The Collective Wound: Godzilla and the Collective as a Character in Japanese Filmmaking

Gojira (Dir. Ishirō Honda) is not only the first Godzilla film but also one of Japanese film’s first expression of the horror of nuclear warfare. The film began production immediately after the end of US occupation. During the occupation direct references to the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasake were censored in Japanese media. [1] But tensions were still high, and Toho Studios pushed for a film that could speak to the tragedy without directly visualizing it. The kaiju monster Godzilla — through character design, plot references to the Lucky Dragon No. 5 disaster, and visual evocation of photojournalism covering the bombings — embodied the collective anxiety and horror without depicting the trauma itself. [2]

Gojira is the source of so much pop culture iconography, but the film’s effect is unexpectedly dark, haunting. This is not a man in a suit play fighting with a giant moth on strings, as one might come to expect from later incarnations. The 1954 Godzilla is more Lovecraft than kitsch.

What we feel at the end of Gojira, as the monster disintegrates at the hands of the Oxygen Destroyer (along with the self-sacrificing scientist who created the weapon), is a membership in the collective who listen via radio to live reports of Godzilla’s death and soon set themselves to piecing their country back together.

This is not a Hollywood moment, where almost all screenplays are written according to a strictly codified sense of what makes an individual grow as an individual. For most Hollywood studios with their bastardized-Joseph-Campbellian rubric, a film works if the viewer feels connected to the hero to such a degree that the hero’s transformation feels like a transformation in the viewer. But for the audience of Gojira, the film works because we come away feeling like a member of that collective who withstood the kaiju and defeated it, and who must now face the reality of so many dead, so much to rebuild.

One could say this is because of a societal difference, that Japanese culture is less individualistic, or that the wound of Hiroshima and Nagasake and the end of the empire was a collective wound. Given the amount of great Japanese cinema focusing on individuals, the latter argument has a stronger pull, but here we are less concerned with why the film is made this way or what cultural factors play into it. Rather, let us look at how the film draws the viewer in as a member of the collective.

To tell the story, Honda relies on seeing the events through several lenses, each viewpoint expressed by a main character. This is a technique we’ve come to expect from mega-disaster blockbusters (just think of the multiple converging hero journeys at the heart of Independence Day or The Day After Tomorrow, both filmed by Roland Emmerich who directed 1998’s US Godzilla). A major benefit of the technique is that it works: watching many people from all places and stations of a society reeling from the central crisis makes that crisis feel big and widespread.

The conflict is also mostly one sided. While most films involve an antagonist who interacts with a protagonist — or at least gives the protagonist some way forward — Gojira’s conflict mostly centers around a rampaging kaiju who can’t be stopped. Characters look on in horror or flee for their lives while Godzilla destroys large swaths of various Japanese cities. When the military finally tries a counter-offensive, they are only halfway successful. It is not until scientists collaborate across disciplines and convince the government to back their plan that the protagonists really have much to do. Even then, one has to commit suicide.

What does this passivity look like? Shots of crowds fleeing the rampaging Godzilla. Shot after shot. If we need to raise the stakes for a particular city crushing event, we close in on a weeping mother comforting her crying child as the flames that eat the city around them light their tear-covered faces. Again, these are techniques that are now, some sixty-plus years later, part and parcel of big budget disaster filmmaking.

This cinematic depiction of crowds has a difficult relationship with the medium’s attention to individual protagonists. Master Japanese director Akira Kurosawa is famous for his battle scene depictions of serpentine units of soldiers moving as one through space, as individual characters read the events on the battlefield and react. But a unit of soldiers isn’t quite a crowd. Both are composed of many people who move together with somewhat uniform purpose, yet depicting one should not have the effect as depicting the other. Units of soldiers move together based on commands from a specific, knowable point. When many soldiers act as one, it is a sign of supreme social order. Crowds, however, move together as one during a breakdown of order, as in people fleeing Godzilla.

The end of Do the Right Thing (Dir. Spike Lee) uses a crowd made up of individuals that we have come to know through the events of the film, but once inside a crowd, there is a new tension rising as we see characters moving together, not according to some plan but according to shared experiences, shared frustrations, a shared target. By seeing the crowd coalesce around a common enemy, we see the rise of a new character (the crowd itself) and a sinking away of the individual characters that make it up. This is a very American film with a very similar collective feeling, if only for its climax.

