Alex Adams / January 31, 2022

As Godzilla walked away into the sea in the closing shot of Terror of Mechagodzilla (1975), Japanese film studio Toho seemed to kiss their bellicose lizard goodbye forever. After fifteen explosive (and increasingly audacious) films over the course of 21 delirious years, the curtain finally fell and the lights finally came up. But of course, Godzilla is immortal: after nine long years, Toho resurrected the creature for Godzilla 1984, a thirtieth anniversary blank slate follow-up to the 1954 original. Also known as The Return of Godzilla and simply Godzilla, Godzilla 1984 is what we would now call a reboot: part remake, part sequel, a fresh start that retrieved some things from Godzilla’s past while discarding others.

And it discarded a lot. Every character and event—every wacky monster, every alien invasion—featured in every previous sequel, from the often-overlooked quickie follow-up Godzilla Raids Again (1955) to Terror of Mechagodzilla, was unceremoniously chucked in the bin. Retrieved: the aesthetic restraint and doom-laden tone of Ishiro Honda’s 1954 original. Godzilla was back, and it was mean. This new iteration, the last of the Cold War period, is something of an outlier in the Godzilla canon: stylistically distinct from the movies that precede and follow it, with a unique monster design and a feel all of its own. But it is also an interesting oddity among pop culture of the time, because the movie shows the Soviet and American nuclear powers, usually at one another’s throats, cooperating to eliminate an existential threat bigger than either of them. The film also reflects with unusual frankness on Japan’s geopolitical position as a minor power forced to stand up to both the US and the Russians, and, much like other high-profile sci-fi of the age, it is a powerful warning about the perils—and futility—of nuclear confrontation. A Godzilla movie of unusual sobriety, Godzilla 1984 tells us a lot about Cold War Japan, and the film’s Americanization as Godzilla 1985 a year later tells us perhaps even more about the politics of Cold War cultural production in the United States.

Close to the Brink: Godzilla 1984 and Nuclear Confrontation

Godzilla 1984 has a straightforward plot that interweaves two main stories, one focused on the scientific attempts to understand and contain Godzilla, and the other on the political ramifications of the monster’s unexpected rebirth. When Godzilla (played here with characteristic muscularity by Heisei-era suit actor Kenpachiro Satsuma) bursts out of a volcano, the Japanese authorities attempt, at first, to keep its re-emergence a secret, hoping that the creature will lay low and not cause any trouble. However, Godzilla soon forces their hand by destroying a Soviet submarine and almost provoking a catastrophic confrontation between the two nuclear superpowers. The uncovering of this secret quells the international tension, as it proves that no intentional provocation took place. Soon enough, however, Godzilla rampages through Tokyo, devastating the city and causing a Soviet nuclear missile to be remotely launched by accident. The Japanese Self-Defense Forces stop Godzilla with cadmium bombs and the US military launches a counter-missile, detonating the rogue warhead in the atmosphere above Tokyo. But the fallout from the blast reanimates Godzilla once again, and the only way to stop the beast is to lure it into another volcano using the insights gleaned from the scientific research of Professor Hayashida (Yosuke Natsuki). Falling back into the flames and lava of the underworld, Godzilla burns to death.

Godzilla 1984 is, then, the most direct engagement with Cold War themes to be found in the Godzilla series. Where the earlier films of the Shōwa period (1954-1975) addressed geopolitical matters playfully and obliquely through surreal symbolism and space opera allegory, Godzilla 1984 has explicit political themes front and center and throughout. Godzilla’s rebirth is the trigger event so widely dreaded in the 1980s: a sudden, destabilizing, and unpredictable crisis that threatens the delicate geopolitical balance and pushes the world closer to mutually assured destruction.

But though World War 3 may loom menacingly, Godzilla 1984 dispels the threat of nuclear war relatively quickly. The film’s concern is not the fear that an apocalyptic exchange of annihilations will take place between the nuclear powers, because, as mentioned above, the revelation of Godzilla’s responsibility for the destruction of the nuclear submarine quickly calms these fears. The specific and more nuanced fear that the film exploits is that a “slippery slope” effect could result from the use of nuclear weapons in this emergency. Times of crisis are, after all, times of temptation: when things get tough, the option to discard sensitive ethical principles and use brute force to solve problems seems ever more persuasive—as the Japanese were, of course, well aware, having been the victims of American nuclear aggression. Godzilla 1984 is that rare cultural artifact that doesn’t portray crisis as a time when an exception can be made. Instead, the movie foregrounds the struggle to stand by one’s principles when they are most sorely tested.          

This concern is most pronounced in a scene roughly halfway through the film. American and Soviet negotiators attempt to persuade the Japanese Prime Minister Seiki Mitamura (Keiju Kobayashi) to allow the use of nuclear weapons against Godzilla on Japanese territory. Harangued on both sides, the Prime Minister eventually stands firm in his anti-nuclear convictions. Pacifist principles mean nothing, he says, if we abandon them when they become inconvenient. More than anything, then, the film is a reaffirmation of Japan’s anti-militarist credo, enshrined into their post-war constitution in the form of a commitment to never again wage war. Even using nuclear weapons “defensively” is rejected: any deployment at all will legitimize their use and thus set a precedent that will encourage, however indirectly, their use in the future. (Of course, nuclear weapons are used, as a US missile intercepts the rogue Soviet warhead; but this is a tragic eventuality, an outcome that shows that the only justified use of nuclear weapons is itself anti-nuclear.)

This long negotiation scene also articulates a clear and passionate commentary on the Japanese national position during the Cold War. When the Japanese Prime Minister, once he’s finished discussing matters with his cabinet, plainly refuses to allow nuclear weapons to be used against Godzilla, he finishes his remarks by asking by what right the USA or Russia can demand to use these weapons on Japanese soil. “You accuse us of acting out of national pride, and maybe we are guilty of that. But what of your attitude? What right do you have to say that we should follow you? You are being selfish too.” Like the much later Shin Godzilla (2016), which sees Japanese authorities collaborating with American and French forces in their attempts to destroy the monster, Godzilla 1984 shows a Japan that can assert itself as a nation among equals, refusing to be dictated to. There is a certain nationalism here, of course, but also a tentative anti-imperialism. Both the US and Soviet ambassadors are pushy, aggressive, overconfidently combative; the Japanese PM is calm, reserved, above all human, his hands trembling as he holds his cigarette in his office and explains to his ministers how he finally managed to resolve the situation. Unlike the representatives of the nuclear powers, who seem to feel they have finally found the opportunity they crave to push the nuclear button, the Japanese—the only nation to have actually been on the receiving end of a nuclear strike—have a uniquely intimate insight into the human costs of nuclear aggression. This insight demands that they exhibit the vigilance and courage to say no, always, to nuclear weapons.

Rebirth, Resurrection

It’s not only the film’s more open approach to its political commitments that sets Godzilla 1984 apart from previous Godzilla movies. It also has grittier visuals and a more realist narrative approach, blending elements of the horror and political thriller genres into a more stylistically austere version of giant monster science fiction. The tone is darker, tragic, more serious; there are no more victory dances, special moves, speech bubbles, child protagonists, or plucky kaiju sidekicks. In place of these fun, carnivalesque elements that characterize many of Godzilla’s later Shōwa features, Godzilla 1984 prioritizes Godzilla annihilating Tokyo by night while the itchy trigger fingers of global superpowers threaten nuclear winter. The film’s opening has a pulpy horror feel, featuring spooky green lighting, grisly gloop and grue, and corpses sucked dry by a giant facehugger-esque sea-tick. Its closing movement is slow, quiet, elegiac, full of moments of aching stillness as the confused monster is led to its doom. Like only three other Godzilla films (the original, Roland Emmerich’s 1998 Godzilla, and Shin Godzilla), Godzilla does not fight another monster, allowing the primal majesty of the monster itself to take center stage.

This majesty feels a little understated, though, as Godzilla’s redesign is only partially successful. There is lots to love, particularly in the creature’s auditory profile. The crashes and booms of its stomping feet are satisfyingly cacophonous, and the roar is more animalistic, guttural, and thunderous—more, in short, like the roar found in the original Godzilla and less like the more jovial skreeonk heard throughout the comparatively light-hearted sequels of the 1960s and ’70s. On the other hand, the suit often looks goofy due to its clunky articulation and static, inexpressive eyes; and compared with Godzilla’s previous destructive antics, the rampage through Tokyo feels lukewarm and low-energy. But it is the characterization of Godzilla as what director Koji Hashimoto calls “a living conflict of evil and sadness” that ultimately makes the new Godzilla an effective beast. Though critics have dismissed Godzilla’s slow movement in this movie as aimless, dawdling, and boring, the monster seems more sympathetic, and more interesting, when interpreted as a confused, hapless, and hungry creature struggling to understand the world around it. Neither a conquering embodiment of sheer, malicious onslaught or a swashbuckling, child-friendly superhero, Godzilla appears here as a tragic, doomed figure, lost in a baffling and hostile environment. This iteration of Godzilla speaks to the confusion and helplessness felt by many in the face of the absurd yet terrifyingly real nuclear threat.

The deliberate strategy of positioning Godzilla 1984 as more grown-up, more aesthetically mature, is an attempt to refurbish Godzilla’s reputation, to wipe away the embarrassment of the increasingly goofy Shōwa years. Many fans (myself included) love the more freewheeling 1970s films, with their wackier stories and more outré characterizations—such as the space cockroaches using an amusement park to infiltrate human society in Godzilla Vs. Gigan (1972), the sentient robot Jet Jaguar who helps Godzilla destroy an avenging hollow earth cockroach in Godzilla Vs. Megalon (1973), and the dog-god King Caesar who helps destroy Godzilla’s metal doppelganger in Godzilla Vs. Mechagodzilla (1974). But Steve Ryfle, in his book Japan’s Favorite Mon-Star, speaks for many when he calls the post-Destroy All Monsters (1968) movies Godzilla’s “dark days” because of the dramatic drop in both seriousness and production value.

And it is true that these later stock footage-laden sequels were made on lower budgets, catered to a younger audience, and saw decreasing ticket sales. The rise of TV kept audiences away from the cinema, and genre competition from the likes of American import Star Wars, rival studio Daiei’s turtle kaiju Gamera, and TV sensation Ultraman dethroned Godzilla from his status as King of the Monsters, demoting him into a mid-field also-ran no longer able to dominate at the box office. This reduction in quality is reflected in the critical consensus around these later movies, which very often dismisses them as tacky pop culture crap that reflects poorly on the brooding arthouse gravitas of the 1954 original. “Americans in particular,” writes Den of Geek, “were coming to see Godzilla films as a punchline, as the cheapest of the cheap and the dumbest of the dumb.” The child-friendly animation series by Hanna-Barbera (1978-79), with its fairy-tale tone, grating levity, and the Scrappy Doo-esque mini-monster Godzooky, did nothing to counter this reputation.

These judgements about the cultural value of entertainment clearly influenced the creative process of Godzilla 1984. If this new incarnation was to be taken as seriously as its creators felt Godzilla deserved, the film needed to comprehensively parade its seriousness. It has its moments of humor and brightness, of course, but the movie’s color palette is dominated by blacks, grays, and reds; its soundtrack is an opulent mixture of the heavily percussive and the orchestrally mournful; and its conclusions (both narrative and philosophical) are somber. For some critics—notably the condescending Roger Ebert, who said in his error-filled one-star review that the movie deliberately echoed “the absurd dialogue, the bad lip-synching, the unbelievable special effects, the phony profundity” of the original—this was not a task worth taking time over. But for others, the return to darkness is a return to form, and the movie was successful enough to initiate a run of six increasingly flamboyant sequels. From 1989 to 1995, a new series of “versus films” would feature wild, bizarre plots worthy of the Shōwa era and a newly threatening, grimly charismatic Godzilla.   

Your Favorite Fire-Breathing Monster… Like You’ve Never Seen Him Before! 

Godzilla’s history is, to an extent at least, a history of cross-cultural communication. As Japan modernized rapidly in the decades after the Second World War, its popular cultural export business, including anime and manga (from the surreal darkness of Akira and Ghost in the Shell to the melancholy whimsy of Studio Ghibli), extreme horror movies by auteurs such as Takashi Miike (whose 1999 Audition and 2001 Ichi the Killer pushed the horror envelope at home and abroad), video gaming platforms and characters including Nintendo, PlayStation, and Pokemon, and popular toy lines such as Gundam Wing and Bandai’s two brands Transformers and Machine Robo (known in the West as Gobots), constituted one of the most important aspects of its economic recovery. Tokusatsu—special effects movies, including kaiju movies—were no small part of this outpouring of soft power.

But Godzilla’s history in the West is also, in large part, a history of bowdlerization. Godzilla: King of the Monsters! (1956) was a tonally sympathetic adaptation of the 1954 original; it retained a great deal of the original performances and much of the best effects work, adding Steve Martin (Raymond Burr), an American journalist functioning as a focalizing character who narrated the plot more or less directly to the audience. For years, however, Toho’s poor grasp of overseas licensing meant that US distributors (keen to exploit the films financially, but utterly unsentimental about their content) were often free to butcher subsequent movies willy-nilly, adding stock footage, new music, and comically bad dubbing. Though the rationale for these editorial intrusions was usually that such changes were intended to make the films more accessible to non-Japanese audiences, some of the interventions seem brutal and ludicrous to later viewers, many of whom prefer to see the films as close to the way their original creators intended as possible. Godzilla’s first sequel, Godzilla Raids Again, was recut and retitled Gigantis! The Fire Monster (1959)—as well as stuffing it with stock footage and giving it a patronizing explanatory voice-over, the adaptors even changed Godzilla’s name—and sequel number two, King Kong Vs. Godzilla, had vital scenes of exposition, comedy, and characterization stripped out and replaced with a talking head newscaster who directly and listlessly explained the plot to the audience.

Compared with rough handling like this, Godzilla 1985 is a mostly thoughtful and considerate adaptation of Godzilla 1984. Much as the Japanese version is a blank slate reboot of the original Godzilla, the American recut is a direct sequel to Godzilla: King of the Monsters! And, like its predecessor, Godzilla 1985 features a light-touch streamlining of the narrative, a reasonably proficient dub, and the retention of much of the original score. That said, Godzilla 1985 has its share of problems. Reviews were generally poor, with critics often targeting the special effects, which seemed old-fashioned and underwhelming to US audiences now used to the visual wonders experienced in films like Alien (1979), Blade Runner (1982), and The Terminator (1984). “Though special-effects experts in Japan and around the world have vastly improved their craft in the last 30 years,” wrote the New York Times, “you wouldn’t know it from this film.” Elsewhere, the adaptation process itself took flak. A redundant sub-plot featuring American military characters, which is shot on a visibly flimsy set and padded with silly jokes, was added. On this count, Steve Ryfle is particularly withering, noting that this narrative element makes Godzilla 1985 “a dead serious Japanese monster movie interrupted every ten minutes or so by pointless vignettes featuring (mostly bad) American actors, including a wisecracking military punk who should be shot.”     

But this is the least of it. Godzilla 1985 is now notorious for its extraordinarily heavy-handed Dr Pepper product placement. Dr Pepper stumped up a proportion of the cash for the reshoots, and they demanded a lot in return. As a result, the American characters approvingly sip the beverage in the war room and converse in front of a dazzlingly bright vending machine. In the campy tie-in promo adverts, Godzilla attacks Tokyo in search of the soft drink, and his picky girlfriend Lady Godzilla demands the diet version. Though the tonal reset of Godzilla 1984 sought to distance Godzilla from the sillier aspects of the monster’s reputation, the studios responsible were clearly happy enough to exploit this reputation for marketing and promotional purposes.       

Perhaps most importantly, however, Raymond Burr reprises his role as the journalist Steve Martin, appearing here as a world-weary father figure summoned by the US military for his insight into the original disaster. Legend has it that Burr had a profound influence on the project, rewriting or extemporizing lines, refusing to drink Dr Pepper, and forcing the production team to take the subject matter seriously. Whether or not these stories are apocryphal—a recent piece in fanzine Kaiju Ramen suggests that there is little evidence to actually support such tales—Burr definitely brings a certain hammy seriousness to the new scenes without which they would be much the poorer. Much as the Japanese Prime Minister is the voice of conscience in Godzilla 1984, in Godzilla 1985 Martin is a grizzled and wise elder who dampens the youthful enthusiasm of the American military officers with his cynical testimony from the past. Martin offers nuggets of expertise about Godzilla’s behavior, expertise gained from his exposure to the beast but also, it is implied, from years of thoughtful reflection on the matter. He is clear, for instance, that military force will yield no results. “Firepower of any kind or magnitude is not the answer,” he states. “Godzilla’s like a hurricane or a tidal wave. We must approach him as we would a force of nature. We must understand him, deal with him, perhaps even try to communicate with him.”

The movie closes with an ominous monolog delivered by Burr, which is rich in metaphysical claims about humanity’s inability to challenge the colossal natural forces that Godzilla represents:

Nature has a way sometimes of reminding man of just how small he is. She occasionally throws up the terrible offsprings of our pride and carelessness to remind us of how puny we really are in the face of a tornado, an earthquake, or a Godzilla. The reckless ambitions of man are often dwarfed by their dangerous consequences. For now, Godzilla, that strangely innocent and tragic monster, has gone to her. Whether he returns or not, or is never again seen by human eyes, the things he has taught us remain.

Godzilla 1985 is, then, much more didactic than Godzilla 1984, and by hammering the message home so hard it also loses a lot of its subtlety and sophistication. Much of the complexity of the negotiation scenes is stripped out, for example, replacing the debate among the Japanese cabinet with a straightforward refusal to countenance nuclear weapons. This retains the superficial anti-nuclear message of Godzilla 1984 but cuts out the discussion of Japan’s right to participate as an international equal, reducing the thorny discussion of Japan’s delicate geopolitical position to a flat and peremptory rejection of nuclear weapons. Removing these scenes and inserting far less interesting pontifications on man’s relationship with nature—“Godzilla’s a product of civilization. Men are the only real monsters,” says Professor Hayashida—may make the film more palatable to international audiences (although it’s not clear how we would know whether this is really true), but they do so at the cost of dampening and impoverishing the movie’s political insights. Godzilla 1984 gives us a glimpse into Japan’s Cold War position; Godzilla 1985 gives us pompous platitudes about the power of nature.

This distortion is found throughout other American adaptations of Godzilla. In Emmerich’s Godzilla, the monster is awoken by French nuclear testing in the Pacific, and Gareth Edwards’s Godzilla (2014) reframes US nuclear testing in the 1950s as attempts to kill Godzilla. Edwards’s film (as well as its sequel, 2019’s Godzilla: King of the Monsters) does feature Dr. Serizawa’s father’s stopped pocket watch, a family heirloom from Hiroshima, but in general there is a tendency in US adaptations to minimize American historical responsibility for the actual use of nuclear weapons against human targets. Godzilla 1985 is notable in this regard, as perhaps its most striking change is that the Russians are transformed into nuclear aggressors. Where the Russian officer tries desperately to stop the launch in Godzilla 1984, in Godzilla 1985 this scene is subtly recut to indicate that the Russian’s dying struggle is in fact motivated by his desire to ensure that the missile is launched. To the last breath, the Soviets are murderous villains.   

This extraordinary political about-face, in which the movie is changed from a piece of anti-nuclear pacifism to a piece of Reaganite anti-Soviet propaganda, is explained, in part at least, by the conservative politics of the owners of New World Pictures. Originally started by B-movie legend Roger Corman, by 1985 New World was owned by execs Larry Kupin, Harry E. Sloan, and Larry A. Thompson, whose conservative affiliations led to the studio cutting out valuable scenes examining Japan’s right to refuse the demands of the two nuclear superpowers, as well as cynically turning the Soviets into villains. For many viewers this change is not only nonsensical and ridiculous but actively undermines the longstanding political commitments of the Godzilla franchise. Another reviewer writes that in Godzilla 1985 “the Russians take the place of all those goofy alien races that populated the 1960s and 70s-era Godzilla movies.” The Kilaaks and Xiliens were, I have written elsewhere, allegories for aggressive imperial powers; in this light, it is particularly disappointing that Godzilla 1985 makes this change. Where Toho’s previous films—and, indeed, Godzilla 1984—are critical of imperialism, Godzilla 1985 is a piece of imperial propaganda directly engaged in the Reaganite public relations project of demonizing Communism.

In the final analysis, however, Godzilla 1985 is perhaps more interesting than Godzilla 1984. Its distortions of the Japanese version throw light on what is most compelling about the original, and there is a lot of apocrypha to go around to boot. It is fun, for instance, to imagine the trepidation of the production staffer tasked with asking Raymond Burr to approvingly quaff Dr Pepper before delivering a line about man’s fragility in the face of the overwhelming mystery of nature. And home video sales of Godzilla 1985 were a major success, contributing massively to the continued overseas popularity of Godzilla. It is only a shame, then, that no official home video release of Godzilla 1985 exists, at least not here in the UK where I’m writing from. While Toho is putting out Godzilla hot sauce, Godzilla coffee, and Godzilla drinking chocolate, it remains the task of amateur preservationists to ensure that the films themselves remain in circulation. 

Godzilla 1984 generated six sequels over the next eleven years, with a revamped Godzilla battling old foes King Ghidorah, Mothra, and Mechagodzilla, as well as new creatures Biollante, Spacegodzilla, and Destoroyah. These Heisei-era versus films represent the franchise’s first sustained attempt at the sort of inter-film continuity that modern audiences recognize and expect, with a consistent set of characters, later films following up on previous movies, and something of a long-term narrative arc. For me, this sequence of films also represents some of the highest points of the entire franchise, as they feature glittering and pyrotechnically adventurous practical effects at their most wondrous, monster design that is iconic and inventive, and some of the most interesting themes in the series, from the dystopian vision of bioweaponry and espionage in Godzilla Vs Biollante (1989), to the hopeful environmentalism of Godzilla Vs Mothra (1992), to the detonation-heavy antimilitarism of Godzilla Vs Mechagodzilla II (1993). The late Cold War oddity of Godzilla 1984, then, and its much-maligned recut Godzilla 1985, would be the catalyst for a resurgence in Toho’s tokusatsu fortunes that continued long after the tensions the movie took as its subject matter were permanently transformed. The world may change around the monster, but the monster itself is immortal.

Alex Adams is a cultural critic and writer based in North East England. His most recent book, How to Justify Torture, was published by Repeater Books in 2019. He loves dogs.

Sam Moore / November 18, 2021

When an older piece of art comes back into the world, one of the first impulses is to scan through it and look for the ways in which it has aged: outworn ideas and attitudes, characters who might be seen as quote-unquote bad representation. Lynne Tillman’s Weird Fucks — originally published in 1982 and recently reissued by Peninsula Press — is instead striking for how prophetic it is. And while it might be easier to simply assume that a novella about relatively anonymous sex with a revolving door of partners would mostly speak to the ways in which cruising and hooking up have gone digital, the truth of the matter is much more complex than that. 

Each one of the novella’s chapters centers on a different relationship that the nameless protagonist has. Even as she moves from one partner to another, the supporting cast — friends, discarded boyfriends — float around in her orbit. Early on, she catches the eye of an ex, and when their eyes meet, she thinks, “George looks guilty and embarrassed. I feel wanton and he is history.” The idea of history floats as aimlessly through Weird Fucks as its cast of characters; it’s only in the latter half of the book, when the 1972 Olympics are mentioned, that the story/ies are rooted in a specific moment in time. What’s fascinating is that, rather than taking the personal and writing it large, Weird Fucks takes the macro — the relationship between power and desire; the deliberately vague references to “murders, ‘the political situation,’ as it was called” — and draws it deeply into individuals, making these people pieces on a chessboard too vast for them to comprehend, and the center of the universe all at once. 

As she moves between men and around the world, what’s interesting isn’t just the way in which this kind of shuttling between partners — while old ones still exist in the background of your life — prefigured the ways in which technology changed the way we look at, and for, desire, but also the things that have stayed the same. The tension that exists in a contemporary (re)consideration of Weird Fucks is both how much the world has changed, and how little it has. One of the narrative cores of the novella  — which informs so much of its (mis)communication about sex and desire  — is the double standard existing between men and women when it comes to sexual agency and freedom. Tillman writes: “It was difficult, very difficult, for men to understand and appreciate how someone could fling herself around sexually and not know the terms, the ground, on which she lay,” a line that could be repeated ad nauseum decades after first appearing in print and still capture something true about the ways in which men expect women to behave. The language of “the terms” here captures something that runs through much of the book  — that these relationships are microcosms of a kind of conflict, that the terms in question are really rules of engagement. 

It’s easy to oversimplify any story about the relationships between men and women as being a “battle of the sexes.” The term is most frequently applied to romantic sitcoms that have the genders of their casts divided down the middle; shows like Friends in the US and Coupling in the UK draw a line between man and woman, trying to understand what it is that keeps them apart, even when they’re endlessly getting together. But in Weird Fucks, the word “battle” feels most emphatic and important; less a battle of the sexes than a battle of sex. So much of what defines the relationships in Tillman’s novella is power — as it relates to BDSM, consent, gender. All of this is rooted in the experience of the protagonist; there’s something liberating about diving this deeply into the experience and feelings of an individual, rather than using sexual tastes and dynamics exclusively as a way to make a broader, more abstract statement. As much as these things all work across multiple levels, TiIllman never simply leaves something as merely an intellectual idea; everything is felt deeply, and that’s what gives the book the power to speak both for and beyond the experiences of the characters. 

The protagonist is full of contradictions: narcissistic enough to see herself as the center of the universe, and naïve enough to make her deeply uncertain about why her relationships go the way they do. As a lot of contemporary fiction struggles to grapple with the ins-and-outs (so to speak) of sexuality that’s informed explicitly by ideas of power and violence, there’s something striking about the acknowledgement of how these dynamics work, and the way people struggle to understand their own place in them, all packed into this one line: “I couldn’t understand why a man would want a woman in pain. I wasn’t sophisticated about sadomasochism.” In a way that’s both liberating and surprisingly naive, carrying with it an air of innocence. She often seems uncertain of how the games around her need to be played, existing outside of expectations for better or worse.

This lack of understanding goes both ways, and underscores the melancholy that runs throughout Weird Fucks. It isn’t that the novella’s protagonist is sad because of the fleeting nature of her relationships. The thing that makes the book work so well as a kind of dispatch from the frontlines on power, masculinity, and desire as something performed, is the fact that these relationships are brief but vivid — seemingly through a shared lack of the ability to communicate and understand one another. That gulf between man and woman is a dangerous space to try and move between. The other women in the book are seen as backup performers in one way or another by the protagonist, who says of one of them: “I felt she had some sympathy for me, and had watched, from her position in the chorus, other, similar young women.” If men and women can’t understand each other, the protagonist of Weird Fucks is insistent, desperate, to understand herself. In a small moment of revelation near the end of the novella, prompted by the idea that not being attracted to a certain type of a man is a personal failing, she says, “I tend towards men who aren’t as nice.” 

