“The Cyber Sublime and the Virtual Mirror: Information and Media in the Works of Oshii Mamoru and...

The question of how new technologies of information conveyance, storage,retrieval, and manipulation are affecting our lives and our futures is a central

concern for contemporary culture. In the world of creative expression, artists,writers, and filmmakers have been exploring the impact of information and com-munication technology in numerous media, including video, computer, and web-based art; the science fiction, cyberpunk and techno-thriller genres of prosenarrative; and related genres of filmmaking. Amid this diverse artistic exploration,Japanese animation (anime) has emerged as one of the most prominent sites forexploring the impact of information technology and new media on human life.

Nevertheless, attempts at a visual or narrative representation of “informa-tion” and its manipulation encounter some fundamental obstacles. As modeled inearly information theory and implemented in digital technology, “information”can be reduced to a system of meaningful differences (1/0) that are amassed andmanipulated in huge quantities through computer technology.1 As the vast accu-mulation of minute differences, modern digital information is essentially anabstract commodity, and in an important sense is beyond visual representation.In this essay, I am interested in exploring the representational strategies employed bycertain anime with respect to this abstract commodity of “information,” together

CANADIAN JOURNAL OF FILM STUDIES • REVUE CANADIENNE D’ÉTUDES CINÉMATOGRAPHIQUES VOLUME 18 NO. 1 • SPRING • PRINTEMPS 2009 • pp 44-70

WILLIAM O. GARDNER

THE CYBER SUBLIME AND THE VIRTUAL MIRROR:

INFORMATION AND MEDIA IN THE WORKS OF

OSHI I MAMORU AND KON SATOSHI

Résumé: L’influence des médias et de l’informatique sur les sociétés humaines cons-titue un des principaux thèmes façonnant les stratégies visuelles et les orientationsphilosophiques des animes de Oshii Mamoru et Kon Satoshi. L’analyse des Ghost inthe Shell et Innocence d’Oshii révèle ainsi que le développement d’une esthétique dusublime cybernétique se trouve simultanément fondé sur un univers hiérarchique etanimé par un rêve de transcendance. L’étude des films de Kon, tels Perfect Blue,Millennium Actress et Paprika, dévoile quant à elle une approche très différente desquestions de représentation : celle du « miroir virtuel ». Dans ces œuvres, la réalitéquotidienne est saturée de portails ressemblant à des miroirs, et menant à des lieuxidentitaires alternatifs où l’on se prête à des jeux intersubjectifs ; des espaces non-hiérarchiques qui, contrairement à la vision d’Oshii, suggèrent une vue immanentede l’univers.

with the ways in which this information is uploaded, accessed, and sharedthrough various interfaces.

In particular, I will examine how director Oshii Mamoru’s Ghost in the Shell(1995) presents a vision of a huge interconnected database transcending thehuman world—a vision that can be modulated in paranoid or euphoric terms. Iwill refer to Oshii’s vision of a vast “data-realm,” which can be indexed through suchrhetorical devices as metaphor and synecdoche but is ultimately beyond repre-sentation, as the Cyber Sublime. Oshii’s sequel to Ghost in the Shell, Innocence(2004), further suggests the permeation of information in the human world throughits digitally rendered interiors and landscapes, but, as I will discuss below, thiswork still preserves the fundamental scheme of the Cyber Sublime establishedwith Ghost in the Shell. In the second part of my essay, I will argue that infor-mation, technology, and media are figured in a quite different fashion in theworks of another prominent anime director, Kon Satoshi. In examining severalworks by Kon in both the feature film and television series formats, including therecent film Paprika (2006), I will offer the paradigm of the Virtual Mirror todescribe Kon’s distinctive approach, which runs contrary to many of the prevail-ing ideas and representative strategies regarding information technology as exem-plified in Oshii’s work.2

THE CYBER SUBLIME AND THE PROBLEM OF REPRESENTATIONOshii’s feature film Ghost in the Shell (Kokaku kidotai, referred to hereafter asGhost), with its impressive mix of hard-edged action, philosophical exploration,and lyrical, meditative set pieces, has become a touchstone for science fictionand anime fans worldwide. Based on a manga by Shirow Masamune, the filmtells the story of Major Kusanagi Motoko, a cyborg intelligence officer from theState security agency Section 9, who is investigating a series of cyber crimes car-ried out by an infamous hacker known as the Puppet Master. Following somepreliminary sleuthing by the section 9 agents, the Puppet Master is found to havedescended from the Net—the vast, interconnected data-realm that transcends thevisible world in Ghost—and into the body of a cyborg. While the investigatingofficers imagine that the Puppet Master originated in a human body before beingprovisionally lured into the cyborg’s body, the Puppet Master claims that “he” isactually a computer program that gained self-awareness as it traversed the netgathering and manipulating information, and that he entered the cyborg’s bodyof his own free will.3 Finally, he astounds them all by seeking political asylumwith Section 9 as a sentient being. After the cyborg body containing the PuppetMaster is snatched away by a rival intelligence organization, Major Kusanagitracks the body down and attempts to establish communication by hacking or“diving” into it. At the film’s climax, it is revealed that the Puppet Master hasdeliberately attracted the attention of Section 9 in order to propose a mating or“marriage” with Kusanagi, claiming that no life form is complete without the

THE WORKS OF OSHII MAMORU AND KON SATOSHI 45

ability to reproduce and die. Significantly, the merging with Kusanagi will notresult in the Puppet Master obtaining material form, but rather entails Kusanagigiving up anything but provisional material embodiment, and, like the PuppetMaster, existing as a life form in the fluid realm of pure information.

In Ghost, I would argue, there is a fundamental rift between the world ofhumans (and cyborgs), which can be depicted on the screen, and the realm of pureinformation, sometimes referred to as the Net, which is beyond depiction. Anyattempt to bridge this fundamental gap entails a certain awkwardness or evenviolence in the film’s visual representation. For one example, we can recall thecyborg data assistants that are used for Section 9, whose hands burst open toreveal more fingers that are capable of typing on a computer keyboard more rapidly(fig. 1). On the one hand, it stretches credulity to imagine that a society as tech-nologically advanced as that of Ghost would reinvent the hand to better integratewith the interface of the typewriter or computer keyboard, rather than develop anew interface altogether (in fact, other characters in the film jack straight in tothe Net through wires in their neck). However, in its very awkwardness, thevision of the hands popping open to reveal more fingers effectively illustrates theextremity of the gap between human and informational—and the imperative tostretch or break the limits of human anatomy to try to bridge this gap. Indeed,the flesh of humans and cyborgs is often breached or subjected to violence inattempts to interface with the informational—whether the splitting apart of thedata assistants’ hands, Kusanagi’s jacking into the Net by plugging wires intosockets at the nape of her neck, or the more severe tortures of her flesh as hercyborg body is torn apart in the prolonged effort of reaching and diving into thecyborg housing the Puppet Master during the climactic scene.

The world of the Net itself, in which the Puppet Master has been born, isessentially beyond the reach of visual representation in the film. We are only

46 WILLIAM O. GARDNER

Fig. 1. Cybernetic fingers type on a keyboard in Ghost in the Shell (Oshii Mamoru, 1995).

offered occasional samples in the form of visual displays from interfaces access-ing the Net, such as the relatively simple navigational displays that aid the pro-tagonists in their search for the Puppet Master and his agents in the streets ofNew Port City. The film’s title sequence also offers what may be taken as a non-diegetic visualization of the Net in its rapid shuffle of numeric characters acrossthe screen that resolve into the titles—a precursor to the signature “digital rain”of the Wachowski Brothers’ Matrix series. Or, in some cases, two-dimensionalcomputer screens are depicted with minute, indecipherable data or code scrollingacross them. Nevertheless, such elements as characters, code, or navigationaldisplays can only have a synecdochal relationship to the Net in its entirety, oreven to a portion of the Net as functioning sub-system.

