A Dinosaur Dragon

February 6, 2019 2:46 AM

On Godzilla and the Nature and Conditions of Cultural Success; or, Shedding the Skin - "Necessarily, the vast majority of this success and popularity has been distant in time, space, social structure and cultural context from 1950s Japan. How can these two observations --- the specificity of origins and the generality of success --- be reconciled?"
posted by kliuless (4 comments total)

It's an interesting subject, but I'm not sure the author dug quite deep enough into it to bring out all the relevant possibilities. I mean Hollywood has made great number of culturally specific films which have found great success/popularity around the world, so Godzilla hardly stands without ample precedent. Westerns, for example, have been taken up as a genre in many regions of the world where the themes that "mean" something in the US don't have anything like the same application.

One might try to boil down those cases to some deeper moral core values that are shared but at the same time "ambiguity" isn't really a key component of what gave the westerns their fame. Layers of meaning can be heaped on the different works of the genre and filmmakers have certainly taken it in vastly different directions, some adding ambiguity, some maintaining a clearer moral focus, some using it as a template for examining ideas of importance to a different era and place, and so on. Trying to narrow it down to "a" rule over how things translate between cultures strikes me as a mistake since, at the least, those within any culture aren't reacting to the same things in the same way, so that being the case across cultural boundaries seems a bit much to expect.

There is too some idea that the more specific a movie is about its setting, characters, situations and so on simply the more "real" it will feel across cultures for better capturing the feel of life. In this sense context-specificity is itself a thing of value to the viewer, if they're willing to engage with the work at all. That's the case with many of the best regarded films throughout movie history, they are celebrated for their singularity, not their generic qualities.

At the same time, yes, some concepts reach across cultures pretty easily for having shared base qualities. Godzilla, for all the cultural specific context there can be found in the movie if one looks hard enough to tracking such things, isn't really all that specific in its outer form, its a giant monster movie and people can easily ignore the more specific subtext and still enjoy seeing things destroyed. It's hard to imagine a movie made that had no cultural specific context, even if that was in how it stole situations or ideas from other cultures to try and appear universal. Every film has its own biases built in to it, of the makers and of the place and time it was made, that's unavoidable.

None of that is to argue against there being some importance to the idea of ambiguity however, movies, like all art poses "questions" that have no "answers". Seeking a rule for it actually points to the nature and importance of the issue. Art is important because it isn't science, it isn't trying to do what science does and "prove" things through rules, but works through illuminating areas where the rules face internal contradiction by suggesting multiple possibilities of importance presenting themselves simultaneously offering alternative readings that may be equally compelling. At the crudest level, the desire to be or root for the monster against society and the desire to see society saved, the want to destroy and protect, find a compelling tension for many. It's the animating principle behind so many blockbuster movies. We go to see the world destroyed but some piece of it saved at the last minute. Most of us have heroes and villains within ourselves and many other less blatant areas of contradicting thoughts and emotions.
posted by gusottertrout at 7:31 AM on February 6, 2019 [1 favorite]

Godzilla is a clumsy metaphor for the evils of American post-war power. And in some films corporate power embodied by pollution. And in others because monster fights are the best fights, the Angry Turtle, aka Geobukseon, the Kaiju Koreans call their own, and is a hard dig at a famous naval victory for Korea vs Japan as Godzilla gets his rubber-tail handed to his hyuge stand-ins...

Short story long, folks who Didn't Get the Point flourish on awesome right-wing giant monster movie popularity talking points, actual giant monster fans stunting on them. Hard.
posted by Slap*Happy at 8:00 AM on February 6, 2019

See also: FanFare post about Godzilla (1954).
posted by asperity at 9:23 AM on February 6, 2019 [2 favorites]

In terms of the specific-vs.-general theme, I found it odd that the essay made no mention of the fact that there were two movies about Godzilla released in 1954, each adapted to different audiences.
posted by tobascodagama at 10:48 AM on February 6, 2019 [1 favorite]