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Welcome to Podcast 28 of the mySF Project, a project focused on the teaching
of Science Fiction in secondary schools.
Podcast 28 centres on a complex essay by Bolton in
Robot Ghosts and Wired Dreams:
Japanese Science Fiction from Origins to Anime. This essay
discusses, amongst other matters, the film released as
PatLabor 2,
directed by Mamoru Oshii. This podcast relates to the mySF Project theme
area of the 'Ghost in the Shell', looking at humans and machines. The film
and the discussion are aimed at teachers of older secondary students, in the
Australian system in Years 10 to 12, around sixteen or seventeen years old.
I always liked the two PatLabor films by director Oshii and have used
PatLabor 2 in
classrooms. PatLabor
2 in particular falls
felicitously along that arc of texts that begin with mainframe computers,
move through robots and ending with human consciousness within computer
networks, as seen in the wonderful and later
Ghost in the Shell
film, also by Oshii - a staple of every study of Science Fiction study
and the namesake for the 'Ghost in the Shell' theme area.
Like many fans, I enjoyed the Mechas of the
PatLabor films,
those great clunking, metal frames piloted by humans. These Mecha shells may
derive from earlier SciFi exoskeletons.
Chris Bolton in his essay on PatLabor 2 charts some progenitors for the
PatLabor Mechas. Other authors in this collection delve into
these at great depth. I will not summarise the Japanese anime tradition of
the piloted Mecha but instead will
turn away, reluctantly, to some recent manifestations in mainstream
Western cinema as well as my own
introduction to the Mecha in readings as a young man of comparable age to
the students I teach.
For many, the Mecha started as a powered and armoured suit in the series
Starship Trooper by
Robert Heinlein at the end of the 1950s. The popularity of the series as
well as the apparently rabid and Quixotic politics of the author
distinguished Starship Troopers.
The text narratives were matched much later by the absurd
Starship Troopers film but the exoskeleton powered suit
was nowhere to be seen.
To the relief of Heinlein die-hards world-wide, the powered suits were found
in Starship Troopers 3:
Marauder, directed by Neumeier. Here the battle exoskeletons
were grandiose , owing much to
the Anime tradition . The
Accelerator suits of Marauder are not powered exoskeletons but
instead Mecha devices with many different weapons and heads-up displays for
the drivers.
Even though Marauder
revives the armour
from the Heinlein series, it is not important in the film and is
instead used ironically. The vacuous hero Rico dons a Marauder suit and
bounces down from a covert flight to save Captain Lola Beck, one of two
survivors of the great 'thinking bug' and its minions. When the Mechas come
to save Captain Beck she is in the throes of an ecstatic religious
conversion and they arrive like angels.
Johnny Rico's Marauder has a halo and he stands shrouded by a
preternatural light. Rico leaves
his Mecha to reach the beautiful and buxom
woman, Jolene Blalock, from
Star Trek: Enterprise.
Some who chart the rise of the powered exokeleton in SciFi jump back further
than Heinlein's 1959 serial Starship Trooper to remind us that HG Well's invaders in
War of the Worlds
(Wells, 1898) use tripod walkers
in exactly the same way as the later Mechas.
And there are countless other examples, with perhaps the most memorable the
powered tool Ripley wears when she fights the Queen in
Alien (Scott,
1979). This is a Caterpillar
Power mechatronic system, a Loader J-5000, as fans will tell with delight,
and it borrows heavily from Japanese Mecha.
The Mechas used in the 2009 Avatar film by James Cameron reprises the earlier
utility vehicles but now their great fists can clutch machine guns or even a
two metre hunting knife. The Mechas of
Avatar have
enclosed transparent cockpits where the human driver can move freely, quite
different from many others where the human is fully enclosed and the Mecha's
arms extend the human movement. The
Avatar Mechas avoided the full augmented reality display - the
human occupants' experiences are as direct as possible through a transparent
and air-tight barrier. This distinction of mediated distance from reality
becomes very important for
PatLabor 2 .
Hopefully, the least memorable Mechas will be the suits worn in
GI Joe: the Rise of Cobra
(Sommers, 2009). Here the powered suits are more man-sized and they are worn
rather than piloted. They give extraordinary powers to the wearer,
creating far too many opportunities for cheesy CGI animation in the
Transformers mould, but
otherwise they were not at all important.