And it’s fair to say that the men in Weird Fucks aren’t as nice; they seem more than willing to use the women around them, and have a fuzzy understanding of how consent works: “he thought, because I hadn’t resisted, that I liked it.” This lack of understanding, and the stripped back brutality of its consequences, capture the loss of innocence, and the price of knowledge, that defines the protagonist’s journey through these strange relationships. Early on, she’s more than willing to describe herself in ways that are performative, saying “I was a slum queen and in college” in an early story, before saying, at the beginning of the end of the book: “I should have known better.” These five words echo through a lot of Weird Fucks: what she should have known, what her partners should have known; it speaks to a lack of knowledge, obviously, but also an inability to learn about one another. Knowledge doesn’t come easily or freely in Weird Fucks. Across so many of these stories, knowledge is power, and the characters are constantly trying to work out if it’s a price worth paying.

The men of Weird Fucks, as much as they simply strut and fret their hour upon the stage, are all vividly drawn through Tillman’s eye for minute details. It’s this ability to create specifics for the men that move in and out of the orbit of the protagonist — one “looked something like Richard Burton,” another is simply “blond and weak” — that makes them explicitly different, but also magnifies their similarities. The specter of violence goes beyond those not understanding consent when the protagonist has a strange entanglement with a married man: “his enthusiasm grew as I retreated inside, and as if to draw me out, reach me, he whispered bloodlessly, “‘I’d like to kill you with my cock.’” What’s prescient about Weird Fucks is how everything both is and isn’t a matter of life and death; violence is an undercurrent, and every breakup may or may not be the end of the world. The world is ending and being remade seemingly every moment, from the nameless political tension to the endlessly changing ways that people define themselves and their relationships to each other. The surface of the world changes, but all the things that lurk beneath the surface stay the same. Weird Fucks captures the world that Tillman was writing in, the world the book is set in, and a new world — that isn’t that new — all at once.

Sam Moore‘s writing on queerness, politics, and genre fiction in art has been published by the Los Angeles Review of Books, Little White Lies, Hyperallergic, and other places. Their poetry and experimental essays have been published in print and online, most recently in the Brixton Review of Books. If their writing didn’t already give it away, they’re into weird stuff.

Eve Tushnet / November 8, 2021

Dangerous Visions and New Worlds: Radical Science Fiction, 1950 to 1985
Edited by Andrew Nette and Iain McIntyre
PM Press, 2021

Disclosure: This collection includes an essay by Kelly Roberts, editor-in-chief of We Are the Mutants.

In troubled times, we must be grateful for every touch of the ridiculous. And so let’s raise a glass to psychologist and pop scientist Steven Pinker, who in his most recent book burbles forth: “Rationality is uncool.” Pinker pledges fealty to Reason, the chaste goddess, even though he “cannot argue that reason is dope, phat, chill, fly, sick, or da bomb.” This delightful complaint evokes a vanished era in which we all were just vibing on reason, knowledge, hexagons and vaccines and supercolliders and, I don’t know, eugenics. But this timeline, if it ever existed, ended long ago. For the authors whose works are explored in PM Press’s new collection, Dangerous Visions and New Worlds: Radical Science Fiction, 1950 to 1985, cool rationality was the old religion — and they were the acolytes of the strange new gods who displaced it.

Dangerous Visions is the third in a series, edited by Andrew Nette and Iain McIntyre, exploring the radical elements in pulp and genre publishing of the Cold War era. (We Are the Mutants has reviewed the first volume, on postwar youth culture, and the second, on revolution and the 1960s counterculture.) Like the first two installments, this one combines short essays with plentiful examples of weird, enticing cover art — such as a 1955 cover for 1984 that looks like nothing so much as a juvenile-delinquency pulp. The book is punctuated with little round-ups, less like essays and more like annotated lists of sci-fi on subjects like nuclear war, drugs, or animals, which show how cover illustrators could depict similar themes as dream or nightmare, action-adventure or inner journey. The “dystopias” list, for example, includes a threatening cover for Stephen King’s The Long Walk (1979) and an eerily seductive one for Mary Vigliante’s The Colony (also 1979).

The book begins with the opposing open letters published in 1968 in Galaxy Science Fiction, one supporting the war in Vietnam and the other protesting it. This contrast offers an obvious political gloss on the word “radical” in the book’s subtitle: “Radical” means left-wing politics; it means the antiwar stance of Samuel R. Delany, Philip K. Dick, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Kate Wilhelm set against the conservatism of the pro-war Marion Zimmer Bradley, L. Sprague de Camp, Robert A. Heinlein, and Larry Niven. But an early mention of the transition from the term “science fiction” to “speculative fiction” is a more accurate guide to the kind of radicalism Dangerous Visions celebrates. Both Heinlein and the pro-war R.A. Lafferty get thoughtful essays in this volume, suggesting that they, too, were in some way radical visionaries.

There’s little explicit effort to tie the works together or nail down what makes something radical, dangerous, or new. It’s a wise choice that allows the essayists to avoid fixed narratives and Procrustean politics. The new world is a place where a new kind of person lives — although many would argue that this new and dangerous person was always the only kind of person around. The old SF hero was that rational man you used to hear so much about: the imagined actor in liberal political philosophy, the person without dependents or dependencies, who confronted the stars with reason, self-control, and a spirit of adventure. He travels, as the introduction puts it, “from the suburbs to the stars.” The old guard’s heroes were white, even when they were green. The old SF hero might die, but he’d never worry about getting pregnant. Mind and body were manageable; desires were reasonable, inspiring, and above all intelligible, both to the hero himself and to the reader. Whether this is a fair description of the old-school hero, I can’t say. I only like this kind of guy when he’s played by William Shatner — in a book, I just can’t see the appeal. I can say that the works explored in the PM Press collection are rebelling against this hero. These books are populated by mystics and criminals, artists and threatened children, even animals and creatures who are some blend of human and Other. The political apparatus of the state does not enable constructive action; it provokes fear or anger. In these books knowledge is less like an equation and more like a hallucination.

Speaking of Samuel R. Delany, Dangerous Visions avoids the more thoroughly-trampled pathways in his work in favor of a 1979 memoir of his brief stint in a commune called Heavenly Breakfast. Daniel Shank Cruz highlights not only novel sexual arrangements (“they all get gonorrhea […] because intra-commune sexual encounters are commonplace”) but the group’s economic strategy of drug dealing, and its belief — perhaps even more touching and necessary now than then — “that people have value aside from their financial status, and that it is worth living with someone… even if they are unable to contribute their ‘fair share.’” “It is inaccurate to say that its members shared funds,” Cruz writes, “because many of them had no funds to share, but they all shared in the work of caring for one another.” The whole thing only lasted one winter, which the book’s subtitle calls The Winter of Love. Cruz argues that the winter with Heavenly Breakfast taught Delany that he could live in a fully new way, and infused his later work with communal values and greater “sexual openness.” Delany always insisted that the polymorphic sexual community, no matter how perverse, can offer a postsecondary education in love. Sex is his means of reasoning, not his means of getting beyond rational thought; it’s his language, not his apophatic and apocalyptic self-immolation.

And so he is the happy radical, whereas J.G. Ballard and Philip K. Dick represent more lacerating visions. Erica L. Satifka’s essay suggests that Dick’s work “reflects the at times bizarre course of his own relatively short life more than any radical political beliefs” — but if you’re literally approached by the FBI to spy on your fellow students, it’s not your life that’s weird, it’s your times. Dick lived out many of his age’s forms of altered consciousness, from psychotherapy to amphetamines; his experience with alternative homemaking was also harder than Delany’s, as he went through five divorces and found himself “invit[ing] hippies and/or junkies to live with him on a rotating basis,” which is sweet but not nostalgia fodder. All this touched his work with a poignant separation between the self and some true hidden knowledge. Ballard, by contrast, led a stable domestic life, deranged only by the surrounding culture. He expressed this derangement in funhouse-mirror worlds, dreamscapes and projections, where the shock of the real could only be attained through technology-enabled violence. And these worlds were not future but present, because, as Ballard said in the 1960s, “We live inside an enormous novel…The fiction is already there. The writer’s task is to invent the reality.” The more your world is manmade, shaped by technology and terraforming, the more you live in dreams and fetishes: the substance of our inner lives. (I’m sitting in my bedroom and I can’t see a single object I know how to make.) Delany probes wounds and bruises with his tongue and likes the taste; Ballard gets a mouthful of blood and chromium menace, the taste of a self-discovery that’s also a self-loss. Delany winds up a contented eminence grise, replete with memory like a bee with honey; Dick possibly broke into his own house, blocked out the memories, went on a paranoid tear against fellow SF luminary Stanislaw Lem, and a year later entered rehab after a suicide attempt. I love Delany’s work but his luck is too good — it veils some of the harder truths.

As with any collection, Dangerous Visions is uneven, both in the quality of its own essays and (more intentionally) in that of the works it surveys. The experiments in rebellion and discovery conducted by the books’ motley heroes (and by the authors) brought results that were sometimes exhilarating, sometimes disturbing, and sometimes both at once. An early essay on “sextrapolation” includes a lot of taboo-breaking that just seems silly or gross. The best I can say for the quotes here from Bug Jack Barron is that without them maybe we wouldn’t have actually good stories like “Aye, and Gomorrah…,” in which sex is less of a Sharper Image store and more of a mystery play. Meanwhile, a few essays in Dangerous Visions show individual style, like Nick Mamatas’s feverish, slightly aggro tribute to R.A. Lafferty, but the entire first column of Maitland McDonagh’s essay on gay adult SF is bland boilerplate. Stronger editing would have allowed McDonagh’s camp humor to emerge earlier and with less padding. Scott Adlerberg offers an essay about the radical SF of Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, authors of Roadside Picnic (later adapted by Andrei Tarkovsky as the 1979 film Stalker). The critical assessment emerges through biographical data about the grinding, increasing conflict between the brothers and the Soviet censorship apparatus: the Strugatskys seem attuned to fun, adventure, and playful anti-bureaucratic humor in the Douglas Adams vein, but the censorship and fear of a totalitarian system, including a harrowing encounter with the KGB, led them into sharper satire and more hallucinatory blurs of dream and reality. But Michael A. Gonzales’s similarly biography-focused essay on Octavia Butler avoids any real critical engagement with her work’s themes. Her mentors within the genre are listed, which is useful as part of the collection’s overall portrayal of radical SF as a community relying on particular institutions (New Worlds magazine, the Women’s Press) and central figures (in Butler’s case, the author and writing teacher Harlan Ellison). No effort is made, though, to place Butler in dialogue with larger movements, from Afrofuturism to Afro-pessimism; there’s no real exploration of her work’s vision of the body’s metamorphoses, her portrayals of youth and inheritance, her prose style — the texture of her work dissolves and she’s left as a generic Black Woman Pioneer.

Dangerous Visions, as its understanding of “radical” SF emerges, suggests unexpected links between authors: Mamatas’s essay on the gonzo Catholicism of R.A. Lafferty finds a home beside Iain McIntyre’s homage to the anti-imperialist mysticism of William Bloom, whose Himalayan action-adventure hero Qhe is a “cosmic [James] Bond.” A late essay by Donna Glee Williams contrasts the visions of anarchism in Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed and Robert A. Heinlein’s The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress. These two novels suggest possible syntheses between old and new. They both offer metaphysics and political reasoning, while still being recognizably “radical”: both take place in criminalized communities and depict alternatives to the liberal state.

The anthology opens by noting that the radicalism of its authors didn’t vanish, but disseminated itself throughout mainstream SF, suggesting a longing for some synthesis; some recognition of the poignant beauty of human reason and the quest for knowledge, alongside a taut awareness of reason’s propensity to serve violence; some hope for new communal forms of life, new mysticisms in the face of new apocalypses.

Eve Tushnet is the author of two novels, Amends and Punishment: A Love Story, as well as the nonfiction Gay and Catholic: Accepting My Sexuality, Finding Community, Living My Faith. She lives in Washington, DC and writes and speaks on topics ranging from medieval covenants of friendship to underrated vampire films. Her hobbies include sin, confession, and ecstasy.

Alex Adams / October 6, 2021

In Toho’s 1965 tokusatsu spectacular Invasion of the Astro Monster, humanity makes contact with ruthless hive-mind aliens from Planet X, a new stellar body discovered on the far side of Jupiter. The aliens who inhabit this cold, bleak planet—the Xiliens—are a technologically advanced but blankly unemotional civilization, a race of grey-clad scientists whose remarkable intellectual development has allowed them to live safely underground in the hostile, unwelcoming environment of Planet X. They propose an interplanetary trade: if the world’s authorities—Japan, the US, and the UN—will lend them Godzilla and the fire-hawk Rodan in order to fight off the murderous three-headed space dragon King Ghidorah, who has, of late, become the scourge of Planet X, the Xiliens will provide humanity with the cure for cancer. This trade sounds like a win-win, a blessing, as Earth will simultaneously be rid of its two most troublesome inhabitants and gain a medical miracle. But, of course, it is a cynical double-cross: by stealing Godzilla and Rodan, the Xiliens have captured Earth’s only defences against Ghidorah, who is in fact a living weapon under their control that they plan to use to colonize Earth. Though the “superior” race comes offering gifts, they in fact seek to subjugate and exploit.

Invasion of the Astro Monster is a potent blend of alien invasion, mind control, and interplanetary blackmail. This story, retold several times in the Shōwa era of the Godzilla franchise, is a clear engagement with themes of anti-imperialism and anti-colonialism that were very much current across the globe in the mid-1960s, a decade featuring a panoply of gruesome colonial wars the world over in Algeria, Vietnam, Angola, Kenya, and elsewhere. It is widely acknowledged that Godzilla is, as Ian Buruma writes in the BFI DVD booklet for Ishiro Honda’s original Godzilla (1954), “a profoundly political monster.” But Godzilla’s many sequels are often written off as cheap and goofy cash-ins. Big mistake. Much as US sci-fi movies like The Blob (1958), The Thing From Another World (1951) or Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) used alien encounters to think through themes of cross-cultural contact, colonialism, and communism, the Shōwa Ghidorah movies are a rich engagement with world-historical themes of Cold War antagonism, first contact, and imperial manipulation.

A History of the Dragon

Godzilla has long been understood as a powerful symbol of nuclear devastation and the horror of war. While this is true, Godzilla has taken many forms over his seventy-year career, and he has symbolized a great many things. Philip Brophy writes that Godzilla is “less a vessel for consistent authorial and thematic meaning as he is a shell to be used for the generation of potential and variable meanings.” This is true of many of his adversaries too. Monsters have always been tremendously flexible and evocative ways of digesting ideas, fears, and emotions, and Toho’s Kaiju are no exception.

King Ghidorah, an enormous three-headed golden dragon inspired by Yamata No Orochi—a fearsome eight-headed dragon from Shinto mythology—is perhaps Godzilla’s most frequently battled adversary. Along with Mechagodzilla, Rodan, Mothra, and Godzilla, King Ghidorah is one of the cornerstones of the Kaiju Big Five, and his antagonism with Godzilla headlines eight movies, with further variations on Ghidorah also appearing in Godzilla: Final Wars (2004) and the Heisei Mothra trilogy (1996-1998). In the Shōwa period (1954-1975), he is a villain in Ghidorah, The Three-Headed Monster (1964), its sequel Invasion of the Astro Monster, the blockbuster monster brawl Destroy All Monsters (1968), and, as a supporting character, in Godzilla vs. Gigan (1972). In the Heisei period (1984-1995), Godzilla vs. King Ghidorah (1991) would see Ghidorah inflicted on Japan by time-travelling saboteurs—not to mention his cyborgic resurrection as Mecha-King-Ghidorah at the film’s climax. Ten years later, Ghidorah’s role was reversed when he teamed up with Mothra and Baragon to save humanity from Godzilla in Shusuke Kaneko’s Godzilla, Mothra, King Ghidorah: Giant Monsters All-Out Attack (2001). Later in the twenty-first century, King Ghidorah once again features as Godzilla’s arch-nemesis in The Planet Eater (2018), the climactic movie of the Polygon Anime trilogy, and King of the Monsters (2019), the second movie in the ongoing Legendary MonsterVerse. No other monster confronts Godzilla so many times and in so many forms. His Cold War appearances are, thematically, particularly rich and rewarding.

King Ghidorah’s first movie, Ghidorah: The Three-Headed Monster, is a crossover sequel that, through its incorporation of other successful Toho monsters into the Godzilla franchise, was the Avengers: Endgame (2019) of its day. In Rodan (1957), aggressive mining operations awaken a species of enormous and destructive prehistoric birds, and in Mothra (1961) a scientific expedition to Infant Island incurs the wrath of a colossal and beautiful winged insect. Both of these monsters would return in Ghidorah, meshing together their continuities with Godzilla’s and building a wider fictional universe overflowing with Kaiju. Both Rodan and Mothra had a clear environmentalist emphasis, but Mothra is particularly explicit with its political themes. Through its characterization of the greasy capitalist Clark Nelson as an amoral and exploitative villain and its satire of the imperialist nation “Rolisica,” the movie comments on Japan’s geopolitical conundrum: caught between the two nuclear superpowers, striving for more independence from American influence, and balancing the demands of economic prosperity and modernization with the desire to preserve traditional Japanese values. After the runaway success of King Kong Vs. Godzilla (1962/3), which fused monster spectacle with a satire of the advertising industry, Rodan and Mothra too would have their opportunity to confront Godzilla, enriching the franchise with political commentary.

The central themes of power and violence are developed iteratively through the Shōwa monster movies, from the nuclear allegory of Godzilla, the environmental anti-imperialism of the two Mothra films, and on into the Ghidorah movies, which comment much more explicitly on imperial violence and conquest. Mothra’s first sequel, Mothra vs. Godzilla (retitled in the US as Godzilla vs. The Thing) was released early in 1964, and later that year Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster hit cinema screens as a winter blockbuster. The movie’s bombastic plot saw the virtuous Mothra persuade the quarrelsome Rodan and Godzilla to team up against the alien peril Ghidorah, a beast more threatening and dangerous than anything anyone had seen before.

Perhaps the single most notable aspect of Ghidorah: The Three-Headed Monster is its lighter, more family-friendly tone. Where once they represented different flavors of doom, Rodan, Mothra, and Godzilla now come to humanity’s aid and are openly celebrated as the triumphant heroes of the hour. This broader tonal appeal has sometimes been read as a disengagement from political themes, as the movie’s crowd-pleasing entertainment value is seen as overriding any attempt to sermonize on social or political matters. Noted Godzilla investigator Steve Ryfle, for instance, writes that in this movie “high-brow issues like nuclear weapons and commercialism are abandoned in favor of pure, fast-paced escapism.” But the central antagonism in the film—the clash between the alien Ghidorah and the trio of cooperating Earthly Kaiju—in fact extends the series’ engagement with international politics even more boldly than the previous entries in the Godzilla series.

In a short tongue-in-cheek article in a 2000 issue of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Janne Nolan writes that Ghidorah’s first movie works as a compelling example of the benefits of international security cooperation. The movie “is a clear demonstration that even mutants, despite tiny brains and a Darwinian environment, can understand the imperatives of cooperative security when survival is at stake. Maybe policy-makers will be next.” Though Nolan is writing playfully here, this interpretation in fact has much to recommend it. Japan’s post-1945 constitution was written by the occupying US forces, and it placed firm restrictions on Japan’s ability to form an army of any kind. Over the following decades, this constitution and various additional security treaties that were added to it became increasingly controversial and unpopular across the political spectrum, culminating in violent protests in 1960. And there was plenty more happening abroad: China’s regional influence and nuclear weapons program were growing, and China tested its first atomic weapon two months before Ghidorah was released; the USSR was a strong and expanding regional presence; memory of the Korean War was painfully fresh; war raged, bloody and bitter, in Vietnam. Cooperative security, then (however reluctant and fragile), would be a theme that was at the forefront of many Japanese audience members’ minds in 1964.

As we have seen, the sequel Invasion of the Astro Monster (originally titled Godzilla vs. Monster Zero) followed in 1965, omitting Mothra and sophisticating the narrative. Where in his first appearance Ghidorah’s arrival on Earth had been a freak accident, in his second Ghidorah is cynically used against the Earth as part of an overtly imperialist venture by the Xiliens. Similarly, in Destroy All Monsters the Kilaak aliens hijack Earth’s monsters and unleash Ghidorah with the explicit aim of blackmailing humanity into submission. The Kilaaks announce that they come offering peace terms that humanity must accept or die; sacrifices must be made if the Kilaaks are to build the perfect world.

This rhetoric of peace is a particularly evocative element of the films’ representation of imperialism. Roman historian Tacitus famously wrote in Agricola, his history of the Roman conquest of Britain, that the Romans “make a desert and call it peace.” These words are spoken by Calgacus, a Caledonian war leader and resister of Agricola’s conquest, a “barbarian” Briton who Tacitus turns into an eloquent critic of the violence of the Roman Empire. Calgacus’s insight is that the bloodthirsty and warlike Romans, who conquer the entire world through slaughter, slavery, and pillage, cynically describe themselves as benevolent peace-bringers. Indeed, little has changed in the vocabulary of warlike empires: to this day, devastating imperial wars are justified as liberatory and civilizing, as the necessary violence that will bring enlightenment to the dark places of the world. Toho’s Astro-colonizers, too, repeatedly speak the language of peace and cooperation while preparing to annihilate or enslave humanity. In 1972’s Godzilla vs. Gigan (originally titled Earth Destruction Directive), Ghidorah is sidekick to the sinister robotic space-chicken Gigan, and once again both monsters are used against the Earth by an invading force of alien beings, this time the Nebula M aliens. In this one, huge cockroaches masquerading as humans are “striving to bring absolute peace to the whole world.” By this, the Nebula M aliens actually mean that they are plotting the eradication of humanity and the extractive exploitation of Earth’s environment and resources. 

“Oh Glenn, I am governed by electronics”

This masquerade, in which alien cockroaches appear indistinguishable from ordinary humans, is an interesting thematic overlap with a particularly politically charged Cold War form: the espionage thriller. It is of course no coincidence that the monster stories in Ghidorah movies are often complemented by espionage stories involving the human characters. This was due both to the explosive popularity of 007—Sean Connery had swaggered and snogged his way through Dr. No in 1962 and From Russia With Love in 1963, initiating a global sensation still going strong in 2021—and the rise of Japanese Yakuza crime films that were beloved by audiences. Importantly, many generic elements of Japanese crime and espionage stories (and their Western counterparts) translated particularly well to science fiction, including mind control, subterfuge, infiltration, and double-cross.

Some of the movies’ women are particularly important elements of the Cold War politics of the Shōwa Ghidorah stories. In Invasion of the Astro Monster, American astronaut Glenn’s (Nick Adams) Japanese fiancé Namikawa (Kumi Mizuno) is revealed to be in fact a Citizen of Planet X, where all women look identical—she has been sent by the ashen-faced Commander to seduce and surveil Glenn with the aim of recruiting him to the Xilien cause. Like a sexual temptress from an Ian Fleming novel, she has used her feminine wiles to compromise and manipulate our wisecracking male hero. However, in a campy yet emotionally powerful scene, she defies her programming to declare her authentic love for him—for which crime she is vaporized by her superior. “Our actions are controlled by electronic computers, not by human emotions,” explains the Xilien who coldly murders Namikawa. “When that law is violated, the offender is eliminated.” Likewise, in Destroy All Monsters, Kyoko Manabe (Yukiko Kobayashi) has a small metal receiver implanted into her earrings, and, robotically, she follows the Kilaaks’ every broadcasted command, blithely sowing destruction wherever she goes.

Brainwashing was a major cause of political panic in the late 1950s and early 1960s. American POWs, horribly traumatized by their torture in communist re-education camps, were filmed falsely accusing themselves of war crimes, refusing repatriation, and regurgitating communist propaganda. This extreme ideological indoctrination was dehumanizing, depersonalizing, humiliating, and appeared particularly terrifying because it seemed to show that the human brain could be rewired or manipulated to the extent not only that the prior personality was eliminated but, worse, that the victim appeared either blissfully unaware of or sycophantically grateful for their transformation. Very soon, however, the focus of the political panic sharpened, shifting from the suffering of the captured Americans to the possibility that repatriated soldiers could be reprogrammed into secret assassins whilst appearing, from the outside, to be respectable and well-integrated citizens.

In Richard Condon’s 1959 novel The Manchurian Candidate (famously adapted by John Frankenheimer in 1962), for example, the stepson of a prominent anti-communist senator is brainwashed and used as a remote-control communist assassin. The double agent, unaware of his own programming, is memorably described as “Caesar’s son to be sent into Caesar’s chamber to kill Caesar.” Soon enough, of course, this would shift once more into a more generalized scaremongering about Soviet indoctrination, sleeper agents, and totalitarian mind control that clearly influenced Toho’s Ghidorah movies. The enemy who seems concerned for our safety but who secretly plots our violent demise—the double-crossing double agent, the indoctrinated infiltrator—was a very widespread Cold War bogeyman, and he remains with us today in the modified form of the secretive “lone wolf” terrorist living and moving among us.

“The standard message” of the science fiction film, writes Susan Sontag in 1966’s Against Interpretation, “is the one about the proper, or humane, use of science, versus the mad, obsessional use of science.” Later: “Science is magic, and man has always known that there is black magic as well as white.” The black magic of mind control is one of the most enduring aspects of Cold War political panic. In their attempts to “scientifically” understand Communist brainwashing, the CIA developed the MKUltra program, a set of gruesome torture sessions masquerading as scientific investigations into the limits of human endurance. This program (and the assumptions about the scientific possibility of directing the human mind that underpin it) has continued to have terrible ramifications into the present, as psychologists were brought in to develop the post-9/11 torture program, pseudoscientifically dignifying scandalous mistreatment by presenting it as a controlled and methodical process of scientific investigation. In each of these cases, black magic is not magic at all, but simply, and sadly, torture. Of course, it is overreach to suggest that the Shōwa Ghidorah movies are about CIA torture; but it is clearly true that brainwashing and mind control have always been deeply political concerns.

King Ghidorah: A Political Demonology

The four Shōwa movies featuring Ghidorah are, then, remarkably thematically consistent. Alien invasion, subterfuge, mind control, and monster cooperation (a kind of Kaiju anti-imperialism) are central to each of them. Most fundamental, however, is the theme of power. Ghidorah is, after all, a King: a total sovereign, breathing fire, exercising absolute and arbitrary power over everything he surveys. It’s true that there is a lot of knockabout fun involved, but the Shōwa Ghidorah movies are also vibrant explorations of authoritarian power, of the political totalitarianism that was so powerful and such an omnipresent concern in the mid-20th century. Importantly, too, a major part of the appeal of the films is their ambiguity. It’s difficult, after all, to say exactly which empire Ghidorah’s villainous commanders are supposed to represent, and, in any case, pinning it down to one definite answer would only diminish the sloshy, sticky generosity of the metaphor.