As a creature of the Net, the Puppet Master must borrow the body of acyborg to enter the realm of the physical (or, in terms of the film’s aesthetics, toenter the realm of the representable). However, this attempt at bridging the gapbetween the Net and the physical human realm is prone to the same awkward-ness and violence described above. The female cyborg body borrowed by thePuppet Master is mismatched with the Puppet Master’s male voice, while thecyborg body itself is immediately exposed to violence: wandering naked onto acity street, it is struck by a car, recovered by Section 9, and subjected to variouspainful-looking tests and procedures by the Section 9 technicians, before beingsnatched away by a rival agency. Despite these travails, even in its provisionalmaterial form in the upper body of a cyborg, it should be noted that the PuppetMaster is given a certain dignity in its on-screen representation. In the scenewhere the Puppet Master first proclaims his identity as a new life-form, the ivorytorso of its host body resembles a classical sculpture, which, together with thetorso’s elevated on-screen position and lighting suggesting a halo around itshead, and combined moreover with an authoritative male voice, goes beyond themerely awkward or even the uncanny and aspires to produce a mixture of fearand exhilaration—or something like awe—in its viewers. Still, the makeshift pro-visionality of its physical host as well as the painful rigors to which this physi-cal body is subjected remain important aspects of the Puppet Master’s on-screenpresence, coexisting with its would-be dignity and authority.

The visual richness of the New Port City streets depicted in Ghost strikes aninteresting counterpoint to the difficulty of representing the Net and the awk-wardness or violence depicted when humans or cyborgs attempt to interface withit. Especially impressive is an extended scene accompanied only by music ratherthan dialogue, in which Kusanagi travels through the city’s canals on a boat andencounters various entities that, we suppose, make her ponder her own meta-physical condition as a cyborg: a dog, mannequins in a display window, and awoman in a café whose facial features appear identical to Kusanagi’s. In a tour deforce of the animator’s art, Oshii richly captures the slow motion of the boat, theteeming streets, the garbage-strewn canals, and the effect of rain falling on the


city. Nearly every frame of the sequence is packed with detail—countless layersof the city extend from the canals to the heavens, and mysterious birdlike aircraftfloat across the sky (foreshadowing the angelic visitation in the film’s climax, dis-cussed below). Shop signs, advertisements, and posters cover many of the walls,the Chinese characters extending vertically as well as horizontally in a complexmesh (fig. 2). It is as if, in the richness of analog information presented in thisvision of the city streets, Oshii is hinting at the even richer and vaster realm ofdigital information on the Net, transcending the watery human world.

In a different and more direct way, the city is employed as a visual figurefor the Net in the final scene of the film, in which Kusanagi, now having merged withthe Puppet Master and evolved into a higher being, leaves her Section 9 partnerBatou behind to embark on her new life. Departing from Batou’s hilltop safe-house overlooking the city, Kusanagi walks out into the night, the vast baysidecity spread out beneath her, its streets and canals like capillaries through a densematrix of distant towering buildings backing into the ocean and clouds. Pausingbefore this exhilarating vista to ask herself “where shall I go now?” Kusanagireplies to her own question with her final lines of the film: “the Net is vast” (nettowa kodai da wa). In both the language and iconography of this scene, with itssolitary figure contemplating a vast landscape, Oshii invokes the aesthetic cate-gory of the Sublime.4

• • •

From the late seventeenth century, philosophers and critics began to analyze theSublime not only as a rhetorical effect (as with Longinus, the first major theoristof the Sublime) but as a category of aesthetic or emotional experience derivingfrom the observation of natural phenomena as well as works of art and poetry.


Fig. 2. Signs in Chinese over the canal in Ghost in the Shell (Oshii Mamoru, 1995).

The earliest of these formulations stress the greatness and power of God as thefoundation of the Sublime. English critic John Dennis places “God, Angels, andother Creatures of the immaterial World,” as his first category of sources for theSublime experience; in the second category he includes the “great Phaenomenaof the Material World” such as “the Heavens and Heavenly Bodies, the Sun, theMoon the Stars, and the Immensity of the Universe, and the Motions of Heavenand Earth”; while the third category consists of “Ideas of Sublunary Things”including “Seas, Rivers, [and] Mountains.” As Marjorie Hope Nicolson summa-rizes, “Man cannot think of God without ‘Enthusiastick Terrour,’ [Dennis’ phrase]compounded of awe and rapture. The manifestation of God’s majesty and powerin Nature must evoke in sensitive minds some degree of the awe they feel forGod Himself, which is the essence of the Sublime experience.”5

While various subsequent thinkers differed on such questions as whetherthe Sublime and the Beautiful were opposing terms or if one was subordinate tothe other, most agreed that the “Enthusiastick Terror” of the Sublime was anexperience combining both fear and pleasure. “The Sublime dilates and elevatesthe Soul,” John Baillie wrote in 1747, “Fear sinks and contracts it; yet both arefelt upon viewing what is great and awful.”6 As Edmund Burke suggests in hisinfluential treatise on the Sublime and Beautiful, in contemplating the vast, ter-rible, or awe-inspiring aspects of nature from a position of relative safely, we canexperience this commingled fear and pleasure without the danger of immediateannihilation.7

The problematic of the unrepresentability of the Net in Ghost, as well asOshii’s strategies in representing it indirectly (through synecdoche or metaphor),relate particularly strongly to Immanuel Kant’s description of the “mathematicalsublime” in his Critique of Judgment (Kritik der Urteilskraf, 1790). In Kant’s for-mulation, the quality of the Sublime is not to be found in the object of appre-hension itself, but rather describes the state of mind of the subject when viewingphenomena “whose intuition brings with it the Idea of their infinity”—an Ideathat derives from the very “inadequacy of the greatest effort of our Imaginationto estimate the magnitude of an object” (emphasis mine).8 In contemplatingimmense phenomena such as the ocean, a range of mountains, or the vast reachesof outer space revealed by the telescope, we are faced with the limits of our per-ceptive faculties, and must instead strive to produce an “aesthetical estimationof magnitude” (116). This imaginative effort produces the combination of fearand pleasure (or, in Kant’s terms, pain and pleasure) that have been identifiedwith the Sublime since the pioneering works of Baille and Burke.

In a manner which seems designed to evoke the sort of cognitive processdescribed in Kant’s Critique, Oshii’s Ghost holds the Net—which is the immenseaccumulation of information produced by a fictional advanced society’s tech-nologies of information manipulation and storage—as an object of contempla-tion, from which the viewer is to derive both fear and pleasure. For the purposes


of this paper, I will refer to this aesthetic construct in Oshii’s work as the CyberSublime.9 Ironically, it is the very unrepresentability of the Net within the Ghostworld that most effectively conveys the aesthetic of the Sublime. Like the invis-ible “Creatures of the immaterial World” in the first category of Dennis’ Sublime,or the Idea of Infinity in Kant’s Critique, the Net is something that cannot becomprehended or represented in its entirety. Nevertheless, the strategies used inindirectly suggesting the presence of the Net and in configuring the relationshipbetween the film’s protagonist, Kusanagi, and the life form spawned on the Net,the Puppet Master, further strengthen the connection between Ghost and the sub-lime aesthetic.

Although I have pointed out the links between representation of the city andthe idea of the Net in Ghost, there are at least two other entities in the physicalworld metaphorically linked with the Net: the ocean and the sky. The ocean isperhaps the more obvious of these metaphors, being invoked most directly in theparallel between Kusanagi’s unconventional hobby of deep-sea diving depictedmid-way through the film, and the persistent rhetorical reference to “diving”when trying to access the consciousness of the Puppet Master. The ocean, ofcourse, is a proverbially vast and deep entity that has been both revered as cat-alyst for the development of human civilization and feared for its capacity to takehuman life; together with the mountains it has been one of the most frequentexamples cited in discourses on the Sublime. As an object of comparison, then,the ocean readily conveys the ungraspable magnitude of the data-realm of theNet, and suggests a mysterious and untamable power both exhilarating andfrightening. Furthermore, as the birthplace of life in evolutionary science as wellas many of the world’s creation myths, the ocean makes an effective point ofcomparison in conveying the fecund potential of the Net to give rise to life formssuch as the Puppet Master, the cyborg Kusanagi, and their progeny. This con-nection is made verbally when the Puppet Master declares himself to be a “lifeform born on the sea of information” (joho no umi de hassei shita seimeitai), andvisually during the title sequence of the film when Kusanagi’s cyborg body isshown being manufactured in a large tank of water, the data screen displaysmentioned earlier as synecdochic representations of the Net wrapping aroundher like a womb of data.