More memorable by far were the piloted suits worn by the 'Prawns' in
District 9 (Blomkamp,
2009) and later by a part-prawn, part-human. These are metal combat suits
that can run on remote control but also spring open like the best Mechas to
allow their pilots to enter and take control of their powered limbs.
Clearly, quite apart from the long and sumptuous fare of Mechas in the anime
tradition, many mainstream and cult SciFi films show a taste for the
mechanical exoskeleton. One of
the finest and perhaps the subtlest use for the Mecha is found in
PatLabor 2.
The elegant and intriguing
PatLabor 2 is
discussed in more depth here because it offers much to the secondary teacher
and the class of older English students.
Most useful to a study of the political dimensions found in Science
Fiction, PatLabor 2
comments unfavourably on the growing distance that technology constructs
between immediate human apprehension
and the environment. It is this technological mediation between the
human and the world that is the topic of this podcast.
PatLabor 2
is set just three years after the first movie, called
PatLabor in
Australia. Both PatLabor
movies are based on a series of animations produced for cable and
television. The same characters as in the original
PatLabor appear
again in different jobs.
PatLabor 2 has
pronounced political themes, looking at terrorism and the state of the
Japanese government. It is not important to have viewed the first
PatLabor movie
although some students might either already know it, or like to follow up
with a comparison of the two movies and their themes.
The terrorist attacks that are the central problem of
PatLabor 2 have
direct links to both the 9/11 attack on New York and the deadly gas attack
in Japan. Many critics note
references in PatLabor 2
to political questions current at the time and some have noted commentary in
the film related to the surrender of the Japanese Government at the end of
World War II and the status of the subsequent self-defence forces. As with
several other anime movies including
Ghost in the Shell
there are discussions on the different security agencies established after
the American occupation and their roles, especially in the face of more
recent global terrorism. While these points are of interest to students of
Japanese studies, it is to another analysis that this podcast turns.
For all its political dimensions, PatLabor 2 is a story of revenge by an individual
against the state. Tsuge watched his fellow Peacekeepers die in Cambodia
because his superiors would not allow the UN Peacekeeping force to fight
back. Tsuge wants revenge and he uses machines to take it for him,
destroying the Yokohama Bay Bridge with a missile, breaking surveillance
communications and then using Mechas to cause widespread panic amongst the
population. His technical
expertise is such that there is a real fear that waves of pre-programmed
Mechas could kill and destroy the population of Greater Tokyo.
Section 2 reforms itself to capture Tsuge and along the way they battle
other security divisions, the government and anti-terrorist crackdowns that
are worse that the actual assaults by Tsuge's devices.
To anime followers this complex narrative with its wealth of
incident, multi-faceted characters, factional duplicity and city-wide panic
are familiar, but not so
familiar is the equivocal nature of the technologies used to both cause
terror and to combat it. Director Oshii and his writing teams do not treat
the Mechas as either Frankenstein's monster creatures to be feared, or
saviours for a humanity battling forces impossible to defeat without the
technology. Instead, PatLabor 2
is very useful for schools to tread a cautious middle path, discerning
possibilities but also understanding how the technologies themselves change
the user and the experienced world, perhaps for the worse.
In this way PatLabor 2
can be read as a cautionary tale.
In hundreds of anime and dozens of Western SciFi texts it must be admitted
that there is a sensuous thrill when the hero leaps into the giant,
glistening Mecha and prepares for battle. The child-like pilot or driver of
the Mecha has extended his body, creating vast steel limbs from frail flesh
ones. They stride the city as Colossus, glistening in the sun and battling
whatever Super-Sized creature threatens. The Mecha exoskeleton can fulfil
the same damning wish-fulfilment dreams as the lawman unwillingly strapping
on the bright and polished set of pistols he vowed to never touch again. The
viewer wants to change places, wants to be inside the Mecha, wants to be the
RoboJox (Gordon, 1990), or the Mecha trooper striding across
Pandora in Avatar
(Cameron, 2009). And the best part is that the viewer can climb out of the
Mecha when the combative beast is dead, returning to the warm and human arms
of a lover. A Mecha is a temporary empowerment, not the mutilating
commitment of RoboCop (Verhoeven, 1987), the early Borg, or worst of
all the mechanical transmogrification of
Tetsuo (Tsukamoto,
1989). It seems you can keep your humanity intact within a Mecha, but
Oshii's PatLabor 2
questions this premise.
