Two friends: "Let's talk."

Godzilla Minus One [Media Notes 127 B] [has a heart ❤️]

I need to say a bit more about Godzilla Minus One than I did in my earlier post, which is mostly about the film’s look and feel, its overall vibe.

One of the ideas in many of the reviews, including reviews on YouTube, is that unlike most Godzilla movies, this one is about the characters, rather than treating them as props and frames for rampaging kaiju. Godzilla Minus One centers on four characters: Kōichi Shikishima, a former kamakazi pilot, Noriko Ōishi, a girl he befriends who becomes his girlfriend during the course of the film, Kenji Noda, an engineer, and Sōsaku Tachibana, an airplane mechanic. As the film opens Shikishima has landed his plane on Odo Island, ostensibly for repairs. There’s nothing wrong. Later that day the island is attacked by Godzilla. Tachibana urges Shikishima to open fire from his plane. He chokes. Everyone on the island is killed except Tachibana and Shikishima.

Shikishima is overcome with shame for his actions. The film is about how he redeems himself. In the wreckage of post-war Tokyo he meets a young girl Noriko, who has been entrusted with an infant girl by a dying friend. He takes her in and the three come to function as a family. At the same time he takes a job on a mine sweeper, where he meets Noda. When Godzilla shows up in Tokyo harbor, the minesweeper is dispatched to deal with it, unsuccessfully.

Noda becomes involved in a civilian effort to destroy Godzilla. That the effort is civilian, and voluntary, is emphasized. Noda, in turn, recruits Shikishima to the project and he, in time, recruits Tachibana, who is angry with Shikishima because he failed to pull the trigger on Godzilla back on Odo Island. The mission is successful – it has to be, no? otherwise there’d be no film, but not before Godzilla levels a large swath of Tokyo.

From the original 1954 Gojira

Godzilla Minus One owes an obvious debt to the original Gojira (1954) in the way it depicts Godzilla’s destruction of Tokyo. There are a number of shots that are obvious references to the original, e.g. Godzilla with a train in its mouth, or TV reporters transmitting Godzilla’s actions from the top of a building as Godzilla approaches. Akira Ifukube’s Godzilla theme from the original Godzilla theme was used during the sequence in which Godzilla was finally destroyed, which, though quite different in substance from the original, had a similar ceremonial quality. At the end, the sailors involved in the action saluted the now-vanquished Godzilla. At this point the soundtrack has choral music, with a solo female voice, that is reminiscent of a segment in the original soundtrack.

At the end, though, there is an underwater shot that suggests that Godzilla may not have been killed.

Godzilla Minus One [Media Notes 127 A] {opsis & vibe}

Godzilla Minus One is the 37th film in the Godzilla franchise, which is, I believe the longest running franchise in film. I’ve seen, perhaps, a half dozen of them, maybe one or three more. The worst were really bad. Most that I’ve seen were run-of-the-pond kaiju films, or better. This is the best one I’ve seen since the original Gojira, from 1954, which was quite good, haunting. The special effects in the original were terrible, but the film itself rose well above that. The effects in Godzilla Minus One are very good, though not quite state of the art. But who cares?

Actually, that’s a serious question, and a tricky one at that. Opsis, spectacle, is one of the six categories Aristotle set forth for thinking about tragedy in his Poetics. If the original Godzilla film was excellent, despite having cheesy special effects, and having excellent effects is not sufficient to elevate the most recent films to the level of the original, then how important can opsis be? One obvious response is that there is more to spectacle than special effects.

There’s vibe as well. That’s where the original is so effective, in Godzilla Minus One as well the original Gojira. In fact, I’ll go so far as to say that this is the only Godzilla film I’ve seen that captures the vibe of the original, and that that’s an accomplishment of high artistry. Here I talk of vibe in the sense that Peli Grietzer develops, the total Gestalt, everything all included, plot, setting, action, acting, the whole shebang.

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Here's an interesting video about visual effects in Godzilla Minus One:

From the YouTube page:

It only took 70 years, but Godzilla has finally gone home with the gold. Godzilla Minus One made history at the 96th Academy Awards, securing the Academy Award for Best Visual Effects, a first-time win for the Godzilla franchise. Given how important Godzilla has been to nearly a century of international film, it’s a long overdue accolade that couldn’t have gone to a more deserving entry. Minus One isn’t just a great movie, but a prime showcase of director Takashi Yamazaki’s strong artistic vision and proof that Godzilla’s ability to change with the times is unparalleled among film characters.

