Today I watched small pieces of both Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol, and Ghost in the Shell. I was not really repulsed by either one right away. MI I dropped after I started it from the beginning and watched the opening jail break scene. It felt very callous to me. I don't know why I had to watch three inmates beat up a guard, much less the ensuing chaos. But at least the middle of it was exciting.
Ghost in the Shell immediately brought back memories from my teenage years. I think what it made me feel back then was a sort of goal, an aspiration to be like the Major. She wakes up in a dark appartment in a futuristic world, and we conclude very early on that she has no friends outside of work, is financially stable, and does work that suits her. It so happens that she risks her life regularly, too.
I prefer the Ghost in the Shell plot because I too want to be able to say, whether I have friends or not, that I am living my life the way one is supposed to, by all other measurements. In MI, we never get much of a look into Ethan Hunt's personal life and the setting is not science fiction (which usually makes us feel more alone, in either the vastness of space or anonymization of technology). Ethan is just effective. In one of the other MI movies we see that he struggles to maintain a relationship with his girlfriend because he doesn't tell her about his life with IMF. But the mood of the film is decidedly more cheerful than that of Ghost in the Shell. Even though he and the Major have very similar job descriptions.
Ghost in the Shell communicates to me that friendship is optional. But the truth is indispensable. For the Major, the security of Japan is the highest calling. With some juggling, one can speculate that while not all of us work in the army, we are all still responsible for being just as courageous as the Major is, when it comes to being honest with our family, coworkers, and whatever friends we may have. When it comes to falling into formation and moving as a nation.
However, the gloominess of the Major's life is supposed to be temporary. No one actually wants to be risking so much on a regular basis, and no one actually wants to be without friends. Sure, we can say that Ghost in the Shell in an analogy for the storm or dark forrest that awaits us as we pass through adulthood. But we are meant to emerge from that once and for all.
I do not believe that we relieve the elderly of responsibility for protecting our nation just because the age of 65 sounds "about right." I think we do it because we make the educated assumption that the elderly have already taken a side in the war against ignorance and wrongdoing, and have already paid the price for whatever stand they took. And so extracting more performance out of them is deemed redundant and inappropriate.
So it's hard to me to feel like Ghost in the Shell still speaks to me.