Bolton (2008a), in 'The Mecha's Blind Spot: Patlabor 2 and the Phenomenology
of Anime' draws carefully on arguments from Vivian Sobchak to stress the
notion of technological mediation.
Bolton notes that Sobchak
sees the defining quality of electronically mediated experience to be a fear
of insulation and absorption. This fear is associated with "the inevitable
disappointment of our impossible desire for a powerful but fully transparent
technological body, one that projects us into new dimensions without
changing the nature of bodily experience " (Sobchak, 1995). In Sobchak's
Screening Space (1987) this is refined further into the
sense of human sight. Bolton notes that this sense of sight is "uniquely
implicated in constituting the sense of self; the sense of sight is also
subject to the most thorough and complicated mediation in electronic
culture" (Sobchak, 1987: 129). The prevalence of computer readouts, computer
graphics, screens and displays express the threat of dehumanization.
Clearly, Sobchak can be brought to bear on
PatLabor 2 and
Bolton maps this computer mediation carefully arguing that the electronic
sensation and communication (even of the animated film itself twice removed
from direct experience) distances us from reality. This is Bolton's
political critique found in
PatLabor 2: computer-generated information is an obstacle that
insulates us from an outside reality. The Mecha driver, like the film's
veiwer, is forced to look through the technology and however transparent it
might be, however subtle the mediation, it nevertheless alters us and our
view.
Bolton says that Oshii's film uses computer screens and visual displays not
simply as a background but in a way that obliges us to look into them and
through them. In PatLabor 2
the electronic vision is
essentially human, Bolton points out, but also transformed. This is
analogous to the Mechas themselves, suspended between the mechanical and
computer ages.
Bolton distinguishes between 'embodied technologies' and 'hermeneutic
technologies'. The embodied technology is a 'transparent' extension of the
human body. He cites a microscope as an embodied technology, while a
thermometer or a guage is a hermeneutic technology.
Perhaps a more useful description for students might be in considering the
binoculars. These are embodied technologies that merely increase vision
through magnification, but when the binoculars include data readouts on the
observed (such as William Gibson's smart sunglasses in
Virtual Light
(Gibson, 1994) and the contact lenses in Vinge's
Rainbow's End (Vinge,
2006)) they are a hermeneutic technology interpreting or explaining the
distanced world.
Bolton points out in PatLabor
2 the visors, the heads-up displays, the computer and television
monitors through a shopfront window, the rewinding of video files and the
reflections on the glasses of the characters themselves looking at
reflections of reflections. Technological mediation is everywhere, not just
within the space of the Mecha cockpit. Also apparent is the creepy notion
that, "you are the screen, and the TV watches you" (Baudrillard, 1994: 51).
This interest by Oshii in mediation is apparent and Bolton points out a
scene where he blurs a wall of monitors in the background in order to
duplicate a television news camera's lack of depth. At other times Oshii
uses a fish-eye lens effect in the animation so that the viewer becomes a
camera, imagining the mechanical body that perceives in this fashion.
Diametrically opposed to these walls of flickering images, reflections and
hermeneutic technologies are the direct experiences of animals. At the end
of the film when one of the protagonist's
Mechas rises from the ocean to expose the driver the machine's
abdomen blows apart and the Section 2 officer jumps out from between its
legs, as if the Mecha is giving birth, Bolton says. Most importantly, the
explosion startles a flock of seagulls and they take flight. This is one
amongst several key instances where animals are shown to possess the true
and unmediated senses that human lack.
Oshii's PatLabor 2
(1989) is useful for students who may not have picked up on a more subtle
argument about the relationships between humankind and the machine. Texts
routinely warn against technology out of control and others excite us with
the offer of a powerful and indestructible extended body. According to
Bolton, Oshii's PatLabor 2,
draws focus to the nature of computer mediation and its effects. Clearly the
Mechas are needed to defeat the terrorist devices but it is their use that,
finally, disempowers the users, making them less than human, less able to
make true judgements about the real world. This is a political discussion of
some worth with upper secondary students and it can be extended easily into
their own media devices, their iPod headphones through which the outside
world is mediated.
