Contextualizing Godzilla

 

When we examine Godzilla critically the general approach is to discuss how the giant monster, brought to life by radiation from atomic bombs, represents Japan’s post-World War II anxieties about nuclear war. Japan is the only country in the world to be subjected to an atomic bomb attack, and the result of that bombing was catastrophic. As the world trudged forward into the nuclear age Japan was still coping with the fallout from Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

In Ishirō Honda’s Godzilla a giant lizard beast is awakened by nuclear testing. It begins to wreak havoc on Tokyo, spewing atomic fire from its mouth and crushing buildings. It’s a painfully clear metaphor for the nuclear attacks experienced nine years earlier. To a Japanese audience in 1954 it was horrifying and struck close to home.

But there is an angle to Godzilla’s commentary that is often missed by Western audiences. In the United States we are well aware of the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but woefully ignorant that it was only the ending to a two-year long firebombing campaign launched by the allied forces.

Tokyo during the 1943 firebombing

In 1943 the United States began this campaign by bombing Tokyo. 1,665 tons of bombs were dropped on the city, igniting a massive firestorm. It is estimated that 83,793 people were killed, with over 40,000 more injured. This was only the beginning as the U.S. began firebombing every major Japanese city in the same manner, and after that moved onto the smaller cities.

Unlike the United States, Japan’s cities were mostly based on wooden architecture. They burned ferociously. Future U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara helped to oversee these bombings. In the 2003 documentary The Fog of War McNamara discusses this campaign and ultimately admits “we were war criminals.” Hundreds of thousands of civilians are estimated to have died.

Now, flash forward to 1954. Imagine being a Japanese citizen and seeing this on a cinema screen:

Yes, Godzilla was about the nuclear bomb, but it was also about so much more. It was about a country still in shock.

The Coen Brothers and Desks

Have you ever noticed the Coen brothers use desks in their films extraordinarily often?

A desk is a great device for a scene. It not only puts a physical divider between two people, it puts the person behind the desk in a position of power. Sitting behind a desk one feels safer, stronger.

In The Big Lebowski, The Dude is constantly disenfranchised when sitting before a desk. The chief of Malibu police throws a mug at him from behind a desk. The man at the funeral home attempts to charge him hundreds of dollars for an urn while sitting behind a desk. The big Lebowski himself insults The Dude and refuses to compensate him for the soiled rug. The nature of The Dude’s character allows him to shrug these incidents off, but he is never dominant when in front of a man behind a desk.

In Barton Fink, not only is Barton in opposition to the studio executive he is forced to work for, but he is even in opposition to his typewriter. Barton sits at his own desk, ready to work, but his writer’s block stops him. The desk becomes a block between himself and his creativity.

In Fargo, Jerry Lundegaard feels safe and self-assured as he boldly lies behind his desk. Lying is his business, seeing as how he’s a used car salesman. The desk gives him power over his clients, his office is his element. His cockiness will be his downfall. Later when he is on the phone with Carl Showalter he finds himself dominated. He is in his office but his desk has no power over the phone. Finally, when Marge Gunderson exposes Jerry’s lies he flees from his office, abandoning his desk and showing his true vulnerability.

In Raising Arizona, Leonard Smalls approaches Nathan Arizona in his office with an offer to find his kidnapped son. It is Nathan’s desk, but Leonard places his feet on it. He defies the desk, and will not allow Nathan to control him. Nathan refuses to accept Leonard’s offer. Leonard pays Nathan as much respect as he paid his desk and sets out in search of the child anyway, so that he may sell it on the black market.

In No Country for Old Men, the man who hires Anton Chigurh to recover the briefcase is murdered at his desk by Chigurh. The power is reversed. The desk did nothing to protect the man. This action shows just how powerfully evil Chigurh truly is.

In A Serious Man, the supposed power of the desk is subverted. The desk is shown to be but the illusion of power. Larry Gopnik searches for meaning, but the rabbis who sit behind desks offer no good answers. When Larry is at his own desk his hand is forced by his student to alter grades. The teachers and figureheads who sit behind these desks may have knowledge, but lack true wisdom.

A desk is a power struggle. The one sitting before the desk must fight to take control, and the one behind it must retain theirs. It is a symbol that immediately registers with the audience. We all know the feeling of powerlessness when sitting before a desk. 

