Cullum, Ghost in a Cyber-Shell

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       For some reason, the whole time I was watching this movie, I kept thinking about the movie called Surrogates, with Bruce Willis, and that movie scares me. Not because its meant to be a horror film, its actually quite good, but its set in the future and people hook themselves up to a computer and live their life through a cybernetic version of themselves (or whatever they want to be, look like, ect). Which brings me to the point I'm trying to make here, technology scares me, but it also fascinates me. I really enjoyed Ghost in the Shell because of the fact that a lot of it has to do with technology and how you can manipulate it to make it a bad thing. It also has a little bit of corruption in there, like in Botchan. Let's not forget another big issue in this film : identity crisis. In Black Swan and in Perfect Blue the main characters were going through MAJOR identity problems. 

The movie is set in the year 2029. Technology is far more advanced than it was when the movie was made, and pretty far off of what technology we have today. I feel like, the way we depend on technology now, that one day the world as we know it might be similar to the one in this film. In Akira technology is used to basically stalk the population and control them subconsciously. In Ghost in the Shell, people are able to be brain hacked. There is a character called ‘the puppeteer’ and its hacking into people and causing all kinds of rukus. The creator of the puppeteer ends up being Sector 6 and the government. Let’s be honest here, if the idea of someone being able to ‘brain hack’ you doesn’t scare you, you deserve to be brain hacked. 

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In Ghost in the Shell a lot of the world is cyborg, and of course there are still some humans.  In the film, they have cyberneticlly enhanced cops. The main one were focused on in the movie is Major Motoko Kusanagi and she is 95% cyborg, I think, and she was cyborged at a very young age. In our world, modern day and how it has been forever, people have always questioned their identities. People are constatly asking themselves ‘what is my purpose’ ‘why am I here’ ‘who am I’ ‘who do I want to be.’ In the film, the characters are doing the very same thing. The main one is our very own Major Motoko. In Perfect Blue Mima goes through a similar identity issue. Mima has everyone telling her who she should be and people even try to murder her and rape her because she isn’t being who they want her to be. Motoko isn’t even human (mostly), so try to think of the questions about identity she is asking herself. 

       

Cullum Perfect Blue Identities

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I honestly have no idea where to even start with the movie Perfect Blue. It was enjoyable to me, but then again I like thrillers, suspense movies and Alfred Hitchcock movies. Mima is an ‘innocent’ pop singer in a three woman group called Cham! When she announces her plans to become an actress and stop singing, stuff hits the fan. She becomes stalked by Me-Mania, starts to lose touch with herself, people get murdered, and she almost gets killed. For most of the movie, I thought Mima was crazy, like Nina in Black Swan. I wasn’t able to distinguish if Mima was doing something or someone else who thought they were Mima was doing it. I thought she was killing all these people. The moment I knew for sure that it was not her killing everyone, is the moment that the Mima jumping around in the dress turns into Rumi in the street. 

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Through most of the film I feel like Mima isn’t even sure of who she is as a person; this does not surprise me at all. As a female celebrity she has all kinds of people dictating who she should be, how she should act, and what she should do. She changed from a innocent pop singer to a rape victim that had pornographic pictures taken of herself. Her fans basically feel like she doesn’t have the right to stop singing and move on to acting. Rumi thinks Mima is ruining her(Mima’s) reputation and ultimately tries to kill her for it. Her office manager, Tadokoro, is pushy and wants Mima to become an actress. Me-Mania/Uchida is just a crazy stalker that is more than a little upset that she is pursuing a career in acting now instead of singing.

I’ll tie this post up with a little spin on the webpage about her that is written by someone claiming to be her. This is extremely frustrating. I had someone from another country use my pictures and name, my facebook pictures and information, and make a facebook. They spoke some sort of Arabic language, and only had guys added. This is irrelevant, but the point I’m trying to make is that you feel very invaded when someone does something like that. As soon as this aspect was mentioned in class I was thinking ‘oh wow, that happened to me !’