Godzilla
(2014): The Hopscotch Tour-de-force of Militourism
***IF YOU HAVE NOT SEEN THIS MOVIE I AM SO
SORRY THERE ARE MANY SPOILERS. PLEASE FORGIVE ME OR SAVE YOURSELF BY WATCHING
IT BECAUSE IT’S ACTUALLY FANTASTIC, HENCE MY ANALYSIS OF IT. ***
It’s odd that the U.S. film industry produced a
second attempt at retelling the story one of the most iconic of Japanese
characters, Godzilla, even though the figure is an avatar for a U.S. made
monstrosity. The film grossed about $201 million in U.S., $328 million globally,
totaling worldwide at about $530 million in box office sales, which could be
due to the fact that this is the largest Godzilla to date or due to serious
marketing prowess. Yet, the plot and the settings utilized throughout suggest
an underlying motive: to subtly showcase the horrors of nuclear warfare and its
relation to tourism, as well as gentrification, without blatantly coming out with
it.
To most, the idea of a gigantic monster
decimating entire cities, then proceeding to battle another gigantic monster or
two while again, decimating entire cities, is simply an entertaining thing to
watch unfold. Of course the idea of apocalyptic conditions pushing humans to
their extremes and openly displaying their boundless humanity is heavily
entrenched in a romanticized light throughout the monster movie genre. Yet
Godzilla’s conception comes from coping with two horrifying events that greatly
affected Japanese society at the time and still affects the Japanese conscious
now.
Firstly the two uses of the atomic bomb during
the end of WWII in 1945, August 6th in Hiroshima, then August 9th
in Nagasaki. In Hiroshima about 90% of the population was killed, totaling at
about 80,000 people within the instant, with tens of thousands more to follow
due to radiation exposure. For Nagasaki, 40,000 people were killed and again,
more followed suit later due to radiation exposure. In relation to Godzilla,
the recurring images of cities during and after Godzilla and his fellow
monstrous beasts’ destructive reign over them are supposed to mirror that of
Hiroshima and Nagasaki as the bombs went off, as well as their end product.
The second parent to Godzilla is another
instance of bombs utilized in the Pacific Islands, but at Bikini Atoll. This
event is again, another moment that is embedded in the Japanese conscious. On
March 1st, 1954, nine years after the atomic bombings, a small tuna
fishing boat called the Lucky Dragon, had drifted close to Bikini Atoll. When
the U.S. had decided to test Castle Bravo, which was a name given for testing
their first hydrogen bomb, the boat’s crew not only saw the test, they were subjected
to the aftermath of it too: the raining fallout in the form of white ashes. All
twenty three personnel on board had ingested the ashes through every orifice
imaginable because of how penetrating it was and soon after, began to
experience radiation poisoning. Upon their return to Yaizu, they were
quarantined because their bodies were literally deteriorating due to the
radiation exposure, while some of their catch was mistakenly shipped to Tokyo
markets- some of which was purchased and probably consumed. It was later determined
that 856 ships had also been exposed to the aftereffects, which caused upset in
Japanese society because the U.S.’s response was to simply send $2 million to
the government when one of the Lucky Dragon crewmen died from it.
With three instances of bombs from the U.S. as
causes for concern for the whole of Japan’s consciousness, some creative outlet
had to come forth to grapple with it. So the literal embodiment of hell
unfolding, engulfing, and burning everything to absolute ruin takes on the form
of monsters, some of whom expel fire, instead of bombshells. Therefore,
Godzilla and his counterparts warn against the production and devastation of
these colossus terrors, without blatantly portraying the U.S. as the absolute
antagonist to Japan’s yearn for peace. This kept from upsetting the newly
formed alliance of sorts between the U.S. and Japan, which allotted Gojira to soar
into popularity not only in Japan, but globally.
With this stated, why the second American
adaptation for a franchise so focused on portraying the militarism of the U.S.
as a glaring exemplification of pure evil?
Simple- to show the same sentiments in regards
to the U.S. military.
Starting off, the opening credits of the 2014
American revamp explains before it’s revealed in the film that the bombings of
the Marshall Islands and Bikini Atoll was an attempt to kill Godzilla. Though the
movie does not focus on the islands’ names, the year is provided: 1954. From
this point on, the movie’s setting jumps forward in time and places of U.S. militourism.