My Top 50 Films

Sometimes when I'm bored I make lists. But always, without fail, the hardest of all is to make a list of my favorite movies. There's so many and I can barely limit myself. At the same time I feel like I haven't seen enough films to say any X amount stand above the rest. And then there's the issue that depending on how I'm feeling one film might stand out more than another. Sometimes I may leave off something that I love but just haven't seen in awhile to refresh my memory. It's pure subjectivity. I mean, what's the difference between slot 35 and 36 anyway?

But, I decided to have another go at it. So here, ranked, is my list of my Top 50 favorite films. There's stuff I had to cut (Pulp Fiction, Frenzy) but overall I'm happy with it. It's not an exhaustive sampling of my movie taste, there's plenty of genres and filmmakers I've left off. And very well if I do this list again in a year, I wouldn't be surprised to find that it's drastically different. But at this very moment, these are the movies that feel right to me.

The 25 Best Films of the Eighties

Ultimately any "Best of" list is opinion, and mine is no different. I've seen a lot of different lists online of the "best" eighties films, but they seem to all revolve around the same set of movies. Labyrinth, Die Hard, Empire Strikes Back, Raiders of the Lost Ark, etc. Sure, those are all great films (except Labyrinth, fight me), but those lists get boring after awhile. So this is a list of my favorite movies from the 80's, and therefore to me they're the best.

The Top 25 Films of the Eighties

25. Vampire's Kiss
(1989, dir. Robert Bierman)

Knuckle

There’s something admirably primal about boxing. It’s a pure and honest sport. Two men agree to step into a ring and pummel each other to their last breath. It’s that simple. What boxing does is that it seems to speak to our innermost desires. It’s the unleashed Id, running wild and delighting in the blood and ruin the sport entails.

In order to box, one must be able to withstand as much pain as he can deliver. The boxer must be ruthless, but calculating and strategic. It’s a sport that simultaneously combines our most primitive tendencies towards senseless violence and the most advanced, tactical parts of our minds. But most importantly, the boxer must be willing to self-destruct.

 

Ian Palmer’s Knuckle is a film that gets to the heart of the sport. This documentary, filmed over the course of twelve years from 1997 to 2009, chronicles the decades-long feud between three Irish traveler families – The Quinn McDonaghs, The Joyces, and The Nevins’. Despite all being cousins, the longstanding feud regularly leads to challenges for bare-knuckle boxing matches.

Unlike professional boxing these bare-knuckle fights are fought outdoors and without rounds. They merely go until one man knocks out the other or one man gives up. There are referees to enforce a clean fight but otherwise it’s purely a raw and personal brawl between two men who fiercely hate each other.

Palmer mainly follows the Quinn McDonaghs, who repeatedly claim that they don’t instigate the fights, they only accept the challenges. To them boxing seems more like a chore that must be done once every couple of years. 

In contrast, the Joyce family, lead by the aging “Big Joe” Joyce, seems to breathe boxing. Big Joe is a loud and rough figure akin to a WWE wrestler with his constant threats and tirades. When it’s his turn to fight, Big Joe unleashes a flurry of punches, protecting his title as “King of the Travelers.” 

Unlike many boxing movies, Palmer doesn’t shy away from the fights. In fact, he shows them in their entirety. Many films tend to only use the fighting as a backdrop for character studies (Raging Bull, Rocky), but Knuckle is as much about boxing as it is about the families involved. There is a gaze during the matches that makes them exciting. They could be horrifying, but they’re just the opposite. 

That’s not to say Palmer doesn’t also focus on the personal stories of the people involved. There is as much of the film about the fights as there is about how this feud has destroyed the relationships between these people. When he interviews the wives of the boxers they all express a desire for the fighting to end and for the families to finally get along again. Palmer also focuses on the children, especially the young boys who have grown up watching their fathers fight and are learning to continue the cycle of violence.

But even Palmer is not immune. Through narration he finally realizes that at some point he had stopped caring about the documentary and had let himself become a part of this bare-knuckle boxing culture. He was no longer going to the fights for the film; he was going because he enjoyed them. And I think that speaks to boxing’s primal appeal. Even those who recognize it’s horror and devastation are still drawn in. He can acknowledge that this feud has caused endless damage, but even he can’t deny the seduction.

And at its core that is what Knuckle, and really boxing itself, is about. It’s watching destruction in action. But Knuckle goes far enough to show what happens when it bleeds outside the ring and it’s no longer fun.