So here we have two examples of groups of people moving together depicted in cinema. Both the well trained unit of soldiers and the mass crowd threatening to riot. But Godzilla films have people fleeing together in the act of escape and mourning together in the wake of a catastrophe. Thus, what a film like Gojira tries to accomplish is a much more complex emotional arc in these crowds, and by keeping with the crowd for a greater portion of screen time, by centering the trauma of Godzilla’s raid on Japan in the collective experience, the film brings us along that same arc as a member of that crowd.

Gojira is a masterpiece on many fronts, but its focus on a collective wound is perhaps its most profound. Given the filmmakers’ inspiration, it seems the most fitting honor.

References

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occupation_of_Japan

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daigo_Fukury%C5%AB_Maru

Cannibalizing the Past Pt 1: The Suspiria Remake and the Fertility of Reference

The original Suspiria by Dario Argento is a masterpiece of horror cinema. For myself, watching the movie at eighteen sent me down a path of foreign horror films, then foreign films in general, and so opened the universe of great cinema to me. It played such a pivotal role in my personal aesthetic development that the announcement of a coming remake had me feeling two kinds of ways: incredible interest at how the filmmakers would attempt to take a second bite at the apple, and incredible wariness at just what we could expect. Argento’s Suspiria did not seem to me the kind of film you watch and say, “They could have done better. Someone else should take a shot at it.”

It’s worth mentioning that in the last two decades (the length of my film consciousness) there have been a spat of horror classic remakes that were all either bad (like Alaxendre Aja’s The Hills Have Eyes) or, at best, shot-for-shot remakes (like Rob Zombie’s Halloween). The one exception, perhaps, was Zack Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead, but that film now has the dubious honor of spawning the zombie over-saturation wave that came ten years later — along with Danny Boyle’s zombie-like 28 Days Later. So all the signs pointed to a Suspiria remake being less than good work.

When I finally watched it, I was happily surprised.

What Luca Guadagnino et al achieved was that most difficult task of reenvisioning without abandoning. The new incarnation takes the bare bones of the source material and creates an entirely different kind of horror experience, while still drawing enough one-to-one echoes to feel like a kindred spirit.

Argento’s film uses a neon baroque sensibility to create a world where the characters, story, and logic function on a dreamlike, “oneiric” level — a literal nightmare. Guadagnino’s film switches out the high saturation for a muted, realist palette evoking a divided Berlin at the center of world history, and he switches out the baroque with the modernist. These two underlying aesthetic guidelines travel throughout the remake, and provide a lens with which to see on what terms the two films function. It also provides a guideline to keep the film on its own terms while borrowing from its source.

Carrying out a revived aesthetic (like mid-century modernism) is always a balancing act. The visual references must drive all the way up to the line before crossing over into pastiche. That is, every reference must function meaningfully, must express, must convey information. To the degree a reference satisfies these needs, it escapes pastiche. To the degree it fails, and exists merely as a reference, it is pastiche. For Guadagnino’s remake, there were thus two horizons where this danger existed: reference to the original film, and reference to the guiding aesthetic of modernism.

Guadagnino himself claims that he hopes to have no style, but his Suspiria undeniably does. It uses the visual language of modernism to describe the unsettling logic contained within the coven of witches, a brooding and dangerous situation inside Cold War Berlin (a different kind of brooding and dangerous situation).

We use style to forget ourselves. To eliminate our viewpoint and merge into a reference structure handed to us by a social network. By engaging the style, we join that network and influence the very substrate we are relying on to be separate from ourselves, but this is of little consequence inside the gestation and creation because you don’t join that conversation until it has already influenced your utterance — by the time people see your film, you’ve already made it.

In this way, Guadagnino used style much like source material, two reference patterns working in tandem. His Suspiria is conceptually elevated then, because it has so many added layers of discussion. It speaks with history, with its predecessor, with the audience — even with witches.

And while this kind of referencing can go very wrong (see the general culture right now as it feeds on both a blockbuster film based on the early 90’s video game Sonic the Hedgehog and a live-action children’s mystery starring a character from a popular 90’s trading card game and anime), when we see it work as it does in Suspiria, we see the potential fertility of cannibalizing the past.

How does his film succeed? For one, the deliberate pacing works to its advantage. With so many masters to serve (and it seems to freely add to this list by engaging in excessive world building both in historical and geographic context as well as the fantastical mythology), the film needs time. And let me tell you, it takes it. The film runs for two hours and thirty-two minutes, which is absolutely gargantuan for a horror film. But this time means that no reference needs to stand without support. This is not a simple recombination of signs. There are multiple characters able to pass the through the world, interact, and build a reality inside of the sets and the story. That pacing is the precise antidote for the problems with a culture that has begun to recombine symbols rather than create new myths. Recombination is interesting but thin, so a culture relying on it to generate itself needs rapid production of new combinations. The more you sit with a reference, the more people think, and so something has to stand behind it if your camera lingers over it.

