“It feels weird driving with these,” says Batou (Pilou Asbæk), a man with cybernetically enhanced eyes staring down a street with neon adverts and constantly shifting hologram road signs reflecting in the windscreen. Major Mira Killian (Scarlett Johansson) sits in the passenger seat and injects herself via the bio-digital ports in the back of her neck. As she bluntly explains, “It keeps my brain from rejecting this body.” A clear distinction is made: the brain is ‘my’ but the body is separate – a neutral ‘this’. This line embodies the central tension between the subject and their body; the ghost and the shell. This theme can be mapped onto Johansson’s career in a struggle between her star image and her selfhood.
This scene is from Rupert Sanders’ 2017 live-action adaptation of the Japanese Ghost in the Shell (GITS) franchise, first a manga that was adapted into the seminal 1995 anime film and several popular anime TV series. As an American adaptation of a beloved Japanese IP, GITS 2017 was primed for hostility as soon as it was announced. Following a whitewashing controversy regarding Johansson’s casting GITS suffered at the box office and was relegated to the dustbin of obscurity. But this is not the first time Scarlett Johansson has played a character who explores the dissonance felt between their interior soul and their physical form. Viewed amongst these other roles, GITS warrants a closer look.
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Following the commercial success of The Avengers (2012) Johansson levied her increasing commercial power to star in a diverse range of sci-fi films. In Spike Jonze’s Her (2013), she plays Samantha, an Operating System who falls in love with the lonely Theodore (Joaquin Phoenix). As an OS we never see her onscreen; she is only a voice. In Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin (2013) Johansson plays ‘The Female’, an alien donning a human form who rarely speaks and uses her appearance to seduce and harvest men. In both, she portrays a non-human operative who gains humanity through experience. In the title role of Luc Besson’s Lucy, an accidental overdose of a drug allows her brain to access its full capacity, giving her superhuman powers. Here Johansson’s character feels that she is losing her humanity as her intellect grows and she gains command of space, time and eventually transcends the physical world. Finally, there is GITS with Johansson embodying Major, a cyborg with a human brain in a synthetic body working as an agent in Section 9, a government organisation and wrestling with her humanity. Each of these films dissect and emphasise different elements of her persona: her voice, her appearance and her intellect. If you take the star as auteur, what is it that attracts Johansson to these roles?
Johansson worked steadily as a child actor, with acclaimed roles in indie films before her breakthrough in Lost in Translation (2003) a film that opens with a shot of her from behind, lying down in see-through pink underwear. Johansson was 17 during filming but playing older as the neglected wife of a photographer, this celebrated role set the tone for the next phase of her career which saw her frequently cast as a romantic leading woman. Reflecting on this stage of her career in 2023, she describes being hypersexualised and objectified and how ‘it was hard to get out of that pigeonhole’.
It is a widely accepted Hollywood narrative that stars are not born but made: young people are chosen and molded for stardom. At its most cynical interpretation they are manufactured as products to be sold to audiences. This story is echoed in each of these sci-fi films. In Her, Theodore answers a series of increasingly intimate questions so the AI can build a compatible OS for him. Under the Skin begins with the construction of a human body, we hear and see The Female as she learns to speak and dresses in the stolen clothes of a human woman. The novel the film is based on goes into more detail about the drastic surgery the character has undertaken for her job. In GITS we see surgical arms meticulously build Major’s body as her makers discuss what she really is: Dr. Oulet (Juliette Binoche) describes her as a miracle, an autonomous human. Cutter (Peter Ferdinando), the one funding her construction, sees her as a weapon, a product and the future of his company.
Time and again we see a Scarlett Johansson built-for-purpose, and in each of these films we see her challenge her creator and the parameters of her shell; moving from someone else’s object to her own being. Major, Samantha and The Female fight against the limits of their object status to become humanised subjects, echoing Johansson’s own journey as a star. In these roles you see an artist, a woman, exploring the painful parameters of objectification and searching for her own autonomy within and beyond them.
