Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence
2004 · Mamoru Oshii · Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence on Sightlines
Partway into an investigation into murder, Batou stops to feed his dog. He is a cyborg detective whose body is mostly machine, and the dog is a basset hound, low and heavy and soft-eyed. Nothing about the case moves forward while he does this. Mamoru Oshii holds the moment anyway. If you came to Innocence expecting a cyberpunk thriller, this is where the film first tells you what it actually is. In a world built almost entirely out of manufactured surfaces, the dog is the one creature nobody had to design. For a few unhurried minutes it is also the whole plot.
The case itself is real, and it is a good one. Gynoids, doll-like companion cyborgs, have been killing people and then destroying themselves. Each time, their brains wipe themselves clean to protect the manufacturer's software. One doll, which Batou put down himself, has kept a single file: a voice saying "Help me." That is a perfect noir hook. There is a detective, a partner in Togusa, an underworld to go down into and a manufacturer at the top of the chain. Oshii builds the whole frame of a hard-boiled story. Then he keeps stepping off it.
Gilles Deleuze gives us a precise name for what happens when he steps off. He divides cinema into two broad regimes. The first, the movement-image, runs on a circuit: a character perceives a situation and acts to change it, and the cutting serves that chain. The detective story is the circuit at its tightest. A clue leads to an inference, and the inference leads to a move. Deleuze traced what he called the crisis of the action-image, the point where that circuit slackens and characters can no longer turn what they see into action that resolves anything. Innocence keeps the investigation running and still lets the crisis in. Its action set pieces are islands. Between them the film stops for long dialogues and near-silent stretches: Batou driving, Batou with the dog, Batou moving through rooms. Many people find this the film's great difficulty. It is also the reason to watch it.
Those stretches are what Deleuze calls dead time (temps mort). He doesn't mean wasted time. He means time that no longer serves as the measure of an action, so you feel it as itself. Oshii has worked this way for a long time. Angel's Egg (1985) was already nearly silent, glacially slow, and carried by drenched Gothic architecture instead of plot. Patlabor 2 (1993) held empty streets, bridges and canals in long takes scored by Kenji Kawai. The first Ghost in the Shell (1995) had its wordless stroll through a canal city. Innocence takes that interval and makes it the film's main mode.
Then there is the parade. Giant figures and floats move through a festival city, gilded and crowded, built from hand-drawn animation and computer graphics composited into a single image. The CGI is not trying to look real. It is trying to overwhelm. Kawai's choral chant, incantatory and liturgical, carries the whole procession. Deleuze calls a moment like this a pure optical and sound situation. Sight and sound are no longer cues for anyone's next move, and all that is left is to look and listen. The parade doesn't move the case along. It sinks you into a world of made beauty and leaves you there.
That made beauty is the film's subject, and here Deleuze lends us an older idea. Writing about German Expressionism, he described a "non-organic life of things," a vitality in objects that is neither alive nor dead. His examples work through shadow and light. Oshii reaches the same place through ornament. The dolls, the puppet-like framing of the characters, the parade's huge figures, Kim's golden mansion: the staging keeps rhyming human and manufactured bodies until you stop being sure which is which. The line runs back to Metropolis (1927) and its false Maria, the first manufactured woman built to seduce and deceive. Innocence takes that archetype literally, as dolls made for sex that turn violent. The question Blade Runner (1982) asked in its rain-lit city, whether the artificial can have a soul, comes back here as a question about surfaces. When every surface is crowded with detail and charged with this odd half-life, where does the person stop and the thing begin?
The talk raises the same question in a different way. Batou and Togusa trade aphorisms, and the hacker Kim speaks almost entirely in quotations. Solaris (1972) also had its characters read texts aloud in long, lingering scenes. Oshii pushes further. Deleuze has a term for an image that has lost its obvious sensory-motor meaning and asks to be deciphered: the lectosign, the readable image. The frames in Innocence are dense, layered, and full of architecture and decoration, and the dialogue is a collage of other people's words. Neither will simply carry you along. You have to read them, and the reading is part of the drama. Characters who are partly machine speak in borrowed sentences. That is one way a film can ask what a genuine feeling would even sound like.
This is also where the film says something about cinema itself. André Bazin grounded film's realism in photography, in the camera's mechanical bond with the world it records. Deleuze's two cinema books work almost entirely with photographed films. Innocence has no camera at all. Every wet street, every gilded room, every slow glide of the frame was made, by hand and by computer, at the moment before full-3D animation became routine, when the labor of marrying handcraft to computation was visible in the image itself. And yet the dead time is there and the pure optical situations are there. A film about whether a manufactured body can hold a soul is itself made of manufactured images that hold real duration. When it competed for the Palme d'Or at Cannes, one of very few animated features ever admitted to the main competition, that claim was the real argument: animation can do what art cinema does, and not by imitating it.
Here is what to watch for. Whenever the plot stops, stay with it instead of waiting for it to start again. Look at every figure in a crowded frame and ask whether it is a doll. Listen to how often a voice is quoting someone else. And keep an eye on the dog. It is the one thing in the film that never has to prove it is alive.
Concepts in play
- crisis of the action-image — A hard-boiled detective plot (murder case, partner, underworld, manufacturer) used as scaffolding while the film keeps suspending the investigation for long dialogues and near-silent passages; action set pieces arrive as 'discrete islands in an otherwise ruminative flow'
- temps mort (dead time) — Extended near-silent passages of Batou driving, feeding his basset hound and moving through spaces, held in long contemplative takes that do not advance the case; descended from the still-life city montages of Patlabor 2 and the 'urban stroll' of Ghost in the Shell
- pure optical and sound situations — The parade sequence: a hallucinatory procession of giant figures and floats in deliberately overwhelming integrated 2D/3D imagery, carried by Kenji Kawai's liturgical choral chant, offering nothing to do but look and listen
- expressionism (the non-organic life of things) — A world staged as accumulated ornament, gilded interiors and mechanical dolls, with composition rhyming human and manufactured bodies until it's unclear which is which; the murderous gynoids extend Metropolis's false Maria. Applied through ornament and gold, not Deleuze's chiaroscuro
- the readable image (lectosign) — Dialogue built from exchanged quotations and aphorisms, Kim's speech a near-continuous montage of citations, set inside deep, layered, information-dense compositions that ask to be deciphered rather than simply followed
- the closed set (cadre) — Deep, layered compositions crowded with architectural and decorative detail, with the frame treated 'as a space to be inhabited and studied rather than cut through'