Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of Shin Godzilla
2016 · Shinji Higuchi · Shin Godzilla on Sightlines
The thing comes ashore with its eyes wrong. Dead, set too far apart, nothing behind them. Gills working at the sides of a head that has no expression to read. It doesn't stalk and it doesn't roar. It flops up a Tokyo canal like something born too fast. Anno holds on it just long enough for you to understand that none of your monster-movie training applies here. Then he cuts away. A room. Suits at a long table. White kanji slams across the frame: name, title, ministry, set at the size of a spreadsheet cell.
That cut is the film.
Godzilla is onscreen for minutes. The rest is meetings. Cabinet rooms, sub-basements, press lecterns, a corridor where two agencies work out which of them owns the problem. Plenty of people come for the monster and leave irritated, and the irritation deserves a real answer, because answering it is where the film cracks open.
The answer comes from Bergson, by way of Deleuze.
For Bergson, what makes a living thing alive is a delay. In dead matter, movement passes straight through: push, and the push continues. A creature is the place where a gap opens between the two. Light arrives, and the response does not automatically follow. Deleuze calls that gap the centre of indetermination, the hesitation between perceiving and acting, and he builds the whole tradition of action cinema on it. In the movement-image the gap is small and it always closes. A man sees a situation, the situation presses on him, he acts, the world changes shape. Perception runs into action like water down a pipe.
Shin Godzilla takes that gap and stretches it to the length of a feature.
The state in this film perceives magnificently. There is more information onscreen than any viewer can absorb, and every fact arrives on time. What it cannot do is act. Not from cowardice or villainy. The act simply belongs to nobody: not this ministry, not that statute, not without a signature from a man who is currently in another room being briefed. Deleuze names this the crisis of the action-image, characters who can no longer produce a response equal to what they see. He found it in postwar Europe, where it looked like drift and aimless walking. Anno finds it in a government that is working flat out. Same broken circuit, opposite surface. And the cast disperses to match: dozens of weakly linked officials, no protagonist, characterization outsourced entirely to those caption cards, because a man here is his title and his title is his limit.
Anno's specific invention is to cut a committee meeting the way other directors cut a chase. The staccato rhythm, the kanji cards labelling every person and place and piece of hardware, Sagisu's chorale rising over rooms where nothing is being decided: he is quoting his own End of Evangelion, where SEELE and NERV also sat paralyzed while the world ended. What it does to narrative is genuine and not small. Exposition stops being the delay before the spectacle and becomes the spectacle. Suspense migrates off the creature and onto latency itself.
Those caption cards are doing something Deleuze has a precise word for. A lectosign is an image that has lost its sensory-motor obviousness and has to be deciphered instead, read rather than simply watched. Silent cinema had intertitles; Anno converts them into telemetry, until the screen stops behaving like a window and starts behaving like a console. You are not looking at Tokyo. You are reading a situation report about Tokyo, at a speed nobody can sustain, which is exactly the condition of the men in the room.
Deleuze has a name for that room, too. Writing on Kubrick, he says the world has become a brain: the great luminous circular table in the war room is not a set, it is a cortex, and the film's horror is a thought that cannot complete itself. Shin Godzilla inherits that table directly. Dr. Strangelove and Fail-Safe are both in its ledger, and Patlabor 2 supplied the specifically Japanese version, where constitutional hair-splitting about what force this country may legally use becomes the suspense engine. Anno extends the brain past one room into a whole nervous system of phone relays, corridors, and press desks, and the failure he stages is synaptic. The signal is perfect. The synapse is procedure.
Meanwhile the thing in the bay is on a different clock. Deleuze's impulse-image describes a cinema of raw drives, where a recognizable setting turns out to be the thin crust over what he calls an originary world, a savage substratum of appetite. The sea is that world here, and the creature is nothing but drive: no motive, no malice, no face to negotiate with, mutating through one grotesque intermediate form into the next while the cabinet is still confirming the wording of a statement. Deliberation versus metabolism. The film's dread is arithmetic.
And its body is a performance. The motion capture came from Mansai Nomura, trained in butoh, so what you are watching is not animal behaviour but attitude, a posture held. Deleuze calls that the gest: a bearing that exposes a relation rather than illustrating a feeling. The creature's dead-eyed stagger is a gest, and so is everything in the meeting rooms, the bowing, the seating order, the deference that costs hours. Monster and committee rhyme, both bodies locked into forms they cannot break.
None of it would land without the realism contract underneath, and that belongs to Higuchi, whose Gamera treated a kaiju as a logistics problem with real evacuation staging and physically plausible wreckage. Shin Godzilla honours that by refusing the sublime shot. The 2011 imagery is there in the silt line, the helicopter feed, the ruined coast, which is also how the film reopens the 1954 contract. Ifukube's brass is re-orchestrated rather than parodied, and the creature goes back to being what it originally was, a national wound given a body.
Then the film does something generous. A scratch team of volunteers and misfits cuts through the tape, and the weakness gets found by reading the thing rather than fighting it. The circuit closes at last, at a smaller scale, hand-built. Deleuze's late political cinema turns on the line that the people are missing, that a film can no longer assume a constituted people and must show one being assembled. That is unmistakably what happens here: the collective that acts is not the one the constitution provides, and even the monster's origin turns out to be entangled with a foreign power, so the problem was never sovereign to begin with.
The Japan Academy gave it Best Picture, which is the sound of a form being taken seriously for the first time. Its ancestors fill a page; its descendants are still being written. Watch it again for the cuts rather than the creature, and see how long the film can keep two men from agreeing about whose job this is. What, in the end, is the monster in this movie?
Concepts in play
- the interval (centre of indetermination) — The entire runtime sits in the gap between a state that perceives perfectly (captions naming every official, ministry and piece of hardware) and a state that cannot act; the bureaucracy is the hesitation between perception and action, hypertrophied to feature length.
- crisis of the action-image — Officials receive complete information about the creature and can produce no adequate response: jurisdictional turf wars, statutory hair-splitting, and missing signatures replace the decisive act the monster movie normally supplies.
- dispersive situation — Dozens of weakly linked officials across ministries, with no protagonist; characterization is handed over entirely to rapid-fire kanji caption cards giving name, title and ministry.
- the readable image (lectosign) — Kanji intertitle cards captioning every person, place and piece of hardware in strobe rhythm — the screen stops functioning as a window and becomes a surface to be read, faster than any viewer can read it.
- cinema of the brain — The war-room architecture inherited from Dr. Strangelove and Fail-Safe, extended by Anno into a whole nervous system of meeting rooms, phone relays and press desks whose failure is synaptic rather than informational; Patlabor 2 supplied the Japanese constitutional-limits version.
- impulse-image — A dead-eyed, gilled creature with no motive or malice, mutating through grotesque intermediate forms — pure appetite and drive rather than an antagonist with intentions.
- originary world — The deep sea from which the gilled thing emerges, revealed beneath the procedural crust of Tokyo ministries as a savage substratum the state has no protocol for.
- the gest — Motion capture of butoh-trained actor Mansai Nomura makes the creature's stagger a held posture rather than animal behaviour, rhyming with the ceremonial bearing of the meeting rooms (bowing, seating order, deference that costs hours).
- action-image, large form (restored) — The rag-tag team of volunteers cuts through the red tape and finds the creature's weakness, rebuilding by hand the perception-to-action circuit the state could not close.
- the people are missing — The collective that finally acts is not the constituted one but an ad-hoc volunteer team assembled outside official channels, with the crisis itself tied to a foreign superpower — sovereignty never fully available.