MARDOCK SCRAMBLE: THE FIRST COMPRESSION, or "Cyborg Prostitute: The Anime Legacy of Molly Millions"

Rune Ballot is a fifteen year old prostitute who gets blown up by Shell, a client who turns his victims into blue diamonds (I don't know why he does this, maybe the next two films will explain that). Her body is repaired by Dr. Easter, who runs medical experiments under government order using top-secret body modifications. Ballot wakes to find herself with a mix of wireless computer hacking skills and electromagnetic manipulation, abilities she must use to help apprehend Shell. As with any good cyberpunk story, there's some healthy corporate warfare going on between Dr. Easter's financial backers and Shell's financiers, the October Corporation.

Mardock Scramble: The First Compression. Go Hands.

There's an undeniable charge (perhaps an electromagnetic one?) that kept me interested in Ballot's story. She was raped by her father at 12 years old, but claims that she consented to it because she loved him. Her brother caught wind of their sexual encounters and shot the father; dad is now handicapped and hospitalized, and the brother is in jail. Prostitution soon becomes Ballot's means of survival, and her lack of outward remorse for such a lifestyle causes others to view her with disdain. But inwardly, Ballot wants to escape this way of living. The fact that she's only 15, with a bemusing understanding of her circumstances and in possession of a desperate, almost pathetic need for love grants the story an unexpected amount of levity.

Fetishization and objectification are mainstay themes in cyberpunk fiction; the amount of references one can mention are legion. In many cases these themes are explored through the classic cyborg femme fatale, a commodified living doll who is costumed and framed as a futuristic prostitute or loose woman. In a previous review I wrote some months ago, I humorously referred to the risque fashions of Naomi Armitage (Armitage III) and Motoko Kusanagi (SAC) as coming from stores that sell techno-prostitute clothing, but the comment holds a great truth: uncoupling the erotic link between cyborg technology and female flesh seems all but impossible for cyberpunk fiction. Mardock Scramble's Ballot is the first anime cyber female I've seen that truly is a prostitute, accepting a legacy established by cyberpunk's seminal robo-prostitute godmother, Neuromancer's Molly Millions. In that way, Mardock Scramble is quite deconstructive and exposes the genre's tropes for what they are.

Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex. Production I.G.

Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence gives an excellent parallel for the relationship between sex workers and robot fetishization. In the film, girls are kidnapped and their souls are transferred into sex gynoids. In retaliation, the gynoids, cursed with cheaply reproduced sentience, begin to destroy themselves. One of the most striking lines from the film comes from the character Kim, who upon interrogation by our protagonists remarks, "The definition of a truly beautiful doll is a living, breathing body devoid of a soul. It's nothing but an unyielding corpse, tiptoeing on the brink of collapse." The female cyborg, with her plastic beauty and heavily commodified body that always belongs to corporate entities but never herself, serves as metaphor for the the street worker who is trapped within sexual cybernetics that dictate she must offer herself to her clients, losing her sense of self-worth and even her sanity in order to survive. Rune Ballot's solution to escaping such sexual politics is to die, a desire she holds throughout much of The First Compression.

Battle Angel. MADHOUSE.

The real question is, "Is the cyborg woman doomed to be a commodified, erotic slave to an external system?" In the case of cyberpunk anime such as Ghost in the Shell, Armitage III and even Battle Angel Alita, our characters never aim to change the system they are a part of, instead opting to flee the environment and begin new lives. Keeping in mind the helpless, trapped outlook cyberpunk holds, is this the only viable escape for its female characters?

Mardock Scramble: The First Compression. Go Hands.