This was supposed to appear earlier but then things at USC went to shit, and I didn’t feel like posting it. Things aren’t any better at work—they’re still doing bag searches—but after several weeks of weak box office performance, the piece now makes even more sense as a project. If it’s a bit of a reach for a blog post, I promise I’m working on one about Maria Menounos and that will be more in the City of Industry wheelhouse.
The thing to explain, this time, is how Godzilla and King Kong become buddies, and the reason to explain that is not simply that in the midst of the 6th Great Extinction we are seemingly all suckers for an interspecies friendship. The reason is that the cynical play (enemies become frenemies) actually worked at a time when not much else is working. And the reason the MonsterVerse is working is that there is still enough contingency to make the franchise ride worth taking.
To recap: Hollywood’s preferred strategies for stripmining IP are under significant pressure. The “firehose” of content is not the reliable revenue generator it was. The model universe now requires not the suffusive brutality of “something provided for all so that none may escape” (that’s Adorno, but it is also, obviously, Disney) but motivation—specific, attuned motivation. The success of an installment comes down to timing and intensity, not simply its own integrity. And in saying that, I am also saying that it requires attention at every scale in which timing and intensity apply. That sounds abstract. I want to show how it isn’t. It’s multilayered, but not abstract.
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Before getting into the timing of it all, I’d like you to take a moment to think about time. I mean, Time. I visited the re-installation of Cycladic art at the Met in March—more than 100 pieces that fill a dedicated gallery. Just across the way are red and black figure vases, the stuff that probably first made you jump when you realized that the “myths” that seemed to be ancient adventure stories were also the stuff of horny décor.
The Cycladic artists were roughly as old to the vase-painters as the vase-painters are to us. The works in the Met collection are overwhelmingly ritual objects, cross-armed fertility icons that have lost their pigment, many of them apparently produced in artisanal workshop settings, cranked out to fulfill broad social demand. The danger, looking back, is that we might mistake that regularity for uninventiveness.
And then you see this guy. Look at this guy. This is a pull-out-all-the-stops, I-gotta-have-something-to-occupy-my-time-other-than-these-folded-arm-figures-that-you-all-keep-putting-in-the-ground challenge. “I am an artist, you know?” It is just so ebullient, whether made for the harpist or his master or just an aficionado of music or the sculptor. “Dude, you know I can do other stuff?” “Whatever. Prove it.” Done and done. Who is not happy with this, made happy by this?
Marble Seated Harp Player, The Met
There are at least four temporalities here: The ancientness of ancientness, something almost impossible to fathom even in its most anthropocentric version as “2800–2700 BCE,” or “twenty centuries before Homer.” Among the sculptors, it is hard to imagine a life spent among the stone without someone having a moment of catastrophic vertigo in the face of the primordiality of the rock itself—rock as old as world, it must have seemed—and in the face of that vertigo, surely someone tricked themselves into a little of the old immortality gambit. “Ta-da. Hewn from the living rock. I mean, who knows how long it might last?” (And then to be right. To be right! Hold on to that, because that is the MonsterVerse’s regular zone of transcendence, that moment of glee proper to the dino-loving kid.)
The lithic ancientness is so solid but so slippery—rock obviously given by the planet, taken up by a culture without a calendrical sublime: how did they frame its antecedence? What were their ways of imagining old? Against vague eons there is the more manageable span of a lifetime of preparation to be able to sculpt, to get the craft into the body before the body gives way—a body buffeted by everything the world could throw at it 4,800 years ago.
Third there is the rhythm of this artistic life, the diurnal requirements of making the run-of-the-mill stuff or overseeing it or working alongside it. And against that, but in sync with it, there is the diversion, the accession to the driving need to let it loose and try something else for a change.
(The hands! The hands! These are a sculptor’s recognition; a harpist’s tools that the sculptor took into the work, copied and tested and checked against their own like an animator getting a face right in a mirror only not like that because the animator’s face is copied through the hand and here that link is hand to hand. That right thumb sounds with cartoon eternity. The allegories of 19th century realism, of Caillebotte’s floor scrapers—are those impossible to imagine for this piece? Impossible because it is so old, so far from the forces that made realism demand allegory?)
