Tag Archives: Nicolas Labarre

Inside Gozilla’s Rotting Carcass

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In 1999, Warren Ellis, John Cassaday and Laura DePuy explored the Godzilla imagery in the second issue of Planetary, “Island”. The series was still in the process of codifying its relationship to its readers and was very open about its objectives and methods. It sought to present the archeology of fiction by conflating the narratives of popular texts and their very existence as popular objects, and having the heroes of the series excavate and interpret these condensed remains.
 

mothra in planetary

The carcass of Mothra, in Planetary #2 (May 1999)

 
Thus, when the Planetary team meets Godzilla, they also encounter Godzilla, the cultural phenomenon. The history of the monster merges with the history of the monster genre and the demise of the latter mean the former have turned into rotting carcasses. In the series, these rotting carcasses are to be found on Island Zero, where the Planetary team is summoned in order to stop a sect, whose members intend to feast on the corpses of the Kaijus. By the time the team arrives, the members of the sect and the local Japanese soldiers have killed each others, positioning the heroes as spectators. Only at the end of the issue does the reader get a modicum of explanation, through a piece of expository dialogue:

Jakita Wagner: It all started the day after Hiroshima. […] We can’t say it was an atomic bomb. We can’t say these things are radioactive mutants. I mean, that’d be stupid. […] But five years later, island zero was populated by great monsters. They died off for some reason. They never left the island and they died.

The parallels are obvious, and even readers with a passing knowledge of the daikaiju genre are likely to notice the similarities between its history and Jakita’s story: the Japanese giant monsters movies appeared after World War 2, with Godzilla in 1954, and the giant pterodactyle Rodan (a stunning sight in the last page of the Planetary issue) in 1956, then spawned a popular series of films until the mid-70s before a prolonged eclipse; although the genre was very popular in Japan, it also remained profoundly insular, exotic imports in the rest of the world, it “never left the island”. The “five years later” reference does not quite match, though it could be a reference to 1948 Unknown Island, a little known RKO film by Jake Bernhard, in which a group of adventurers stumble a lots island populated by (giant) dinosaurs, in the form of cheap costume-wearing extras.
 

Unknown Island (1948) trailer

 
Planetary thus transmuted the history of the genre – a history shaped by Western perception, which means the 80s renaissance of Godzilla, which was barely distributed abroad, can be ignored – into a history of the dead monsters on Island Zero. This strategy, which the series applied to a variety of popular genres and cultural objets, has been since praised by critics and academics as a challenging, complex and satisfying bridge between meta-fiction and popular texts.

I suspect that in the last few years, this conflation of Godzilla and Godzilla has become the default mode of engagement with the character. This is at last what the two most recent film incarnations of the King of the monsters suggest. Indeed the most interesting sequences of both Godzilla Final Wars (Ryuhei Kitamura, 2004) – the final Japanese entry in the franchise – and Godzilla (Gareth Edwards, 2014) both introduce the history of the franchise in the diegetic world. In both cases, this insertion occurs during the opening credits, setting the tone for the whole film.

During the credits of Godzilla Final Wars, excerpts from previous films in the franchise are intertwined with rolling dates, from 1954 to the present. The status of these images is not made explicit, but the construction of the sequence connects the chosen excerpts to suggest a continuous narrative rather than a collage. The movies blend into each others, are presented out of chronology, accompanied by prominent dates (1960, etc.) which do not correspond to any film, and create an artificial continuity. Godzilla is thus presented as having been a continuous presence since 1954, a description which can only be applied to the cultural phenomenon it represents, and is incompatible with the premise of most of the movies compiled in these sequences. Godzilla’s death at the end of the first movie, but also the various reboots, are glossed over, the better to repurpose existing images. Plots, foes and stories are briefly cast aside in order to foreground the cultural icon trough its five decades of existence, archetypally stomping over cities and soldiers. Though the movie itself includes numerous homages – and even a match versus the 1998 Emmerich version – it never develops this idea explicitly.
 
In Gareth Edwards’s Godzilla, the process is slightly less overt. As in the case of Godzilla Final Wars, the credit sequence opens with images of an atomic blast footage, before inserting Godzilla into actual footage from the 1950’s atomic tests in the Bikini islands. 1954 is only mentioned later in the film, in a passage of blunt exposition. Nevertheless, popular-cultured spectators are expected to understand that the discovery of the creature roughly coincides with the date of Honda’s first film.

True, this is a revisionist reading of the origin of the creature and of the American role in particular. In Edwards’s films, based on a script by Max Borenstein the tests did not disturb Godzilla, they were an attempt to destroy the creature. However, this history again acknowledges the age of the franchise, its historical origin. Incidentally, this is also, as in the case of Planetary, an example of redacted, or secret history. We are invited to re-read what we thought we knew: we thought we were familiar with the Bikini tests, we thought we knew Godzilla, but a new light will be shed on both.
 


