In Praise of Suitmation! Godzilla at 65.
The starting point of my paper is a word. A word that made me laugh when I first heard it.
[SLIDE 3]
Suitmation.
Or (for some of you)
スーツメーション Sūtsumēshon
As you all know, ‘suitmation’ means, broadly, the using of monster suit for special effects in cinema [SLIDE] often (but not always) in combination with miniatures [SLIDE], background projection, mattes or other analogue special effects. [SLIDE]
[SLIDE: ‘suitmation’]
Linguistically it’s a portmanteau-word. It combines the word ‘suit’ and the suffix ‘-mation’ (taken from ‘animation’). It’s a neologism, coined in Japan, and it resembles the other faux English abbreviations that the Japanese are so fond of [They use ‘su-pa’for supermarket, depatofor department store, pasokonfor personal computer, or rimokonfor remote control – and sutsumeshonfor suit animation].
It is, in short, ‘suitmation’ is not English, but fakeEnglish – a non-English English word; it’s a Japanese word that only pretendsto be English, but which has, nevertheless, infiltrated the English language, and has remained there, as an alien linguistic body that is somehow uncannilyat home in it new environment.
The word ‘suitmation’ provokes laughter – at least in me - not onlybecause of foreignness [I have to confess that I find ‘rimokon’ for remote control funny as well) but alsobecause the phenomenon itself is a bit goofy. As people working in advertisement know, nothing is, perhaps, as immediately silly looking as having an actor wearing a creature suit.
[SLIDE 2x]
[These are from recent commercials]
The silliness of the creature suit is – perhaps – more enjoyed in Japan than anywhere else in the world. [In my short trip to Japan, I’ve seen more people in creature suits in shopping centre than in my entire life.]
In fact a former student of mine, Jelle van der Ster, keeps a twitter account that is entirely devoted to retweets of Japanese people in creature suits.
[This is a random selection taken from his recent tweets]
[SLIDE 4x (stoppen bij groen en rood poppetje]
It is not hard to explain why a creature suit is so profoundly silly. [SLIDE] It makes your body soft and round; you end up with short arms and a gigantic head. [SLIDE] It gives you the physique of a toddler [SLIDE] and it makes you clumsy. [SLIDE] The only movement that you can make is waving,which they typically excessively do. [SLIDE] [SLIDE]
[I always feel an irresistible urge to wave back – and even this picture triggers a waving reflex in me.] [Feel free to wave back at the screen]
[So the suit does not only turn the suit actor in a toddler, it infantilizes the person it speaks to]
[Slide: Suitmation]
So the word ‘suitmation,’ I guess, is funny because it combines the lo-fi silliness of the creature suitwith the pseudo-scientificsounding suffix ‘-mation,’ a suffix that suggest a technique, a procedure or a technology (information, animation, transformation, legitimation, approximation, sublimation, etc, etc.)
Hence, as a word ‘suitmation’ is truly Monstrousin the renaissance meaning of the word monster [SLIDE] as the combination of two species that should not be combinable.
The word ‘Suitmation’ stitches together parts of words that belong to two discourses, two genres, two spheres of life:: the infantile pleasure of dressing up, and the sophistication of technology, thereby creating a word-monsterthat is not entirely unlike Godzilla (or Gojira) himself [SLIDE] whose name is, after all an equally a monstrous portmanteau word, a combination of the English loanword for Gorilla,and the Japanese term for Whale (kujira).
And Gojira- the ‘Gorilla-Whale’ – is a word whose history, I am afraid, also made me laugh.
2. The Gorilla-Whale-Elephant-Bear
[SLIDE]
The word ‘suitmation’ – sutsumeshon– was (if I am correct), used for the first time by Eiji Tsuburaya, head of Toho’s Visual Effects Department. According to the story that has become part of the lore that surrounds the Gojira films, Tsuburaya had been asked by director Ishiro Honda and producer Tomoyuki Tanaka to provide special effects using the stop motion technique that Willis O Brien had used for the 1933 King Kongfilm [SLIDE] and which he had later, with the help of Ray Harryhousen, perfected for Mighty Joe Young(1949) [SLIDE 2X]S. Harryhousen, in turn had used the technique in The Beast from 20.000 Fathoms(1953) [SLIDE], which had come out a year before Godzilla’s release. It is a film about a dinosaur that is awoken from its frozen state by a nuclear bomb test, who then destroys NYC. [For the film Harryhausen had developed a technique he dubbed ‘Dynamation’ (which his own neologism) that splits the background and foreground of a live action sequence into two separate images so he could add stop-motion animation , integrating live-action with the animation.
