As the late great Alfred Hitchcock would start off; good evening viewers, tonight’s tale of auto ethnographical horror comes to you from the desk of my study, where Gojira returns once more. If any of you don’t know who Alfred Hitchcock is I insist that you immediately stop reading this post and go hang your head in shame, after completing that task I highly edge you to google his name or even better ask your grandparents about him. Why did I start the post like that I hear you all asking? Well that simple, I realised that my prior post about Gojira was lacking a bit in term of auto ethnography and so decided to beef it up a bit and explore it more in depth with a second post, secondly I just always like to talk like Hitchcock.
I was first exposed to Godzilla as a young boy, I remember sitting in my living room with my father on a Sunday afternoon and dad had the TV fixed on Godzilla, asking him now even he wasn’t aware that it was originally Gojira. Which seems odd because when we were kids running around in the yard playing Godzilla the one line you always quoted from the film was “runnnn it’s Gojirrrrraaaa”. Which like anyone I used to see as racist until I learnt the actual name of the creature. To me the film deals with many issues that would have been present in a post war Japan, as well as the natural horror of a giant 150ft monster that rises out of Tokyo bay to demolish an entire city. As I mentioned in my last post, the fear of radiation or anything associated with the word nuclear in this time period was a frightening concept, this is mainly due to the effect and devastation that occurred in Japan when the atomic bombs were dropped in 1945. And I think this fear is both well founded and still present today. Think of it, if any of you hear of something nuclear we instantly think of the bombs, Chernobyl, or a disaster of some sort without even thinking of the benefits that nuclear energy, or nuclear medicine has given to the world. And in my mind it is always going to be this way, and rightly so due to the mass devastation of Hiroshima and negasaki and this is where I think one of the horror elements of the film is derived from. Also on the adaption of the film for a western audience I am led to believe that this was the start of a trend of Hollywood cashing in on eastern movies, especially in the 90’s and early 2000’s many Hollywood movies were simply remakes or adaptions of eastern films that had already been made but adapted for a western audience.
Righty-o, that’s it for me here in cyber world. So enjoy the rest of your evening and I’ll catch you next week with more exciting updates.
Digital Asia 