Though adept at smaller scale comedies (she loves to dust off her local girl accent), since becoming an A-lister she hasn't labored for respectability in Oscar bait the way others have, becoming instead a kind of sci-fi royalty, the poster girl for a Tyrell Corporation-sponsored Time-Image sci-fi future, the first girl to hang glide all the way across the Uncanny Valley. Part-Hawksian 'one of the guys,' part-older sister's cool friend who's nice to you, when we see strange new sci-fi worlds through her eyes--be they Seoul's skyways, the post-riot despair of 3 AM Glasgow, jet-lagged Tokyo, futuristic Tokyo, some other Tokyo, Paris, mall culture America, the empty rose-colored void, or the past of all mankind on the earth, from the first female ape to the last gasp--those worlds seem somehow absolved, their furrowed scalps gently but robustly tousled. Turn on any channel and there she is, making the future seem not only real, but inviting, even survivable, even if it's all just in bits and rates.
I'd heard the 'white-washing' accusations (1) before going to (open the Netflix envelope of) Ghost in the Shell but that only helped lower my expectations, which were low to begin with, for it seemed like Aeon Flux meets Ultraviolet x Resident Evil all over again. Maybe that helped in ways I can't foresee, or I'm racist, but I actually think Ghost in the Shell is actually a goddamn great film. For one thing, it's so rich in ambient futuristic detail --from the ingeniously animatronic reptilian geisha girl assassins to the visualized 3-D streams of bit data (they're so cool they make the green columns in The Matrix seem like the dos prompts in War Games --insert snorty nerd laugh)--that all its generic cop vs. corporate corruption clunkiness is forgivable (and certainly no more perfunctory than that in Ghost's most obvious template, Blade Runner).
In a role originally conveyed via an anime pixie, Johansson plays "The Major," an advanced cybernetic cop chick chassis (the shell) housing a Japanese girl's ghost. The point woman fronting an elite group of cops who investigate AI-related crimes, she regularly gets told not to rush into danger by her concerned chief (Takeshi Kitano!), which is almost as tired as M. Emmett Walsh tossing back whiskey and cigars while talking about "beauty and the beast - she's both." As in Blade, some advanced robotics engineers are the target of a splinter group of amok replicants, or something - (shades of Shelley!). Their next target seems to be Major's own creator, Juliette Binoche (which is funny if you've seem Clouds of Sils Maria).
The killer, named Kuze, turns out to be an evil mastermind earlier version of the Major herself, basically a kind of cyberterrorist robot-human melding 'early edition,' played by another gaijin, Michael Pitt. A marvelously intricate character, Kuze seems to be constantly reconstituting himself from surrounding bit rates, only half alive and half virtual at any given time, his tortured voice wracked with auto-tune and static. Once they start talking, comparing notes on their mostly-erased human pasts, Major wakes up to her true human origins, eventually 'going rogue' while the evil robotics CEO turns the bullets their way. Luckily, the cool thing about being a robot, she can get shot to shit and still be ready to dive slow-mo backwards off the parapet and come crashing upside down through a skyscraper window with both automatics Woo-style blazing again by the next beat. The end! Hurray! The future is nothing to fear as long as hangdog toughies like Beat Kitano carry teflon briefcases and can shoot from the hip.
In her defense, while Johansson might not be Japanese, but she has experience for the job, including that of being alienated in Tokyo (as 2003's Lost in Translation); having her face dissolve into bits of digital programming in Tokyo (in Luc Besson's Lucy); disappearing altogether and becoming just a SIRI-style AI (in Spike Jonze's Her); or a clone raised for its organs in a Logan's Run style enclosed citadel in The Island). Boris Karloff and Christopher Lee didn't just play Fu Manchu because they were white, they played him because of their resume's laden with successfully conveyed evil megalomaniacs. In the same way, ScarJo has a resume of successfully conveyed artificial intelligences, test tube babies, amnesiacs, assassins, and substantial fight training that keeps the obligatory hair in the face stunt doubling to a minimum. She's appeared around the world, she's gone global. She puts in the flyer miles. She's sanded her psyche down for mass appeal, ready to be on the cover of everything from Italian Vogue to Japanese iPhone keypad ads for fragrances based on the novelization of the German manga.
