1.9.2010
"One strategy of defamiliarization, which Oshii borrows from French New Wave director Jean-Luc Godard, is citationality. The dialogue throughout the film is interspersed with quotations of other authors—meditations on the relationship between mind and body, as well as between dolls and humans, drawn from such diverse sources as René Descartes, Heinrich von Kleist, Villiers de l’Isle Adam, Julien Offray de La Mettrie, John Milton, and the Old Testament. This technique adds a critical dimension to the film by drawing attention to the history of ideas that informs its inquiry into the human and the artificial. The characters, thus, speak both for themselves and within a network of cultural and historical relations of which the viewer is made continually aware. Characters are also disrupted from within the diegesis through e-brain hacking. There are numerous instances in the film in which, as Brown puts it, “one character literally or metaphorically ‘pulls the strings’ of another” (224) by hacking into his cyberbrain (implanted cybernetic components that allow the brain to interface directly with information networks) in order to exert control or to implant false realities or memories.27 A third strategy, of particular relevance to the discussion in this essay, is the kind of unmasking so critical to ASFRian desire and fantasy."
—
Allison de Fren
Technofetishism and the Uncanny Desires of A.S.F.R.
(alt.sex.fetish.robots)
SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 36 (2009) pg.431
