Away! Burn all the records of the realm.
Among recent releases, Godzilla: King of the Monsters really is a good film, and one I thoroughly enjoyed. For one thing, it is unabashed commercial entertainment: the magnificent spectacle and exquisite effects were a real blast. For another, Godzilla has an appeal of its own as something that stirs memories and nostalgia. Nostalgia itself is an interesting problem, of course. It places greater emphasis on time; if instead we ask what spatial image our nostalgia attaches to, the question becomes one of longing for home. In other words, there is a difference between emphasizing what is old in a temporal sense and emphasizing a place where the heart belongs. As an aside, it is interesting that in Japanese cinema—indeed, in modern Japanese culture more broadly—home is an exceptionally clearly described and constructed concept. The quintessential examples of this Japanese longing for home, or this beautiful Japanese imagining of home, are Hayao Miyazaki’s films, including the recently released Spirited Away.1
In Miyazaki’s work, this magical, warm home, full of wonder yet tinged with bitterness, seemingly nurturing a sense of comfort, is a very important element of his cinematic style. His protagonists adopt a narcissistic stance, healing the wounds and frustrations inflicted by external reality within an imaginary space filled with forms of themselves. This imaginary space called home is, in fact, forever gentle. There is no genuine violence in it (there may seem to be “evil villains,” but we all know those quotation marks are necessary). If we insist on finding any violence, it lies in the transcendental imagination that, within the protagonist’s—or the viewer’s—synthetic activity of self-affection, tries to inflict violence on the dispersal of pure temporality. It is precisely this violence that allows reality itself to maintain a minimum of ontological consistency within the story, so that we are not “pulled out of the film.” Put simply, when we watch Miyazaki’s films, we enter this gentle home from the protagonist’s perspective and are licensed to direct our libido toward an outside overlaid by our inner fantasies. In doing so, we feel healed and comforted. Because of the way we misrecognize the ego ideal and the “outside” in this process, actual others in the real world seem to lose the otherness that frightens us. That is why, when we finish a Miyazaki film and look back at our lives outside it, there is a moment when even our lifeworld feels yasashii—gentle. (Similar devices are, in fact, often used in Japanese film and television.)
The innocent subject who inhabits this home has nothing whatsoever to do with so-called constitutive lack. It even possesses a determinate form that allows it to apply the understanding’s range of inference to intuition. Temporal experience in Miyazaki’s mythic fairyland is therefore always already forged into a homogeneous, linear succession. Nor is this confined to Miyazaki. We can see that works colored by this beautiful Japanese imagining of home also seem inevitably drawn to those vaguely fatalistic narratives of “destiny,” “bonds,” or mysterious guidance from spirits and gods. As I said earlier, these are not gratuitous superstitious plot devices—at least not in these works. The writers know perfectly well that all their storytelling has to do is unfold this mythic fairyland’s immanent potential. Temporal experience in Miyazaki’s cinematic world, for instance, always has this relation of succession: the world’s past and future are subordinate to its present. It preserves the past as its repressed prehistory—Chihiro’s childhood before the move, for example, when she had already had her fated encounter with Haku—and noncommittally foretells the future: after this adventure, Chihiro will certainly have grown up; she will be more grounded, more diligent, more devoted to her family.
Take another recent release, Destiny: The Tale of Kamakura. Masato Sakai’s character has always had misgivings about family life because he saw his mother having an affair when he was a child. But when he goes to the underworld to rescue his wife, he unexpectedly encounters his parents, very much in love, and learns that the man with whom his mother was “having an affair” was actually his father in disguise. He also discovers that his father, who died young, was the writer he most admired. With his parents’ help, he then rescues his wife, and they return to a happy life in their old home in Kamakura. In the film’s gorgeous, fantastical Kamakura, there seems to be no need to distinguish past, present, and future. If we understand “world” as the finite horizon of the unconcealment of Being, as the horizon in which entities present themselves to historical Dasein, it is not hard to see that nothing in this mythic fairyland can truly be said to have “passed.” What makes a historical object “past” is not its age as such, but the fact that it is no longer a trace belonging directly to “our” world. The film makes it clear that this is not the case in Kamakura: ghosts and the dead who have become yōkai can go about their everyday lives alongside the living. People from the past can engage in meaningful social practice; past and present can form an interconnected structure.
Chinese subtitle: “The deadline’s nearly here!”
