Question Time with S.T. Joshi

Necronomicon Australis presents An Evening Discussion with S.T. Joshi

Friday 28^th of June, 5.30pm-9.00pm, 1^st floor Conference Room, the Castlereagh Boutique Hotel, Castlereagh Street, Sydney NSW.

What can I say about this? Where to start? To begin with, I only heard about this event because one of the organisers read my author bio somewhere and then contacted my publisher to ask her to pass the details on. I was intrigued, but that weekend was building up to be a big one with many events – including a family reunion – being scheduled then. In the end, I felt constrained to go for three reasons: one, there probably wouldn’t be another opportunity to do something like this; two, good Lovecraftian events are few and far between out here; and, three, I felt guilty about turning it down after they’d sought me out. Turns out, none of these reasons were valid, and I may as well have stayed at home.

‘Sounds harsh? Let me explain.

The organisers had envisioned an evening of music written by Larry Sitsky, an Australian composer you’ve never heard of, whose oeuvre was largely inspired by esoteric philosophies and occult written works; at some point in the 90s he wrote a series of linked short pieces for piano and clarinet entitled “Necronomicon: 18 aphorisms for clarinet and piano”. One of the organisers works with Sitsky at the Canberra School of Music and decided that the stars were right for a performance of this piece. So far, so good.

The issue was that the composition is quite short, and so dragging people out for an evening of music that would last less than half an hour seemed problematic – something else was called for. They decided that someone needed to do an introduction to the life of HPL to kick things off and, in a giddy moment, one of them contacted S.T. Joshi, on a whim or a dare, and he agreed to come Down Under and do it. I hope you’re all following…

Now they had one evening’s entertainment prepared, but that seemed like a lot of effort for just one night. So they decided to go on the road and turn it into a touring event. They penciled in Hobart, Melbourne and Sydney, along with the Canberra date, but there was just one issue: the musical performers who could play the piece had other commitments and couldn’t be contracted for any more performances than the one night. This meant that all the other dates would have to be carried by Joshi flying solo. You can probably see where we’re headed…

Fast forward to Sydney and the last evening of the tour. We had Joshi coming on after the interval, fine, but for starters we were addressed by two other figures from the local Lovecraftian scene, willing to talk about the impact of HPL’s work in the Antipodes. Well, I say two, but one of them bailed, and had to be replaced by a ring-in an hour beforehand. The first of these speakers – Leigh Blackmore – talked us through his collection of Lovecraftian articles, books and fanzines, published locally and elsewhere since the 1930s, while the second speaker – Charles Danny Lovecraft (I shit you not) – just gushed about how cool he thought HPL was, in his opinion. After this, Joshi came on and told us all about his accomplishments and the “complete accident” of how he came to be the world’s foremost Lovecraft scholar, followed by some awkwardly-handled YouTube clips of a Lovecraft poem set to music, both performed by choral groups, one including Joshi himself, who also composed the music. After this came questions.

Let me say, this was a train-wreck. Despite being “planned” ahead of time, the event was cobbled together at the last minute and nothing of any value or interest was presented (and frankly, if I want to watch YouTube clips, I can sit at home in my underwear and do that). Anyone with a passing interest in this stuff, knows who S.T. Joshi is and knows what he has done – we don’t need to hear him blow his own trumpet and certainly not after ponying-up 30-odd dollars and a trip into the City for the privilege. Additionally, if I want to hear an HPL fanboy sing his praises while wetting himself in excitement, I’ll go to a fan event where everyone cosplays (no, on second thought, I won’t!). The only thing of interest – to me, anyway – was the listing of bibliographic details of locally-published Lovecraftiana, and the delivery of this material was dry and mirthless, scuppered by the ineptitude of the person running the projector and the laptop to which it was connected. Every time someone mentioned Fritz Leiber, they pronounced it “LEE-ber”, which always gets my teeth clenching.

Somethings were outside the organisers’ control: tea and coffee facilities had been provided by the Hotel, but had been set up at one end of the very small conference room, with the result that each time the urn went through its heating routine, the sound of it drowned out whoever was talking. Add to this that management had seen its way clear to turn off the air-conditioning, we were all sweating profusely by the half-time break, during which someone thankfully located the switch. On top of this, the audience – comprised chiefly of socially-inept nerds – was about as rude as it was possible to be, talking loudly at the back of the room while presenters were presenting, or playing games on their ‘phones during the talks. I mean, really – would it kill them to unplug for a couple of hours? Even the organisers themselves were culpable in these transgressions, lending the event an air of them having gratefully reached the finish line and getting ready to party. And all the while I was thinking: “I paid for this?”

