Godzilla in Rio de Janeiro And the Industry of Imaginary Warfare

Godzilla in Rio de Janeiro And the Industry of Imaginary Warfare

Marcus Lyra

MA. Semiotics -‐ Faculty of Semiotics, Institute of Philosophy and Semiotics (FLFI)

Models of Communication and Mass Media

University of Tartu Jun 10th , 2014

Abstract The entertainment serves a social function and is established by the economic-‐politic management of social time and functions. Entertainment is the opposite of labor time, but confluent to ideology. The management of an ideology consumes every aspect of social roles of an individual’s life, and must be understood as belonging to no specific character, but instead, as a whole disembodied movement that aims and controls its values by the management of the appropriative discourse of a given reality -‐ Habitus. In this article it is presented the fundamental aspects of the disembodiment of the notion of ideology and its relation to the construction of modern economic politics and the function of the entertainment by the creation and control of Cultural Texts as fundamental ideological documents. As a case of study, it is studied here the multiple narrative layers contained in the latest Hollywood movie Godzilla, a comparison to its first version in 1954 in Japan and its political causes, and the aspect of Politics of Fear, as well as the political metaphors within the discourse of power in consumable popular entertainment.

Keywords: Warfare, Ideology, Politics, Cultural Text, entertainment, industry, military, discourse, habitus, culture, media, fear, critical theory, Godzilla, Hollywood. 1.Linguistic Reality; Entertainment is Not Politically Innocent. What divides fantasy from reality? Fundamentally and amongst other elements, different levels of language, metalanguage, and distinct linguistic structures make the scission, all culminating in modes of discourse. Discourse though, is from the scope of highly enriched cultural elements, empowered of an enormous energetic potentiality of generating and influencing social movements. Discourse is here understood as a fundamentally political management of language, not in terms of belonging to political parties, but instead, in terms of a whole movement towards a general world-‐view, generally economically tended, a structured structuring system of practices and Habitus. The political sphere of mastering of language – here referred to as discourse -‐ is made visible in the way society is functionally shaped, being more commonly attributed to the modes of production and hierarchies of labor, however its permanent presence features the leisure time and its demands as well. Both, work time and the disposition of the elements of leisure are components of the

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same fundamental political order and are complementary. “Discourse is more than talk and writing; it is a way of talking and writing. To regulate discourse is to impose a set of formal or informal rules about what can be said, how it can be said, and who can say what to whom. ... The ultimate consequence is a regulation of action. ... When a form of discourse is established as standard practice, it becomes a tool for reproducing inequality, because it can serve not only to regulate thought and emotion, but also to identify Others and thus to maintain boundaries as well. (Schwalbe et al. 2000: 433–434)”(ALTHEIDE, 2009: 56) The regulation of social realities is not made by prohibition of discourses, but rather, by means of the establishment of a certain mode of discursive act, in foucaultian terms ”incitation to discourse”.

Thus, entertainment is not politically innocent; the formulation of the contents within the scope of entertainment passes through the same processes of formulation of socio-‐political models of discourse, and that is made explicit through the lenses of the aestheticization of the politics1 in its most various configurations, mainly and more widespread known as Political Propaganda. For the concept of Propaganda, besides the modern definition commonly inferred to the Nazi-‐Fascism and the Soviet experiences, when considered the level of linguistic management of reality via discursive appropriation, several new shades commonly ignored may arise, including while analyzing elements contained within so called modern democracy states. Either forcedly present and visible as in these historical experiences, or as a natural movement in a circumstance cine qua non politics is made impossible, the propagandistic element seems inherent to the movement of having set centers of reference of knowledge within a society, entities in charge of assuring truthfulness and reference, such as for the purposes of the tribunals and how it stands for the law, and as the academia is for the knowledge, as politics is for economy and church for morality. These social entities are the holders of what can be understood as the official social texts, that is to say, the documents of prescription of all habits and conducts taken as approved and positive, as oppositions to all that must be kept as transgressions. As Lotman points out “Text may, however, be defined -‐ if not logically, at least for working purposes -‐ by pointing to a concrete object having its own internal features which cannot be deduced from anything else apart from itself. (LOTMAN, 1978: 233 – My emphasis) These entities organize and make available nothing but Texts, as well as they are in charge of guiding the presumed ‘proper reading’ and ‘proper understanding’ these internal features of the texts. Lotman claims further on that “Hence, at this stage of culture the distinguishing feature that divides truth from nontruth is a supralinguistic organization of the utterance.”(IDEM – My emphasis) This way, discourse is organized by means of documents or cultural texts, both with supralinguistic controlling elements that will be studied later in this text. But what is the place of entertainment amongst these official entities? The most straightforward answer possible is: Nowadays we understand and perceive entertainment as an industry. By logic association, this industry corresponds to a conglomerate of financially organized companies with economic power and thus,