“Did you hear what they’re doing next bench over?” “Lemme guess. A figure?” “Nope.” “A figure on top of a figure.” “No. A harpist.” Based on the survivals harpists were part of the repertoire but not common in the way the folded-arm figures are. And none seems to have the this-guy-ness of the one in the Met’s collection.
Fourth and finally there is the ephemerality of the music, of the accompanied song, always suspended in the stone but always occasioning its questions: What is being sung? To whom? Why? Was a song its occasion? “Carve me playing ‘Sprout and the Bean’.” Was it an epic? Was the occasion the player? The player singing to himself with his little shell ears?
Minutes or hours of song, days or months of carving, years and lives of training, generations of belief and thought composing a culture, eras of stone and of a faith now lost: all ready to be seen and heard, balled up like the extra dimensions of a string theorist, unwound by a simple prompt: Look at this guy.
One of the great Wittgensteinian gambits is the ostension game. There is a lot of successful pointing at stones in Wittgenstein, but as things complicate, the ostension game breaks down. “Point to a piece of paper. —And now point to its shape—now to its colour—now to its number (that sounds strange).” (In Hollywood Math and Aftermath I tried to explain how and why ostension breaks down in the particular escapology of capital wriggling out of the 2008 recession. As usual, whatever the underlying coherence of my argument, its intellectual consequences have been nil because the envelope not worth opening.)
In every flicker of ekphrasis, in every gesture at a career, we are playing the ostension game across all these timeframes and more. What remains striking about Hollywood cinema—about, I want to say, industrial cinema more generally—is that those temporalities can be rankly venal franchise times and yet no less the occasion for reflecting on the big stuff, on the Shapes of Time and Life.
And so the gambit here is this: We are going to figure out a little of what it means to live the multiple orders of temporality by watching Godzilla take a nap.
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It helps that the harpist is a fake. I didn’t know it at the time—I didn’t know it for a while—but part of the reason this guyjumped out is that he is midcentury-modern ersatz, made by Angelos Koutsoupis and fobbed off as authentic on the Met by his dealer. It doesn’t say so on the vitrine, but even in the digital catalog entry there are references to the scholarship that seals the deal. Based on my reading of that work the Met here is engaged in some serious bad faith, not even hinting that that they have known for decades how disputed this figure is.
When the British artist John Craxton was tooling around the Cyclades after World War II, he went looking for ancient objects. In 1947 he bumped into Koutsoupis’s son, who took him to Angelos, who explained the whole situation and drew him a sketch of what he had made. There is a similar harpist in Greece (the “Keros” harpist), but his forearms have been lost; Angelos, commissioned to make a new one, added them back. Years later, Craxton was touring the museum with curator John Pope-Henessey who “drawled, ‘I really don’t care for it.’” He was snobbing, of course, since the harpist had become something of a star in the museum’s collection. Craxton responded, “Oh, I do. But then I met the man who made it.”
“Drawing of white marble seated harpist by Angelos Koutsoupis for John Craxton in January 1947 (Craxton Notebook). Manuscript annotations (Craxton): (Top) drawing made by Koutsoupis in Ios. Jan 1947 (Middle) Theodoros Seboulikis (dashed line) St Edwardoulo 10 (Bottom) the name [Seboulikis] of the dealer in Athens who commissioned the figure. Misspelt at the time Zoumboulakis.” Caption from John Craxton and Peter Warren “A Neocycladic Harpist?” in Material Engagements: Studies in Honour of Colin Renfrew, Neil Brodie and Catherine Hills, eds., Cambridge: McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, 2004, 109–113, 111.
What I saw as a leap across time into a craftspace I could understand was not much of a leap at all. That cartoon thumb is a post-Disney thumb; the “restored” forearms are post-Popeye forearms. I know nothing about ancient harps, but, now that you mention it “the arms are extended uncomfortably, and the hands [would] have to shuttle up and down the rod to reach all strings.… The impossible situation seems to imply that the sculptor (whether ancient or modem) had not seen a live model.” (Bo Lawergren, “A ‘Cycladic’ Harpist at the Metropolitan Museum of Art,” Source: Notes on the History of Art, 20:1 (Fall 2000, 2–9, 7, 8).