Spring Breakers

Harmony Korine has pulled one of the greatest bait and switches in film history. The advertising for Spring Breakers was expertly designed to lure in teenagers and twenty-somethings with the promise of a wild T&A party movie a la Project X. Well, in a way it delivers on that promise. It gives audiences the nudity and the chaos that is expected from a film like this, but it doesn’t feel quite right. It feels dirty and wrong, as grimy as the drops in its dubstep soundtrack. It’s a college T&A movie, but it’s not the one most people want.

The film opens with four college-aged friends, Faith (Selena Gomez), Candy (Vanessa Hudgens), Brit (Ashley Benson), and Cotty (Rachael Korine) trying to figure out how to raise the money they need to go to Florida for spring break. While Faith attends Bible study (and is warned of how wild Candy and Brit are), the other three rob a local restaurant and make off with enough cash to hop a bus to St. Petersburg. 

After a night of partying the group is arrested for possession of cocaine, but they are quickly let go when the evidence doesn’t hold. They then meet rapper/drug dealer Alien (James Franco) who promises to show them a good time, but instead acts as the gateway to a criminal underworld.

Make no mistake Spring Breakers is an arthouse film. To those familiar with writer/director Harmony Korine this is no surprise, but for those who have never heard of him I’ll just say that he’s responsible for a movie called Trash Humpers (and that title should be taken literally).

One aspect of the film that has turned off a lot of audiences is that it plays out like a deranged nightmare. The editing is choppy and nonlinear, full of droning narration repeating phrases like “Pretend it’s like a video game” and “spring break forever” ad nauseum, digging them deeper into your skin with each reframe. It’s like something made by the Bizarro World version of Terrence Malick.

But the editing serves a purpose. Franco’s constant whispering of “spring break” casts a dark specter over the film. Spring break becomes this sinister concept where hypersexuality reigns and oppresses. Women seductively suck on lollipops, men hold beer bottles to their crotches, everybody’s drunk and looking for sex. But to the audience it isn’t titillating. It feels disgusting and perverted. Were this exact footage being shown on MTV or in a Girls Gone Wild video it would be praised and even enforced. But in Spring Breakers it becomes dark and twisted. The veil covering the rape culture of spring break is torn down and revealed for what it is.

Spring Breakers may be the most purely American film of the 21^st century thus far. It’s an exploration into excess and greed that shows a depravity that makes Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas look like a family vacation. Korine holds a mirror to us, the college kids who partake in this yearly ritual of hedonism and debauchery. Of sex and violence. He shoves our faces in our mess. We made our bed and now we must sleep in it.

Some may disagree with me on this, and I wholly understand it. I’ve read several reviews from critics who found the film to be incredibly sexist, and I’m sure plenty more people are going to see it and feel the same way. Harmony Korine has always been as aware of social issues (as in Kids) as he has been intrigued and in admiration of those who indulge in their most primal instincts (the aforementioned Trash Humpers), and Spring Breakers is a bit of both.

The characters of Candy and Brit are sociopaths who show no remorse for their actions. They always want to dig deeper and deeper into the underworld of spring break. They lead their friends, and the audience, on a Heart of Darkness-esque descent into Hell, each step of the way peeling back another layer of the sex-violence conglomeration.

The film’s climax feels like the bastard child of Girls Gone Wild, Grand Theft Auto, and Michael Mann. “Pretend it’s like a video game” becomes words to live by. “Spring break forever” becomes a mantra. Candy and Brit are the people that the spring break lifestyle is made for. They’re the ones without empathy, who care nothing about the dignity of others, who have no regard for human life. They only want to satisfy their own selfish desires.

Perhaps it’s a good thing that Spring Breakers has been misrepresented in its advertising. Those going in hoping for something fun and light are going to be sordidly disappointed and they may not know why. They’ll say it’s because of the unconventional free-flow narrative. They’ll say it’s because it’s too dark and creepy. But hopefully it’s because they’ve finally been shown the true darkness hidden within the culture they’ve come to idolize, and that takes time to digest.

Idea for a Film Festival

Strike (1925)
Metropolis (1927)
Modern Times (1936)
On the Waterfront (1954)
Salt of the Earth (1954)
Harlan County, USA (1976)
Killer of Sheep (1977)
Blue Collar (1978)
Matewan (1987)
Office Space (1999)