So although the story certainly “unfolds as a process,” any objective reality within it is, as discussed above, already fully constituted from an ontological perspective. (Of course, films are made by people in the first place.) This is also why Miyazaki’s fetishization of innocence can be an effective political decision within his animated films. (At least while watching, we are moved—though that does not prevent us from criticizing his extremely childish humanism afterward.) In other words, the worlds of these works are unquestionably conservative worlds that reject a historical narrative of becoming—and thus unquestionably worlds of fantasy. Here, the subject’s internal ontology has not failed. The moment when the protagonist discovers the secrets of these fantastic worlds—the film’s moment of elevation—is often the moment when the protagonist recognizes that they should stop seeing their former life in terms of rupture. Instead, they should understand the world’s history from the standpoint of its ending, its fulfillment, through an illusion attached to the past—an illusion that is no longer an illusion here, but something more real. This is, in fact, what Benjamin calls “now-time” (Jetztzeit). The “bright future” that redeems the past is born of just such a now-time. Nor is this confined to fairy tales: the same narrative theme appears even more frequently in Japan’s taiga dramas, NHK’s long-running historical television series, especially those concerned with the end of the shogunate and the Meiji Restoration. The future in which Japan becomes an advanced, developed East Asian power, redeeming its past as an impoverished, weak, feudal island country of the Orient, is born of this turbulent now-time teeming with heroes. Think of the portrayal of Ryōma’s death in Segodon and Ryōmaden. (Incidentally, the two leads have a new series out, Everyone’s Demoted!!.) Amid the glittering collective frenzy of what looks like a celebration but is really a demonstration—the Ee ja nai ka, or “Isn’t It All Right?”, movement—the people of the old era have entered the “new era” without realizing it. Yet Sakamoto Ryōma’s story has already reached its end: he is quietly cut down in a tavern while the crowds outside make merry. The intercutting of the scenes gives us the experience of history itself intersecting. Only then do we remember that this is the final episode, and realize that everything that had to happen had already begun happening in episode one.
Chinese subtitle: “What’s wrong with it? What’s wrong with it? Isn’t it all right?”
At this point there is no need to wait for the great event, no need to wait for the Messiah, because the Messiah has already come, the great event has already happened, and we live in its wake. This concerns not only the people within the story. The theme also reminds viewers that what is being depicted is history: in your actual life, too, you are a beneficiary living in its wake. What is interesting is that, in these serious historical dramas, the writers, directors, and screenwriters seem obliged to make a gesture of withdrawing from this unified field of discourse into anonymity. A historical script must first be “history,” and only then a script; the former should conceal the latter. This is also what Shiba Ryōtarō has always been criticized for: it really is easy to spot the things he makes up in his historical novels. The image of the historical figure, meanwhile, takes their place, retaining the “author’s name” and using it to organize the work. This image represents the unconscious in its atemporal dimension—the unconscious that, as Freud puts it, knows nothing of time. A successful recreation of Ryōma, for instance, does not mean that his image has changed from A into B; rather, once B appears, he has “been like this from the beginning.” For this image, which occupies the position of the subject supposed to know in transference, the unconscious meanings of all symptoms are always already determined.
Against this background, viewers sitting before the television and crying over Ryōma’s death—myself included—seem to undergo an experience resembling psychoanalysis: the transitions from possibility to necessity and from impossibility to contingency. At first sight, Ryōma’s death seems to belong to pure possibility, an accident that might not have happened. Within the narrative structure of Ryōmaden, however, it is retroactively transformed into an “abrupt event” that would necessarily have happened whatever the circumstances. The same goes for last year’s Segodon, where Saigō Takamori’s historical mistakes are presented as long-planned self-sacrifice. My point is not that history might actually have happened differently. What I want to emphasize is that this reality’s absolute certainty within the drama rests on a retroactive illusion and on misrecognition produced at the performative level of discourse. At this moment, viewers seem to grasp a profound, “eternal” meaning, worthy of compassion and emotion on the scale of history—a meaning actually constructed in the very process of its discovery. At the same time, the impossibility inherent in the obstruction posed by the intersubjective imaginary axis means that viewers always return to themselves through the imagined historical figure, engaging in a narcissistic form of viewing. (We forget how distant historical events are from us, and that we cannot measure ourselves against the greatness of historical figures.)
More importantly, within this same discourse, the big Other’s structuring and mediation of the subject make an interpretive intervention by the subject supposed to know possible. At the same time, the subject’s breakthrough beyond the imaginary axis brings it face to face with the death drive of the impossible Real. This signifies surprise and the intrusion of the Real: the transition from impossibility to contingency.
