Godzilla

Monsters of Modernity explores the contemporary human condition through a selection of globally iconic monsters. In each chapter, the authors explore monsters for what they reveal about the world in which we live and for the ways that they enable us to address critical issues facing humanity. Although monsters might be feared and thought of as threatening, the authors show how each monster brings us to a deeper appreciation of various aspects of our troubled world, from gender relations, to the lasting impacts of colonisation, to neoliberalism, to the fragility of humanity’s place in the world in the Anthropocene. Monsters of Modernity explores new ground in the conventions of authorship and scholarship, including through the highly personal and subjective perspectives in each chapter, and even the absence of an Introduction. This book will be a valuable companion to anyone interested in the study of monsters as well as those seeking engaging ways to explore and teach key global issues. Open Access text available at: http://kismet.press/portfolio/monsters-of-modernity/

This essay specifically takes issue with the bikini swimsuit with regard to its birth in the latter 1940s and the power the suit garnered in the ’50s and early ’60s. This time period was rife with fears of female sexuality as well as the atomic bomb. Thus, I correlate a relationship between the swimsuit, the sexuality it implicates, and the bomb: how the bikini lends real sexual, some would say, “atomic,” largess to its wearer vis-à-vis the swimsuit’s cultural environment—its name, bikini, and the cultural practices associated with it, I argue, relate to the invention of the atomic bomb. Because the bikini swimsuit is such a visual text, the treatment of the bikini, in its initial film appearances, are incredibly important to this study because they ultimately reveal the linkage between bombs, bodies and the swimsuit. Incorporating an analysis of early filmic debuts of the swimsuit, I show that this swimsuit, more than any other piece of 20th century clothing, imitates a metaphorical cultural marking of the body similar to the atomic bomb.

This thesis functions to outline the various questions within my artistic practice. Deeply connected to my upbringing and familial ties, I navigate the interwoven themes embedded in my artwork and personal history.
Growing up in Los Angeles in the 1990s’, I was surrounded by the culture of a billboard landscape, while equally entrenched in the religiosity of Judaism. I therefore describe my autobiographical relationship to Judaism and the nuclear family, while dually questioning the symbolic functions of television and pop cultural symbology within my visual arts practice. Television is used as a symbol for escapism, this is butted up against a complex understanding of a religious culture weighted with the traumatic history of the Holocaust. I employ the personal artifact of my Grandfather’s Holocaust survival testimonial to complexify these relationships and search for their combined meaning.
Hello Kitty is introduced within my work as an additional trope of escapism and commodity culture. I further define that Hello Kitty, a Japanese creation and cultural icon, emerged as a capitalist symbol of comfort, cuteness, and security in a nation that was still bleeding the wounds of World War II.  Hello Kitty and other famous Japanese figures served a semi-pacification of the traumas never dealt with in Japan, and became a global phenomenon whose origins of pacification became generally unacknowledged, which furthered its purpose to delusional fans of the cute kitty.
Ultimately, this thesis acts as an invitation to contemplate the present political moment.  Unfortunately, the world is not very different from the one my Grandfather describes in his testimonial. Hopefully, the reader will be for affected to engage in a further search for truth and peace in a world where so many are desperately trying to destroy the foundations of life, liberty and freedom.

Published in Renate Bauer and Ulrike Krischke (eds.). 2011. Fact and Fiction: From the Middle Ages to Modern Times. Essays Presented to Hans Sauer on the Occasion of his 65th Birthday. (Texte und Untersuchungen zur Englischen Philologie 37.) Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 197-215.

Kaijū eiga – literally “monster movie” – is one of the most easily recognizable genres of Japanese cinema, as well as one of its biggest export products. Yet, despite its tremendous popularity in North America and Europe, for decades this genre was ignored by Western film scholars. The main goal of the present article is to discuss the kaijū eiga phenomenon as an area of intersection between escapist entertainment and socio-political commentary. As kaijū eiga productions are numerous, detailed analysis of even the most important representatives of the genre is beyond the scope of a single paper. Therefore, I have decided to focus on the first instalment of the Godzilla series. In the first section of the article I present a brief history of the Western reception of kaijū eiga, from its disregard by mainstream film criticism to its recognition as an important cultural phenomenon by the academic community. The second section serves as a brief review of the canonical and unorthodox interpretations of the original Godzilla that appeared in the subject literature during the course of the last three decades. In the next part of the article I discuss Honda Ishirō’s influence on the Godzilla form and purport within the context of his world-view and the traumatic events of his past. The last section of the article is devoted to the changes introduced to the film by its American distributors that led to the distortion of its original purport.

