The Classic Films of Godzilla and King Kong

In our fifth episode of Season 1, Shanny talks with Cary Elza and Valerie Barske about Godzilla and King Kong.  We had such a great and wide-ranging conversation, we're splitting it into two parts.  In part I, we primarily focus on the original Godzilla and King Kong films.

In part 2, which will be released  May 10, we focus on the new film, Godzilla vs. Kong, released in March 2021.

Transcript

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Shanny Luft: 0:10

I love that roar. Thank you for tuning into no cure for curiosity. I am Shanny Luft, the Associate Professor of religion, and associate dean of General Education at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point. I was inspired by the release of Godzilla versus Kong by Universal Studios this month. And so I asked Carrie Elza to come back and talk to me about that film, as well as the history of Godzilla and King Kong in cinema. Carrie Elsa, you remember is the Associate Professor of Media Studies here at UWSP, where she teaches courses on screenwriting, Film and Media analysis, history, and genre. We also invited Valerie Barsky to join us Valerie is the professor and coordinator of the International Studies Program at UWSP. Her specialties include East Asia, modern Japan, cultural history of Okinawa, Women and Gender Studies and theories of the body and embodiment. Carrie, Valerie and I had such a great conversation, I decided to split it up into two episodes. It's our first two parter, and the episode you're gonna hear today, Valerie Carey and I talked mostly about the history of Godzilla and King Kong in cinema. In our next episode, which we'll drop on May 10. I'll share the second half of our conversation, which will focus primarily on the current Godzilla slash King Kong monster universe, and especially focus on the Godzilla vs. Kong film that was released this March. If you have thoughts and comments, please hop over to our Facebook page at no cure for curiosity and share your thoughts. I hope you enjoyed the conversation as much as we enjoyed having it. Valerie Barsky and Carrie, I'm so excited to talk to you both. I went back and watched the original Godzilla. I feel like everybody is aware of the fact that the story of the monster is that it rises because of nuclear testing. The movie comes out just nine years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But what stood out to me in the original movie is the metaphor of Godzilla is even more explicit than I had realized, for example, the body of Godzilla does not look like contemporary Godzilla. Right. Contemporary Godzilla is like lizard, or dinosaur like that original Godzilla looks like a body that is scarred from nuclear radiation. It's a really, it's a much more disturbing monster than it then I had remembered it. I remember just the movie being metaphorically about nuclear war and the bomb. But it is much more explicit and obvious and unmissable than I had even realized.

Valerie Barske: 2:36

I think my comments of that is, if you remember that the US occupation ends, just not that long before this film 1952. And there was extreme censorship on artists, on writers on everyone trying to find a new vocabulary for how are you going to talk about this? How are we going to make sense of something that no other places experienced? And that we still don't know what it means. And so by by 1954, there's really a desire to find how do you represent those scarred bodies? There were some great artists in Hiroshima doing these huge panels, the matsuki panels about Hiroshima, and they used real bodies to like, map what the bodies looked like, and then made them look distorted. I think Godzilla is playing off of all of that as well, right? A new visual vocabulary for that trauma.

Cary Elza: 3:29

I love it. Yeah, I like this emphasis on embodiment, too. I remember when I went to Japan and went to the Hiroshima Museum, the actual scarred bodies you can see in the museum and I remember that really striking me as a teenager. But what struck me and rewatching the original Godzilla this time was the pain that I saw. So yeah, yes to all of those yes to the mutated body of Godzilla that has bumps in swine, penises and movements, and weird and creepy ways, you know that. It feels like hard feels. It feels real gross, right. But the pain on people. I didn't I hadn't seen the 1954 Godzilla in a long time. And I watched it a couple weeks ago. And I was sad. I mean, there's, it's a sad movie. You see a lot of scenes of people in the aftermath of the Godzilla attacks, you know, children crying, people injured people taking care of each other. And I just, you know, maybe the last time I saw it, I was in my 20s. And so I was a little bit in a different frame of mind, but I didn't remember that pain. And so the expression of pain, they're very much tied to that time period.

Shanny Luft: 4:53

There's like this, what seems to be like a throwaway moment in the movie where a unidentified mother is kind of huddling with her two children. Right as the monster is kind of rampaging Tokyo. And she just has one line, which is we're going to go be with daddy now, right? Presumably, it implies that they're their father husband died in the war. That character doesn't show up anyplace else in the movie. It's just this one sentence to communicate the degree of suffering that these people have felt prior to Godzilla. Being right Godzilla is just the next wave of suffering is such a bleaker movie than I had remembered or realized.