I don't know why I'm sticking up for the casting decision- except that I, like everyone else, needs to prove he's not racist, even if it's only to himself, and the filmmakers clearly went all out to out-imagine both their holy bible Blade Runner and the anime version, combining multiple viewings worth of layered space and evocatively wrought Black Mirror future shockiness, and I'd hate for all that to be lost like tears in rain just because they were scared Maggie Q. wasn't a household name. The level of artistry and detail on display is jaw-dropping, and for once it actually serves a narrative purpose. We're clued into not only the world of the future but the foreign/alien way that future will be perceived. I can hardly wait until it too is on FX or FXX and comes punctuated with commercials for the next word in high-definition television.
As an anime all the cyberpunk detail tended to get lost in the overwhelming rush of negative and positive space (ink can't be layered the way blacks shadows in HD can) and--let's face it--the internet was just getting rolling back then, a lot of all that future stuff was still just on the page of Dick and Gibson novels, 'cyberpunk' fiction. The anime had a lot of rotoscoping and confusingly conveyed overlap between future, past, reality vs. virtual, and--unless you were an anime devotee familiar with the narrative tics and traits--seemed a kind of over-the-top cartoonish reliance on animation shortcuts rather than segue/linking micro-movement (i.e breathing). That over-the-top literalness in this live action version lives on only in the 'tactical' eye adjustments of Batou (he loses his human eyes and opts for two telephoto / infrared lenses that make him look like Little Orphan Annie's jacked uncle). Aside from those eyes, nearly every image is lustrous and best of all, at least semi-subtle and subdued. Since the actual actors and lighting provides some measure of corporeal relativity, the VR super-impositions stand out yet are so fully meshed it at times reminded me of last February when I had the DTs, watching Veronica Lake beckon to me from below the shining tiles of the ER waiting room. The slow-mo glass shattering and frozen water diving splashes were cliche minutes after The Matrix but here they actually fit the post-modern future on display; the differences between ancient past and far-flung future are dissolved almost as a side effect to the collapse of 3-D space and linear time.
The ultimate takeaway is that when the virtual world is as valid and 'real' as this one, (and the Uncanny Valley bridged), one of the side effect developments will be time travel, and the ability to replay our sensory recording of a single event, which can then be slowed down until the whole world stops on a fraction of a nanosecond for all eternity, and those watching/reviewing can wander into the middle of your 3D retinal projection display and see around corners and read the names of files left on the dresser. We see bits and pieces of this future in various Black Mirror episodes, but in this Ghost in the Shell it all fits together in a blast of subdued overwhelming elegance, like an atomic bomb inside an orchid.
There is one way to watch Ghost in the Machine and avoid any residual guilt over this issue, a way to amp up the subtextual resonance until it rings like freedom's bell: watch it with a Japanese dub language track. Hearing a Japanese actress speaking from inside ScarJo's shell as a Japanese woman trapped in a robot body will likely make all the difference.
If racial equality gets knocked back a peg by ScarJo's presence in this film, beauty parameters takes one step forward: though she's supposed to be the shell of an android, Johansson's body appears as it might an actual trained female fighter, i.e. solid and heavy, way heavier than any svelte anime assassin girl might have. It's not so noticeable she's unattractive, but solid evidence of her fight training that reminds of Cynthia Rothrock in her earlier films and of Gina Carano in her current ones. Like them, when she walks she has kind of a canny back and forth shoulders movement you see only with actually-trained female fighters, like Bruce Lee, a Thai boxer, and an alley cat melding together in one sultry, deeply present, fearless 'insolent' strut.That may not seem like much but it's pretty cool. Johansson is a big enough name she can steer the whole of our future's global beauty parameter to meet her changing silhouette. Her 'Major' is neither gangly pleasure model like Pris or svelte assassin like Aeon Flux, she's got more gravity and its center is lower to the ground.
