Oriental Imprints in American and Asian Cyberpunk Essay

In general, science fiction has occupied a significant place in the world literature already for many decades. It has developed and evolved in numerous genres and subgenres, and with each step forward it has been revealing different, mostly far-going issues of painful future aspirations and fears. Cyberpunk, in particular, rose first in the United States, but in the second part of the twentieth century it found equally broad audience in Asia. What is more, the Asians authors did not simply copy the idea. Instead, they reasonably used the wave to apply it to the most urgent and timely questions of the age and combined the method with some traditional elements and patterns; especially such fruitful compilation is typical for contemporary Japanese culture.
Further, the American and East Asian film industries began to influence each other mutually and virtually both benefited from those interferences. However, the interesting fact is that neither has lost its autonomy and authenticity. But what are those specific differences? We will try to find the answers departing from the example of the two well-known SF films, Ghost in the Shell produced in Japan by Mamoru Oshii in 1995 and The Matrix produced in Hollywood by Larry and Andy Wachowski in 1999.
First of all, it is significant to underline that the manga Ghost in the Shell that was put into the base of the Japanese film with the same title was highly influenced by the American blockbuster The Blade Runner (directed by Ridley Scott) that appeared in 1980s. At the same time, Wachowski brothers admitted that they were strongly inspired by Oshii’s work. It is obvious that these two facts eloquently reflect the ongoing mutual cross-cultural affects.
To go on, it should be noted that Ghost in the Shell differs much even from the other Japanese cyberpunk films. It has been recognized as a skillful “combination of technically sophisticated (and extremely beautiful) computer animation and its complex and philosophically sophisticated story line” (Napier 104). As for the plot, this is a dramatic story of cyborg Motoko Kusanagi. She works as an assassin for the Japanese National Public Safety Commission, in the secret division known as Section 9. Kusanagi was bionically created to fulfill her work, she has supernatural abilities and her body is mechanized almost completely. However, her brain is organic as well as one segment of her spinal cord, and with events developing, she realizes that she is not human, but she is not completely a machine too. She occurs to have feelings and through the film she seeks her lost identity and her “ghost”. The latter word here stands for some spiritual substance that distinguishes artificial intellect from natural one.
The Matrix, in turn, tells a story of Thomas Anderson (further Neo) who used to be a programmer and hacker, but once he is proposed to learn the truth and from that moment his life changes totally. He finds out that the world he used to live in was nothing but a simulacrum, “neural-interactive simulation,” “a digital construct indistinguishable from the real” (Nakamura 66) created by artificial intelligence machines. The latter turned out to have enslaved humans and made them their energy sources. Yet, there is a covert grouping of people (“100 percent pure homegrown human beings”) who know the truth and who fight against the hegemony of machines.
Thus, the first contrast we can see is that in The Matrix human beings are traditionally opposed to cyborgs who are unambiguously embodying evil forces while in The Ghost in the Shell the other side of medal is demonstrated. It is shown that cyborgs can also possess human features, their vulnerability can cause sympathy and the way to cooperate should be hunted. As Napier states, “although it gives us an indubitably cyberpunk world replete with cyborgs, computers, robots, and other mecha tropes, at the same time it is a world clearly imbued with a sense of otherness that seems remarkably feminine” (Napier 115).
Speaking further about the impacts, we should mark that by the time of The Matrix release references to East Asia in Hollywood movies became prevailing in the film industry and popular culture of the United States. In Park’s view, technology conflated East Asia in a global, multicultural context, hence Asian tropes and themes have occupied the background of Hollywood movies and familiar orientalist tropes and attitudes became a part of cinematic vocabulary (Park viii-xii). However, ideology and aesthetics of Asian culture have been left behind to a great extent. By Park, the orientalist tropes have been acknowledged “for their style, not their content, and their surface, not their interiority” (Park ix). Besides, in the entire popular discourse and in the movies in particular “both kinds of oriental imagery – the invisible abject and the hypervisible feted” are restrained to decorative functions and thus creates a mistreating image of their origin (Park ix). For broad masses of fans that were not familiar with the East Asian popular culture, anime and martial arts have been something new and original. It was a fresh sip and thus subcultural base rapidly gained the scale of mainstream. Therefore, American SF cinema became a kind of “a collective fantasy of the futuristic, high-tech Orient” (Park viii). The Matrix, “a feel-good, cross-marketed science-fiction blockbuster” (Park 163), with its opportune use of martial arts in combination with tremendous visual computer effects, with the idea of sacral sansei-student relationships (between Neo and Morpheus) and Buddhist notion of transition into other world has made it a perfect follower of Orient dream.
