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Related to but different from the theme of the cyborg in Ghost in the Shell, Oshii Mamoru spends much time in Innocence picturing and describing dolls. What do dolls bring to his continuing mediations on humans, life, and human life?
Dolls are physically similar to humans but doesn’t have the ghost that humans do. The ghost, which refers to the soul, is what the little girl provides the dolls with. At the end the girl says she doesn’t want to be a doll, suggesting that we take it for granted that people are different from dolls. When talking in commonsense no one regard dolls as living things and therefore we have the convention that when inanimate things come to life it is unnatural and surprising. But dolls have the same physical appearance as real human beings. So we can technically consider the human body to be a doll that is controlled by individual human minds. Therefore, humans are actually dolls with individual conscience and thoughts. Our bodies are controlled not by external forces but by the innate center of ourselves. Instead, where there is a doll there is a doll master controlling it. The difference between human and dolls is that humans are their own masters. Or in the other way we can also say that without the innate master, we aren’t too different from a doll.
I agree with Jack. Dolls are very similar to humans. I think something that Osshi portrays in the film is how easily dolls can be controlled because they don’t have that “ghost” humans have. It goes back to the question about how far we should be taking technology; if cyborgs don’t have that “ghost” humans have, how easy are they to control? Is it really a good idea to take technology to an extent to where we have to raise questions about scenarios that if an event like a terrorist hack in the cyborgs happened, what we would have to do? We can also see that the half cyborgs half humans like Batou and Togusa are not immune to being hacked when they are put in a dream scenario by Kim. The dolls act as a sort of a symbol for humans. They reflect the vulnerabilities humans may start to have as technology starts to get more advanced, especially in terms of control.
The introduction of dolls in GITS Innocence is Oshii’s attempt to convey his belief that “ghost” within the shell in fact defines humanness. In our common sense, human’s ghost, the amalgam of self-consciousness and emotions, is inseparable from human body: as body perishes, the ghost will follow to die. However, in GITS, technology realizes L’homme-machine, and enables the ghost to separate from the body.
In the discussion of dolls, Oshii portrays dolls as bodies without the existence of self-awareness and soul. Though they are “primitive form of human,” their functions are reduced to robotically repeat the orders from puppet masters, no matter they are the owners of bodies or are other beings. Also, the dolls are only the container of one’s ghost, and they can be thrown away, just like the gynoids which are discarded when they are not in need. From this perspective, Oshii intentionally insinuates that no matter how the shell changes, as long as the ghost exists, like the omniscient Kusanagi on the internet, the fundamental self-awareness and humanness are confirmed.I agree with Kevin in that Oshii uses dolls to more clearly highlight the divide between humanness (sentient life) and inanimate life (puppets or dolls). Though these dolls have a clear resemblance to humans, something about them will never quite be human, no matter how sophisticated their AI becomes. On the other hand, human bodies slowly evolved to the point where their bodies are almost like puppets in themselves; the presence of a ghost gives them their “life”. This is demonstrated when Kusanagi comes down into one of the dolls in the final scene. Though her body is that of a doll that the viewer has been associating with creepy and programmed actions, the presence of a “ghost” or at least sentient presence within it was enough to allow the doll to move much more freely, to the extent that we could even think of her as Batou’s partner. To Oshii, life is less about the body which might as well be a shell, and more about what moves it.
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