But there is another lesson that Hollywood should take away from Godzilla Minus One’s landmark achievement. How did a movie with a small VFX team of 35 artists and a frugal budget of $15 million show up the entire Hollywood blockbuster apparatus? Part of the answer lies in the film’s leaning into a distinctly 1990s way of depicting CG effects.

More so than resources or manpower, I would contend that the issue ultimately comes down to attitude, and how Hollywood has spent the past couple of decades denigrating the entire field of visual effects artistry. What was once a brand new field of exciting technology that was supposed to expand what was possible within the medium by a wide margin has instead spent much of the 21st century being treated like a laborious obligation that many filmmakers and audiences wish would go away.

Addendum: I discuss other aspects of the film in a new post: Godzilla Minus One [Media Notes 127 B] [has a heart ♥︎].

Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019) – World-spanning thoughts [Media Notes 99]

I’ve just watched Godzilla: King of the Monsters – in three sessions over two days (is there any movie capable of fully holding my attention for two hours given everything else I’m thinking about?). I’m talking about the 2019 sequel, if you can call it that, not the 1956 American re-edit of the 1954 Japanese Gojira. For my money it’s the best Godzilla film I’ve seen (and I’ve only seen a half-dozen or so) since the Japanese original. While it’s bulked up considerably, not only is Godzilla larger, but there are three or four monsters featured prominently, it manages to capture some of the spirituality of the Japanese original. I’m thinking particularly of the scene where the Serizawa travels to Godzilla’s underwater lair so he can energize it by exploding a small nuclear bomb, killing himself in the process. In the original, of course, Serizawa set out to kill Godzilla, and succeeded. But the 2019 film captures some of the ritual quality of that scene.

But that’s not what this note is about. While watching the film I was struck that THIS is SOMETHING I’ve been thinking about from time to time. I’ve probably made a post or two about that something, but I don’t know how to find those posts because I’ve never given it at name. I’m going to call it world-spanning thoughts. What do I mean? To the extent that we can perceive and conceive the world, not only do we seek to understand it, but to exert (some kind of) control over it, the WHOLE extent. In particular, I’m thinking about this in the context of the control theory of William Powers, though I’m going to have to leave that out of this little note.

If you are an animal, your ability to conceive of the world is quite limited, limited to what you have immediate access to, more or less. When a thunder storm blows, you deal with it. When it’s over, it’s gone from your mind. Not so with humans. We can remember, and brood, and worry. And not only about thunder storms, but about volcanoes, about lions and bears and snakes. What about the sun, the moon, the stars? What are they, how do they affect us, and how can we influence them? And so we invent magic, myth, and religion, and populate the world with strange and powerful creatures that we can appease through ritual.

All this is pretty much standard. You’ve read it many times before, and so have I. And yet, there’s more to be said about it. Just what, I’m not sure, and I am sure Powers would help, but not now.

What I’m after is how all this becomes REAL. If it’s not real, in some deep sense, it doesn’t work. Films like Godzilla: King of the Monsters, are one of the imaginative vehicles through which world-spanning thoughts engage with reality. On the one had we’ve got these huge ancient monsters, called Titans in the film: Rodan, King Ghidora, Mothra, and Godzilla (there are a bunch more, but they’re not depicted). We’ve got high-tech science, computers and submarines, and the whole damn thing hangs on a twelve-year-old girl. Above all else, she’s what brings human scale to the whole venture.

Fiction is full of such world-spanning thoughts, the function of which is to bring human scale the very large (but also the very small). James Bond films do it in a different way, conspiracies plus Bond himself. Super-hero films do it as well. But what of realistic films, what is their scope? But what is realism? Where do we situate 2001: A Space Odyssey?

More later. 

Hmm...World spanning thoughts, or desires, goals, objectives?

BTW, lots of Gojira/Godzilla posts. 

ALSO, check out this post from 2015, Our Rage for Order and Coherence.