Johansson's modulated low-key acting (as demonstrated first in Lucy) fits both this fighter stance parameter and the role of a soul who's basically had her identity stripped away; a "brain-washed white and enhanced with micro-processors, recording and playing back memories that can be, as in the Tyrell corporations' most gifted Nexus edition, Rachel (Sean Young) artificially implanted or removed, but unlike in Blade Runner can be 3-D projected and walked through and examined, her digital eyes catching details so pristinely her handlers can read names on files on the desk she once leaned over six weeks ago. When the themes are about identity and cultural meaning in an era where the digital and analog are no longer separate, where humans can be hacked and turned into weapons just by visiting the wrong sight while doing live action interior chip role playing games, her daringly non-perfect form and whitey-white whiteness become a weird assertion of humanity against the machine its in. In her small indirect but incessant way, her A-list clout works to widen the scope of what constitutes 'perfect' in the feminine form. She ain't no anime pixie. She's not even prone to act feminine. She's a real woman, you tricophobic devils!
What makes Ghost in the Shell work for me, too is that, like Blade Runner it keeps its ambitions and goals for narrative and resolution low to better focus on the visuals, and in the ample cracks all that good white-washing subtext can seep in like drainage from some polluted industrial river; in the end Major's cop team backs her up and most of them defeat the hit squads sent out after them by the evil CEO, and all is well again. There's fascinating callbacks, such as a go-nowhere but still interesting scene where she touches the actual flesh(?) of an androgynous, only partially-human 'mixed race' freckled prostitute (above). In a very touching but not quite sexy scene their faces touch close enough the heat is there, but there's no need to go all the way there - instead we have that curiosity with which a human might gaze into an animal's eyes (as in the cliche'd scenes with Batou's stray mutts) or vice versa, each fascinated by the mystery of a separate, never quite-knowable intelligence on the other side; for Major it's the unknowability of what makes us human, metered out with the fascination by this woman's unusual racial composition; for the girl she hires it's money, plus the chance to spend time with an AI, a lifestyle she's clearly enthralled by. For us it's weird since we're watching a human with artificial augmentation through the eyes of an artificial being with human augmentation. Watching Blade Runner now, on the ultimate edition cut, or whatever, I notice dozens of these little moments, the android equivalent of Hamlet looking into the skull sockets of pure Yorick; which is good because there's not much else to grasp, as the narrative is so wonky. But it's those moments, the monster looking for its reflection in the iris pond, that resonate long after the digital bullets and rain machines have sputtered to a stop.
--
As a privileged straight white male of course me sticking up for a movie other people are piggybacking a valid flashpoint off of should be suspect, yet here I am, wading into the self-perceived sludge of demons. If we were all 100% aware of all our subconscious agendas, one way or another, would we ever say or do anything? No, we'd just stand there paralyzed, realizing at last why the veil between unconsciousness and waking is so opaque. Even so, I hear most Japanese citizens think--if those who've read and summarized their tweets can be a reliable consensus--that we're (in the States) overreacting, but we don't have as many creepy life-size robots, either); the head bad guy, and the two center robots and the cop buddy are all white, but even Scarlett's ghost's mother is Japanese. So though this might be the 'flesh-colored crayon' du jour over here, in Japan but don't think of Shell as part of the Japanese cultural identity as they also know the whole genre comes via the novels of Phillip K. Dick and William Gibson, the same authors who indirectly or otherwise spawned Blade Runner, their granddaddy bible, a film full of Asian characters and symbolism (albeit played up for culture shock effect).
