Modernity?

from Godzilla and Inside the Cable Temple冀西南林路行.

Modernity was to be mourned as a loss of spiritual presence and resisted by a missionary, evangelistic variety of Shinto.

Shinto, by definition, is the way of the gods. The how do we define gods (from a non-religion point of view)? I often think a god is something that we used to fear and have limited knowledge to, like Godzilla or a huge mountain 太行山.

The Film and The Album

Godzilla Steps into Modernity

Description of the Scene

The scene starts at 1:02 and ends around 1:03:30. It describes when Godzilla first comes ashore in the city, and a group of reporters tries to get a closer view of it and explain it verbally to the audience. From the beginning of the scene, a close-up is used to draw the audience’s attention to the head of Godzilla, establishing a monster-like horror feature as Godzilla’s characteristic. This close-up is followed by an eye-level medium shot of Godzilla destroying a bell tower and the reporter group running towards the site, which gives us a sense that we are witnessing a conflict between Godzilla and modern technology, namely a huge clock that makes sounds and television reports. Then the film presents a medium shot of the reporter reading scripts to the camera and describing the scene of Godzilla destroying the city. The next half minute is about the reporter describing the ongoing event to the audience – not only the citizens in the film but also us watching the film – from a media and perhaps political point of view. The director and the film writer point out one of the ideas behind the scenes, the confusion towards modernity, in the words of this reporter, “Will the world be destroyed by a two-million-year-old monster?”

Cinematic Technics

The first interesting technics used in the film is the interaction between the clock tower and Godzilla around 1:02:40. At 11 O’clock, the alarm goes off, which attracts Godzilla’s attention. As mentioned in the article Cinematism and Animetism, utilizing a paradigmatically modern example related to our experience of the world gives rise to a feeling of relatedness and immersive experience of the audience (Lamarre, 2013). The clock tower, also known as Wako, is not only an example of modern technology but also “the modernization industrial inheritance” of the Japanese people (和光と時計塔の歴史). This scene highlights a contrast between the ancient creature interrupted by modern technology, then destroyed after a second of hesitation. Furthermore, the film gives information about the current situation through a tv reporter as the media. By letting the audience of the film get information through media inside the film, this scene introduces another important critical topic: how the media is passed on through the media; overshadowing that latter, Dr. Serizawa decides to use the oxygen bomb after watching the news on his television.

Transformation

Mark Anderson mentions in his paper that “science and technology (including communications media) have transformed the Japanese social formation (Tsutsui and Ito, 2006).” In this scene selected from Godzilla, the media of message also plays a critical role in the public appearance of Godzilla. As shown in the film, the actual figure of Godzilla is only exposed to a limited amount of people, whereas the public gets to know Godzilla through the description of the reporter. The film shows a well-designed emergency radio broadcasting system to inform people to escape. At the same time, the film shows how the message system achieves psychological mobilization and civil defense against Godzilla and during the war (Tsutsui and Ito, 2006).

Maybe Another Ending?

If I could remake the film’s ending, I would further highlight the contradictions of modernity and how modernity could be overcome by further modernization. In this case, Godzilla would survive the Oxygen Destroyer but is in a coma and will be studied by the scientists led by Dr. Yamane. The research group funded by the army uses Godzilla’s body to build the defense of the country and the stairway to achieve the highest technology in the world. The scientists will build a new era of technology on Godzilla’s body flesh. Then, the country will start a new world war with the most advanced tech and weapons, which are powerful but cannot be fully controlled by a human. As a result, not only the country in the film, the human race will be eliminated by destructive weapons. Godzilla’s soul, who, of course, died from all the experiments on it, watches the consequences and the extinction of humans, then go back to the ocean and disappears.

NOTE the idea of this section are from the album 冀西南林路行 by relating/referring Godzilla to the Taihang Shan 太行山, especially on the song 采石.

Reference

Lamarre, Thomas. The Anime Machine: A Media Theory of Animation. U of Minnesota Press, 2013.

Tsutsui, W., and M. Ito. In Godzilla’s Footsteps: Japanese Pop Culture Icons on the Global Stage. Springer, 2006.

和光と時計塔の歴史. https://www.wako.co.jp/clock_tower/. Accessed 23 Oct. 2022.