Monsters of Modernity explores the contemporary human condition through a selection of globally iconic monsters. In each chapter, the authors explore monsters for what they reveal about the world in which we live and for the ways that they enable us to address critical issues facing humanity. Although monsters might be feared and thought of as threatening, the authors show how each monster brings us to a deeper appreciation of various aspects of our troubled world, from gender relations, to the lasting impacts of colonisation, to neoliberalism, to the fragility of humanity’s place in the world in the Anthropocene. Monsters of Modernity explores new ground in the conventions of authorship and scholarship, including through the highly personal and subjective perspectives in each chapter, and even the absence of an Introduction. This book will be a valuable companion to anyone interested in the study of monsters as well as those seeking engaging ways to explore and teach key global issues. Open Access text available at: http://kismet.press/portfolio/monsters-of-modernity/

Quello di Godzilla è un fenomeno culturale alquanto vasto, che al momento di scrivere conta un totale di ventotto film e varie incarnazioni di diversi media, tra i quali televisione, fumetto e videogioco. Esso è stato, ad oggi, studiato in una pluralità di differenti maniere.

A studi di carattere enciclopedico, che da una parte analizzano le componenti artistiche fondanti dell’oggetto in questione e dall’altra si concentrano sulla raccolta di utili dati statistici su di esso, si affiancano analisi fenomenologico-culturali, che approcciano Godzilla dal punto di vista del suo impatto sulla società.

Tali lavori hanno messo in evidenza le molte sfaccettature di questo enorme oggetto d’analisi, mostrando come per approcciarvisi criticamente sia necessario prima di tutto scegliere un punto di osservazione particolare, a partire dal quale avvicinarsi progressivamente a Godzilla. Al termine di un percorso di analisi di questo tipo potranno essere infine tratte delle considerazioni generali sul fenomeno.

Volendo seguire un sentiero inesplorato, ho perciò scelto di costruire uno studio culturale di Godzilla a partire da un’analisi dei meccanismi seriali della sua saga. Come si vedrà, infatti, di film in film, di decennio in decennio, la produzione di Godzilla ha saputo individuare un linguaggio seriale personale, degno di essere osservato con attenzione e che, come vedremo, mi permetterà di avanzare ipotesi e considerazioni sulla natura culturale del mostro in questione.

Este trabalho analisa o sound design de monstros do cinema, sobretudo suas vozes. Chewbacca (Star Wars, 1977), Godzilla (1954) e Predador (1987) constituem o corpus da presente pesquisa. Estes monstros possuem vozes compostas por designers que experimentaram diferentes processos de criação, utilizando sons na natureza, do corpo e de objetos manipulados para criar a identidade sonora destas personagens. investigamos os contextos destes processos de criação e os sons criados, em suas particularidades, para compor uma proposta de método de composição de som de monstros, o qual abarca as potenciais fontes dos sons de base e demais características sonoras, como frequências, timbres e intensidade. A pesquisa foi feita a partir da observação dos materiais audiovisuais selecionados e do resgate da documentação disponível sobre os bastidores da criação dos mesmos (bastante vasta dada a popularidade dos monstros selecionados). A tese se baseia sobretudo em articulações com obras de Rick Altman, Michel Chion, William Whittington acerca do som cinematográfico e em Theo Van Leeuwen em sua proposição de análise sonora.

This research analyzes the sound design of movie monsters, especially their voices. Chewbacca (Star Wars, 1977), Godzilla (1954) and Predator (1987) constitute our corpus. These monsters have voices composed by designers who have experimented different creation processes, using sounds generated by nature, body and manipulated objects, in order to create the sound identity of these characters. We investigate the contexts of these creation processes and the resulting sounds in their particularities to make a proposition of a method for creating the sound of monsters. Our method covers the potential sources of base sounds and other sonic characteristics such as frequencies, timbre and intensity. The research was based in the observation of the selected audio-visual materials and in the documentation available regarding the making ofs (which is vast, given the popularity of the selected monsters). The thesis is based mainly on articulations with the works of Rick Altman, Michel Chion and William Whittington, on the cinematographic sound, and of Theo Van Leeuwen in his proposition of sonorous analysis.

Gojira (1954) is a Japanese film with two intertwined plots: 1) a monster plot about a prehistoric beast angered by atomic testing, and 2) a love plot structured around a conflict between traditional arranged marriage and modern marriage by couple’s choice. The film exhibits ring-composition (A B C D C’ D’ A’) as a device linking the two apparently independent plots together. Nationalist sentiment plays an important role in that linkage. the paper ends with a 6-page table detailing the actions in the film from beginning to end.