And then there's the weirdest part of all: stealing the whole movie is Kaori Momoi as her maybe Major's mom - this last is such a wow of a performance - it's clear English is not her first language but she attacks it with a stunning, raw innocence- as if in forming these strange words she's creating some new kind of polyurethane fiber, even across the divides of language and digital artificial shell recombination, and even race, she recognizes her long lost daughter. Maybe we can all learn a lesson from that. Probably not. Either way, the net has spoken, public opinion has crashed the white-washing festival's invisible omnipresence. It's almost done. Maybe we can finally learn who are Asians really anyway, beyond being Asian, or what that even is, and if they can ever be anything but foreign to us, or when cultural admiration and adoption and approximation and co-opting begin and end relative to racism. Or if everyone sees other races this way relative to their own alienation from themselves, or who the hell coded all our damned genetic racist neural programming. I mean, if it wasn't the admiralty, or the reptilians. Or like, whatever. 1982 called, it wants my wanting to go back to it back, but now it's too late even for wanting directions. The days of loading computer games into the TI99 from a phone modem via cassette tape, that's when it was real. A true north to set the magnets by.
IRON MAN 2 / AVENGERS: AGE OF ULTRON / CAPT. AMERICA: THE WINTER SOLDIER
A nurturing friend to the Comic-Con geek, ScarJo likes to get right up close to the Hulk and rub his fingers or invade his puny Banner's personal space, or fall on top of him in a sexy silk dress behind the bar, telling him "don't turn green, ok?" She ends up trying to help Capt. America find a girlfriend even while the unfurl a dastardly Fourth Reich Paperclip conspiracy deep within the CIA (I mean HYDRA within SHIELD) and trying the direct approach with Banner, who ends up running away instead. The smart move, that, because Black Widow is single for a reason - Marvel 'gets it' - she's who we, the lovelorn teenage male demographic, imagines for ourself. We know she wouldn't be turned off by our living in mom's basement and spending our disposable income on mint condition action figures. Were Marvel to saddle her up with some dude like Luke Wilson bringing her flowers and making hangdog eyes, that, sir, would be a major miscalculation in how fantasy works to allay and soothe the hormone-tortured adolescent mind. Marvel's too smart for that. DC, on the other hand, gives superheroes sidekicks ('boy wonder') showing a too-literal interpretation of adolescent 'identification' psychology. We don't mind Wonder Woman goes out with Capt. Kirk as he's a badass. It's the smarmy hipsters we hate -- they're too close to us. That's the difference between smart attempts at playing into audience identification and bad. Luke Wilson is too close to us; we need to be able to slot the boyfriend of our love interest into either the 'soon to be arrested' bad guy category or the cool older brother category.
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Marvel gets it, and clearly posits Black Widow (it's in the name) as the girl we can imagine ourselves with (lord knows I did, back in the days of her character's large-size black and white comics). That said, I wonder just how many young boys and lesbians imagine themselves with Scarlett Johansson. Maybe it's her Bronx upbringing, but Scarlett's one weakness is that she can't do 'weakness.' She can never quite tap the accessible vulnerability (emblematic in, say Heather Graham or Patricia Arquette) that brings out the lusty aggressor in a man so essential to his sex drive (and detrimental if he can't control it). Instead, we love her at a respectful distance, and she boosts our ego without having to get awkward about it.
There's a scene early in the first Avengers where she's tied up getting slapped around by a cadre of Russian mobsters in an abandoned warehouse and her cell phone rings, it's Fury who wants her to come in, and she says something like Hold on, I'm almost done interrogating these guys. In the calm collected way she says it, the men realize she's never not been in control of the situation like they thought. She easily escapes her bonds and beats the shit out of them all with pieces of the broken chair, then sashays away. That scene to me illustrates the breadth of Scarlett's range, for she is not the most giving and exhibitionist of actresses, yet this scene she works, and it plays to her strengths, the way Neil Young works his limitations on guitar, i.e into strengths, through a kind of advanced depth primitivism. We can buy her as vulnerable only if it comes packaged with the idea it might be a ruse.