Question time at the end was the moment that I thought things would get interesting but even here it was dull. Someone asked if anyone else in the world of literature has had such an ongoing impact on their audience and there was some mumbled discussion between the speakers which resulted in a “no, not that we can think of” response. Someone asked if Lovecraft was inspired by his home-town surroundings to write his work, to which Joshi answered, “yes, yes I think so”. Some people asked if there was any particular movie adaptation the panel felt really delivered. I stuck my oar in, in desperation, and asked about my last sentence of “The Haunter of the Dark” issue, asking why that particular construction had been chosen as ‘correct’ and got a dismissive “because I know better than you” answer. I mean really? How naff could all this be? It was all empty, obvious inquiry and ego, and it made us run overtime at which point the organisers abruptly called it quits.

In summation, this was an event that was pitched at novices, people with no clue about who HPL or S.T. Joshi were, but attended by an audience of people who knew all there was to know about them. I mean, imagine going up to – oh, I don’t know – your Mum, and going “hey! There’s this really cool event happening with S.T. Joshi – wanna come?” What would you expect? Frankly if you had bought a ticket to this event, you know what to expect, you’ve got all your bases covered and you’d be anticipating something more. Something above Novice Level, anyway. There was no depth to the knowledge on display and certainly Joshi’s talk could have been read directly from his Wikipedia entry, except for the odd personal revelation that made little difference – overall - to the material. The technical aspects of the show were handled by a ham-fisted Luddite who should have known better: I mean, I showed up early and was told to wait in the bar before going up to the room; the whole time I was there, the Luddite was there too – shouldn’t he really have been upstairs getting things good to go? Like learning how to use a computer? The whole event was poorly thought out and even more poorly executed. I came away feeling like I’d been fleeced.

As a means of recouping something from the evening, I asked Joshi to sign a copy of one of his books which I’d brought with me. He did so as dismissively as he’d addressed my question earlier and his signature is an illegible scrawl. If ever I decide to put it up on E-bay, everyone is going to just ask me to prove it’s actually his signature!

To top it all off, my train broke down on the way home and I didn’t get back until almost two o’clock in the morning. Thank-you Gladys; thank-you State Rail. A crappy way to finish off a crappy evening.

Dark Hauntings…

“I see it – coming here – hell-wind – titan blur – black wings – Yog Sothoth save me – the three-lobed burning eye…”

-Last sentence of The Haunter of the Dark, HPL.

This sentence has been my personal bugbear for quite some time now; long-time readers will know that I’ve discussed it before. It has been bothering me again however, so I would like to take the time to pin down everything about it that annoys me.

When I was a teenager, I first discovered Lovecraft and immediately tried to devour everything of his that I could get my hands on. I borrowed and bought compilations and re-prints and, after consuming them, lost them in house moves or gave them away to fellow readers to (of course!) never see them again. It wasn’t until much later that I began seriously to collect editions of Lovecraft and amass my own private library. Long before that stage though, I had noticed something peculiar: this sentence changed depending upon the edition you were reading.

It became a sort of game with me to turn to this page of each collection I stumbled across and see which version of the sentence had been committed to print. I rapidly learned that there were three main variants and I sometimes purchased the volume, or not, simply based upon whether the variation was the one that I favoured.

As time passed, things changed – now only one iteration of the last sentence appears in print (the one above). It seems that a “definitive text” has been prepared and that this version is the one that all publishers turn to at need. This is fine. However (and I have to say that this is just my opinion), I think it’s the wrong one.

Let me issue a caveat at this point: I have never seen the original manuscript, or drafts, of this story; I have never seen it as it appeared in its first presentation in “Weird Tales” magazine; I also have no idea how Lovecraft prepared his texts for publication. All I’m proceeding upon is gut instinct, a knowledge of the publication industry and a long familiarity with HPL’s writing style. In short, I’m no expert, but I think my point is a valid one.

Without going into the specifics of the words themselves, let’s first take notice of how the sentence is constructed. It works something like this:

(Phrase1: “I see it”) (Dash) (Phrase2: “coming here”) (Dash) (Hyphenated Phrase1: “hell-wind”) (Dash) (Phrase3: “titan blur”) (Dash) (Phrase4: “black wings”) (Dash) (Phrase5: “Yog Sothoth save me”) (Dash) (Hyphenated Phrase2: “the three-lobed burning eye…”)

From this we can see that the sentence is comprised of five disjointed phrases, between two and four words apiece; two phrases which contain hyphens; and six dashes. Breaking it up like this allows us to look more closely at the sentence’s construction and to start untangling its riddle.

The purpose of this sentence is to show the narrator’s fear and desperation at the approach of the entity which is coming to destroy him. It has been noted in the past that this device – the last written words of the doomed scribe – is a bit ludicrous, a bit like Eric Idle reading the wall inscription about Castle Aaargh! in “Monty Python and the Holy Grail”. Many people have told me that this story needs to end with a pen scrawl running off the edge of the page. These views are all valid, but HPL was living in a pre-Monty Python world and so we can largely forgive him his indiscretion. We’re supposed to feel as though Robert Blake (the narrator) is busy watching his approaching doom, turning from the window erratically to hastily pen a few more sketchy words as it gets closer. Some have said that in such circumstances he probably wouldn’t have written “Yog Sothoth save me”, but whether it works or not really comes down to the individual reader.

