Godzilla vs. Biollante · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

A rose the size of a hill stands in Lake Ashi at night, picked out against black water. In its petals, a girl's face. Not a suggestion of a face: Erika's, kept legible inside the tissue the way Ishirō Honda kept his actors' features readable inside the foam-latex fungus of Matango, so that you can't look at the flower without knowing someone is still in there.

Kazuki Ōmori's 1989 film is remembered as the odd one in Toho's Heisei cycle, the Godzilla picture that finds time for corporate espionage, a psychic teenager, and a long argument about research funding. But start with a production fact instead. Biollante is rooted. The final build was one of the largest creature props Toho ever assembled, a crocodilian mouth on a mass of writhing tendrils run by a crew of puppeteers with wires, rods and hydraulics, and it was immobile by design. It cannot chase. It can only reach.

That constraint is the whole film, and it's where Deleuze becomes useful rather than decorative.

Deleuze sorts film images by what a body can do with what it receives. In the action-image, the circuit closes: someone sees a situation, acts, and the situation changes. That's the engine of nearly all monster cinema. You shoot the thing, or you build the weapon that kills the thing. The affection-image is what appears when that circuit is cut and feeling has nowhere to discharge, which is why he anchors it in the close-up: a face registering something it cannot act on. His narrowest term for the purest case is the qualisign, an immobile reflecting face expressing one quality and nothing else. Normally that's a shot lasting a few seconds. Ōmori and Kōichi Kawakita build one at the scale of a hillside and leave it standing in a lake.

Which is also why the fight staging goes strange. There's no wrestling match. Godzilla wades into a static tentacular field and gets grabbed; it's a siege. The Day of the Triffids solved the same problem the same way thirty years earlier, an antagonist that can't walk to the fight, shot in isolation, striking with a whipping tendril. What's new in 1989 is that Ōmori makes the immobility mean something. The monster is grief, and grief doesn't come after you. It waits where you left it.

Now the other half of the film, cut at a completely different speed. Meetings, briefings, a shootout, a chase. Everyone wants the G-cells and none of them for knowledge: an American conglomerate, a desert client state buying Japanese science, Japan's own government, and one geneticist with a private use for them. Deleuze has a precise name for that object. The fetish, a part-object charged with compulsive force, the thing around which the drives of the impulse-image organize themselves. The Heisei series canonizes the premise here, and it comes down from Frankenstein Conquers the World: immortal tissue that regenerates a whole organism from a harvested sample. Ōmori's contribution is to treat the cells as an asset class. Funded, stolen, weaponized, sold.

Beneath the glass and the white laboratory surfaces and the banks of monitors, which is the derived milieu, Deleuze's word for the concrete social setting we mistake for the world, the film keeps exposing an originary world: a wet, vegetal, taxonomically illegal mass where plant and human and reptile have stopped being separate categories. The horror is classificatory before it's physical. The sap-and-tendril sound design, among the most unpleasant textures in any Toho film, is where the two layers touch.

Then there's the arguing. A remarkable amount of this movie is people in rooms deciding whether Japan should possess the Anti-Nuclear Energy Bacteria, an agent that could disable nuclear energy anywhere and that makes whoever holds it a target. Ōmori trained in medicine, and he writes institutions like someone who has watched them from the inside. The scaffolding is Quatermass: inquiries, laboratory tests and containment debate in place of combat. Deleuze would call the result a discourse-image, an image that poses a problem it cannot resolve and transposes action into argument. Watch what the film does with the debate. It never settles it. Events overtake it. The 1954 Godzilla gave the Oxygen Destroyer a scientist's conscience and closed that account with his death; ANEB gets no such closure.

Three plots run in parallel and converge late: the espionage thriller, the policy drama, the father who can't let his daughter go. Deleuze calls a weakly linked spread like this a dispersive situation, and it usually signals the action-image coming apart. Here it isn't collapse, it's architecture. Godzilla operates as the synsign, the encompasser, the milieu-level pressure that forces every smaller situation to answer. He isn't a visitation. He's a consequence of decisions taken in rooms we have watched, and the editing keeps insisting on it, cutting fast and flat through bureaucracy, then slowing into the long 1960s-length takes reserved for the thing bureaucracy made.

One character is exempt from all of it. Megumi Odaka's Miki Saegusa, in her debut, can hear Godzilla. She perceives and cannot act, and the institutions around her have no use for what she receives. Deleuze's term is the voyant, the seer, the figure who watches and endures where a hero would intervene. Toho kept her for the rest of the cycle, which tells you they knew what they had: the standing proposal that this animal could be listened to instead of only shot at.

And then the ending. Biollante dissolves; the spores rise and briefly form a face in the sky, carried almost entirely by Kōichi Sugiyama's score, the only Heisei music not written in the Ifukube line, pastoral where the series is martial. What resolves is not the conflict. It's the grief. The rose is the film's symbol in Deleuze's exact sense, the object that condenses the organizing relation of the whole: mourning turned into tissue, tissue turned into a weapon, the weapon finally let go.

What Biollante did to the form was make the kaiju an outcome rather than an arrival, and prove that a monster film could be built on an immobile monster and a funding argument. Toho read the receipts and retreated to King Ghidorah and Mothra. It kept the beam, the "vs." branding, Miki, and the idea that Godzilla's cells can generate new life, which is the entire premise of SpaceGodzilla and of Destoroyah. The studio took the biology and left the mourning.

Watch it again for the rooted things. Notice how often Godzilla is framed against infrastructure rather than ruins, and where the film finally puts him: on a beach, beside a nuclear plant. Then ask what it costs a movie to build its most expensive creature and give it nowhere to go.