Forum - View topic

Literary Quotes in Innocense - Ghost in the Shell

And I wonder why, as ShellBullet almost mentioned, quotes weren't used so generously throughout the first movie, Stand Alone Complex, or even the original manga.

Just because people may persistantly quote and make obscure allusions all the time in the future doesn't mean that taking advantage of that possibility and beating the audience over the head with it is good screenwriting.

I was wondering what other people thought of the literary quotes in Innocence... or more specifically, how many other people don't find them out of place?

Like most, at first I found the quotes rather odd. Why the hell are these people constantly quoting Shakespeare, the bible and so on... I mean, it would be okay if one character who was supposed to be particularly deep did it, but why was everyone doing it?

I found that it was bad writing to have everyone unrealistically quoting deep and somewhat obscure literature. As if the writer / director was speaking through the characters...

The it dawned on me, the people in Ghost in the Shell have something that we don't. Their e-brains provide them with a huge capacity to store information, in pure text format, the entire collected works of Shakespeare is only a couple megs in size. In the future, these people are probably walking around with instant access to hundreds of terabytes of storage. Why not waste 1% or so of that on storing public domain documents that are... fun to quote.

In the fictional history of the Ghost in the Shell Universe, people who wanted to appear deep probably started doing this years before the movie takes place. And over the years, it probably became a common custom to quote literature in everyday conversation...

Thoughts?

-t

The it dawned on me, the people in Ghost in the Shell have something that we don't. Their e-brains provide them with a huge capacity to store information, in pure text format, the entire collected works of Shakespeare is only a couple megs in size. In the future, these people are probably walking around with instant access to hundreds of terabytes of storage. Why not waste 1% or so of that on storing public domain documents that are... fun to quote.

In the fictional history of the Ghost in the Shell Universe, people who wanted to appear deep probably started doing this years before the movie takes place. And over the years, it probably became a common custom to quote literature in everyday conversation...

Seriously, you don't need to postulate a future fad. This sort of thing is absolutely de rigeur at any faculty of the humanities I've ever visited.

Umm..... some of us don't need e-brains to do that. As you say, the storage capacity needed is negligible. All you need is the desire to retain the information in long-term memory.