Episode 78: Transcript

Episode: 78: Godzilla vs. Kong vs. America

Transcription by Keffy

Annalee: [00:00:01] Welcome to Our Opinions Are Correct, a podcast about science fiction and all the other stuff. I'm Annalee Newitz. I'm the author of Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age, which is all about archaeology and ancient abandoned cities.

Charlie Jane: [00:00:17] I'm Charlie Jane Anders. I'm the author of Victories Greater Than Death, a brand new young adult novel out in April about a group of teenagers who leave Earth and go off to save all of the worlds. 

Annalee: [00:00:29] In this episode, we're going to be talking about a very big subject, kaiju, or giant monsters.

Charlie Jane: [00:00:38] Woo!

Annalee: [00:00:38] We're gonna be talking about where these giant monsters come from, what they mean, what our feelings are about them. And this is all kicked off, of course, because the new Godzilla vs King Kong movie is coming very soon. And it's really brought up a lot of thoughts. So stay tuned for the biggest subject we could ever tackle.

[00:01:04] Intro music plays: Drums with a bass drop and more science fictional bells and percussion. 

Charlie Jane: [00:01:31] So Annalee, why do we love kaiju so much?

Annalee: [00:01:37] I mean, my love starts from when I was a kid, and I watched all the giant monster movies on TV as a little kid. I watched some of them in the drive-in. These were all Japanese giant monster movies that had been dubbed into English, oftentimes given new names that weren't direct translations of the Japanese names at all, confusingly. And many of those movies had lots of edits done to them to Americanize them. And so it was this weird blend of American and Japanese pop culture, perhaps in a kind of a nonconsensual way and nonconsensual blend. 

[00:02:18] King Kong Vs. Godzilla is of course, very famously, one of the most messed up of the American imports, because so much crap was added to it, which we'll talk about later. 

[00:02:28] For me, it was just as a little kid, I loved thinking about creatures who were the biggest possible thing in the universe. Because when you’re kid, of course, you're you feel like you're one of the littlest possible things in the universe. And so I just I really, really identified with these monsters, especially Ghidorah, but Godzilla too. 

[00:02:47] So where does your love of kaiju come from?

Charlie Jane: [00:02:49] I mean, it's kind of similar. When I was a little kid, our local kind of UHF station, this is wow, taking us back in time to when there were a UHF stations. Our local UHF station had a thing called the Creature Double Feature. That was basically, on Saturdays, they would show like two monster movies. And mostly they were giant monster movies. Sometimes they were like regular sized monster movies, but it was a lot of kaiju and creatures and giant spiders and giant whatevers like smashing stuff. And I love the kind of disaster movie aspect of it. I love the fact that it's just like, “Aah! Run! Everything's breaking, everything's— It's just super exciting to watch that as a little kid and as an adult, honestly.

Annalee: [00:03:30] Mm-hmm. 

Charlie Jane: [00:03:31] To some extent, part of what's fun about these monster movies, and these giant monster movies and kaiju movies especially is that they're kind of like apocalyptic movies on kind of steroids. Like, most apocalyptic movies are like, okay, there's zombies or there's some disaster and everything is breaking down. But you don't get that kind of cathartic thing of buildings being knocked over, and telephone wires, or electricity wires, sparking and flying everywhere, and just the kind of bigness and raw, reckless abandon of everything being destroyed and just the pure joyful kind of rage of a kaiju just stomping through a city and stomping everything. It's just, you know, it's kind of liberating and fun and exciting to just watch that. Even though in real life, you probably wouldn't really want that to happen to your city. But you know—

Annalee: [00:04:23] Absolutely not.

Charlie Jane: [00:04:24] It's a fun. It's an exciting fantasy. And it's really kind of… it's just kind of freeing to see that.

Annalee: [00:04:30] I think joyful is such a great word for it. Like there is something and I can't fully explain it, and maybe we'll get to understanding it by the end of this episode. But it is that sense of, when I see the big monster come on screen, I'm filled with joy, just pure happiness. 

Charlie Jane: [00:04:45] Yeah, so. Okay, where do kaiju movies come from originally? Or where does the idea of kaiju come from originally?

Annalee: [00:04:52] So this is a big question. And I think there's sort of two origin stories for them. I want to say the first origin Story is King Kong, which is a film that comes out in 1933 in the United States. King Kong is a giant gorilla and he lives on Skull Island, which in almost every version of the King Kong story, including the Japanese version, where King Kong fights Godzilla, Skull Island is somewhere vaguely in Indonesia, somehow. Off the coast of Indonesia or in distant islands of the Indonesian chain. So it's a Southeast Asian creature. And it was a huge hit. The film was a special effects blockbuster, King Kong was made with stop motion. And also at the time, gorillas themselves were a huge pop culture obsession. They pop up in a ton of movies. Mighty Joe Young is another gorilla movie with a more normal sized gorilla, made by the same special effects artist who made King Kong. Gorillas had only recently been discovered by non-African people in the late 19th century. Africans obviously knew about gorillas, but people outside Africa had not known about them. And so people were just obsessed with gorillas. 