1 Walter Benjamin’s Theories on German Fascism.

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direct political influence. The entertainment follows the agenda of the economic system. 2. The case of Hollywood Aesthetic Politics; Griffith and Godzilla. Brought from the culture of the big epics of war movies first established by the cinematography of David Llewelyn Wark or "D. W." Griffith, Hollywood industry lies on a long history of political issues artistically framed and projected in the big screen. Griffith’s most known works, mostly war epics treated with all cinematographic grandiose techniques present at his time, pushed the limits of the technical production of movies in order to satisfy the urge for the power of the image; notwithstanding the most emblematic production carries no other name but “the Birth of a Nation” depicting the American civil war.2 The political influences of the big epic as deduced being inherent to any formulation of a cultural text, in this case, is interestingly related to the severe presence of racist content on the movie, to cast an example. “All over the country, but especially in the South, enthusiasm for the movie and the romantic idea of the Ku Klux Klan was spreading like wild fire. The movie introduced the idea of burning a cross on the lawn of black homes in order to create fear. White Supremacy was being re-‐born.” (Bang, 2012: 5) “and the chastity of womanhood, to maintain forever white supremacy, to teach and faithfully inculcate a high spiritual philosophy through an exalted ritualism, and by a practical devotion to conserve, protect and maintain the distinctive institutions rights, privileges, principles, traditions and ideals of pure Americanism."3 (IDEM) Karen Bang concludes saying: “Fifty-‐million people watched the movie.”

Although in avoiding a purely positivist approach in the analysis of such cultural phenomena, the relations here established between a cultural creation and its real dimensions and effects must be taken really carefully unless they are bound to remain in absolute speculation. It is assumed here the incapacity for creation of quantitative verifiable data, in a process in which the very translation of a cultural historical event into objectified -‐ presumably -‐ understandable entity is as well bound to fail. Although, a historical event and the presence of such happenings are in themselves meaningful and can – given a proper attention to the issues contained in historicism – be used in juxtaposition of the modern movements within the same cultural structure, namely, Hollywood and the presence of aesthetic politics.

Godzilla as first depicted in 1954 movie from Ishirõ Honda follows the general movement of the ‘alive’ interaction between politics and entertainment, but from a slightly different perspective. In this case, there is the movement of politicisation of aesthetics, and the chimera that is Godzilla as firstly depicted is but a mix of several elements with historical correspondence with the events of the atomic bombs in japan. “On March 1, 1954 – eight months to the day before Gojira (1954) roared onto movie screens in Japan -‐ the United States set off the 2 Directed by D. W. Griffith and based on the novel and play The Clansman, both by Thomas Dixon, Jr. Griffith co-‐wrote the screenplay (with Frank E. Woods), and co-‐produced the film (with Harry Aitken). It was released on February 8, 1915. 3 Stanley Frost, The Challenge Of The Klan. New York: Bobbs-‐Merrill Company, 1924, p. 57