That is to say, something that could not previously happen, something outside the very field of possibility—Ryōma’s death, so abrupt and unceremonious, or, earlier still, the arrival of the Black Ships—suddenly happens, contingently. Of course, never forget that these are the Black Ships of the taiga dramas: after their arrival, Japan’s terrified “men of high purpose” actually think of secretly swimming out to the ships to see what is going on. Such events often become the coordinates that change the entire field. After Ryōma’s death, the Meiji Restoration’s pure romanticism seems to vanish in an instant, replaced by a sinister atmosphere, or a more concrete political picture. The arrival of the Black Ships is an even more decisive event, cutting cleanly between Japan’s premodern and modern narratives. In a premodern narrative, someone like Sakamoto Ryōma would not so much be treated as a traitor and a fantasist as simply never be discussed at all; in a modern narrative, he is a hero of immense importance.
According to one account, the Japanese people lived harmonious, tranquil lives under the isolationist shogunate. Their simple everyday existence made them forget danger. At just this moment, Perry’s Black Ships, as the negative reference point of this symbolic order, thrust the Real into this seemingly peaceful, warm peasant society in a gesture of refusal to be symbolized. The encounter then laid bare its traumatic core. This is also what the opening episodes of Segodon and Ryōmaden show: behind the tender warmth of the initially harmonious, cheerful countryside, peasants and lower-ranking samurai have nothing at home but bare walls, go hungry every day, and suffer the ruling class’s unchecked contempt and humiliation. One interesting scene shows samurai who had intended to win glory by expelling the barbarians. When actually confronted with Perry’s Black Ships, they can only gape in shock and cry, “ばけもの—bakemono!”—“A monster!” This is most conspicuous in Ryōmaden: on screen, the Black Ship resembles a vast black beast, churning up huge waves and roaring as it “lunges” at Masaharu Fukuyama on the sea cliff, while he and his companion Katsura Kogorō are already scared witless. We all know, though, that this is only a steamship, not an actual fire-breathing beast. Rather, “bakemono” is something opened up by premodern Japanese civilization’s own symbolization and historicization. Such a product would certainly not be treated as uncanny in Western industrial society. But the Black Ships arriving in Japan exceed the coordinates of “civilization” as seen from Japan, becoming “unnatural monsters” that its discourse refuses to admit.
Chinese subtitle: “So this is… a Black Ship.”
Chinese subtitle: “Sakamoto!”
This structure is also very clear in the earliest Godzilla films. (It is a very classic—read: old-hat—interpretation.) Like the Black Ships, Godzilla suddenly emerges from the mysterious, vast, unknown ocean and displays a power genuinely capable of tearing apart the existing order, causing enormous panic in human society. Godzilla is a so-called monster only from the perspective of human society: stronger than me, yet savage and inferior. In the animal world at large, there is no such thing as a monster. Savage strength is natural; so-called monstrosity does not arise. Interestingly, shifts in perspective allow both East and West to use Godzilla in this metaphorical sense to identify the other as an alien, deformed, unpredictably temperamental monster. The original Godzilla of Tomoyuki Tanaka, Eiji Tsuburaya, and Ishirō Honda embodied the nightmare of the atomic bomb, trampling Tokyo into ruins while sparing the emperor’s Imperial Palace. Hollywood’s Roland Emmerich version, meanwhile, wreaks havoc in an American city. Interestingly, apart from laying eggs, this Godzilla has no anthropomorphic features whatsoever, and the blame for the nuclear tests has quietly been shifted to the French.
On one hand, this is of course a matter of Godzilla’s emptiness and arbitrariness as a signifier. As the cultural environment changes, so do the targets against which filmmakers deploy this empty master-signifier in symbolic attacks. (By now even the anti-nuclear theme is passé; Godzilla has moved on to environmental protection.) On the other hand, as a sign, Godzilla also harbors a conservative meaning that refuses translation and reassignment. (This is also why the American versions of Godzilla have always come in for criticism.) Godzilla is a terrifying monster, not a beast whose nature is wholly animal. Descriptions of animals have long been present, explicitly or implicitly, within civilization’s discourse; animals do not constitute anything unfamiliar. The Western culture represented by the American military aboard the Black Ships was soon recognized as a more advanced culture that Japan needed to learn from across the board. The strange civilizations the West encountered in the tide of globalization were soon aesthetically discovered as “sacred barbarians.” And Dr. Serizawa, who understands Godzilla best, regards it as a being wiser than humanity. (These are, of course, imaginary communications with the other through the mediation of the big Other. But the crucial point is that the “inhuman” bakemono is identified here as an other, something entirely different from an animal in the ordinary sense. Like “humans,” it is an important actor; animals emphatically are not. This reminds me of a documentary that went viral recently, Dynasties. What it does is just what we used to do as children, smashing dinosaur toys into each other, supplying voices and making up stories as we went. The cruelty of the animal world is viewed politically, with considerable irony, as though the director believes a political idiom can describe the cruelty of the Real more accurately. In a certain sense, then, this documentary is unexpectedly healthy.) … Thus neither the Black Ships nor Godzilla is a loser in some Laclau-style discursive struggle. (Besides, neither lost at all: they won, and won big.) They are barred subjects containing an “abyss of infinity,” the radical negativity that the subject must encounter when the Real intrudes.