[00:06:14] So anyway, King Kong becomes really popular. It’s exported, it goes all over the world. And then you see a second origin story for giant monster movies, which really are post-atomic. And this is the wave of giant monster stories that kind of start with Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, which is a 1953 film, that's the year before the first Godzilla film comes out. And Beast From 20,000 Fathoms is also about a giant lizard brought back to life with atomic weapons. 

[00:06:44] So after that, obviously, Godzilla becomes a huge hit. And suddenly, you see this wave of giant monsters, atomic monsters, so you have like Tarantula, you have Them, you have Giant Teenagers, like 50 Foot Woman. And not all of them can be traced back to atomic accidents, but it becomes a big trend in the 1950s and a little bit in the ‘60s, as well. 

Charlie Jane: [00:07:10] Right.

Annalee: [00:07:10] That's kind of the beginning.

Charlie Jane: [00:07:12] And we're kind of processing, I guess, the trauma of World War II. And also just, in America, I think we're processing both the fear of nuclear weapons now that we've used them on other people, they might get used on us, but also kind of the, I mean, I'm just spitballing here, but the United States was really becoming the world's preeminent superpower for the first time ever in the 1950s. After we won World War II, basically. And so we were like the giant monster that everybody else hd to deal with. And so like, there's kind of a double-edged sword of like, the giant monsters represent this destructive power that we're terrified of, but also that we possess, and that is kind of our exclusive preserve for a little while during that era. 

[00:07:56] And of course, Japanese culture is you know, full of giant monsters going back to Shintoism and to traditional theater. You have this whole yokai tradition of giant octopi and other giant creatures. And so there was a Japanese tradition that something like Gojira and other giant monsters could kind of slot into.

Annalee: [00:08:17] Yeah, that's right. And when we were doing some research last night, we found out that the word yokai, the word kai in there, which means kind of mysterious, or strange, is also in the word kaiju, which is sort of mysterious, strange beast. So they have the same… yokai and kaiju have the same root word. 

[00:08:36] Also Gojira owes his or her or their existence, we don't really know what Gojira’s gender is, to both King Kong and atomic horror. Of course, Gojira is resurrected by this kind of atomic weapons testing. But the name Gojira is a portmanteau of two Japanese words Gorira for gorilla, and kujira for whale. So it basically means gorilla whale. And so the gorilla part is clearly a hat tip to King Kong.

Charlie Jane: [00:09:10] So Gojira’s been around for over 60 years, how have they changed in this time? And how has their influence kind of, and their role in pop culture changed?

Annalee: [00:09:20] So I just want to start by playing something that's probably really familiar to everyone which is Gojira’s traditional cry, battle cry or hello cry, we don't even know. 

Sound clip: [00:09:33] [Gojira roar from the ‘50s movies.]

Annalee: [00:09:34] As soon as you hear that you immediately know who you're dealing with.

[00:09:37] Gojira is an interesting franchise, in that it's had a lot of ups and downs. And it's had multiple reboots. In fact, Gojira, I feel like, is the most rebooty of almost any franchise I can think of. I'm sure there's others, but basically, Gojira’s born in the 1954 film and then they're kind of killed at the end of that film. And then Toho Studios, which eventually kind of specialized in kaiju films, made a couple of other kaiju films after that, including one with like a knockoff Gojira in it. Not the original Gojira, but like a cousin fights and ankylosaurus. And then that series kind of got a reboot with King Kong vs. Gojira, when Gojira comes back, and then that goes on up through the ‘70s, with highlights such as Gojira vs. the Smog Monster and Son of Gojira, and stuff like that. And then there's a reboot in 1984 and there's a new Gojira series, which is totally… just erases the previous, all those previous series and goes through, basically the ‘90s. Then there's another reboot in 1999 and you get a new series of Gojira films, which become increasingly silly. I mean, there were also some silly ones in the in the 1990s, if anyone remembers Gojira vs. Biollante, which is Godzilla fighting a giant rose. And then there's another reboot in 2016 with Shin Gojira, which was made by the people who created Neon Genesis Evangelion, so it's very weird and it has a totally different kind of Gojira monster who goes through different evolutions and has a really different relationship with humanity. 

[00:11:31] And then… I'm just going to keep going. And then there's another reboot. Actually, well, this might not be as much of a reboot. So there's a new animated trilogy that started in 2017, with the movie Godzilla Planet of the Monsters, which is set 20,000 years in the future, after Gojira has taken over earth. And there's like a group of humans and aliens who are trying to re colonize the earth. And that's a trilogy, it's all animated. It's like CGI animation. It's actually great and completely confusing and batshit insane. Highly recommend it, you can see them all on Netflix. And there's going to be another reboot this year, with an anime TV series called Godzilla Singular Point, which is a great name, I have no idea where they're taking it. 

