Warning: spoilers for both movies
Poor Things
Cool aesthetic, vaguely anti-progress
Poor things is the latest from director Yorgos Lanthimos, set in fantasy-steampunk Victorian England. Dr. Godwin (Willem Dafoe) is a mad-scientist Frankenstein who creates Bella Baxter (Emma Stone) from parts recovered off of a recently deceased pregnant woman. Bella is resurrected with an infant’s brain in a woman’s body. As part of her bildungsroman, she runs away from Dafoe’s smothering Victorian estate into a hedonistic world tour where she discovers sex, philosophy, poverty, and socialism, eventually returning home to continue her “father’s” work.
The best part of the movie was the set and costume design.
Almost every scene in this movie had visual interest.
The philosophical themes of the movie are overt. There are several explicit discussions of philosophy and politics between characters. Bella rejects nihilism in favor of altruism by donating her lover’s gambling winnings to the poor. She later joins a socialist group in Paris. This is depicted as positive but ultimately naive as Bella’s donation gets stolen by obviously untrustworthy sailors.
The other philosophical undercurrent in the movie is a debate over science and progress which ultimately favors the anti-progress view. Godwin’s deformities are revealed to be the result of sadistic “experiments” performed on him by his father. Godwin rationalizes this abuse by praising his father for sacrificing in the name of progress and science. Godwin himself is far less cruel but is still unsettling. His house is filled with monstrous chimeras and mutilated bodies.
The centerpiece of the movie, Bella, is a result of Godwin’s human engineering and she decides to continue his surgery practice at the end of the movie, so the depiction of science is not a one-note negative. But Bella’s resurrection is still grotesque and morally suspect, and there is no indication that Godwin’s science could have larger societal benefits, besides lobotomizing the psychopathic General Blessington.
Poor Things entertains with its intricate visuals and set pieces but underrates science and progress.
Godzilla Minus One
Good acting; Japan is crazy
Godzilla Minus One is a Japanese-language kaiju film from Toho studios. The movie begins in 1945, just before the end of the war in Japan. The main character, outside of Godzilla him(?)self, is Kōichi Shikishima a “failed” kamikaze pilot. After a brief first-encounter with Godzilla, which leaves Shikishima as the only surviving witness, he returns home to a post-war Tokyo. The best performances in the movie are in this first act where Shikishima deals with the shame and trauma of surviving the war.
The rest of the movie proceeds as expected with some more encounters with Godzilla, failed attempts to destroy him, and finally a last ditch attempt and a chance at redemption for Shikishima as he flies a plane filled with high explosives straight into Godzilla’s maw. In the final scenes its revealed that the team of veteran engineers working on Shikishima’s plane installed an ejection seat, allowing him to escape and representing Japan’s move past their culture of self sacrifice.
The movie was enjoyable enough but the meta things it reveals about Japan are what is most interesting. The most striking one to me is the contrast and breakneck shift between the culture of wartime and post-war Japan. The mid-20th century is full of chilling examples of totalitarian regimes and totalizing ideologies, but wartime Japan still manages to stand out. There are no other examples of a culture of martyrdom and obedience that elicited true belief from so many millions of people. No other country had generals ordering thousands of men into certain death charges shortly before committing ritual suicide themselves and no other country had soldiers still fighting 30 years after WW2 had ended. A Japanese WW2 veteran Kinjo Shigeaki, says of wartime Japan:
“Back in those days of 100 million Japanese citizens supposedly being prepared to fight to the very last man, everybody was prepared for death. The doctrine of total obedience to the Emperor emphasized death and made light of life. The willingness to die for the Emperor on a faraway island resulted in a whole new sense of identity.”
Despite being an extreme case of despotism even among 20th centuries dictatorship, Japan became a world-leading economy, a liberal, peaceful democracy, and the primary exporter of cute cartoons within three generations.
This might not feel so surprising because we’re living in a world where it already happened but its akin to Palestine or Iraq becoming the most advanced economies in the world and massive cultural exporters just a few generations a total war where children were trained to martyr themselves as suicide bombers.
Godzilla Minus One is a good source of questions on the transition between the Japan of its setting and the Japan of its making
This post is a product Christmastime time constraints so it’s a bit out of my usual topic window. Let me know if you liked this post and if you want more (or less!) cultural commentary from this blog in the future!