But it is nonetheless interesting to think it through in terms of concrete possibilities. Since the relationship to the US was a matter of considerable controversy in 1960s Japan, the Astro-colonizers in these movies could well represent America—that most powerful and potentially violent of international actors, the occupier turned ally whose boot was slamming down heavily and noisily in Vietnam. The USSR was also a significant political concern, another expansionist superpower bearing down upon Japan; as we have seen, brainwashing was seen as a specifically communist tactic. But the Cold War period was also marked by precipitous decolonization and rapid, blood-soaked political reconfiguration. The French suffered humiliating and ruinous defeats in Indochina and the Maghreb, most notably in the Algerian Revolution, a bitterly violent conflict abroad that caused the downfall of the Fourth Republic at home. Britain fought dirtily in harrowing counterinsurgency wars in Kenya, Aden, Cyprus, Malaya, and elsewhere. Portugal, too, prosecuted a gruesome campaign in Angola that ended in ignominious defeat. Japan, of course, had its own share of Imperial shame.

Invasion of the Astro Monster makes explicit reference to this global unrest in a startling montage of documentary photography that follows the revelation of the Xilien betrayal.

In the 1960s, cities the world over, including Tokyo, were the stages of protests, unrest, and heavily militarized police crackdowns as groups representing a wide array of new political forces rose up against the established order. This clear visual reference to the global reconfigurations of power that were taking place in the long wake of World War 2 unambiguously situates the Xilien conquest in the tradition of Earthly political upheaval. The Xiliens could be the French, the Soviets, the US, Perfidious Albion—the British Empire—or even the militaristic Japanese Empire of recent memory. Destroy All Monsters, too, set in the utopian future of 1999, shows the fragility of international peace and its vulnerability to imperialist aggression. The futuristic society at the end of the Millennium, dedicated to cooperation and scientific discovery, is still easy prey to the calmly, arrogantly seductive Kilaaks, who are an amalgam of every negative trait ascribed to imperialists: parasitic, violent, manipulative, and smugly convinced of their own superiority. In the final analysis, it is precisely the fact that the Kilaaks, Nebula M aliens, and Xiliens represent imperialism in general, rather than any specific historical constellation, that gives these movies their power.

This condemnation of empire, of course, raises an interesting contradiction, or tension, with relation to the US. One of the defining ideological contradictions of postwar America is that it has managed to present itself as somehow “not an empire” despite its constant projection of militarized power across the planet. The demonization of the tactics of the duplicitous aliens in Invasion of the Astro Monster—a Japan-US co-production—is, for example, clearly in harmony with the political ends of American Cold War neo-imperialist ideology, and serves to cement US-Japan relations as much as it does to criticize them. That is, by using the Xiliens to caricature the crimes of the dying 19th century empires and showing the countries of the democratic capitalist West as an anti-imperial coalition defeating the villains, US-led imperial aggression is painted as a form of humanistic anti-imperialism. The fetishization of anti-imperial resistance is, after all, a core component of contemporary imperial ideology: think Star Wars or any number of similar genre pieces in which plucky Davids smash brutish Goliaths. 

In summary, then, the Shōwa Ghidorah films are extraordinary documents of Cold War politics. As they were being made, the old empires were being smashed to the ground, and in the process imperial power itself was problematized and condemned as never before. In this context of global transformation, imperialism itself took on the appearance of senseless, cruel, and openly manipulative barbarism, and imperialists were known more openly as blackmailers, villains, and torturers—or, as Glenn puts it in Invasion of the Astro Monster, as “double-crossin’ finks.” What better metaphor, then, for the arbitrary despotism of empire than a colossal golden hydra remotely controlled by forked-tongued extortionists?

Alex Adams is a writer based in North East England. He writes widely on popular culture and politics, and he is currently writing Godzilla: A Critical Demonology for Headpress Books. Follow him on Twitter at @AlexAdams5 and @GDemonology, or visit his website to read more.

Mike Apichella / September 23, 2021

Outside of David Cronenberg’s work and stray oddities like 1980’s The Changeling, the Canadian horror and sci-fi movies of the 1970s and ‘80s often get overshadowed by their counterparts from the US and Europe. Unlike gory scares from other nations, these films reflect the fears of a society deeply impacted and alienated by the goals of close political allies. When viewed through the prism of the Canadian diplomacy that helped diffuse tension during some of the Cold War’s most dangerous moments, America’s patriotic vanity, the remnants of Old World imperialism, and other messy political controversies appear self-destructive and excessive at worst, futile and absurd at best. The 1988 film The Brain presents a grotesque rumination on suburban neurosis, mass media, and Canada’s place in the tangled mass of global politics. A film whose complex special effects, creature designs, dangerous stunts, and high-speed pacing place it a step above many other ‘80s horror works, The Brain is a seamless hybrid of sci-fi adventure and insane spectacle with political symbolism burning at the core of every scene and characterization.

The Brain was directed by Ed Hunt and written by Barry Pearson, two indie stalwarts who’d been active for the better part of two decades by the time of the film’s release. Los Angeles expat Hunt didn’t begin his film career until relocating to Canada in 1969, where his twisted vision brought life to sci-fi/crime hybrid Point Of No Return (1976) and the cult-classic “documentary” UFO’s Are Real (1979). Hunt and Pearson collaborated on several interesting cheapies, including the convoluted but colorful Starship Invasions (1977) and the kids-on-a-rampage flick Bloody Birthday (1981). The Brain premiered in Toronto on November 4, 1988, generating little interest before quickly fading into the blurry late-night glare of cable TV and the home video market. 

Much of The Brain was shot on location at Ontario’s Xerox Research Center, a gargantuan example of architectural modernism that looks like a cross between an alien spaceship and a megastadium. Interior scenes are shot with the stark ambience of a morgue, which emphasizes the building’s grim fictional repurposing as headquarters of the P.R.I. (Psychological Research Institute). The faux medical facility functions primarily as the secret hideout for the film’s titular alien monster, a huge, tentacled, telekinetic mutant brain with gaping jaws, beady bulbous eyes, and an insatiable hunger for human flesh. The Brain works hard to control Earth’s population via a hypnotic P.R.I.-produced TV program called Independent Thinking, which is hosted by the creature’s smooth-talking lackey Doctor Blakely (David Gale of Re-Animator fame) in the guise of a Tony Robbins-like motivational speaker. Unbeknownst to its loyal viewers, however, the broadcast progressively drains their free will whenever it airs.

This process is illustrated when mischievous science prodigy Jim Majelewski (the smirking, Ferris Bueller-ish Tom Brezahan) is punished by his high school principal after one prank too many. The uptight administrator (Kenneth MacGregor) orders Majelewski to get psychiatric treatment at P.R.I. or face expulsion from school. When Jim arrives at the site, he’s greeted by silence and the cold stares of line upon line of emotionless Independent Thinking audience members and P.R.I. “patients,” his wisecracks answered only by the surly mumbling of security guards. P.R.I. isn’t so much a medical entity as it is a psychic meat processing plant where victims are primed for consumption by the operation’s grotesque mastermind.     

The giant Brain draws power from the sheep-like “independent thinkers,” whose loyalty springs from the desperate search for an efficient solution to everyday suburban problems—workplace stress, financial woes, marital dramas, and, most of all, raucous teens and juvenile delinquents. Much of the program’s loyal fan base is made up of educators, school administrators, police, and parents, who represent the authority figures who struggle with huge moral decisions that can make or break young lives. They flock like lemmings to the fluffy pop psychology of Independent Thinking and its glorious potential as a universal stress remedy.  

Even before Majelewski discovers the grim secret of P.R.I.’s “therapeutic” behavioral modification, he’s shown to be one of the few people who refuse to watch Independent Thinking, and he frequently tries to stop friends and relatives from watching once he notices the show’s damaging mental effects. When P.R.I. thugs and other local authoritarians take note of his disruptive influence, the teen becomes a target and is forced to go on the lam. In the film’s most 1984-esque twist, there’s even a short, PG-rated love scene that occurs while Majelewski and his girlfriend Janet (Cynthia Preston) hide from pursuers in a shuttered school library, a structure dedicated to knowledge and enlightenment—both of which are subverted when Majelewski wakes up the next morning to find Janet watching TV, mesmerized. The latest episode of Independent Thinking comes on, featuring a false portrayal of Majelewski as a psychotic serial killer. Janet starts screaming her head off and rushes out of the library to alert authorities, revealing that the Brain’s power can instill emotional instability just as well as destructive passivity,

Although The Brain does offer something of a critique of the power of television, it does not demonize the medium, much to its credit. The plot revolves around the idea that mass media can only be destructive in a society that refuses to question its authority. What saves Ontario (and ultimately the world) from mass zombification is not technology or Luddism, but Majelewski’s emotional concern for the well-being of his community. Conversely, the monstrous Brain and its violent appetites are cold-blooded and antisocial in the extreme: the creature treats people—from TV audiences, to unsuspecting home viewers, to Dr. Blakely and other acolytes—like interchangeable tools to be used and abused at will (that is, of course, when it’s not busy eating every living thing in sight). The monster is ego and gluttony, a combination of crazed dictator and rabid animal. 

That brutal inhumanity is fleshed out in growling, spitting, drooling visuals inspired by a patchwork of iconic sci-fi influences: bits of Audrey II from Little Shop Of Horrors, rubberized ‘50s sci-fi monsters (with nods to 1957’s The Brain from Planet Arous and 1958’s Fiend Without a Face), and Dark Crystal-esque acid nightmares all congeal in the gooey weirdness of the effects work of Mark Williams and Daniel White. Roaring aerodynamic attacks tear across the screen thanks to “brain operators” Chris Thiesenhausen and Phillip M. Good (who doubled as assistant producer), the monster’s cartoon fury providing a perfect contrast to the tragic vulnerability defining many of the characters who fall under its telekinetic death spell.  

The Brain’s predictably noisy, ultraviolent demise is contrasted by an unexpectedly subtle final scene. All we see is a quiet, overcast day in an inconspicuous suburban development as victims and protagonists decompress. It works equally well as the set up for a sequel or as an extra layer of political symbolism. There’s no fanfare, no triumphant hard rock anthem blasting over the end credits. Grey skies and contemplation are all that can accompany the calm and unease—and vigilance—born of the Brain’s strange aftermath.

Mike Apichella has been working in the arts since 1991. He is a writer, multimedia artist, musician, and a founder of Human Host and the archival project Towson-Glen Arm Freakouts. Under his real name and various pseudonyms, his work has been published by Splice Today, Profligate, Human Conduct Press, and several DIY zines. Mike currently lives in the northeast US where he aspires to someday become the “crazy cat man” of his neighborhood.

Sam Moore / September 1, 2021

The most striking moments in 1971’s Cuadecuc, Vampir, Pere Portabella’s experimental recreation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula entirely through behind-the-scenes footage of Jesus Franco’s 1970 adaptation of the novel, are the ones that have less to do with the vampire himself, and more to do with the illusions that are constructed and broken apart through cinema. Scenes where a train passing by ruins a take, or the curtain being pulled on how the special effects are made and used. These scenes show not only the ways in which the vampire myth continues to be reinvented throughout cinema, but also the ways in which it can be deconstructed. The cinematic vampire is a fragile thing, not only for its many vulnerabilities—sunlight, crosses, garlic—but for the ways in which it can be rendered hollow, a construction. The vampire as seen on film becomes a perfect example of how horror—as a genre, as a feeling—is created and recreated. 

Vampirism is at the heart of cinema history. F.W. Murnau’s 1922 Nosferatu is one of the early examples of the medium’s great potential, and the iconic image of Count Orlock’s shadow looming large over a wall as he ascends a staircase to find his prey has lost none of its power. But if footage were revealed that showed how the filmmakers achieved it, then some of that magic, that fear, might be lost. Cuadecuc gambles on this, on the idea that watching Christopher Lee step in and out of a coffin between takes will weaken the fear that his Dracula inspires; but instead it captures how that fear is constructed, and is able to turn it into something else. The counterpoint of legitimate horror—the imagery in Cuadecuc, with its looming shadows and stark, black-and-white photography reminiscent of Nosferatu, with behind-the-scenes interludes—becomes a meditation on horror itself, a way of trying to understand why the things that scare us get under our skin. It’s about the relationship that the vampire myth has with the history of cinema, and how this archetypal, mythical figure can change with the times.

E. Elias Merhige’s Shadow of the Vampire (2000) also explores the place of the vampire film in cinematic history, and, like Cuadecuc, it’s a kind of commentary on how film reifies these myths. Merhige’s film imagines an alternative version of 1922 in which Max Schreck (Willem Dafoe), the actor who played Count Orloff in Nosferatu, is actually a vampire. Shadow is framed like a kind of rockumentary; there are moments in between scenes that offer a behind-the-scenes glance at the “production” of Nosferatu, with inter-titles that reference Murnau’s (John Malkovich) attempts “to accommodate his difficult star.” As Murnau says in the film, “If it’s not in the frame, it doesn’t exist,” something that both Cuadecuc and Shadow wrestle with in different ways. In the former, the idea of horror itself isn’t in the frame; it exists through the smokescreen of movie magic. Shadow makes vampirism real precisely by putting it in the frame. There are moments when the reality of Schreck’s vampirism literally bleed into the version of Nosferatu that’s being made, in stark counterpoint to the film’s climax, when his reflection is invisible in a full-length mirror, revealing to those around him that Schreck truly is the phantom of the night. In contrast to this, Cuadecuc obsesses over the artifice inherent in filmmaking, the fact that this horror is anything but real, instead interrogating how and why the real feeling of horror is constructed in the way that it is.

This desire to myth-bust the relationship between vampires and cinema is something that runs through the DNA of George Romero’s vampire film, the strange and somber Martin (1977). While the title character might think of himself as a vampire, he goes to great pains to tell people—from the paranoid family he stays with to the radio show he calls into using the alias “The Count”—that his vampirism isn’t a curse, or supernatural in nature, but that it’s a kind of illness instead. His late night calls with the radio show are testaments not only to his loneliness, but to the problems that he thinks movies create about vampires. Often, Martin sees these things as being intertwined: “And that’s another thing about those movies,” he says. “Vampires always have ladies. Sometimes lots of ‘em.” Martin has no ladies, and ties his vampirism into a kind of sexual repression, hoping to one day do it “awake, without the blood part. Just do it. And be with someone. And talk.” The DJ that he calls even sympathizes with him—as much as a shock jock can—telling him, “I’ve seen that in the movies. People try to stop your kind.”

The relationship that Martin the film and Martin the character have with other vampire movies is something that comes through in the character’s dream sequences. They’re in black and white and highly stylized, featuring Latin chants and shadow play straight out of Nosferatu or Jacques Tourneur’s Cat People (1942). In this way, it’s similar to Cuadecuc in its desire to show the artifice behind horror and the idea of a vampire myth that’s at once fluid and transparent, transforming into mist like the creatures themselves.

In treating vampires as real, Martin and Shadow of the Vampire both present different relationships with artifice than Cuadecuc. Murnau himself (the fictional one) even calls for “an end to this artifice,” which he gets in the form of his vampiric leading man, and Martin attempts to break down the artifice of cinematic vampires in order to reveal the loneliness of life as a real one. The reality of Schreck’s vampirism is sold to Murnau’s crew through a simultaneous embrace of and push against artifice. The director insists that Schreck is simply a method actor: he’ll be referred to as Orlock, wear no makeup, and only be filmed at night. It’s through the conceit and construction of cinema that the Murnau of Shadow is able to create the idea of a vampire that will end up going down in cinematic history.

What these three films have in common is a desire to unravel the ways in which the vampire is perceived by placing them in relationship to different ideas within cinema, whether these stories are being told through found footage, film history, or a sly self-awareness of where they exist in the canon. None of the filmmakers here treat horror as something that exists in a vacuum; instead, they understand the ways in which horror is constructed and mythologized, and find new ways to explore and manipulate the genre’s myths. The end of Cuadecuc ends as seemingly every vampire film does: with the killing of Dracula (just as Shadow’s Orlock and Martin’s Martin are killed). But instead of showing sunlight bursting through a window or a bloody stake, Portabella simply uses a scene of Christopher Lee in his dressing room describing the end of Stoker’s novel. These final moments in Cuadecuc go to the heart of all vampire films by highlighting the ways in which they vampirically drain from Stoker’s source material. Every iteration is a kind of supernatural rebirth, like the vampire itself, a mutation of the myth that runs through the genre’s bloodstream.

Sam Moore‘s writing on queerness, politics, and genre fiction in art has been published by the Los Angeles Review of Books, Little White Lies, Hyperallergic, and other places. Their poetry and experimental essays have been published in print and online, most recently in the Brixton Review of Books. If their writing didn’t already give it away, they’re into weird stuff.

Alex Adams / June 15, 2021

Godzilla is one of the boldest visual metaphors in cinematic history, widely recognized as a phantasmagorical embodiment of the nuclear destruction inflicted on Japan by the US at the end of the Second World War. But perhaps less well known are the many spectacular creatures that he has battled with over the almost seventy years of his bombastic gladiatorial career. Western audiences may well be familiar with smash-hit headliners like King Ghidorah, Mothra, and Mechagodzilla, titans that our radioactive lizard lord has confronted time and again over the years. But ask a non-fan to describe deep-cut back-catalog obscurities like Megalon, Gigan, Titanosaurus, or King Caesar, and you will be met with incredulity—or, more likely, a straightforward and very definite lack of interest. 

This is a terrible shame, because some of the creatures from Godzilla’s Shōwa era (1954-1975) are tremendously evocative and great fun. Consider, for instance, the screeching lobster colossus Ebirah who chirps and squeals through a surf-movie showdown with Godzilla; the mutant Ankylosaur Anguirus who often comes to Godzilla’s aid in his hour of need; or the oversize praying mantises Kamacuras (known as “Gimantis” in the English dub of Son of Godzilla) who cruelly wallop boulders at Godzilla’s helpless offspring Minilla. Despite the widespread critical dismissal of Godzilla’s many sequels as increasingly childish and redundant, many of the fifteen Shōwa films are rich with social commentary and formal and stylistic innovations. Perhaps the boldest of them all—and perhaps the most unfairly maligned—is 1971’s psychedelic eco-horror Godzilla vs. Hedorah. 

Hedorah is an alien lifeform that feeds on filth and thrives on pollution. Falling to Earth and landing in Japanese waters, it quickly grows to enormous proportions, feasting greedily on the omnipresent slurry and sludge to be found in Japan’s once-green environment until it is the size of Godzilla. After the turning point of 1964’s Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster, in which Godzilla teamed up with Mothra and Rodan to defeat the golden space-hydra King Ghidorah, Godzilla would remain a hero, and it would be his godlike opponents who in their turn would represent mankind’s imminent doom. The black-green reptile-god was no longer an uncontrollable force of judgment; now, he was a family-friendly crusader for justice. By pitting him against Hedorah, Kaiju maverick Yoshimitsu Banno made a bold statement about climate change, the Anthropocene, and pollution that was years ahead of its time.

Hedorah: Anthropocene, Apocalypse, Appetite 

The contested term “Anthropocene” refers to the current geological epoch that we inhabit here on Earth, an epoch characterized by alarming increases in temperature caused by the organized human destruction of our natural habitat. That is, whereas previous epochs such as the Pliocene and Oligocene were characterized by natural and long-term evolutionary, climatic, and environmental changes (such as the diversification of vertebrates, the development of weather patterns, or the formation of ocean currents), the Anthropocene is a state of ecological emergency precipitated by the drastic effects of man-made climate change. Though the term is relatively recent—popularized by Paul Crutzen only 21 years ago, in 2000—and though its beginning is sometimes located in or around 1950, the processes that have contributed most to its emergence have a longer history. Admittedly, this history is chicken feed in geological time, but the Anthropocene has dawned over the last few centuries and is roughly contemporaneous with the environmentally annihilatory rampages of capitalist globalization.

For capitalism has always thrived amid shattering environmental catastrophe. In his book Slave Empire, historian Padraic X Scanlan describes how plantation agriculture at the height of the British Empire in the 17th and 18th centuries turned the Caribbean into “a creeping frontier of money, human suffering, dispossession and ecological mayhem.” Sweeping deforestation, monoculture, and industrialization permanently changed the weather systems of the Caribbean, to say nothing of the environmental ravages of the more or less constant colonial warfare between the multiple slave economies of the time. And this is only one example. From the disastrous spread of disease and the wanton destruction of biodiversity, through the sustained ruination caused by multiple forms of mining, drilling, and fracking, to the generation and release of the toxic waste that devastates precious and irreplaceable habitats the world over, industrialized international capitalism has always been at war with the natural world—plundering, polluting, and poisoning it for profit. 

By the 1970s, Japan had been politically rehabilitated after the devastation of the war, welcomed back into the West as a full participant in international capitalism, and Japanese corporations (like their American and British counterparts) had wasted no time getting rich quick and dirty. Industrial endeavors including mining, smelting, petroleum production, chemical refinement, city construction, and more led to near-catastrophic deforestation, contamination of air and water, and at least three man-made diseases: Itai-itai disease, named onomatopoetically after the screams of those who suffered from it, was a debilitatingly painful result of cadmium poisoning; Minamata disease, acquired by eating fish contaminated with mercury, attacked the central nervous system, sometimes causing insanity and death; and the city of Yokkaichi, a center of petroleum refinement, experienced skyrocketing levels of a specific form of chronic bronchitis caused by the release of untreated sulphur dioxide into the atmosphere. By the time filmmaker Yoshimitsu Banno came to create his debut Kaiju picture, Japan was choking on smog. 

Hedorah, Banno’s monster, the name derived from the Japanese word meaning sludge, polluted mud, or chemical slurry, is the embodiment of a uniquely Anthropocene apocalypse. So foul is our treatment of our precious planet that a scum-loving alien considers our once-beautiful home a delightfully appetizing smorgasbord, and now that it is here it certainly does not intend to stop eating. One of the strengths of the Kaiju genre is its obligation to forego subtlety; the films’ characteristic exaggeration, caricature, and hyperbole enable them to treat their subject matter with both knockabout playfulness and polemic intensity. In their scholarly volume Japan’s Green Monsters, Sean Rhoads and Brooke McCorkle describe Godzilla vs. Hedorah as an “environmental call-to action”, and “a protest film of a different order.” Banno’s only Kaiju movie is a bold, flamboyantly weird parable about mankind’s responsibility for the murder of the Earth.  

Trouble at Toho

Though it may be uniquely uncompromising—even preachy—in its prioritization of eco-doom-mongering, Godzilla vs. Hedorah is by no means the only Kaiju movie with an environmentalist message. The theme features in many a Shōwa movie, and would resurface in the later Heisei series too (in particular Godzilla vs. Biollante [1989] and Godzilla vs. Mothra [1992]). 2016’s Shin Godzilla, which deals with the environmental and political fallout of the Fukushima nuclear disaster, is another vivid example of this preoccupation. Many Toho films end with a character looking into the sunset and delivering a didactic epithet about humanity’s responsibility to live in greater harmony with nature. 

And yet, although it is perhaps the boldest expression of Toho’s major theme, Godzilla vs. Hedorah remains a divisive oddity in the Shōwa series, 80 pulsating minutes stuffed with bizarre aesthetic choices and jarring narrative turns. Critics at the time tended towards the dismissive, a trend that was consolidated into an orthodoxy when Harry Medved lambasted the film in his 1978 book The Fifty Worst Films of All Time. Perhaps this was because the film explicitly withholds the pleasures that audiences had come to associate with Toho’s work. Rather than the stomping, triumphant orchestral score familiar to fans, the film has a soundtrack peppered with rock’n’roll, Moog electronica, and jazz—including an introductory musical number with swirling lava lamp visuals that wouldn’t have been out of place in a Bond movie. Formally, it experiments with delirious hippie psychedelia, including the insertions of some baffling (yet oddly beautiful) animated sequences. None of the familiar faces from previous films—such as Akira Takarada, Akihiko Hirata, or Yoshio Tsuchiya, stars of many of the most popular Kaiju movies of the 1960s—appear in the cast, which instead features a young child protagonist and a group of dropout longhairs partying on Mount Fuji. Moments of humor and warmth rub up against scenes of striking horror; dry sequences of “scientific” exposition sit awkwardly alongside sequences of luminous, hallucinatory surrealism. Memorably, one of Godzilla’s early clashes with Hedorah is intercut with vivid scenes of fish-headed young people dancing frantically in a go-go bar.

The result is a singularly strange mix of arthouse avant-gardism, early music video aesthetics, children’s dreams, and special effects-led genre pugilism—in short, a tonal miasma that some audiences (especially overseas audiences, who lacked the cultural context provided by the many poisoning scandals in Japan) found almost unwatchably dissonant. “Even for a movie about a big anthropomorphic fire breathing reptile fighting a giant pollution eating monster that looks like a big pile of blackened teriyaki chicken,” writes Kaiju fan site Stomp Tokyo, “Godzilla Vs. Hedorah is a weird movie.” Another reviewer writes that they’ve never “seen such an intractable tangle of the laugh-out-loud stupid and the chills-up-the-spine disturbing in one movie,” in part because of the way that the film features some of the franchise’s most goofily comic moments—such as Godzilla’s atomic-breath-fueled flight—and some of its most openly horrific set pieces, such as the famous sequences in which the noxious fumes Hedorah exudes dissolve human flesh. “Sometimes,” writes yet another reviewer, “the grim and the giddy are mixed in the same sequence.” 

But such criticisms overstate the strangeness of the film. It is weird, but in a spirit of experimentation and adventure, rather than gloomy or pretentious incoherence; it is dark and audacious, even somber in some places, but so are the best entries in the Godzilla canon. Quite apart from its many peculiarities, perhaps the most noticeable departure that Godzilla vs. Hedorah makes from its predecessors is the visible cheapness and roughness of the movie. In the 1970s, the Japanese film industry struggled with slashed budgets; the dramatic rise in the popularity of television corresponded with a precipitous dive in cinema ticket sales that hit Toho in the wallet, hard. Banno had to shoot the whole movie with only one crew, on a drastically reduced timescale and with half the money that the studio would usually spend on a Godzilla movie. 

Banno himself is an interesting figure with a complicated, unfortunate story. Former assistant director to the legendary Akira Kurosawa, he was offered the directorial role on the new Godzilla feature after he impressed Toho by completing a documentary on behalf of special effects maestro Eiji Tsuburaya, who fell ill during production. Toho was looking to expand its pool of regular Godzilla directors, and Banno’s strong credentials and valuable experience placed him first in line. Immediately upon accepting the job, Banno knew that he wanted to make a serious and powerful statement about pollution, which he called “the most notorious thing in current society.” Despite the severe budgetary and time constraints, he was able to realize and deliver a singular, extraordinary piece of work. 

But the film quickly made enemies in high places. Tomoyuki Tanaka, one of the most senior figures at Toho, hated Banno’s film so unreservedly that he swore never to allow Banno anywhere near another Godzilla picture. And Tanaka got his wish: even though Banno teased a sequel at the close of Godzilla vs. Hedorah, he was never to work on another Godzilla production for Toho, and Hedorah would never be heard from again apart from one blink-and-you’ll-miss-it cameo in 2004’s Godzilla: Final Wars. Banno’s enthusiasm for Godzilla, though, remained undiminished to the end of his life in 2017, and, despite his creative exile, he would later become a key figure in the development and production of Legendary’s 21st century Godzilla movies. For Banno, the spectacular success of 2021’s Godzilla vs. Kong is an extraordinary posthumous vindication: Toho’s anarchic outsider belatedly bringing Godzilla to his widest ever audience.

