Shin Godzilla and Music in Visual Media: A Brief Thought
Note: A lot of this issue is applicable to several audio-visual mediums, but I will be using film as a synecdoche for those at points because the article’s focus is on one. I also refer to Godzilla as it rather than he, because in this depiction it is an accidental creation—a living sin of science and environmental disregard, really—and a strange, essentially budding entity by the end.
There’s a sentiment that music can be doing too much emotional heavy-lifting in film, television, and video games. Even well made music. It’s a simple gripe to understand. Think of a piece of media that you believe had an unearned or poorly executed “sad’ emotional beat, and try to recall if the composer was really wailing on the strings trying to sell you on the moment anyway. I’ve seen the criticism of these sorts of moments framed as being “manipulative”, which is true in that most art is manipulative. It is not trying to capture or merely relay an event the best it can, it is trying to invoke some feeling about it, including, maybe especially, documentary and non-staged film. You don’t have to stage anything if you can frame and edit the material you have until it communicates what you want. That’s Propaganda 101. Experiments in minimalism to see how barebones art can be and still produce a reaction are still manipulating you, trying to create emotion with simple shapes painted with subtly different shades of a single color. They might not be aiming for particular reactions, and artists may claim it's an experiment in purity, but the manipulation remains. By presenting these works as finished art, people are predisposed to scrutinize the shapes and look for meaning, or supply their own, more so than if they walked past a random piece of cloth, tarp, or canvas that had the same thing on it. After all, you can find shapes and images in the uneven surface of stucco, but people don’t tend to think of those as having intent behind them Let a minimalist painting be used as a tablecloth, and the reaction will probably be different than if you hang it in a gallery and call it an experiment.
What good audio-visual media does is make the manipulation subtle, create music that is pleasingly complementary to what is being shown, or dissonant in a way that still enhances the feeling. Put upbeat music over grinning figures doing something awful, and you can create a discomfort similar to if you put in instrumental shrieking and infra-sound tones that make the listening experience as unpleasant as the visuals; a sense of dread. It’s a little tricky determine where the line is, because a well done somber scene with grand but melancholy John Williams stylings will get criticized less than one where the acting is wooden, the story doesn’t make much sense, or characters are suddenly acting out of character without motivation, even when people can agree that both films were well scored on a technical level. Broadly divisive films will have people arguing over whether elements like music are enhancing or propping-up a work. Which is why I have a certain respect for people who think non-diegetic music, or any sound if they want to go that far, ultimately diminishes the impact of the moving picture. Music has its own independent ability to provoke, and I see the internal logic of the argument that even when it’s intended to enhance image, it’s really exerting an independent influence, diluting the impact of the visual component, even if I don’t fully agree. Not in absolutist terms, at least. It does cut through the arbitrariness in making decisions about what counts as overbearing and trying to salvage a project from an inadequacy of the filming, and what counts as being well deployed. And as I said, art is manipulative, even when the music isn’t “obviously” trying to get to feel something very specific, when it is considered to be enhancing, it is still trying to deepen the intended impact, and a given work itself is usually trying to get you to feel specific ways as it emotional beats play out with all of its other constituent parts. Music in film is rarely something that lends itself well to letting you draw your own conclusions or playing impartial.
Which is what makes Shin Godzilla interesting, specifically the original score track Who Will Know. What’s interesting is that I haven’t seen much debating its merits, when it is perhaps the most overtly manipulative track I’ve ever heard. And I say that as someone who really likes it as a part of the movie and as its own piece of music, albeit to a slightly lesser degree.