The second way that the film succeeds is more quaint and old fashioned, but it gives us a clue about a good test for a work that relies on references and is embedded in an entire network of style. That is: does the film work if it weren’t evoking the original? Yes. The Suspiria remake goes it alone enough to prove itself, particularly in areas that are the easiest to exploit for nostalgia, like musical themes and iconic shots. The one sin of nostalgia exploitation the remake commits is using the lead actress from the original (Jessica Harper) for a cameo. But the fact that they resisted using the iconic theme of the original and remaking any of the famous death scenes absolves them if there be any justice in this world.

What I took away from the experience of 2018’s Suspiria was a renewed interest in the zeitgeist-dominating nostalgia spectacles over which so much cultural critics’ ink has been spilled. Sure, I noticed it, even hated it, even used it as a symptom to diagnose a terminal cultural disease embedded in late capitalism. Once I’d seen a nostalgic remake done correctly, it all meant so much more. If it were all bad, it would be inherent, inescapable. But remakes can be done well. Our warm and fuzzy cinematic memories can be used and manipulated for new purposes in a productive, generative way.

That means there is more to the story. Cannibalizing the Past is a series of observations on that story.

The Show's Too Long: The Superfan in the Era of the Seven Hour WrestleMania

The wrestling community is in recovery from another WrestleMania weekend and its centerpiece seven hour event. The fan consensus appears unanimous: Mania is too long, a sentiment echoed by performers inside the company and wrestling commentators alike. The criticism strikes on a major problem with WWE in general: they make too much wrestling.

A recap of their production schedule is head spinning. Mania seems to grow longer every year along with the rest of the big four (each accompanied by a Takeover special that same weekend and a pre-show the evening of). These mega-weekends punctuate a weekly schedule with five hours a week of prime time storytelling (for some perspective, Raw’s scheduled runtime exceeds that of WrestleMania XII, which comes in at a tidy two hours and forty-eight minutes, even with an hour-long Iron Man match as the main event). And there’s more: 205 Live, NXT, and NXT UK collectively produce three hours week, there are a few stadium supershows a year for the benefit of a totalitarian regime, the occasional tournament series on the Network, reality shows, and a couple of hyper-disposable syndicated broadcasts.

But it isn’t just the WWE. Even if you remove their output, there’s too much wrestling and wrestling-adjacent media to consume it all. Podcasts, YouTube videos, articles, social media battles—not to mention the countless other wrestling promotions putting out weekly content themselves, many available on proprietary streaming services.

That’s why it might be time for wrestling fans to change their habits and relationship to the art form. While it seems like WWE’s content production is irrational, perhaps there are very good reasons (or at least, reasons too good for WWE to change), and the fans need to adjust, if only to preserve their passion for wrestling before they let it burn them out forever.

The Superfan’s Maladaptation

The complaints of WWE’s content glut mostly come from a certain kind of fan (that of the vocal, well-informed variety — the superfan). These superfans masochistically consume as much wrestling as they can. This completist instinct is a hand-me-down gene from a time when wrestling video was scarce, the field not just mercifully less bloated but nearly barren. In those decades of scarcity, fans went so far as to create subterranean networks, forced to trade bootleg VHS tapes to see anything outside their regional TV market. Surely those fans dreamed of a searchable library of wrestling, all available at the touch of a button. That informed nerd culture of so-called “smarks” continued, but the world of wrestling content is now inside-out. Perversely, now that the dream of superfans came true, it threatens to crush the joy of wrestling for that same set of fans.

It might be, as many online superfans would have it, that WWE is sadistic with their production schedule. They might be out of touch with the audience (some evidence of this is read into their booking and written dialogue). But it might be that the highly successful WWE is acting rationally in light of the recent changes in the entertainment world, and maybe superfans need to change as well. Just as the nineties’ internet fandom forced the industry to change, so the current internet media landscape might force the fandom to change.

The Road to Seven Hours Is Paved with Good Intentions

So what is the justification for all this programming? Think of a much-maligned phrase from Titan Towers regarding concerns about All Elite Wrestling, or about Total Nonstop Action so many years ago, or about the popularity of mixed martial arts, or about the lack of competition after the fall of WCW and its effect on creative. They repeat, “We are in competition with all entertainment, not just sports, not just wrestling.” The superfan rolls their eyes and calls it rationalization, deflection. But consider again what WWE is saying. As the only mainstream wrestling company, they are the only vessel for wrestling in pop-culture at large, where competition is fierce, and for them to draw fans, they have to convince the prospective viewer to turn off other content and focus on pro wrestling. These viewers aren’t interested in wrestling just because it's wrestling or they’d already be watching. And just as wrestling has experienced a content explosion, so too has film, television, music, video games, and so on. There is near infinite entertainment for the individual, and WWE has to compete with all of that content for attention. They really do see themselves as competing with all possible entertainment, and they're right.

