Wrote this for school this semester. Ehhh, it turned out decent.
DOWN WITH WORD LIMITS
2000 IS NOT ENOUGH
FIGHT THE POWER
Blade Runner and Mothra vs. Godzilla: Expressions of
Economic Paranoia
Since
the inception of film, directors have been using this versatile medium to
express religious, political and moral beliefs, and to convey specific emotions
and feelings to their audiences. Some films overtly critique governments or
dictators and have explicit allegorical messages, and others are more vague and
subdued in their expressions. Two films that can be seen as expressions of fear
and paranoia regarding rapid economic expansion in Japan are Ridley Scott's 1982 film Blade Runner and Ishiro Honda's 1964
"kaiju-eiga" Mothra vs Godzilla.
These films were made in different decades by different directors in two very
different countries and contain varying subject matter, but each one distinctly
expresses fear that rapid economic growth in Japan may not have a positive
effect on their respective countries. Both of them use techniques of
"Othering" to portray another culture as alien and unknown and warn
against the perils of rapid industrialization and economic growth.
Ridley
Scott's film Blade Runner takes place
in a futuristic, dystopian version of Los
Angeles . While this setting may seem familiar to the
film's Western audiences, the famous city where it is set is much different
than it appears in the real world. The theme of rapid industrialization and
economic growth is established in one of the very first shots of the film, a
landscape shot of the massive, sprawling city of Los Angeles in 2019. Huge smokestacks reach
up into the sky, higher than any other buildings, and spew bright flames into
the air. These smokestacks are symbols of development, progress and production,
and in these shots they look quite fearsome and dangerous, depicting industrial
development as something that can eventually become frightening if allowed to
get out of control. Many of the early scenes of the film depict a futuristic Los Angeles that appears
to be overrun with Japanese influence. Most notable are the scenes where
protagonist Deckard is flying around the city, being taken to the police so
they can enlist his help in finding some escaped "replicants" or
synthetic human beings. In these scenes, the ship Deckard is in is shown flying
through the dense, heavily populated city. Long shots show the ship cruising
past a skyscraper that is almost completely covered by a giant television
screen showing a close-up of a Japanese woman's face. She is clearly acting in
an advertisement, and appears to be dressed in traditional Japanese attire. She
is only shown from the shoulders up, but it can be seen that she is most likely
wearing a kimono. She is also wearing the white, pale makeup characteristic of
Japanese culture and her hair is tied up with flowers in it. The screen that
the woman is on occupies a large portion of the frame when it is shown and it
is clear that Scott wanted the viewer's eye to be directed to this part of the
screen, despite the fact that Deckard's ship is also travelling through the
shot. This massive, explicitly Japanese (the screen shows Japanese kanji text
instead of English words) advertisement placed squarely in the heart of one of America 's largest cities shows that in the world
of Blade Runner Japan has become a very powerful nation and
their culture has expanded, gaining a foothold in the United States .
In
her essay "Innovation: Japan Races Ahead as U.S. Falters", writer
Constance Holden says that Japan "now sees herself at the threshold of a new
era of advanced technology" (751). This essay was written in 1980, just
two years before Blade Runner was
made, when Japan
was experiencing a massive economic boom due to their increased production of
advanced technology. This contributes to Scott's portrayal of Japan as a country that is very advanced and one
that has culturally crossed over the United States . He defamiliarizes Los Angeles by bringing
in huge advertisements in the Japanese language and creating an atmosphere of
extreme multiculturalism and claustrophobia. In the decade in which this film
was made, there were concerns that Japan
could become more powerful and technologically advanced than America , and Scott's film reflects this
real-life paranoia by portraying a future where Japan
has a huge presence in America
and there are synthetic humans that are capable of escape and murder. In the
film, it is also shown that Asian people work on and help create the synthetic
humans. An Asian man who creates eyes for the replicants is in one scene in the
film, and he is shown using chopsticks to pick up the eyes that he is working
on. This "disturbing commodification of biotechnology" (Yu 54) show
how the replicants (and main antagonists) of the film are created, by people
from the East. This portrayal of the Japanese as a mysterious Other who creates
machines that have minds of their own and the ability to kill furthers Scott's
expression of Japan-related paranoia and his representation of them as an Other
to be feared in Blade Runner.
