The arc of Godzilla’s attacks is like a traditional Marxist lesson in political economy, moving from the base of material production to the superstructure of political and ideological power.
#GODZILLA ENEMIES WEAPONS TV#
It is only in his final attack that he goes for highly populated sections of Tokyo, where he destroys commercial buildings, media infrastructure (a TV broadcast tower), and the symbols of political power (the National Diet Building). Then in Godzilla’s next strike, he attacks an industrial area, destroying power lines, fuel storage facilities, train, and bridges. First, it’s fishing boats-Japan’s industrial food source-trading vessels-Japan’s lifeline to the global economy-and a small fishing village. Mediated technocatastrophy is the new natural disaster. In such societies, the distinction between natural disaster and man-made disaster is at least partially dissolved, as modernity itself constitutes a kind of second nature, its cataclysms having the scale of natural disasters, devastating ecological consequences, and, perhaps most terribly, having been naturalized by ideology (see the vogue for “resilience” in urban planning) so that they seem inevitable facts of life rather than the results of historical processes of collective decision-making, guided by and serving the interests of the powerful according to the logic of capital accumulation. Populations that are distributed geographically in such a way that a relatively small interruption in the supply chain of food or fuel could have catastrophic consequences in terms of death, deprivation, and/or civil unrest.
Societies with such huge energy and material needs that their production sites and infrastructures are highly dangerous-featuring mine collapses, storage site explosions, nuclear meltdowns, train-wrecks, pollution, and the constant risk of foreign wars over control of trade and resources. When I say that Godzilla represents the threat of catastrophe that is always present in modern societies, it’s not just a matter of societies being dependent on technology, but of societies in which all aspects of social and technical life are organized around the intensification of industrial and/or post-industrial production. He’s radioactive, his rampage was brought on by H-bomb tests, and one character, complaining about having to endure “yet another evacuation,” even says, “What did I survive Nagasaki for?” But nuclear weapons are themselves a metonym for technological and social modernity, and that’s what Godzilla is really about. Godzilla is a metaphor for nuclear weapons, duh. The high contrast photography and all the moody, expressive shadows hides the seam between the foreground and background well but not entirely, so that it appears neither totally realistic nor totally fake, but uncanny, ontologically disturbed.įuck the traditional Gaia interpretation of Godzilla-“By creating nuclear weapons, we have disturbed the natural order and disrespected traditional life, and Godzilla is our just punishment.” It’s more complicated than that. The real craftsmanship of the image lies in the seamless blending of the life-size set and the scale model in the middle/midground of the frame. This composite inverts the normal relationship of foreground to background: here it is the foreground that was actually further away from the camera.
The above two stills from the film are both composite shots of two different moving images, shot at different scales: there is the image of the people running around at the bottom/foreground of the frame and then there is the image of Godzilla, here portrayed by a guy in a costume, in the top and background of the frame. Now imagine that all the parts are moving. It has a great, Rite of Spring-influenced score, striking German expressionist-inflected visuals, and really cool special effects-brilliant use of slow motion, miniatures, mattes, back projection, and composite shots with densely layered compositions and multiple scales all in one image.
#GODZILLA ENEMIES WEAPONS MOVIE#
But the thing is, it’s true, the movie is fantastic. You always hear about how the first Godzilla movie is, in distinction from every other Godzilla movie, a real movie, a serious movie, about nuclear weapons, about World War II, etc. The original Godzilla plays out the struggle between two of post-war Japan's major political tendencies: a revolutionary critique of modernity against a victimized anti-historical Japanese nationalism
0 kommentar(er)