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world's first Hydrogen bomb.”4 In the process of creation of this chimera, “Iwao Mori wanted the dinosaur's skin to show explicit scars from H-‐bomb exposure, so the suit designers crafted it with a distinctive skin modeled after the keloid scars of Hiroshima's survivors.” 5 “From 1945 through 1952, the American occupying forces enforced official censorship on Japanese films, explicitly forbidding open discussion of A-‐bomb matters.”6 3.Disembodied Ideology; Embodied Politics. Godzilla is not a fictional monster. We are constantly dealing with a natural struggle in the analysis of cultural texts, here, specifically those commonly understood as entertainment and its relations with politics and discourse. The struggle occurs between the inherent condition of formalization of any discourse and the influence of political values, and the intentional modeling of discourses – also referred to as Propaganda – and the aim of this third part is to expose the reasons why these two elements should not be understood as different movements, but facets of one only general movement. This general movement is sought under the name of ideology. Godzilla is a biological chimera but not only that; this creature is a cultural chimera as well. The original Japanese version from 1954 contained a critical aesthetic in reference to a war factum, the crimes against humanity occurred in 1945 in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The version released by Legendary Pictures in May 2014 however, shows a completely different monster under the same name and physical form. Now, it became a fully American movie, contextualized and correspondent to all the political discourse common to Hollywood movies, from the plot to the visual elements employed in the construction of the movie. To immerge deeply in the logic of formulation of inner-‐structures of cultural texts and the abovementioned fundamental aspect of ideology, it is first made necessary to comprehend what the term ideology in this work stands for, and then, to return to the movie analysis as cultural texts. In this respect, we should recall the works of Mihail Bakhtin in the aspect of sign as a communal construction, as the product of the dialectical involvement of individuals. Although every sign must be understood primarily as a thing constituted and present in the material form, -‐ experienceable -‐, its meaningfulness does not belong to the scope of pure experience but in the relation of this material element with two or more consciousness by means of dialectical language – thus not monological. The process of interwoven signification of elements, as presented in the social ideologically formatted world for practical reasons, is what gives rise to the higher levels of linguistic complexity – most of which being fundamentally metalanguages – and culminates in the whole of what is here called ideology. Ideology is not understood as present within one’s consciousness, as Bakhtin says “The idealistic philosophy of culture and psychologistic cultural studies

4 TCM – Turner Classic Movies Film Article -‐ SUNDAY JUNE, 22 2014 -‐ by David Kalat 5 Ibid. 4 6 Ibid. 4

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locate ideology in the consciousness”(BAKHTIN, 1973: 11) These two main movements of cultural studies left aside “that consciousness itself can arise and become a viable fact only in the material embodiment of signs. The understanding of a sign is, after all, an act of reference between the sign apprehended and other, already known signs”.(Idem – original emphasis) Something that stands for something else, but with the crucial aspect of being something already known, that stands for something else also known, in a possible known relation, in sum, this means that the link for any signifier is a cultural convention in its essence, that allows the relations of discrete units as well as shape and give existence to these very units out of a continuum of potential segmentation of the space. Nevertheless it is necessary to grip the fact that these segmentations, the broken reality into discrete smaller units and the later rearrangement of these particles are not a work of accidental or ‘natural’ formation, that would lead to the formulations of language in Saussure and its aspect of conventionality. Bourdieu points out the risks saying: “To posit, as Saussure does, that the true medium of communication is not speech (parole), a datum immediately considered in its observable materiality, but language (langue), a system of objective relations which makes possible both the production and the decoding of discourse, is to perform a complete reversal of appearances by subordinating the very substance of communication […] to a pure construct of which there is no sense experience.”(BOURDIEU, 1990: 30) This inversion operated by Saussure confers to the abstract overwhelming ‘language’ (langue) its fundamental aspect of the presumed Nature behind human speech (parole). “Saussure, who elsewhere proclaims that 'the point of view creates the object', here clearly indicates the viewpoint one has to adopt in order to produce the 'specific object' of the new structural science: to make speech the product of the language one has to situate oneself in the logical order of intelligibility. (BOURDIEU, 1990: 31). The construction of the Real -‐ the social formulation of the real as a register – must thus be understood as fully dependent and directly interfered by social actors and dialectically consumed by means of interaction. “However, the ideological, as such, cannot possibly be explained in terms of either of these superhuman or subhuman, animalian, roots. Its real place in existence is in the special social material of signs created by men. Its specificity consists precisely in its being located between organized individuals, in its being the medium of their communication.” (BAKHTIN, 1973:12) The reality of the sign is wholly a matter determined by the process of communication; the sign and the social reality – as a major cultural sign or the whole Semiosphere– are both risen at the very moment of interaction, and still, hold one only dimension of determinative aspect, the past, that dimension of the history as a factum. However not accessible as a factum, the presumption of history standing for a logically undeniable aspect for the formulation of the actual potentialities, for the happenings in the present and future, cannot be ignored by the consideration of its blurriness, abstractness, as interfering in the composition of past-‐future relations as a logic construct, but instead, must be perceived as an actively influential -‐ not by determinism – for the whole shaping of the disposition of elements displayed in the ‘now’. This influence is so direct as it is dynamic and non-‐naturally-‐given.

