It's very difficult to keep the line between the past and the present.

Do you believe that someone out of the past can enter and take possession of a living being?

We may be through with the past, but the past is not through with us.

Welcome back to The Next Picture Show, a movie of the week podcast devoted to a classic film in the way it's shaped our thoughts on a recent release. I'm Tasha Robinson, here again with... Keith-thips. Genevieve Kosky. Scott Tobias. On the first half of this episode pairing, we looked at the Wachowski Siblings' groundbreaking 1999 science fiction story of The Matrix. In this half, we'll talk about the weird conceptual sandwich that links it with ghost in the shell, the embattled new cyberpunk thriller starring Scarlett Johansson as Major, an android with a human brain stolen from an unwedling victim and reprogrammed to make her the perfect soldier. In the film, Major questions her humanity and whether she has a soul, and she gets a push from a terrorist

named Cousay, played by Michael Pitt, who has a series of connections with her that she doesn't

anticipate. Like The Matrix, Ghost in the Shell is a visually complicated film that's meant to be

groundbreaking, and meant to touch on big, earth-shaking ideas about who we are and where identity

springs from. In practice, we'll see if we can reconcile this movie's ghost with its shell.

You are the first of your kind, but you're not invulnerable.

Maybe next time you can design me better.

Everyone around me, they feel connected to something.

Connected to something I'm not.

Everything they told you was a lie.

Who are you?

They did not save your life.

They stole it.

All right.

So how much of the controversy around Ghost in the Shell did you guys follow?

There's this narrative that was pushed by one of the producers of the film that the controversy soured critics in the movie and then critics soured filmgoers in the movie. And there was

kind of a big tail wagging the dog kind of situation. But did you guys follow it closely? And do you

think it actually affected how you feel about the film? I don't know if you know about this,

but I work in media covering pop culture. So it's kind of hard to avoid. Yeah, I mean, I followed it. You know, my thinking was it's a legitimate, a very legitimate concern. It describes a lot of discussion, but I was going to try to like to sort of compartmentalize that when I watched the movie. And that's the attitude I went into watching this. as to whether or not that alone, sour-critics, I can't be alone and like trying to at least not make the entirety of the discussion of the film and trying to judge on other aspects of it. So I'm assuming other critics did that as well. Although, I mean, I didn't review this. So I'm using critic in the sense that I do write and talk about movies, but not this one in particular until now.

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