International ScarJo: GHOST IN THE SHELL, LUCY, GHOST WORLD, Black Widow

Turn the cable on at any given time and there she is, chest deep in sci-fi weirdness: Scarlett Johansson as the KGB experimentally-augmented Black Widow in THE AVENGERS and related Marvel-verse franchises, or as a girl who becomes more than human with 100% brain usage in LUCY; or (voice only) as a sexy Siri Mach 2050 in HER, an alien in UNDER THE SKIN, an alienated Tokyo tourist in LOST IN TRANSLATION, an alienated high-school graduate in GHOST WORLD, and on an on she goes, her wry half-smile and husky voice transforming any ludicrous enterprise into something earthy and tangible while still being never quite of this world. Born in the Bronx, and inheritor to all the tough chick rasp that implies, Johansson's ever ready to use seduction or a mixture of the kind of martial arts (Muay Thai, Kali, etc) that involves swinging around people's necks like an ice ballet starlet, she has a great across the thug-filled room saunter, shoulders low and hunched for a sneak attack, and way with sussing potential trouble out of the corner of her eye without breaking stride or cool. ScarJo seems always a notch above her material, yet at the same time she doesn't step on it as she climbs, and gingerly she brings it along behind her. No easy feat, to redeem and solidify shaky CGI realities (considering how much of that stuff is done in green screen). It's OK too if she can't quite pull off some of the more encompassing moments of grandeur, for she has the brains to underplay rather than ham it up to make up the difference. In this way she has the same fundamental cool savvy we find in, say, 80s action stars like Bruce Willis and Arnold Schwarzenegger. If she lacks their self-deprecating doofus undercarriage, she at least doesn't wink at the audience or start doing funky dances like Cameron Diaz. That shit doesn't age well, but Scarlett's built to last.

GHOST IN THE SHELL

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.
But getting back to the race issue, the casting of Johansson and Pitt as -SPOILERS! formerly Japanese eco-terrorist lovers living in the contaminated zone, interestingly presumes if any Japanese person could create their own ideal robot shell, they wouldn't look Japanese, or at any rate even if the ghost/soul was Japanese, the white (French) engineer would give her shell a white face, and she'd automatically speak English (the universal corporate language) rather than Japanese. This strange but conceivable decision (in the future, colonial history still works its racist mess) reaches a peak subtextual moment in the one at top, when Kuze and Major, remembering each other from their Japanese teenager past, take off each other's facial covers, revealing the circuitry beneath (but not showing the maze of sociopolitical awareness vs. box office second-guessing at work in their mask's lack of epicanthic folds). ENDPOSILERS

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.
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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.

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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.

In Lucy (2014) there's a great bit where, after spending the first 1/4 of the movie crying and pleading, one of her captors kicks her in the stomach, breaking open the package she's carrying sewed inside, a kilo of high end brain boosting Limitless-style super drugs. Peaking on these blue crystals, she ably escapes, kills an array of bad guys, gets shot, goes to the hospital and--while a doctor removes the bullet at gunpoint--she calls her mom to explain she remembers being in her womb and the taste of her milk and how much she loves her Delivered by Johansson in a flat whispery monotone, Lucy's monologue to mom will bring uncomfortable recognition from anyone who's ever had a mind-opening drug trip / manic high and decided to call their mom out of the blue to 'connect' and show off, and explain they've cracked it wide open, broken the code, that they 'get it now' and can see past the limitations of time and space and realize all the interconnected love etc. etc. I know I've had a few of those back in the 80s-90s, and was always grateful for my mom's sense of denial, for I'd never hear about it later and forgot most of what I said/promised. Even if she did look at me kind of funny for a few weeks. Since then, I've had the experience of younger generations doing the same thing to me or in front of me, and I've been privy to how crazy these sorts of phone calls and explanations sound, both pretentious and deluded, egotistical and full of fragility masked in bravado, as if in convincing me of their discovery their discovery becomes real. It's like they try to etch these fleeting feelings into the consciousness of those around them, rather than where they should go- onto paper, magnetic tape, and hard drives- but just sound crazy--it doesn't translate, just like hearing about someone else's dream never has the same dizzy power as our own.

