This second episode does well to go back and establish the background of the Elric brothers as it played out in the manga, complete with Ed's encounter with the "Truth." Unfortunately, rather than tell the story properly and at an appropriate pace, the writers either can't bring themselves to or aren't allowed to forget that this was all covered in the previous adaptation.
As a result the show rushes through everything so quickly that very little (beyond the rather well done scene with Ed and Al's failed human transmutation) actually sticks. Trisha Elric is introduced and killed off with such carelessness that the viewer doesn't have the chance to get a handle on her as a character or even to understand the depth of the relationship the brothers have with their mother beyond their desire for her praise and the mere convenience of her role as their mother. Then there's the issue of Winry's parents. One scene they are acknowledged as being alive working abroad, the next, during Winry's conversation with Riza, they are dead. No moment between the two where news arrives, just a sudden shift from alive to dead.
The issue with Winry can be resolved fairly easily through flashbacks in a later episode, especially as the deaths of her parents hold greater significance later on. Also, it can be said that this episode was purely focused on the background of the Elrics with everything else being peripheral to that account. However, that does not excuse the utter failure to establish the relationship between the brothers and their mother, especially since that relationship, and their attempts to restore, is the whole reason the Elrics are in the mess that they're in.
The third episode of the science-fiction television series Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, titled “A Modest Rebellion,” concerns a movie fanatic named Marshall McLachlan who owns an outdated model of a female robot. Something of a recluse, he invents a romantic relationship with the robot, called a “Jeri,” based on one of his favorite films. At certain points throughout the episode their relationship is shown to be played out like a replication of the one portrayed on film with one reciting one line of dialogue with the other picking up on the next as they’d act out the scene. The episode largely concerns the man’s attempts to make his relationship with Jeri more of a reality.
He goes out of his way to destroy the other Jeri models so that his would be a unique individual. It is this act of his that ultimately draws the attention of the police. McLachlan and his Jeri are forced to flee but are cornered in the end by the police. In a last desperate act, McLachlan draws a gun prepared to fight to the end. However, McLachlan’s Jeri, at the last moment, restrains him in an apparent act of betrayal, reciting the closing lines from the film. However, she alters these lines, telling McLachlan that she “truly loved” him. This deviation from the script, showing Jeri to have developed and expressed actual feelings for McLachlan keys into the programs overarching themes about what it means to be human and of artificial intelligences.
What is important to note, however, is that the episode, in large part, was paying homage to Jean-Luc Godard’s 1960 film A Bout De Souffle or as its known in English Breathless. The underlying difference between the two is that while in Breathless the cinematically influenced characters stand out as unrealistic against the realistic background of 1960’s France, Ghost in the Shell predicts a future in which that which is “material” or “unreal” becomes “real.” However, the similarities are worth noting. The Jeri featured in Ghost in the Shell is actually modeled after Jean Seberg’s character of Patricia from Breathless. Both feature characters that are so heavily influenced by what they’ve seen in movies that it has started to guide their actions in radical ways. While both works, the latter influenced by the former, come to different conclusions, they both explore the powerful influence film and other similarly “unreal” cultural artifacts have on people. It is a prevalent theme in Ghost in the Shell, and one I intend to explore in greater detail in future blog entries, where the line between what is real and what isn’t is blurred.