[SLIDE 2 x]
[SLIDE: Tsubaraya]
According to legend, when asked how long it would take to animate the Godzilla sequences using stop-motion, Tsubaraya answered it would take him a biblical 7 yearsand suggested a different solution: namely to use suitmation: a combination of the use of a creature suit, with miniatures [SLIDE] and optical effects [such as shooting the film at a faster speedrate, to make the movement of the suit actor seem, when projected at a normal rate, slower and heavier.
[SLIDE, Nakajima in the middle]
This technology – suitmation – would become a staple of every Japanese Godzilla film, while ‘suit acting’ developed into a real art, especially in the hands of Haruo Nakajima (here depicted wearing his Godzilla outfit) who played Godzilla in the first 12 movies (1954-1972) [Godzilla (1954), Godzilla Raids again (1955), King Kong vs Godzilla (1962); Mothra vs Godzilla (1864); Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster (1964); Invasion of Astromonstser (1965), Son of Godzilla (1967), Destroy all Monsters (1968); All Monsters Attack (1969); Godzilla vs Hedorah (1971) and Godzilla vs Gigan (1972).
[SLIDE]
Prior to his appearing in costume Nakajima visited the Tokyo Zoo to study the movements of animals, deciding, in the end, to combine in his impersonation of Godzilla the body language of a bear with that of an elephant, so that the Gorilla-Whale-suit would be animated by a human body imitating the movements of an Elephant-Bear.
[SLIDE]
Nakajima was followed by a string of other suit actors, and suitmation has become such an integral part of the franchise that when Roland Emmerich’s 1998’s American Godzilla was released, many Japanese fans felt betrayed. As one of the suitmation actors said: “It’s not Godzilla. It doesn’t have its spirit.” (Allison, Millenial Monsters, ..)
So my question (for the remaining 15 minutes) is simply: why is the love of Godzilla linked to the technology of suitmation? Why can the spirit of Godzillaonlybe conjured up by suitmation? What are the joys ofSuitmation? What sets of pleasures, fears and fascinations are triggered by suitmation?
3. Suitmation, Animation, Stop Motion
To get us started, I want to compare suitmation to two other forms of animation: stop-motion animation and hand drawn animation. Each of these techniques, I would hold, offers a distinct set of pleasures.
[SLIDE]
Stop motion confronts us with the spectacle of ‘real objects’ that seemingly come alive. As
As animation theorists such as Maureen Furniss, Suzanne Buchan and Paul Wells have observed, stop-motion is about [quote] ‘objects that we know to be inanimate,’ that nevertheless move [end of quote]. The first three known stop-motion films of the early 1910’s, the Haunted House, Fun in Bakery Shop, the Sculpture’s nightmare, are all rely on the spookiness of everyday objects that are suddenly animated. The effect is one of uncanniness, a result of the blurring of the lines between the living and the non-living. This uncanny effect is also explored in the early films of Wladyslaw Starewicz(1892-1965) [SLIDE] who used dead insects in his films, provoking an eeriness that is further exploited by Ray Harryhausen [SLIDE], for example in the famous sequence of the seven skeleton warriors in Jason and the Argonauts(1963), and by surrealist animator Jan Svanmakjer [SLIDE], who uses insects, skulls [SLIDE] and slaps of meat [SLIDE] who do not so much appear to be alive, but rather to be undead.
[SLIDE] The feeling of ‘undeadness’ is heightened by the slightly hesitating, stuttering nature of stop-motion animation – which is even there in a sophisticated works by a master animator such as Harryhausen, which make it seem as if the figures lack what Henri Bergson would have called an elan vital– a vitality.