This term can be defined as a form of neocolonialism, where mainly former
colonized countries agree to house military bases from imperialist countries,
which causes a rise in tourism; thereby, causing tourism to become an essential
part or central basis of the country’s economy. As a result, a symbiotic
relationship between military bases and the tourist industry is produced due to
the influx of incoming residents on or around the base, maintaining a subtle
imperialist dominance because of the military presence and appropriation of
certain aspects of the country’s culture or land for the sake of tourists’
pleasure. So the appearance of Godzilla’s body amidst the white, sandy, beaches
as he disappears in the aquamarine depths of the sea to escape the submarines
and vessels alludes to the militourism to come.
The next setting is 1999 in the Philippines,
where an American mining team working closely with Filipino workers who look
considerably sweatier than their Caucasian coworkers, inadvertently find an
underground cavern. Though they’re looking for uranium deposits and have
readings that state there’s tons of it present, researchers arrive to check it
out for themselves because of the humongous skeleton found inside of it. Japanese
researcher Ishiro and his British assistant Vivienne arrive, revealing during
their exploration that there’s two spores within it: one dormant and one that
clearly hatched, then went to sea. The fact that the main figures here are American,
Japanese, and British is significant because of their respective countries’
interest in the Philippines at some point in world history. The U.S. had numerous
military bases in the Philippines throughout the Philippine-American War, WWI,
and WWII to maintain their hold on the Philippines as a U.S. territory and keep
the likes of other imperialist countries, especially Japan, at bay from taking
over. During and after WWII, plenty of Filipinos immigrated to the U.S. (my mom’s
side of the family included) and Britain, some even marrying members of the military
from the U.S. bases. (Oh and even now the U.S. plots to reopen two bases in the
Philippines.) So it’s somewhat jarring to see an American based corporation
deeply penetrating the Philippines’ land for the sake of uranium, a component used
to produce vast quantities of energy, such as that in a nuclear bomb, for some
unnamed purpose. Yet, this moment to most is merely the origin and introduction
to the beetle-like monsters.
Meanwhile across the way from the Philippines in
Tokyo, Japan, an American nuclear plant worker in the fictionalized Janjira
Nuclear Power Plant named Brody is concerned that strange seismic activity may cause
the nuclear power plant to malfunction. Though he attempts to convince his
superiors to temporarily shut it down, he fails because they believe it is
ripple effects from the Philippine earthquakes; in the meantime, his wife and a
team check the reactor to see if it’s damaged. Suddenly, a huge tremor crops up
and everything that could possibly go wrong does, resulting in Brody’s wife and
her team dying. Their son sees their plant’s cooling towers collapse from his
classroom as all of this is happening and knows this may not bode well for his
parents. His classmates rush out and watch the mushroom like cloud formulate,
while he remains behind in horror.
This moment is visually like that of a small
scale exemplification of a nuclear bomb going off due to the mushroom cloud
image that the falling reactors produce. In terms of recent history, it is somewhat
like the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster that happened in the wake of the
worst earthquake and aftershock tsunami to ever hit Japan on March 11th,
2011, which caused the power supply to the reactors and their cooling systems
to cease. All three reactors melted and within the course of 4-6 days, about
940PBq of radioactivity was released, which is 10% of what was released in Chernobyl,
Ukraine. So again, the movie focuses around nuclear energy, but this time through
the indirect gaze of an American family in Japan. It’s likely that they wouldn’t
have even been present if it wasn’t for the parents’ jobs at the plant, which
tends to be one of the main reasons behind any person hailing from an
imperialist country such as the U.S. to move to a foreign country. Nonetheless,
the coupling of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster with its effect on the
occupying American family as the central focus for the tragedy is a convention
that seems to be in place to induce empathetic feelings from a certain target
demographic. Note the aforementioned box office grossing of the film, where the
U.S. audience takes up almost half of the total.
When the movie travels forward in time to 2014,
the same son that previously lost his mother in Janjira is now a Navy explosive
ordnance disposal officer named Ford, who returns from deployment to San
Francisco. A more in depth analysis of the use of San Francisco is to come, but
Ford’s occupation is so…blatant. He’s a Navy expert at working around bombs.
How familiar to the opening credits!
