Orientalism in the Shell

Orientalism, or the stereotypical portrayal of Asian and Middle Eastern culture in films and other artistic works, is not very hard to notice once you start looking for it. Movies like Aladdin take on a whole new light. The West has an enormous collection of films, paintings, and TV shows that fall into this trap, but I started to wonder how actual Asian films do in relation to their Western counterparts. Specifically, I thought about the original Ghost in the Shell from 1995 and the remake from 2017. Sure enough, the remake held many examples of what we would think of when we hear "Japanese" city would be. In particular, the remake clutters its city with a seemingly impossible number of holographic displays that I think are supposed to be advertisements, almost all of which contain things that are "Japanese" like people wearing kimono, large glowing koi fish swimming around buildings, or large signs featuring Kanji that would be totally illegible from anywhere except from sweeping helicopter shots that we are presented with. One image that kept reappearing was someone who seemed to have fans growing out of their head. I'm not really sure what that's supposed to be. These things may find their roots in actual Japanese culture, but in this film they serve to do little else than to attempt to create an atmosphere. They serve no real purpose in terms of plot, and really would not be realistic in the world of the film. Here are two identical shots from the remake and the original:

You can see a little bit of the holographic billboards in the background here, but if you notice, the original's skyline looks just like a city. It looks like a futuristic cyberpunk city, but it's still a city. When it comes down to it, the original Japanese creators see their own cities as being just that, cities. There is no reason to flood them with stereotypical Japanese imagery as that won't make it any more of a Japanese city than if it hadn't been there.

Similarly, the remake attempts to shadow the original's opening scene. The movies open on a strike operation being run by Section 9, a division of a Public Security department under the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Both scenes essentially result in a window being shot in by the main character, but the scene's execution deviates here from the original. In the original, a meeting is interrupted and a foreign diplomat is assassinated, preventing a programmer from defecting the country, and that's it. However in the remake, the scene involves a meeting between an African leader and a member of a company that is attacked by terrorists and hacked geisha-bots. That's right, robotic geisha. These robots wind up playing a decently large role in the film, being used in later scenes to gather information via hacking, but when you boil things down, this is just another instance of the remake trying to fit as many things that seem Japanese into the film. They rely on that to create a feel of wonder and fascination as much as they do the future technology that is prevalent in both films.

The remake also sneaks other Japanese stereotypes into the remake. The head of Section 9 is Japanese, and he is also the only character in what is clearly made to be Japan to speak Japanese. It feels out of place, and they even changed the character from the original into the stoic tight-laced kind of stereotypical Japanese police chief. The first thing that the main character's Japanese mother (even though Scarlet Johansen plays the main character) does when she sees her is offer tea. The more you dig in this movie the more instances of Orientalism you see, and with the original movie to compare against, each offense just grows in severity.

These two films show that Orientalism has not faded from our media. The original gave a rarer perspective from the actual culture being represented, while the remake shows the American take on it. The remake is just a bad movie in general, but the stereotypes it employs to create its setting create even more barriers that prevent me from enjoying the film. The remake tried too hard to be the original, except bigger and better, and it wound up just being more empty as a result. Interestingly, the fist movie opens with these lines: "In the not so distant future, when the corporate networks fill the Earth with electronic and optical communication lines, but society has not yet been too computerized to erase nations and races..." The city the original portrays is still Japanese, and it manages not to have all the same in your face stereotypical Japanese representations. The remake, with what its producer called an "international world" embraces Orientalism completely and fills its film with stereotypes. Orientalism is alive and well.