Which is also to say: I know nothing about the ancient ones that dwell inside the hollow earth beyond what I have learned from the MonsterVerse and some half-remembered Cthulhu mythos. That there are in fact no ancient kaiju that populate an earth within the earth does not mean they might not be good to think with. But what I am tricking myself into thinking is that they are about thinking beyond the market when, in fact, I am being marketed to all the time.
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This spring I taught a course on the art and industry of action cinema. In such a course, Kathryn Bigelow is good to think with because she is a credentialed interlocutor: A member of the Art + Language group, a bit player for Barbara Hammer, twin masters degrees, a first movie in which a couple of guys beat the daylights out of each other for explicitly political reasons while a couple theorists discuss the implications of said beating. Her GWOT–era political swing may have been predictable, but in some smart interviews coincident with Point Break, Bigelow offered a theory where “momentum and suspension” are the key to action staging, plotting, and even theorizing. Momentum and suspension: the spacing that makes presence possible, in Derrida’s terms; the practical alternations necessary to make a good chase scene. She intends both.
Momentum and suspension—what Soderbergh calls rhythm and release—are easier to keep in focus at the micro level of the scene than higher up the ladder of the universe where demands to replicate success are more pressing. One industrial result has been “superhero fatigue,” with the Marvel and DC universes undergoing pretty deep reconceptualization.
But Justice League fatiguée was not simply an internal failure. Their projected 10–year slates were, as I have argued in this column before, zero interest-rate policy phenomena. Historically low inflation and interest rates, historically low volatility in rates meant that time horizons stretched into a nearly infinite future. An investment today could pay off in a decade without consuming itself in carrying costs. The return of higher rates and of volatility in 2022 shortened those timelines, recalibrated payoff dates, changed the priorities of private equity players, and amplified worker demands for higher salaries. In other words, internal creative exhaustion syncs up with broader pressures as if the entirety of the political economy had grown impatient.
At their most baroque the major universes suggested that cinema-tv audiences might get used to the multiple simultaneous continuities that comics readers had come to accept and even relish. Beyond the major arc—the Infinity Saga; the Snyderverse version of DC—there could be other Batmen, other Wolverines, what have you, places to explore the “What If?” offshoots and dead ends that might soak up surplus fandom or offer nooks and crannies for corporate auteurs to give it a shot.
Within those offshoots, ostension is necessarily everywhere. The DC version of “Look at this guy” is Colin Farrell’s Penguin griping, “Holy God, what are you showin’ me here? Come onnnn!” and Jeffrey Wright’s Commissioner Gordon screaming, “Open your eyes!” One Marvel version gets its charge from Tony Stark visiting his father across timelines. Audiences and interest rates willing, someday those different continuities could collide in even more super-super-crossovers.
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Toho/Legendary’s management of the MonsterVerse has achieved this polyrhythm without the self-congratulation of the hyperfranchises. Toho releases live action movies—Shin Godzilla, Godzilla Minus One—animated movies—Planet of the Monsters—animated tv shows—Godzilla Singular Point—and so on. Legendary now has its five movies, its pricey adventure series (Monarch: Legacy of Monsters), its cartoon.
Staring down a March release date, Legendary/WB was nervous about the success of Minus One, which had made $100m worldwide—not a blockbuster but not nothing. Would it add to the Godzillust? Would its Oscar win for VFX help? Would Legendary’s tween-pitched movie suffer critically compared with Minus One’s more mature version? Would that have box office consequences or are kids critic-proof? Is Minus One really more mature, or does it share enough with Yamazaki Takashi’s work directing Doraemon and Lupin III to be “for big kids” as we might say?
I was lucky enough to host a Q&A with producer Alex Garcia just before GxK opened, and he was legitimately unsure of the movie’s prospects. Instead of the gradual, every-few-years pattern of the earlier entries, Godzilla x Kong would be part of a 1-2-3 combo of Godzilla Minus One (Nov. 3, 2023 in Japan, later that month in the US), Monarch: Legacy of Monsters (Apple TV+ Nov. 17, 2023–Jan. 12, 2024), and GxK (March 25, 2025 in the US, a month later in Japan, where it tanked). Would the traffic jam create kaiju fatigue? Garcia pointed out that the new, post-Covid marketing patterns are far more condensed and so there was separation in the marketplace. (I helpfully noted that shows on Apple TV+ are unlikely to eat into the audience for anything else.)