[SLIDE] Hand Drawn Animationon the other hand, typically offers the spectacle of the fluidity of lines that come alive on the screen [SLIDE]. It depicts a ‘vitality’ that is not anchored in a three dimensional body [SLIDE].
[SLIDE met combinatie]
Hence, whereas stop-motion depicts the stuttering undead movements of objects-witout-vitality, hand-drawn animation depicts ‘aliveness’ (anima) without bodies.
[SLIDE]
Suitmationdiffers from both. It has neither the uncanniness of the undead, nor the elegance of the line, but it offers the spectacle of a body that inhabitsanother body
[SLIDE] a human body that impersonates an animal, or the spirit of an animal that possesses a human body.
[SLIDE – met Harryhausen naast Godzilla] Godzilla doesn’t have the ‘undeadness’ of Harryhausen’s dinosaurs]
[SLIDE: kleur]
[And Godzilla, especially in later instalments, is a creature that moves, strangely, humanlike.] [SLIDE]
The joyof suitmation lies in the fact that we watch a body that is bothanimalandhuman. The Godzilla films, in other words, entertain us with acts ofinterspecies crossdressing. Suitmation, therefore, is situated at the transvestite continuum. [SLIDE] Transvestism as Marjorie Garber argues in a book first published in 1992, is always about the blurring of the boundaries between two categories that are typically thought of as opposites. Through ‘suitmation’ we can witness the emergence of a ‘third’ body, a body that is neither human nor animal.
In fact, transvestism has been part of the modern history of the creature suit. As Wikipedia tells me, the first modern usage of a creature suit dates back to the circus side shows of PT Barnum of the 19thcentury [SLIDE] in which actors would perform as ‘ape-men’ along the other stars, the so-called ‘freaks,’ such as [SLIDE] Jo-jo the Dog-Faced Boy(here to the left) (a Russian circus artist, who suffered from hypertrichosis), and the Indian Krao (to the right) who suffered from a similar disease) and [SLIDE] the african Zippy the Pinhead,who were presented to the audience as examples of the ‘missing link’ [SLIDE] between ape and human, and who were asked to bark and growl to the audience (as Jojo) or where an ape suits (as Zippy) [SLIDE] and who Barnum claimed to have ‘discovered’ in the jungles of Africa.
4. Infantility / Play
Part of the ‘joy’ of suitmation, then, is that it crosses boundaries between human and animal, but also betweenspecies (Godzilla is, after all a ‘Gorilla-Whale who walks like an Elephant-Bear’) and offers the spectacle of a body that primitive, animalistic- but also infantile.
[SLIDE]
The morphologyof Godzilla’s body is infantile (he has a huge head and large buttocks, tiny hands) and so is his body language(he steps with the clumsiness of a toddler who has just learned how to walk) and his behavior. As Philip Brophy stated in an essay written in 2002,
Godzilla driven by what he calls a ‘destructive immaturity,’which is strangely a-sexual.
[SLIDE] Compared to the American monsters of the same period, who are all obsessed with blonde women, Godzilla shows little interest in human beings. His drive is not sexual, but destructive.
In American horror films, such as ‘The Creature from the Black Lagoon(1954), the Monster that Challenged the World(1957) The She-Creature(1957), there is always a sexual undertone. Even the look of the creatures suggests sexuality.
[SLIDE]
Brophy writes: “The Creature’s gelatin lips, the Demon’s hairy nostrils, the Monster’s cellulite bulk, the She-Creature’s crustaceous breasts – all stir up a gorgeous heady confusion between the penile, the vaginal, the mammarian, the anal.”
This subliminal sexuality is absent in Godzilla.
[SLIDE]
Brophy continues:
“For Godzilla is not there to titillate with the prospect of aberrant sex (which is the keY charm of the western monster movie); he is there to embody energy per se, and to perform the action of willfully unleashing that energy without control.”
Brophy links this to use of the creature suit, and the sense of play that it embodies.
[SLIDE]
“The use of a human-in-a-suit is crucial to one’s identification with this act, so that one might imagine the power in being that person who is the agent of destruction.”
Suitmation, Brophy holds, makes it possible for us to project ourselves into the monster. This playfulness is furthermore evoked by the use of miniature sets.
