Oshii’s films commonly use themes of mythology or religion to get the viewer to begin thinking critically about the hegemony of power structures of religion and technology. This is very apparent in Oshii Mamoru’s more recent science fiction films; Mobile Police Patlabor: The Movie, Mobile Police Patlabor: The Movie 2 and Avalon.
All of Oshii’s science fiction occur within an institutional setting depicting a problematic hierarchy of power. In Patlabor the story concerns members of a police force that wear robotic exoskeletons, Motoko Kusanagi is a section 9 government operative and occasional assasin, Avalon is set in the structured world of a total immersion game. The plots of these films show, in an exploration of how the human subject is shaped by its own semi-conscious complicity in discursive fields of power relations, how each of these systems can dominate the individuals within these groups.
In GitS all of the religious symbolism(The halo surronding 'crucified' puppetmaster & the descending angel at the merging of Motoko/2501) and the religion based quotations are controlled by, or invoked by the puppetmaster acting in the role of antagonist. By associating religious quotations and metaphor with the source of conflict within the afore mentioned instiutional structures(which bear the protaganist), Oshii sets up an eventual confrontation between mythos(mythology) and logos(reason). But the solution given is not a conflict with mythology. Instead, Motoko is able to bring about a positive change through reasoned interaction with and manipulation of these mythological structures.
IMO by including this mythological vien in ghost in the shell Oshii is implying that rather than allowing the hegemony of dogmatic mythology and control structures to force us down a particular path, we should manipulate, change and reshape our mythology to aid interaction with a world where technology is becomming increasingly internal.
well that's my current thinking anyway, what do you lot think the meaning of the mythological elements of ghost in the shell are?
...feel free to rip my POV to shreds peeps, it's a fairly jumbled one. - i'm as confused as george bush at a peace summit!
![Confused :?](./images/smilies/icon_confused.gif)