What the sentence does have though, is pace. As you read it, it starts to speed up of its own accord: it revs and growls a bit at first, then tears off down the verbal highway to jangling horror. This, I think, is not an accident; I think HPL deliberately wrote it this way.

Let’s think about how it was written. As I said, I’m no expert on HPL’s writing method, but we can assume a few things: first, the story might have started as a few scribbled notes, or ideas, in a notebook, and then it might have migrated onto some larger sheets of paper, like a legal notepad. Once it began to crystallise, HPL might then have started a first draft, typing it out onto standard-sized sheets of paper. After that, he might have taken to it with a red pen and made corrections and alterations, removing bits that didn’t work and scribbling in other new concepts (remember, he was working Old School, without the benefit of a word processor). Then, once it was all good to go, he would have typed out a “clean copy” to send off for consideration; he might also have created a carbon copy while doing so, using sheets of carbon paper to duplicate his keystrokes onto a second sheet of paper.

So far, so good. Now comes a wrinkle. Writers use a style guide to write. Often, this is just picked up as part of learning the craft and amounts to little more than standard, correct grammar usage. But certain things are idiosyncratic: do you indent each new paragraph, or each paragraph after the first one in each new section of writing? Do you use colons and semi-colons? Is it okay to use more than one exclamation point at once? Each writer will have their own rules. That being said, when a writer is creating a piece for a specific publisher, they often find that they have to conform with that publisher’s way of doing things and use their style guide. It’s not inconceivable that HPL would follow the rules of the “Weird Tales” regimen when writing a piece for them, although it’s also as likely that he would have deliberately chosen not to (he was a bit cantankerous).

When it comes to dashes and hyphens, most publishers usually have rules regarding them, and they help serve to make clear which is which, especially when a manuscript is not as pristine as they would like. Oftentimes, dashes are required to be written like this: “ — ", a double hyphen with a space at each end. This helps clearly delineate them from hyphens, which are singular and bounded at either end by the words that they tie together. You can start to see how our sentence might have been mangled during the printing process.

After finishing the story, HPL would have sent it off to Farnsworth Wright at “Weird Tales” for consideration. We know from correspondence that these two men had a somewhat contentious relationship, and that HPL often refused to alter anything that didn’t quite pass muster. When Wright passed this piece on to be put through pre-press and prepared for publication, can we be sure that he meticulously annotated this sentence to guarantee that it was transcribed correctly? Journals and magazines are notoriously time-pressured in production, so I don’t know…

There's a further wrinkle to all this: Lovecraft's documents languished for quite some time after his death in the hands of a young man in Florida, who didn't know - as HPL's unexpectedly chosen literary executor - exactly what to do with them. It took some time before August Derleth was able to acquire them and build Arkham House around this potential gold mine. What kind of damage might have affected the manuscripts during this time? Add to this that Derleth is notorious for having tampered with Lovecraft's vision, imposing his own creative notions upon the texts, including the detested "Elemental Theory" of the Mythos. Could he have tinkered with our sentence, re-working it for publication under his new publishing banner?

Let’s look now at one of the other variations on this line:

“I see it – coming here – hell-wind – titan blue – black wings – Yog Sothoth save me – the three-lobed burning eye…”

The only real change here is that the word “blur” has been replaced by the word “blue”; everything else remains unchanged.

We now have a curious image – what is “titan blue”? It sounds like something you would find written on the side of a Crayola carton, like “Prussian blue”, or “cerulean blue”, but it isn’t; it doesn’t mean anything; it’s a nonsense. You don’t have to have read Houellebecq or Harman to know that HPL had a very precise, scientific turn of mind. You can’t read “At the Mountains of Madness” or “The Shadow Out of Time” without sensing that HPL had a yen for scientific exactitude. This is a guy who was an amateur astronomer from a young age. It doesn’t make sense that he would let his character say something meaningless at this point.

Of course, you can argue that the fact that it is nonsense underscores Robert Blake’s disintegrating mental state, but really? This is the climax of the story; words are crucial here and you don’t want to waste a single one of them. All it takes is just one reader to stop and say, “what the hell is a ‘titan blue’?” and you can call the story an utter failure. (Of course, here in Australia, a “titan blue” is a really big fight, but equally, I’m sure that’s not what Lovecraft was going for!)

