MOVIE DIARY RESURGENCE: Shin-Godzilla (2016)

In anticipation of the last (ha, I hope so) Evangelion movie coming out in January, my friend and I are rewatching the Evangelion Rebuild movies. I suggested we do this (1) in reverse order, from 3 -> 2 -> 1 and (2) starting with director Anno Hideaki’s 2016 live action film Shin-Godzilla as though it is an Evangelion film. Why did I suggest this? Because I have a deep instinct for weird film curation connections, okay, I don’t know. My friend was like, well, huh, okay, Caitlin, whatever, but of course I was proven to be a genius. Because Shin-Godzilla is an Evangelion movie—it’s a live action version, more or less, of Evangelion episode 06’s “Operation Yashima.” It even uses (arguably overuses) the distinct Evangelion background music “Decisive Battle.”

Evangelion performed by the Japanese Self Defense Force marching band. I don’t discuss this in the post, but the politics of Shin-Godzilla are 👀dubious.

That + versions of the original Godzilla theme and other music by Ifukube Akira are the main music cues and they are distractingly recognizable and temporally confusing. There’s a great book chapter by Shuhei Hosokawa on sound design and the Godzilla theme in Off the Planet: Music, Sound, and Science Fiction Cinema, edited by Philip Hayward.

You know this one. You don’t have to click play on this, but you want to.

I’m fascinated by Anno, given a major live action franchise, deciding to make something that feels almost shot-for-shot, at times, of his older work. It reminds me of Hosoda Mamoru weirdly remaking his Digimon movie as Summer Wars.

But I’m not here to talk about that. I’m here to talk about my new love.

Godzilla early evolution: Kamata-kun! He looks weirdly like my cat.

Of course, I love all monsters. I have a Gritty t-shirt and I don’t watch hockey. I have always felt moe for Godzilla and his children and friends. Controversial stance: monsters are good. And the Godzilla franchise has long encouraged feelings of love and friendship to our God-Gorilla-Whale-King-Destroyer. Disclaimer here, I am not a Godzilla expert and will surely make up some things about Godzilla canon here, but I do love Godzilla. Not as much as the girl who recently went on a date with him, but a healthy familial respect and affection.

People say Godzilla only got friendly in the later movies, but he was a bro from the early tie-in manga.

But the Shin-Godzilla version is special because he’s so freakin’ weird. He’s gross and terrifying. His early evolution, pictured above, when he makes landfall in Kamata (hence his nickname, Kamata-kun), has giant eyes and textured bloody gills. He evolves into something moderately more Godzilla-shaped but then his splits the the bottom of his mouth open to evolve atomic breath. He shoots beams of energy haphazardly from his spines, his fins, his mouth, his gills. I do not know what the heck is going on with his neck. His tail is freakishly long. Does it need to be that long? Is it for swimming? I felt a genuine what-the-fuck body horror revulsion when I looked at him. And he keeps changing! He’s eight Godzillas in one, a Pokemon of Godzillas. The final shot (apologies for spoilers) is some gruesome humanoids evolving from his tail. Eh??? What the fuck?? I shouted at my TV.

Hmm, um, hmm.

One of the wacky scientists repeatedly says they can’t get a good analysis of his behavior because all this Godzilla does is move. He moves through the city in a straight line, destroying, leaving a trail of radiation behind him. But more than move, this Godzilla stays still. He stops. He sits there. This is when he is tired or preparing to evolve. He is this weird mystery body in the middle of the city. He is still while the people scream and the politicians meet. He comes, he goes, he waits. His stillness, rather than his movement, is how he is finally defeated-but-immortalized: frozen with magical science coagulant in the middle of Tokyo.

Much ado was made about having Nomura Mansai, a Kyōgen actor and icon of Heian period homoeroticism with his starring role in the Onmyōji films, play Godzilla through motion capture. Some balance of this Kyōgen-style performance and the decision to make Godzilla fully CGI despite an initial push to make him partly puppet/suit/animatronic results in a very different Godzilla. The original Godzilla was a man in a suit, Nakajima Haruo, a genius stunt performer; once at a talk at Anime Boston, he described his acting style like this: “I stomped where they told me to stomp.” There is something human about the suit-man Godzillas—some flexibility, some texture, some real maneuverability that the CGI Hollywood Godzillas lack. Instead the CGI Godzillas allow a hugeness and an alienness that, perhaps for some, is a superior Godzilla form—they have a supernatural smoothness in movement and in the way they smother the space they occupy.

Shin-Godzilla somehow has the texture and jerkiness of a human Godzilla combined with the size and invasive strangeness of a CGI Godzilla. He moves less and more awkwardly than a man in a suit—this Godzilla really doesn’t know how to walk on land, he just evolved legs yesterday. He plows direct through buildings to save himself the inconvenience of walking around them. In my own youth, I was in a Nō theatre club and, same as Kyōgen, every step you take is plodding, deliberate, weighed down by a heavy costume, before the dance becomes quick and furious in a burst of energy. That is how this strange Godzilla moves, adjusting to open air after evolving under the pressure of water, and then bursting out with literal energy beams. Godzilla’s cycles of rest, movement, destruction are very JO 序 - HA 破 - KYUUUUUUUUU 急, the pattern of movement from slow start to breaking out to frenzied speed attributed to traditional Japanese arts—also the subtitle of the Rebuild of Evangelion films 1 to 3.