With every movie, Legendary has recalibrated. The darker, Godzilla-as-threat of Gareth Edwards’s 2014 movie got a slight lightening in 2017 with Kong: Skull Island, until GxK the most successful. The first two entries crossed their monsters with period-specific corporate malfeasance, running along the tracks that the modern conglomerate has relied on to think through the lumbering abstraction of their size against the pointillism of their internal dynamics. Cultural autotheorization is not all Hobbes’s Leviathan, but a lot of it is.
Legendary has since youthified the MonsterVerse, and for this most recent installment they reduced the budget in case they guessed wrong. The next narrative step was fairly obvious: What if the kaiju were buddies? What is it like to make a friend? There is a lot of pooh-poohing of GxK compared with Minus One, but if you are under 15 you might find that the forging of friendship is as important a topic as the lingering damage of wartime defeat is for adults. And you might not remember how important Jia’s sign language exchange with Kong in GvK was in conveying the tentative fracturing of the isolation they share. It helps to know just how much a movie might mean to a lonely kid.
By now, Kong is older, tired, Thanos-y in his desire to just hang out. By the end of GxK he has something like a kaiju-dog and a band of kong-friends—he’s a social critter. Godzilla, meanwhile, curls up in the Colosseum, himself a lizardog, no need for social life. What we are getting in old Kong and scarred-but-ageless Godzilla is a characterologized franchise polyrhythm, a chance to watch various forms of timing and intensity play out in the ravaged bodies of the great. Sometime down the franchise line Kong will die, swapped out for that little shit baby Kong. Godzilla will also die but that will be a shock. And it will be temporary.
The Harry Potter movies aged with their audiences, becoming slightly more intense, violent, and wrapped up in supposedly more adult concerns. The MonsterVerse, by aging backward, is not only pitching itself toward the abandoned tween audience but pitching itself to that audience’s fascination with anteriority: If your first entry is GvK you will have to go back in time in order to understand what has come before. But that is a foundational experience of the tween: These are the aficionados of the dino, of Pompeii, of Qin Shi Huang’s terra cotta army. The complex corporate and temporal mechanics of Monarch await them as the theoretical armature of the experience they have already latched onto.
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As I said above, that experience is getting it right, of figuring out how this system in which one is already enmeshed, works. Monarch’s own emblem for this is the scene where a pair of half-siblings (and their coder friend) attempt to figure out what their bigamist father already knew, which was how the Titans moved around the world undetected. We know the earth is hollow; they only know that their dad’s world map has a bunch of pinholes in it. As the sun comes up in the San Francisco exclusion zone, the solution, ahem, dawns on them and the perforated map becomes the technology for the revelation of the franchise’s projected understanding of itself.
I said I wanted to explain how Godzilla and Kong become buddies, and up to now I have stuck with the why, the logic of it. But in movies the formal causes (understood in multiple senses) are reasons. Years ago, I was talking with production designer Rick Carter about his work on Jurassic Park. During shooting, it became clear that at the climax the T. Rex was going to have to save the humans from the velociraptors. This was a change in plans, and Carter asked Spielberg how the T. Rex was going to enter. “Like this,” Spielberg said, and made a gesture where his hand—here pretending to be a giant mouth—arced in from the top of an imaginary frame. But Carter hadn’t been asking about the shot, he had been asking because as the architect of the (fake) visitors center where this was all going to go down, he knew that the doors weren’t tall enough for the (fake) T. Rex to get in. Carter’s question was (fake) practical, not formal; Spielberg’s answer implied that form mattered more than practicality.
Formally: Godzilla and Kong become buddies by putting them next to each other and letting them run like hell at the camera to kick someone’s ass. Practically-narratively: Godzilla and Kong become buddies when Mothra mediates their conflict and turns them toward their common enemy. The time of the instant (the run), of the crafting (Mothra’s mediation), of the buildup and rhythm (the franchise), of the planet and the planet within the planet (the ancient). These are what George Kubler called the “streams of contemporary happening,” and while we can’t “chart their flow and volume” the way a historian might, we can certainly measure their timing and intensity, their rhythm and release, their momentum and suspension. When the sync hits, we just might get it.
Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire, Wingard, Legendary/WB 2024