Charlie Jane: [00:12:20] Singular Point… [crosstalk] pencil.

Annalee: [00:12:24] I… Who knows? Anyway, the characters look really cute. It's not like the Planet of the Monsters trilogy, which is kind of more intended to be kind of more realistic. This is much more like a cartoony feeling to it. I mean, even though they're both animation. And then of course, there's the American Godzilla movies. There was the ‘90s Godzilla movie, which let's all pretend didn't happen. And then the more recent Godzilla movie. So we've had our own reboot of Godzilla in the US. Like, we had the first US Godzilla. We don't think about that anymore. And then with the new Godzilla series, which starts with Godzilla, and then we had Godzilla vs. Ghidorah. And now we have Godzilla vs. King Kong. That's its own little entity unrelated to the Toho Studios Gojira. So, what I'm trying to say, my dear Charlie Jane, is that this is a complicated series full of reboots. It’s full of contradictions. Gojira can be whatever you want them to be, and apparently, whatever size you want them to be. And it's a continuous delight. And it's both confusing and exhilarating.

Charlie Jane: [00:13:35] Yeah, I mean, there's a Gojira for every occasion. It's interesting to think about all these reboots, like okay, so when they rebooted Superman in the ‘80s, part of why they rebooted Superman was explicitly because it had just gotten too complicated. Like Superman had… there were other Super characters who were running around. There was Superboy, there was Supergirl. Superman had like a Supermonkey. He had a Superdog. He had a Supercat named Streaky the Supercat.

Annalee: [00:14:03] Really? 

Charlie Jane: [00:14:04] Yeah, Streaky the Supercat.

Annalee: [00:14:04] Wow.

Charlie Jane: [00:14:04] Maybe Supergirl had the Supercat. I can't remember there was the Supercat. There was—

Annalee: [00:14:10] I love that.

Charlie Jane: [00:14:11] There was just all this insane stuff. Superman had all these weird powers that he didn't use to have like super hypnosis. And super speed reading and super… and it's just it got to the point where it was just getting kind of ridiculous and over the top and just there was too much stuff. But especially, there was just a lot of stuff attached to Superman and I feel like maybe something similar happened to Gojira where you have Monster Island and you have all these… You have a special organization that's like the monster organization. And have special… And just you know, is it the case that just Gojira got so much baggage and so much complicated world building attached to him that it was no longer as pure as it perhaps could have been?

Annalee: [00:14:57] Yeah, maybe clear the decks. I mean, certainly, I think with the 1980s reboot, there was definitely that sense that Gojira had become too silly. And there were so many monsters. There were just, it was a crazy, it really was like the DC Universe, where it was like how many monsters? And they all have weird origins and they're contradictory. Some of them are from space and some of them are from under the earth, and some of them are from the past and then there's Mecha Gojira and Mecha Ghidorah. And it just gets really silly. And so in the ‘80s film, there was this effort to kind of make Gojira scary again, and kind of imposing again and redesign the monster. 

[00:15:42] But interestingly, that series that goes on into the ’90 ends up kind of just reinventing a lot of the same old monsters. So we get baby Gojira again, who in the ‘90s is called Junya, and Junya, instead of looking like the original baby Gojira, who's just got this like little funny round face, and is always like, “Gwah gwah!” and that's the noise that they make. The new Junya looks just like a mini-Gojira. So it's not, you know, it's a little bit more stately, shall we say. And then Ghidorah comes back and a bunch of other bad guys, but you never get the silliness of something like the Smog Monster from the early ‘70s. Instead, you get stuff like Biollante, like I said, a giant—

Charlie Jane: [00:16:25] Not silly at all.

Annalee: [00:16:26] Rose. Biollante, I still think it's one of the best of the of the ‘90s Gojira, because it is so unexpected. And it's about a genetic experiment where like a rose is spliced with G cells from the big G, and you get a rose… half rose, half Gojira. 

Charlie Jane: [00:16:47] Roseilla.

Annalee: [00:16:48] Imagine that, Biollante. I think that that's part of it, I think it's wanting to have Gojira for a new generation. And certainly that's the case with Shin Gojira from 2016. It's a totally different monster clearly influenced by things like Pokémon, with the evolutions. And also it's just a very different world, like the human characters are really different. I think looking at the human stories in these movies, we always talk about how boring the human stories are. But that kind of gives you a sense of kind of where people are at in terms of the stories they want these monsters to intervene in. Which actually segues nicely to talking about King Kong vs. Gojira. Which is a very, very strange story.

Charlie Jane: [00:17:32] Yeah. So we're gonna take a little break, and then we're gonna come back and we're going to talk about the clash of the titans… titans… titans…. [mimics echo]

[00:17:39] Segment change music plays. Drums with a bass line including bass drops. 