To go on, both films Ghost in the Shell and The Matrix exploit the traditional mecha tropes “as the cyborg and urban high-tech settings to explore more inward states of consciousness” (Napier 104). They set the scenes of frightening future where everything human is just illusion and innuendo.
Still, there is a significant difference between philosophical contexts of the two stories. While The Matrix is associated with the Bible legend about the Savior, the One predicted to come and save all the lost and take them to better world, Ghost in the Shell is centered on the individual. Although Kusanagi is a cyborg, she may be approached as a metaphor for a human being of the late twentieth century and the early twenty first, that is to say the postmodern era. The theme of total loneliness, “corrosive loneliness of the human condition” (Napier 107) in large technocratic surroundings is one of the crucial for contemporary literature and cinema. In the film, technology is really acting as an “instrument of alienation” and the thing that drives the protagonist for “a quest for her spiritual identity” (Napier 107). Furthermore, while Kusanagi is both organically and technologically constructed and thus “totally free of human origins”, she does not take this freedom as a bonus, on the contrary she feels restricted by her origin and cannot agree with such a choice. As Napier considers, “Ghost in the Shell is a genuinely metaphysical work that is concerned less with individual identity in society than with such philosophical questions as whether one can possess a soul in an increasingly technological age” (105). Due to the predominance of philosophical speculations and theatrical mode recalling the Japanese puppet theater (Bolton 250), the film turns out to be “far less action-driven than most Western cyberpunk or mecha anime” (Napier 106), and that is a weighing feature distinguishing this anime from Wachowskis’ work where everything is overfilled with action and stress is even made on appropriate techniques. So, Kusanagi demonstrates a protest against being a mechanical animal, she “herself is looking through a glass darkly, searching for some fuller image of herself, one that may go beyond her lonely individuality” (Napier 110), it is a traditional motive of moving toward some better, larger, more encompassing identity that is found in many religions. For instance, “the notion of a bodiless union with an amorphous greater entity has clear evocations of the Buddhist concept of nirvana, where the self is said to become like a single drop in a vast ocean” (Napier 113). And though body is usually seen as an obstacle on the way to salvation, for Kusanagi it is “standing at the nexus between the technological and the human, that can best interrogate the issues of the spirit” (Napier 107).
So, Neo is the one to save everyone, while Kusanagi is all alone to save herself. But in the end we see that Neo stays alone to contract to the machines, while Kusanagi is uniting with a greater entity where she can feel herself a part of something more essential. As Napier concludes, “While the American films seem to privilege a kind of individual humanism as a last resort against the encroaching forces of technology and capitalism, Ghost simply repudiates the constrains of the contemporary industrialized world to suggest that a union of technology and the spirit can ultimately succeed” (Napier 114). In other words, the main difference is that Neo is defined to be different from others and to be exclusive, and Kusanagi is trying to find an answer of how to be normal.
As for the other geopolitical issues, the Matrix is often observed for new approach to race reflecting the real matters of changed popular depictions which used to mythologize race as a marker of difference. The film presents mixed-race perception As Park speculates, “Throughout the film, racial, gender, and sexual differences are reduced and spectacularized to virtually orientalized bodies that move in concert – and sometimes merge – with orientalized virtual spaces” (Park 172). What is more, sinister agents are shown as all the same white males of the middle class, and the main leader of the underground movement is played by Afro-American actor. According to Nakamura, “The Matrix constructs a new discourse of race in the digital age, one which plugs us in to our own dream-worlds about cyber-utopias and cyber-futures” (Nakamura 69).
Finally, the provocative motive in Ghost in the Shell is seen in the moment when Kusanagi is stopped from falling by a slender cable. This moment “can be seen as having both umbilical associations and associations with a corporate, or at least governmental, form of Puppet Master; the institutions literally bind her to her work as an assassin” (Napier 109). Consequently, both films develop around humanity’s submissive service to postmodern media and computer technologies which devour our identities and souls, but actually execute this function using different cinematographic methods.