Thanks for the Avalon website! I’ve been a fan of Ghost in the Shell for a long time, and recently been looking though Oshii’s other works, what a film! I have read a lot of the thoughts on the film people had, some interesting stuff, I had a different take on it to a lot of them, and I thought I would share it with you.
I feel the film is all about reality, and what feels real for us. What is ‘real’ and what is not is entirely down to our perception. Ash is somewhat lost in this sense, for her the game is as real as the world outside it. This is represented by the colour of the film. It starts inside the game, in there everything has an unusual yellow glow, which highlights the fact that this place is unreal (from the viewpoint of Ash, whose view we follow throughout). When we get out of the game however, the unreal colour carries through. This highlights that Ash’s feelings of reality are as absent outside the game as within. In her mind, her reality, she is as much the Ash people know inside the game as she is a person outside of this ingame persona, maybe more so.
When Ash finally gets to class real, the colour changes. I think this is showing us that she has finally found her ‘reality’. Murphy remarks that she no longer has the silver steak in her hair. The people who play the game call her Ash because of this streak. The absence of this shows us that here, she is no longer just ‘Ash’ the ingame persona, but she is finally herself at last, someone outside of the online persona. She does not have the streak outside of the game, she is real there, but the world around her does not feel real to her, hence its colour. Now she is finally real, and so is the world she is in, she has finally found her place. This is reinforced by Murphy saying ‘Don’t let appearences confuse you, this is where you belong’. He had taken the bullets out of his gun because he didn’t want to win. He knew this is where Ash belonged, and he had to make her kill him in order to achieve this. I believe at the end, she stays in this world, in class real, where she and the world she exists in finally feels like reality to her. This is also shown by the statues, outside of class real the statues were incomplete, they were missing their head, their face, who they were, at the end she sees the statues whole, as she now is.
So the film is about finding your reality. You must find out who you feel like you are, but also the world around you, you must find what feels real to you. You cannot let the appearence of yourself or the world confuse what you feel is real. You must strive to find whats real to you, and let go of both what you think you should be and what others think you are. You must find a reality that makes sense to you.
Those were my thoughts anyway, I found it hard explaining myself there (as always with Oshii films, he reminds me of David Lynch in this respect). Thanks again for the site, I enoyed reading it and I am sure a lot of others did too.