Being allowed to breathe and see the city as it is, allows the audience two things: First and most obvious, we get a moment of world-building, of simply seeing the city of the future from the point of view of a person on the street. We see the electronic signs, the towering buildings, the intricate waterways that snake their way through the entire city, the half-finished construction projects, and trash littering the streets. The identity of our world is not established here, but fleshed out. The audience is given time to take it in, to internalize where this film is taking place. The second point, one much more formless and subtle, is in actuality a continuation of Motoko's musings about identity. The shots of the city are slow and detail-oriented as a reflection of her gaze. The things she is looking at, the things she is noticing, these are what are brought to our attention. She is looking at her environment with new eyes, a new curiosity and desire to understand. She sees a cyborg in a window that resembles her extremely closely, causing her to reflect more on how much her outward appearance makes up who she is. If she is simply a brain inside of a cyborg that isn't even unique in appearance, does that make her less of herself? Is she just a brain living in a generic shell? Does she have more in common with these half-finished buildings than she does with a human being? At one point, she watches people walk past a department store window, which is filled with mannequins dressed up in the store's clothes. Which one is she supposed to identify with, the humans walking past, or the mannequins made to look as human as they can? Motoko's outward appearance is constantly in conflict with the way she speaks and thinks, which causes more dissonance for both her and the viewer. She's clearly a mature individual, with well-fleshed out thoughts about her own soul and identity, but her body suggests that she's a girl in her mid-20s instead of the grizzled military veteran that she truly is. The medium of anime is used here to it's fullest potential, creating a protagonist that is beautiful and young which meets the expectations and desires of the audience, but then subverting this to use her appearance against the audience to confuse them.

In fact, the entire film is a subversion of what the typical viewer would expect out of a famous anime movie. A surface-level viewing would result in some enjoyment of the animation, the plot, and the action. These are all excellent parts of Ghost in the Shell, and I believe they're designed in such a way that if these are the only elements an audience member sees, they can still have a good experience. But in reality, these are all in service of deeper questions asked about Motoko's personage, about her identity, and about her ghost. In turn, this is meant to question us about our identities, and to ask us to consider how we feel about the identity and soul of a cyborg like Motoko. This isn't a problem we face today, but as technology inevitably advances, the kind of things we see in Ghost in the Shell will come to pass. It isn't addressed directly in the movie, but it is implied that the difference between a human brain and a cyber-brain isn't really that much, that they're both just extremely complicated machines that evolved for a purpose. The cyber-brain was designed and evolved very specifically and over a much shorter time period, but due to it's level of complexity, it's similarity to a real brain is close enough that the sort of questions asked in this movie must come up. The other conversation in the film that most of it's philosophy stems from is the elevator scene, in which Motoko speaks to Batou about the cyborg body that they have trapped the Puppet Master in. Despite the fact that it's supposedly just an empty shell, Motoko sees herself in it, it reminds her far too much of herself and causes her to question her identity once again. She posits that it's completely possible that she's nothing but an empty shell just like it is, that she has no ghost and that all of her memories are faked. Batou doesn't have much tolerance for these sorts of conversations and insists that her brain was originally human and that it's merely been integrated with the cyber-brain. Motoko makes a point that has been a point of contention for philosophers since the dawn of time, which is that no human has ever seen their own brain. We are simply trusting that the impulses we receive are a reflection of reality, that our minds tell us the truth about who we are and our surroundings. This has been called into question though, due to the ability to supplant false memories and experiences like was seen earlier in the film. Motoko's hold on her ego is extremely fragile at this point, and the brief confrontation with the Puppet Master has cast her entire identity and even her belief that she has a ghost, into doubt.

The climax of the film begins with a startling revelation: the Puppet Master was never human, he is a rogue AI that evolved when exposed to the raw data of the net, and insists that he has a ghost of his own. This raises far more questions than it answers, but before any can be directly addressed, he escapes and Section 9 is tasked with finding him. The final action scene of the movie is an exciting one, brilliant choreographed and animated, and extremely fun to watch. But the true final confrontation comes after the action is over, when Motoko attempts to "dive" into the Puppet Master to see his ghost for herself. The Puppet Master is more intelligent and powerful than she suspects, and instead of a simple dive, it becomes a deeply chilling conversation between the two. The Puppet Master speaks to her of her fragile identity, her longing to expand beyond the boundaries of her shell, and the extreme similarities between the two. Motoko is presented with an option she had never considered before: merge with the Puppet Master to create a new being. Combine their ghosts, to result in an entity that is at once both of them, and neither of them. This only further complicates the questions of identity and soul through the movie's perspective, but it does address Motoko's struggle to identify herself as a human being. She can either continue living in her machine body, experiencing the world through her supposed human mind, and deal with the cognitive dissonance this causes her, or she can merge with the Puppet Master and cast off her human identity all together, and definitively become something that she can at least believe in. Her ultimate choice is to merge, to escape from the existential limbo that she has found herself in, and to become something completely different, something that has never existed before. The answer to her dilemma was not an actual answer, but an escape from the dilemma itself. The questions that plagued Motoko were so intense, so personal, and so unanswerable, the most satisfactory way she found to live with them were to transform her very being. This speaks to the enigmatic struggle for identity that is not just a sci-fi subplot, but a part of who we are as humans. We are always seeking purpose, seeking identity, and meaning, and regardless of what we think, technology will only make that question more difficult to answer.

As a cyberpunk cautionary tale, Ghost in the Shell, has been a defining influence on the genre and on pop culture as a whole. These questions about technology's effect on who we are as people had been asked before, but by bringing it to the forefront of culture, by placing the idea into the layman's head, we began to have a conversation about it that has been ever-present since. Movies like The Matrix, large cultural touchstones, draw direct and obvious influence from both visual elements of Ghost in the Shell, and it's ponderous atmosphere. Nothing however, can seem to touch the emotional complexity and elegant balancing act that the film pulls off. Nothing that I've seen since has done such an incredible job with so little to actually work with. As a filmmaking exercise, it is a marvel all on it's own, but combine this with it's philosophical musings and widespread cultural impact, and what we have is definitively the best movie of it's genre, and perhaps one of the greatest films of all time. I know that as time passes, Ghost in the Shell will only become more relevant, the need to answer the questions that it poses will become more urgent, and the reality we live in will become more and more like it's simultaneously frightful and awe-inspiring look at the future of humankind.