Charlie Jane: [00:17:51] Okay, so Annalee, ever since I was a little kid, and I learned about the existence of King Kong vs. Godzilla, which felt like the most kind of bizarre and fascinating crossover, and I must have seen it as a kid, but I have no memory of it. How did this come about? How did we end up putting these two very different creatures together? And what did that movie end up being?

Annalee: [00:18:14] It's such an interesting story. So at the time that the original came out, which is 1963, there hadn't been a Godzilla movie in about nine years. And I should just acknowledge that I'm going back and forth between the American pronunciation and the sort of approximation of a Japanese pronunciation and that's just how it's going to be. So Toho Studios, which owned Godzilla, really had been focusing on other monsters, they created Rodan, who was like a flying pterodactyl kind of creature, and Ghidorah, obviously, the most important monster in the pantheon who has three heads and can shoot lightning, and is just super badass. And what happened was, there was a special effects artist named Willis O'Brien, who created the original stop motion for King Kong. And he was kicking around in Hollywood trying to come up with a new monster idea. So he went to a kind of a underhanded producer and pitched that producer King Kong vs. Frankenstein, which for some reason, he thought would be great. 

Charlie Jane: [00:19:19] [Crosstalk]

Annalee: [00:19:19] So the producer, and also at this time Willis O'Brien was kind of ill and, and wasn't able to kind of pursue this stuff himself. So this producer goes off and pitches this idea around Hollywood. Hollywood is like, ho, we don't care about King Kong or Frankenstein. Remember, there hadn't been a King Kong movie since 1933 and Frankenstein had also become kind of silly by the 1940s. So this producer goes to Toho, goes over to Japan and pitches it to them and is like, hey, don't you guys want to do this? And Toho says, actually, yeah, we love the idea of King Kong. Let's do that. But it's impossible to get the intellectual property. rights to Frankenstein that's too complicated. There was a whole set of internecine things about who owned Frankenstein on film, even though the novel would have been in the public domain. 

[00:20:12] So Toho was like, fuck that. We already own great IP. We own Godzilla. So why don't we have King Kong vs. Godzilla. So they're like, great. So they make the film and then this producer has the right to take it back to the States and do whatever he wants with it. So there's this 1963 Japanese film, which I'll get into in a second. And then there's the 1964 American version, which like the 1954 Godzilla, they add American actors in. Basically white guys to come in and be like, hello, I am a white guy. Let me explain the action to you. And that barely worked in the American version of the 1954 Gojira, which comes out in 1955 in the US. In King Kong vs. Godzilla, it makes the movie incoherent. They added like a bunch of characters who are like UN reporters, who are like reporting in from different UN stations about what's happening with the monsters. They cut out a bunch of the subplots in the Japanese version that actually make the movie make sense. And they also totally change the soundtrack. So the soundtrack to King Kong vs. Gojira is very much like the original Godzilla. It's very intense and there's lots of drums and it feels very momentous, you know. The American version, they basically had access to a bunch of music from whatever studio was, was releasing it. And they just recycled a bunch of music from like, super cheesy American movies. And so it's just this weird hodgepodge of like, goofy comic music, and it really changes the film a lot.

  [00:21:55] So let's not even talk about the American version, because the American version is just dumb. It's like, you can't even tell what's happening. It's basically just the two monsters fighting. What's interesting is, the Japanese version is all about how there's a pharmaceutical company called Pacific Pharmaceuticals, that has an advertising branch. And the advertising branch of the pharmaceutical company is trying to promote, I guess, science. It's not clear. They have a science TV show and it opens with this pharmaceutical executive yelling at his underlings saying, “We need something to make people watch our science show because our science show is dropping in the ratings!” 

Charlie Jane: [00:22:41] Wow.

Annalee: [00:22:41] It's so boring, and what are we going to do? And they get wind of this scientist who's gone to this remote island, which is, they call it Faro Island, but it's Skull Island. And this guy has come, the scientist has come back with these little red berries, which are a non-addictive narcotic. So you'd think that the plot would be all about how the pharmaceutical company wants the berries, because that's like a great drug. But no, the plot is that they want to send some representatives from the science show to the island to find this giant monster that eats the berries on the island. Fuck the berries, okay, it's all about this giant monster is going to boost the ratings for their science show, which will then make people want to buy pharmaceuticals from Pacific Pharmaceutical company. 

[00:23:33] So it's like this… And that entire plot is basically removed from the US version. I mean, it's kind of in there, but it's very, we don't see the whole thing about the science TV show. There's none of that stuff. So these two untrained basically TV personality guys go over there, and they actually have a moment where they're like, are we trained for this? Like, is this a good idea?