“Green pastures exist only in our hearts now” 

To return once more to Banno’s creature itself: Hedorah is interesting primarily because of its near-indestructibility. Our prehistoric hero’s atomic breath and powerful physical brawling have little to no effect upon Hedorah’s viscous, semi-solid body, and neither can human weapons damage Hedorah. Bullets and Kaiju fists simply pass harmlessly through the evanescent sludge. Like the flesh-eating snot-monster in classic US sci-fi The Blob (1958), Hedorah is uniquely adapted for pure, unthinking consumption, and the very simplicity of its anatomy—an uncomplicated embodiment of sheer appetite—is what makes it virtually impossible to stop. 

Hedorah is also the first of Toho’s monsters to metamorphosize through a range of physical embodiments. It begins life as a species of microscopic organisms, a dispersed collective of hungry tadpole-spores from outer space; after gorging on the plentiful industrial slime encountered in Japanese waters, they meld into one solid organism, growing, absorbing and mutating, constituting itself in a series of increasingly threatening forms. First it appears as a mean, amorphous marine creature; second, a crawling, slug-like amphibian; third, as a sort of flying disc of malevolent ooze; and finally, after repeatedly frustrating Godzilla in battle and guzzling more goo, it achieves its final incarnation as a semi-anthropomorphic titan. Such an evolution would recur with Godzilla’s later foes Biollante—the product of weapons-grade bioengineering, half Godzilla, half haunted rose; Destoroyah—a hostile crustacean life form created by the Oxygen Destroyer, a weapon of environmental annihilation used to kill the very first Godzilla back in 1954; and, with time, Godzilla himself, as he grows from a sea-beast, to an enormous worm, to a murderous ambulatory nightmare over the course of Shin Godzilla. 

Each of these movies feature monsters that embody some form of ecological disaster, and this dynamic metamorphic principle is key to their meaning. Ever-changing, ever-growing, unfixable, slippery, unkillable, given ever more power by humanity’s hubristic efforts to defeat them, Hedorah and his later analogues embody this most central and confounding aspect of climate disaster. It is not only that we humans are responsible for the desecration of the Earth, but also that the problem we have created is so nightmarishly flexible and generative that anything we do to tackle it simply makes it worse. In the face of this doom-laden iconography, Godzilla represents not merely justice or virtue: he represents hope itself.  

However, even though child protagonist Ken calls Godzilla “a superman” at the start of the movie, the film is unrelentingly pessimistic about the possibility of ever defeating Hedorah for good. For most of the film, Godzilla is simply unable to wound Hedorah, and the beast is only (ambiguously) banished through Godzilla’s cooperation with the military. State institutions are powerless to stop Hedorah, and the counterculture youth who attempt a mass mobilization against the smog monster are unable to imagine any form of resistance to it apart from throwing a party and playing vacuous protest songs. “Why complain about it?” asks the guitar player. “Green pastures exist only in our hearts now. Let’s sing! Let’s dance!” 

This muted hope is, in the final analysis, what makes Godzilla vs. Hedorah really compelling. The previous entries in the series, notably 1968’s Destroy All Monsters and 1969’s All Monsters Attack, were lighthearted, triumphant, and easygoing—and all the more enjoyable and relatable for it. Yoshimitsu Banno, though, knew how to take the Godzilla films back to their shocking, politically urgent origins. Decadent, sour, and an idiosyncratic gem, Godzilla vs. Hedorah is one of the most striking entries in that most idiosyncratic and freewheeling of cinematic cycles—the Shōwa series of Godzilla movies.

Alex Adams is a cultural critic and writer based in North East England. His most recent book, How to Justify Torture, was published by Repeater Books in 2019. He loves dogs.

Jonathan Lukens / June 3, 2021

As a young man, I felt that most people conceived of memory differently than I did, believing that failures of memory were errors of playback more than of recording. This idea, that memory works like a vinyl record in which everything we experience has its groove, supposes that it’s just a matter of knowing precisely where to put the needle down to replay the experience. In contrast, my younger self operated with the also erroneous belief that our memories are only hazy recordings of what we have somehow deemed worthy of recalling—that memory is like finding old semi-legible notes to ourselves written in an old notebook and trying to  figure out what they mean.

It was with this theory of memory in mind that I had begun to consider Split, a movie that I thought I remembered renting from a video store up the street from my childhood home sometime around 1990. For over a decade, my occasional recollections of the film, often spaced years apart, might prompt a web search with no results, which would then introduce a sense of disorientation: I could not experience the instant gratification of finding some online mention that might confirm that what I remembered was real. Was Split (that was the name, right?) just an Easter Egg written into the script of my past—some sort of Berenstain (sic?) Bears thing? After all, and with all due respect to the films’ creators: if my adolescent mind was going to fabricate a memory, this is the sort of thing it would have come up with. 

Originally released theatrically in 1989, and subsequently on VHS in 1991 by Futura Home Video, Split was reissued on DVD in 2018 by Verboden Video and is also available through Alamo Drafthouse’s streaming app, which is how I was able to confirm its existence and watch it again. Spoilers of the film follow, but only insofar as my synopsis is veridical to the plot—a nested disclaimer I wouldn’t need to make if the film were less fractured. Whether its cracked mirror nature is a deliberate mindfuck, the result of freshman filmmaking hamfistedness, or both, is not something I can tell you. 

The film opens with Starker, our hero, wandering the streets of San Francisco. His ripped jeans show his bare rear end, and he’s wearing the sort of jagged and discolored false teeth that might have been advertised in old comic books alongside fake vomit and squirting flowers. He walks through a parking lot full of city buses, suddenly looking directly at the camera and yelling, “Stop following me. Leave me alone.” At first, we believe he is addressing us, the viewers, and breaking the fourth wall, but the camera cuts to two men dressed in a mid-‘80s Ivy League casual style—like they just walked out of a JC Penny catalog shoot. One sits at a computer; the other, older and mustachioed, is framed over his right shoulder. The younger man was surveilling Starker, and, as the dialogue reveals, the populace more broadly. He rewinds a recording of Starker’s camera-facing monologue and consults with the older agent, who says Starker is just crazy, but capitulates to the younger agent’s desire for further observation.

They run a face recognition program, presented as a musical montage, in which we see Starker’s head rendered as a 3D model as the camera hops around a black and white grid of similar hairless heads looking for a match. The sequence is still enthralling and somewhat hypnotic after 30 years. This isn’t a real 3D scan of a human head; rather it’s a painstakingly created proof of concept showing us what the technology that would soon become ubiquitous might look like. It dances. We hear pitch-shifted human voices of the sort we might associate with Laurie Anderson’s “O Superman,” and they create a synthetic and escalating harmonic pattern as the facial recognition nears completion.

This is the first of a few similarly rendered and soundtracked scenes that make Split worth more attention than it will ever receive. Analog processes are used to pre-mediate future digital operations, and there is a lo-fi poetry to them. These skies are the color of the ancestors of our flat-screen TVs, their saturations and frequency roll-off the stuff of a time when there really were dead channels, and tuned-in heads bobbed to the tangible yet barely audible click that the phone made just before it rang. Different media have different dispositions, and I explain these in the hope of being descriptive, while mindful of any argument about the veracity of concepts of authenticity.

Jittering a bit and mumbling, Starker heads into a diner and has a seat at a booth. He orders coffee from a waitress we’ll meet again later while speaking in a hybrid of fake European accents. Making a mess while examining a ketchup bottle, then pouring a packet of artificial sweetener onto the table and snorting it up his nose like cocaine, he talks to himself as the surrounding patrons begin to grow nervous. One of them gets up, takes him by the shoulder and leads him outside. At one point the camera lingers for a moment—letting us know that a brightly colored fabric pouch that Starker has left behind means something. 

As the film progresses, we watch Starker give the agents surveilling him the slip. After being knocked out and having his jacket tagged with a tracking device, he discovers the device, removes his jacket, and changes clothes to elude his pursuers. To illustrate the process of his being tracked we are treated to a primitive color representation of a 3D vector map of the city. It’s like an isomorphic video game built of an extruded and pastel colored De Stijl painting that says, “Welcome to the control society. Now you’re playing with power.” The whole sequence provides a taste of the ‘90s to come, bringing to mind critiques of the automatic production of space and tactical media projects like the Institute for Applied Autonomy’s iSee and the performances of the Surveillance Camera Players.

Starker retrieves the brightly colored fabric pouch from the trash outside the diner. He dons a new—and more ridiculous—disguise: a stick-on mustache and goatee paired with wire-rimmed glasses, a brown turtleneck, and a beige corduroy sports coat. Setting the scene for an art gallery opening, a lovingly blocked shot of Starker creates the sort of recursion we would associate with a Magritte or Escher through a row of champagne flutes. The camera lingers over a series of paintings reminiscent of Basil Wolverton’s or Erol Otus’s more psychedelic work. Gallery patrons talk trash about the paintings and each other while Starker shoves food in his pockets—John Belushi in Animal House style—as a lovely minimal synth piece by Robert Shaw, the director’s brother and creator of the computer generated effects seen through the film, begins to warble and flutter.

Conversing with the fictional creator of these paintings (in reality those of writer/director Chris Shaw himself), a flat-topped New Waver wearing a mustard yellow dinner jacket over a t-shirt, our ludicrously costumed hero mentions preparing to “wake people up.” As they discuss the artwork hanging on the gallery walls, they stop to look at a storyboard—which we realize is the storyboard of the current scene. As the artist begins to realize the same truth, he becomes enraged. He screams, but none of the patrons seem to notice or care.

The film meanders for a while, if it was not already meandering. We see the junior and senior agents discuss an analysis that reveals no discernible patterns in Starker’s behavior, and they escalate their attempts to find him. Now at the artist’s apartment after the art opening, Starker is coaxed into revealing his plan: “All we have to do is change the program!” he says, later addressing the painter’s skepticism with, “I have the way. The way is here—in my package!” Removing the pouch from an inside coat pocket, Starker then opens it to reveal a white plastic disc approximately the size of his hand. The artist remarks that it resembles a urinal deodorizer.

Starker goes on a tear: “Science is a jealous god.” The mystical “separates us from robots.” “What I am holding is a mutant biological organism.” He almost immediately contradicts himself and says the substance is just a placebo because people require a scientific reason to believe in something and that that is necessary for “the dream” to have power. He explains that he is going to dose the city’s water supply with this substance and then it will spread around the world as people excrete it through their urine. Sort of an Amanita muscaria re-trip meets infrastructural schwerpunkt: The MacGuffin is Elan Vital as urinal cake.

A few meaning-laden but plot-insignificant scenes later, Starker heads back to the diner. After a scuffle in which he startles Susan (the waitress we saw earlier) and she kicks him to the ground, he pressures her to let him hide out at her place. Reasonably viewing him as a crazy and potentially dangerous creep, she declines his offer. But, after following her to her car, he convinces her to relent by claiming that he used to be a veterinarian and that he may be able to explain the lethargy of the cat in a carrier in her back seat. The absurdity of this caged animal suddenly appearing to move the plot along is rendered even more absurd when Susan later explains that she already understood that the cat was lethargic because she had had it sterilized earlier in the day. There is something so metaphorically overt about this detail that I can’t tell if it’s a bad joke or a catastrophic mistake. In any event, Starker seems no less concerned about going home with a woman that left a post-op feline in the back of a car all day than Susan is about bringing home a man who claimed he was being followed and sat in her place of business snorting Sweet and Low through a straw while ranting in a fake French accent.

I will omit a lot of interpersonal awkwardness, strange dialogue, and things that may be significant to alternate interpretations in revealing that Starker crashes at Susan’s place (Pop Tarts and chill). The time they spend together only serves to make her subsequent death at the hands of the Starker’s pursuers insufficiently tragic to motivate his subsequent attempt at revenge. Discovering her murder at the hands of the Izod-clad archons, Starker—now in drag and blackface—follows the agents back to their bosses’ HQ. They enter through a large circular metal door, and Starker, who they don’t realize is following behind, is unable to enter.

Their boss, perhaps too obviously referred to as the “Agency Director” in a film about agency panic, laments his “monstrous” newly installed cybernetic arm. In an abrupt spasm of the plot that seems to indicate that the Director’s body is deteriorating, a lab-coated flunky soothes him by explaining that he has created that ultimate mad-scientist expression of mind-body dualism: a machine that can transfer a mind into another body. The camera cuts to Starker, unseen on the Agency Director’s CCTV, who is loading a pistol. He tries to find a way to open the door while the minions inside hurry to find a body to receive the Agency Director’s mind. The agents open the door and grab Starker, having seemingly no idea that they have apprehended the very person they were relentlessly pursuing earlier. Starker drops his gun in the struggle, and they strap him to a chair and lower a brain transfer apparatus over his head.

“Let me out! It worked!” Starker says, but it’s not clear if the process was successful or if Starker is trying to convince the agents that it was. We’re left to wonder if this Camp Concentration-style mind transfer worked at all. It’s set up as a techgnostic climax that never happens, as if this cyberpunk yacht rock anthem makes it to the guitar solo just as the amp blows. The enraged Agency Director yells and tells his minions to get rid of “her.” They throw Starker out, not seeming to care that this random person just entered their secret bunker, and still not realizing that it was Starker himself. 

The final quarter of the film involves agents pursuing Starker while the Agency Director’s body is gradually replaced with a mechanical one. The music is great here and evokes both a sort of period instrumental soft rock call-center hold music and early Chrome. Someone with disposable income should release a proper soundtrack.

Now looking like a lo-fi Robocop or a reject from a Shinya Tsukamoto film, the Agency Director’s cybernetic augmentations (or too on-the-nose self-amputations) have endowed him with new powers. He accesses satellites while issuing abrasively vocoded directives that also appear on a camera-facing screen, perhaps to ensure intelligibility to the audience. Starker’s location is revealed on a map as crescendoing lo-bit sound effects accompany synth pads and drums. “Eradicate!” The Agency Director yells in a Davros-like moment. The camera cuts to Starker hopping over fences and traversing a roadside embankment, while the Agency Director seems to glitch out as he installs one last bionic eye into his head. 

Now fully metal-skinned and ambulatory, he walks over to a pool of water inside headquarters. Elsewhere in a meadow, Starker stumbles into a pool himself, grabbing the white disc he revealed earlier. Somehow, both pools have become a sort of fold in space—the Agency Director reaches through and grabs Starker. They struggle, each remaining primarily in their own physical location while their arms bend through each others’ space. Starker breaks free and releases the chemical in the white disc. White dust floats in the air.

The end credits roll (well, melt, actually) and no further explanation is given.

***

Ultimately, outside of the beauty of the graphics and soundtrack, the joy and frustration of Split is that we are confronted with something that we can’t quite classify. Foregrounds and backgrounds of plot and image oscillate and change places, but so do the cues we’d typically use to determine whether or not we approached the material as comic or tragic, accidental or deliberate, high brow or trash stratum.

Watching Split (had I really seen it before?) left me with the distinct feeling that I just missed five minutes of it without leaving my seat. Shaw never really makes it clear what we should focus on, and the director’s commentary on the DVD doesn’t provide much help. There Shaw describes the film as “a dream that doesn’t really explain itself.” He does, however, talk a bit about chaos—not just disorder, but the branch of mathematics we might associate with Lorenz, Mandelbrot, the butterfly effect, and fractals. While history might provide examples of minor perturbations in complex systems causing them to collapse or toggle into alternate states, it seems here that chaos is really just used as a sort of “magic” (in the same way that “science” is used in superhero comics) to attempt to explain how Starker has a capacity for action that exceeds that of the archons that surveil him.

Really thinking about agency as contingent and distributed means something quite different and perhaps far more unsettling. I’d like to tell you that Split reveals a negotiation between ideas of cowboy individualism on one end, and on the other an appreciation of the behavior of complex adaptive systems of which human “individuals” are both composed of and parts of. In reality, the film presents 20th century ideas of autonomy and individuality taken to such an extreme that they become a bit goofy. The film presents an inverse relationship between attachment and individuality. Take, for example, this dialogue between the two primary agents who discover and begin tracking Starker, in which the frustrated junior agent asks:

How can he make it? We all have something: our family, our friends, something, but he… he gets by on nothing. How can he be that free? No human needs, no weaknesses, no feelings, nothing.

As they discuss their pending report to the Agency Director, the senior agent explains that they will just have to tell it like it is:

       No recurrent behavior, no attachments, no soft spots: superman.

So, the superman, the “free” man, is the man who cares about no one and has no routine. Attachment to others is presented in the same way that an ascetic might present an attachment to material things, but also as a commodity that the system of surveillance capitalism depicted in the film exploits. In the world of Split, one can either be “free” and thus detached from social forces one can’t actually detach from, or part of some sort of winkingly self-aware Matrix.

Many of the characters, including Susan, the painter, some street crazies, and the pursuing agents, seem to have some awareness that by participating in society they are being had. It’s as if they are wearing the glasses from They Live (1988) but realize that if they call attention to their alien overlords they will just be ignored anyway.

Shaw’s broader argument seems to be that as an “individual” who is truly “free,” Starker exists without a data-body; he’s an Übermensch who cannot be profiled or reduced to his so-called statistical self. As such, Starker stands outside of culture—the infrastructure of shared social and material substrates that both the one and the many call upon to act. But he still has the magic urinal cake, the fulcrum and lever by which he is super empowered.

Like a bad haircut, dosing the water supply with mutagenic hallucinogens seems cool in high school, when we are naive enough to dream that control is simply a matter of centralization and that shocking the dupes out of their somnambulism is something they will high five us for afterwards. But while portrayed as some sort of systems-disrupting black swan herald of a “new age,” maybe Starker—and the film itself—just represents a dance around the collapse of any sort of shared systems of meaning. After all, at the climactic moment when Starker releases the mutagen, the end credits roll. Were not shown what comes next—just the end of the now.  

Jonathan Lukens is a cultural worker from Atlanta. His work has been shown at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, played through omnifarious speakers, and published in The Atlantic, Design Issues, and The International Journal of Design in Society.

Pepe Tesoro / May 26, 2021

If you are even mildly interested in science fiction criticism, chances are that you have bumped into Susan Sontag’s 1965 essay “The Imagination of Disaster.” Written at the tail end of the long 1950s golden era of sci-fi film, the text is a bold and keen examination of a genre that wouldn’t receive serious criticism for quite a few years, especially in its cinematic form. Sontag, always motivated to engage with the marginal and seemingly worthless aspects of her culture, was one of the first voices to address the wild popularity of disaster and monster movies during an era that defines the genre to this day.

It may seem, though, that Sontag’s central insight was pretty trivial. These movies, for her, represented an expression of a historically specific transformation to a permanent human anxiety towards death, intensified to a qualitatively new level after the horror of concentration camps and the reality of nuclear weapons. This was the result of “the trauma suffered by everyone in the middle of the 20th century,” explains Sontag, “when it became clear that from now on to the end of human history, every person would spend his individual life not only under the threat of individual death, which is certain, but of something almost unsupportable psychologically—collective incineration and extinction which could come any time, virtually without warning.”

It is important to stress, especially today, that the intensification of the fear of extinction and global catastrophe was not just a matter of an increase in potential victims; it was also the new technological sophistication of the means of that destruction. After World War II it became clear not only that humans were able to destroy their own species in a matter of seconds, but also that the new menace of instant extinction was a direct result of human scientific inquiry and the advancement of industry.

This pretty much encapsulates the ambivalence towards science in 1950s science fiction. In these early genre movies, a scientific advancement or weapon test gone wrong almost always initiates the plot. In The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953), a monstrous prehistoric lizard preserved inside the ice is set free by a series of atomic tests in the Arctic. In an almost identical manner, the giant beast of the quintessential kaiju film Godzilla (1954) is awoken from a dormant state in the bottom of the ocean by the deployment of nuclear weapons. In both of these movies (and in many others, like 1954’s Them! and 1957’s The Amazing Colossal Man), collective destruction is the result of unpredicted consequences of human scientific development that awaken a deadly power that not only surpasses but also often precedes human existence, and which breaks down conventional power structures. Here human responsibility is diluted; there are no discernible culprits and everyone is equally a victim. But there is also the idea of a pre-existing geological determination of human extinction that eerily relates to today’s anxiety about our biological vulnerabilities in the face of environmental collapse.

Godzilla, 1954

There are many themes that can be extracted from 1950s sci-fi movies, from the early postwar tensions of gender dynamics in American society to a sometimes not-so-obvious subtext about racial inequality, to fear of revolution in the face of the decolonization of the Third World and, most prominent, the ghostly menace of communism. There is also a near ubiquitous obsession with depersonalization or, quite literally, “alien”-ation. As Sontag sees it, the mythology of possession has been historically related to animalistic traits, as an overdose of passion and animal instinct, but now it seems that the true fear “is understood as residing in man’s ability to be turned into a machine.” This is the case of productions such as 1960’s Village of the Damned or the fantastic Jack Arnold classic It Came from Outer Space (1953). In both these films (see also 1958’s I Married a Monster from Outer Space), some alien race or entity possesses human hosts or recreates human-like bodies to communicate with us—or to infiltrate our society. This trope (which had the added benefit of being budget-friendly) encapsulated the modern fear of losing human passions and emotions, such as love or solidarity, to the advancement of a cold, sober, and technocratic rationality.

This is, of course, the case of the much-discussed Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), mostly considered an anti-communist metaphor. But without disregarding the common interpretation around McCarthyism and the Red Scare, the film can also be explained as an expression of greater anxieties about modern dehumanization. As M. Keith Booker puts it, the anti-communist metaphor is available, but “is also perfectly consistent with the content of the film to read the interchangeable pod people as representative of conformist forces within American society itself.”

Countless interpretations are available in these particular visions of catastrophe, but I’d like to focus on the complicity of cinematic spectacle in defusing the threat of catastrophe itself. Sontag herself was wary of science fiction’s fascination with destruction and collective incineration, and appropriately points to the ways in which these films encapsulated the fear of collapse in a satisfactory hour-and-a-half-long narrative, where the good guys always win and the apocalyptic menace is symbolically defeated. Not only could you go on with your life without fearing the bomb, but you could also enjoy the mesmerizing spectacle of the bomb in the glow of a cinema’s film projector. These symbolic solutions more often than not include some form of technological messianism, because even when the problem is caused by science, the threat is almost always defeated by science (Godzilla, 1953’s The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, 1956’s Earth vs. The Flying Saucers). 1950s science fiction was simultaneously fearful of unleashing scientific advances but also placed its utopian hopes in technology. We enjoy the spectacle of not just crumbling buildings and fiery towers but also of the dissolution of social hierarchies and the incursion of the extraordinary into the monotony of daily life. (The disaster movie genre originates in sci-fi, particularly 1951’s When Worlds Collide and 1953’s The War of the Worlds.) Because at the end, all returns to normal: the scientists save the day, the hero gets the girl, authority is restored.

But these films offer more than mere utopian aspirations focused on technology, or the naturalizing of spectacular violence. The depersonalization inherent in these films often leaves traces of a yearning not so much for technology but for human connection and solidarity. In this sense, I’m personally fascinated by an obscure and low-budget film (Roger Corman’s second sci-fi production) called The Beast with a Million Eyes (1955), in which we are presented with a weird and ghostly ranch, inhabited by a stereotypical patriarchal family, in the middle of the spectral landscapes of the southwestern American desert. After the impact of an extraterrestrial artifact, the ranch is rapidly haunted by the incorporeal presence of an alien spirit that takes control of, first, the animals, and then attempts the same with the humans.

Once again, we are presented with the familiar theme of alien mind control, which turns humans into lifeless machines—no budget needed. But this time the alien encounters a surprising obstacle to its plan: it seems especially difficult to take control of humans when they are bonded by love. In an unexpected speech at the end, the father of the family tells the alien that the secret of human survival is quite simply love and connection, or, as the mother says: “you would never find a human alone.” Other details of the film point to this idea of care and solidarity. For example, the seemingly mute and terrifying servant of the family is revealed in the end to be a war veteran suffering from heavy trauma; the father, a fellow soldier, had taken this traumatized man under his protection from a society that mistakenly deemed him dangerous after feeding him to the machinery of war. 

The message is all-too-naive and corny to the modern eye. The question is, though, why do we deem positively portrayed examples of love and affection as something unbearably corny and naive? Speaking about our contemporary cultural sensibility at large and not merely about 1950s science fiction, it seems that today we are totally desensitized to the most extreme images of violence, but the mere representation of unconditional love might make us sick. The technocratic utopianism that runs through 1950s sci-fi cinema has infested not just our fiction about catastrophe, but our narratives of survival and endurance at large. In this sense, a weird oddity like The Beast with a Million Eyes can be seen as a genuine instance where apocalyptic destruction is resisted not by our machines, but by human connection.

These movies don’t necessarily contain a secret revolutionary agenda; we must remain skeptical about the potential of fiction to reconnect to any utopian desire, considering the widely differing receptions and political interpretations that different people bring to the same cultural products. But the overpowering cultural sensibilities that lead us to cynically dismiss messages of connection and solidarity as unsophisticated and credulous, our collective ways of reading fiction and art, can be inverted. I experienced this realization in a recent re-watch of James Cameron’s Aliens (1986). Having seen the movie only once as a teenager, I thought about it as just another militaristic and frenzied spectacle of violence. All I remembered were burning buildings, bullets flying, and the splattering of giant bugs’ acidic blood, so I was pleasantly surprised to discover a compelling tale about teamwork, motherhood, and love, where a bunch of nobodies and outcasts are able to overcome the terror unchained by mindless corporatism through cooperation and quite literally caring for each other. 

It goes without saying how pressing and important these attitudes towards violence and solidarity are for us today, in an especially dark and apocalyptic time. I don’t want to indulge in nihilism with an infinite series of examples that offers little to no hope that humanity’s utopian desires and survival instincts can be diverted away from delusional technocracy and towards an aspiration for greater mutual help and cooperation. But if movies about the end of times can be useful at what may be the end of the world as we know it, we may be required to reeducate ourselves and (re)train our sensibilities to forsake the scathing modern cynicism that excretes from this cult-like adoration of technology. We have to search for better answers, better utopias—based on working together and loving one another.  

Special thanks to David Sánchez Usanos.

Pepe Tesoro is a philosophy PhD student from Madrid. You can follow him at @pepetesoro.

Eve Tushnet / May 12, 2021

I came to Douglas Coupland’s novel Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture, thirty years after its 1991 publication date, expecting sharp sociocultural observation and maybe some economic critique. After all, Coupland, who said that his generation was “sick of stupid labels,” inadvertently coined the self-effacing generational moniker under which my cohort has labored.

But Generation X is something stranger than a novel of social observation. It is a scrappy, almost zinelike collage of images, marginal text, and patchwork narratives, making it feel like a back issue of a magazine that never quite existed. It’s full of incisive nouvelle slang: “McJob: A low-pay, low-prestige, low-dignity, low-benefit, no-future job in the service sector. Frequently considered a satisfying career choice by people who have never held one.” Coupland provides all the expected pleasures: lostness, drifting, downward mobility, a surfeit of irony and anti-politics; and over it all the fading shadow of global thermonuclear war, which still haunts the imaginations of this last generation of Cold War kids.