Zbigniew Wałaszewski

Mechagodzilla and cyborg woman. Techno-terror of triumph over nature

https://wuwr.pl/lkp/article/view/11896 (download)

Interpretations suggested in this article are based on the fourteenth and the fifteenth Godzilla
films, Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla (1974) and Terror of Mechagodzilla (1975), featuring the eponymous icon of the kaijū-eiga (monster films) genre and global pop culture.
An analysis of diverse contexts (visual, narrative, structural, and genre) of the cinematic fight of Godzilla (the epitome of Nature) with Mechagodzilla (the epitome of Technology) makes it possible
to reveal details of the expression of the desire to acquire and maintain control over technology and, through that, over nature.
In the context of the genre of both the analysed films, frightening elements characteristic of a  horror film are overcome by mechanisms derived from science fiction, i.e. science and technology, with the concern of civilisation about threats or fatal consequences of the use of devices which get out of control.
In the cinematic discourse of images of the conflict of fear of nature with anxieties of civilisation,
a  technological demon emerges, Mechagodzilla, in an ultra-modern body made from titanium, accumulating the horror of atavistic monsters attacking humans with the new terror of powerful alien machines. The techno-terror of Mechagodzilla is contrasted with original nature, unspoilt by technological interference, which transforms Godzilla, the frightening monster and an archetype of the chaotic and destructive force of natural disasters, into a  sympathetic defender of humanity.
The sensitivity and cultural tradition of a  Western viewer of the films, which serves as the point of departure for the analyses, initially made it difficult to derive a  complete interpretation of the message; when the interpretive apparatus was broadened, however, by rooting kaiju eiga in Japanese culture, this helped overcome the problems of interpretation and enriched the reading of Godzilla symbolics with a  spiritual element referring to nature.

This paper observes that recent Kaiju cinema produced in Hollywood, including Godzilla (2014), and Godzilla II: King of the Monsters (2019), depict the rise of gigantic monsters as a response to the climate crisis. The violence that these monster perform can thus be read as an accelerated and global form of what Rob Nixon (2011) has termed “slow violence”, in these films seen as affecting all geographies and social strata. At the same time, these films cast the US military as a final line of defense against this violence, so that the industrialized, nuclear and militarized modernity that has been instrumental in the production of the climate emergency is here perceived as its last best hope. In the case of Godzilla, this is not surprising as this movie was partially funded by the US Department of Defense. With this in mind, this paper notes that the troubling alliance between the US DoD, the Hollywood entertainment and military industrial complex may energize rather than decelerate the climate emergency.

Monsters of Modernity explores the contemporary human condition through a selection of globally iconic monsters. In each chapter, the authors explore monsters for what they reveal about the world in which we live and for the ways that they enable us to address critical issues facing humanity. Although monsters might be feared and thought of as threatening, the authors show how each monster brings us to a deeper appreciation of various aspects of our troubled world, from gender relations, to the lasting impacts of colonisation, to neoliberalism, to the fragility of humanity’s place in the world in the Anthropocene. Monsters of Modernity explores new ground in the conventions of authorship and scholarship, including through the highly personal and subjective perspectives in each chapter, and even the absence of an Introduction. This book will be a valuable companion to anyone interested in the study of monsters as well as those seeking engaging ways to explore and teach key global iss...

Aus:
Meisig, Konrad [Hrsg.]:
Utopias from Asia : An International and Interdisciplinary Symposium in Santiniketan On the Occasion of the 150th Birthday Anniversary of Rabindranath Tagore An Asian Impact Activity in memoriam of Momoyo Okura / ed. by Konrad Meisig. - Wiesbaden : Harrassowitz, 2012. - XXVI, 205 S. : Ill. - (East Asia Intercultural Studies = Interkulturelle Ostasienstudien

Marcus Stiglegger:
Kaijū eiga: Utopias and Dystopias in Japanese Cinema
Marcus Stiglegger:
Avalon 2.0: Die Mythopoetik von Mamoru Oshii


Art attempts to create the impossible with limited means. Sometimes this gives birth to works of greatness. Sometimes it leads to giant monsters.

Bienvenue pour ce quatrième GéoPopCulture. Maintenant que les bases de ce modeste projet de vulgarisation ont été posées lors des précédents numéros, je vais pouvoir essayer de proposer des réflexions sur des thèmes plus circonscrits.

Je vous propose donc dans ce nouveau numéro de revenir sur ces quelques réflexions atomiques, en espérant que vous pourrez y trouver un peu de plaisir et d’intérêt.