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4. The Plot of The World Entertainment is not innocent to politics as stated twice before, and the rise of political influence follows parallel to the rise of economic influence of a given subject. This may be straightforwardly disclosed when observing the roles of the movie industries during historical events such as the world wars of the cold war, and even – but with slightly different configurations – the postmodern multi-‐media political management. To cast a simple example of the discourse employed by entertainment industry that heaps the necessary elements in order to build up a proper political-‐fictional narratology, we can start by the Hollywood in the period from 1939 to 1945. This is commonly referred as the moment that United States prepared their citizens culturally to its entrance and participation in world war II.7 Logically, the deconstruction of the discourse behind the figure of the enemy shows the reasons why its opposite is taken by a hero; in other words, the construction of the hero is made by setting up the elements of the enemy and vice-‐versa, in a movement such as determining the “pure social entities” such as family, church, education and by showing someone who presumably attacks these values, one simply builds up the public enemy. In a work published in 1990, with the title “PROPAGANDA TOOL: THE HOLLYWOOD WAR MOVIE AND ITS USURPATION BY TV”, Bob Osborne from the U.S. Army War College says:

Movies produced during the period 1939-‐1945 would show the Axis powers maligning American values as they attacked such symbols as "mother, home, justice, health, beauty, love, money, security and education." These symbols were held in extreme value by Americans and they would react to their degradation especially when shown being destroyed by an enemy’s “acts of cruelty and barbarity”. The Hollywood movie would mold national will by swaying public opinion into a patriotic, willing war machine.” (OSBORNE, 1990: 15-‐16)

The tactical construction of the enemy and its metaphorical depiction in entertainment can be considered constant and never ending, however the overall configuration of these political aesthetics may vary through time in intensity and type. Here is made fundamental to comprehend Entertainment as one more fraction of social time, in which people are meant to spend in commodities and to consume information and pleasure. This control of social time is made by simply setting up days and time of working hours, and the capital generated in labor will be drained back in the needs consumed in commutation of weekends -‐ in the most common labor-‐time division – and precisely here, the entertainment falls into the very social structure that organizes production by means of organizing the production time. Time to study, time to work and produce, time for retirement and etc. David L. Altheide calls attention to the forms in which these organizations are made, and the way they are impregnated in every mode of entertainment, by 7 These efforts were “to provide an explanation of America war efforts to the public” as Hollywood became "an unofficial government agency “in these efforts. At no time in American history was the Hollywood contribution to the molding of the American national will more visible or direct than the period 1939-‐1945, as America prepared and eventually entered World War II. (OSBORNE, 1990: 15)

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framing specific political-‐economic needs in discursive manner conveyed via any sort of media; to this, he gives the name of Discourse of Fear within the Politics of Fear. He says: “Criminal victimization, including numerous crime myths (predators, stranger danger, random violence; Best 1999) contributed to the cultural foundation of the politics of fear, particularly the belief that we were all actual or potential victims and needed to be protected from the source of fear—criminals or terrorists” (ALTHEIDE, 2009: 55)