The track plays during the movie’s atomic breath/dorsal beams scene after Godzilla has been attacked by planes with bombs powerful enough to injure it. The kaiju of this particular iteration is a miserable looking being that appears pained by its own nature at times, such as when it comes out of the water but hasn’t developed lungs yet. It’s incredibly adaptable, but it suffers in doing so. Wounded seems to be its baseline. Now, the film is often described as satire, and there are scenes in the first couple of acts that play out as political comedy before it settles into something more serious, although it’s still not humorless: the most main protagonist casually dropping that he does indeed have long term personal ambition later in the film, despite his more high-minded rhetoric most of the time, comes to mind. Godzilla, though, is depicted quite seriously throughout, even with his early stages’ incredibly buggy fish-like eyes, and to the protagonists it is a disaster and obstacle. To them, it is not an at least somewhat sapient being like Godzilla has been in both the Monsterverse and a number of Japanese films. It is a riff on the original after all, just in a different way than Godzilla Minus One was. The music in this scene contradicts that presentation. For a few minutes, viewers who can understand the lyrics are treated to how Godzilla: The Opera might play out. The lyrics are about something with a confused awareness of something hostile outside of itself having a moment of not only physical but existential pain. The first line is “If I die in this world, who will know something of me?” Arguably it’s mainly intended to be an anthropomorphization of the feelings of an alone and wounded animal to drive home the tragedy of its existence, but the lyrics also contain specific references to what is unfolding, which is why I like it somewhat less on its own. As it is firing up its engine of destruction, the voices are singing about how a “a shaft of light is all I need to cease the darkness killing me.” The music is narrating the event while also presenting it from Godzilla’s perspective, which feels very much like it is presenting the creature as having an inner life that is unknown to the creatures opposing it. It’s a different tragedy than an animal created by human pollution and being in pain, it is the tragedy of two beings not understanding each other. The humans do not understand just how complex Godzilla is behind those weird little eyes, and Godzilla does not understand what is happening or why it’s happening enough to not cause destruction, but has the capacity to want to survive beyond mere instinct. And the end reveals that the next stage of Godzilla’s evolution was humanoid beings growing from its tail, now frozen to the bulk they were emerging from, which I took as a sign that its consciousness was evolving along with its body. It also adds a little more sting, knowing that this lonely colossus may not have been so lonely or alien to humanity for long, even if that probably would have been disastrous for humanity if they continued to not understand, or became more like us in all the worst ways. The music here is not merely enhancing the mood, selling the tragedy of it all, it is creating dramatic irony that would not otherwise exist in the moment. It is telling the viewer that Godzilla has a level of awareness that the characters in the movie could only hope to guess was there. It is telling the viewer that this is not merely a wretched animal in unfortunate circumstances, it is a wretched, more thoughtful being. It feels like the movie wants you to be on Godzilla’s side for a moment, subtly undercutting any future bombast and triumph that might be present in humanity’s overcoming of it. The music is injecting more complexity into the story then there would have been, or at least would have been more debatable. And it isn’t brought up much as an example of music being overbearing, I think because it is so “manipulative” that it bypasses many people’s mawkishness detectors and feels like something that enhances rather than perhaps creates or introduces meaning. This is not some elaborate horn arrangement trying desperately to make ten extras and a couple of actors in a muddy field swinging fake swords feel as epic as characters said it would be but the budget couldn’t deliver on. It’s a little narrative piece attached to an already well-executed moment of two different kinds of beast inflicting suffering on each other that never needed to have happened in the first place. It’s bold in a way, and feels like an unusually clear window into Godzilla rather than someone telling you to feel a bit sad, even though it is definitely doing that, in case you were tempted to think of it as more cool than awful and awesome, the latter of those two in the classical sense.
There is an interesting wrinkle though. The lyrics are in English in the film's domestic and foreign releases. Japan has a relatively low rate of English acquisition for a developed nation that is so tied to the US by trade and cultural exchange. Which means that this song is a bit like an English speaking composure writing lyrics in Latin, to a lesser degree. The meaning is still there if you knew the words, but plenty of people wouldn’t have understood the lyrics or only picked up familiar parts of it. Assuming it wasn’t subtitled: I couldn’t find an answer to the question of whether it was or wasn’t, but going off other countries' handling of lyrics in scores, I lean toward thinking it was not. They would be getting the feeling, without knowing how specific the lyrics are to the movie. Also as far as I have found, Shin Godzilla was made with the domestic Japanese audience in mind first and foremost. They knew that a number of those people would not understand the lyrics in the moment, which means it was less blunt for the primary audience. People could look up translations , but that’s not the same as understanding them as they are sung, which I imagine might have had perspective impacts on different audiences. English speakers get the most flagrantly manipulative song, that still works, that I can recall ever hearing , others not so much. I don’t know enough to pick apart the significance of that fact, but I think the English speaking world’s response does support a basic point: the scene is a masterpiece of Godzilla destruction in general, and people tended to like the song, which helps demonstrate that subtlety is not necessarily a good measure of mastery, because the more confident and skilled you are in your work, the more you can get away with being direct. I imagine people would have made more mocking notes and accusations of pretension if that song played over the very cheapest, clumsiest Godzilla scenes committed to screen.
Furthermore, I consider Palestine to need to be freed.