Ishiro Honda's film Mothra vs. Godzilla also expresses fear
and uncertainty over rapid Japanese economic expansion and contains fearful
depictions of a mysterious Other, but it does this in different ways and from a
completely opposite perspective. Instead of viewing Japan
as the Other, a country becoming more and more advanced that will eventually
overtake and occupy America ,
Honda's film views Japanese economic growth from within Japan , and expresses concern that
industrialization can go too far. In this monster film, a giant egg is
discovered after a typhoon and is eventually revealed to have come from the
beast Mothra. The egg is brought ashore and very quickly sold to Japanese
businessmen. This is the first instance of Honda's film portraying
industrialization as negative. In an early scene in the film, the news reporter
from whose perspective the majority of the film is shown confronts the man who
purchased the egg. The businessman is immediately portrayed as an unreasonable
man, telling everyone to back away from his
egg. When journalist Ichiro Sakai tells him that he does not think that the
egg can be considered private property and he should not have been permitted to
buy it, he simply says that he will share it with the public, as long as they
pay him to see it. In buying the egg and using it for his own financial gain,
the businessman is exploiting nature that he has no right to buy, as the egg
rightfully belongs to Mothra. Jarome Shapiro notes that the industrialist
"is very Western in his desire to contain or control nature, rather than
live in harmony with it" (182). This is interesting, because in an
inversion of Ridley Scott's representation of Japan
in Blade Runner, Honda depicts
Japanese economic growth as something negative that is caused by Western attitudes
toward nature and development encroaching upon Japan .
Westernized
attitudes toward economic expansion is not the only thing in Honda's film that
is portrayed as an Other. Godzilla is also a mysterious force that appears to
be bent on dismantling Japan ,
a "violent, yet sympathetic, force in nature" (Shapiro 185).
Interestingly enough, Japan 's
only defense against the destruction of Godzilla comes from the very egg that
is taken over by those who seek to use it for monetary gain. This symbol of
nature that is being corrupted by industrialism for the sake of corporate
growth hatches into two Mothra larvae that spray silk fibers out of their
mouths and bind Godzilla until he is forced to retreat back into the ocean. This
battle can be seen as nature correcting itself and restoring a natural balance.
Godzilla came to destroy humans and their created cities, and the Mothra larvae
were sent to stop him and protect the natural order of things. If the
businessmen who initially bought the egg had been allowed to have their way
with it, it is possible that the egg may not have hatched into the monsters
that saved the island from Godzilla and he would have been allowed to rampage
endlessly, causing untold destruction.
While
Godzilla is a very distinct Other in that he is a giant creature resembling
nothing in the natural world, Mothra is portrayed as an Other quite
differently. In similar fashion to Ridley Scott's transposition of the modern
city of Los Angeles
to a fictionalized, futuristic one that is almost unrecognizable, Honda's film
takes a common insect (a moth) and blows it up to massive size, creating a
massive, mysterious beast out of a small, harmless creature. This
defamiliarization of an organism that is already known to people in the real
world creates an Other that is much different than Godzilla, who is also much
more mysterious in his purpose. Godzilla exists to destroy, but Mothra's role
in the film is that of a guardian. Yet another group of Others in this film are
the native people that inhabit the island where Mothra lives. These people
appear to know a great deal about what goes on in the outside world and say
that Godzilla is the Japanese people's own fault, their consequence for
"playing with the devil's fire", an obvious reference to nuclear tests
and experimentation. This can be seen as another critique of Japanese
industrialization and economic growth having negative effects, as the leader of
the tribe of natives talks about how their island used to be a beautiful, green
place before the experiments began. Nuclear experimentation was a controversial
subject at the time, just as biological engineering and cloning are both now
and when Blade Runner came into
existence.
Blade Runner and Mothra vs. Godzilla are two films that appear very different on the
surface. The only immediately apparent similarity between them is the fact that
they are both easily recognizable as films in the science fiction genre.
However, despite the different countries of origin and being made almost two
decades apart from one another, they both contain very interesting commentary
on the rapid economic growth that was occurring in Japan between 1964 and 1982. Each
of these films expresses paranoia and fear related to Japanese
industrialization in different ways, and from different cultural perspectives. In
addition to this, both films have their own ways of "Othering"
specific cultures or monsters in their respective universes, making them appear
mysterious or dangerous. Ridley Scott and Ishiro Honda each made a film that is
distinctly different from the other's, but both of these works contain similar
subtexts in reference to Japan .
Works Cited
Holden, Constance. "Japan Races Ahead as U.S. Falters." Science. vol. 210. Nov 14, 1980. pp. 751-754. Web. Apr 4 2015.
Shapiro, Jerome. "When a God
Awakes: Symbolism in Japan 's
Mysterious Creature Movies."
World and I.
vol. 13.5. May 1998. pp. 182. Web. Apr 5 2015.
Yu, Timothy. "Oriental Cities
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