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Clik here to view.It's perhaps the sadder truth of enlightenment, especially via the poison path that the more brilliantly the ideas cascade inside your mind, the more the tongue can barely keep pace. Ideas as they flow out into brush strokes on canvas, words on the screen, words from the mouth - but try to talk normal to a friend or parent and--unless you really practice the art of doing it as an act in your down time--you don't quite sound like someone who's cracked it wide open and broke on through to the other side, you sound like an amok egotistical maniac, a frothing lack-of-sleep meth-addled grandiose version of James Mason in Bigger than Life and maybe, a little bit, like Scarlett Johansson in Lucy would if she didn't wisely underplay to such a dry extent. She can back it up with remote controlling all media, gravity, and telekinesis and shit in ways that make her more than a match for Neo in The Matrix, but she does it all without leather and dark glasses.

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For Lost in Translation (see A Jet-Lagged Hayride with Dracula)

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Ghost World

It was in 2001's Ghost World, Scarlett J. first showed the world a most endearing smirk that set her in a class somewhere off from/ above the hipster anarchy of her self-destructive friend Enid (Thora Birch); Scarlett would look upon Enid with the same kind of bemused indulgence Enid looked upon Steve Buscemi; the kind of halfway grin that can--in the wrong face-can smack of snide dismissal--when hers finally did, turning against Enid and moving in favor of a job and independence, we felt a chill in our guts like mom had just kicked us out of the house. Not that we blamed her, for we'd realized too that Enid's rebellion was a dead end. Sure her options were all soul-sucking drone work, but she needed to knuckle down and do it, to let her soul die just a bit, to reign in her wild mare in basement art, like some John Cheever country husband, instead of being all smarmier than thou straight into the isolated drifter bin. Scarlett J. was right to do dump her. Enid's world view and attitude is in the end, not self-sustaining. There's nowhere to go, and that--I think--was the film's big flaw, it didn't know how to end itself- to find the right note. It should have zapped the title up to a blast of punk anarchy when the old man gets on the bus that wasn't supposed to come and leaves Enid alone on the bench. Bam! She looks out at camera, Bam! Ghost World title card and punk rock credits music. A Winner. They probably tried that ending, but test audience asked what happened to Seymour, so the film checks in with Seymour again, letting us know--not that we cared--he's doing just fine, getting professional help, as if we needed that rather than to experience the zero sum game of his arc and Enid's both in that one bus stop moment. The utter pointlessness of rebelling against life outside the beef jerky and numb chucks of prefab American reality while still living within in it, Scarlett mutes it all down and gets excited about a fold-down ironing board in the apartment she's rending with Enid (if Enid gets the money), and that's really the film's one emotional payoff. The terror that flits across Enid's face as she suddenly realizes she truly is alone in the universe.
Scarlett's never really given us that ironing board moment gaze since, thank goodness, and has become instead a global scale avatar of a kind of mirror reverse nerd gaze - reflecting the geeky adoration of the Comic-Con Cos-play Kid back upon itself, with a wry half-smile that says "I know you would run in terror if I came onto you in real life, and I'm not going to, because then when you saw me onscreen again you'd jut get the sting of shame at the memory of when you ran away. I'd rather have you adoring me than upset by my advances, but just know I'm not threatened by your wanting me; since I can believably kick your ass, there's nothing to fear from you so I'm not threatened, and if that's a turn-off to your male instincts, watch me bat my eyes and feign vulnerability, but if you're not a chump, don't buy into it." This is the gaze that boys want to see mirrored back at them, for it acknowledges their gaze as something other than toad-like; even as it gently rejects, it flatters; the male gaze is returned without the Medusa stone surcharge. The fanboy's gaze is not judged sexist, misogynist, evil, gross or all the other judgments women make on men who leer way out of their league, nor is it returned with a come-on directness like a prostitute meeting your gaze across an Atlantic City casino bar, the type where you look away in fear instantly, before you consciously even realize what just happened. If your gaze screenwards is met with an insolent stare it's not the same as the gaze thrown back as a gauntlet, like make your move, Sampson- or don't - either way, in the morning you'll still have the same full head of hair.

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Gross.. I just read she made out with Colin Jost at the SNL wrap party. Nevermind. She sucks.