However, in addition to the sea, Ghost also presents a subtler topologicallink between the data-realm of the Net—particularly its child and representativethe Puppet Master—and the territory of the sky. While hinted at earlier in thefilm, this link is most explicit in the climactic scene in which Kusanagi attemptsto access and dive into the Puppet Master’s provisional cyborg body. After a fire-fight with the Puppet Master’s kidnappers in the cavernous ruins of whatappears to be a natural history museum or exhibition hall, the woundedKusanagi and the Puppet Master’s cyborg body are laid together facing upwardson the floor of the hall, connected to each other with Batou’s assistance.


Meanwhile, military helicopters on a mission to destroy both cyborgs hover over-head, visible through a large hole that has been blown open in the museum’sglass roof. As the Puppet Master proposes his “marriage” to Kusanagi, thealready birdlike shape of a hovering helicopter seems to transform into that ofan angel, while a shower of feathers rains mysteriously from the sky (fig. 3). Thisangelic apparition and rain of feathers has no diegetic motivation, but ratherserves to enhance through its iconography the idea of a marriage between a this-worldly mortal and a heavenly or other-worldly being, as depicted in such mythsas Leda and the Swan, the Christian Annunciation, and the heavenly maiden ofthe Japanese hagoromo legend.10

In her brilliant study The Secret Life of Puppets, Victoria Nelson discussesthe essentially Platonic or Neo-Platonic structure of Ghost in the Shell as well assimilar narratives in Western horror, fantastic, and science fiction literature,positing a reemergence of the Platonic and related Western esoteric traditions,including gnosticism and cabbalism, in contemporary culture. Under this inter-pretation, the Net is equivalent to the Platonic World of Forms, the PuppetMaster is the Divine Being or Demiurge, or one who speaks the Divine Language(the Logos), and Kusanagi is a golem figure, created by humans but capable ofserving as an intermediary between the human world and the World of Forms.11

Nelson’s study, though it misrepresents some minor details of Ghost, pro-vides a rich and surprising account of the Neo-Platonic underpinnings of manyof our ideas of modern information technology so aptly captured in Oshii’s work,as well as the intellectual lineage of idols, golems, puppets, and cyborgs.Nevertheless, in the present study I would like to focus not primarily on thephilosophical substrate of Oshii’s work, but rather on its representative strate-gies—the Cyber Sublime. In iconographically representing the Puppet Master as


Fig. 3. An angelic shape hovering overhead at the climax of Ghost in Shell (Oshii Mamoru, 1995).

a kind of Sky God, and thereby construing the heavens as the figurative locationof the transcendent data-realm, Oshii establishes a hierarchical vertical axis ofup—the realm of the informational—and down—the earthly realm of physicalentities, daily life, and human beings. (In a problematically overdetermined gen-der symbolism, the earthly realm is represented by the female Kusanagi, in oppo-sition to the celestial realm of the “male” Puppet Master).12 This schema puts theviewer, through the intermediary of the protagonist Kusanagi, in the position ofbeholding a Sublime vision, culminating in the supernatural rain of feathers.Indeed, this invocation of the Sublime reaches beyond Kant’s “mathematicalsublime” to the earlier, more direct association of the Sublime with the Divine(the heavenly realm of “God, Angels, and other Creatures of the immaterialWorld”). While the vertical axis, connecting the Earthly and the Heavenlyrealms, is revealed most strikingly in the staging of the climatic scene in the exhi-bition hall, the importance of the vertical axis is emphasized throughout the filmin the dense layering of the city and the richness of visual information that fillsthe screen from bottom to top.

• • •

These basic iconographic features are also present in Innocence (Inosensu, 2004),Oshii’s sequel to Ghost in the Shell. This film delves further into philosophicalquestions surrounding cyborgs, pondering the meaning of human beings’propensity to create copies of themselves, and comparing the relative ontologi-cal status of cyborgs, dolls, and dogs (elaborating on the meditative scene inGhost described above, in which Kusanagi encounters her various doubles dur-ing her passage down a New Port City canal). The film also presents breathtak-ing cityscapes rich in detail and movement along the vertical as well ashorizontal axis, especially the giant, cathedral-like manufacturing outpost ofLocus Solus.

In the original Ghost in the Shell, there is a clear visual distinction betweenthe occasional digital displays representing computer technology and the subtlymodulated, watercolor-like, “analog” background drawings. However, inInnocence the landscapes, interiors, and other backgrounds are all recognizablyrendered through digital technology—only the human, cyborg, and animal char-acters appear to be hand drawn. This decision to use 3D computer animationrepresents more than a technical evolution in anime production between thedates of the two films, and has significant aesthetic and thematic implications.In contrast to Ghost, it seems as if the informational has pervaded and renderedvirtual the very fabric of life in the world of Innocence, and as the action movesfrom New Port City to the Northern Frontier home of Locus Solus, this impres-sion becomes even stronger. In particular, as the film’s protagonist Batou and hispartner Togusa venture into the baroque mansion of a corrupt hacker named


Kim, the characters begin to question their ability to distinguish between physi-cal reality and computer-generated virtual reality. Contributing to this uncannyeffect, the walls and other surfaces of Kim’s mansion seem unnaturally “hard”with digitally rendered edges and surfaces that appear constructed of CG “wall-paper,” while the “camera” or viewing-frame movements suggest those of a com-puter game. Moreover, the progression of time, at least within the subjectiveexperience of Batou and Togusa, becomes distorted, catching the pair of detec-tives in loops of time, as if the time-space continuum itself has been hacked byKim and imbued with computer algorithms.

It seems, then, that physical reality in the world of Innocence has been“upgraded” from that of Ghost and imbued with the informational. Nevertheless,the hierarchical structure that separates the world of humans from the world ofpure information persists. In this sequel, Kusanagi (or rather the post-Kusanagilife form resulting from the merging of Kusanagi and the Puppet Master) hasmoved outside of the realm of representability and inhabits the Net as a being ofpure information. In the climactic melee of the film, in order to aid her formerpartner Batou, she descends from the Net into the body of a “gynoid” cyborgbeing manufactured by Locus Solus, confirming the Neo-Platonic structure of theGhost in the Shell world as explicated by Nelson. In other words, there are tworealms in the Ghost world: the human world and the Logos or World of Forms(the Net); and Kusanagi, who has now become a purely Spiritual being of theLogos, takes possession of the body of a human-made idol (a cyborg, which canalso conceptualized as a puppet, doll, or golem) in order to mediate or intercedebetween the two worlds.

Not only Oshii’s films but numerous other anime, such as .hack//Sign (MashimoKoichi, 2002), Revolutionary Girl Utena: The Movie (Ikuhara Kunihiko,1997), andNeon Genesis Evangelion (Anno Hideaki, 1995), exhibit similar Neo-Platonicschema, the latter betraying an overt fascination with gnosticism and cabbalism.In particular, the series Serial Experiments: Lain (Nakamura Ryutaro, 1998) can insome respects be seen as an elaborate response to the Neo-Platonic vision of Ghostin the Shell. Lain also imagines a two-fold universe, in which the two realms arereferred to as the Real World and the Wired. In pointed contrast to Kusanagi,however, the protagonist of this series, Iwakura Lain, ultimately rejects the temp-tation of disembodiment and transcendence of the Real World proposed by a SkyGod figure (“Deus,” formerly the software designer Eiri Masami), choosinginstead to remain embodied in the Real World.13

Concurrent with this tendency to associate the accumulation of data byinformation technology with the World of Forms is the aesthetic tendency to nar-rativize and visualize information technology so as to appeal to the Sublime aes-thetic of fear and pleasure. Given this pervasive tradition of the Cyber Sublime,exemplified most strongly in Ghost in the Shell, it is significant that we can finda refusal of the aesthetic and metaphysical schema of the Cyber Sublime—and


an entirely different conception and set of representative strategies—in the workof another prominent contemporary anime director, Kon Satoshi.