It is not suggested that the study of PatLabor 2 would constitute a major assignment, but instead a discussion of the Mecha in SciFi (and the students will know of many) could lead naturally into a discussion of the pilot within the Mecha, asking questions like:
'Is the Mecha a natural extension of prosthetic surgery?',
'What purposes would you see a Mecha serving in your own community?' and
'Should the construction of Mechas be reserved only for the government,
or open to private enterprise?'
From these pre-film discussions the
PatLabor 2 film might then be watched with a good deal
of halting the DVD on particular scenes where the computer mediation is
highlighted, as well as the unmediated animal view of the world. The
students can then comment on what it is that is perceived in these cases -
which perception is true?
After the movie, students might be asked to complete a video log exercise
speaking of the theme of empowerment and disempowerment seen through the use
of Mechas in PatLabor 2.
What are Oshii's recommendations for the use of Mechas and, more widely, of
computer mediated, hermeneutic technologies?
Mike Walsh (2008) of Flinders University of South Australia reviewed
Robot Ghosts and Wired Dreams
(2008b) and this writer agrees with that review when he states that
the essays can be heavy going. Bolton's essay does seem to locate
PatLabor 2 within
"an interpretive framework" of postmodern theory (Walsh, 2008) and there is
even a suspicion that examples from films are used to support the theory,
with some circularity in the argument resulting. Bolton's essay and others
in the collection reward the reader, establishing Japanese Science Fiction
as a "vital and exciting genre" (Walsh, 2008) but for teachers of secondary
students this is wonderful background reading for students studying anime in
particular, without being directly relevant or able to be copied out to any
but the most academic student.
Rockwood (2008) in 'Looking within: Science Fiction Explores the Future of 'Being Human'' says that "Science fiction stories are written for people who choose to read and understand complexity, and who may see in science fiction narratives that will enable us to assemble an acceptable future" (Rockwood, 2008: 32). Oshii's PatLabor 2, a popular anime text with students may prove a useful tool to discern technological mediation and perhaps to avoid its disempowering and disembodying effects as they assemble their future.
Resource List
Baudrillard, J. (1994). Simulacra and Simulation. Translated by Sheila Faria
Glaser. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Bolton, C. (2008a). 'The Mecha's Blind Spot: Patlabor 2 and the
Phenomenology of Anime', in Robot Ghosts and Wired Dreams: Japanese
Science Fiction from Origins to Anime, edited by Bolton, C.,
Csicsery-Ronay I, and Tatsumi, T., Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press.
Bolton, C. (2008b). Robot Ghosts and Wired Dreams. Minnesota:
University of Minnesota Press.
Blomkamp, N. (Director). (2009). District 9. Written by Blomkamp, N. & Tatchell, T.
Tristar Pictures.
Cameron, J. (Director). (2009). Avatar.
Written by James Cameron.
Gibson, W. (1994). Virtual
Light. New York: Viking Press.
Gordon, S. (Director). (1990). RobotJox. Written by Stuart Gordon and Joe Haldeman. MGM
DVD.
Oshii, M. (Director). (1989). Pat Labor 2. Original story by Headgear. Concept by Yuki
Masami. Script by Kazunori Itoh. Madman DVD, English version, 1995.
Tohokushinsha Film Corporation.
Neumeier, E., (Director). (2008). Starship Troopers 3: Marauder.
Written by Neumeier, E. Sony DVD.
Rockwood, Bruce L (2008). 'Looking within: Science Fiction Explores the
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Scott, R. (Director). (1979). Alien. Screenplay by O'Bannon, D., Giler, D., and Hill,
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Futures 27: 731-2.
Sommers, S. (Director). (2009).
GI Joe: the Rise of Cobra. Screen play by Beattie, S.,
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Vinge, V. (2006). Rainbow's End.
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Screening the Past.
Retrieved 3 September, 2009 from
www.latrobe.edu.au/screeningthepast/23/robot-ghosts-wired-dreams.html
Wells, HG (1898). The War of
the Worlds. London: Heinemann.
ends
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