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Let's All Be Ghosts: Jaganrei

"Haven't you had enough?" she cries. "You have no right to do things like this!"

Let's All Be Ghosts: Jaganrei

Where does art come from? Does it require a spark of inspiration? Or is it a matter of hard work and iteration? Some even say these days that generative AI can make art. I believe that art requires perspective. It doesn’t have to be good or bad, but it should communicate something about whoever made it.

Psychic Vision: Jaganrei is a faux documentary film about the creation of a pop song, “Love Craft.” It precedes in stages. Emi Kato is chosen as idol and performer. Her managers meet with producer Yuji Kawanishi to decide on their marketing strategy. Kawanishi provides the music. He hires Awashima Kaoru to write the lyrics. Arranger Hisashi Aida inputs the song into a computer for karaoke, giving it “a modern rhythm.” Meanwhile, Kato undergoes voice training with professional Shuichi Honda. Then she does a photo shoot to promote the single. That’s when everything starts to go wrong.

a young woman holds her hands to her headphones in the recording booth.

If you’ve been paying attention, you will have noticed an unsettling thread running through this documentary: nobody will admit just where “Love Craft” came from. Aida says that “it has a strange melody, doesn’t it?” The real giveaway, an example of perhaps too much enthusiasm on the part of the filmmakers, is that Awashima previously wrote a song called “Goodbye to Innsmouth.” The reference to Lovecraft leaps out of this previously sedate film like a Jack in the Box.

So when a stage light nearly falls on Kato at the shoot, and a ghostly woman appears in her photos, it isn’t too surprising. Neither are the ghostly howls that interfere with Kato’s voice on track during recording. That is because “Love Craft” was built on a lie. Before lyrics, arrangement, vocals and even the producer, there was the composer, who killed herself seven years before. Her face bookends the film, and her assault at the hands of Kawanishi is the curse from which everything spreads.

Kyoko, the reporter leading the documentary, tracks down the original demo tape of “Love Craft” together with her team. What they find is not the city pop riff that Kawanishi and his company constructed so meticulously. Instead it is a cry for help. An eerie, distorted expression of suffering.

various men and women sit outside the recording booth.

Jaganrei was directed by Teruyoshi Ishii, who previously made the similarly idol-focused and low-budget Daikanyama Wonderland Horror. The script was written by Chiaki J. Konaka, who spent the early 2000s sneaking Lovecraft references into children’s franchises like Ultraman and Digimon. Konaka also wrote Serial Experiments Lain, a 1998 anime series that blended cyberpunk with 1990s conspiracy fiction like The X Files.

Like Lain, Jaganrei is preoccupied with how technology transforms humanity (and how humanity transforms technology.) While I can’t say for sure, I also suspect that Jaganrei was influenced by the work of British scriptwriter Nigel Kneale, particularly his 1972 television film The Stone Tapes. Both that film and Jaganrei are about just how much can go wrong when you record supernatural forces on a computer. They also reflect a certain societal cynicism, that those forces don’t actually need to exist in order for people to hurt or abuse each other.

Jaganrei ends explosively as the composer’s ghost tortures Kato and kills Kawanishi on the music video film set. We see through the ghost’s eyes via the magic of cameras, making us both observers and accomplices. Kyoko, too, communicates with the spirit. “Haven’t you had enough?” she cries. “You have no right to do things like this!”

the blurry face of a woman, over which the text "video calibration" is superimposed.

That may be so. Yet I can’t help but sympathize with the composer’s ghost. Sure, she killed some people and hurt many others. Who can blame her? Kawanishi took her music, the record of her suffering, and he locked it in a box and sold it. His company denied her perspective. In fact, it did everything that it could to overwrite it.

But it couldn’t. Even after remixing the song and adding vocals and lyrics, the composer’s melody was loud enough and angry enough to drown it all out. Then they put the song on a computer and, just like in Nigel Kneale’s The Stone Tapes, the ghost took over the computer, too. Her perspective would not be denied.

These days, our words and pictures and films are all being recycled and sold back to us by generative AI. These programs are marketed as a way to make art more democratic. You, too, can create a novel or a painting or a pop song out of nothing. No matter that these programs were trained on other people’s work without compensating them. No matter that products of generative AI (for now) lack perspective. The hope of folks like Sam Altman is that most people will not be able to tell the difference; that we have always been bad at listening. Perhaps they are right.

A woman drinks from a cup. In front of her are various dishes of food. She sits in a restaurant; various customers can be seen sitting at tables behind her.

That’s why I find Jaganrei to be such an appealing heroic fantasy. The real composer of “Love Craft” refuses to be recycled. Just like generative AI poison progams such as Glaze and Nightshade, she corrupts the same systems designed to flatten her work. They do her bidding rather than the other way around.

Living as an artist these days means gambling, just like how it is elsewhere under capitalism. You make your work look as appealing as possible in the hopes that somewhere, somebody with money will swallow you. But what if you could be poison? A ghost in the machine, perspective infection. You can’t salvage the machine. But one day, if you’re patient, you could make it rust. Grow like fungus through the circuit board. Bring it all down.

If and when the machine eats me, I don't want to be erased. I want to be heard. Let's all be ghosts. Happy Halloween!

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