Godzilla (2014), opening credits

 
Although both films purport to be modern takes on the king of monsters, it is striking that they both emphasize the age of the franchise and its now removed point of origin. In doing so, they acknowledge the fact that the Godzilla franchise – a familiar series of cultural objects, with a well-established connection to the atomic trauma in Japan – is bigger than any specific movie. The success of both endeavors is predicated on the existence of an audience eager to connect with the franchise as a whole rather than with a specific film or series of films. The story of the Japanese Godzilla may have been rebooted in 2000, but it is hard to conceive of a spectator going to see Final Wars with no awareness of the previous films. Neither film is a period piece, though: Godzilla is at once current and historically grounded, as if some of Planetary’s erudition and esteem for its readership has seeped into both productions. Still, while Planetary made the exploration of the link between history and stories the center of its narrative, the movies contain it in a space where they can still claim plausible deniability. The ambiguous space of the opening credit seems perfectly appropriate to negotiate this tension.

The comparison with the 1998 Roland Emmerich version is enlightening. That film tried to imagine a modernized origin, one which would transpose the story of the original films with no respect for the film as film. It is hard not to see this as another expression of the changing conception of the audience among mass media producers. The subculture connoisseur may not be the target audience, but he or she is important enough to warrant the creation of these two opening sequences.

More generally, this embrace of history also sheds a light on the cultural status of various icons of popular culture. Godzilla is a 1954 creation and the movies acknowledge it, yet it seems unimaginable to have a major Superman or Batman film taking the thirties as a point of origin (Captain America is a somewhat complex exception here, since the character is both of the forties and the sixties). DC did produce a short film doing for Superman what the opening credit of Godzilla Final Wars tried to achieve, but crucially, it was distributed separately from Man of Steel, thus maintaining a clear distinction between the character in the story and the character in cultural history.
 

Superman at 75


 
It may be that Superman and the other superheroes have a less overt relation to their historical points of origin. It may also be that these characters haven’t been consistently used a mass-media franchise over the course of their existence – Superman Returns did touch on the tension between diegetic and non-diegetic time. It may be the fact that explaining a 50+ year-old Godzilla is more acceptable than a 70+ year-old Batman. Or it may be that a franchise with a history is less likely to be repurposed as entirely in a different setting as super-heroes have been over the last 16 years.

The Descent: Between Promises and Genre

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The Descent, a 2005 British film, directed by Neil Marshall, is a genuinely frightening experience.

The plot is simple, a group of women get trapped in an uncharted cave, and discover a group of cannibalistic underground monsters while looking for an exit. The main conceit of the movie, its claim to originality, is the fact that horror happens underground, in a constrained and dimly lit space. What could have been a gimmick quickly proves visually and thematically fruitful, as the choice produces a slew of effects which enrich the horror tropes. Thematically, the film is close to Deliverance – a comparison made by several reviewers at the time – in that it foregrounds the connection between the environment and the monsters it generates. Or to put it differently, the environment is the real monster of the fim. Indeed, the beginning of the cave’s exploration, which merely presents caving as a trip towards frighteningly regressive regions, is the most convincing part of the film. The opening sequence, during which the heroine’s family dies in a brutal car accident, establishes a narrative contract in which anything can happen, even the sudden death of a cute child. Together with copious foreshadowing regarding the dangers of cave exploration and – less efficiently – with copious startling false alarms, the narrative strategy calls our attention to the threat inherent to the sport.

A most disturbing and effective sequence involves the group of women crawling through a narrow corridor, which eventually collapses.
 

 
Marshall shows us all the women going through the narrow passage until the heroine, Sarah, panics and causes the tunnel to collapse. Repetition is key here, and the tension increases with each woman, precisely because nothing alarming happens. The device conveys the feeling that the cave is threatening not because of what could happen but because of its very existence. The continuous presence of the environment is in itself a source of danger, even while the violent discontinuities of the horror genre have not appeared yet. Besides, in this case, the apparently unmotivated repetition of similar actions – it is even hard to tell who is crawling through the tunnel at a specific time – has a faux-naturalistic quality which may recall the tactics of the popular “discovered footage” films, and their attempts to imbue horror with a highly codified form of realism (cf. David Bordwell’s recent and insightful comment on the form).

Formally, the cave-setting also has interesting consequences in that it frequently functions as a form of cache or mask, as vast areas in the frame are entirely black, maintaining an ambiguous spatial relations to the locus of action. This distinctive effect – a pre-modern cinematic device naturalized by the setting here – not only produces unusual images, but it also works to open potential spaces for horror, potential startles. Genre connoisseurs expect startle effects and are acutely aware of the need to observe dead spaces. In The Descent, this is countered by the impossibility to see though these spaces.
 