I’m confident that this version of the sentence is incorrect; however, it’s still closer to being right than the “definitive” one. Let’s turn to the last alternative:

“I see it – coming here – hell-wind – titan blue–black wings – Yog Sothoth save me – the three-lobed burning eye…”

As you can see, the previous version of the line exists simply because the hyphen between the words “blue” and “black” was misread as a dash. It’s not “titan blue”; it’s “titan blue-black wings”. Now we have a clearer picture of the menace and a greater precision in the language which accords well with HPL’s technique. The wings aren’t black and they’re not blue; they’re “blue-black”, like a raven’s wing.

The other thing to consider about this variant is the rhythm. Blake’s panic is building at this point as his doom becomes clear to himself and us. Accordingly, Lovecraft ratchets up the pitch, making the flow of the words convey the growing sense of hysteria. “I see it” is almost a sentence unto itself; it stops the preceding action cold. Then we get two fearful stutters: “coming here – hell wind”. The next phrase is the last time we get a measured sense of reportage from Blake: “titan blue-black wings”. It’s panic stations from here on in: “Yog Sothoth save me”. Then the rest is madness. Each step in the sentence gets longer as the fear heightens; if you read it aloud, you will see that you have an instinctive tendency to speed up as you go. This is what Lovecraft intended. This is madness exploding out into the open.

For my money, this is the correct version.

Let’s now go back and look at the “definitive” version once more.

“I see it – coming here – hell-wind – titan blur – black wings – Yog Sothoth save me – the three-lobed burning eye…”

Compared to the “titan blue-black wings” variant, this version is choppy. The first five phrases stall the terror, rather than letting it off the leash. It may have seemed that this punchiness would speak to a sense of rising incoherence, but it actually robs the sentence of its power by making. It. Stop. Again. And. Again.

Where did the “blur” come from? Well there are a number of possibilities. The letter ‘E’ is the hardest-working symbol in the English language, and it makes sense that, on an old-fashioned typewriter, it would wear out long before the other letters – maybe this was the case with HPL’s machine? We know that he was too much of a skinflint to get it fixed or buy a new one. There’s also the possibility that Wright was working from HPL’s carbon copy of the manuscript and carbon paper, if not replaced regularly, tends to wear and get a bit unreliable – perhaps the bulk of the ‘e’ on the end of “blue” was lost in transmission? There’s also the possibility that HPL actually wrote “blur” accidentally and missed it – this was the last long piece he wrote before he died, so he might have slipped up. Or Farnsworth Wright, or one of his typesetters, might have made a compositing error while preparing it for print. We’ll probably never know for sure.

So, what makes me so positive about this? Read on…

“Blur”, by definition, is an imprecise word. Lovecraft hates imprecise words. If he can use a definitive term – even while trying to describe the indescribable – he will do so. He will call it “squamous”, or “rugose”, or “quinquepedalian”, but he will never call it “fuzzy”. “-Ish” is not in his overly developed vocabulary. So why is there a “blur” here? It doesn’t read right.

Secondly, HPL would not have used the word “titan” like this. The phrase “titan blur” (and “titan blue”, for that matter) has an implied indefinite article in front of it – “(a) titan blur”; “(a) titan blue” (whatever that is). Conversely, there is no implicit article before “titan blue-black wings” which changes its delivery and the usage of the word “titan”. Lovecraft’s style of writing was Victorian; olde worlde; archaic: with an article ahead of it, he would have used the adjectival form of the word - “titanic”- in preference. If he was just going to use the word “titan”, I think he might well have capitalized it – Titan – because Titans are creatures from Greek mythology who were titanic. The “definitive” version of the sentence tends to shipwreck itself on the very two words it claims to be original and correct.

*****

As I said earlier, I haven’t seen an original manuscript version of this story, or a first draft from which the story was originally published. I haven’t seen the first printing of the story from “Weird Tales”. All I have is my memory of the fact that there used to be variations on this line and now they’ve been subsumed by a variant which seems to me to be incorrect. Everything I’ve posited to this point might well be blown away by hard, textual evidence. I don’t mind – it would be nice to put this issue to bed.

Some might say that this is just a storm in a (non-Euclidean) teacup, and I heartily agree: nothing will be changed by resolving this issue – the Universe is a huge, uncaring void after all. What bugs me most about this state of affairs, however, is that someone, somewhere, made a decision about this, and it has had ramifications upon the enjoyment that fans have in these works. This is not what Lovecraft said; this is what someone thinks Lovecraft might have said, which is something quite different. That decision might have been well-intentioned and based upon the evidence available to hand, but I hope that I have shown that it’s not conclusive. Lovecraft himself made his creations “open source” before such a term was even dreamed into being; at the very least, this line in the sand should have had some kind of fanbase discussion centred upon it before being signed off. Perhaps there should have been a vote? I don’t know.