On the other extreme of the acting intensity range, for example, we might consider Noomi Rapace, who acts her pain and anger so vividly in films like Prometheus and Girl with the Dragon Tattoo that she leaves any concept of 'fun' far behind her. In her hands, that scene in the Russian warehouse would be a grueling drag. She'd make the pain and trauma of her slapping brutally real - she'd make it our problem, the post-call thrashing would be cathartic but we'd still be left irritable and clammy. She forgets we come to movies to be entertained, especially movies about space monsters and girl avengers. We don't need to feel traumatized, or to hate ourselves worse than we already do. The only thing tempering our pain at her automated C-section in Prometheus is that her character has been such a self-righteous bitch we're happy to see her suffer. She makes her own pregnancy issues everyone else's problem, then gets pissy when the ship's crew don't drop everything they're doing to ram an alien space craft on her command even if it will kill them all. Why she's so good at big international productions is that Scarlett implicitly understands the parameters of a scene in ways beyond mere chops and intensity; she's her generation's Angie Dickinson.
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There's a scene early in the first Avengers where she's tied up getting slapped around by a cadre of Russian mobsters in an abandoned warehouse and her cell phone rings, it's Fury who wants her to come in, and she says something like Hold on, I'm almost done interrogating these guys. In the calm collected way she says it, the men realize she's never not been in control of the situation like they thought. She easily escapes her bonds and beats the shit out of them all with pieces of the broken chair, then sashays away. That scene to me illustrates the breadth of Scarlett's range, for she is not the most giving and exhibitionist of actresses, yet this scene she works, and it plays to her strengths, the way Neil Young works his limitations on guitar, i.e into strengths, through a kind of advanced depth primitivism. We can buy her as vulnerable only if it comes packaged with the idea it might be a ruse.
On the other extreme of the acting intensity range, for example, we might consider Noomi Rapace, who acts her pain and anger so vividly in films like Prometheus and Girl with the Dragon Tattoo that she leaves any concept of 'fun' far behind her. In her hands, that scene in the Russian warehouse would be a grueling drag. She'd make the pain and trauma of her slapping brutally real - she'd make it our problem, the post-call thrashing would be cathartic but we'd still be left irritable and clammy. She forgets we come to movies to be entertained, especially movies about space monsters and girl avengers. We don't need to feel traumatized, or to hate ourselves worse than we already do. The only thing tempering our pain at her automated C-section in Prometheus is that her character has been such a self-righteous bitch we're happy to see her suffer. She makes her own pregnancy issues everyone else's problem, then gets pissy when the ship's crew don't drop everything they're doing to ram an alien space craft on her command even if it will kill them all. Why she's so good at big international productions is that Scarlett implicitly understands the parameters of a scene in ways beyond mere chops and intensity; she's her generation's Angie Dickinson.
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Dig the way her shoulders hunch and move with her eyesight like a canny low-center boxer snaking through the crowded disco as the ecstasy kicks in. |
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For Lost in Translation (see A Jet-Lagged Hayride with Dracula) |
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Ghost World |
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Gross.. I just read she made out with Colin Jost at the SNL wrap party. Nevermind. She sucks.
Further Reading:
Skeeved by an Asian: THE BITTER TEA OF GENERAL YEN, MASK OF FU MANCHU, ETC.
It's only real if it wrecks your life: HER, THE WAY WE WERE, LOVE AFFAIR
Antichrist in Translation: UNDER THE SKIN, HABIT
A Jet-Lagged Hayride with Dracula: LOST IN TRANSLATION, THIS GUN FOR HIRE
NOTES:
1. Blair, Gavin J. (April 19, 2016). "Scarlett Johansson in 'Ghost in the Shell': Japanese Industry, Fans Surprised by 'Whitewashing' Outrage".
Skeeved by an Asian: THE BITTER TEA OF GENERAL YEN, MASK OF FU MANCHU, ETC.
It's only real if it wrecks your life: HER, THE WAY WE WERE, LOVE AFFAIR
Antichrist in Translation: UNDER THE SKIN, HABIT
A Jet-Lagged Hayride with Dracula: LOST IN TRANSLATION, THIS GUN FOR HIRE
NOTES:
1. Blair, Gavin J. (April 19, 2016). "Scarlett Johansson in 'Ghost in the Shell': Japanese Industry, Fans Surprised by 'Whitewashing' Outrage".