KON SATOSHI AND THE VIRTUAL MIRRORKon Satoshi’s first feature-length anime as director, Perfect Blue (1998) exploresthe tensions between the private identity of its protagonist Mima, an aspiring“idol” pop singer turned actress, and the outside agency of viewers, bloggers,fans, and managers, who shape and consume her public image. In Perfect Blue,as in Kon’s other works, the technological or informational is not relegated to aseparate realm that transcends the daily lived world of his characters, but ratherit is densely interwoven into their lives and psyches, in such ubiquitous andbarely noticed forms as telephones, fax machines, cameras, personal computers,the internet, television, and gossip magazines. In Perfect Blue in particular, theinformational world interwoven with the daily life of the characters extends tothe entire multi-media complex that surrounds the creation, marketing, and fanconsumption of the pop idol in the Japanese entertainment industry.

The central visual motif of the mirror is introduced early in Perfect Blue. Theinitial scene of the film takes place at a concert in an amusement park, in whichMima’s announcement of her retirement as a pop idol is disrupted by rowdyfans. This scene establishes Mima’s public persona as a pop singer (a memberof the idol group Cham), as well as the important plot element that Mima and heragents are planning a major revision of this public persona from “teenage” popidol to serious “adult” actress. The footage of Cham’s concert is intercut throughthe use of matching shots with a second and third scene introducing the “private”Mima. In the first of these, Mima in street clothes returns home on the train. Shegazes at the scenery out the train’s window and quietly sings to herself the songfrom the concert; the viewer sees both the cityscape out the window and Mima’sreflection in the windowpane (fig. 4). At this point in the film, the glass mem-brane of the train’s window is functioning normatively as an effective borderbetween inside and outside. On the one hand, as a window, it gives visual accessto the densely populated world outside the train, while protecting the inside of thetrain from direct contact with the outside world. On the other hand, as a mirror, itaccurately reflects the “private” Mima who gazes through it; while Mima doesnot gaze directly at her reflection, we sense that she takes for granted the stableself-identity that the window-mirror presents.

The next “private” scene intercut with concert footage already begins tosubtly threaten the public/private dichotomy of the first two scenes. Mima isshown shopping at a small supermarket to buy some daily items such as milkand fish food. Although this shopping takes place in a public commercial space,it seems to be solidly part of Mima’s “private” life. (As a member of a relativelylow-ranking idol group, Mima does not have the entertainment-world status tohave a personal assistant do her shopping, or the fame to be stalked by paparazzi


in such a daily act.) However, in contrast to the unassuming medium-shot “cam-era” angles and normative “focal points” of the previous scene on the train, thesimulated “camera” effects of the supermarket scenes are vaguely disquieting:Mima in the supermarket is first seen scanning the shelves in an unusually closeframing, as if taken from the vantage point of the merchandise on the shelves,or perhaps a surreptitiously placed security camera. This “shelf-eye” view isintercut with a tight POV close-up from nearby Mima’s position of her selectingthe individual merchandise. Thus, while we do have shots from nearby Mima’sposition suggesting that the scene is merely documenting her personal daily life,the reverse shots from the shelves’ position suggest that Mima’s actions are alsobeing recorded as public data that could be used for security surveillance, track-ing of consumer behavior, or, as we will see later, the creation of a public “blog”of Mima’s activities as part of the construction and consumption of a commodi-tized or informationalized “Mima” by her handlers and fans.14

As the film continues, the window/mirror motif introduced in the trainscene emerges as a central visual figure of the threatened and confused bound-ary between inside and outside, together with a number of similar translucent/reflective surfaces such as fish tanks, computer screens, and windows that canbe seen as interfaces or membranes between inside and outside spaces. Of these,the most important membranes are the window and balcony of Mima’s apart-ment and the screen of her home computer. These portals between the outsideworld of the city and the real-world private life of Mima, and the interface to thevirtual world of “Mima’s Room,” which is a first-person web diary publicizing orexternalizing Mima’s private life, become confused from the first time we hearof the web diary. A zealous fan tells her “I’m always looking into Mima’s Room.”At this point in the film, both the viewer and Mima herself are unaware of the


Fig. 4. Mima riding the train early in Perfect Blue (Kon Satoshi, 1998).

web diary’s existence, so both are naturally concerned about the intrusion of thestranger’s gaze into the private realm of Mima’s real-world apartment.Immediately after this scene, Mima is shown returning to her apartment, and shepauses on the balcony to give a worried glance at the cityscape outside.

Threats to her private home space continue throughout the next scene, asMima receives a prank call and a mysterious fax covered with the word “traitor”(uragirimono). Mima again peers anxiously out her window, and we are treatedto a reverse “camera” shot from outside her balcony, which rapidly zooms back-ward into the city and away from the window and balcony, perhaps to reveal theposition of an unseen stalker who is observing her from afar. This shot is linkedto the next scene—the set of the television drama where Mima will appear as anactress—by overdubbing the line of dialogue she is given to recite: “Who areyou?” (anata wa dare). This line can be taken to question both the identity ofher presumed stalker, and, as Susan Napier notes, her own identity as well.15

Some of this tension regarding the invasion of Mima’s private space is momen-tarily relieved later in the film when Mima discovers that “Mima’s Room” refersto a seemingly harmless web diary that someone has established to chronicleMima’s life and singing career (fig. 5). As Mima reads the diary further, however,she quickly discovers that private information—such as the items she boughtearlier at the supermarket—as well as her “private” thoughts and feelings, arealso being uploaded mysteriously onto the site. This uncanny doubling of Mima’spersonal thoughts on a publicly accessibly website—outside of her own con-scious agency—provides one of the film’s most disturbing moments.

In such ways, the membrane between private and public, inside and out-side, or self and non-self, grows increasing endangered and ambiguous as thefilm progresses. In particular, the new public self that Mima, with the support of her


Fig. 5. “Mima’s Room” website from Perfect Blue (Kon Satoshi, 1998).

managerial staff, is trying to establish as a mature, serious, sexy televisionactress, begins to diverge from the Mima presented on the “Mima’s Room” blog,which remains true to her prior public identity as a childlike, doll-like, cute(kawaii) pop idol. Moreover, it is unclear which Mima, if either, is in closer align-ment with Mima’s true inner self—if such exists. Thus, later in the film as Mimais again shown riding the train, it is no great surprise when her refection momen-tarily shifts and the “Pop Idol Mima,” maintained faithfully in “Mima’s Room,”appears in place of the private Mima’s naturalistic reflection (fig. 6). The samePop Idol Mima emerges out of mirror-space several times in the film thereafter.

This image of “Mima” appearing in the mirror is a visualization of the infor-mationalized Mima that is the intersubjective construction of her own public per-formance together with the desires of the primarily male producers and fans whohave created and consumed the Pop Idol Mima. Thus, the mirror space or “otherside of the mirror” inhabited by this informationalized Mima is the visual ana-logue of the cyberspace “Mima’s Room,” which is also an intersubjective spaceof desire that operates beyond Mima’s personal agency or conscious control. Itis in the mirror space/cyberspace inhabited by the doppelganger Pop Idol Mimathat we find the operation of the Virtual Mirror in Kon’s work. This space of theVirtual Mirror integrates optical effects, individual psychology, and the role ofinformation technology in creating networked, intersubjective sites for the man-ifestation and exploration of human fears and desires.

Furthermore, as is made abundantly clear when Mima participates in a nudephoto shoot to establish her new public image as the “mature, sexy” ActressMima, the alternate identity of the Actress Mima is equally informationalized,and equally a visualization or virtualization of the anticipated desire of the malegaze. In this situation, Mima’s private self-image (as it should exist in the mirror)


Fig. 6. Near the middle of Perfect Blue (Kon Satoshi, 1998), “Pop Idol Mima” appears in a trainwindow reflection.

is usurped by the manifestation of the desire of the male gaze—either the PopIdol Mima or the Actress Mima— and this usurpation of the other side of the mir-ror cannot fail to destroy whatever integrity exists of Mima’s self-image. The rapescene that Mima is asked to perform in the context of the TV drama, and whichthreatens to be actualized in the “real world” in a repetition of this trauma laterin the film, further literalizes the crisis of identity by threatening to forcibly vio-late the integrity of Mima’s body itself, to puncture the skin as the final mem-brane or interface between “public” and “private.”