All I can say is, once upon a time, there were three (at least three) variants to the last line of this story, Lovecraft’s last. Back then, you could take your pick. Nowadays, I think we get short-changed…

Postscript:

My recent evening indulging S.T. Joshi and friends provided some insights into this question which have moved the answer closer to a resolution of some kind. So that evening wasn't a complete waste of time after all! In no particular order, here are some further revelations:

1) The original manuscript for this story is considered lost. When Joshi "re-mastered"  Lovecraft's work for Arkham House in the 90s - creating the "definitive versions" - the only texts that he had to go on were those reproduced in the original publications (both books and magazines);

2) August Derleth - far from being cavalier with HPL's words as I suggested - seemed to hold them as almost sacred. It seems that, even if he couldn't make out what the words were supposed to be (from Lovecraft's original drafts), even if they didn't make sense, he left them unaltered. Joshi was quick to deride him for not being able to read HPL's handwriting (a skill that he claimed as his own "superpower" on several occasions) but was not able to intuit that Derleth was perhaps being acutely - even didactically - cautious, as the custodian of these works; and

3) Apparently, the original text for the story - the Holy Grail that would put this question to bed once and for all - was bought at auction by a buyer in (of all places) Melbourne, here in Australia. At this time, no-one knows who that was or where they are - and better-connected people than I have tried to run this issue to ground with no result. So, if anyone out there has a crazy uncle or aunt who collects (or collected) Lovecraftiana and who was actively buying in the 80s and 90s, sit them down and have a really good chat with them about this!

Review: "Aquaman"

James WAN (Dir.), “Aquaman”, Warner Bros./DC Comics, 2018.

This movie wouldn’t have even been on my radar as a possible subject for this blog but right at the start of the film – about ten minutes in – there was this:

Right. So they grabbed my attention. James Wan is an avowed Lovecraft fan, apparently.

Of course, the choice of title here is a bit weird (in other senses). If you sum up this film with the line “child of two worlds discovers his role and finds his destiny”, that certainly rings true, but it also applies to Wilbur Whateley in The Dunwich Horror – certainly not the most heroic - not to mention SUPER-heroic - of characters. I would have thought that The Shadow Over Innsmouth would have been a more appropriate title to choose. Of course, that book gets a guernsey later on…

Aquaman was always a bit of an enigma to me when I was growing up. The comics that I could get were usually locally-produced compendia gathering black-and-white reprints of the US four-colour versions, and these were mainly gatherings of Justice League stories with the odd solo story thrown in for good measure. These old 70s yarns usually relegated the Sea King to the background and focused very little on his capabilities, usually because the adventures took place far away from the ocean. Friends of mine would deride the character because “he talks to fish”, or “he rides a seahorse”, but I always thought that there was more to the guy than we were regularly seeing.

Think about it: the guy lives in a city at the bottom of the ocean. He regularly travels from Atlantis to the surface and he doesn’t go pop! each time he does so. That implies some extraordinary kind of musculature and pressure control; in fact, the sort of super-strength and invulnerability that would give Superman a run for his money. However, in the DC Universe, Supes is king, so he has to be the strongest. I would therefore put Aquaman at a close second, at least the equivalent of Wonder Woman and way more durable.

But, “I hear you can talk to fish”, is how we got introduced to the movie iteration of the character in “Justice League”. Along with the concept comes a poisoned chalice of dismissal that even Joss Whedon’s best comedy efforts couldn’t entirely ameliorate. As the director being handed control of this project, I assume that your mind would be boggling with the idea of taking the twinkly, sparkly ‘Cinderella-of-the-Sea-Floor’ trappings of the character and trying to jam Jason Momoa in there somewhere. I’m thinking My Little Bro’ny…

But, James Wan has H.P. Lovecraft to guide him. What we learn from HPL is that the sea is a very dark and scary place, at least as menacing and indifferent as the vast reaches of outer space and populated with a wide variety of creepy things with lots of teeth. Here is where Innsmouth comes into play. We are told that one faction of the Atlantean realm has split away and devolved into a community of subaqueous horrors known as the Trench. We encounter them shortly after Aquaman and Mera leave Sicily by boat and they look like this:

For my money these are damned near perfect Deep Ones, a little short in the goggle-eye department but very cool indeed.

In other aspects of the film, Wan doesn’t try to downplay or eliminate the tricky parts of the concept, rather he embraces them wholeheartedly. He establishes the sea-kingdoms as places of dark horror and potential danger, then uncorks a crap-load of wonder in the midst of it all. The ocean depths are also amazing in their diversity and beauty and Wan grabs all of it in both fists and paints his canvas as hard as he can with it. The vistas he unleashes are spectacular and breathtaking: grandeur is what he aims for and he damn well gets it right. Even his seahorses are gobsmacking:

But it’s a high-wire act and it almost collapses, not due to the visuals but in some of the story choices and in some of the performances.