Nevertheless, Ford’s welcome home to his wife
and child is cut short because his dad, Brody, is arrested in Japan for
trespassing in the Janjira quarantine zone. So, he flies to Tokyo to bail his
dad out, who insists the seismic activity that caused the reactors to meltdown
fifteen years prior was from something other than an earthquake. Somewhat
curious, Ford agrees to go along with his dad to their old home in the
quarantine area to retrieve his research, which shows that seismic activity and
echolocation may be responses to each other. The entire district channels Chernobyl
because nature appears to be reclaiming every structure, with vines and foliage
throughout the decaying buildings. There is no trace of a living human being,
the silence produce is eerie, and all is relatively grim, until they notice a
pack of dogs. Brody realizes the quarantine is uncalled for and right when they
take their masks off, Japanese security guards locate them, then whisk them
away to a secret military base beneath the ruins of the nuclear power plants he
used to work at. So Brody’s paranoia about the government covering something
fishy in regards to the earthquakes is confirmed, but the way these bureaucratic
forces worked in secrecy to take over an entire district for the sake of
experimenting on the spore from the Philippines is exact portrayal of
militarism. The Janjira district in Tokyo is seemingly rundown and shutdown for
years, even though it is relatively safe thanks to the Japanese government
agreeing to the demands of outside powers in the form of researchers from America.
This willingness on Japan’s part to house this spore that has grown into a cocoon,
while the researchers monitor it and keep their activities secret from the
public, is much like the idea of Area 51: lie to the public, but keep the lie
hidden in plain sight.
Afterwards, the U.S. military takes over (go figure),
then proceed to take Ford and Brody onto a Navy aircraft carrier, where Brody
dies and a group formulates, including Ishiro, to converse over what this
possible threat could be. They proceed to watch some clips from the opening
credits where Ishiro identifies Godzilla by his spiky spine and suggests that
the giant bug creatures may be communicating with each other through
echolocation. Because Ford has told them all he could gather from his father’s
research, he’s flown to Hawaii to catch a flight home to his family. Shortly
after he leaves, Ishiro suggests based upon their tracking of the echolocation
that the creatures are going to convene in Hawaii and that Godzilla may end up
there too, which is thoroughly supported when he is spotted swimming beneath
their ship. So the ship ends up following Godzilla to Hawaii, while Ford is on
his way to his flight in Honolulu. The U.S. Navy finds out that the Russians
are missing a nuclear submarine, while Ford encounters a Japanese boy on the
airport train who entered the cart without his parents. Then the power goes out
because the bug monster is eating the nuclear warheads from the Russian
submarine in the forest, while Godzilla is rising out of the ocean to fight it.
The airport is in darkness, same with the beachfront resorts of Honolulu as the
water Godzilla displaced produces a tsunami, then he proceeds to try and fight
the bug monster.
There’s serious white savior complex with Ford,
a grown Caucasian, American adult, proceeding to save a Japanese child during
this segment and reuniting him with his parents, but that is something I will
leave for my reader(s) to ponder.
OKAY. It’s no secret that in WWII, the Japanese
bombed Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, nor is it a secret that the islands have become
a paradise for tourists to flock to and enjoy the beaches. This setting is
pretty complex in regards to all of the imperialism and overtones happening in
it. On the surface before it is inundated with Godzilla’s wave, the tourist
industry based Hawaii is presented with the beachfront resort luau that
consists predominately of Caucasians and their favorite fabrication of the
Hawaiian experience, the hula girl. This R&R image was produced after the
bombing of Pearl Harbor because the U.S. was able to add Hawaii as a state,
which kept the military base not only running, but as a fixed point of an
American tragedy. The militarization that it stands for is thereby completely
ignored because of all the pretty beaches and chance to wind down with a girl
donning a coconut shell bra. Next is the utilization of the forest, which not
only parallels previous Pacific Islands that were used in the movie, it hints
at the use of it by U.S. profiteers who plowed through it for resources. The
fact that it’s drenched in nuclear goop, then flames, emphasizes this during
the scene before the monster encounters Godzilla. Finally, the airport evokes
the view of Hawaii as the “Crossroads of the Pacific”, which is a phrase that
stems from the idea that it is the literal crossroad from the U.S. to the rest
of the Pacific Islands and Japan. It is an extremely imperialist viewpoint of
Hawaii, but the crossroads signpost that used to exist was located in Honolulu.
So the fact that Godzilla and the bug beast proceed to fight at the airport,
with planes and flames bursting everywhere, is like destroying the use of
Hawaii as the crossroad in the same manner as Pearl Harbor did. Within the same
instance, it also remarks on Pan Am, which catered to American tourists by
regurgitating the same imperialist ideology of Hawaii as before, with an extra
emphasis on rest and relaxation.