But Coupland’s characters long more for sublimity than for 1950s-style industrial and familial stability. They’re haunted not just by the mushroom cloud but by the monastery. Reading Coupland’s debut novel, you’ll be reminded that seminal Gen X lit includes not just Jay McInerney’s moral tales but Donna Tartt’s 1992 divine-madness pulp masterpiece The Secret History.

Generation X is about three friends, Andy, Dagmar (a man), and Claire. Their platonic cuddling and aggressively retro aesthetic create an odd, lightly ironized, closety vibe. A novelist more concerned with our moral life would explain this atmosphere: perhaps through parental divorce, which played such a huge role in the national psyche of the ’80s and ’90s. Divorce defines the cultural landscape of Generation X. As one of the marginal comics by Paul Rivoche puts it: “Don’t worry, mother… If the marriage doesn’t work out, we can always get divorced.” The atmosphere of divorce, its ever present possibility, shapes these characters’ contingent and uncommitted life—but it doesn’t define their psychological backgrounds. Unlike in much Gen X fiction (including McInerney’s Story of My Life and The Secret History), our hero’s parents are still married.

In 2019, the divorce rate hit a record low, as did the marriage rate and the childbirth rate. Divorce and the experiences of “children of divorce,” which shaped so many books and movies in the 1980s and 1990s, play a much smaller role in our cultural landscape now that nobody’s getting married or having children in the first place. This shift has not exactly reduced the ambient level of instability and precarity. The covert intensity with which Andy and his friends cling to one another, the mingled hope and guardedness in their promise-free love, is if anything even more striking in our current relationship moonscape.

The place of gay people and gay longings has shifted in a far more significant way since 1991, and here Generation X does feel even more retro than it’s trying to be. But although there are clues to the narrator’s sexuality for those who would like clues (it’s no coincidence that Claire’s awful boyfriend calls him “Candy”), Coupland doesn’t pathologize the unspoken quality of Andy’s sexual longings. Andy’s reliance on dreams and hints suggests an extended adolescence; that’s part of the experience of the closet, but it’s also something he can share with his friends, opening him to them as well as limiting him.

Andy and his friends are bracingly aware that they won’t do as well as their parents. I remember answering the phone when I was in middle school and finding myself in a poll: “Do you expect to have the same level of financial security as your parents, or greater, or less?” I said, “Less,” of course, with a suppressed duh. Doesn’t everyone expect less? And yet Andy and his friends live in their own bungalows, right next to one another. (Andy’s from Portland but fled to tend bar in Palm Springs with Dag; Claire sells Chanel at a luxury department store.) They don’t need housemates. They have pets! Who do you know, who isn’t rich, who can afford their own rental and a pet? There’s a chapter in here titled “Quit Your Job.” I enjoyed that slogan, but thirty years on, in the middle of the gig pandemic, I also thought, Gosh, remember when people had “jobs”? Andy and his friends come from the middle class or higher, true; they’re also part of a generation that could feel the floor tilting under them—even if they hadn’t yet slid all the way off. They’re able to choose between the service industry and a soul-crushing job with health benefits. We should all be so lucky!

The most powerful image of the precarity of these characters is not their withdrawal from romance or their bartending jobs. It’s nuclear war. When the novel was released, in March 1991, the Soviet Union still existed. It’s set in 1990, the year after the Berlin Wall fell. The old game of brinksmanship was rapidly changing its rules, and nobody knew how it would end. Dag is obsessed with the mushroom cloud; he accidentally covers Claire’s bungalow with radioactive rocks; he closes one of his many “end of the world stories” with “the silent rush of hot wind, like the opening of a trillion oven doors that you’ve been imagining since you were six.” Nuclear war is an ever present memento mori: a reminder that you’re a target, that political forces you can’t hope to affect may turn you and everybody you know into glass. 

But nuclear war also offers the promise of a totally different future. Maybe things won’t just keep going the way they have been. Maybe apocalypse will bring revelation. Dag’s vision of the mushroom cloud ends in communion and a kind of confession. His nuclear fantasies express deep-rooted fears, but also a longing for the ecstatic shattering of the self. Nuclear war would not just crack open the self-protective carapace of irony: the persona. It would not only be the ultimate shared experience in an atomized and alienated world (“We Will All Go Together When We Go,” as Tom Lehrer reminds us). It also represents the white-hot moment when loss becomes total. And it’s in this loss, a kind of mutually-assured asceticism, that Coupland’s characters hope to discover some form of transcendence. That’s vague, and it’s vague in the novel; maybe it has to be vague, because, having left the ornament and doctrine of religions behind, Andy and Dag and Claire have little idea what other shape transcendence might take.

We see this in their stories. One of the unexpected delights of Generation X is the way it turns the postmodern obsession with narratology into a game. The three friends constantly tell each other “bedtime stories,” with various rules and conventions. This is part of their self-protective irony (it’s not me, it’s not my heart). It’s part of the zine aesthetic of the novel, and it fits the characters’ directionless lives; no individual plotline can be sustained for very long. But Coupland makes this shared storytelling feel loving and genuinely communal. It’s a sincere statement that they may view their own lives as pointless and meaningless, but they want to hear their friends’ stories. There’s an uncynical lightness to the storytelling, which lets these characters reveal their secret desires as if at a slumber party, flashlights under their chins.

And so we get Claire’s fairy tale of the spaceman who persuades a girl stuck on the backwater planet of “Texlahoma” to give her life so he can get back to Earth. He’ll revive her, he promises. Her sisters know it’s a lie. But they still let her go to her ecstatic death: “And together the two sisters sat into the night, silhouetted by the luminescing earth, having a contest with each other to see who could swing their swing the highest.” This is a tale of deadly romance, appropriate for the sex-kills era. It’s a tale of economic marginality. But it’s also suffused with longing for the unknown, even if the journey into that black, star-studded expanse will kill you. And it’s a hint that death, at least symbolic death, may be necessary in order to touch the stars.

Claire is also the one who tells the most direct parable of asceticism. She tells this story soon after her sketchy grifter friend, nicknamed Elvissa, runs off to be “a gardener at a nunnery.” Dag says, “I don’t buy it”; but Claire retorts, “It’s not something you buy.” Generation X, in Generation X, shelters neither in the certainties of the ’60s revolt nor in the post-Great Recession certainties of the millennials, but in irony and delay. Elvissa’s flight suggests an unsheltered alternative. Not the convent—that’s too much certainty or the wrong kind—but something convent-like: some ascesis, some mystery, some intelligible loss and unintelligible gain.

Right after Elvissa leaves, Claire tells a story called “Leave Your Body,” about “this poor little rich girl named Linda.” Linda’s parents break up when she’s a kid; she becomes a “charmed but targetless” woman, restless and unhappy. And then in the Himalayas she learns about “a religious sect of monks and nuns… who had achieved a state of saintliness—ecstasy—release.” Linda accepts the sect’s strict rules (though it’s important to the generational portrait that they’re not the rules of kashrut or the catechism) and begins seven years of fasting and meditation. She misunderstands. She makes what is literally a fatal error, due to her ignorance of the Himalayan discipline. And yet that doesn’t mean she fails. The ultra-American’s quest ends not in humiliation but in mystery: even in her folly, she found the doorway.

This is Coupland’s attitude toward all his characters’ longings. He lavishes attention on their bright and curlicued foolishness, but he never holds their hopes in contempt. He suggests that they may someday find whatever it is they’re seeking, even if they never understand it. This is an unfinished book; it defined a generation by our unfinishedness.

Eve Tushnet is the author of two novels, Amends and Punishment: A Love Story, as well as the nonfiction Gay and Catholic: Accepting My Sexuality, Finding Community, Living My Faith. She lives in Washington, DC and writes and speaks on topics ranging from medieval covenants of friendship to underrated vampire films. Her hobbies include sin, confession, and ecstasy.

Sam Moore / April 28, 2021

One of the first, most potent images in Wakefield Poole’s groundbreaking 1971 adult film Boys in the Sand is that of Casey Donovan emerging from the waves before making his way onto the beach. The image feels like a queering of a common cultural touchstone: a figure of great beauty surrounded by water, as if the waves and sea came together to create it. From Botticelli’s Birth of Venus to Ursula Andress in 1962’s Dr. No (subverted decades later by Daniel Craig in 2006’s Casino Royale), there’s something about the water as a site of (re)birth that’s full of power and myth. This idea of a loaded geography, at once physical and representative of something greater, runs deep in the DNA of Boys in the Sand; the film wouldn’t exist without the Fire Island locale that it calls home. 

Poole’s film explores both the reality and mythical unreality of New York’s Fire Island, a place that’s taken a heightened place in queer art and culture for decades now—a kind of sanctuary, a place of freedom, one made all the more tempting by the fact that it isn’t available for everyone. In the director’s commentary for Boys in the Sand, Poole says that when it came to Fire Island, “a lot of people had heard of it, but never seen it.” Boys is a kind of strange travelogue, capturing both the island’s reality—how elemental it is, the heat and the water—and also imbuing it with a kind of magic, helping to turn the place into a myth. The film is a perfect escapist fantasy: there are no straight people, there’s no violence, all the men are beautiful, and the sex is plentiful. It becomes something utopian, the kind of gay-only place that people might normally have only dreamed of. The nature of queer life at the time, the extent to which it was something that had to be kept secret, is one of the things that’s gone on to make Fire Island such a staple of queer culture, an iconic part of its history. This idea—attractive men bathed in a sunlight so bright that it seems almost unreal—is echoed in a lot of art that explores the Fire Island milieu, perhaps most explicitly in the images detailed in Tom Bianchi’s 2013 Fire Island Pines: Polaroids 1975-83. 

Bianchi’s images echo the aesthetic of Boys in the Sand, and looking at Donovan in the film alongside some of the men who appear in Bianchi’s Polaroids, it becomes clear that they share the same approach to Fire Island: both artists echo the same Arcadian myth of the pines. A certain type of body populates the vast majority of the snapshots: buff, gym-going, masculine, tanned—the tan lines on Bianchi’s subjects, in fact, are often vivid in contrast to their sun-kissed bodies. Poole’s actors fall into a similar camp, and this creates the sense that Fire Island is a place that’s by and for a narrow group of people within queer communities: conventionally attractive men. The prevalence of these images inverts similar ideas in a straight tradition: tempting women on distant islands, stretching all the way back to the sirens in The Odyssey. From a queer perspective, this idea is both new and old all at once; while it changes the ways in which male bodies are viewed—and challenges mythical traditions that often only frame female bodies in this way—it continues to show that only certain kinds of bodies are worth immortalizing via images. 

For all of the possibility in the air, the bodies that occupy these spaces make it clear that the Fire Island that exists in queer art is a place to showcase a certain type of body, a way to look and a way to live that’s the price of admission for this very specific utopian escape. Boys in the Sand finds power in these bodies as objects of desire—a magical pill literally causes a boyfriend to materialize out of thin air in the film’s “Poolside” section—the currency with which the place is navigated. This is echoed in some of the queer art that comes in the wake of Boys in the Sand. The Andrew Holleran novel Dancer from the Dance (which uses one of Bianchi’s Polaroids as a cover photo in a recent reprint) is obsessed with the mythical image of Fire Island, populating it with characters who exist through gossip and assumption as much as through their own lives, much like the island itself, so it makes sense when Holleran writes: “we queens loathed rain at the beach, small cocks, and reality, i think, in that order.” None of these things exist in the images of Fire Island put forward by Poole and Bianchi; the sun is always out, and the real world is always on the other side of the water. 

How one stayed at Fire Island is one of the other great dividers of the place. Poole himself acknowledges this in his Boys commentary, where he argues that the economics that defined much of the island came down to whether you came in on the ferry or owned your own boat. None of Poole’s characters seem to be on the lower end of the economic spectrum; the houses they stay in are nice, and the integration of domesticity—a lot of the characters in Boys want relationships beyond a sexual fling, and there’s an air of loneliness that exists in a push-and-pull dynamic with the possibility inherent on the Island—carries with it the idea of a kind of ownership that not everyone can afford. The idea of loneliness—both on and beyond Fire Island—is echoed in an interesting way in Bianchi’s Polaroids: it’s rare for any of his subjects’ faces to be seen, as if the specter of the world beyond the island stops them from revealing all of themselves to the camera. 

This is one of the things that makes Fire Island such a strange, liminal place in queer art. It exists in a singular way, unlike anywhere else, and also unlike a real place. There’s a scene in Boys where a door is opened to seemingly nowhere, a sort of non-space that’s divorced even from the rest of the island. The episodic structure of the film—”beachside,” “poolside,” and “inside”—break the place down into a series of fragmented landscapes, at once connected and not connected to one another. This is never a place that people will stay in for the long-term, we know. Even if the domestic moments suggest some kind of future, it isn’t a future that’s possible here.​

​And yet, queer art keeps returning to Fire Island, this place that’s at once impermanent and inescapable. For Poole, much of the drama in Boys is the act of cruising itself: the slow-moving camera that follows the movements of his lonely lovers, the immediacy and intimacy that’s only available on Fire Island. For Bianchi, it’s a bright escapism, even if his images don’t always show all of their subjects—that incompleteness allows viewers to fill in the blanks, imagining their own dream man.

Holleran’s novel makes for a fascinating contrast with both Poole and Bianchi. He seems more willing to engage with the idea of the myth, where the others, knowingly or not, contributed instead to the act of myth-making. The echoes of Fire Island also echo some of the problems inherent in the ways that queer culture is understood. There’s a reason that the bodies across all these different media are so uniform, and one of the strangest, most compelling parts of the Fire Island myth is how explicit it is about the fact that freedom and joy won’t be offered to everyone who arrives. The thing that most clearly, most viscerally ties together the film, the photographs, and the novel are these bodies—their conventional, masculine attractiveness serving as a kind of shorthand for the acceptable face/facelessness of Fire Island, a small sample of the kind of men who are most likely to be accepted here. Even though the entrance to Fire Island is restricted—by how you look, by how much money you have—the return, season after season, still seems inevitable. It makes sense. All of these people, fictional or otherwise, escape here because the island offers them something that the real world won’t.

Sam Moore‘s writing on queerness, politics, and genre fiction in art has been published by the Los Angeles Review of Books, Little White Lies, Hyperallergic, and other places. Their poetry and experimental essays have been published in print and online, most recently in the Brixton Review of Books. If their writing didn’t already give it away, they’re into weird stuff.

Noah Berlatsky / April 14, 2021

The Angel Levine was greeted with irritation, befuddlement, and a good amount of indifference upon its release in 1970. Organized and produced by Harry Belafonte, the movie is an allegorical discussion of Black-Jewish relationships using a mix of realism and fantasy that managed to appeal to neither Black nor white audiences. A contemporary New York Times review labeled it “a failure of major proportions.” The Black press barely covered it, despite Belafonte’s fame and standing as one of the leading Black entertainers of the time. After the DVD release in 2002, a mostly sympathetic critic admitted, “the best that can be said about it is that it doesn’t quite come together.”

Watching the movie now, it’s clear the film is not exactly ahead of its time. Even post-Get Out (2017), with interest in Black speculative fiction on film at a historic high, it’s difficult to imagine The Angel Levine finding much of an audience. The fact that the movie continues to alienate seems significant, though. Truly egalitarian cross-ethnic solidarity remains difficult for creators and audiences to imagine. 

The movie is based on a short story by Bernard Malamud, “The Angel Levine,” which was originally published in Commentary in 1958. Malamud was one of the postwar Jewish writers who took advantage of diminished antisemitism to celebrate his ethnic identity as a storytelling resource. His stories were often set in the Yiddish New York of the ‘20s and ‘30s, even as they dealt with contemporary themes. “The Angel Levine” is the story of Manischevitz, a Jewish tailor cursed with multiple catastrophes: his shop burns down, his insurance is insufficient, his back goes out, and his beloved wife Fanny becomes deathly ill. Burdened beyond endurance, he is startled one day by a Black man who appears unannounced in his apartment. The man says his name is Alexander Levine, and that he is an angel. Manischevitz doesn’t believe him, and the man leaves. But as Fanny grows worse, Manischevitz becomes desperate. He goes to Harlem, tracks Levine down, and finds him drinking and dancing in a very un-godly manner. Nonetheless, he tells the angel he believes in him. The angel returns to Manischevitz’s door, grows wings, and flies into the sky in a fluttering of black wings. Manischevitz enters his house and finds his wife has been cured.

Malamud’s story has Black people in it, but it’s told from a white Jewish perspective. Manischevitz is the main character, and the third person narrative is in his head; you see only what he sees, and he is the only character whose thoughts you know. The story is about the need to believe in others, and about welcoming Black people into the circle of Jewish ethical commitment. “Believe me, there are Jews everywhere,” Manischevitz says to Fanny in the story’s last line. But it is white Jewish people doing the welcoming. Levine merely waits to be summoned.

Belafonte was a singer who drew on a broad array of musical traditions, and who saw connections between working class struggle across racial, ethnic, and national boundaries. He was drawn to a story about mutual faith as a foundation for solidarity and transformation. But he didn’t want to follow Malamud in presenting that story entirely from a white perspective. Instead, he carefully assembled an interracial group of creators to work on the film. Slovakian Ján Kadár, who had been interred in a Nazi work camp, was brought on as director. Zero Mostel plays the lead, renamed Morris Mishkin, and Polish actress Ida Kamińska took the part of Fanny. But Belafonte also brought on writer Bill Gunn, who would later create the much-admired Ganja and Hess (1973). Gunn was specifically tasked with expanding the character of Alex Levine. There’s also a role for Levine’s girlfriend, Sally (Gloria Foster). Finally, Belafonte created an apprenticeship program so that young Black and Puerto Rican filmmakers, mostly excluded from the film industry, could get paid to work on set, contribute their talents, and gain experience for their own projects.

In short, Belafonte wanted Black experience to be at the center, rather than the periphery, of the filmed The Angel Levine. He accomplished this in part simply by appearing in the film himself.  Belafonte is an enormously charismatic presence, who effortlessly steals scenes even from a character actor as accomplished as Mostel. It’s impossible to see Belafonte as a figure in someone else’s drama, or as a kind of comical enigma. His smile manages to be both beatific and lived-in; you want to know more about him, because you know he has his own story to tell.

The movie, contra Malamud, takes pains to tell that story. Levine, in this version, is a small town hood who is killed by a car while trying to escape with a stolen fur. When he got to heaven, he says he was told to turn around and come right back. (“Every white mother” went right on to heaven, he says bitterly, “but me they put on probation.”) He is tasked with getting Mishkin to believe in him. That belief will allow him to miraculously heal Fanny, and become a full angel in heaven. In the meantime, though, he has his own unfinished business. He wants to reconcile with his long-suffering girlfriend Sally, apologize, and tell her he loves her.

Giving Levine a narrative of his own creates a clash of genres. In accord with the Malamud story, Mishkin is still the main character in a white ethnic Jewish tale about endurance, suffering, and empathy, told in a sentimental register.  But Levine’s story draws on the social realism of Black protest genres. His angry soliloquies (“Nothin’! Nothin’! A whole lifetime with nothin’ to show for it!”) and his quick rage at Mishkin’s casual racist slurs (“You call me a schvartze one more time and I’ll knock you on your ass!”) echo the inchoate, yearning despair and simmering righteous violence of Richard Wright’s 1940 Native Son.  

The film uses its magical elements to try to bridge these contrasting narratives. Levine simply appears in Mishkin’s kitchen, through uncertain means, and the two must then elbow around each other in the cramped set, their bodies and stories squashed in together for better or worse.  Mishkin bustles around and tries to make his wife comfortable while Levine in the next room embraces Sally in an effort to overcome her skepticism. Repeatedly, Mishkin looks through the window in the kitchen, or through a door jam, gazing at Levine just as the movie audience gazes at Levine. Those who came to see a white Jewish drama are encouraged to see, with Mishkin, another story. “Mr. Levine, you have meaning for me,” Mishkin says. That’s a demand not just for understanding, but for interest, investment, and a recognition of relevance across difference and across genre.

Being in one another’s stories should in theory provide a common ground for solidarity. The movie makes numerous efforts to show intersections of Black and Jewish experience, and to suggest that the story of one can be the story of the other. In an early scene, Mishkin applies for welfare to a Black woman caseworker—a reminder that, despite racist messaging to the contrary, it’s not only or primarily Black people who sometimes need state aid. Later, during Mishkin’s final trip to Harlem, he drops in to ask for directions in a Black tailor’s shop, looking for help from a member of his own profession.

The most obvious appeal across Black and Jewish communities, though, is the fact that Levine belongs to both. This is an approach that should resonate more solidly now than at the time of the film, more even than at the time of Malamud’s story. In 1955, Malamud could write that Manischevitz “had heard of black Jews but had never met one.” In the ‘70s, Black Jewish people still did not have much public visibility; James Baldwin doesn’t mention Black Jewish people at all in his famous 1967 essay “Negroes Are Anti-Semitic Because They’re Anti-White.” Some five decades later, however, intermarriage has substantially increased the number of Black Jewish people in the United States, and Ethiopian Jewish immigration to Israel has been a topic of international discussion. Levine in 2021 isn’t just a symbol, if he ever was only that. He’s a screen representation of people who are rarely portrayed in mainstream Hollywood films. 

Mishkin’s attitude towards Levine in 1970 is one of incredulity; he demands that Levine recite the blessing over the bread and, in a hugely inappropriate move, asks if he’s circumcised. Again, Black Jewish people are significantly more prevalent now, but Mishkin’s racist notion that Jewishness is linked to skin color persists. Sandra Lawson, a Black rabbi, wrote at the Forward that she’d “never been in a Jewish space where I wasn’t questioned.” Black Jewish Texan Tracey Nicole says that she always introduces herself to a new police officer at her place of worship because “I am the only Jew of color at our synagogue. So when I walk into situations like that, I’m wondering if people will acknowledge that I belong.”

Malamud’s story, which is rooted in Jewish experience, imagines shared suffering and marginalization as a path to renewal and resurrection. And that’s not completely fantastic; many Jewish people did work prominently for Black civil rights in the ‘50s and ‘60s, and some even died for it. But Mishkin’s racism, and the way it is still echoed in white Jewish treatment of Black Jews, should make viewers hesitant about taking away a too hopeful message. Belafonte himself approached his film about faith with a good deal of skepticism only two years after the assassination of his friend Martin Luther King Jr. “For me, the miracle in America was Martin Luther King,” he said in a press interview about the film. “In the years that King and SNCC were coming to the people with love, the people didn’t believe. They finally believed when it was too damn late.”

The difficulty in crafting a white Jewish story and a Black story simultaneously is underlined in one of the film’s most telling exchanges. Levine, distraught, has gone to the roof. Mishkin follows him and tries to comfort him by referencing white Jewish experience of assimilation and waning antisemitism. “They’re not very nice to you now, but tomorrow they’ll be ashamed of themselves and do better,” he says with complacent assurance. To which Levine responds, “Bullshit.” Black people have been in America a good bit longer than white Eastern European Jewish immigrants. Time brought them not apologies, but the opportunity to be exploited by a broader ethnicity of white landlords. When Mishkin suggests he wants to draw Levine into the orbit of white Jewish ethics and experience, it’s meant to be beneficent altruism. But it could also be a self-serving lie. How can you create solidarity without flattening difference? How do you make another’s story your own when it isn’t yours to own?

Malamud’s “The Angel Levine” mostly ignored those questions, which is why it feels finished and coherent, if slight. The film version, in contrast, tries to answer them, and seizes up in the process. It obviously doesn’t know how to wrap up its runtime. As the New York Times review says, it keeps “stopping and starting up again.” It finally dead-ends in melancholy ambiguity, with Fanny hovering between life and death back at the apartment while Mishkin stands in Harlem, reaching up to try to catch a floating black feather that eludes his grasp. He fails, and the movie largely fails as well. Belafonte was trying to rework a Jewish idiom into a Black one to create a story about universal solidarity that retained particularity without condescension. More than half a century later, American cinema, to say nothing of American society, is still unsure how to do that. It’s not even sure it wants to try.

Noah Berlatsky is the author of Wonder Woman: Bondage and Feminism in the Marston/Peter Comics.

Alex Adams / March 25, 2021

Ishiro Honda’s 1954 Godzilla is perhaps the most widely praised Kaiju film ever made. A special effects masterpiece at the time, the monochrome mother of all monster movies had bleak, fume-laden visuals, a gloomy, mournful tone, and an unambiguous anti-nuclear message. Even its conclusion, in which the pained Dr. Serizawa unleashes his hyper-toxic Oxygen Destroyer to finally rid Japan of its avenging lizard king, sees no redemption, as the weapon that banishes the beast also irreversibly poisons the Earth. Godzilla is rightly remembered as a serious, somber, and politically insightful cinematic monument with a powerful message and internationally historical significance. Its first dozen or so sequels, however, are quite another matter—a different beast, you could say.

For Godzilla would not remain an icon of manmade devastation for long. In the course of the next two decades, Godzilla would grow from a nightmarish God of Destruction into mankind’s dependable, child-friendly ally. “The dragon has become St. George,” wrote New York Times film critic Vincent Canby on the 1976 US release of Godzilla Vs. Megalon, in which Godzilla defends the Earth against the giant cockroach Megalon and his sinister ally, the buzzsaw-chested robot chicken Gigan. Godzilla’s role as the bane of modern Japan would be assumed by the many Kaiju successors he confronted, and the beast who had once embodied the apocalypse would now stand heroically between his antagonists and their desire to destroy the Earth.

Varying wildly in tone, the corpus of movies from the Shōwa era of the Godzilla series veers vertiginously between family-friendly entertainments—such as All Monsters Attack (1969), Son of Godzilla (1966), and Ebirah, Horror of the Deep (1964)—and the more adult tone evident in the environmentalist psychedelia of Godzilla Vs. Hedorah (1971) or the WrestleMania spectacles of Destroy All Monsters (1968) and Godzilla Vs. Mechagodzilla (1974). These movies are fondly remembered by fans for their rough and ready practical special effects, their cartoonish, preposterous pugilism, and their deliriously inventive storytelling, which could use anything at all as the pretext for a monster battle—from an insect invasion of the Earth to a 24-hour dance competition.

Nevertheless, their lack of the thematic seriousness and visual restraint so evident in Honda’s first film means that they are often looked down on as a silly dilution of the original movie, a goofy world cinema novelty of interest only to kids, nerds, or the sort of weirdo who used to load up on caffeine and stay up late to watch men in rubber suits wrestling on cheaply painted sound stages. Naturally I, as just such a weirdo, think that this sneering, while understandable, underplays a great deal of the sophistication and interest of these wacky, silly, excellently distracting films. Not simply the impoverishment of a once-grand icon in the pursuit of ever-dwindling box office returns (although Toho has certainly never been shy of ruthlessly commercially exploiting Godzilla), Godzilla’s evolution from cosmic punishment to benevolent savior also makes him one of the most interesting, flexible, and dynamic popular cultural icons of the Cold War years.

