The cyborgian limit? Opening sequences as cultural analyses

Abstract

With the advent of digitalisation, digital soft-wares enable the creation of extraordinary opening sequences, one such being the animated opening credits of Mamoru Oshii’s 1995 Ghost in the Shell, recently reproduced in Rupert Sander’s 2017 live-action film. This paper rethinks psychoanalysis and explores this analytic approach to film in and through its opening sequence by way of the following inquiries. What is the relevance of Lacanian psychoanalysis to the question of gender in the twenty-first century if gender is supposedly one of the defining ontological facets of human beings? Given the recent attention to the place of feminist politics, can we say that Haraway’s cyberfeminist take still has challenging potential in contemporary postgendered reality when Haraway herself has called her brand of politics a postgendered one? What if that which necessitates an address is not so much the place but also the temporal event that “animates” an individual’s consciousness, especially if perception is somehow tied to how we remember our past? Investigating how one’s imagination is “animated” in one’s encounter with an aesthetic object, this paper will elaborate the epistemological import of Lacanian psychoanalysis with critical analyses of the opening scenes of Tim Burton’s 2014 Big Eyes, and the aforementioned versions of Ghost in the Shell.