• • •

I will use the term Virtual Mirror to refer to the opening of heterogeneous spacein the fabric of base-line narrative reality—a space both personal and medial.That is, to some extent this space is inhabited by the self-image or imaginativeworld of a single individual, but to a significant extent it is also determined bynarratives, expectations, desires, and other psychological forces that are beyondthe control of the individual concerned. Furthermore, this heterogeneous spaceprovides a meeting point and site for interaction between the multiple subjectiveactors. The space is often opened by a mirror or other portal such as a door orcomputer screen, but in Kon’s later works, the space of the Virtual Mirror iswoven into the film’s diegetic space, even without the presence of such physicalportals.

The space created by the operation of the Virtual Mirror in Kon’s work isprimarily a horizontal space. Mirrors, as well as other portals or interfaces suchas windows, doors, computer screens, etc., are generally placed in or against awall and open up a new space along the horizontal axis. On the two-dimensionalfilm screen, this newly opened space may extend to the right or left of the screencenter, or it might create the appearance of additional depth within the viewingframe, as with a mirror placed against a wall to the rear of the figures on screen.However, with the exception of Paprika, the Virtual Mirror is unlikely to opennew spaces above or below the main plane of action. On a metaphoric or meta-physical level as well, this schema is in contrast to the emphasis on up/downvertical space in Oshii’s works, which suggests heterogeneous planes of exis-tence (i.e., a quotidian earthly realm and an otherworldly realm of information,associated iconographically with the ocean or sky). The horizontal openingsdepicted in Kon’s films through the operation of the Virtual Mirror suggest theexistence of a virtual dimension that is densely, vertiginously interwoven withthe existence of humans in the quotidian world, rather than removed from it ona fundamentally different metaphysical plane.

Moreover, I would argue that the emphasis on left-right or right-left move-ment within Kon’s works further emphasizes the importance of the horizontaldimension, which is interwoven with the virtual space that I am referring to as


the Virtual Mirror. Indeed, this stress on horizontal movement in Kon’s worksunderscores the ease with which the characters can move through the VirtualMirror. This ease of horizontal movement is reinforced throughout the films notonly by simulated pans and tracking shots, but also by frequent sliding motionsof the drawn images in the frame. That is, there are a number of shots in Kon’sfilm that do not seem to simulate the tracking motion of a camera so much asconvey a sense of the scenery or figures on the screen being pulled or scrolledhorizontally across the screen. While planar visual elements moving against eachother in sliding motion could be viewed as one common element or potentialityin animation more generally, I would argue that in Kon’s case such sliding motionrelates specifically to his exploration of the interpenetration of real and virtualspaces.16 As I will elaborate below, the visual motif of “sliding” parallels a psy-chological theme of being pulled across different states of fantasy and reality.

Sliding motion is especially prominent in two of Kon’s works followingPerfect Blue, namely, the feature film Millennium Actress (Sennen joyu, 2001) andthe television series Paranoia Agent (Moso dairinin, 2004). Furthermore, inexploring the horizontal space opened through the Virtual Mirror, both of theseworks supplement the use of sliding motion with the unexpected revelation ofnew adjacent horizontal spaces. A playful use of sound cues and invocation ofoff-camera space, together with editing “tricks” such as shot-reverse-shot andeyeline match sequences, tend to substitute new spaces for those expected underthe conventions of continuity editing. In all of these films, the revelation of newand unexpected horizontal spaces through sliding effects or editing “tricks” is away of weaving intersubjective imaginative spaces—the spaces behind theVirtual Mirror—into the fabric of expected, ordinary reality.

• • •

Millennium Actress is a “biopic” of a fictional Japanese movie star, FujiwaraChiyoko. The story follows documentary filmmaker Tachibana Genya, a devotedfan of Chiyoko, who tracks the star down in her retirement and interviews herabout her life and film career. As she recounts her story, the films in which shehas appeared intermingle and blend with the her own life story, and “plot ele-ments” of her personal narrative carry over into the films, which are interwoveninto the “flashback” sequences depicting her former life experiences.Furthermore, the star-struck Tachibana and his less-enthusiastic assistant Ida areinserted into the flashback sequences from the films in which Chiyoko hasstarred: for example, as we see a sequence from a medieval period drama,Tachibana appears as a loyal retainer to save Chiyoko’s character from peril.

Much of Millennium Actress strives to convey the sense of a headlong rushthrough history—both the legendary pre-modern history of Japan as depicted inJapanese cinema, and also the equally mythologized Twentieth Century history


experienced by the fictional actress Fujiwara Chiyoko. Accordingly, a recurrentvisual motif of the film is that of Chiyoko running or propelled in a vehicle acrossthe screen, while the background scrolls against her in the type of sliding motionmentioned above. Examples begin with a scene previewed in the opening titlesequence and repeated in the diegesis where Chiyoko runs in pursuit of a traindeparting a station. This scene features several layers of images sliding at differ-ent speeds: the train, Chiyoko’s running figure, silhouettes of stationary peopleon the platform in the foreground, and the scenery behind the moving train inthe background. A similar but more abstract sequence occurs when Chiyoko firstbegins her interview with Tachibana. As she starts to narrate her life story, aseries of what appear to be old photos showing iconic images of early TwentiethCentury Japanese history is shown. In some cases, such as a class photographfrom her elementary school, Chiyoko is herself a figure in the photo. In othercases, formally analogous to the image of Chiyoko chasing the train, Chiyokoruns through the still photographs which slide against her, such as a photo of amilitary parade evoking the militarization of Japan in the 1930s and 40s. Laterin the film, in perhaps the most striking “sliding” sequence, Chiyoko is propelledacross the screen in a changing series of conveyances—a horse, a horse-drawncarriage, a rickshaw, and a bicycle—as iconic background scenes drawn in thestyle of woodblock prints representing a progression of historical eras—Bakumatsu, Meiji, Taisho, and Showa—slide in counter-motion behind her. Thekinetic, techno-influenced soundtrack music by Hirasawa Susumu accentuatesthe scene’s dynamic flow and departure from strictly narrative development.

In other scenes, the transition into new horizontal spaces (and into newspaces of fantasy, reality, and memory) is made not through sliding motion butmore abruptly through the use of editing “tricks.” One early scene of this typetakes place on a train in Japanese-occupied Manchuria being attacked by mount-ed bandits. As the train bursts into flames from the bandit attack, Chiyoko strug-gles to open the door of her car to escape. Shots of the bandits outside the traincar are intercut with shots of Chiyoko struggling against the door. Then, on thesound cue of the door finally opening, we are presented with a frontal shot ofChiyoko and the other characters staring in amazement into the space presum-ably occupied by the next car of the train, from a “camera position” in the nextcar. A 180-degree reversal is expected to follow the gaze of the characters intothe next car, but instead reveals a completely different space—the balcony of amedieval Japanese castle under attack by warring forces—the scene of a differ-ent “film” in Chiyoko’s career.17 The following shot, taken from a position to theside (at a roughly 120 degree angle from the axis of the train cars), shows thecharacters stepping out of an undefined space presumed to be the portal of thetrain car from the previous scene, and onto the balcony of the castle. Subsequentscenes throughout Millennium Actress interweave new diegetic spaces into thefilm action through similar editing “tricks,” as if the film’s diegetic space was a


fun-house of trapdoors and magic mirrors. Furthermore, the interpolation ofthese spaces into the film’s narrative—and the free movement of the charactersbetween these spaces—steadily erodes the distinction between the framing nar-rative of Tachibana’s interview, the scenes from Chiyoko’s past life, and thescenes from her films.

• • •

Similar formal devices are pursued in Kon’s television series Paranoia Agent,which first aired on the Japanese cable channel Wowwow in 2004. This seriespresents a series of interlinked stories about characters who are attacked by amysterious assailant named Shonen Bat (a teenager wearing in-line skates whowields a golden baseball bat). Distinguished by its use of black humor, multifar-ious narrative techniques, and a compelling cast of characters, Paranoia Agent isperhaps the most revelatory work in Kon’s oeuvre in shedding light on his viewson contemporary society and media. Episode five of the series, “The HolyWarrior,” offers an especially close parallel to the expository style of MillenniumActress. In this episode, detectives Ikari Keiichi and Maniwa Mitsuhiro interro-gate a middle school student, Kozuka Makoto, who is suspected of being respon-sible for the Shonen Bat attacks. In the interrogation room, the student launchesinto an apparently delusional narrative about how he is actually a Holy Warrior(seisenshi) on a mission to save the world from an evil presence named Gohma(goma). According to this narrative, the various victims of the Shonen Bat attackswere all manifestations of Gohma. As Kozuka begins his narrative, through aseries of fades and matching shots, we are shown both flashbacks of the “real”incidents and visualizations of the suspect’s “Holy Warrior” narrative, which isrepresented with multiple allusions to the visual and narrative conventions ofanime and fantasy role-playing computer games.