Rumble in the Jungle: King Kong vs. Godzilla (1962)

King Kong vs. Godzilla is perhaps the best remembered of the Shōwa-era Godzilla movies, after the original Godzilla. The first time either creature would be seen in color, it remains the most successful and popular Godzilla movie to this day, in terms of ticket sales at least, perhaps due to the way in which it was marketed—almost like a high-stakes boxing match or wrestling bout. The genius of its combination of two iconic monsters at a time when both of them still remained fearful beasts, rather than comic or heroic figures, was powerful enough for the movie to remain a genre high-water mark for years to come.

This double-headliner structure, in which two A-list monsters were brought together in order to double the appeal of the movie, would initiate a run of versus battles that would last for over a decade. From 1964 onwards, Toho produced at least one Godzilla movie every year until the financial failure of Terror of Mechagodzilla drew the franchise to a screeching halt in 1975. Though Godzilla had fought against the Ankylosaur Kaiju Anguirus seven years earlier in Godzilla Raids Again (1956), it would be King Kong Vs. Godzilla that truly cemented the formal template for the many monster clashes to come: on some pretext or other, Godzilla would face off against invading life forms from outer space, such as his arch-nemesis King Ghidorah, or against creatures with more Earthly origins, such as the mysterious and oddly beautiful Mothra, the sea-monster Ebirah, or, indeed, the American myth King Kong.

At the same time as it is great knockabout fun at face value, the “versus movie” format also provides a tremendously flexible and rich conceptual palette for filmmakers to engage with social and political ideas. In his extraordinary book of mini-essays Mythologies (1957), French critic Roland Barthes observes that amateur wrestling is a kind of broad-brush theater in which good and evil battle for symbolic supremacy. “In the ring,” he writes, “wrestlers remain gods because they are, for a few moments, the key which opens Nature, the pure gesture which separates Good from Evil, and unveils the form of a Justice which is at last intelligible.” The very simplicity and crudeness of the drama, he writes, is what makes these bouts transcendent. Further, he claims, its ramshackle nature—and the foundational role of the audience’s gleeful suspension of disbelief—also means that its value as symbolic play is brought to the forefront: “There is no more a problem of truth in wrestling than in the theatre. In both, what is expected is the intelligible representation of moral situations.”

So it is in the Kaiju clash film, that unique brand of spectacle cinema that shares many formal and thematic traits with wrestling as well as other Japanese cultural forms such as anime and manga. The bold, lurid language of gesture, the vivid play of symbol and myth, and their open environmentalist and anti-nuclear ethical commitments make them a kind of powerful moral theater, at once sublime and ridiculous, at once ostentatiously silly and deathly serious. Crucially, it is equally redundant to point out that the special effects are unconvincing in King Kong Vs. Godzilla as it is to point out that wrestling is “not real” or that a play is made up (or indeed, that your Extreme Noise Terror record features a lot of shouting—what exactly did you expect?). What matters is not verisimilitude, or even a coherently sequential narrative, but the experience of grand moments of sensory power, scenes of epic destruction and wrenching pathos, and the realization of overwhelming visions of primal, fantastical worlds previously not imaginable.

You don’t, after all, go to a film about wrestling monsters expecting subtlety. But this doesn’t mean, of course, that they are without content. Even the original Godzilla derives its power from its total commitment to the enactment of one broad, bold idea.

The Meaning of Monstrosity

Toho’s first Godzilla film had such a potent social and political message that the creature would always be thought of in semiotic terms, always interpreted as a metaphor for the pressing concerns of the time. The subsequent Shōwa films, though, are chaotically flexible in this regard, and Godzilla cannot be read consistently as any kind of fixed or coherent symbol from film to film. More often, it is his foes who “embody” some social or political force against which the Earth needs to be defended, whether it is arms-race militarism (Mechagodzilla), pollution (Hedorah), renewed atomic testing (Megalon), or intergalactic imperialism (King Ghidorah, Gigan). Most of all, though, in his initial incarnation at least, Godzilla represents the unstoppable force, the mute, brute power of nature, the principle of sheer indestructibility.

This characterization of Godzilla remains, for many, the most compelling. Shusuke Kaneko, director of Millennium-era fan favorite Godzilla, Mothra and King Ghidorah: Giant Monsters All-Out Attack (2001), famously commented that Roland Emmerich’s 1998 Hollywood interpretation of Godzilla was disappointing in part because of its fear of American ordnance. “Americans seem unable to accept a creature,” he said, “that cannot be put down by their arms.” (Rather than an adaptation of the Toho legend of the mysterious force of nature, Emmerich’s version recalls nothing more than the climax of the previous year’s Jurassic Park: The Lost World, in which a T-Rex runs amok in San Diego.) Godzilla is at his most attractive when he is at his ugliest, when he embodies a total disaster that can be momentarily deflected but never truly defeated.

In “Mammoth,” the 74th essay in Minima Moralia (1951), Theodor Adorno writes that “the desire for the presence of the most ancient is a hope that animal creation might survive the wrong that man has done it, if not man himself, and give rise to a better species, one that finally makes a success of life.” Adorno’s reflections on the appeal of prehistoric beasts have more than a little relevance to Toho’s reptilian colossus. Very often Godzilla is conceived of as the resistance or revenge of the natural world, an embodiment of nature’s apocalyptic judgement upon mankind, a kind of demonic scourge unleashed by the obscure yet vengeful conscience of the wronged planet. He retains this character in King Kong Vs. Godzilla—when he bursts out of an iceberg at the start of the movie, nobody is pleased that he has arisen from his slumber to save the day, as would happen in later films. Here, he is a wild, unpredictable cataclysm that cannot be stopped, a symbol of the natural world’s dominance over us and its indifferent ability to survive us.

Kong, too, is no stranger to social and political interpretations. There is a long and distinguished critical tradition of reading King Kong as a problematic and racist engagement with themes related to slavery, imperialism, and moral panics about Black masculinity and sexuality. Merian C. Cooper’s 1933 original, which draws heavily on the representational traditions of lost world adventure fiction, is widely considered to be an allegory of slavery and imperial exploitation, a tragic parable of man’s ruthless, irreverent, and self-involved abuse of the world’s majestic wildness. John Guillermin’s 1976 US version would more explicitly locate the story in the context of petropolitics, as the colonizing expedition to Skull Island is motivated not by a desire to capture a mythic beast but, more prosaically perhaps, to drill for oil. When Peter Jackson remade the movie in 2005, he made it a satire of the entertainment industry, casting Carl Denham as a roguish, self-destructive genius, an Orson Welles figure whose visionary talent threatens to destroy all of those near to him, and whose pledges to complete his work in the honor of the people who died in its course recalls the increasingly desperate dedications of documentarian-cum-unintentional-murderer Remy in 1992’s Man Bites Dog. For Jackson, Denham is like Kong, an unstoppable and doomed force of nature who destroys by loving.

Every Hollywood version of the original story, though, however sophisticated, simultaneously exploits the persistent racist panic about Black male desire for white women that is embedded into the fabric of the story. King Kong is, at its heart, a story about the violent death that inevitably looms at the horizon of Kong’s love for human women, a fable that has always been read as a racist allegory of the tragedy and illegitimacy of Black men’s supposedly insatiable appetite for the love of white women.

King Kong Vs. Godzilla is no exception here, as Kong’s storyline fuses critique of corporate colonialism with a problematic representation of Black desire. The characters’ extractivist plunder of Kong’s home island—changed from the enigmatic and unlocatable Skull Island to Pharaoh Island, a fictionalized landmass among the Solomon Islands—is the incident that prompts the confrontation between the two legendary beasts, and the Pacific Pharmaceutical execs who exploit Pharaoh Island for its pleasantly intoxicating fruit are shown as single-minded, hubristic buffoons as they capture Kong with the insane intent of using him to advertise their company. The clash of titans still makes time for a comedic critique of the ruthlessness of the capitalist advertising industry; so too does it retain Kong’s fascination with human women, as he scales a government building while clinging to a beautiful young woman he has captured.

The natives of Skull Island, too, are always a problem for these films. From Cooper’s original painted tribe of Kong-worshippers, to Jackson’s violent brutes (who recall the Uruk-Hai orcs from his Lord of the Rings trilogy), to the noble savages of 2017’s Kong: Skull Island (who recall Kurtz’s sinister and silent tribe in 1979’s Apocalypse Now), the human inhabitants of Kong’s home are routinely represented in extraordinarily dehumanizing ways.  

Once again, King Kong Vs. Godzilla follows suit. The tribe of Faro Island is portrayed by actors in full-body blackface, and the Pacific Pharmaceutical employees bribe them with a transistor radio and tobacco. This patronizing bargain, in which they steal the island god in return for habit-forming poison and toys, is part of the film’s critique of exploitative capitalism; it is also, however, played for laughs. No matter how progressive the themes, a film that features dehumanizing ridicule like this is irredeemably racist. It is interesting, too, that the first major development in the Godzilla franchise’s relationship with its US audience foregrounds anti-Black racism, as though one of the safe territories on which the US and Japan could rebuild their relationship was the imperialist dehumanization of Black people.

For King Kong vs. Godzilla is historically and politically significant most of all because it was an international co-production between Japanese and American filmmakers. Where the original Godzilla is a fable of the nuclear suffering that the US inflicted upon Japan, made only two years after the conclusion of the post-war American occupation, King Kong vs. Godzilla is a symbol (and product) of the renewed Pacific alliance and the reestablishment of geopolitical cooperation between the US and Japan. Ishiro Honda returned to direct the original Japanese version for Toho, released in 1962, and John Beck helmed the adaptation of the US version for Universal Pictures, which was released the following year. This collaboration would fuel a monster movie franchise that endures today.

“This is UN reporter Eric Carter with the news”

Prior to Emmerich’s 1998 adaptation, every time a Godzilla movie appeared in Western markets it would be bowdlerized in some way. The movies were often retitled, recut, or given comically bad English dubbing; some of them, such as the original Godzilla and Godzilla 1985, were reshot, with American stars retroactively given focalizing roles in order, it was thought, to make the films more appealing to American and European audiences. Many of the recuts were extraordinarily unforgiving—the NBC screening of Godzilla vs. Megalon, for example, savagely streamlined the movie down to just 48 minutes, cutting out almost half of the movie in order to accommodate commercials and a Godzilla-suited John Belushi’s accompanying skits.

King Kong vs. Godzilla is unique in the way it is recut. A great deal of Honda’s original is brusquely shaven off and replaced, not with dramatic scenes featuring American actors, but with newscast-style footage of a reporter, Eric Carter, explaining the events of the plot directly to the audience. There is an amusing irony here: in the Japanese version, Pacific Pharmaceutical needs to use Kong for advertising because their own TV show is “dull, boring, and without imagination.” Carter’s broadcasts are almost as dry as the output of Pacific Pharmaceutical’s fictional TV network, as clumsily direct and awkwardly literal an expository device as you are ever likely to see in any film. Carter, the voice of the movie, is the antithesis of “show, don’t tell,” sometimes dictating not only the events but the way we should feel about them, too.

This clunkily oratorical exposition may be dramatically flat, but it has the virtue at least of being swift. One of the enduring problems of the Shōwa Godzilla series is the grinding slowness of some of the utterly turgid exposition, so it is in a way gratifying for an audience to be simply given the facts rather than having to yawn through interminable dialogue. And Carter’s scenes are also, sometimes, wonderfully comic. The scene in which he invites a paleontological expert into the studio to explain Godzilla’s origins and anatomy, for instance, features this expert—purportedly from New York University—using a child’s illustrated guide to dinosaurs as a visual aid.

And this formal oddness did nothing to stop the film’s popularity, as it was a hit on both sides of the Pacific. Strangely, though, given the film’s walloping success, Godzilla and Kong would never meet again until this year’s Godzilla vs. Kong, produced as part of Legendary’s MonsterVerse, which will be released almost a full sixty years after the movie it pays homage to. This seems odd, given that Toho retained the rights to Kong long enough to make King Kong Escapes in 1967, and that Toho was keen to make Godzilla face off against certain foes repeatedly—notably Mothra (four times), King Ghidorah (six times), and Mechagodzilla (five times).

The original was also uniquely difficult to acquire on home video for years, which meant that King Kong Vs. Godzilla became something of a myth, a legendary “lost” movie, particularly in my wet corner of Tory England. It was rarely if ever screened on British TV (not even in the small hours of the morning), and when a series of affordable VHS releases of Shōwa classics was released to coincide with Emmerich’s Hollywood Godzilla, King Kong Vs. Godzilla was nowhere to be seen among them, much to my adolescent disappointment. The US version was unavailable on DVD before 2006, and until the release of the 2019 Criterion Shōwa Blu-Ray box set, one of the only ways to get hold of the Japanese cut of the film was through obscure mail-order catalogs or DVD-R bootlegs.

Its iconic success, its lack of repetition, and its unavailability led to the attachment of a quasi-mythological status to this singular and mysterious film—a film that for many years of my pre-internet youth I couldn’t even confirm existed. Tantalizing half-truths and outright falsehoods circulated among fans like whispered playground rumors, further distorted in the retelling. The most enduring of these claimed that the two versions ended differently, with Kong winning in the US version but with Japanese audiences seeing Godzilla emerge victorious.

Perhaps inevitably, when I saw the film for the first time it was extraordinarily disappointing. The US cut is far less coherent than the Japanese, with characterization, comedy, and subtext stripped out; the Godzilla suit looks tired; and the Kong suit is almost unbearably goofy (despite what I said about special effects not being important, it still smarts to see them be quite so poor). But such is the unpleasable nature of fans: nothing, no matter how spectacular, could have lived up to the King Kong Vs. Godzilla in my head, nurtured by years of feverish daydreaming and speculation.

In the final analysis, what is perhaps most striking about this movie is that its legacy—the structuring principle of the Kaiju battle film—saturates every Godzilla film to come. The natives of Infant Island, home of Mothra, bear a striking resemblance to the natives of Faro Island, and the franchise as a whole is more than a little indebted to the problematic Kong mythos, not least in its representations of monster-infested lost world islands that seem to have avoided the great extinctions. This movie, and the trans-Pacific alliance of which it is so powerful a product, is in some ways the distilled essence of all the Shōwa Godzilla films: goofy, imperfect, but magically suggestive.

Alex Adams is a cultural critic and writer based in North East England. His most recent book, How to Justify Torture, was published by Repeater Books in 2019. He loves dogs.

Mike Apichella / March 24, 2021

From Creepy Things #1, July 1975. Art and script by Tom Sutton

Today’s sophisticated communications infrastructure did not emerge fully formed as totalitarian surveillance. Its annihilation of privacy was merely the price we had to pay for an unprecedented level of reliability within an endless array of applications. The drive to eliminate the slightest material discomfort and provide instant gratification is nothing new—air conditioning and central heating technology first became widely available in the early 1900s, home refrigerators in the 1940s, TV and transistor radios in the 1950s. By the end of the 20th century, millions of people were immersed (billions still could not afford to be) in a world where technology could manage or minimize any kind of deprivation, danger, or imperfection.

Nature’s unpredictability was marginalized, and this new marginalization bore new phobias. Horror comics like Swamp Thing, Heap, and Man-Thing, films like The Legend Of Boggy Creek (1972), Frogs (1972), Jaws (1975), and Prophecy (1979), and novels by Guy N. Smith, John Halkin, and James Herbert presented situations that spilled out beyond the control of modern society. These narratives were set in places where technology was hard to come by, rural areas steeped in folklore, far from the reach of telephone service, big electrical grids, broadcast signals, and synthetic environmental conditioning. Charlton Publications’ acidic title Creepy Things embodied this new fear of technological deprivation.  

By 1975 Charlton had reached the peak of its creative powers. The company boasted a large, diverse roster of anthology titles that usually contained non-serialized content, and they offered artists and writers more creative freedom than any other mainstream American comic publisher. Some of their biggest sellers were horror comics; no less than eleven different mid-’70s horror titles carried the bold Charlton bull’s eye logo. Many of the Charlton’s comics adhered to an eccentric house style that favored post-impressionistic art paired with stories that were sometimes so limited in narrative content and character development that they bordered on absurdity.

Themes explored were standard genre fare: zombies, vampires, ghosts, and other undead monsters; werewolves and other lycanthropes; wizards, witches, and various ominous mystics; aliens, robots, and other sci-fi terrors; a menagerie of giant wild animals, swamp monsters, killer insects, slime creatures, and deadly plants. These latter beasts were often the subject for stories by Tom Sutton, one of the ’70s most prolific and innovative creators. Sutton’s Charlton material pushed representational art to abstract extremes. Conversely, his scripts were more nuanced than those of most other Charlton writers. In many ways, Sutton’s work epitomized the distinct tone of Creepy Things, which debuted in July 1975. In place of a fan mail page the first issue ran a bizarre manifesto that summarized the new series:

What do you think of when you read the title CREEPY THINGS? Snakes? Spiders? There are ants, rats, wriggly things in the mud when you go swimming, things you find under rocks… We neglected to mention the creepiest creep of all. Lest we forget, the deadliest species on planet Earth is Man! And, when Man gets a little twisted, spaced out, or peculiar, he can do some mighty funny things. You find sadists, psychos, killers, and all kinds of weirdos all over the place.  

This cynical outlook proved to be one of Creepy Things’ biggest narrative tropes. A powerful element of that anti-human fervor was the title’s host, Mr. Dee Munn. All Charlton horror titles featured wisecracking Crypt-Keeper-type narrators decked out in scary costumes that recalled the classic style of Universal monster films and Hammer’s sexy goth chillers. While he did have pointy elven ears and plentiful one-liners, Dee Munn didn’t look much like the other ghost hosts. He gave off the aura of a mafioso with his fine tailored pinstripe suit, neatly trimmed devil beard, and tinted cop shades. He chomped on cigars and kept a pet raven by his side at all times. Paunchy and balding with slicked back hair, he certainly looked creepy, but not in a Bela Lugosi way; more like some sketch bag who’d be lurking around at your seedier local gambling den or red light district.    

Even in stories that were literally flooded with slimy amorphic monsters, nothing was scarier than the series’ main human antagonists. These were nasty degenerates who brought cruelty and neglect to children, the disenfranchised, romantic rivals, pets, and livestock. Their tendency to prey upon the vulnerable and their lust for control stood as symbols of the cold-blooded authoritarianism that’s infected world progress since civilization’s earliest days. For the swamp mutants and supernatural globs of Creepy Things, brutal violence often functioned as a kind of vigilante justice doled out in order to keep “the creepiest creep of all” in line.    

“The Grass Is Always Greener” was the cover story of Creepy Things no. 3, one of a small but powerful selection of Charlton horror tales written by Mike Pellowski. Here we are introduced to Rud Pangley, an obnoxious alcoholic living in a swamp in America’s Deep South. After a “hard” day avoiding work and soakin’ up corn liquor, Pangley stumbles upon a cherubic community of “green folk” frolicking in a cool glade. Clad in bikinis and loin cloths made from tropical blossoms, the hairless, lime-skinned beings enjoy a utopian existence—until one of them strays unwittingly into Rud’s grimy clutches. Overcome by greed and distorted ambition, the sloppy drunk quickly puts together a crude side show that exploits his green captive, whose curious presence, up until this point, was considered to be nothing more than local myth.

It turns out the green folk can only survive on a plant-based diet and not the meat and potatoes that Rud tries to force feed his prisoner. The little green meal ticket promptly dies—starving behind bars in a makeshift cage before a noisy audience of angry hecklers. It’s a moment that emboldens a view of humanity as a nexus for all things selfish and callous. Abandoning the dead creature’s carcass, Pangley scampers back through the brush, hot on the trail of another hapless victim. Things don’t go quite according to plan, and artist Mike Vosburg renders this fateful twist with tenderness. The painful sequence makes Rud seem almost as victimized as the green folk.

Two other Creepy Things standouts come from the title’s second issue, an oozing tour de force by Nick Cuti and Tom Sutton called “Slimes, Slogs, and Glumps,” and the anti-classist Joe Gill/Rich Larson yarn “A Spell Of Misery.” The former tale centers around yet another community of surly swamp folk. The main character is a young boy fond of bringing home all kinds of swamp critters and keeping them as pets in his family’s shack. The kid’s father is a loudmouth control freak who wants none of it. With flagrant disrespect for the sanctity of life, the dad’s short fuse incurs the worst consequences for all involved.

Some of Creepy Things’ horrific locales possessed a remoteness caused by human negligence. The NYC ghetto setting of “A Spell Of Misery” is a prime example. In conditions nearly as miasmic as the swamp from the previous tale, we find the impoverished residents of a shambolic low-income housing complex struggling to survive, until slumlord Edmond Ruggles falls victim to the magic of benevolent local voodoo priestess Mama Carafino. Ruggles’ wretched indifference is matched by the horror of voodoo born monsters, gigantic versions of the dangers that plague the tenants daily (i.e., rats, roaches, fire, etc.). The landlord’s wife Ethel comes off as a shallow materialist unphased by her husband’s gross mismanagement. The elderly couple are depicted as snarling malcontents dissatisfied with themselves and each other despite their comfortable, antiseptic, and well-fortified suburban mansion far from the unfortunates whose rent checks bank roll their luxury.    

The 1970s witnessed the rise of what is known today as folk horror, and Creepy Things was one of the first comic book series to represent the genre, which works by contrasting the modern world’s scientific arrogance to the timeless forces of magic and mysticism. “The Star Of Siva,” an action packed Joe Gill/Rich Larson work from Creepy Things no. 6, presents a deadly clash where earthly strategies are no match for divine neutral chaos. Three greedy criminals (a French drug pusher, an AWOL American soldier, and a Viet Cong deserter) invade a Southeast Asian religious site with intent to steal a priceless treasure trove of artifacts. The deeper they go, the closer they get to their own destruction. Their hateful blasphemy is only surpassed by their disrespect for each other, culminating in the story’s grisly conclusion. With fierce energy, Larson’s depiction of the mercenaries’ meeting in a sleazy, smoke-infested metropolis stands in stark contrast to the jungle tranquility of the sacred enclave’s surroundings. The site’s rugged charm is preserved within a bubble of obscurity, much like the agrarian paradise Summerisle, fictional setting of 1973 folk horror touchstone The Wicker Man.      

You can’t talk about Charlton Publications without mentioning the company’s biggest superstar freelancer, Spider-Man co-creator Steve Ditko. One of Ditko’s greatest Charlton works was “Where Do They Flee?,” which ran in Creepy Things’ third issue. Yet another Joe Gill-penned folk horror parable, this one was partially inspired by real accounts of the strange beings who haunt abandoned British mines. It also boasts a complex sub-plot involving labor politics—Barbara Kopple’s 1976 documentary Harlan County, U.S.A. hit theaters shortly after the issue’s publication. The film follows the Brookside Strike, a violent labor uprising that occurred in a remote Appalachian town in southeast Kentucky. Tragedies connected to the strike and its impoverished proponents had been making headlines since the early ‘70s, so it’s easy to understand how these incidents could’ve impacted Gill’s script.

“Where Do They Flee?” melds archaic folklore with a politicized empathy for the desperation of miners and others suffering through the decline of the labor industry (a cultural development ingrained in many ‘70s and ‘80s historical narratives). Resembling a cross between zombies, ghosts, and mole people, the hollow-eyed, supernatural main characters secretly reside in squalid conditions hundreds of feet beneath the rubble of a decrepit Welsh mining tunnel (this locale could be a nod to another iconic artifact of the labor struggle, Idris Davies’ tragic poem “Gwalia Desert XV” aka “The Bells Of Rhymney“). The inhuman presence is just the right jolt needed in a confrontation between a close knit group of rural miners and their greedy boss, whose crimes against humanity bear close resemblance to those of the Brookside protesters’ arch enemy the Duke Power Company.  

Perhaps the most striking visual element of Creepy Things were the lavish cover paintings. Most of these were done by Sutton, with two exceptions: issue five’s cover featured a Rich Larson/Tim Boxell piece exploding within a dense zip-a-tone fade; the sixth issue brandished a moody, teal-soaked nightmare by Mike Zeck, who later became a mainstay at Marvel and popularized vigilante character The Punisher. The third issue’s Sutton cover is the major visual expression of Creepy Things’ philosophy. A distillation of “The Grass Is Always Greener,” it shows Rud Pangley overpowered by Lilliputian green folk. As they descend upon the grizzled opportunist all they can see is a threat that must be eliminated; the sanctity of human life isn’t even an afterthought. Surrounded by wilderness, impotence and terror etched upon his face, he’s paralyzed by the horror of an uncontrollable environment, pushed beyond the limits of science, immersed in a world where civilization is meaningless.

Mike Apichella has been working in the arts since 1991. He is a writer, multimedia artist, musician, and a founder of Human Host and the archival project Towson-Glen Arm Freakouts. Under his real name and various pseudonyms, his work has been published by Splice Today, Profligate, Human Conduct Press, and several DIY zines. Mike currently lives in the northeast US where he aspires to someday become the “crazy cat man” of his neighborhood.

Annie Parnell / March 10, 2021

Originally released one month after the Apollo 11 moon landing, Jim Sullivan’s psych-folk hidden gem UFO (1969) is characterized by a drifting kind of hopefulness. Over the floating strings and upbeat horns of The Wrecking Crew, who famously backed The Beach Boys and Phil Spector, the album’s lyrics consider alien abduction and psychic links with loved ones with a curiosity tinged with despair. Sullivan weaves these unearthly themes together with transitory imagery of highways and train stations, a cosmic American landscape that calls to mind Gram Parsons, who he is frequently compared to. Throughout, he searches earnestly for connection, in “Whistle Stop” asking, “Do you know the feeling? Can you love someone you’ve only met a while ago?”

UFO paints love as an otherworldly link with another person who can “hear what I am thinking,” and the album’s title track extrapolates this idea further to consider the notion of divine love. Sullivan, who was raised Irish Catholic and is described by his son Chris as having grown up in an “age of exploration,” wonders in the song if the Second Coming of Christ might arrive by UFO, an idea that’s since been amplified by his better-known space-rock contemporary David Bowie. Jim, however, is no Ziggy Stardust—where Bowie’s odes to an alien messiah are jubilant, “UFO” is inquisitive and a little guarded, with a refrain that insists that he’s only “checking out the show.” For Sullivan, it’s not only hard to comprehend the seemingly telepathic sense of connection that true love offers—on both an interpersonal and a godly scale, it’s almost impossible to believe in it.

It’s a potent sentiment, and Sullivan’s idiosyncratic, wandering lyrics parallel the mystery that surrounds his life. Chris Sullivan explained to the New York Times in 2016 that Jim resented “the idea that he might have to be a square and go work for someone else,” but despite attracting the attention of Playboy Records and celebrity fans like Farah Fawcett and Harry Dean Stanton, his music career failed to pick up steam. This struggle between the talent he so clearly possessed and the recognition that stayed out of his reach is preternaturally visible on his debut album: in the song “Highways,” Sullivan is both dogged and lost, clearly stuck but stubbornly rebuking a world that refuses to let him live by his own rules. 