From the level of speculation it is made completely possible to design metaphors to culture industry in relation to their function within a political field and still remain in pure speculation, although once contemplated all the aspects related to a cultural text in its three levels, a more clear relation can be pictured. Lotman explains the three levels of a cultural text as follows: “One can distinguish three types of relationship: subtext (general linguistic) meanings, text meanings, and the functions of texts in the given system of culture. Thus, a culture may be described at three different levels: the level of the general linguistic content of its constituent texts, the level of text content, and the level of text functions.”(LOTMAN, 1978: 240) It is by now clear enough that within a certain frame, every cultural element can be understood and studied as a text, therefore, being constituted by these three fundamental levels and their potential combinatory configurations. This said, Hollywood movies and their relations to politics, linked via discourse for its ends of warfare, is one of the possible categories of entertainment, that accordingly has its internal texts, and this way, their inner-‐linguistic relations, their content – in this case, cultural and political – and their incidental or accidental social function.

In Bakhtin’s “Problems in Dostoievisky Poetics”, in the sought for the sources of the predominance of one Monolog in the narratology of political discourse, he points out the constant presence in European intellectuality, brought from the enlightenment process, of the element of monologism in form of a prospected order – commonly attributed to natural causes in positivist sciences – that is meant to build up a concept of a single consciousness to which every performance is nothing but the execution of that consciousness. He says:

The consolidation of monologism and its permeation into all spheres and ideological life was promoted in modern times by European rationalism, with its cult of a unified and exclusive reason and especially by the Enlightenment, during which the basic generic forms of European artistic prose took shape. Semantic unity of any sort is everywhere represented by a single consciousness and a single point of view. This faith in the self-‐sufficiency of a single consciousness in all spheres of ideological life is not a theory created by some specific thinker; no, it is a profound structural characteristic of the creative ideological activity of modern times, determining all its external and internal forms. (BEASLEY-‐MURRAY, 2007, 25)

Here, the characteristic of the modern episteme into a formulation of the unitary perspective, comes along with most of the modern and postmodern modes of convergence of scientific truth, relying in technological apparatuses through which the singular perspective can be framed and the duel of dimensions can be overcome.

Now, with some of the most fundamental aspects of ideology brought to surface

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and linked with the dynamics of discourse and the reality-‐making cultural plots, the case of study of the movie Godzilla released in 2014 can be shown in two distinct levels of cultural-‐text reading. The second and the third levels, namely, the level of content and the level of cultural function.

5. Godzilla In U.S.A. and Godzilla in Rio de Janeiro; The Consumption of Warfare Heading back to the case of study I aim to explore, as said before, the depiction of the Godzilla from the first to the last movies changed dramatically. The one from 1954 as the result of the cultural shock caused by the atomic bombs – remembering Godzilla is a radioactive creature resultant of the atomic contamination caused by the bombings, or the embodiment of the bombs as a metaphor8 – to the last one in which the monster is depicted as a threat to United States and the whole movie is about the US Army dealing with the creature to kill other undesired monsters. The central figure of the movie is an American soldier who engages in the mission for saving his family that lives in the city that is attacked by the monsters, and the whole of the plot is a military action towards a figurative enemy, with heavy visual support of military technology concerning missiles, aircraft and terrestrial weapons, as well as the military management of masses and public spaces. Not only that, the movie brings up the graphical support of the violence against the sacred values of society, in which the gigantic creature is shown destroying the city’s infrastructure and interfering in the status of technology and electricity demands, by emitting electromagnetic waves that ceases all telecommunication and electronic devices to work.

The speculative manner of these political elements in the level of content of this text a here easily underlined as far as the internal structures of the movie are highlighted, for instance, the televisions shown are in a fictitious “Emergency National Report” in which the lettering of the headline is “AMERICA UNDER ATTACK” visible in full screen by the timecode of 01:03:15 to 01:03:22. Also noteworthy, is that in this latest version of Godzilla, the monster comes from Japan to Hawaii where he makes the first attack, and then heads to San Francisco.