So their strategy begins with an assumption that is fundamentally true: this content explosion means people can find enough content within their niche interests, and they will gravitate to those options. We see everywhere the trend of audiences narrowing into more and more specific interests, now that there is plenty of entertainment to go around. But WWE doesn’t want to be limited to one niche — they want to attract millions of eyeballs to one product, they want to fill stadiums. How do they do that? By satisfying multiple niches. So what do you have to do to satisfy an expanding set of niches? Expand the amount of programming. If every niche needs, say, thirty minutes of content a week to be satisfied, every niche you attempt to satisfy expands programming by thirty minutes a week.

This is related to the reason for WWE’s other oft-maligned refrain during investor calls and interviews, this one to address falling ratings. They repeat, “Ratings matter less and less, and you have to factor in other forms of engagement to get the full picture.” Why do they say this? Because they don’t expect any one fan (save those of the “super” variety) to watch all of Raw — only the segments that appeal to that specific fan’s niche interest. They expect most fans to wait till Tuesday to watch the segments that interest them because that’s where media is moving and has been moving for some time (i.e. from broadcast to on-demand). Raw presents three hours of content in order to cannibalize it on social media and YouTube over the next week. That their TV broadcasts somehow still garner enough viewers to command hundreds of millions in rights fees is a serendipitous side effect.

In short: WWE’s goal is to make a slice of programming for as many niches as they can. The more niches they serve, the more total programming they have to create. And so WrestleMania is seven hours long (including the pre-show) because it serves as the climax and inciting incident of the year for every niche they serve. You as an individual fan are not expected to watch all seven hours. That’s a major aspect of the Network for WWE as they sail forward with this strategy, because now viewers can move directly to the matches and angles they care about. The major conflict with this feature is that it only works after the event is held, and this has to live alongside the desire of fans to see events as they happen, but even then, you can watch like you would if you were in the live audience, judiciously choosing your bathroom breaks and beer runs to overlap with the matches you don’t care to see. (Another major conflict with this strategy is that the appeal of live television programming is also a major part of WWE’s promise to deliver millions of viewers to networks for big money, and that is in direct tension with the sheer amount of programming if TV isn't geared for live broadcast viewing — we’ll see how that tension develops in the future. The billion dollar deal with Fox suggests the tension will continue for some time.)

A Superfan Survival Guide

If you have friends who are casual fans, you’ve probably seen how this strategy of picking and choosing the wrestling you watch works. Casual fans follow on social media and YouTube. Maybe they only watch the women’s matches, or they only watch segments with Finn Balor, or they only watch the WWE and Universal title storylines, or maybe they watch some combination. What they don’t do is sit down and chug three hours of wrestling every Monday night and then two or three on Tuesday and so on. (WWE’s success with platforms like Youtube reveal how a large portion of the audience engages with the product in the casual way described above, far outperforming their sport league cousins.)

These casual fans are where WWE sees its growth, not in appealing to the superfans who will watch wrestling until they die, who can’t help but watch anything they can get their hands on. And since the casual fans don’t participate in the same online discussion spaces as superfans, many superfans don’t recognize what the appeal of so much programming is. The superfan discussion is made up of themselves as well as commentators whose job it is to sit through everything WWE puts out—the two groups who burn out from all the content.

If only superfans could choose to watch less and to watch more judiciously, they might not resent the company that is the undisputed flagship (like it or not) of the art form they love so much. That being said, many issues that arise from so much programming cannot be solved by superfans reducing consumption. The exhaustion of unique match-ups, the head-scratching creative that passes in the desperation to fill airtime, the repetition of presentation, the premature peaking of storylines — these cannot be so easily fixed and are ongoing, serious weaknesses for the WWE. One wonders how much better they might manage these drawbacks if they focused on making one or two great hours of wrestling a week, but that has to be weighed against the potential loss of certain niche audiences. This reduction in quantity would certainly serve the superfan better, giving their eyeballs a rest. And if this reduction in quantity led to an increase of quality, they could create more superfans. But that isn’t the strategy WWE is taking, and they appear to have no interest in changing.

And as long as they take this approach, superfans will have to deal with a seven hour WrestleMania.