Six years after UFO’s release, Sullivan decided to drive cross-country to try and catch a break in Nashville. Along the way, he checked into a hotel in Santa Rosa, New Mexico, bought a bottle of vodka at a local liquor store, and disappeared without a trace. His Volkswagen Beetle was found abandoned at a nearby ranch. In the passenger seat were his wallet, his guitar, and a box full of copies of both his sophomore release Jim Sullivan (1972) and UFO. The latter’s listing on the label Light in the Attic’s website describes a conversation in which he claimed that if he ever had to disappear, “he’d walk into the desert and never come back.” Others point to a stop by police near Santa Rosa, which, as Chris notes grimly in an interview with FLOOD Magazine, has “a way of making people disappear.” A short documentary made by Light in the Attic touches on another theory: that he was abducted by aliens. Regardless, as his son points out, Jim was “great at what he did,” and the music on UFO is as intimate as it is enigmatic, asking questions about existence, the universe, and our place in each.

Sullivan’s quip in “UFO” that “too much goodness is a sin today,” as well as his gaze towards the stars for salvation, might have resonated with Judee Sill—another unsung singer-songwriter whose debut album Judee Sill (1971) is stuffed with references to aliens and the paranormal. A former church organist, she mixes these occult images more explicitly than Sullivan with Christian spirituality, crafting an intimate assortment of lyrical confessions that she once described as “Country-Cult-Baroque.” On “Crayon Angels,” the album’s opener, she sings gently that she is “waiting for God and a train to the astral plane.” Throughout the album, Christ continues to appear to her in a variety of far-out forms, including an “archetypal man” who’s “fleeter even than Mercury” and whose “moon mirage is shining.” 

In “Enchanted Sky Machines,” a gospel-influenced ballad near the album’s close, Judee is especially hopeful, blending salvation and spacecraft in a way that distinctly evokes “UFO.” On the live album Songs of Rapture and Redemption, she explains candidly that this song is “a religious song about flying saucers coming… to take all of the deserving people away.” Her Live in London BBC recordings reveal a deep-seated belief, explored through this alien metaphor, that “deserving people will be saved.” Unlike Jim Sullivan’s passive and cautious “checking out the show,” however, Judee’s hope for an alien, ’70s-style rapture is yearning, open, and at times deeply anxious. Early on, she admits—to God or to us?—that she “could easily love you if you’d just let me feel”; by the second chorus, she begs the titular “sky machines” to “please hurry.”

This urgency behind Sill’s search for space-age saviors seems intrinsically tied to the adversity she faced during her life on Earth. Sill began her career after spending time in jail for forgery and narcotics possession; a letter she sent along with her demos to Asylum Records detailed the ways her struggles with addiction had informed her music. She died at age 35 of an apparent drug overdose that was controversially ruled a suicide. A musing note about life after death that was found on the scene has been contended by those who knew her as a misinterpreted diary entry, or else the first draft of a song. 

Just as there’s more to Jim Sullivan than his disappearance, though, Judee Sill’s music goes well beyond a reflection of her personal tragedies, and her transformative ideas about God, love, and the universe are intrinsic to her work. Openly bisexual, she had public relationships with both men and women, and once described to Rolling Stone a fluid vision of gender, sexuality, and religion drawn from Carl Jung’s masculine force of the “animus” and feminine force of the “anima.” Her music is preoccupied with radical philosophical senses of redemption and acceptance, each with its own unearthly tint. “Jesus Was a Cross Maker,” for instance, delves into the grueling process of forgiving a former lover, written while she read Nikos Kazantzakis’s 1955 novel The Last Temptation of Christ. “Lopin’ Along Through the Cosmos” portrays her searching for answers among the stars, all the while insisting serenely to her listeners that “however we are is okay.” 

Outer space seems to suggest some of the same possibilities to both Sullivan and Sill: acceptance, transcendence, the possibility of leaving behind a flawed world where good and deserving people who chafe against societal norms are punished for it. Turning to the universe for solace when the world rejects you is an intrinsically reclamatory act—not only does it argue that the bindings of normative society are escapable, it also suggests that they’re not inherently natural or inborn. Jim Sullivan’s search for love and freedom within a repressive capitalistic framework is perhaps most zealous on “Highways,” when he insists that “my world is real, yours a dream,” while Judee Sill’s earnest belief in a better place is clearest on “Enchanted Sky Machines,” as she reassures the listener (or herself) that it “won’t be too far away.” 

This idea of a futuristic alien society more accepting than our own is certainly not a foreign one. In fact, it’s now a hallmark of the way that science-fiction themes have been explored in modern music, from Janelle Monáe’s Afrofuturist android-centric concept albums to The Butchies’ audacious queer punk anthem “The Galaxy is Gay.” Sullivan and Sill’s metaphysical pickings, however, came long before the social justice crossroads currently faced by modern country music, a realm that’s historically been considered a bastion of American conservatism. Like fellow ’70s trailblazers Lavender Country, UFO and Judee Sill not only call this characterization into question, but turn it on its head, using interplanetary imagery to imagine an open-minded world of country and folk decades before Nashville’s Music Row began to catch up with them. The holy connections each artist makes lend an additional layer of sanctity to the search—Sullivan and Sill suggest that not only is it natural and acceptable to diverge from the prescribed earthly norm, but it’s also righteous, sacred, and true.

In the decades since its original release, Jim Sullivan’s UFO has gone on to inspire folksy indie darlings like Okkervil River and Laura Marling, who have carried his ruminations to a new millennium of listeners. On the 2016 collaboration album case/lang/veirs, artists Neko Case, k.d. lang, and Laura Veirs paid tribute to Sill with “Song for Judee.” Another tribute album, Down Where the Valleys Are Low: Another Otherworld for Judee Sill, is due to come out this month. The modern resonance of these artists’ messages, half a century after they slipped into relative obscurity, is both tragic and hopeful. We certainly haven’t reached the utopia of Jim Sullivan’s UFOs and Judee Sill’s sky machines, but perhaps their songs provide their own kind of deliverance—a soothing, abiding prayer that a better world may be out there after all.

Annie Parnell is a writer and student based in Washington, D.C. who hails from Derry, Maine.

 

Andrew Nette / February 17, 2021

In a June 2017 article in Fortean Times, the British magazine concerned with strange and paranormal phenomena, writer and broadcaster Bob Fischer discussed how the sensation of not being exactly sure what you were watching on television, or not being able to recall the details with any precision, was a common experience in relation to consuming visual culture in the 1960s and 1970s, before the advent of streaming, DVD, and VHS. This sense of “lostness”—of incomplete and unverifiable experience—is also what makes these memories such powerful nostalgia prompts.

The television viewing experience that most encapsulates this sense of lostness for me is a little-known, American-backed, Australian-made horror anthology series, The Evil Touch, that debuted on Sydney screens in June 1973 and in Melbourne a month later. Largely forgotten now, American critic John Kenneth Muir referred to the show in his 2001 book, Terror Television: American Series 1970-1999, as the “horror anthology that slipped through the cracks of time.” The Evil Touch has never had an official DVD release, although poor quality versions of some episodes can be found online, or as bootleg editions originally copied from television on VHS. It is not even known who now owns the rights. But the program was significant in many ways.

From the late 1950s to the early 1960s, Australian television programming was dominated by cheap to purchase overseas productions, mainly from the United States. While the balance started to shift starting in the mid-1960s, when demands for more Australian-made content grew louder, American product still dominated, and few Australian shows were sold overseas. The only Australian-made television show sold to the United States during this time that I am aware of is The Evil Touch. Produced in Sydney specifically for the American market, it was shot in color on 16mm film at a time when local television was still black and white; the first color broadcasts in Australia did not occur until 1974, and color did not roll out nationally until 1975.

The Evil Touch was also unusual for being the only locally produced entry in the once highly popular canon of horror anthology television. The anthology horror format, in which each episode is a different story with a new set of characters, originated in the 1950s, increased in popularity in the 1960s with programs such as The Outer Limits (1963-1965) and Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone (1959 to 1964), and peaked in the 1970s. Debuting in 1970, Serling’s Night Gallery, a series of one-off stories with macabre and supernatural plots, was the beginning of modern horror television. Numerous shows followed in America, and anthology horror also proved popular in Great Britain, most notably the 1976 series Beasts, written by Nigel Kneale (who had scripted earlier science fiction television series and films featuring the scientist Bernard Quatermass), consisting of six self-contained episodes, each with a recurring theme of bestial horror.

The central figure behind The Evil Touch was silver-haired expatriate American television director and producer Mende Brown. Brown formulated the idea for the series, produced all 26 episodes, and directed 15. According to his 2002 obituary in Variety, he was born in New York, started in radio after World War II, and his first directing credit was a 1953 episode of the popular radio show Inner Sanctum Mystery, produced by his brother Himan. Working in film and television throughout the ‘50s, his first feature directing job was The Clown and the Kids in 1967, noteworthy for being shot entirely on location behind the then Iron Curtain in Bulgaria, with the cooperation of the country’s state film body.

Variety’s obituary dates Brown’s move to Australia as 1971, but other sources suggest he arrived in 1970. Either way, he soon set up his own company, Amalgamated Pictures Australasia, operating out of an office in Sydney’s then vice quarter Kings Cross, which at the time also played host to a large number of American service personnel on R&R during the Vietnam War. From this base of operations, Brown oversaw a number of projects prior to The Evil Touch. He directed and produced Strange Holiday (1970), based on Jules Verne’s 1887 novel A Long Vacation, and Little Jungle Boy (1971), a made-for-television children’s film shot in Singapore. In 1973, Brown also wrote and produced And Millions Will Die. Made in Hong Kong, the story pitted popular American television actor Richard Basehart, best known for playing Admiral Harriman Nelson in the science-fiction adventure television series Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea (1964-1968), as a secret agent battling a Nazi germ warfare expert who threatens to unleash a lethal gas on the British territory. 

The Australian Women’s Weekly described Brown as “An American TV producer and director who has decided that Australia is a good place to make films.” Emanuel L. Wolf, president and chair of Allied Artists Picture Corporation, which backed The Evil Touch to the tune of A$250,000, put it more bluntly when he visited Sydney to discuss possible film and television deals in August 1972. He told journalists there was a great advantage to making films in Australia because the costs were substantially lower, and the work restrictions were considerably less than those enforced by entertainment unions in America. At the cost of A$30,000-40,000 per episode, The Evil Touch was a glamorous, big budget affair by local standards, and a host of American television/film actors travelled down under to star in, and sometimes direct, episodes. “Never has Australia been so inundated with so many top name American movie stars,” declared the Australian magazine TV Week on August 4, 1973. In reality, most of these individuals were long past the peak of their careers; but in Australia, which was only just developing a domestic film industry of its own, they remained big names due to the continuing proliferation of American shows on local television. Many of them were also desperate for work, given the economic difficulties facing the American film and television industry in the early 1970s. “American actors are happy to come here, both for the money and the work,” Brown told a press conference to announce The Evil Touch in Sydney in October 1971. “They’re delighted to work anywhere they can get it.”

Brown milked the publicity generated by his overseas cast for all it was worth. Australian magazine and newspaper coverage from the time records a steady drum beat of fascination with visiting stars: Leslie Neilson; veteran actor Leif Erickson, familiar to Australian audiences as a cast member of the TV western High Chaparral (1967-71); Ray Walston, known as the Martian in My Favorite Martian (1963-66); and Vic Morrow, star of Combat (1962-1967). Others included Darren McGavin, US child model turned actress Carol Lynley, Susan Strasberg, Robert Lansing from Gunsmoke (1965-1969), and Julie Harris, whose career stretched back to the late 1940s and included a role in Robert Wise’s eerie 1963 ghost film The Haunting.

One lesser-known international actor to feature in The Evil Touch was Mel Welles. After appearing in television series and B movies in the US in the 1950s, Welles spent much of the 1960s in Europe, where his directing credits included the now infamous 1971 Italian horror Lady Frankenstein, a weird exploitation riff on Mary Shelley’s 1818 Gothic novel. The early 1970s saw him in Japan for a small role in a local science fiction action series, after which he found himself in Australia, where he appeared in one episode of The Evil Touch, “Wings of Death,” about an Australian family whose son disappears while they are travelling in an unspecified Latin American country. Welles plays a sleazy cop who heads up the local death cult that, unknown to the parents, has kidnapped the child. Having discharged his obligations to Brown, Welles spent his time organizing the only Australian showing of Lady Frankenstein, at Kings Cross’s Metro Cinema. To accompany this, he organized a live stage show titled “Orgy of Evil,” a self-styled history of nudity, violence, and torture. An advertisement in the Sydney Morning Herald in July 1973 billed the show as “A live stage presentation of evil, terror and horror beyond the mortal imagination.” It reportedly cost a fortune to mount, attracted the unwelcome attention of the city’s vice squad, and closed after only a week, at which point Welles fled the country.

In addition to American acting talent, American writers penned all but three The Evil Touch scripts. One of those writers was Sylvester Stallone, who was then trying to break into Hollywood. According to IMDb, he scored his first writing credit on an episode of the show under the pseudonym “Q Moonblood.” The US-centric nature of the show landed Brown into trouble with local entertainment unions, who threatened an international campaign against The Evil Touch. Brown was forced into negotiations, Variety reporting in early 1973 that his company reached an “entirely equitable agreement… Basically that is that one American star can be imported for each episode, with one Australian player to be co-starred and others featured.” As a result, the show played host to a plethora of local actors who went on to become major names in home-grown film and television.

The Evil Touch screened throughout America in late 1972 and, according to Variety, rated well. Australian viewers were far less taken with the show, however, and it lasted only a few episodes on Channel 9 before being dropped from the schedule. Heavy-handed censorship meant that horror was not a genre with particularly deep roots in local television or film, so audiences were possibly unaccustomed to it. Yet in Australia, as elsewhere, the 1970s were the era when Erich von Däniken’s Chariots of the Gods? was a staple of many bookshelves, when the occult became a suburban preoccupation, and when mysteries such as the Bermuda Triangle, UFOs, and the Loch Ness Monster were popular tabloid fodder. As such, The Evil Touch’s lack of success probably had more to do with its main competitor, the soap opera Number 96, which screened at the same time on rival Channel 0 (now 10). This featured the salacious goings on in an inner-Sydney block of flats, complete with ground-breaking television depictions of nudity and sex, including Australian television’s first gay kiss.

The Evil Touch continued to turn up regularly on late night television in Australia throughout the 1970s and 1980s, when I am fairly sure I saw my first episode, most likely left unsupervised with the television in someone’s den during one of the many boozy dinner parties my parents attended. The few grainy episodes I caught haunted me for years, even though I wasn’t exactly sure what I had seen. Indeed, until I started researching the show for a film festival presentation in 2016 and found some old episodes on YouTube, my memories of The Evil Touch were so blurred and uncertain, I wondered whether I’d just imagined it.

The one image I always remembered from The Evil Touch was its prologue. Each 25-minute episode followed the basic structure and tropes of 1970s anthology horror television. This included a mysterious host, in The Evil Touch’s case British actor Anthony Quayle. To the jazzy lounge music score of Australian composer Laurie Lewis, each episode opened with Quayle walking forward through swirling, multi-colored smoke (produced by holding a lit cigarette just below the camera) to briefly introduce the story. He would appear again at the episode’s end with some concluding remarks and an ominous farewell: “Until next week this is Anthony Quayle, reminding you there is a touch of evil in us all.” He would start to walk away, stop, and turn back and mischievously say, “Pleasant dreams.”

Host Anthony Quayle

Muir links the popularity of the anthology horror format in America in the early 1970s to several factors, which were echoed in Australia: the relaxation of censorship standards, which allowed shows to get away with more explicit horror and violence; advances in make-up and special effects; and the shift in the national mood due largely to the shocking prime-time news footage coming out of the Vietnam War. “Vietnam and Watergate were two turbulent and controversial public events which America had to digest,” he writes, “and horror television responded with a cathartic form of entertainment that acknowledged national fears yet reinforced positive values.” If there is a thematic strand running through 1960s/1970s anthology horror television, it is the sense of an otherworldly moral judge and jury operating to punish murderers, adulterers, and greedy businessmen for crimes they would otherwise get away with. The Evil Touch ran the gamut of genres, from science fiction to mystery murder tales, to horror, but nearly all the episodes utilize this punitive narrative form.

Less characteristic of the television anthology horror genre was The Evil Touch’s surreal, dream-like quality, and its deliberately non-linear storytelling style. With the exception of Quayle’s omniscient and enigmatic introductions and conclusions, the characters and events in each episode are given little context and there is usually no sense of narrative closure. The strange ambience of The Evil Touch is also the product of its generic setting, a deliberate strategy on Brown’s part to maximize its appeal to American audiences. While mostly shot in or around Sydney, landmarks and characteristics that could have been recognizable are de-identified. As TV Times put it in 1973: “The Evil Touch was made in Australia, but unless you recognize familiar faces among the bit players you might not suspect this, for by using cunning devices such as reversing film negatives, producer-director Mende Brown shows right hand drive cars belting through Sydney on the wrong side of the road.” To a local watcher, the overall effect is unnerving: Australia rendered largely anonymous for American viewers, almost a fulfilment of fears, dating back to the 1920s on the part of local left- and right-wing critics, that Australia would be subsumed by American popular culture. A particularly vocal critic was The Age’s television critic John Pinkney who, in a July 1973 column, lambasted the show’s American dominated look and feel, in particular the fact that Australian actors were required to speak with US accents. “Evil Touch conjures the Commonwealth of Oz into the status of a non-county,” he wrote.

In the aforementioned episode “Wings of Death,” outer Sydney stands in for a nameless Latin American republic. In “They,” an academic and his young son are vacationing in the Cornish countryside (most likely the cliff tops overlooking Sydney Harbour). The son gets lost on “the moors” and runs into a malevolent cult of ghostly children led by a creepy young woman, who he has already seen in his dreams. In what is undoubtedly a comment on the new forms of youth culture that were sweeping much of the world by the early 1970s, the group she leads has given up the “Old Ones”—anyone over the age of 15—and is also responsible for a string of deaths in a nearby town. “The Fans,” set in the American deep south, sees Vic Morrow as a cynical horror movie star who visits two elderly female fans as a publicity stunt. They drug him, dress him in his screen vampire persona, and imprison him in the basement of their large manor house in an attempt to drive the devil out of him. “The Trial” involves a rapacious property developer (Ray Walston) being pursued through an abandoned carnival ground (Sydney’s Luna Park) by a pack of circus freaks led by a discredited brain surgeon who lobotomizes him, in what feels like a macabre homage to Tod Browning’s 1932 horror classic Freaks.

The only episode obviously shot outside Sydney, “Kadaitcha Country,” is possibly the strongest. Leif Erikson plays a washed-up Christian preacher, who it is inferred has significant mental health issues. Given one last chance at redemption by his church, he is sent to a remote outback mission, where he clashes with an Aboriginal shaman (the “Kadaitcha Man”) who has the power to play with reality. While English spellings of the name vary (either “Kurdaitcha” or “Kurdaitcha”), it appears to refer to a type of shaman/sorcerer who lived among the Arrente people near Alice Springs in central Australia. There are also records of the term “Kadaitcha” being used to refer to Aboriginal law keepers. The episode was directed by Brown and written by Australian Ron Mclean, one of only two local writers to work on the show. The story fuses Indigenous myth (or at least a white director’s interpretation of it) with folk horror tropes in a way that would not be seen on cinema screens until Peter Weir’s The Last Wave in 1977. Not only does the episode rank as an early depiction of the clash between Indigenous spirituality and invading Christian faith, it also featured an Indigenous actor: Lindsey Roughsey, one of the traditional custodians of Mornington Island in the Gulf of Carpentaria, where the episode was filmed, played the Kadaitcha Man. This was something of a breakthrough, as it was not uncommon, well into the 1970s, to have white actors play Indigenous parts in black face.

Mende Brown would go on to produce one further film in Australia, a little-known hardboiled thriller, On the Run (1983), about an orphaned boy sent to live with his uncle (an aging Rod Taylor), who unbeknownst to the boy is a ruthless assassin. It was never released theatrically. Brown returned to the United States in 1991 and died in 2002. Episodes of The Evil Touch continued to rerun on television throughout the 1990s, from America to Japan and Malaysia, like ghostly messages relayed from a long-abandoned outpost of 1970s popular culture.

Andrew Nette is a writer of fiction and non-fiction. He can be found at www.pulpcurry.com.

Richard McKenna / February 9, 2021

Hawkwind: Days of the Underground
By Joe Banks
Strange Attractor, 2020

Disclosure: Joe Banks is a We Are the Mutants contributor.

I don’t really remember anybody actually mentioning Hawkwind in my youth. You just seemed to absorb an awareness of them from the landscape by osmosis, the same way you absorbed knowledge of the locations of short-cuts, haunted houses, and the more dangerous potholes. Cognizance of these archetypes stalking out from the mists—lead singer and guitarist Brock the stroppy-looking, vaguely Asterix-ey Celt chieftain, even his name sounding like something out of the pulps; Stacia, mad-eyed unafraid galactic goddess; Calvert the seer, consumed by the voltage of his visions; Nik Turner, crazed sax druid; Lemmy the pagan barbarian; and all the other assorted weirdos, bruisers and flakes, equal parts disconcertingly familiar and reassuringly alien—somehow assembled itself in your brain of its own accord from fragmentary exposure like a sub-language. Shards of an aesthetic, like the weird Art Nouveau-ish t-shirt worn by the girl at the youth club, the truncated roar of “Silver Machine” coming from the open door of a pub, a friend’s older brother’s odd-smelling bedroom, all pointing to the existence of this thing: Hawkwind.

For a period, I didn’t even realize that Hawkwind was a band, having intuited that it was a TV program along the lines of Catweazle, and by the time I was a teen in the mid-’80s, Hawkwind were so violently out of fashion in the milieus I frequented that it wasn’t even necessary to choose not to like them—not liking them was the default position. Perhaps, along with a widespread post-’77 mistrust of hippies (ironic, seeing as it was often hippies-turned-punks who were punk’s most dedicated propagators), it was this sense of them more as an aspect of the environment than a rock revelation that contributed to the relative neglect the band long enjoyed in their native island. And yet they remained eerily omnipresent and potential, like a seam of strange metal running through everything that you did like, and biding their time until the moment you noticed them and the electricity started to flow. 

For those that have managed to avoid the knowledge, Hawkwind are a British band who played—and in fact continue to play—an unappetizing-sounding cocktail of hard rock, hippy sludge, psychedelic rock, prog, and a kind of Ur-punk. Over the top of the chippy rhythms, DIY electronics, and gloomy melodies sits the crazed lyrical world the band have gradually accreted around themselves over the years, where genuinely inspired SF poetics collide with off-their-face ramblings pulled from the last SF pulp someone read. All this somehow coalesces into what’s often seen as the UK’s equivalent of Krautrock. It’s often referred to as “space rock,” a concoction they’ve stuck with for decades. See? You’re already sneering. But that’s only going to make you feel even more of a tit several years down the line when you feel compelled to play “Orgone Accumulator” five times in a row every time you’ve had a drink. Because Hawkwind technology works, and when that electricity starts to flow, you will feel the irresistible cosmic boogie blasting through your body.

Hawkwind: Days of the Underground takes upon itself the task of lasering away the galactic cobwebs obscuring the sleek form of starship Hawkwind, waking its crew from suspended animation and firing up its thrusters. In it, author Joe Banks shows how transformative Hawkwind were from a musical, political, and maybe even sociological standpoint, their stubborn refusal to become part of the machine hardwired into the instruments of their mission. He contextualizes them in the various musical scenes they warped through and reminds us of their DIY vocation, highlighting how much more they perhaps have in common with an entity like CRASS than they do with their nominal peers. It’s in their shared aggro-hippie roots in free festivals and pagan whatnots, artwork-as-intrinsic-part-of-the-package philosophy, quasi-military collective presentation, relentless beat, guitar rhythms that feel like they’re hacking away at something, and even in the prole-patrician tensions implicit in the contrasting vocal stylings of Hawkwind’s Brock and Calvert and CRASS’s Eve Libertine and Steve Ignorant.

Like the idiot I am, I avoided Hawkwind like a time-plague for much of my youth, so the revelation when it came that they were not in fact some embarrassing 12-bar club band but a paradigm-blasting mindfuck was even more shocking, and this is the feeling that Days of the Underground captures: that moment of protracted excitement when you realize something is great. It’s also the perfect book for anyone like me who has a dread of books about bands and the deadening effect too much information can have (at least for me) on the daft power of rock ‘n’ roll. Practically every time I’ve read a book about a band it’s felt a bit like watching a beautiful stage set be dismantled by well-meaning yet stolid roadies whose main interest is in the kinds of screws holding the props together, or what’s going to be on the catering table.

Days of the Underground isn’t like that. It’s a book written by a fan in the best possible meaning of that phrase, in the sense that it communicates its author’s deep passion about and desire to share something transformative and, in its way, profound. The book is rammed with insightful commentary, informed analysis, and detailed information about every aspect of the band (and their endless internal crew disputes), but despite that it somehow never lets the momentum slack or allows fannery to drown out the driving Cosmic rhythm. I came away from it feeling excited and galvanized—not just wanting to re-listen to every Hawkwind LP (though I definitely did) but also wanting to actually do things: not read another rock book but pick up a guitar, draw a picture, write a story, go into suspended animation and let the automind pilot me outside of time. It’s a read that feels more like an actual exciting thing than it does a book about an exciting thing, if that makes any sense. As far as I’m concerned, there’s no greater compliment.

Richard McKenna grew up in the visionary utopia of 1970s South Yorkshire and now ekes out a living among the crumbling ruins of Rome, from whence he dreams of being rescued by the Terran Trade Authority.

Annie Parnell / February 3, 2021

The irony of the Voight-Kampff test, an analysis that Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford) performs to identify “replicant” androids in 1982’s Blade Runner, is that it does not actually prove that his subjects are replicants. Instead, by observing and establishing various responses as “not human,” it proves what they aren’t. By asking suspected replicant Rachael (Sean Young) a series of questions while monitoring her verbal and physical responses with a machine, Deckard is able to quantify precisely how inhuman she appears to be; through noting the absence of what Dr. Tyrell (Joe Turkell) describes as “the so-called blush response” and “fluctuation of the pupil,” the Voight-Kampff test produces a kind of “human-negative” response that isn’t even disproven in Blade Runner’s dystopian Los Angeles when Rachael produces childhood photographs as positive proof of her humanity.

This strategy of collecting data that prove what the self is not connects inversely to Andy Warhol’s Screen Tests, a series of short films from the Pop Art movement that depict subjects attempting to stay motionless and hold eye contact with the camera for three minutes, each inevitably failing to not blink or twitch. Jonathan Flatley, for the art journal October, describes these films as revealing “each sitter’s failure to hold onto an identity” of performance, and links the Screen Tests to Warhol’s exploration of queer attraction and selfhood, describing the ways that the intimate series blends desire and identification with another. The Screen Tests form a kind of queer collection of humanities, emphasizing the viewer’s kinship with the series’ subjects through slight, unique movements that contradict the roles ascribed to them, while the Voight-Kampff test forces a sense of self by negation of the other upon the observer. The questions it uses rely on whether or not the subject makes a correctly “human” response, determined by rules of “human” performance that society has projected upon its members. The parallels to queerness are obvious here: in addition to tracking the dilation and contraction of her pupils, one of Deckard’s questions for Rachael asks if she would be sufficiently jealous to discover that her husband finds a picture of a woman in a magazine attractive. Humanity, in Blade Runner, is boiled down to whether or not you conform to a particular, heteronormative pattern of behavior; fail to live up to that pattern, and you are cast out.