Beyond his physical weirdness, this stillness-frenzy is what makes Shin-Godzilla’s Godzilla so horrifying—and endearing. Because of course, my revulsion turned quickly into delight. I just love to see weird things doing their weird things. I’m not sure if I can reconcile my love of Godzilla the monster with the reading of Godzilla as nuclear meltdown in this film, but, well, our feelings about monsters can never be fully suppressed.

Meek's Cutoff (Kelly Reichardt, 2010): Program Notes for Yale Film Colloquium

For the Fall 2016 Yale Film Colloquium film series, we planned a series of films on the theme of transportation in cinema, including the films Speed, Closely Watched Trains, Luna Papa, Meek's Cutoff, Christopher Strong, and Thelma and Louise. I wrote the program notes for Meek's Cutoff, the fourth film in the series on November 7th, which I thought I would share here as well. 

Meek’s Cutoff, the 2010 western directed by Kelly Reichardt, counters the relentless speed which began our Start Your Engines: Transportation in Cinema series with a style of filmmaking prioritizing the slowness, the silence, and the uncertainty in a form of transportation that cinema has memorialized as a dynamic and triumphant movement westward. While John Ford’s Stagecoach gave us the thrill and terror of the encounter with the “Wild West” through a chase and a gunfight canonized in film history forever, Reichardt’s approach to a group of unlucky travelers on the Oregon Trail divests the West of bursts of adrenaline in favor of a long, increasing tension, a tension which maintains the irreconcilable ambiguity of western settlement and the modernizing impulse which underlies cinema’s own fixation on the machines of transportation and the mechanics of speed.

The genre of the western, eternally returning in new forms throughout film history and in national cinemas around the world, centers on the struggle of modernity to spread to the places and the people whose exclusion from the realm of civilized society is what gave civilization its definition and its power. This negotiation has never been straightforward; even the most stereotypical cowboys versus Indians style of western has embedded in it a love of wildness, a celebration of freedom despite the inevitable filmic conclusion of civilization’s victory over its alternatives. The balance between “primitive” freedom and “civilized” control is the contradiction at the center of the hero of the classical western, a masculine figure whose position on the fringes of the society he upholds makes safe the contradiction we suspect lurks at the heart of every attempt at defining the self, the present, and the nation which relies on the clear exteriorization of all that is other. 

In Meek’s Cutoff, Reichardt counters the traditional dichotomies propelling the western genre with a vision of western movement which prioritizes everyday labor, decisions, and anxiety. In the space of the trail, neither civilization nor natural landscape can be fully beautified: the attempts at settled culture the travelers repeat are inevitably dwarfed by a vast unsettled space, promising no water or life for miles, completely unknown. During the day, their faces are always hidden under brimmed hats or bonnets or otherwise shadowed, divided sharply from the brightness and expanse of the landscape which menaces them with heat and thirst; during night scenes, they are obscured in a darkness so complete you will be happy see this film on a big screen in a darkened theater (believe me.) They can trust neither their hired guide, Meek, whose arrogance suggests the rugged masculine individuality deified in western conquest, nor the Native American they find and capture, who has every reason to prefer to lead them into a trap. Centering the narrative on the women travelers, who must sit and listen while their husbands discuss life-and-death decisions, Meek’s Cutoff offers no heroic figure in the classical sense; instead, Emily Tetherow, played by Michelle Williams, emerges as the central figure of a collective, a woman who learns to make choices with no narrative guarantee of a settled conclusion. 

Most noticeably, the film’s pace is slow to the point of being anticinematic, working against the teleological logic of the western, the film, and modernity itself, which pushes narratives and progress forward on the rapidly spinning wheels of cause and effect as they clatter through firefights and love affairs to arrive safely in a settled town. Film developed for global consumption a form of time which was chopped into pieces, occurring simultaneously, based on visual logics which, at some point, we spectators must have learned to understand, because they are utterly different from how we experience everyday time. Filmic time was, perhaps, a later, mechanized offshoot of the time of modernity, which transformed and often dominated understandings of time by conquered and colonized people as Western European powers expanded in power and influence. By slowing and stretching the filmic time, Meek’s Cutoff works against America’s own favorite narrative of modern progress, that of the western, with a story that returns to the west its unsettled time, a time with no promise of ending. 

Beyond these concerns of genre and time, Meek’s Cutoff expressed for me something which I often have trouble describing to people I’ve met in adulthood. I didn’t grow up in the American West, but in the landscape of Meek’s Cutoff I can feel something that reminds me of the countryside where I did grow up, a space where silence is so complete every conversation feels like an intrusion, where the sky dominates the visual field down to an endless stretch of unreadable alien land, and where we’d walk for miles in boredom and communion, remarking only on the land and the work. While contemporary Pennsylvania farmland lacks the sense of jeopardy of the Oregon Trail in 1845, that landscape remained within me as a source of silence and of dread even as I escaped to the overbuilt coasts. Sometimes, in the middle of an action movie fight scene, when the average shot lengths are dangerously approaching the milliseconds, I think about that space. Watching Meek’s Cutoff, I wonder if, underneath the current speed of cinema and its rebellious media children, is a fear of that space which cannot be framed and that time which cannot be cut.