Valerie Barske: 5:35

Absolutely. And I think that's very intentional by the director. So hold on, he shadow is a war survivor. He was in a POW camp at some point. He's very intentionally referencing this and he wasn't a you know, a kaiju kind of monster movie guy. He would he did other kind of intense romances and female centered directing female centered films. But he wanted this to have a purpose. He wanted to say a message. And some people said you're stupid for putting messages into these silly movies. But he had a real intentionality to including those kinds of scenes. I think it's really crucial.

Cary Elza: 6:13

Yeah. And I remember to a different perspective expressed about, you know, the recent past in that film, too. And forgive me if this is fuzzy for me, but there seems to be a blog veinous too, doesn't there. So there it one point, at one point, there's a numbness expressed by one of the characters saying, Oh, this is just another thing, or, Oh, here we go again, or something like that. And I might be misremembering, but I, but I remember hearing that and thinking, well, this is the kind of perspective of a of a society that has been so beaten down, that that the only response at that point is to is to numb themselves is to say, well, just another thing, I guess we'll deal with this too. So, so a variety of perspectives to, to recent suffering, I think our apparent in this movie.

Valerie Barske: 7:10

And it's not, I think I want to go back a little bit and say, it's not like, Oh, this horrible thing happens in the war. And now we have a monster to represent it. There. That's a trope. It's a an a kind of archetype, a trend that you see throughout, certainly throughout modern Japanese history, and probably pushing back further representations of the jigoku held like the hell scrolls in Buddhist depictions in the 13th century, moving forward to like dealing with earthquakes, volcanoes, all these natural disasters, that that may graph with mistakes that humans made, but really aren't about what happens in terms of science or humanity. And using things like these numazu characters characters of like big overgrown carp, that have to do with the earthquakes and trying to make sense of trauma by giving it a kind of grotesque embodiment, that seems to be very comforting, actually, in history and in cultural context, that there's that you can either place blame on something or look to something for comfort. I think that's really quite powerful. And that's the tradition I feel that Godzilla really comes from.

Cary Elza: 8:21

And it's important to just throw out there too, that the personification of of forces and forces outside of our control or forces to seem like they're outside of our control is also happening in the US at the same time to you know, we've got the Day the Earth Stood Still and Byron Haskins War of the Worlds which both come out before Godzilla so so there's a lot going on, you know, internationally about using monsters to represent those things that are too big, too big for us to really think to think through on our own.

Valerie Barske: 8:53

I mean, that's just cool, right? Just super cool, right? Every time I go to look at it, and I think I'm not really a monster person. I see so many intersections in every direction, but I just get like, I kind of geek out even though I'm not a Godzilla decal person. That makes sense.

Shanny Luft: 9:09

Yeah.

Cary Elza: 9:10

I want to just throw out there too that I just looked it up. The Disney our friend the atom episode comes out in 1957 and is largely a kind of adaptation of Eisenhower's Atoms for Peace speech at the UN General Assembly in 1953. So there's a lot of that kind of public relations attempt to recoup nuclear power.

Valerie Barske: 9:33

The atom is our future. We made plans to build an exhibit at Disneyland that will show you atomic energy in action.

Cary Elza: 9:42

But at the same time, popular culture knows that this is the blowing smoke. So there's these kind of different attitudes circulating and the monster films are expressing these very legit fears that people have.

Shanny Luft: 9:57

I wanted one of you mentioned the word kaiju or Right, these giant monsters and robots, I've always associated these kind of giant monsters and robots with Japan. And so I was gonna ask this question, does Japan have like this particular affinity for giant monsters? mcherry? You're reminding me that in the 1950s there were lots of American movies about giant ants and giant spiders. And does that have to do with something happening in culture? Does it have to do with just a new way of special effects?