In fact, Blade Runner makes repeated references to queerness, both for comedic and dramatic effect. “Is this testing whether I’m a replicant or a lesbian?” Rachael asks Deckard coyly after she’s asked about the woman in the magazine, her eyes inscrutable from behind a cloud of smoke. When renegade replicants Roy Batty (Rutger Hauer) and Pris (Daryl Hannah) find themselves in the apartment of the sympathetic human Sebastian (William Sanderson), Batty gets down on his knees and positions himself between the other man’s legs. At the scene’s climax, when Sebastian leads them into the Tyrell Corporation, Roy kisses Dr. Tyrell (Joe Turkel) passionately before killing him on the spot. Throughout Blade Runner, the replicants are not only queered and sexualized, but their queerness and any implied proximity to it is as alluring as it is dangerous.

Towards the end of the film, however, both this aversion to queerness and the Voight-Kampff test’s negation-based model of selfhood is challenged when Deckard fights and flees Batty in an abandoned building. Deckard, who has “retired” a collection of replicants over the course of both the film and his career, is suddenly and brutally confronted with one who seems very capable of destroying him. This represents a confrontation between two concepts of humanity and definitions of the self: the isolating, heteronormative notions of the Voight-Kampff test, and a queered, kinship-based model centered on similarity rather than difference. Even ignoring the long-standing fandom debate over whether Deckard himself is a replicant, Blade Runner seems to ask what the functional difference between humans and replicants is, anyway. Just as Warhol argues for an understanding of sexuality and identity based on similarity rather than difference, the fight between Deckard and Batty signifies a brutal process of redefining the self in connection to others, despite coming from a framework that relies on destroying and negating them.

In this final battle, then, Rick Deckard is not only fighting for his life, but fighting to maintain a precarious sense of self that relies on the notion that replicants are fundamentally different from him. Despite this, the gaze of the camera consistently portrays him and Batty as similar to each other, juxtaposing both their bodies and their pain. After a shot that emphasizes Deckard’s fingers, bent at odd angles after Batty breaks them one by one, the camera cuts to a shot of Batty’s own hand curling in on itself as it necrotizes. The parallels are taken to new, gory heights when Batty drives a nail through his atrophying hand in order to trigger a healing response and stop his rigor mortis from spreading. Here, the camera calls back to Deckard having done the exact same thing: his grimaces and the angle of the shot are almost indistinguishable from an earlier shot of Deckard painstakingly and agonizingly popping his fingers back into place.

These instances also emphasize the sadomasochism throughout Deckard and Batty’s climactic chase—a raw, erotic fight to define the self. This is initially teased out through a variety of double entendres in Blade Runner’s script that harken back to the film’s earlier references to queerness. After he breaks Deckard’s fingers, Batty hands him his gun back and tells him that he will stand still by the hole in the wall and offer Deckard one clear shot at him—he must only “shoot straight.” When Deckard fires, Batty jumps out of the way and laughs, shouting gleefully that “straight doesn’t seem to be good enough!” From the other side of the wall, Batty tells Deckard that it’s his turn to be pursued and, his face twitching lasciviously, says that he will give Deckard “a few seconds before I come.” The role that the audience plays in witnessing the physical torment of both men—the pain that they inflict on themselves and each other throughout this chase—is almost pornographic, recasting the viewer as a voyeur absorbed into the crisis of selfhood occurring between them.

The notion of the gaze of an audience upon eroticized pain not only suggests the identification with a subject that the Screen Tests encourage, but also evokes an artistic successor of Warhol’s: Robert Mapplethorpe, whose depictions of gay male S&M are described by Richard Meyer in Qui Parle as insisting on “the photographer’s identity with… the erotic subculture he photographs” and emphasizing the impossibility of “knowing” a person or a culture through outside observation. This suggests potent ramifications for the battle between Deckard and Batty. Much like the Voight-Kampff test proves the absence of humanity through observation rather than identifying its presence, a read of Warhol and Mapplethorpe’s projections onto Deckard’s observation of replicants and the climactic fight with Batty suggests that distinctions of identity are unknowable through opposition and passive perception, and that selfhood relies instead on likeness and identification with others.

When Batty does catch up to Deckard, he maniacally shouts, “You’d better get it up, or I’m gonna have to kill you!” before Deckard attempts to flee out of the window. From this point onward, Deckard is cast in an explicitly submissive light by the camera: as he desperately attempts to scale the decrepit building and escape, we follow him almost exclusively in wide-range shots from above, watching him pant as he stumbles and dangles off the building’s edge. When he reaches the roof, he lies at the top of the building, whimpering. The sexualized power dynamic between Deckard and Batty is only re-emphasized when Batty comes outside and finds him again. Deckard, once more attempting to flee, leaps to the next building over and fumblingly latches onto one protruding metal bar, only to find Batty looming over him moments later after gracefully jumping onto the rooftop. Batty is portrayed, here, as a kind of unhinged replicant dom; the camera showcases him from below in a series of shots that emphasize both his power over Deckard and the physique of his body.

After Batty pulls Deckard up with one hand and throws him onto the rooftop, Deckard continues to struggle below him, breathing heavily as both he and the audience wonder what Batty will do to him. Batty, by this point, has removed most of his clothes; his nakedness, which gave him a primal, animalistic edge during the chase, now makes him seem vulnerable and human as he stands with Deckard in the rain. In a compelling moment of empathy, he physically crouches in order to face Deckard, then muses about the fleeting nature of memory and time before telling Deckard it is “time to die.” 

By the end of the scene, when Batty gracefully shuts down, Deckard’s practice of collecting replicants through administering the Voight-Kampff test and violently retiring them has been overhauled through a sadomasochistic struggle that ends in Batty thrusting likeness upon him and ultimately retiring himself. Deckard is left to grapple with a sense of selfhood that is suddenly uncategorizable by opposition. Closing his own eyes moments after Batty has closed his, both he and the audience are left to reckon with Warhol and Mapplethorpe’s queer notions of identity and kinship instead.

Annie Parnell is a writer and student based in Washington, D.C. who hails from Derry, Maine.

 

Ty Matejowsky / January 14, 2021

As far as innovative 1980s music videos go, probably none is more immediately visceral and less popularly remembered than Belfegore’s “All That I Wanted.” Like a repressed memory from the dark recesses of Generation X’s collective unconscious, the promotional clip of this 1984 near-hit single from a short-lived German industrial/goth/post-punk/new wave trio warrants reappraisal—if not for how it showcases the propulsive strains of a song that blends the best of Killing Joke, Billy Idol, and Joy Division (while prefiguring Pretty Hate Machine-era Nine Inch Nails along the way) into an unholy alchemy of snarling guitarwork and abrasive electronica, then certainly for its reification of late-phase Cold War anxieties running amok along a Hudson River pier under the looming presence of the World Trade Center, still some 17 years away from its abrupt deletion from the Manhattan skyline.

By this point in their all too brief career, Belfegore seemed on the cusp of some mainstream breakthrough recognition. Having already released a long-player in their native Germany in 1982 alongside a pair of singles the following year, the band got signed to Elektra Records, home of CBGB-bred pioneers Television and new wave perennials The Cars. Belfegore’s self-titled English language debut built off the band’s more rudimentary predecessor thanks in no small part to the expanded sonic palette made possible by trailblazing krautrock/kosmische producer Conny Plank. Known for overseeing the recordings of both Neu!’s first album (1972) and Kraftwerk’s Autobahn (1974), Plank’s trademark electronic stylings and harsh guitar and drum sound find expression in Belfegore’s ferocious opener and lead single “All That I Wanted.”  

The video’s aesthetic genius lies both in its conceptual simplicity and unbridled kineticism. An ominous sense of foreboding prevails as leather-clad lead singer Meikel Clauss trots across the asphalt desolation of a New York City dock looking like a gothed-up version of “Mad” Max Rockatansky. Amid a scattering of overturned musical equipment, road cases, crash cymbals, amplifier stacks, and rubbish blowing about, Clauss speeds up slightly when a man carrying a fine art painting and easel closes in from behind, both of them increasing their stride as if fleeing some unseen menace. Next, Clauss appears back where he started, this time sprinting and singing manically to the camera, presumably one step ahead of imminent death and destruction. The man with the artwork is there also, picking up the pace, rapidly moving forward without so much as a backwards glance. Abruptly, a wide-angle shot reveals Clauss racing down the concourse from a similar starting point, this time running ahead and alongside a motley mix of costumed music video extras, some gripping luggage, one or two clutching firearms. 

Over the next four minutes or so, Clauss—occasionally with his electric guitar or microphone stand—zigzags among this improbable throng of central casting rejects, bumping shoulders and throwing body blocks as they all dash headlong towards some unreachable destination. That or the crowd races past a now-stationary Clauss who, along with Belfegore bass player Raoul Walton and drummer Manfred Terstappen, performs “All That I Wanted” as if his very life depended on it. A series of fluid tracking shots sweeping past the band while these stock characters randomly hustle by adds dizzying intensity to an already chaotic scene. Among those unfortunate souls damned to repeatedly traverse this narrow tongue of industrial bleakness are a construction worker, nurse, showgirl, briefcase-toting businessman, Olympic torch runner (the 1984 Summer Olympics were held in Los Angeles), nun, sheik, uniformed schoolgirl, pram-pushing mother, restaurant waiter, cowboy, man with a leashed German Shepard, policeman, bellhop, assorted punk rockers, and a man inexplicably carrying a porcelain toilet. Many of these background actors end up taking a spill, some pitching forward while moving in and out of frame; others fall while dodging or leaping over random obstacles. As the music builds to a crescendo, the video does not so much end as peter out, left exhausted by a vicious onslaught of sonic and visual chaos.

As much a product of its time as a prescient foreshadowing of the mayhem that would one day envelop Lower Manhattan, sending ripples of dread across the global psyche, the video is not without its flaws. Amid shifts in camera direction, abrupt edits, and no discernable consideration for daylight continuity, the clip allows sharp-eyed viewers to pinpoint what happens when artistic vision bumps up against the time constraints, budgetary concerns, and other realities of on-location shoots. Beyond eyeblink instances of extras visibly hesitating before slamming to the ground (or more likely onto off-camera crash pads), the most obvious imperfection is the noticeable breathlessness and decreasing speed exhibited by some of the background talent in scenes ostensibly shot late in the day after take after take of running back and forth on an exposed pier while lugging cumbersome props. From the looks of it, only Belfegore’s rhythm section got off easy in this regard, as neither drummer Terstappen nor bassist Walton had to move much beyond their stage marks.

Minor quibbles aside, the video readily captures the prevailing sense of angst and helplessness characterizing Cold War antagonisms in the years immediately preceding thawed US and Soviet relations before the Berlin Wall came down. Ronald Reagan’s real and rhetorical efforts at pursuing the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) known colloquially as “Star Wars,” his scuttling of the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT II) treaty, and the escalation by the Soviets of the Soviet-Afghan War threatened to upend the geopolitical equilibrium previously maintained through the military/foreign policy stalemate of mutual assured destruction (MAD). Against this backdrop, the first half of the 1980s was a time suffused with varying levels of unease and uncertainty. Belfegore’s video for “All That I Wanted” viscerally distills the existential dread surging through the global body politic. Not only does it elicit the social breakdown that occurs with the panicked realization that the normality of everyday life is suddenly and irrevocably overtaken by events, it also visually encapsulates the powerlessness of ordinary people scrambling for a nonexistent offramp from a crisis neither of their making nor compliant to the political sway of their so-called leaders. With nowhere to run and nowhere to hide as prospects for survival rapidly dim, might our final moments—the mushroom cloud already on the horizon—somehow resemble this?

Directed by experimental filmmaker and 1986 MTV Video Vanguard Award honoree Zbigniew Rybczyński, the heart-racing propulsion of this lost classic captures all that was possible for a short-form entertainment genre finally coming into its own as a veritable artform. Rybczyński—a Polish émigré and likely the only Oscar winner ever arrested and jailed mere minutes after receiving an Academy Award—cultivates a singular style easily recognizable across his decades-long filmography (he went on to work with Art of Noise, Lou Reed, Simple Minds, Rush, Fat Boys, Mr. Mister, Supertramp, Pet Shop Boys, and the Alan Parsons Project, among others). The eccentric visual language he employs in his music video work pairs rapid edits, repetitions, and sweeping Steadicam pans with the detached sensibilities, nonlinear narratives, and quirky aesthetics of an ascendant 1980s postmodernity not yet reduced to an exhausted caricature of itself. 

Despite an eye-popping video, some initial college radio buzz, and prized opening slot on the 1985 European leg of U2’s Unforgettable Fire tour, Belfegore never connected with a wider audience, quickly slipping into obscurity. In 2011, after some 25 years of radio silence, flickers of life emerged when the band unexpectedly resurfaced for a one-off German reunion show. That same year acclaimed director David Fincher used “All That I Wanted” in a pivotal scene of his screen adaptation of Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Such faint hints of a career resurrection notwithstanding, Belfegore’s legacy remains all but negligible.

Seemingly resistant to the YouTube algorithms working nowadays to define so much of our recollected MTV-era tastes and preferences—sorting formulas that work to winnow out all but the most obvious one-hit wonders and essentialized mainstays of a Stranger Things-like nostalgia trip—the conceptual novelty and thrilling imagery of “All That I Wanted” evokes an adrenalized urgency that belies its unsung status within a collective headspace prone to blind spots, if not outright bouts of generational amnesia. Despite such popular and critical indifference, the howling catharsis and uncompromising frenzy of Belfegore’s only major label video resonates today not just as a hidden gem of 1980s college radio ephemera awaiting rediscovery, but also as a pure embodiment of the pre-détente fears gripping the wider world when the specter of nuclear annihilation remained ever-present.

Ty Matejowsky is a Professor of Anthropology at the University of Central Florida in Orlando.  He is a Libra who enjoys sunsets and long walks on the beach.

Recollections / December 31, 2020

2020 in action

MCKENNA: Christ on a bike, it has been a year. Who would have imagined back when we started 2020 with a frivolous piece on little plastic spacemen the grim turn things were about to take? And to think, back in a previous end-of-year mutants communiqué, we were hubristic enough to say that 2018 had been punishing, jejune fools that we were! 2020 didn’t like that and decided to show us what punishing really meant: an appalling bastard physically, mentally, and financially that has put immense numbers of people through nightmarish shit. So what better way to indulge in a bit of propitiatory magic in the hope of a better 2021 than by quickly listing a few of the gems your faithful muties have been fortunate enough to find embedded in the continent-sized turd that has been the year? So Mike, Kelly—what have you two stumbled across in the last twelve months that’s given you a glimmer of optimism?

GRASSO: Richard, first things first: when Jenny and I were going through our own presumed COVID infection back in the spring, one of the things that kept me going was chatting with you early in the mornings, whinging about symptoms, lamenting my suddenly swiss-cheesed brain, worrying about… well, nearly everything. So friends have absolutely kept me going this year, and having you and Kelly as comrades and creative partners for a fifth year has been the lifeline that’s largely kept me going.

Like I may have mentioned, much of everything before our recovery in about June is a bit of a blur, sadly. I did stay sane like many people during the first months of the pandemic by watching, yes, Tiger King, which, by the time it was over, got me wanting to watch an earlier, much better Netflix documentary on the tension created by the collision of cultic belief with American capitalist culture, Wild Wild Country. Both of these, though, paled in comparison to the recent release of Heaven’s Gate: The Cult of Cults on HBO Max, a terrific and nuanced look at the individuals who found themselves so damaged by a society that denied them wonder and companionship that they marched off to their deaths for beliefs that seemed insane to everyone outside the group. People were talking about it around the election for precisely the wrong reasons, I found.

Honestly, though, I haven’t had the attention span for much visual media this year. I’ve been doing far more reading and listening. I’ll start with Carl Neville’s fascinating novel of a sideways Earth where an out of control right-accelerationist America faces off against a mostly-Communist rest of the world (including the UK), Eminent Domain. Its deep, detail-packed examination of a “utopia with dystopian characteristics”—a largely post-scarcity “People’s Republic of Britain” where a 1990s revolution against the CEOs and toffs has allowed an ostensibly classless technologically-driven society to flourish—is a political thriller, a spy novel, an exploration of alternate-history culture and art, and in the character that I identified with most—a young American college student who falls in love with the PRB thanks to its cultural products, art, and music—a simultaneous celebration and warning about falling in love with a place you’ve never been. It changed my life in a lot of ways and I’m unimaginably proud I got together with Carl to talk about it back during the summer.

ROBERTS: A blur is right. It’s almost like I’m existing in somebody’s demented time-lapse photography experiment. These (so far) nine months have been hard and they have certainly changed my life—the extent of that change won’t be clear to me until some sense of normality (what does that word mean anymore?) reasserts itself (or my mind inserts it). With a full-time-plus job in a public university health system and two kids at home who are deeply bored and sometimes furious at the inadequacies of Zoom, I haven’t had a hell of a lot of time or energy for discoveries. But I did re-watch a lot of disaster movies, a genre we subsequently (and rather angrily, on my part) wrote about here.

And we did get some great news in 2020: we signed a contract with Repeater to do a book exploring the themes of reaction and resistance in American film from about 1967 through 1987, and it’s been a lot of fun, as well as a welcome distraction, watching so many films from the era and finalizing the chapter list with you guys. It’s also been really hard, because we have no choice but to leave out so many movies we love and admire. I’m really excited about the final list, though, a mix that’s heavy on genre but also includes a few blockbusters, a couple of documentaries, some exploitation classics, and some absolute gems that have all but disappeared from the public eye. The idea is that each chapter will pair two films that may not have much in common on the surface, but connect profoundly on a deeper level.

This project, as well as the videocasts we’ve done, has gone a long way in keeping me sane.

MCKENNA: Yes, having you two to shoot the breeze with has been good—well, those of you two that aren’t a grumpy, monosyllabic Californian. Naming no names. But this year’s definitely brought home how fortunate I am. Work’s been tough but at least there’s been some, which is more than a lot of people have had. I was sick in March—fuck knows what it was but I’ve never had such weird symptoms (annotated list available on request—really). It only lasted a week, but I was still in a weird state when it finished, because work was at a complete standstill, I spent it in bed, and for some reason it seemed to make sense to devote the time to watching or re-watching a lot of Bela Tarr films. At the risk of sounding a bit precious, it was an oddly therapeutic experience that I’d recommend, if you’re lucky enough to have the time. And even though I’m sick to the back teeth of Lovecraft, have had enough Nic Cage to do me for the next few decades and never had much time for Richard Stanley in the first place, I actually found myself quite enjoying 2019’s The Color out of Space.

Despite the numbing effect of events, one thing that did make a big impact on me was James Cawthorn: The Man and His Art. There’s so much beautifully rendered art around nowadays, but (and it may just be because I’m getting older) it often seems a bit too perfect—so intimidatingly slick that it can come off as strangely impersonal and unaffecting. That’s not the case with Cawthorn’s stuff—it’s like getting zapped with a cattleprod. I read John Varley’s Gaea trilogy, which I started off thinking was everything I dislike about SF but which turned out to be a lot that I love about it, and, prompted by the website Science Fiction Ruminations, I also read Nancy Kress’s brilliant Alien Light, Suzy McKee Charnas’s brilliant Walk to the End of the World, and finally read some Tanith Lee, which was even better than I’d been hoping since I first meant to read her in 1984.

Music-wise, I fell in love with Fushigi, a 1986 album by Akina Nakamori, Caterina Barbieri’s latest, 2019 Ecstatic Computation, which is just as great as its predecessors, and Yasmine Hamdan’s Arabology (after a tip off by fellow mutant Daniele Cassandro). And of course, a shitload of Hawkwind, after a review copy of Joe Banks’s brilliant Hawkwind: Days of the Underground (review on its way, but in the meantime Joe has written us a great article on the band) spurred me to pull out all my old Hawkwind records and blast myself into the cosmos.

GRASSO: I remember finding myself, immediately after recovering from COVID, really needing music on a near visceral level, spending hours listening to NTS Radio and ordering countless vinyl and DVD compilations from Numero Group, getting into micro-genres and musical scenes I’d never really delved into before. That died off somewhere in the autumn, as I began to mourn what really always attracted me to music, and that is the communal experience of listening and talking about it, which didn’t translate into my isolated life all that well. (One of the exceptions was listening to mixes made by friends and artists I love, but I’ll come back to that in a bit.)

But there was one musical experience in that very difficult autumn that did evoke a sense of community, and that was the release of Oneohtrix Point Never’s semi-eponymous masterpiece LP Magic Oneohtrix Point Never. Given the fact that I was already acquaintances with quite a few fans of Daniel Lopatin’s work, getting to share the experience of listening to and diving deep into the themes and symbolism around this intensely personal album was a delight. Lopatin has always acted as a theorist of nostalgia and media history, and on this album, he uses the conceit of a single day on old-school terrestrial radio, replete with “dayparts” aimed at distinct audiences and demographics, to explore his own career obsessions with the bits of our lives that fall through the cracks of a lifetime bombarded by media. Lopatin’s obsessions around our once-mighty collective pop culture monoculture, its historical fragmentation, and its digital afterlife spoke to me in a year where our collective isolation grew more grim:

“There’s a kind of thesis in [album closer “Nothing’s Special”]. It was a really rough fucking year and it’s been hard for everybody. Something that’s always given me a lot of solace when I’m in a funk is that I notice that I’ve become disenchanted. The thing that can kind of re-enchant me very quickly when I get there is to remember that—like the Philip K. Dick quote said—everything is kind of divine, and everything is interesting, including the stuff between the dials. The noise.

Honestly I did find myself revisiting what you might call media “comfort food” at various points in 2020; I did a complete re-read of James Ellroy’s Underworld USA trilogy and did (er, multiple) rewatches of my favorite Scorsese films—Goodfellas, Casino, and new entrant to the Scorsese pantheon The Irishman—all those tales of white men behind the scenes in the shadows acting badly, those paeans to what Mark Fisher called a “desensitization [to] capitalist realism.” Somehow those old-fashioned, bloody, up-close-and-personal brutalities and cruelties seemed easier to take than the impersonal mass slaughter going on outside our quarantined walls. At least in a Scorsese film or an Ellroy novel you (might) get to look in the eyes of the guy who kills you.

One other old favorite author who surprised this year was Don DeLillo, whose efforts in the ’10s have become almost like prose-poetry: spare, evocative, sketching the edges of our collective collapse. In his slim but powerful 2020 release The Silence, he imagines the loss of our digital commons on possibly the most media-laden holy day of our American calendar: Super Bowl Sunday. Given the dislocations that coronavirus has wrought on all our senses of time and place (especially in relation to using professional sports to orient ourselves in our yearly cycles and how badly COVID scrambled these collective rituals), I found DeLillo’s haunting novella to be both a valedictory for his own career and for an older world of media and parapolitical action that he has helped explain and explore.

But mostly what got me through 2020 were my friends. As acutely painful as it was for me to be physically separated from those friends for a full year, they invariably kept me sane, safe, solvent, and prevented the worst of the demons from knocking at my door. Whether it was gathering online to play Among Us (I have lots of thoughts on why a video game based around betrayal and suspicion became the year’s biggest hit) or just hanging out in those cursed Zoom boxes, without this minimal level of contact I would have surely lost my mind completely. I started a new tabletop RPG campaign online this year, set in the Weird Seventies, and my players have knocked me out time and time again with their own worldbuilding, character development, and exploration of the game’s themes that have been for me much like a magickal Working. This includes, yes, a mix of psychedelic rock, funk, folk, soul, and Motorik music from ’69 to ’73 contributed by player and comrade Leonard Pierce that was a delight to discover and listen to over and over this year. So thanks to the URIEL team. And yes, the planning and writing of the Mutants book (in addition to the Repeater media channel I’ve been working on) has me excited to throw myself into new projects in 2021. So to everyone who’s stuck with us through a once-in-a-century calamity, who’s submitted their own thoughts to our pages, who has shared or commented on our pieces during this difficult time—thank you, yet again. You’re the reason why we keep at it, why we keep plugging away.

ROBERTS: When I have had a couple of hours to myself, I’ve been rewatching a lot of stuff from the late ’80s and early ’90s, starting with Predator and Predator 2, inspired by Alex Evans’s great piece on the first one. And you know what? I really like 2010’s Predators too. Everybody says Adrien Brody was miscast, but that’s bullshit. He’s great in it. He’s great in everything and people are always saying he’s miscast because he doesn’t look like Brad fucking Pitt. I also love 2004’s Alien vs. Predator—no, I will not be taking comments at this time. From there I revisited a really enjoyable Predator/Terminator rip-off called I Come in Peace (1990), starring my man Dolph Lundgren and, ahem, Brian Benben, who many of you will remember from HBO’s long-running series Dream On. It’s certainly nothing you haven’t seen before, but the chemistry between Dolph, the renegade cop, and Benben, the by-the-book FBI geek, is great, and the evil alien (Matthias Hues) shooting tubes into his victims’ brains to suck out the endorphins (an addictive drug on his home planet) is a nice touch.

Another buried treasure from that high-’80s period is Cherry 2000. I saw it when it came out on video (it did not receive a theatrical release in the US) and didn’t remember much, but it’s got a lot of spirit, and the plot is, er, unique: in 2017(!), a businessman’s sex robot shorts out, and he is so in love with it/her (a Cherry 2000 model) that he hires a tracker (human tough gal Melanie Griffith) to take him into Zone 7 (which turns out to be a destroyed Las Vegas) to find and bring home a replacement. I am in no shape to take on the sexual politics right now, but the film is really colorful and uses a lot of kitschy design elements from the ’50s and ’60s to describe its post-apocalyptic setting, there are some excellent action sequences, and supporting turns from Tim Thomerson (the bad guy, who ends up crucified on a Las Vegas casino sign) and legend Ben Johnson (Shane, The Last Picture Show) make up for the stilted performances of the leads. Director Steve De Jarnatt also directed Miracle Mile (1988), another low-budget cult classic that I watched again and still love.

Aside from research on the book, I’ve read literally jack shit this whole year. My mind can’t do it. Music is an endless loop of the Charlie XCX channel (apparently there is something called hyperpop, and I dig it), New Age ’80s ambient, and anything that resembles the ’80s output of Toto, Rick Springfield, and The Cars.

MCKENNA: I Come in Peace is a fucking rocker, on that we can all agree. And I also agree that Adrien Brody deserves more credit, not least for being one of the few credibly punk faces in a film (Spike Lee’s 1999 Summer of Sam). Anyway, as Mike has so eloquently put it, thank you on behalf of all of us to all of you who have taken the time to read We Are the Mutants this year and anyone who’s supported us in any way, whether by contributing or by commenting, or retweeting, or forking out cash, or whatever—it really is much appreciated. And while I’m at it, thank you two for putting up with me too! With so many going through so much shit, wishing anyone “Happy New Year” sounds a bit empty, but fuck it, Happy New Year anyway!