[00:23:56] So they go and of course, the usual stuff happens. They find King Kong and stuff like that. And it kind of replays a lot of the standard King Kong tropes. And like the American movie that's coming out. Tis is not a spoiler. If you've seen the ads for the movie, they wind up bringing King Kong back to the mainland to fight Godzilla because Godzilla is rampaging and we don't know why. Same thing in the 1963 movie. I don't think they ever figure out why Godzilla is rampaging. He's been awakened after near death from the oxygen destroyer in 1954. And he kind of breaks out of Arctic ice and just starts running around, and eventually, they wind up on Mount Fuji as you do. And King Kong has grown 200 meters or something for no reason and has developed lightning powers—

Charlie Jane: [00:24:44] It’s the berries.

Annalee: [00:24:46] The berries. I don't know. Also has lightning powers. Looks absolutely nothing like the original King Kong that O'Brien made, the guy who originally pitched this film, and they fight on Mount Fuji and they fall into the water and that's the end. Okay, so that's a spoiler. There's a lot of nitpicks about this Japanese film that have come up again with the American film that I think is really interesting. 

[00:25:07] So, if you think about it, King Kong vs. Gojira, in 1963, is a version of what the US did in 1999 with Godzilla, which is to say, the Japanese took a classic American monster and created a Japanese version of it. And one way that they did that was they didn't use Claymation technology. And so, instead, King Kong is a guy in a suit just like Godzilla. And fans just hated that. They were like, what? American fans, I mean, hated that. Because they're like, King Kong can't be a guy in a suit. It looks ridiculous. But to Japanese audiences used to kaiju movies, they were like, oh, yeah, this is, this is our kind of monster now. 

[00:25:51] But I love the fact that despite the fact that they've imported the monster from the United States, and they've changed the look of the monster and kind of changed his motivations. One thing that doesn't change is that King Kong comes from an Indonesian island, like both the United States and Japan can agree the most exotic location for an scary monster is definitely Indonesia. And in the 1963, King Kong Vs. Gojira, there's a lot of incredibly painful scenes of Japanese people in blackface, who are supposed to look like Indonesians, who are worshipping. 

Charlie Jane: [00:26:24] Oh no, oh, God.

Annalee: [00:26:27] I mean, remember, the original King Kong in 1933. And the Peter Jackson remake in 2005, both had really icky blackface stuff, too. And so that's just part of the story. And it really wasn't until the movie Kong: Skull Island, which came out a few years ago, that you didn't have that anymore. You still have kind of, native people worshipping King Kong, but they're not. It's the stereotypes are not as like, flagrantly disgusting, they're just kind of more mild. So… If you can even say that. 

[00:26:59] So, but anyway, so there's like Japanese blackface, which is Indonesians. And so that's kind of how it unfolds. And the thing that I think is interesting, and the reason I emphasized this narrative about the science TV show, and the pharmaceutical company, is that King Kong, the original King Kong story, and nearly every subsequent story, is about anxieties around entertainment and display, like the display of wild animals on the Midway at a carnival, for example. The original King Kong movie is about a filmmaker who wants to go out into an exotic location to film and stumbles upon King Kong and brings King Kong back as a piece of entertainment. 

[00:27:43] So it's not an allegory for say, war, or the atomic bomb, or—

Charlie Jane: [00:27:48] Or science. They’re not trying to study him.

Annalee: [00:27:49] Right, or even science. Exactly. That's such an important point. It's about wanting to gawk at him. It's about display and spectacle and objectification. And all of the horror of that and King Kong's rebellion against it. We kind of get it like, we kind of get why he's mad. And so I think it's interesting that in the kaiju genre, which up until that movie was largely about these kinds of fears around atomics, these fears around war and battle and issues around how we treat nature. Suddenly, it's all about the entertainment industry. And the way the entertainment industry overlaps with science, which is like amazing. It's just like, it's 1963. And they're making fun of pharmaceutical companies. So I think that we'll have to see, I obviously have not seen the new film. But that's the deep history of the film. 

Charlie Jane: [00:28:44] So interesting. And, part of what I think is foundational to King Kong as a character is that he's, like Frankenstein, in fact, he's kind of a tragic hero. He's kind of misunderstood. He's abused. He wants love. He wants Fay Wray or whatever he wants. He wants a bride. It's weird that King Kong vs. Frankenstein would have been a really kind of terrible fight like I hadn't even imagined how you would stage that fight. Like I can’t even…

Annalee: [00:29:13] Yeah.

Charlie Jane: [00:29:15] How would that work? What kind of weapon does Frankenstein have? Does he have a breath weapon? Does he have like?

Annalee: [00:29:20] Electricity.

Charlie Jane: [00:29:20] He has electricity. I guess he—does he? Does he shoot lighting? 

Annalee: [00:29:24] I mean, he could. I mean, obviously, this would have been a reboot of Frankenstein. So my guess would be, my guess would be it would have been a bigger Frankenstein with electricity powers for sure.

