Ghost in the Shell as a Cyberpunk Rhapsody
Ghost in the Shell as a Cyberpunk Rhapsody

Summary/Abstract: The article proposes a reading of one of the constituent aspects of the feature film Ghost in the Shell (2017), its plot, as a compendium of influences of what is usually considered to belong to the science fiction genre. According to the reading, the movie presents ideas and an aesthetics that points to the newest trends of science fiction, such as cyberpunk, suggesting passages of many previous films, something that can help draw the constitutive master lines of the plot as similar to the concept of rhapsody, an old, if not ancestral concept. In an attempt to understand this pendulum-like movement that presents the new but is made up of the past, one of the canons of Western literature of all times was sought as the theoretical support for an attempt to explore this old facet in a futuristic film. From this point of view, concepts such as mimesis and emulation were used in this approach to the filmographic version of the homonymous manga published in Japan in 1982, a film that presents itself as a challenging puzzle whose resolution finds, in this article, a beginning and also an incentive for future studies.

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