 
The end of the film suffers, from the fact that the tension between naturalized scary effects and identifiable genre conventions is abandoned in favor of an overt formula. Plausibility issues also interfere, as the blind monsters have developed an acute sense of hearing but apparently no sense of touch. Several close escapes thus appear artificial and disruptive to the narrative contract, even though they may be thrilling self-contained moments. A scene during which a monster walks on a motionless Sarah without noticing her presence is a striking example. The ending of the film is not without pleasures, but these are referential pleasures, tied to knowledge of the codes and the history of the genre, a pre-condition to appreciating the minor deviations on display. Will there be a final girl? Will our point of focalization turn out to be the heroine after all? The issues at stake towards the end of the film are far removed from any involvement with the characters. Still, the gorgeous photography sustains the film even in its weakest moments.

My viewing experience, however, was shaped long before this final inflection by the opening sequence of the film. There are several possibilities open to horror film-makers, but an usual gambit is to open with a quiet, lustful act, with hints of the horror to come included in the mix: the auto-stopper in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, the explanatory text in Cloverfield,  the hints of madness in The Brood, the sport and shower scene in Carrie, etc. The Descent initially seems to adopt this strategy of introducing harmless scares before the actual monsters enter. The film opens with a rafting scene, fraught with tension and the suggestion that rocks or water could severely harm one of the female protagonists – a fitting introduction for the speleological horror expected by most viewers at this point – which ends in satisfied displays of camaraderie.

The thrill ends quickly, however, and Sarah, one of the girls, leaves a bit early to come home with her child and husband. This initially appears to be a bridging scene meant to accompany the credits, an introduction to a meaningful conversation or perhaps a naturalistic account of a change in location. The scene is a bit long, though, and after twenty seconds, you realize that the film is dedicating a portion of its running time to showing us an “intermediary space”, “un espace intermédaire”.
 

 
These empty places, in which you “leave the realm of the expected meanings” (Jean Cleber) are of course ubiquitous in our lives, but notably absent from the compressed narratives of mainstream cinema. You expect them in Duras’s films, but not in a fairly low-budget genre work. Foregrounding these spaces is the strategy used in Jarmusch’s Broken Flowers or Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation, and it serves to establish these two films as flamboyantly non-generic. This is also what Nicolas Winding Refn used so effectively in Drive, but then, Drive is a film about style and film-making more than a genre exercise. The very logic of genre and commercial cinema dictates that scenes must have a narrative or thematic significance. For a fleeting moment, The Descent seems to forego that logic and open itself to a whole realm of possibilities. If a genre is a set of possibles, a specific “vraisemblance” meant to frame our expectations (Jonathan Culler) then this aimless conversation challenges our notion of genre.

Then comes the tell-tale shot:
 

 

It lasts for eight seconds, after a series of much more classical close shots on the three protagonists. The unusual camera placement calls our attention back to the presence of a photographer and a director. This is a shot with a narrative purpose: it suggests the need for Marshall to establish a coherent sense of space, the need to organize the scene and to provide it with a form of order. The shot does not in itself appear clearly teleological, but it suggests very strongly that something is at stake, that the fleetingness of the scene has to give way to a usable set-up.

Indeed, that set-up is used only a few seconds later, when a gruesome car accident kills both Sarah’s husband and child, reframing our expectations once more towards a shock-based filmmaking. When a slow-motion shot shows us a metal tube perforating the husband’s head, any trace of generic ambiguity is gone. Shock and gore erase the fleeting moment of uncertainty to reassert generic conventions. These remain somewhat blurred for a while in the film as the formal qualities of the cave environment threaten to take over the narrative imperatives of the genre, but they never truly go away.
 

 
For a brief moment, The Descent offers a tantalizing glimpse of another film, a possible naturalistic character study centered on a family in dangerous places. That way only remains open for a few seconds in the film, but it leaves a lasting impression. Its openness points to richness of possible narratives which suggest that the characters are not mere cannon fodders, that they are not entirely constrained by the fairly rigid boundaries of a horror-driven tale. Simultaneously, it asserts the film-maker will to knowingly work in the genre, having examined other possibilities only to discard them.

The scene therefore works not only as a repetition for later sequences, but also as a miniature of the film’s structure: openness and promises violently brought back to the specific pleasures offered by genre conventions. The Descent may not be the most accomplished horror film in the Western canon. It is a smart and efficient movie, which puts forward its affection for the conventions it puts to use. It may, however, lead us to regret the many ways not taken, and the promises they held.