Cary Elza: 10:27

But yeah, there are, you know, there's a lot of special effects artists that are working in the 1950s to make these monsters possible. And, you know, famously, the Godzilla monster or the Godzilla, Godzilla is a suit, right? What was it called pseudo nation or something, that term they use for the special effect, which I love. Because, you know, the fact that it's not stop motion Instead, it is like literally a guy in a suit. I mean, on the one hand, it looks um, you know, hokey sure to our eyes today. But on the other hand, it has that smoothness of movement, which some of these stop motion monsters just don't have. Like, if you think about those giant, the giant ants in them. Those giant ants like they're great. Yeah, I don't want to disparage the giant ants. But, but Godzilla has a kind of movement that adds realism to the kind of a realistic effect to the destruction that he wreaks upon these miniature cities. So the suit animation, innovation is funky as it might look to our eyes today. For me, it feels more visceral. And this could be entirely subjective. But yeah, lots lots of interesting choices being made in practical effects during the 1950s.

Shanny Luft: 11:46

But let's jump over to King Kong. Because while the original King Kong movie comes out 2030 years earlier, 1933. But it has a direct impact on Godzilla First, the original 1933 King Kong had been released in the 1950s. And so it's still in the popular imagination. And the character of King Kong directly inspires the character of Godzilla. So it's not a modern idea, or early 21st century idea that these two creatures should be put up against each other. They were fighting each other 10 years after Godzilla was created, right there. They're like directly they seem like siblings from the beginning.

Cary Elza: 12:22

I shouldn't say I would like you all to know that. For the sake of this conversation, I made an extreme parenting mistake. And I showed my children who are almost four and six the original 1933 King Kong. I did not do Godzilla, I thought Godzilla was going to be too much. But I decided to go for it with King Kong. And I will say that the 1933 King Kong packs a punch for small children. Yes, there were nightmares. Um, there was some very uncomfortable conversations about race. Really? Oh, can't the original King Kong is a horrifically racist movie. And I miss remembered, you know, which is on me for sure it's on me. But But we did have to have some very interesting conversations about the way that that people that you know, this, this kind of tribe that worships Kong is portrayed. I also did some strategic editing with this movie. And it had nothing to do with the with the gorilla. It had to do with the depiction of this tribe. So um, so the original King Kong is as fascinating it but it really does lay a lot of the tropes in place that will continue for a lot of these other kaiju movies.

Shanny Luft: 13:41

I didn't really watch the original column. So what are the tropes that you are thinking about?

Cary Elza: 13:47

The original Kong has at its core, this idea that you must present to Kong a maiden and calm will be placated with a maiden to I don't know, loving to hold unpeel like a banana is what happens if a right and if sea maiden is removed from calm calm will wreak havoc. So we see here a beauty and the explicitly of Beauty and the Beast narrative. And that idea is carried into the more recent versions of Khan, as well. Connie's call needs a girlfriend. Um, you know, it all if the most recent Kong movies, the girlfriend is either kind of Brie Larson, or the girlfriend is, is the small a member of the IE tribe? Who can speak to common sign language. We should totally get into that topic. Oh, yeah.

Shanny Luft: 14:43

Yeah, so that's typically that's Valerie and I got to watch the new con versus the Kung v Godzilla movie together and we kept talking about this deaf girl who had this special relationship with King Kong, it seemed to both continued Guess what 90 year old trope of King Kong and a maiden that he has this kind of special relationship with? Did it improve upon any of that? Or did it sort of reinforce the long standing kind of racist tropes that the original comic carried.

Valerie Barske: 15:15

But as someone who studies embodied action signs and who actually studies people from what is, you know, kind of a post colonial Island context, I very much responded to Jia, and to the to the actress who at least, I will give a nod to the fact that she's genuinely a deaf actress Kaylee hodel. And I think it was powerful to watch the way in which they use the image of a native girl of an island girl, perhaps from you know, this kind of Skull Island world, but, and it's powerful that she's able to communicate. It's not saying that she can't talk, but she doesn't have a voice and trying to intersect and give kind of representation of native peoples, and yet, perhaps stifling them perhaps giving them limitations even though right, we want to acknowledge absolutely, that it's, it's great that she's represented as an authentic, there's an authenticity to the actress playing or taking this in this longer question about indigeneity. And, for me, it was really striking that she didn't have a voice.

Shanny Luft: 16:19

From the 1933 kingkong to the present, the weird way in which Kong always seems to have a damsel that is placating his hostility, right, he needs a woman to make him more sensitive, more thoughtful, you know, kinder, to discourage him fighting, it feels like a very 19th century notion of womanhood.