Just as the documentary filmmakers Tachibana and Ida in Millennium Actressare literally “drawn into” (represented within the diegetic space of) Chiyoko’spersonal narrative, which becomes indistinguishably intertwined with her films,so are Ikari and Maniwa drawn into Kozuka’s narrative, in which the “true” eventsof the Shonen Bat assaults are intertwined with Kozuka’s fantasy of the “HolyWarrior” role playing game. In both cases, one of the interrogators (Tachibanaor Maniwa) throws himself enthusiastically into this immersion in their inter-locutor’s narrative, while another (Ida or Ikari) is more skeptical and resistant.Still, whether enthusiastic or reluctant, both pairs of interrogators eventuallybecome pulled into the narrative. In this context, “drawing in,” “pulling in,” and“sliding” can be seen as key effects in Kon’s works, not only with regard to visualeffects, but also with regard to the narrative, as characters are constantly pulled intoor slide into new realms by the seductive powers of narrative and imagination.

In using the television series format to present a series of linked narratives


that focus on different characters, Paranoia Agent arguably offers the clearestview yet onto Kon’s thematic preoccupations. Each of the characters in thisseries is beset by the stresses of modern life. (Indeed the series presents a virtu-al encyclopedia of hot-button social issues in post-millennial Japan: youth vio-lence, school bullying, prostitution, internet-based suicide clubs, etc.) Eachcharacter attempts to escape this stress by projecting a fantasy realm or fantas-tic self-image—the Virtual Mirror—into the space of their daily lives. The animecharacter designer Tsukiko regularly communicates with a cuddly talking dognamed Maromi who is a character of her own invention; the schoolboy Yuichipainfully strives to protect his self-image as the high-achieving golden boy “Ichi”in the face of rumors that he is actually the assailant Shonen Bat; the staid uni-versity professor’s assistant Harumi, in a plot thread strongly reminiscent ofPerfect Blue, develops a second, disassociate identity as a prostitute namedMaria; Kozuka imagines that he is the Holy Warrior; Maniwa develops a secondidentity as the superhero Radar Man; and even the conservative Ikari, in episodeeleven, enters into his own fantasy realm of an idyllic, two-dimensional Japan ofthe Showa 30s (1955-1965).18 When even these imaginative mechanisms proveinsufficient to cope with the stresses of their respective situations, Shonen Batappears to strike the characters with an incapacitating blow to the head with hisgolden bat. It is one of the dark ironies of the series that Shonen Bat’s attacks,while ostensibly something to be feared, actually seem to be fulfilling their char-acters’ deeply seated desire for an escape from their dilemmas.

While each of the imaginative worlds or alternate identities of these charac-ters might seem to be a purely private fantasy realm, each is intersubjective inseveral important ways. First, each is the product of strong social expectationsand desires, or partakes of powerful shared cultural narratives. For example,Yuichi’s identity as “Ichi” is clearly the manifestation of powerful social expecta-tions of the “perfect” high-achieving elementary school student, while Mariamanifests the object of the desiring male gaze within the profoundly unequalsocial and sexual economy of contemporary Japan—Harumi’s two identities lit-eralize social desires to see her as either a “good girl” or a “prostitute.” Maniwa’sRadar Man and Kozuka’s Holy Warrior partake of the shared storytelling tropes ofthe comic-book superhero or role-playing avatar, while Ikari immerses himself inthe pervasive nostalgia for the “simpler times” of the Showa 30s.19 Paranoia Agentvisually emphasizes the mass-media, communal nature of these fantasies by con-spicuous reference to the stereotypical visual signs of anime, comic books, andcomputer games in the cases of Tsukiko, Yuichi, Harumi, Maniwa, and Kozuka,or cinema and stage drama in the case of Ikari. Finally, in partaking of powerfulsocial expectations and storytelling tropes, these characters’ personal fantasieshave the ability to “draw in” the other characters around them, as exemplified inthe “Holy Warrior” episode described above, and ultimately to project themselvesinto the visual representation and narrative unfolding of the series to the extent


that reality and fantasy become indistinguishable.While Paranoia Agent does not at first appear to be “about” information

technology in the same way as an overtly cyberpunk anime such as Ghost in theShell, the information and communication technologies of contemporaryJapan—cell phones, television, computers, the Internet—are a ubiquitous pres-ence in Paranoia Agent and play a suggestive role conceptually in the series.While not explicitly stated, there is the distinct suggestion that through theseever more advanced and pervasive information and communication technolo-gies, individual desires, fears, and fantasies are becoming more and more dense-ly linked with each other and with the social expectations, social anxieties, andnarrative tropes disseminated by the media and the entertainment industries. Asthe series’ narrative progresses, the figure of Shonen Bat emerges as the ultimatemanifestation of these interwoven personal anxieties and fantasies, a massapparition that cannot be limited to the actions, imagination, or personal psy-chosis of any single character.

• • •

Given Kon’s thematic preoccupations, it seems almost inevitable that he wouldbecome involved in the feature-film anime adaptation of Tsutsui Yasutaka’s sci-ence fiction novel Paprika (Papurika, published by Chuo Koronsha, 1993).Tsutsui’s novel posits the invention of a device called the DC Mini that allowspsychotherapists to view and enter the dreams of their patients. While Kon’s filmadaptation differs from Tsutsui’s novel in a number of plot details, in both casesconsiderable mayhem breaks loose as the device is stolen from the team of psy-chotherapy-researcher protagonists; in further unforeseen consequences of thetechnology, characters’ dream and waking states become intermingled, and thecharacters become psychologically linked so that they can enter each others’dreaming states, and ultimately disrupt the fabric of mutually acknowledgedwaking reality, even without using the DC Mini device. The heroine of both noveland film is the eponymous Paprika, the beguiling avatar of psychologist Dr.Chiba Atsuko as she enters patients’ dreams in DC Mini-assisted therapy (fig. 7).Clearly, these basic narrative parameters give Kon full license to explore his per-sistent themes of the interpenetration of fantasy and reality, the assumption ofalternative personalities, and the links between personal fantasies or psychosesand the shared narratives disseminated by mass media.

Formally, Kon takes the opportunity in Paprika to consolidate and extend thetechnical devices he has developed in his previous anime projects. In his previousworks, Kon used mirrors, windows, and screens, sliding motions, play with soundcues and off-camera spaces, and the integration of unexpected locations throughmanipulation of continuity editing conventions, all to interweave unexpectedcharacters and spaces into the film’s diegesis, primarily working along the hori-


zontal axis of screen space. In Paprika, Kon accelerates this playful interweavingof unexpected space, and extends it in all six directions—left and right, above andbelow, and in front and behind the screen space. As the protagonists vigorouslyexplore the new worlds created by the merging of waking reality with multiplecharacters’ dreams, a myriad of trap doors, ladders, elevators, and freefalling leapswhisk them to unexpected spaces above and below as well as to the left and rightof the screen’s frame. In some scenes, such as one that captures the vertiginousswing of a circus trapeze, Kon’s film invokes the space in front of and behind thescreen (an effect that is especially pronounced when the film is viewed on the“big screen” of a movie theater). Nevertheless, while the vertical dimension isplaited into the kinetic brocade of Paprika, Kon’s film does not invest it with ahierarchical value as in Oshii’s Ghost in the Shell, but simply extends the logic ofthe Virtual Mirror into the vertical as well as the horizontal axis.

