Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence

Gnosticism describes a world made by a lesser creator, the Demiurge, who fashions beings and traps sparks of true spirit inside dead matter. The gynoids are exactly this. Human makers, playing demiurge, forge bodies of plastic and steel and then imprison stolen fragments of real human ghost inside them to animate them. The dolls are the pneumatic spark buried in false matter, and their violence is the anguish of trapped spirit that half-remembers it came from somewhere real.

The film states this openly. When the hacker Kim lectures Batou in his mansion of dolls, and later when the truth surfaces, the theme is that the dolls were given souls they never consented to carry. The Gnostic cry is the cry of the spark that knows the world it wakes in is a fabrication. The child's voice that finally speaks through the case says only that she did not want to become a doll. That is the Gnostic protest in its purest form, the spirit declaring that this counterfeit body and this counterfeit world are not its home. The horror runs the opposite way from what it first seems. The dolls disturb us because they are too human, spirit crying out from inside matter that was never meant to hold it.

Oshii saturates the film with the sense that the boundary between human and doll is an illusion, and this is where Batou's own path lives. He is almost entirely machine. The film keeps asking, through him, what exactly is left that we call a person. His one anchor to something like a soul is his relationship to his basset hound, a warm-blooded creature he feeds and worries over, the last thread of unmanufactured attachment in his life.

The Buddhist reading turns the doll into a teaching rather than a horror. The dolls unsettle us because they expose that the self we defend is also assembled, also empty of a fixed essence, also a form arising from causes. Kim tells Batou that the doll is the human without illusion, a body without the pretense of an indwelling ego. This is close to the doctrine of anatta, no-self, delivered as dread. The film does not offer comfort. It leaves Batou walking through a world where the line between the ensouled and the empty has dissolved, and asks whether a being made entirely of parts can still love a dog. That it can is the only ghost the film is sure of.