Charlie Jane: [00:29:33] Actually, that sounds kind of interesting. But you know, the thing that… I'm having a hard time picturing the mechanics of King Kong vs. Frankenstein, but I think thematically they're both kind of misunderstood victimized monsters who are kind of victims of our hubris and our kind of like folly or whatever. Versus I don’t think of Gojira that way. I haven't seen as much Gojira material as you have, but I think of Gojira as being this badass who can't be contained, can't be exploited, can't be stopped. And so I almost feel like King Kong vs. Gojira movie should be about Gojira teaching King Kong to have more self-respect or to stand up for himself more or something. Or like giving him media training and like being like, well, you don't have to do all the media stuff that people are trying to get you to do. You should get an agent and you should like, I don't know.

Annalee: [00:30:24] Well, I wanted to segue into our next segment where we actually talk about the meaning of all this in more depth. But before we switch over, I wanted to put to rest a rumor that has long persisted about the 1963 King Kong vs. Gojira, which is that there's a different ending for the Japanese version versus the American version. There is, in fact, not a different ending, the American version is significantly different, but the ending is the same. It ends with a draw. The monsters fight and fight and fight and then they fall into the ocean and go their separate ways. So they're an equal match. And it is not about which country can beat the other country.

Charlie Jane: [00:31:06] And it doesn't end with either of them realizing that their mothers have the same first name or anything or you know. Martha! [Mimics Gojira roar.] Sorry. 

[00:31:18] Both laugh.

Charlie Jane: [00:31:18] Okay. So.

Annalee: [00:31:19] It doesn't, strangely. Strangely, no.

Charlie Jane: [00:31:21] So we're taking a little short break and then when we come back, we're gonna talk about the meaning of giant monster fights.

[00:31:29] Segment change music plays. Drums with a bass line including bass drops. 

Annalee: [00:31:41] So what do these kaiju represent? We've actually been talking about this a little bit throughout the episode, and then I kind of put to rest the idea that goes Gojira is Japan and King Kong is America. It's not—it doesn't seem to be where the narrative is going. So what do they represent?

Charlie Jane: [00:32:00] I mean, I think it's interesting to think about it in two ways. Like, when you think about something like Gojira, there's his origin story, which is, often tied to the atomic bomb, and, often tied to we were doing nuclear testing, and we woke up this this creature that was lying dormant or something. And then there's the effects. Like, there's the cause and then there's the effect. And the effect is the thing I talked about earlier, which is the pure id and just mass destruction and smashing the cities and almost… I almost want to sing that song from Homestar Runner about, like, burningating the countryside like Trogdor the Dragon Man.

Both sing: [00:32:37] Burninating! Burninating the countryside! 

Annalee: [00:32:39] No, I mean, we all have those feelings.

Charlie Jane: [00:32:42] There are definitely days when I just want to be a giant lizard and burn some shit down. I'm not gonna lie. There are days, there are many days recently, when I just wish I could have like a breath weapon that was really powerful. So I think that you have to kind of separate a little bit, the origin, which I think is important, from the final impact of the creature. And they're both important in different ways. And I think Gojira definitely is a means of dealing with the trauma of World War II and Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But it's also kind of weirdly, like, it's turning that trauma into something kind of cathartic, I feel like. What do you think?

Annalee: [00:33:25] I very much agree with that. I think there is no question. I mean, right there in the text, that Gojira comes from atomics. And also, the firebombing of Tokyo is kind of reenacted in the 1954 film, and it's quite upsetting. It's really a very dark tone, in that film. I highly recommend if you haven't seen the original Japanese version, there's a lovely new Criterion addition of a bunch of the older Godzilla movies, and it's chilling, it really is a disturbing film. It reminds me a lot of Cloverfield in that way, which, say what you want about Cloverfield, it's still a great monster movie, and it's definitely reenacting the trauma of 9/11. And in a way that's very, very similar to the way that Gojira in 1954 reenacts the firebombing of Tokyo. The interesting thing that happens to Gojira is that they get kind of domesticated over time, like Gojira has a baby and then fights pollution and eventually does some like dancing and kind of almost starts talking in some of the ‘70s movies. There's this gradual evolution from like, terrifying force of nature to kind of like Japan's most awesome mascot. Gojira becomes essentially a mascot and that’s kind of played with in some of the Godzilla movies like in Shin Gojira. There's like action figures and people kind of know about the monster and it, kind of the franchise's is sort of haunted by this cuteness that it's constantly having to shed in a weird way.

Charlie Jane: [00:35:06] Right. And Gojira becomes sort of a friend, right? He becomes the defender of Japan rather than the destroyer, right? At a certain point. 

Annalee: [00:35:14] Yeah, no, I think that, definitely in some of the films, and I think that King Kong vs. Gojira is a little bit like that. But, of course, in a sense, King Kong is defending Japan from Gojira. It's very unclear, but definitely, there are movies in the ‘70s like, say, Destroy All Monsters, where there's teams of ood guy monsters and bad guy monsters. And so there's like, Gojira and Rodan and Mothra are kind of the good guys. And then there's like, Ghidorah, who's a bad guy and a number of other like, Megalon is a bad guy. There's like a bunch of rando bad guys. Mecha Godzilla is a bad guy, partly because Mecha Godzilla is space technology from evil aliens. Yeah, it becomes kind of like Godzilla is on our side. Godzilla is kind of like a super weapon to defend against other super weapons and I think you get that sense kind of reversed in a movie like Pacific Rim, where the giant monsters are the bad guys. And then we have to build these giant robots, these Jaegers to fight them. And here's a clip from one of my favorite scenes from that film.