For proof, here are some real ads from Pan Am that one could easily find by Google Image searching, but I found in my friend's apartment building:
Waikiki Beach, poor lighting, but consisting of nothing but Caucasian tourists and beachfront resorts:
For proof, here are some real ads from Pan Am that one could easily find by Google Image searching, but I found in my friend's apartment building:
Waikiki Beach, poor lighting, but consisting of nothing but Caucasian tourists and beachfront resorts:
And perhaps the same hula girl greeting the incoming Caucasian tourists happily:
*Note that "Orient" is a term from the Victorian era that encapsulates all non-Europeans into one category, but commonly refers to Asians in general.
The final setting, where the bug beasts and Godzilla proceed to throw down is in America. Woohoo. First, it is revealed that the insect monstrosity may have a mate, whose body is stored close to Yucca Mountain, Nevada. This is significant because Yucca Mountain has a nuclear waste facility built into it, essentially providing the dormant companion a large quantity of free food. Upon waking, it proceeds to eat a portion of the waste, then it cuts through the Strip in Las Vegas. Oh no, Sin City, whatever shalt we do without the modern day Sodom and Gomorrah? The storing of nuclear waste in Yucca Mountain is one thing, but the way it is transported there is by driving on the outskirts of Las Vegas in large trucks. It contains an active military base called Nellis and also has a history of erasing indigenous people from its image to focus solely on being a destination of adult entertainment. Moreover, on January 27th, 1951 nuclear testing began at the Nevada Test Site, which was about an hour northwest of Las Vegas. Mushroom clouds could be seen on a regular basis and seismic activity was reported, while radioactive fallout was carried by wind to other parts of Nevada, Utah, and Arizona. With all this commingling together, it was relatively crucial to include Las Vegas, a city founded upon tourism and militarism outright, as one of the places to get destroyed by nuclear energy.
So when it all concludes in the Bay Area, in San
Francisco’s Chinatown, the nuclear premise flips to coincide with a different
narrative of U.S. history in light of the arrival of Asian immigrants after
WWII. After Japanese internment, the next example of bureaucratic induced racism Asian immigrants and Asian Americans had to face was
gentrification. Most Asian immigrants, no matter when they came, were pushed to
the slummy areas of San Francisco, which became the focus of “repairs” in the
late 1960’s and early 1970’s. This particular area was and still is partially
in San Francisco’s downtown, but to ascertain the land utilized to produce the
skyscrapers associated with the city’s skyline now, forcibly removing countless
families through the use of Manhattanization was employed. As a result, developers and investors ousted plenty of poor immigrants and bulldozed their former homes to make way for high priced offices or condos to push these people out of the downtown area. For those that remained behind, the Chinatown/Japantown/and former Manilatown areas became entrapments marked by main streets that dictated these sections as the places where these communities could flourish exclusively. Meaning, if they tried to leave the microcosm of say, Chinatown, they were likely to be met with racial slurs and hate crimes; however, visitors to the area considered these Asian towns as fragments of their respective countries brought over to America. The tourist industry around the area flourished, causing ignorant tourists to believe the arches of Japantown truly represents the Tokyo experience, without ever setting foot in Tokyo for themselves. To watch Japanese monsters battle it out and decimate the entire area is rather intriguing.
Yet, what does it all mean? One icon of American atrocity taken and appropriated for a second time to destroy symbols of American militarism, imperialism, and racial ideology? It means that no matter what, Caucasians need to be thrust into the liminal space between imperialist and subordinate nations to show the violence to the masses. It also means that the avatar used to deal with several tragedies can be taken and commodified, to be mass consumed, devoid of its original meaning. Though, the commentary of nuclear warfare and neocolonialism is so subtle, it could easily be looked over, this adaptation of Godzilla does prove that he is the lesser of two evils by defeating nuclear loving insects and militarism, while snubbing out the tourism it breeds. Thus in a similar vein to Ishiguro's A Pale View of Hills, the Godzilla franchise proceeds to provide a blurry view into the aftermath of Japan's darkest hour, without bastardizing the U.S. openly. The acceptance of Godzilla despite its ties to the U.S.'s militant growth thereby obscures his true meaning and significance, causing it to be left for open interpretation by those outside of Japan's art culture after the atomic bombs and hydrogen bomb. Within this misty halo of interpretive meanings, Godzilla has taken on being a villain or a savior depending on the story, when at his true essence he is the "King of All Monsters" because he represents the king of all explosives from the king of all leading world powers in militarism.
"The arrogance of man is thinking nature is in our control and not the other way around."
-Ishiro Serizawa
No comments:
Post a Comment