There’s a lot of wood here. The problem with using a lot – a LOT – of CGI is that nuanced performances get lost amid the sparkle. It’s the digital equivalent of wearing a Gojira suit. When you’re strapped into a harness that’s crushing your gonads and wearing ping-pong balls on your head, your best Oscar-worthy expressions of The Art go right out the window. For guys like Dolph Lundgren and Temuera Morrison, that’s not really a problem; but when you hire Nicole Kidman and Willem Dafoe, it starts to look like wasted money. Not that there’re any really bad performances in this flick; it’s just that everything kind of gets evened out in the digital wash.

And then there’s Jason Momoa. In past efforts such as “Stargate: Atlantis” (ironic) and “The Bad Batch” he’s demonstrated a fair range beyond the trademark growl and smoulder, but here he has two modes – “ON”, and “ON-er”. “Restraint” doesn’t seem to be in his vocabulary. He’s obviously having a great time with this. I love the re-design of the character from its American white-bread appearance into a Pacific Islander vibe, with all the mokos and hongis and hakas and tokis, and Momoa is obviously relishing the cultural showcasing that’s taking place. It’s just that he tends to come off as a big kid, and that sort of relegates the movie to kid’s levels. “Guardians of the Galaxy” was a kid’s book that was able to grow up on film; it doesn’t quite happen here. Along with this, there’s not a lot of chemistry between Momoa and Amber Heard as Mera – it feels more like the sibling relationship Miles Morales has with Spider Gwen than a real romantic involvement. When you step back and look at it, all of the defining emotional moments of Arthur Curry’s life – loss; abandonment; alienation; personal discovery - are literally outsourced to other actors in this movie – Momoa doesn’t have to let pesky things like nuance interfere with his chewing-up of the scenery.

(He’s standing right behind me, isn’t he?)

Of course, he’s being tarred by the same brush as all of the other actors – a subtle approach would most likely disappear beneath the computer wizardry, so it’s impossible to hold a grudge. Physically, he’s the perfect choice for this role and that’s always half the battle.

Palace intrigue forms the major part of this narrative and it sadly doesn’t get a lot of oxygen. I like me some good Machiavellian treachery but it’s the kind of thing that needs to brew over time, like in a TV series. Here, time constraints keep the scheming to a minimum and a lot of it is choppy and wasted. We get told that Volko is a “vizier” – despite the cultural incongruity of this term - and immediately we think of Jaffar from “Aladdin”, so – shortcut - we know he’s shifty. At one point, King Orm barrels into the throne-room of the Fisherfolk and slaughters their king, thereby bringing this faction under his immediate control. I mean, really? He and King Nereus should never have made it out of the throne room alive after such a despicable act, or else these mer-people really are the timid poets and intellectuals that Orm derides them as. I understand that such politicking needs to be shorthanded in this kind of vehicle, but it seemed a little weird – I could have done with less Indiana Jones-ing and more skullduggery.

As to that, there were some unnecessary moments of convenience about the archaeological sifting that stretched belief. We get a gizmo that needs to be taken to a lost place and activated, thereby revealing the next widget that leads us to the big MacGuffin – Atlan’s trident. Along the way, Aquaman displays brute ignorance and deft intelligence in equal measure as the plot requires and it’s all a bit naff. My estimations of Atlantean ruggedness were well-served in the scene where our heroes leap un-parachuted from an aeroplane but it was still a little silly (I did like the goat, though).

Then there’re the villains of the piece. The first is King Orm who shouts a lot. As Arthur Curry’s half-brother and in danger of having his dreams of conquest thwarted by a prior claim to the throne, his motivations are pretty clear from the start. He pouts, schemes and sulks as you’d expect, and is the kind of dick that such a role demands. I’m glad that they didn’t try to shoe-horn in a reconciliation between him and Aquaman before the credits – that would have been a bad misstep. Black Manta on the other hand was odd. I can only think that this guy is hopelessly, utterly mad. He starts off by way-laying a Russian submarine, shooting and stabbing all of its occupants in cold blood, and then gets fixatedly angry when Aquaman pays him back in the same coin. I mean, if you’re a pirate, with all of the ethical standards that go along with that role, you expect that, right? So your daddy gives you his favourite knife (oddly, in the middle of an on-going operation) and then gets pinned beneath a pile of fallen torpedoes – as a cold-blooded pirate, wouldn’t you just say “fair cop; thanks for the pig-sticker” and leave? Why so sentimental? It’s just one more way in which this film never quite leaves the kids’ movie tag behind. Props to Aquaman though, for leaving ‘Manta and his dad in the lurch – seemed like the right call to me!