Pacific Rim Clip: [00:36:39] Not today. Today, we face the monsters that are at our door and bring the fight to them! Today, we are canceling the apocalypse!

Charlie Jane: [00:36:52] I love that movie.

Annalee: [00:36:53] And I love how that's a movie where it's not about defending Japan or defending China or defending the United States or the Philippines or any of the places that are attacked by the kaiju. It's, we're all in this together. You know, it's the whole world. And I think that's the moment for me, when we start to see a lot of allegory for climate change. And that that has not been absent from the series. I mean, obviously, back in the early ‘70s Gojira vs. the Smog Monster is about how smog turns into a giant monster. There's this giant monster that literally embodies toxic waste. But I think there's a big difference between that and climate change, which is lashing us with superstorms and causing fires and floods. And I feel like that's what Pacific Rim is jumping off of.

Charlie Jane: [00:37:49] Right. And, you know, it's interesting to think of the monsters as a force of nature. But also, we may need to have something equally powerful in order to protect us against something that powerful and that's the kind of impulse which obviously, you can't really do with climate change. You can't fight, like you can fight monsters with monsters, but you can't fight global warming with global warming, unfortunately. Maybe geoengineering, I guess would be the kind of the Jaeger to the kaiju of climate change. I think it's interesting—

Annalee: [00:38:19] Yeah, that's interesting, actually. 

Charlie Jane: [00:38:23] Oh, man. I think it's interesting to think of these monster movies, especially the ‘70s ones, like Destroy All Monsters as being almost like pro wrestling, where you have heels and faces and you have like, there's the good guy, wrestlers and the bad guy wrestlers and they're like, I'm gonna get you, I'm gonna break a chair over your head, I'm gonna shave your head. I'm gonna like, rarr! I'm wearing spandex like, jump, fight, coming off the turnbuckle or whatever. And like after having just watched Glow recently, it feels like, there's a certain amount of that in some of these monster movies, that kind of campy Smackdown kind of feeling about it.

Annalee: [00:39:01] So much. And I and especially in King Kong vs. Gojira. There's literally, the main weapon that Kong uses against Gojira is biting Gojira’s tail, which feels very pro wrestling.

Charlie Jane: [00:39:15] That does actually feel very pro wrestling, God. 

Annalee: [00:39:18] Yeah. 

Charlie Jane: [00:39:19] So is there a kind of xenophobia in some of these movies where it's like, Japan is kind of facing a hostile world and is—

Annalee: [00:39:26] I think there is, sometimes. I think, more often, especially in the more recent films like Shin Gojira, it's much more about Japan being at war with itself, and how there's this big generational gap in Japan between people who want to do things the old way, and people who are embracing new kinds of business and new ways of doing science, new ways of tackling natural disaster. Like the human plot in Shin Gojira is all about how these entrenched bureaucracies need to learn to function more like a startup with a horizontal org structure, and just in time production of an anti-Godzilla serum, which is basically what they create. 

Charlie Jane: [00:40:15] Oh, wow.

Annalee: [00:40:15] So I think, I guess what I'm trying to say is that it's very much about the spirit of Japan. It's less about fighting outsiders and more about grappling with Japan's own giant, hidden monsters and its history. 

[00:40:30] In the American Gojira films, I feel like it's weird to see, because I don't feel like Gojira represents anything about the United States, really.

Charlie Jane: [00:40:43] Mm-hmm.

Annalee: [00:40:44] It doesn't feel… Like when you watch a Japanese gojira film, you feel like, this is about Japan in some way. And the American films, they don't manage to translate it. They don’t, I don't know, how do you feel about it?

Charlie Jane: [00:40:59] I mean, yeah, a lot of the context is lost, and a lot of the kind of meaning is missing. So, you know, changing gears slightly, I've been reading through a giant stack of back issues of Famous Monsters Magazine. And there was one issue from several years ago, I wish I could find it now, where I read an interview with one of the guys who did the special effects and also directed a bunch of the Gojira movies, for decades. And he was saying that he felt like after the Fukushima disaster of 2011, that they couldn't make another Gojira movie, because it would be too upsetting to Japanese people to see something that reminded them of that disaster. And then of course, you know, you fast forward to 2016 and we do get Shin Gojira, which I feel like does actually kind of comment on the Fukushima disaster.

Annalee: [00:41:42] It’s absolutely. I mean, because Gojira comes out of the water and is rampaging through this seaside town. And it's very, it has a lot of images that are reminiscent of the Fukushima disaster. And of course, Gojira is radioactive.

