![]() Among the most influential of this work is, of course, Donna Haraway’s cyborg feminism, which suggests the cyborg as a figure whose hybrid nature-both human and machine-promises a way to overcome the enforced and ultimately limiting categories of biology, race, and gender. ![]() It is also an idea that has attracted the interest of literary critics, a number of whom have seen human-machine hybrids in a range of texts as figures that embody or solve the dilemmas we face in our increasingly electronic and virtual culture. The trope of a body that is both enhanced and invaded by technology is a staple in anime. I will address this by taking a closer look at Sobchack’s phenomenology of electronic and cinematic experience, and applying it to Oshii’s film to examine what kind of vision might be constituted by anime. The concluding part of this paper argues that we can see such a critique in Oshii’s work, but not without some attention to the nature of representation in anime. Of course, this raises the question of whether Oshii’s anime, itself part of a high-tech genre and the popular media, can effectively critique the milieu from which it arises. The issue of the mass media is in fact much closer to the heart of the film than the crisis of a literally robotic body. The technologically-mediated experience represented by the labors is an extreme fantasy, but Oshii’s film also addresses milder examples much closer to hand-for example, the idea of the mass media as the most thorough and pervasive electronic filter for experience. The primary goal of this paper is to trace this motif of dehumanization through Patlabor 2 with reference to Vivian Sobchack’s ideas about mediated experience and virtual reality. The motif of an enhanced vision that has its own blind spots is made to reflect the trade-offs between technological amplification of bodily experience and a progressive alienation from our original bodies, threatening dehumanization. The labor pilots and virtually everyone else view the world magnified and filtered by sensors, displayed on screens, enhanced and often distorted by electronics. Napier’s discussion focuses on the mecha’s outward physiognomy and bodily topology, but one of the most prominent figures for this trade-off in Patlabor 2 is the trope of vision and mediated vision. They are “simultaneously appealing and threatening, offering power and excitement at the expense of humanity” (88). The more frightening threat implied in Patlabor 1 and its sequel Kidô keisatsu patoreibaa 2 (1993, Patlabor 2, 1995) is that the labors are images of us, human-machine hybrids that have lost all humanity, increasingly technologized bodies that turn out to be empty shells.Īs Susan Napier has shown for similar anime, these giant mechanical puppets carrying tiny human souls are an evocative metaphor for the ways that technology magnifies the body’s reach and power, but also changes what the body is. The scene encapsulates the central threat in the film, which is the fear that these robotic tools will turn rogue, rising up without pilots and rampaging en masse. Their target is a rogue labor, but when they finally capture it and open its hatch to apprehend the pilot, they find only an empty cockpit. The hunters are a mixed group of soldiers, tanks, and the “labors” of the film’s title-giant human-shaped robots with living pilots. ![]() In the opening sequence of Oshii Mamoru’s animated film Kidô keisatsu patoreibaa (1989, Patlabor 1, 1995), a small army of men and machines hunts down an elusive quarry but what they finally capture is an absence that lies at the heart of the film’s fears. Christopher Bolton The Mecha’s Blind Spot: Patlabor 2 and the Phenomenology of Anime
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