All 33 Godzilla films ranked

Matthew Chernov ranks them in Variety. Chernov regards the first one, Gojira (1954), as the best. As I've not seen most of them, I can't really say it's the best. But it's the best one I've seen and I'd be very surprised if there are any better ones. Here's an essay I wrote about it; and here's a working paper that includes that essay and some other material, including a ring-form analysis.

H/t Tyler Cowen.

Gojira apologizes

So there are toys of Japanese monsters giving press conferences to apologize for destroying cities.

And I want one. pic.twitter.com/He3kJoIkhZ

— Michael Warburton (@mikewarburton) March 20, 2021

Gojira contemplating their next move in a troubled world

Best 怪獣 kaijū parody yet

I’ve been laughing for 10 mins straight😭 pic.twitter.com/YWLypWrlLe

— Naj📿 (@Zencsss) November 19, 2019

Three Godzillas in Jersey City

On the set of Gojira 1954 [dig the umbrella]

Haruo Nakajima and Momoko Kôchi on the set of Godzilla, 1954 pic.twitter.com/VNUWGNJgXi

— 41 Strange (@41Strange) October 22, 2019

BAPC camping trip 3: In which plants turn out to be communication systems, a distress signal is received from deep in the Arches, and plans are made

When we left on our camping trip we expected it to be just that, a camping trip. We hang out, tromp around in the woods and along the lake, build a campfire, eat whatever, do a little canoeing and kayaking, maybe even take a dip, and, for me at least, take a pile of photos. The usual stuff. To be sure, we were camping in a strange planet in a galaxy long and ago and far away – for that’s how these things are, no? – but still, camping is camping, no?

No. It turns out that camping was just camping, not at all. But we didn’t know that for awhile.

We started exploring along the shore. All these marvelous weeds and wild flowers.

But then we began to get suspicious. See those glowey tassely things at the tips of those tall grasses? I know what’ you’re thinking, it’s just sunlight reflecting off the surface of the tassely things. Of course that’s what it is, but sunlight isn’t just sunlight. It’s energy, it’s information, and above all, it’s messages. We began to suspect that those tassels are in fact transdimensional information transfer and dispersal units (TITDUs).

And that thicket of weeds?

Intergalactic cross-bar switches! We were camping in the middle of an interdimensional communication nexus.

And just how did we figure all this out? We were hanging out around the fire when the sky started to glow and we began sensing trans-sideral vibrations oscillating in the visual plane. The sky took on an eerie glow.

And then an image materialized and hung before us. It looked like the arches, and it didn’t look like the arches. The form was there but the color was agitated.

Two Godzilla Movies [Media Notes 8]

I’ve just watched two American Godzilla films: Godzilla (1998, #23 in the franchise), and Godzilla (2014, #30). In terms of special effects and general craftsmanship they’re much better than the original Japanese Gojira (1954). But I was unable to watch either one of them in a single sitting. Other things called to me.

So why blog about them at all? Because I want to note how they are like the original and how they differ from it. Since the two films have the same name, I’ll simply indicate them by date, 1998 and 2014. A quick one: The monster was radically redesigned for 1998, but pretty much the same for 2014, though somewhat larger. In 1998 the monster was hermaphroditic and managed to nest in the middle of Manhattan; finding and destroying that nest and all the baby monsters consumed much of the plot. In 2014 Godzilla is a good monster fighting two MUTOs (Massive Unidentified Terrestrial Organism).

Neither film picks up on the romantic conflict of the original film, the conflict between arranged marriage and marriage by mutual attraction and consent. That's simply not relevant in the contemporary American context.

1998

Godzilla heads to Manhattan from the South Pacific. Dr. Nick Tatopoulos is recruited to help deal with it. He’s the one who figured out that it’s hermaphroditic and breeding. He advises that Manhattan be evacuated and suggests they bait Godzilla with a big pile of fish. It works, of course, but not quite like they’d wanted it to, of course.

Meanwhile his ex-girlfriend from college, Audrey Timmonds, is trying to make it as a reporter (the news reporter motif is, I assume, an element from the 1956 American version, Godzilla: King of the Monsters. The two meet, she snags a tape of Godzilla from his tent, and her nasty boss in turn snags if from her. However, she eventually gets some footage and makes her career.