Cary Elza: 16:43

And it comes from Marian Cooper. So Marian Cooper, who came up with the idea for calling the very first image that we see in the first King Kong movie. So this is a you know, it starts with an overture and then we get the credits, and then Mary and Cooper mix up a quote. So the quote is allegedly an old Arabian proverb, proverb that says, and the Prophet said, and lo, the beast looked upon the face of beauty, and it stayed its hand from killing. From that day, it was, it was as one dead. So this old Arabian proverb is what we what she was our expectations for the very beginning of King Kong, the only thing that is going to be able to placate the beast is beauty. And that is among the oldest ideas that they're possibly like. It this I mean, every romance novel, right, that there's some kind of some kind of rascal who just needs a good woman to tame him. You know, that is such an old and, and dangerous idea, right? It's such it the feminine labor that has to go in, placating of calm in the first the first movie literally fe re gets pulled off the street because they need you know, Carl Denham is this is this kind of megalo maniacal filmmaker who wants to go to Skull Island and film something. He doesn't know what. But he knows he needs a maiden, right? So she gets pulled off the street. She gets convinced to come on this crazy adventure. She gets sacrificed to King Kong. She gets chased all over the place. And it but it's on her right. It's her responsibility to be the one who placates Kong and eventually she's the cause of his undoing. So this relationship between between beastliness, and the beauty is when we've seen all, you know, many times over sense, but that is the basic idea of the story of King Kong.

Valerie Barske: 18:45

What raises for me, I know, it's not a simplistic East versus West movie, the most recent one. However, there are absolutely those undertones. And so for me, it's a really big question of how then, does this Kwazii perhaps associated with an African or even as you're suggesting an Arabian, ritualistic background of the mythical Skull Island? How does that become a representation of the US? How does that become an embodiment? Somehow, if we're talking about in these bigger kaiju worlds, that that's going to be the one that stands for kind of Western civilization or euro American something, when you have all these other characters from other parts of the exotic world? Right, exotic in quotations?

Shanny Luft: 19:29

Yeah, the new movie definitely feels like an East versus West. Kinda like the monsters represent, like people's right. That's how I read it. Right? There's like, King Kong is like the representative United States and Godzilla is the representative of Japan.

Cary Elza: 19:44

I don't quite so I don't know if it maps that cleanly, honestly. Because Because we, you know, we have we have these castes, these multicultural castes, we go all across the globe. And it seems to me that the real enemy in this movie, right is multinational corporations Yeah, capitalism. You're right. It's cat. It's capitalism, because mechagodzilla is the real is the real problem. Yeah, I'm not. I see, I see that. And I and I don't write like, I'm not sure that it maps that cleanly. And I hadn't thought of it that way. But yeah, King Kong does seem to be friendlier than Godzilla. There's the possibility of communicating with King Kong. Yeah, I'm not sure I just think about that for a minute.

Valerie Barske: 20:36

I agree that it can't be that clean, have a read, write, it can't be quiet. It's got to be Messier. But there is something happening as we build up these interactions between these two big characters. There's some reference to world superpowers or what the dynamics are in the world. I do think it's significant. We can circle back to the there's a whole scene in Hong Kong. But I'm saying but they're completely ignorant of what's happening in terms of upwards of democracy and the place that Hong Kong lives between kind of Euro American having been a British territory, and now return to China. Like, I feel like Hong Kong is also significant in the location of this film.

Shanny Luft: 21:14

I couldn't get any sense that the movie had any sensitivity or awareness of the real Hong Kong that exists in the world, including the fact that this Hong Kong is empty, right? It has enormous giant buildings that should have housed millions of people. There are no people in it. It is the opposite of the original Godzilla, where they cut to people, like that woman huddling with her children, you do not see any reference to the human toll of what King Kong and Godzilla are doing right in that battle that takes place at the end should kill millions of human beings. There are no depictions of any impact on any human beings, the last 30 minutes of movie look like a child playing with toys.

Cary Elza: 21:59

Yeah, and I was I during all of this, I was kind of struck by the similarities to Pacific Rim to del Moro, one the good one. Yeah. And and I was just looking up here where the battles took place, because it was like, it looks so similar to Pacific Rim. And yeah, the battles are in Hong Kong, and Pacific Rim. And I think part of that is just is honestly a visual choice. But you're right, you're right, Valerie, that they can't be ignorant of this. I mean, this is a film that is designed to work overseas. It's a it's a film that is designed to do well at the International Well, I say box office, but it's designed to do well with international streaming. Right It is it is calculated like many of these large blockbusters bar to appeal specifically, specifically to Chinese audiences as well, which is where now American blockbusters make a lot of their money. So they must take that into consideration when making a movie, this flippin expensive, so they can't be ignorant of this. So I don't know, I think that perhaps we can. And we could maybe map on this this fight between the East and the West in Hong Kong as having a greater significance I can, I can see that. I can do that.