Within the lineage of Kon’s Virtual Mirror stories, the character of Chiba/Paprika is an especially interesting one. Like other inhabitants of the VirtualMirror, Paprika has a dual nature as both personal and medial. On the one handshe is the avatar or alter-ego of Chiba; unlike the rather stern and restrained psy-chologist, who is often shown walking solidly on the ground, the playful Paprikaseems to embody movement—running or flying in all directions, in some casessoaring on a cloud or fluttering with Tinkerbell-like wings—seemingly free toexplore Chiba’s every repressed impulse. On the other hand, as the image of Chibawho appears in the dreams of the male characters who surround her, she appearsto be the very embodiment of their desires—constantly retailored according to thefetishes of the male character controlling the dream sequence, and appearing ina variety of guises evoking the “cute” and widely fetishized heroines of Disneyanimation and Japanese anime (fig. 8). In this respect, Paprika is an entity much


Fig. 7. Dr. Chiba Atsuko and her alter ego Paprika from Paprika (Kon Satoshi, 2006).

like the computer-generated female characters of some Japanese erotic computergames who precisely embody the erotic characteristics and behaviors chosen andblended from a database of potential erotic markers by male gamers so as totrigger the aesthetic, emotional, and sexual response referred to in the otakucommunity as moe.20

With this dual nature, Paprika suffers the same dilemma as many of Kon’sother female protagonists, who are unable to resolve the tension between estab-lishing their own subjectivity and serving as the object of the male gaze. In PerfectBlue, this dichotomy is never satisfactorily resolved for Mima: in the film’s con-clusion, the doppelganger Pop Idol Mima is revealed to be the creation of Mima’spersonal manager Rumi, who is ultimately defeated in a confrontation withMima (impaled, in fact, on a mirror). Unfortunately, regardless of the film’s othermerits, this ending is both unconvincing as a narrative resolution, and dismayingas ideology, as it scapegoats the neurotic, middle-aged female manager, ratherthan condemning the patriarchal entertainment industry surrounding them. Thedilemma of Harumi and Maria in Paranoia Agent also eludes convincing resolu-tion (other than the coup de grâce of Shonen Bat), while the question of theestablishment of female subjectivity within a realm of male desire and control isoddly never problematized at all in Millennium Actress.

While the problem of female subjectivity in a male-dominated realm is stillnot fully elaborated in Paprika, within the limited span of the film’s kaleido-scopic narrative development, Kon does at least suggest more positive possibilitiesfor Chiba/Paprika’s ability to exert agency and reconcile the two halves of her per-sonality. Intriguingly, within the intersubjective Virtual Mirror-space of the film,the battle to exert individual agency is frequently figured in terms of ingesting. In theclimax of the film, as various characters’ dreams clash, the brilliant, childlike,


Fig. 8. Paprika in Tinkerbelle-like form. Paprika (Kon Satoshi, 2006).

and obese inventor Dr. Tokita—who is both friend and sometime foil to Chiba—turns into a giant robot and swallows her, indicating his unsatisfied sexual andemotional appetite for Paprika by commenting that his meal still “needs a littlemore spice.” However, as the scene continues, we find that Chiba has not beenannihilated but is now herself dreaming, and is able for the first time to expressher suppressed love for Dr. Tokita, connecting with her libidinal nature that hadpreviously been monopolized by the freewheeling Paprika.

Thereafter, mimicking the voracious, child-like appetite of Tokita, Chiba isable to expand her own body size, growing from baby to a child to a giant woman,and in the process swallowing the dreams and body of the film’s true villain, theChairman. By summoning the ability to ingest, Chiba is able to overcome theanxiety about inside/outside boundaries that so dominated Mima’s psychic worldin Perfect Blue. In fact, Chiba’s act of ingestion reverses an earlier scene in thefilm, reminiscent of the two rape scenes in Perfect Blue, in which Paprika ispinned down on a table by the Chairman’s henchman, while the Chairman insertshis hand, grown into an octopus tentacle, into Paprika’s mouth—a clear allusionto the “tentacle sex” scenes of such anime as Legend of the Overfiend (TakayamaHideki, 1989). While unwilling oral penetration and a willing act of ingestionmay appear similar in physical terms, Kon’s film makes the psychological differ-ence of the two clear. In the world of Kon’s Paprika, it seems that a character suchas Chiba must cultivate her own imagination, mobility, appetite, and strength ofwill in order to avoid being penetrated or swallowed—and even develop the abilityto swallow her enemies.

CONCLUSIONUnlike Perfect Blue’s Mima or the troubled characters of Paranoia Agent—or eventhe blithe Chiyoko from Millennium Actress, who seems satisfied merely with the“sliding” sensation of movement through the Virtual Mirror—Chiba is able totactically master the realm of the Virtual Mirror and successfully integrate thatexperience into her personality in the “real world.” However, while this may sug-gest a formula for growth or empowerment, it is not a narrative of transcendenceequivalent to that achieved by Ghost in the Shell’s Kusanagi. Indeed, as surely asOshii’s vertically oriented cosmology is invested in the dream of transcendence,Kon’s horizontally oriented universe is committed to a visual and narrative elab-oration of immanence.21 The experiences of the Virtual Mirror—those narrativeepisodes which are dreams, delusions, expressions of alternate identities, role-playing games and computer simulations—are not removed from the level ofphysical reality. Physical reality cannot be separated from the mind (nor can onebe subordinated to the other); the individual self cannot be separated from inter-subjective forces; the natural cannot be separated from the technological. Rather,each of these elements is immanent in the other, and their interplay comprisesthe complex weave of Kon’s fictional world.


Thus, while both directors explore the implications of media and informa-tion technology, their approaches are radically dissimilar. The differences beginwith the very meaning and uses of “information” in their works. As I havedescribed, there are many references in Ghost in the Shell to the vast network ofinformation known as the Net. Ironically, however, in proportion to the aura thefilm cultivates around the idea of information, the content of the informationstored on the Net generally remains vague, and the actual uses of this informa-tion, and their impact on daily life for most residents of New Port City, seemrather limited. For the elite characters to whom we are introduced, the two mainuses for information seem to be prosthetics and logistics. Computer memory asnetworked on the Net is basically presented as a prosthetic device for augment-ing human memory and mental processing, much as other technological devicesprovide prosthetic enhancements to bodily strength. These augmentations arecertainly useful to the cyborg police agents of Section 9 in such logistical tasksas navigating the city or researching the background of criminals. Furthermore,these prosthetics are extensive enough to cause an unusually sensitive cyborgsuch as Kusanagi to question how much of an original human mind or soul (or“ghost” in the language of the film) remains after all of the technological modi-fications. Nevertheless, it is only in the accidental birth of a new life form (thePuppet Master), signaling a new stage in human evolution and the possibility oftranscendence, that information technology is recognized as a fundamentaltransformation, rather than augmentation of the basic fabric of daily life.

The role of information technology in the anime worlds of Kon Satoshi,while central, is even more limited in scope. Kon shows little interest in infor-mation as an abstract concept, nor its potential applications in prosthetics orlogistics, nor, as we have seen, in the narrative of transcendence. Rather, he onlyseems truly interested in information technology insofar as it intersects with hisfundamental concerns with storytelling, imagination, and play (although this“play” can be threatening and disturbing, as in Perfect Blue and Paranoia Agent).The primary significance of information technology for Kon seems to be in pro-viding a ground for intersubjective play. The ominous web diary Mima’s Roomin Perfect Blue, the DC Mini in Paprika, and the more subtle but omnipresent roleof technology in Paranoia Agent provide the ground for an interaction of variousindividual agents, within the limitations of the “software” of some pre-creatednarrative or environmental structure. Thus Kon traces the process through which,as the permeation of technology into our daily communicative and imaginativeactivities accelerates, the borders between the natural and the technological, thelucid (“real”) and the dreamlike (“virtual”), are steadily eroded, and new realmsof intersubjective play, both liberating and threatening, emerge. The digitalrealms enabled by information technology are not presented as fundamentallydifferent, or even distinguishable from, such non-digital phenomena as dreams,hallucinations, or moviegoing.


Movies in particular hold a special position in Kon’s world as the imagina-tive ground where such figures as Millennium Actress’s Chiyoko and Tachibana,or Paprika’s Konakawa, engage in play that is both personal and intersubjective(interacting both with other characters and with pre-existing narratives and cul-tural tropes). In this sense, the presence of cinema in Kon’s world demonstratescontinuity between the virtual worlds enabled by digital information technologyand previous modes of narrative and interactive play, whether cinematic, liter-ary, or mythological.22 Nevertheless, as suggested most strongly in ParanoiaAgent, the sheer ubiquity of contemporary information and communication tech-nology, together with the many individual and collective pathologies of ouradvanced societies, may give rise to a state in which the penetration of technol-ogy into modern life becomes indistinguishable from mass psychosis. Kon’sprophecy, both reassuring and disturbing, is that the virtual worlds made possi-ble by information technology will be little different from dreaming or delusion—that is, far from sublime, and fundamentally human.