To cite Brophy one more time:
“From young girls playing with doll houses to grown men playing with train sets, one engages in play with an enlarged sense of self.”
5. Mothra / Animate / Inanimate
[SLIDE]
This infantile sense of playfulness is, perhaps, more evident in the later Godzilla films, such as 1961’s Godzilla vs Mothra(my personal favorite) which opens with the discovery of a gigantic egg, out of which a monstrous moth hatches.
[SLIDE] [SLIDE]
The moth, we soon learn, is from Infant Island[SLIDE] where he is worshipped by a primitive tribe. [SLIDE]
[SLIDE]
Godzilla vs Mothrarevolves around same set of oppositions that also structure the first Godzilla film: the monstrousness of the Kaiji is opposed to modern technology, science, and media.
[SLIDE]
Immediately upon the discovery of the egg a discussion emerges about ownership of the egg and its economic value [SLIDE] contracts are signed, plans are drawn up, telephone calls are made [SLIDE] [SLIDE]. This contrasts with the more traditional approach of the fishermen who find the egg, who call in a Shinto priest [SLIDE], and the primitive shamanism of the inhabitants of Infant island. [SLIDE]
[SLIDE]
Hence film revolves around an opposition between the infantile, the primitive, the exotic, the monstrous - and technology, science, capitalism, media, calculability, economic worth (in short, modernity and its symbolic systems).
But, compared to the 1954 Godzilla, the opposition is more ambivalent. Godzilla vs Mothra also seems to be driven by a romantic yearning for a more primitive but authentic life, a life from before modernization. There is a romantic anti-capitalist streak to the film that is absent in the first Godzilla.
Also, the kaiji in the film become borderline benign. Both Mothra and Godzilla are still nominally mutants, products of radio-activity, but they also evoke a primitive, cyclical sense of temporality. Mothra, for example, is not so much an individuated creature, but one who re-generates, who is reborn every time an egg hatches.
[SLIDE] Similarly, Godzilla, when he first shows up in the film, emerges from the mudd [SLIDE 4 X] alongside puffs of smoke and steam, evoking, at least in me, the Aristotelian notion of the spontaneous generationof life which Aristotle describes in his treatise on animals. Life, Aristotle argues, typically comes from other life, unless it is spontaneously generated from [quote] “putrefying earth or vegetable matter,” [End of Quote]
As Aristotle scholars have argued, the notion speculation of the ‘spontaneous’ generation of life is linked to Aristotle’s understanding of causality where everything that happens must have a cause that lies outside of itself, but which also leaves space for what the philosopher calls ‘tuche’ – the purely uncaused accidental, and which Jacques Lacan in his seventh seminar links to the traumatic, an eruption of the real which disrupts all symbolic systems of knowledge and causality.
The 1954 Godzilla film, then, is about unexpected confrontation with a traumatic violence that cannot be captured by symbolic systems, by science, by media, by economies, by a military infrastructure. The 1961 Godzilla film, on the other hand, is alsoabout the confrontation with its opposite, namely a life force that is not yet individuated, a vitality embodied by the monsters, that equally remains unsymbolizable.
I would argue – in concluding - that both destructiveness andvitality are linked to the technique of suitmation and play, since, as we could have learned from the British school of Psychoanalysis play itself is linked to what Melanie Klein calls the ‘destructive impulse.’ Through play, Klein holds, we repeat the violence of individuation, of separating ourselves from the body of our mothers, andwe try to defuse our fearof being destroyed, and of losing our sense of individuality. For Klein, play is always profoundly ambivalent: it inspires fear and joy, aggression and anxiety.
[SLIDE]
A similar ambivalence is, I belief, captured by the Godzilla films, by the tension between the gloominess of the early films and the silly joyfulness of the later instalments. This tension is repeated in each new cycle of films, when every reboot that returns to the darkness of the original is followed by a decadent, campy and silly but joyful stage, until a new reboot follows.
Hence, to conclude, the Godzilla franchise is dated. It is marked by an event – a nuclear disaster. But it similarly offers a joy that allows it to outlive its original context, very much like the monster itself, whose temporality is famously out of joint, so that it can always awake in new context to entertain and horrify us.
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