Shanny Luft: 23:16

The other thing about Godzilla, that strikes me not just the character, not just in this film, but just the character in general, it's Godzilla always seems connected to Japan's relationship with the United States. It seems the constant Godzilla and King Kong seem just endlessly connected to one another. And Godzilla seems always about the complex relationship that Japan has with America. And Valerie, I wanted you to talk about that.

Valerie Barske: 23:40

There what there is a complex kind of love hate, loving, falling in love with your captive, your capture kind of thing going on between the US and Japan in the 1950s and 60s, the King Kong comes out I think, in 62, Godzilla versus King Kong, and they've just gone through this tumultuous experience of what is the new US Japan Security Treaty, the omble juliaca, what is that going to look like? And there was a bunch of like railroading by the Liberal Democratic Party. There's all this kind of political manipulation happening.

Shanny Luft: 24:10

Well, that's the next thing I wanted to talk about is from my childhood, my childhood of thinking about Godzilla movies, I had remembered Godzilla being a protector of Japan, because there are a couple of movies where that seems to happen, right where Godzilla climbs up out of the water swims up out of the oceans, and then destroys a monster that is in fact attacking Japan. And so Godzilla becomes like their avatar, right? He becomes like the defender of Japan. So I was curious going into the new movie. What how are they going to depict Godzilla's relationship with the nation of Japan? Is Godzilla their their national avatar their representative like at the Olympics, right? These these monster movies are like every nation submits a monster to the Olympics. They'll punch each other, or is Godzilla going to be more like a force of nature, like in the original? And it was it was more like the latter, I thought, right? Godzilla is just a force of nature. He's destroying, but in a way that he's not conscious of. Right. And then in other ways Godzilla in the movie seems to create a relationship with Kong. I'm trying to understand Godzilla's personality, right? Is he a monster to be afraid of? Or is he like Godzilla, our friend who will come rescue us when we need him?

Valerie Barske: 25:28

But I think it depends on who's doing the depicting. So in your Shin Godzilla majida. So Shin gojira, meaning the new Godzilla came out, I think it was 2016 or 2017. You know, the prime minister and and others Ave were saying, oh, but we should be proud of this. It was for him a chance to re militarize Japan, and Japan is going to be this great nation. And, and Godzilla could be a symbol of that. And that was post Fukushima. Right. So I do think it matters. What is it Hollywood? Is it Tokyo? Who's doing the representation of Godzilla and who's appropriating him they for for what purposes matters? I think.

Cary Elza: 26:09

Right. And I was gonna say he's, you know, he, he's not like, nuclear power itself. Right. it you know, it depends, like, it depends on the situation, right? I do get the sense in in this movie and in the 2014 Godzilla, that, you know, he he is uncontrollable, right, but she can work either for or against you, depending on how you treat him and communicate with him. Right. So they, by the end of this movie, where it's the it becomes clear that the real enemy is not Godzilla, the real enemy is runaway corporate power, and overreaching and technology that Godzilla is our friend in to protect us from ourselves from our own delusions of God like Grandmaster Godzilla, the other Titans are there to remind us that we are not the sole inhabitants of this planet. And that was made way more explicit in the Godzilla King of the Monsters movie. Yeah, the 2019 one in which, which was not as I don't know, I hesitate to be reductive, but I don't think it was quite as good as this one. But that had a really explicit like metaphor of climate climate change and taking care of the planet and all of these Titans are rising up right and, and, you know, we have to make sure that the right Titans are in control. And and we have to make sure that we take care of the planet so that the Titans like kind of like lovecraftian old ones, don't just decide to take it back from us. I definitely get that sense that Godzilla is Godzilla was threat versus benevolence changes based on the circumstances.

Shanny Luft: 28:03

So that wraps up the conversation that focused primarily on the history of Godzilla and on King Kong. Thank you so much for listening. And thank you, Carrie Elsa and Valerie Barskie, for joining me. Please come back in two weeks and listen to Carrie, Valerie, and I talk about 2021's Godzilla vs. King Kong.

Gretel Stock: 28:23

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