post-medium

Cyberpunk, as a storytelling genre and as a subcultural paradigm, has offered critics material rife with opportunities for analysis. It deals explicitly with the organic/synthetic dialectic, theories of consciousness, and notions of freedom and agency in its dystopian iterations, and thereby plays with the larger science fictional question of what is the human condition. Further, as a form of futurism it can throw the cultural norms contemporary to its creation into relief. Ghost in the Shell makes a particularly good subject because of its relative complexity and because of the influence it has had on the cyberpunk phenomenon. Whether or not it actually originates all of the genre elements generally attributed to it is not an essential question, because its particular use of these elements is unique and seminal. For the narrative critic (or dramatist critic, in Sellnow's terms), several potential implications emerge from film's narrative that call for closer scrutiny. Kusan