Je dédie ce dossier à l’immense Kentaro Miura qui nous a quitté le 6 mai dernier, fils de cette époque et dont l’œuvre a été marquée par ces menaces nucléaires.

Al escuchar el nombre "Godzilla" (en realidad: ゴジラ Gōjira) se evoca una serie de películas, y otros medios de entretenimiento, en donde un gigantesco monstruo (怪獣 kaijū) arrasa todo lo que se interpone a su paso, ya sea para destruir una ciudad, o bien, para defenderla de otros kaijū. El argumento, al parecer, resulta sencillo: los seres humanos deben ingeniárselas para sobrevivir a toda costa, incluso, si eso significa causar más destrucción que los propios kaijū.

En este sentido, Godzilla no es bueno o malo, ya que él es una figura metafórica de las fuerzas de la naturaleza y su interacción con la humanidad. Asimismo, este mítico ser es todo un icono del Japón, por lo que desde el año de 2015 es oficialmente ciudadano y Embajador de turismo en Tokio. Esta ponencia se presentó el 16 de Enero de 2020 en la sesión del seminario Japón y los Imaginarios Transculturales en el Museo Nacional de las Culturas del Mundo, Ciudad de México.

The entertainment serves a social function and is established by the economic-politic management of social time and functions. Entertainment is the opposite of labor time, but confluent to ideology. The management of an ideology consumes every aspect of social roles of an individual’s life, and must be understood as belonging to no specific character, but instead, as a whole disembodied movement that aims and controls its values by the management of the appropriative discourse of a given reality - Habitus. In this article it is presented the fundamental aspects of the disembodiment of the notion of ideology and its relation to the construction of modern economic politics and the function of the entertainment by the creation and control of Cultural Texts as fundamental ideological documents. As a case of study, it is studied here the multiple narrative layers contained in the latest Hollywood movie Godzilla, a comparison to its first version in 1954 in Japan and its political causes, and the aspect of Politics of Fear, as well as the political metaphors within the discourse of power in consumable popular entertainment.

The paper interfaces the ‘dark ecology’ of ecocritical literary theorist Timothy Morton with the communal ecotheology of theologian Richard Bauckham to begin to develop contours of an aesthetic of the ‘ecomonstrous’.  Morton criticises ‘ecomimetic’ environmental writing for its implicit anthropocentricity and advocates instead for an ‘antiecomimetic’ approach that embraces grotesque and apocalyptic representations of the non-human:  a Longinian rather than Burkean form of sublime that ‘contacts’ non-human objects as ‘strange strangers’, enabling humans to hear the environment ‘speak’ in, for example, oil spills and erratic weather patterns.  Bauckham argues that ‘stewardship’ ecotheology, though helpful, still retains a measure of unwarranted anthropocentrism in failing to situate humans as deeply embedded in the environment as the biblical narratives portray.  Bauckham argues instead for a communal picture of creation and redemption where the human is alongside rather than over against the non-human.  I argue that Bauckham’s ecotheology can significantly accommodate Morton’s ecophilosophy.  Yet the latter challenges the former to a richer and more redemptive view of monsters than Bauckham’s discussion of Leviathan evinces.  The foregoing insights make room for an ecomonstrous aesthetic that represents ecology paradoxically but fruitfully as a Community of Strange Strangers, where ‘intimacy with an alien presence’ (Morton) engenders deep respect and cooperation.

Giant monster movies, far from representing  mere escapist fantasy, constitute a major mode of modern mythology. Born with the development of colonialism, capitalist industry, and cinema, the mythology of giant monsters provides a lens through which to understand the modern world.

