electronically virtualize itself to live in the online world. As a physical body can be any machine or even a living body with purely electronic signals, we can imagine that her psychology and self-cognition will change accordingly, and conversely, we can also say that only her physical existence can define her self-identity. In the 1980s when cyberpunk was popular, American biologist and feminist scholar Donna Haraway put forward the famous "Cyborg Manifesto", she used the modern science fiction culture of the cyborg (Cyborg) life form. It is a metaphor for the evolutionary direction of human social identity, claiming that people will no longer have a single gender or identity, and put forward the slogan of "better be a cyborg than a goddess". Broadly speaking, we are also cyborgs who use electronic devices every day, defining and reshaping our identities in society. The future is indeed here, as works like Attack show when they push real-world technical, social, and political issues to the extreme.
(This article was published in the surging news "Idea Market" with the original title "Cyberpunk: A Contemporary Fable from the Future".)
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