Nick and Audrey their separate ways through most of the film, both pursuing Godzilla, but met up after the little ones have been destroyed. Nick had been removed from the military action, for having allowed the tape to be swiped by Audrey, but is then snapped up by the French secret service. Why are the French secret service interested? Because it was France’s nuclear testing in the South Pacific that created Godzilla in the first place, where Godzilla swamped a Japanese fishing boat (from the original film).

Then Godzilla shows up again (we’d thought it had been killed) and chases them – Nick, Audrey, her cameraman, and he Frenchman, all over the place. But the Air Force gets him. We have a happy ending.

2014

This is a complicated story, spanning two generations. Including two generations within one American family. This is the interesting thing. There is no romance; but there is family. But then, I suppose, we had that in the Japanese original as well, Yamane and his daughter. Is this why, in myth-logic, Godzilla turns out to be a ‘friendly’ monster?

In 1999 two scientists (Serizawa and Vivienne Graham) find two giant spores in the Philippines. There’s trouble at a nuclear reactor in Japan where Joe Brody looses his wife Sandra. In 2014 their son Ford chases after his dad, Joe, who’s been arrested in the quarantine zone for the reactor. This and that happens, Joe is killed, and a MUTO heads toward San Francisco. Serizawa & Graham and Ford follow on a US warship.

Other stuff happens, but it comes down to Godzilla killing two MUTOs in San Francisco and heading back to sea. Ford has something to do with it (as do Serizawa and Graham). Ford is reunited with his family, who were in San Francisco, where Joe had been until he got the call.

Godzilla has doubled in size since it appeared in 1954. Why?

One proposal is that it reflects increasing anxiety: Nathaniel J. Dominy, Ryan Calsbeek, Godzilla’s extraordinary growth over time mirrors an increase in Anthropocene angst, Science, 28 May, 2019:

[Susan] Sontag argued that our taste for disaster films is constant and unchanging. On the contrary, we suggest that Godzilla is evolving in response to a spike in humanity’s collective anxiety. Whether reacting to geopolitical instability, a perceived threat from terrorists, or simply fear of “the other,” many democracies are electing nationalist leaders, strengthening borders, and bolstering their military presence around the world.

Oleg Sobchuk is not buying it, The “Science” of Godzilla in Science, Medium, 26 June 2019:

Personally, I think that another — simpler and less dramatic — hypothesis is more likely. More likely because it concerns not a particular film but a general pattern of the cultural evolution of art.

This hypothesis has to do with a common, though not very well studied, phenomenon of the intensification of artistic stimuli over time. Mnay artistic “devices” — techniques of manipulating pleasant emotions in the audience — tend to be used in more intense ways during their evolution. Godzilla is a device, similarly to King Kong or any other monster in the kaiju genre featuring giant monsters: somehow, the size on its own may be enough to evoke some pleasant fear in us.

Makes sense to me. Spreading anxiety is a reasonable way to think about the spread of Godzilla films, but stimulus intensification is a better way to talk about the monster's size.

The Gojira Ur-text has been discovered

The Godziliad  

Needless to say, it's epic!

Here's how it begins:

Godzilla's wrath, to Earth the direful spring
Of woes unnumber'd, heavenly goddess, sing!
What grudge could fire the fierce atomic breath
That burnt so many citizens to death?
What move four mighty limbs to crush and tear
Whole city blocks and scatter them to air?
Vast anger that found voice and fuelled the roar
Of this whale-monkey-kind-of-ichthyosaur.
Declare, O Muse! what woke such monstrous foe
And summon'd him from ocean bed below;
What stirred him from millennial slumbers deep
To swap-out slaughter for abyssal sleep?
What made this slug-a-seabed rise as killer?
Good Gods, why did ye thus make ill Godzilla?

Click the link above to read the rest
Of this mighty tale in verse expressed. 

God damn you Adam Roberts! look what you made me do

To verse you've summoned my writing too!