In response, the subject’s ceaseless symbolization continually generates positive articulations with different concrete contents. Godzilla returns to the screen again and again, and each time the secret content we glimpse in this never-speaking abyss is different: fear of the nuclear threat, fear of the Yellow Peril, fear of natural disaster, repentance for environmental destruction, or the revelation that all things should coexist in harmony. It is not Godzilla as a “being” that keeps returning; rather, return itself constitutes being by affirming becoming and passing away. It is not the emergence of this iconic figure as an event that keeps returning—strictly speaking, Godzilla was designed only once—but return itself that is the event affirmed by difference and multiplicity.
Even if we return to the story itself, the Black Ships crisis was, in fact, resolved through negotiation. But the Black Ships that were dealt with were merely a signifier that had stood for Western colonialism. The actually existing, ill-intentioned nations of the “Southern Barbarians” had not been eliminated. Once this signifier had receded, the signifier of the Black Ships would instead disperse across every foreign country belonging to an alien civilization beyond the horizon. Within the narrative structure of the Meiji Restoration, the end of an actual crisis therefore produces a more acutely felt sense of crisis and an anxiety at being surrounded by danger. (The same structure exists in Chinese narratives of saving the nation from extinction and securing its survival.) In the modern history that men of high purpose inaugurated in “now-time,” Japan instead wholeheartedly embraced the Western civilization that had once been its other. To some extent, this resembles the ending of King of the Monsters: humanity recognizes its own ignorance and Godzilla’s nobility, begins submitting to the giant beasts’ rule, and joins them in building a beautiful world of harmonious coexistence—along Godzilla’s lines, of course. All this rests on identifying Ghidorah, the “false king,” as the genuine invader from outer space, the danger truly coming from outside against which we should join hands. On an optimistic reading, this seems to suggest that the gulf between human and nonhuman does not necessarily mean an absence of communicability. Rather, communicability remains potential, capable of being actualized—though it can, of course, also refuse actualization. In this sense, it would seem more appropriate to replace the pure negativity at the core of the barred subject with what Agamben calls pure potentiality.
But that is only the optimistic account. Through the Meiji Restoration, Japan seems to have successfully entered the beautiful modern world, shoulder to shoulder with the civilized West. The most vivid spectacle of this conclusion is naturally the first Great Exhibition in London on May 1, 1851. (Strictly speaking, of course, the Meiji government was not established until 1868; it was the reform-minded shogunate that was “opening its eyes to the world” at this point.)2 Within the magnificent Crystal Palace, created by modern industry and technology, the world’s civilizations filled this artificially fashioned world of spectacle with every marvelous and beautiful thing, constructing the most beautiful, most desirable vision in human history. Yet we should be wary: the beautiful miracle inside the Crystal Palace depends precisely on the castration of the real world as a whole. The Palace conceals whatever the civilized people who have entered so-called modern society find less than pleasing, retaining only the world’s delightful objects and scenery. On one hand, this industrial and architectural spectacle distinguishes the flourishing world inside from the desolate, sorrowful world outside—the outside world is not a product of modernization—and sets them in sharp contrast. On the other, its meticulously designed layout separates the beauty on display from the filth deliberately concealed. In other words, the Crystal Palace’s splendor needs a smoothly functioning sewer beneath it. Even as the exhibition proceeds, the filthiest sewage, garbage, and feces are continually discharged through its most carefully hidden drains and dumps.
Chinese subtitle: “If you don’t change, this country has no future.”
Chinese subtitle: “Now is the time to learn the barbarians’ superior skills.”