In the final analysis, I was a bit conflicted about this film. It’s a bit rough around the edges, despite looking gorgeous, but it did allay all my reservations about how they’d treat the character (the fight between Mera and Aquaman and Black Manta in Sicily was particularly nice). As I said though there’s a fine line between wonder and camp and the last scene kind of tipped things the wrong way:

Was it just me who was reminded of Mel Brooks’s “Robin Hood: Men In Tights”?

Three Tentacled Horrors from me.

Review: GOOOJIIIRAAA!

Ishirō Honda (Dir.), “Gojira”, Toho Film (Eiga) Co. Ltd., 1954.

“With a purposeful grimace and a terrible sound

he pulls the spitting high-tension wires down;

Helpless people on subway trains

scream ‘My God!’ as he looks in on them;

He picks up a bus and he throws it back down

as he wades through the buildings t’wards the centre of town.

Oh no – they say he’s got to go!

Go, go Godzilla!

Oh no – there goes Tokyo!

Go, go Godzilla!”

-Blue Öyster Cult, “Godzilla”

I wanted to go and see the new Gojira film this weekend just passed; however, I discovered that it had been pushed off the i-Max screen by the “Dark Phoenix” abomination. Frankly, if you’re going to see a kaiju film, why would you bother seeing it in small scale? Why would you screen it in small scale? So, I said “phooey” to that and threw my DVD of the original film into the player instead.

Monster movies tend to code for things to do with human society. They tend to be stories about ‘outsiders’ – those who don’t conform to society’s strictures – or to be cautionary tales regarding the results of unacceptable behavior. Thus, werewolves tend to be metaphors for puberty, or unbridled lust, or rage; while vampires warn against succumbing to seductive strangers or offer salient warnings about the ramifications of disease. Frankenstein’s monster is a tale about overreaching and the inevitable tragedy of hubris. On the other hand, some monsters have little or no sub-text – they just want to get out there and cause mayhem – I’m thinking of the Thing From Another World, or the Blob. It’s interesting therefore, that Godzilla covers all the bases.

There have been over thirty films starring the radioactive dinosaur and most of these are pretty fluffy. The 2014 American iteration was a mess and the less said about the Matthew Broderick version, the better. Most of the Japanese movies were made specifically for children and introduced ‘friendly’ versions of Gojira, Baby Gojira, and even Jet Jaguar, the size-altering kung fu expert, who was designed by a child after they won a competition. These have their moments, but they tend to focus more on the city-trampling than any pesky narrative considerations.

There is a tendency to play the maximizing card throughout all of these films although, arguably, it’s handled better than most American franchises. When Gojira out-guns all the other big critters on the planet, humans invent a semi-robotic Gojira (Mechagodzilla) to try and take him out; then aliens find their own big lizard and beef it up with cybernetic implants to try and gain the upper hand (Gigan). When Gojira defeats King Ghidora, a cybernetically enhanced version replaces him (Mecha King Ghidora). And so on, and so on. Each ‘Monster of the Week’ gets replaced by a more powerful version in a slowly ascending series of gladiatorial bouts. Anyone out there still wondering where Pokémon came from?

Getting back to the start of all this mayhem, 1954’s “Gojira!” takes us to post-World War Two Japan, and a society that is trying to re-build and forget the recent misadventures of the past. We see a steamboat out on the water with its crew relaxing in the hot sunlight. Suddenly, a massive submarine explosion disturbs the water to one side and all hands are running to action stations: they never make it. The ship is dragged below the waves, the dogged telegraph operators still morsing as hard as they can. This is an interesting opening in that it directly parallels a notorious real-life incident that struck a major chord with Japanese audiences of the day. The “Lucky Dragon 5” incident saw a Japanese merchant vessel of that name 'accidentally' irradiated by American nuclear testing in the lead-up to the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The ship and its entire crew were taken into custody by the testers and their developing symptoms of radiation exposure monitored for research purposes. All were later released, with the exception of one radio expert who died after his underlying liver issues were exacerbated by the radiation. The incident rang loud bells of alarm for the Japanese public in the last days of the War and those worst fears were later to come true. The ship is now contained within a museum in Japan.

With this piece of nuclear history securely in place, let’s now take a look at the Monster himself. The designers of Gojira wanted him to be like a dinosaur, but also like a gorilla; a submarine creature, but able to walk on land. The name itself was a portmanteau of the Japanese words for ‘gorilla’ and ‘whale’ which kind of lets you know what they were aiming for. Technology of the period only allowed for the creature to be built as a suit driven by an actor cocooned within and it took a team of three valiant performers – Katsumi Tezuka, Haruo Nakajima and Jiro Suzuki - to endure the rigors of bringing him to life. These guys could barely breathe in the costume and were regularly dragged out of it unconscious, not to mention being sliced open by loose edges of chicken-wire, or having the circulation to their limbs cut off. Gojira’s hide was specifically made to resemble the keloid scarring that many post-Hiroshima radiation victims displayed.