The performance of a film is to be judged based on production and reception. What makes Godzilla an exceptional case is that it took longer than 50 years to fully appraise the reception on a par with the original production. Such a gap was created by a travestying version of the 1954 original that gave  birth to Godzilla as both a character and a film genre, according most Japanese critics and historians  who have long mercilessly dissected the Americanized edit Godzilla, King of the Monster! with Raymond Burr. On the one hand, it is common knowledge for scholars of media and cultural studies that the sensitive historical circumstances turned the exportation of the film to America into a process in which Godzilla was stripped of his creators’ dark and cautionary tale of nuclear horrors. On the other hand, the charm of the 1956 recut is indisputable and a natural given among the Western fans  because it was thanks to this highly edited version that Goji-san made tremendous financial success, along with establishing his name and his one-of-a-kind genre beyond the border of Japan. It is only fifty years later its debut was Godzilla screened in cinemas all over America for the first time in 2004 and it was a revelation to his international G-fans that, they hardly knew him (Ryfle, 2005). Since these two roads crossed, little has been done to find out how this revelation has impacted Goji-san’s American loyal fans. The best place to find out can be in the middle ground where serious academic analyses and devoted fan reviews intertwine. This paper argues that Godzilla’s dual status of international cult idol and major politico-historical allows us to study the production and reception simultaneously. By studying in-depth reviews written by a special category of those who spent childhood loving the Americanized version and adulthood discovering the Japanese one. In particular, fan reflections and analyses on online forums and news/journal articles and interviews. This paper presents a selection of writings by authors that share the mentioned experience with the two films to holistically assess the possibly revamped fan’s perception of Godzilla caused by the special circumstances of his two dissimilar representations. Previously laborious analyses of the subtexts in the original and what role the American recut plays are a point of departure to examine the extent to which current Western fans are aware of the embedded subtexts in the original representation of their beloved daikaiju.

The 1954 Godzilla (Gojira) is a landmark monster film, and the film franchise has made the monster Godzilla one of the most globally recognizable figures of Japanese celebrity. The original Japanese film is remarkable for its melding of concerns about scientific progress, environmentalism, and for its use (at the time) of excellent special effects. In particular, the monster Godzilla (actor Haruo Nakajima in a rubber suit) rampages across small villages and through power lines, flattens planes and ships alike, and finally destroys Tokyo. It is the first of the live-action Japanese film genre tokusatsu (special filming) and is also part of the kaiju (monster or strange beast) genre. Gojira is an amalgam of gorira (gorilla) and kujira (whale). However, in order to export the film to the United States, Toho Studios used Godzilla, a portmanteau of god, lizard, and gorilla. Rather than invading foreign countries (and invoking colonial narratives by locating the foreign, other, or monstrous in former colonial spaces), this monster is terrorizing the nation-state itself. Godzilla’s origins and subsequent defeat are articulated through sophisticated scientific analysis and discovery. Dr. Yamane determines that Godzilla is the product of irradiated nuclear testing that penetrated the ocean’s depths, and Dr. Serizawa developed a weapon he called the “Oxygen Destroyer” that can dematerialize Godzilla and destroy all life in the body of water where it is deployed. The government sends naval vessels to drop depth charges in an attempt to destroy the monster, although neither the Japanese Coast Guard nor the land-based military succeeds in stopping Godzilla. Scenes of Japanese people running to air raid shelters coordinated by soldiers and the flattening of major cities recall the destruction rained down on Japan in World War II. The film closes with a somber note. Although the young lovers Emiko Yamane and Hideto Ogata reunite and Serizawa’s sacrifice saves them all, Yamane suggests that if nuclear testing continues another Godzilla may rise in the future. Godzilla did return, of course, in subsequent films, first as a rampaging monster and later as a defender of Japan, beginning in 1955 and continuing in the 2000s. Scholarly interest in studying the franchise began in the late 1990s with news of a new US film from TriStar Pictures starring Matthew Broderick, and much of the scholarly attention to the series flourished in the 2000s. The franchise remains active with the film Shin Gojira (Godzilla: Resurgence), produced in 2016 by Toho Productions and Cine Bazar, that drew inspiration from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster in 2011.

The Kaiju (strange monster) film genre has a number of themes that go well beyond the "big monsters stomping on cities" motif. Since the seminal King Kong (1933) and the archetypal Godzilla (1954), kaiju has mined the subject matter of science run amok, militarism, capitalism, colonialism, consumerism and pollution. This critical examination of kaiju considers the entirety of the genre--the major franchises, along with less well known films like Kronos (1957), Monsters (2010) and Pacific Rim (2013). The author examines how kaiju has crossed cultures from its original folkloric inspirations in both the U.S. and Japan and how the genre continues to reflect national values to audiences.

De paddenstoelwolk, een oogverblindende flits gevolgd door een alles verwoestende vuurzee: in de twintigste eeuw heeft de atoombom zowel in de werkelijkheid als in de filmwereld een onuitwisbare indruk achtergelaten. In Little Boy en Fat man onderzoekt Sidney Smeets aan de hand van bekende voorbeelden als Godzilla, Star Trek en Planet Of The Apes - en historische ontwikkelingen zoals bijvoorbeeld de Cubacrisis, Reagans buitenlandse politiek en het einde van de Koude Oorlog - de nucleaire impact van de atoombom op de Amerikaanse en Japanse filmindustrie. Oftewel, een aanrader voor zowel historici als fans van het witte doek!