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The filmmakers of GITS were accused of whitewashing the role of Motoko by casting Johansson. But even if this casting came from the (racist) perceived necessity of a white American lead in a major Hollywood movie, it is integrated into the narrative in a thoughtful way. It is revealed that Major is a cyborg whose brain was forcibly taken from a Japanese runaway named Motoko Kusanagi. She is whitewashed and objectified and can only rediscover her humanity by learning about her past and racial origins.
Throughout the film Major is grappling with her identity. As a cyborg she is part-human, part-robot but not fully either. She exists in a liminal space between the two, feeling distant from other humans and uneasy in her identification with other robots. A connection is made between Major and Red Robed Geisha (Rila Fukushima), a companion-bot introduced at the beginning of the film serving clients in a luxury restaurant. Red Robed Geisha suffers double subjugation when she is hacked to kill one of her customers. Major feels guilty when she kills the hostile robot as she identifies with a humanoid machine being used in service to humans. Batou notices this and insists on their difference, but Major is unconvinced.
Major frequently passes for human, but when Section 9’s investigation brings them to a Yakuza club, the suspects clock her as a cyborg and threaten her to make her dance like the other female android sex workers in the club. Major fights back saying “I’m not built to dance”. In this case, it is Major not Batou who draws the line between Major and other androids.
In both instances the robots that Major is compared to are Japanese women who are racialized fetish objects, primarily built to serve men. She relates to their robotic status but perhaps deep down her repressed identity of Motoko recognises them as fellow dehumanised Japanese women. Accidentally or intentionally, GITS 2017 uses sci-fi metaphor to make a commentary on racialized sexism through the depiction of a privileged Japanese woman who is disturbed by the dehumanisation of the less privileged Japanese women around her.
Building on this is Major’s connection to the antagonist Kuze (Michael Pitt), who like Major, was a Japanese teen runaway that was abducted, experimented on and whitewashed. Unlike Major, Kuze was discarded when his cyborg was deemed a failure, setting him on the path for revenge. The use of Michael Pitt is incisive meta-casting. When Dr. Oulet attributes the failure of Kuze to his ‘violent, unstable mind’ you can’t help but think of the rumours of Pitt’s unruly behaviour that contributed to his diminishing on-screen appearances. Building on the themes of globalisation from the 1995 anime, in an unnamed city, in an unnamed country with an international, accented cast that includes Danish Pilou Asbæk, Japanese screen legend Takeshi Kitano as well as French, Romanian, Singaporean and British actors with mixed racial heritage. Despite its overwhelming global dominance American culture is stereotyped as superficial and when the only Americans in the film are deeply troubled whitewashed subjects a disparaging critique of Hollywood whitewashing emerges. This echoes Johansson’s own objectification for the way her personhood is flattened to a superficial image by the industry. When GITS 2017 raises such provocative themes, the questions become: does making it part of the narrative justify whitewashing? Is it enough to suggest these themes, or do they need more exploration to justify their existence?
GITS 2017 concludes with a monologue by Major in which she asserts that her identity is not based on her memories or her complicated heritage, but on her actions. She is neither Mira nor Motoko, but Major: her role and her rank – the proof of her competence. Similarly, Johansson has asserted that her identity is not based on the industry’s limited perception of her. She has taken action to work on films that add nuance to her star image as her characters fight against their initial purpose. To take further control of her career, Johansson founded a production company whose slate includes reteaming with GITS director Rupert Sanders for Rub & Tug a true-crime film in which she would star as a trans man. Even her enormous star power was not enough to overcome this casting controversy and the project was shelved, but it shows a continued desire to explore her on-screen physical presence. Perhaps it’s better to stick to science fiction, where she can explore her physicality and identity via metaphor, which she may do so again in Bride, in which she is set to produce and star as the titular, purpose-built perfect ‘Bride’. In the proposed genre-bending fantasy, Bride escapes her creator to find her own humanity. It’s clear that Johansson is frustrated as ‘Scarlett the Bombshell’ so she strives to become Scarlett the Producer, in an effort to tell this story in new forms. Bride was announced in 2020 and over 3 years later there are no updates. While these various projects remain unmade, one hopes that Johansson can once again explore the tension between the self that inhabits the shell.
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