NOTES1. For the seminal model of digitally encoded information transmission, see Claude E.

Shannon, “A Mathematical Theory of Communication,” originally published in The BellSystem Technical Journal vol. 27 (July, October 1948): 379–423, 623–656. Archived athttp://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/ms/what/shannonday/shannon1948.pdf (accessed 15November 2008). On the concept of meaningful difference, or “a difference that makesa difference,” see Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind (Chicago: University ofChicago Press), 457-459. Regarding the vast amounts of information stored through con-temporary digital technology, the pocket-sized Apple iPhone made available in June2007 could store up to 8 gigabytes of information, or 64 billion bits, the smallest unit indigital information theory representing a meaningful difference of 1 or 0 in the binarynumeral system. As a communications device, of course, the iPhone can readily accesseven more vast networks of stored and transmitted information.

2. In this essay, I am using revised Hepburn romanization except in a few cases, such aswhen an author has a preferred non-standard romanization for his name, as with ShirowMasamune (Shiro Masamune), or when there is a commonly accepted romanizationwithin the English-Language critical and fan community, such as the character Batou(Bato) from Ghost in the Shell.

3. While making it clear that this is only a matter of convenience, the computer scientistsand government officials who created the Puppet Master program, originally for the pur-poses of cyber-espionage, refer to the Puppet Master with the male pronoun. Althoughthe Puppet Master borrows a female cyborg body to materialize in New Port City, itsmale voice in the film, as well as its role in proposing reproductive marriage to Kusanagi,also seem to mark its gender as male.

4. The iconography of the scene, featuring an individual on a hilltop or promontory over-looking a vast landscape, identifies it with such Romantic paintings as Casper DavidFriedrich’s Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog (Der Wanderer über dem Nebelmee, 1818),which are closely identified with the development and popularization of the sublimeaesthetic. Livia Monnet has also discussed the sublime aesthetic in Ghost in the Shell inher article “Towards the feminine sublime, or the story of ‘a twinkling monad, shape-shifting across dimension’: intermediality, fantasy, and special effects in cyberpunk filmand animation,’” Japan Forum 14.2 (2002): 225-268.


5. Quotations and summary in Marjorie Hope Nicolson, Mountain Gloom and MountainGlory: The Development of the Aesthetics of the Infinite (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,1959), 282.

6. Quoted in Philip Shaw, The Sublime (London and New York: Routledge, 2006), 54.

7. Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime andBeautiful, ed. J.T. Boulton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1958), 40.

8. Immanuel Kant, Kant’s Critique of Judgement, translated with introduction and notes byJ. H. Bernard (London: Macmillan and Co., 1914), 106-132.

9. Concepts similar to the Cyber Sublime have been pursued in studies of American tech-noculture such as David Nye’s American Technological Sublime (Cambridge, MA: MITPress, 1994) and Vincent Mosco’s The Digital Sublime: Myth, Power, and Cyberspace(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004).

10. Susan Napier discusses the mythological elements of this scene in Anime from Akira toPrincess Mononoke: Experiencing Contemporary Japanese Animation (New York:Palgrave, 2001), 113.

11. Victoria Nelson, The Secret Life of Puppets (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,2002), 268-271.

12. Livia Monnet argues that Oshii’s film posits a fantasy of the feminine sublime, whereby “theabstract image in which the cyberminds and ‘ghosts’ of Motoko and the Puppet Master areabsorbed represents, as it were, a Deleuzian becoming-molecular woman, which is bothgrounded in and transcends the historical materiality of molar (cyborg) women, or womenas subjects.” See Monnet, 253. While Monnet’s argument is fascinating and persuasive inmany respects, nevertheless the iconography of Oshii’s film, even as it gestures at theJapanese female-centered Amaterasu mythology, seems to me to fundamentally replicatemasculinist Indo-European and Semitic Sky God myths in ways that undercut the poten-tially liberating or subversive element of “animistic femininity” in the film.

13. Lawrence Eng describes Eiri as a male magus turned false God on his website “ThoughtExperiments Lain,” which cogently explicates a number of elements of the series,http://www.cjas.org/~leng/lain.htm (accessed 27 June 2007).

14. Although working in the cel animation medium, which employs drawings that are pho-tographed with a camera, Kon simulates numerous camera effects associated with live-action films, such as tracking shots, pans, and zooms. While I will sometimes refer tothese as “camera” effects, most of these effects are produced by the framing choices anddrawing techniques in the cels themselves, while others may be created when the celsare photographed.

15. Susan Napier, “‘Excuse Me, Who Are You?’: Performance, the Gaze, and the Female in theWorks of Kon Satoshi,” in Cinema Anime: Critical Engagements with JapaneseAnimation, ed. Steven T. Brown (New York: Palgrave, 2006), 14.

16. For a stimulating discussion of sliding motion in animation, see Thomas Lamarre, “Fromanimation to anime: drawing movements and moving drawings,” Japan Forum 14.2(2002): 329-367.

17. It is intentionally ambiguous whether the scene on the train is an incident fromChiyoko’s “real” life or one of her movies. “Mounted bandits” (bazoku) were a stockimage in Japanese fictional representations of Manchuria. Their real-life counterparts mayhave been criminal gangs or resistance fighters against Japanese imperialists in this dis-puted territory. The following scene of the medieval castle under attack alludes frequent-ly to Kurosawa’s film Throne of Blood (Kumonosu jo, 1957).

18. Kon discusses the nostalgic iconography of this sequence in his website “‘Moso’ no bussan,”http://www.asahi-net.or.jp/~xw7s-kn/paranoia/mousou011A.html (accessed 27 June 2007).

19. This nostalgia that can be readily observed outside of Kon’s work in the highly successfulNHK television documentary series Project X: The Challengers (Purojekuto X: Chosensha-tachi, 2000-2005), and the hit movie Always Sunset on Third Street (Always sanchomeno yuhi, Yamazaki Takashi, 2005).


20. As Mitsuyo Wada-Marciano has pointed out to me, the term moe is associated not onlywith discourses by or about male otaku, but is also found in discourses by female enthu-siasts of such genres as Boys’ Love, yaoi, and rotten women (fu-joshi). On male-centereddatabase-based erotic gaming and moe, see Azuma Hiroki, Dobutsuka suru posutomodan: otaku kara mita nihon shakai (Tokyo: Kodansha gendai shinsho, 2001), 62-83.It should be noted that the Virtual Mirror-like space of such games is itself the intersub-jective meeting-place of the personal desires of the players and the culturally basedqualities of cuteness or sexiness cultivated by the shared otaku culture in general, andthe game software developers in particular.

21. By “immanence”, I do not mean the immanence of God or the Divine in the human world,but something more like the immanence proposed in the cybernetic psychological theoryof Gregory Bateson (467) or the “pure immanence” or “plane of consistency or imma-nence” proposed by Gilles Deleuze. See Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A ThousandPlateaus: Caplitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: Universityof Minnesota Press, 1987), 265-272.

22. Melek Ortabasi discusses the place of cinema in relation to otaku culture as depicted inMillennium Actress in “National History as Otaku Fantasy: Satoshi Kon’s MillenniumActress,” in Japanese Visual Culture: Explorations in the World of Manga and Anime, ed.Mark W. MacWilliams (Armonk, NY and London: M.E. Sharpe, 2008), 274-294.

WILLIAM O. GARDNER is Associate Professor of Japanese Language, Literature,and Film at Swarthmore College. He is author of Advertising Tower: JapaneseModernism and Modernity in the 1920s (2006) and numerous articles, including“New Perceptions: Kinugasa Teinosuke’s Films and Japanese Modernism,”(Cinema Journal 43:3). He is co-translator and co-editor of Abe Casio’s BeatTakeshi vs. Takeshi Kitano (2005).


“The Cyber Sublime and the Virtual Mirror: Information and Media in the Works of Oshii Mamoru and...

Documents

Transcript of “The Cyber Sublime and the Virtual Mirror: Information and Media in the Works of Oshii Mamoru and...