A bit of friendly conversation

Notes on Place and Narrative Order in Three Texts

In the course of a recent Academica.edu session (about the nature of stories and the discipline of literary criticism) Per Aage Brandt brought my attention to his paper, Forces and Spaces – Maupassant, Borges, Hemingway. Toward a Semio-Cognitive Narratology, in which he outlines (to quote from his abstract) “a model of the constitutive architecture of narrative meaning as manifested by ‘good stories’, stories that make sense by conveying a vie& of the human condition.” In this model he proposes that actions move back and forth between “a canonical set of narrative spaces, each encompassing and contributing a significant part of the meaning of a story” and that these narrative spaces are typically “staged as distinct locations” in the physical space depicted in the narrative. He labeled these four spaces: Condition, Catastrophe, Consequence, and Conclusion.

That something like this is going on seems plausible on the face of it. As Brandt noted in a comment over at the session, “spaces and behaviors are regularly linked, in human cultures as in many animal behaviors.” Thus humans and animals typically has a nesting space or den where they sleep and a daily routine the moves through the same spaces in a regular circuit where they satisfy their various needs. I note further that, as all animals have to navigate through the physical world, the neural machinery for guiding us through space is phylogenetically very old, reliable, and sophisticated.

However, for the purposes of this post, I want to set the abstract narratology aside and simply concentrate on the physical places in a small set of narratives. Furthermore, those narratives share a common narrative form, known as ring composition. In the next section I describe that form with a simple example and then, in successive sections, consider three texts: Tezuka’s Metropolis, Honda’s Gojira, and Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. A final section has links to other materials.

Let’s Take a Journey

Let us start with a very simple narrative, one with no remarkable features. It is a story about how I leave my apartment to get a quart of milk at the local King’s grocery store and then return to my apartment by the same route. This story, as you will quickly see, had the canonical form of a ring; that’s why I’m telling it.

Here is that story, told in a telegraphic way.

A: Leave Apartment

B: Exit Building, turn left to 13th St.

C: Walk East on 13th St. for a block, cross Hudson

D: Turn right, walk so many yards to the door of King’s

E: Enter King’s and purchase milk

D’: Exit King’s, turn right and walk so many yards to 13th St.

C’: Cross Hudson and walk one block on 13th to Washington St.

B’: Turn right and walk to the door of 1301 Washington St.

A’: Enter building and return to my apartment

This story has a center point, my purchase of milk, and the events in the story, such as they are, are arranged symmetrically around that central event.

That story interests me because the ring-form is incidental to my intentions in telling the story. In telling the story I didn’t intend it to have a ring form. All I intended was to tell the events as they happened or, to be more precise, as I remembered them happening. My memory stream has the events ordered one after the other and that’s how I told them.

Where, then, did the narrative symmetry come from? It came from the material conditions of the narrated events. The story was simple. I started at one place, when to another to do something, and then I returned to my starting point. Because returned by the same route I used when going to the goal place, the symmetry was a natural consequence of geography. Had I returned by a different route, the symmetry would have been broken.

Godzilla, Doctor Who, and Star Trek: the Big Three?

A blast from the past, from March 24, 2014. Should I add King Kong into the mix?

This post is very tentative. I’m thinking out-loud, playing around.

As the title suggests, I’m wondering if these three franchises, Godzilla, Doctor Who, and Star Trek, with their different themes and agendas, triangulate a certain very large space in the world’s popular culture over the last half century. Each has fans all over the world.

The Godzilla franchise is the oldest. It originates with the 1954 film, Gojira (the Japanese for Godzilla), about a large prehistoric beast that was disturbed by atomic testing and, in consequence, destroyed much of Tokyo before it was destroyed. The Japanese film was Americanized by eliminating some footage, adding new footage, and re-editing. This new film was released in America in 1956 under the title, Godzilla, King of the Monsters. The Japanese have so far made 27 more Godzilla films plus spin-off films about other monsters. An American remake is scheduled for release later this year. The franchise also includes animated television programs, comics, and assorted merchandise.

Next comes Doctor Who, a British television series started by the BBC in 1963; it centers on a humanoid alien, the Doctor, who is last of the Time Lords and who travels through time and space in the TARDIS, a time machine. The series ran 26 years until 1989, by which time it had generated enough secondary material – comics, books, and merchandise – to keep the franchise alive until it was restarted in 2005 and remains in production.