Chinese subtitle: “Napoleon—he’s a great hero of the revolution!”
At the strictly symbolic level, this garbage does not exist at all. These expelled remainders are the radical excess within the order of reality. Their existence as individual cases is fleeting; as subjects embodying universality, they know only how to respond with non-discursive force. I do not think I need to give particularly specific examples. Think of the series of bloody wars led by peasants and lower-ranking samurai ten years after that beautiful Great Exhibition. (Japan is my main subject here, but far more, and more typical, instances have repeatedly occurred throughout the vast Third World. The civilized Western society that praised the elegance of Qing China’s silk and porcelain at the Great Exhibition would, thirty years later, denounce the barbarism of the Boxers.3 The excreted feces did not simply vanish into thin air inside the Crystal Palace; they were merely hidden. On the imaginary level, civilized society turned a blind eye to them. Yet at a particular moment, it is precisely these concealed excretions of the Real that will surge into our beautiful Crystal Palace and reveal themselves as a symptom.)
When the Real that Godzilla brings from the ocean’s depths pierces the Imaginary and causes the boundary between inside and outside to collapse, what human civilization confronts is its lack of experience of the real world. (Nor can it ever be confident that it does not lack such experience.) It can respond only with shock, anger, anxiety, astonishment, even terror, falling instantly back into what Agamben calls infancy: a speechless state of extreme anxiety. Godzilla, meanwhile, as the vanishing mediator that radically transforms the order, always returns silently to the ocean afterward and disappears. (Amid the romance of the Taishō era, the actual peasants at the bottom were even poorer. And the last war of the so-called movement to overthrow the shogunate was the Satsuma Rebellion, in which the lower-ranking members of the former samurai class—once the main force of that movement—were suppressed.)
This is also where I find the content of King of the Monsters rather disappointing. This invincible giant beast seems to have only three possible ultimate fates, in Foucauldian terms: elimination—the Japanese version, killed by Professor Serizawa with his oxygen bomb, the Oxygen Destroyer; exclusion—the American version; or correction—King of the Monsters and many of the Japanese special-effects, or tokusatsu, versions. The reverse side of Godzilla’s rule over humanity is that humanity, by crowning it, also enslaves it. It is no longer a metaphor for the Real’s obscene excess of life, exempt from meaning and outside it. Instead, it becomes a little fairy-tale sprite in a standard Hollywood variation on that mythic fairyland. It becomes the outside provided in The Truman Show, the outside into which Truman can step and experience liberation after breaking through the ideological suture of his enclosed world; the outside that cannot be seen from within ideology; that “true reality of nature” to which “ignorant” humanity must humbly submit. If only we could see the world Godzilla sees, we could see true nature. This is how paranoid fantasy captures Godzilla in return—one of Hollywood’s usual tricks.
Chinese subtitle: “Just a pack of monkeys who can do nothing but imitate foreign countries.”
Chinese subtitle: “You can’t look after the common people and abandon us warriors!”
The last war of the so-called movement to overthrow the shogunate was the Satsuma Rebellion, in which the lower-ranking members of the former samurai class—once the main force of that movement—were suppressed.
Chinese subtitle: “We have no home to return to. We are prepared to die in battle.”
Chinese subtitle: “A new era like this? We can do without it.”
We must never forget that Godzilla is just a suit, a prop made of rubber—special effects now. Before we rush ecstatically to declare a dead thing alive—“Look, it’s alive! This lump of special effects has intelligence. It’s thinking better than we do!”—we must not forget the cruel reality in this parallax shift from “outside” to “inside”: the object remains an object, a foreign body resisting subjectivization and subjective empathy. As an object whose humanity defies comprehension, it is humanized and begins to speak in a human voice. But a speaking object is still a monster, still something that ought not to speak. (And in fact, Godzilla has never really spoken. If we take the most malicious possible view, perhaps everything humans think they understand about it is nothing but presumptuous, self-flattering guesswork—including Professor Serizawa’s great friendship.) In a certain sense, Godzilla’s reruns and Che Guevara printed on T-shirts both remind us, with exceptional directness, how capital parasitizes and exploits the pure drive of life—or rather, pure life is itself a category of capitalism. (Think about who is inside the suit: an actor.)
If, as Benjamin asserts, capitalism is ultimately a religion, then capitalism is the obscene religion of “undead,” spectral life, and Godzilla really is the undead king of the monsters.
Chinese subtitle: “A new era like this? We can do without it.”
Editor’s note: Ryōmaden is pretty good.