Charlie Jane: [00:41:58] Right. And you mentioned how like Cloverfield in the US is kind of about 9/11, which it clearly is, I mean, it's just right there on the frickin’ surface. How do monster movies of the past like, 15-20 years, how do they comment on new challenges that are kind of the challenges of our era versus like, atomic war or whatever?

Annalee: [00:42:19] Well, I definitely think, as I said, that they're dealing with climate change. And then I think there's newer movies like Colossal, which, weirdly, is this kind of intimate, character driven story about a person dealing with her past and her inability to form relationships. And she's also controlling a giant monster. And I think that's a really interesting direction that these stories are going in. 

[00:42:47] Meg Elison has an incredible short story about a young woman who grows to be enormous that’s called “Big Girl” that's similarly dealing with this kind of small personal story of what it's like to be a woman whose body doesn't fit the norm and how people treat you. But it's also a giant monster story. 

[00:43:10] So we're seeing giant monsters become a way of talking about very small, intimate things, as well as a way of talking about these global threats that are very, very hard to represent, except using a mega monster. Like, how do you represent climate change? It's just a big giant thing.

Charlie Jane: [00:43:30] And then you have like The Host, which is the Korean movie. There's been multiple movies called The Host, but the Korean movie called The Host, in which the monster is kind of like explicitly pollution and contamination. It’s caused by contamination of local groundwater by the Americans in Korea. It's a movie that's about the environment, but also about imperialism and about kind of representing how the hubris and folly and destructiveness of like the American Empire affects this Korean family who are just kind of like swept up in this destructive situation.

Annalee: [00:44:06] Well, and it's a Bong Joon Ho movie, right? So it also has this really dark satirical edge to it and it's about kind of the Korean working class and how the end… So it's just, it's got everything. Such a great movie. 

Charlie Jane: [00:44:21] Yeah.

Annalee: [00:44:21] If you haven't watched The Host, you’ve got to see it.

Charlie Jane: [00:44:21] It’s basically like if you took the movie Parasite, which Bong Joon Ho also directed and just add a giant monster to it, that you kind of get The Host, a little bit. 

Annalee: [00:44:30] So good. 

Charlie Jane: [00:44:30] It's amazing. And you know—

Annalee: [00:44:33] So Charlie, Jane, where do you want to see giant monsters go next?

Charlie Jane: [00:44:37] Wow, such a good question. I mean, I like the idea that we can use something as huge as giant monsters to tell intimate personal stories. I think that that's something that we could definitely see more of. And I also love the idea that we can deal with… the process of dealing with giant monsters can be about community and about us coming together. Individually, we're tiny, little, helpless little kind of ant creatures next to one of these giant monsters. We're like little bugs. But if you get enough of us together and we all work together and put aside our differences or whatever, then we can be a giant monster collectively. 

[00:45:19] And I guess that's sort of what the Jaeger represents in a weird way, like human ingenuity.

Annalee: [00:45:23] Yeah.

Charlie Jane: [00:45:24] But also, I'd love to see just like teamwork, more emphasis on teamwork, more emphasis on—We were talking when we were prepping this episode about how usually, when you watch a kaiju movie, or a giant monster movie, usually the human characters are just this annoying, kind of filler. It's like, well, they couldn't afford to have like two hours of just giant monsters so we have to look at Aaron Taylor-Johnson running around for an hour, looking upset, or whatever. We have to deal with human drama. We have to deal with—And oftentimes the human elements in the film feels a little bit like an afterthought or feels like it's just kind of the weakest part of the movie. And what would happen if the human part of the movie was as good as the giant monster part of the movie? What would happen then? I don’t know, what do you think Annalee?

Annalee: [00:46:07] I think that's right. And I think that's why The Host is so interesting. I think that's why Shin Gojira is so interesting. And actually the anime series The planet Gojira anime series also has confusing but fascinating human characters. So yeah, that's where I'd like to see it going, too, is kind of bringing together small human stories with these big stories about how do you tackle something as big as climate change, for example? 

[00:46:33] Well, let's wind up there with thinking about the future direction of kaiju. 

[00:46:36] Thank you so much for listening. Once again, we are on Patreon if you'd like to support us. You get lots of extras, you get audio extras, you get fish mailed to you that just disappear as soon as you pull them out of the envelope, which is really cool. And you get a chance to chat with us. We're on Patreon at OurOpinionsAreCorrect. We're also on Twitter at @OOACpod. 

[00:47:00] And thank you so much to Veronica Simonetti for being our awesome producer. And thanks to Chris Palmer for the music. And if you like what you're hearing, please leave us a review wherever you're getting your podcasts and we will talk to you in a couple weeks.

[00:47:14] Bye!

Charlie Jane: [00:47:15] Bye!

[00:47:15] Outro music plays. Drums with a bass line including bass drops.