Star Trek started on American television in 1966, three years after Doctor Who and 12 years after Gojira. The original series lasted three years on network television but then became firmly established in reruns. The first feature film came out in 1979 and the first of four spin-off programs, Star Trek, the Next Generation, debuted in 1987. The franchise has generated a dozen feature films along with comic books, novels, video games, and animated series, and other materials.

What strikes me about these three franchises is that each is multimedia and each is long-lived, with Godzilla being the longest-running franchise in the movies. The Superman and Batman franchises are also multimedia and are even older, dating back to the late 1930s in comic book form. Which is a way of raising the question of whether these three franchises – Godzilla, Doctor Who, and Star Trek – constitute some analytically coherent group or not. I could eliminate Superman and Batman by specifying a post-WWII starting point, but is that an arbitrary move or not? I suspect it isn’t, but that’s not something I’m interested in pressing hard here and now.

Given these three post-WWII pop-culture franchises, they are distinctly different in character. The significance of their longevity is not simply that they have remained popular, but that they have defined the imaginative space in which other titles must situate themselves. All three fall within science fiction, broadly understood – and that might differentiate them from Superman and Batman. Of course, we also have the Star Wars franchise, which is a decade younger than Star Trek, but arguably as widely spread. Does that matter? Don’t know. Let’s press on.

Either Tokyo was a lot smaller or I've shrunk since my glory days

Godzilla Rises in Japan, for the first time in 12 years

The Godzilla franchise is one of the most prolific in the movie biz. Writing in The New Yorker, Matt Alt reports that the Japanese are releasing their first Godzilla film in 12 years.

The 1954 “Gojira” resonated so deeply with its audience because of the painfully fresh memories of entire Tokyo city blocks levelled by Allied firebombings less than a decade before. In the preview for “Godzilla Resurgence,” you can see how the directors are again mining the collective memories of Japanese viewers for dramatic effect. But their touchstones are no longer incendiary and nuclear bombs. Instead they are the 2011 earthquake and tsunami, which killed close to twenty thousand people and introduced Japan to a new form of nuclear horror caused by out-of-control civilian reactors. Indeed, the now fiery-complexioned Godzilla seems to be a walking nuclear power plant on the brink of melting down. For anyone who lived in Japan through the trying days of late March of 2011, the sight of blue-jumpsuited government spokesmen convening emergency press conferences is enough to send a chill down one’s spine. So is the shot in the trailer of a stunned man quietly regarding mountains of debris, something that could have been lifted straight out of television footage of the hardest-hit regions up north. Even the sight of the radioactive monster’s massive tail swishing over residential streets evokes memories of the fallout sent wafting over towns and cites in the course of Fukushima Daiichi’s meltdown.

It’s an open question as to how foreign audiences will perceive the subtext of these scenes, or if they even really need to. Equally so for the shots of the Japanese military’s tanks, aircraft, cruisers, and howitzers engaging the giant monster, which at first glance might simply appear a homage to a classic movie trope. But “Godzilla Resurgence” appears at a time in Japanese history much changed from that of even its most recent predecessor. In the last twelve years, the Self-Defense Forces have gone from little more than an afterthought to folk heroes for their role in 2011 tsunami rescue efforts, and now to the center of a controversy as Prime Minister Shinzo Abe pushes through legislation to expand their role abroad. Traditionally, Japanese monster movies have used images of military hardware hurled indiscriminately against a much larger foe as a potent symbol of the nation’s own disastrous wartime experience. But the regional political situation for Japan is far more complicated now. The fight scenes hint at changing attitudes toward the military in Japan.

Here's a trailer:

Friday Fotos: Sparkychan and Gojochan Retrospective!

Back in 2006, when I first started photographing graffiti, I thought it would be interesting to get some kid's toys and photograph them amid the gritty territory I was exploring. So I bought two, a plastic model of Gojira (Godzilla in America), which promptly became Gojochan, and a hot-pink plush bear, Sparkychan. Here's some stories about their life: The Collected Adventures of Sparkychan & Gojochan (Thus Far). I've posted some photos of them below.

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Sparkychan meditating on the awesomeness of existence.

Gojochan raging against the dying of the night.

Gogochan is attracted to Sparkychan's inner peace.