Gojira’s explicit raison d’être was to symbolize the horrors of nuclear fallout and the dangers of pursuing research in such technology. His sub-text was more of a super-text for a generation of Japanese who were trying to put the horrors of World War Two behind them.

Throughout the movie we see the sort of carnage that Gojira can unleash and the helplessness of those whom he is discommoding. These scenes are all shot using miniatures with the film rate sped up so that the action moves slower than normal: this helps makes the splashing water, flames and clouds of smoke seem more realistic. Panicking people are spliced into the scenes to create tension and there are plenty of interior shots where buildings collapse upon the doomed while Gojira’s tail passes by the window outside. These scenes are all strikingly conveyed, and the gloomy wide shots of Tokyo ablaze strongly resemble photos of the real fire-bombings that the Allied forces beleaguered the nation with. Unlike later Gojira films, these scenes are not meant to provoke cheers and laughter – they are grim and frightening.

Aside from the big lizard, there are other things going on as well. Early in the piece, a likable chap named Ogata is forced to bail on a theatre session with his best girl, Emiko Yamane. As head of a salvage operation, he is called in to help discover what happened to the missing ship. A rescue ship is sent out, but it also vanishes. Another ship accompanied by helicopters also disappears. Radio contacts from fishing vessels and the nearby Ohto Island determine that a handful of survivors have been rescued and talk of a “monster” is rife. Next, Gojira walks over Ohto Island during a typhoon, stomping some villagers and their houses in the process. A research party goes to the island, led by Emiko’s father Professor Kyohei Yamane (played by Takashi Shimura, leader of “The Seven Samurai”), and they find footprints, a living trilobite and high radiation levels before running into Gojira himself, hiding under a hill.

Intercut with the carnage and mayhem, we see an unfolding tale of human morality. Emiko likes Ogata and he likes her in return, but she is engaged to the reclusive Dr. Daisuke Serizawa, who has dedicated himself to his research and shuns the world, having lost an eye in the recent conflict. According to the Japanese model of typecasting, Ogata is a ‘type A’ personality, quick-acting and tempestuous while Serizawa is a ‘B-type’, brooding and mysterious. Emiko is a typical Japanese movie heroine, trying to be everybody’s friend at once and getting torn up because of it. The governmental agencies of Japan are determined to destroy Gojira at all costs, but Professor Yamane wants to capture and study the big lizard – he retires to his darkened study to ponder the wasted possibilities. Various attempts at containment fail and so the army is called in – for all the good they do. As Yamane points out, it took a nuclear explosion to wake Gojira up; the only thing that will harm him is something much more powerful than that.

Of course, Serizawa has just the thing. While trying to completely “understand oxygen” he stumbled on a means of destroying the molecule and invented a weapon called the Oxygen Destroyer. He shows the effects of this contraption to Emiko (who is horrified at what it does to a tank of fish) and he makes her promise to tell no-one about it – he doesn’t want to see it become the new Atomic Bomb. Of course, while helping the victims of Gojira’s rampage, she tells Ogata all about it and they both go to him to try and convince him to use it against the monster. Serizawa says “no” and he and Ogata clash, before some bravely singing schoolgirls, caroling in the face of calamity on TV, cause him to have a change of heart. He destroys his notes, builds the bomb, and kills himself while setting it off, telling Ogata and Emiko to be happy together.

As Gojira gets skeletonized deep below the waves, Yamane makes the gloomy prognostication that, even though Gojira is dead, another might appear as long as humanity keeps messing about with nuclear power. Sequel anyone?

I’ve noted many times in the past that it’s the ingenuity inspired by the lack of easy options or costly technologies that can really make or break a movie. Throwing money at a problem is usually not as good as thinking creatively around it. This movie does all of that and more. Some shots look a little creaky, but since the whole method is uniform, it’s easy to take on board. There are some wonky scenes with crashing firetrucks but even these aren’t too egregious. The scenes of Gojira wading through a model city are spliced together with real-life footage of actual parts of Tokyo to good effect. The human-level action forms a kind of Greek chorus to the unbridled destruction of the uncaring Gojira and is well-portrayed. This bi-level narrative structure – monsters on one hand; people on the other – has become something of a hallmark of these kaiju stories and some of the films make it work, while others don’t. The Godzilla 2014 crew must have thought they were paying homage – or making a pastiche – of the technique, but they forgot to make the human part of the drama at all cohesive, and – despite having CGI out the wazoo – chose to turn away from the monster action rather than showing it, as if they didn’t have the technology to make it happen. Weird!

In the final analysis, if you want to see a kaiju film – be it part of the Gojira universe, a King Kong re-make or even a Pacific Rim franchise movie – take the time to check this out as well. It might seem a little slow for modern tastes, but it’s the real deal and the one against which all others should be measured.

Four tentacled horrors from me.