The supposed fantasy animal directly serves as an excuse for the depiction of U.S.A. military power, a metaphor of the ‘enemy’, and this is being common even in modern Hollywood, with examples such as Independence Day9, District 910,

8 "[…] mixing scenes of panic and burning cities that could be anywhere in 1945 Japan and scenes showing radioactively-‐contaminated children in hospital which specifically remind audiences of the atomic bombings. The director of the movie, Ishiro Honda, made it clear in an interview that the monster Gojira was designed to embody the characteristics of a living atomic bomb." (Claude Estebe, a French scholar in Japanese visual culture, has been a researcher on the subject of Gojira and how it represents the nuclear past and radioactive remnants of Japan.) Bangkok Post: Published: 29/08/2012 at 12:00 AM Newspaper section: Life 9 Plot: The aliens are coming and their goal is to invade and destroy. Fighting superior technology, Man's best weapon is the will to survive. (IMDB) 10 Plot: An extraterrestrial race forced to live in slum-‐like conditions on Earth suddenly finds a kindred spirit in a government agent who is exposed to their biotechnology (IMDB)

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Armageddon11 and etc. The evidential aspect of these claims can be seeing in the third dimension of the cultural texts, as proposed by Lotman, the one of the social function. And here comes the depiction of this film in Brazilian media – the example that I could cast due to the accessibility of the language – in which the supposed entertainment ends up crossing explicitly the barriers of the political creation and maintenance of power, and the second dimension becomes self-‐evident in the third; that is to say, the content is sublimated to the cultural function. Published by Guilherme Solari from UOL (one of the most influential news portals in Brazil), in São Paulo 20/05/2014, the article brings the headline “Especialista imagina ataque de Godzilla ao Rio: "Não sei se ganharíamos”” (Specialist prospects a Godzilla Attack to Rio: “I do not know if we could win”). Needless to say, the overall argument for the article is the military apparatus of Brazilian Army. The opening remarks are “Galante envisioned a hypothetical scenario of attack and how the Brazilian armed forces would react based on your current arsenal. The outlook is not good, in the words of the consultant: "We would make some damage to the animal, but I do not know if we would win"12 The information is provided by Alexandre Galante, defense consultant and editor of the magazine "Defense Forces" and the website Airpower. Further on in the article, a series of aircraft, submarines and warships is displayed with pictures and comments from Galante imagining the combat, always highlighting the technological aspects of each weapon such as in this excerpt about terrestrial weapons: “The armed forces mobilize their heavier armament. From several kilometers distance from Rio de Janeiro, Astros II artillery systems are discharging rockets of up to 300 mm against the monster. More distant units launch new rockets AV/MT-‐300 "Matador" (killer), guided by GPS and with a range of up to 300 km.”13 The most striking fragment of the article is quite obviously the conclusion, where it reads: “As suddenly as it appeared, the creature goes back into the sea, but the consequences of the attack remain. World Cup and Olympics are canceled, the Ministry of Defense implements a doctrine of military mobilization to increase the number of armed forces and strengthen security in coastal cities.” Considering the current issues in relation to the world cup and Olympic games in Brazil in 2014 and 2016 respectively, and the movements of the oppositional parties towards these two massive events brought to the country by the Labor’s Party (PT), the clear political content employed over the fictional creature transcends the boundaries of the simple family entertainment, and brings the political chimera of Godzilla to Brazil in order to have an alibi for political management of the fear, most

11 Plot: After discovering that an asteroid the size of Texas is going to impact Earth in less than a month, N.A.S.A. recruits a misfit team of deep core drillers to save the planet. (IMDB) 12 Original: “Galante imaginou um cenário hipotético de ataque e como as forças armadas brasileiras reagiriam com base em seu arsenal atual. As perspectivas não seriam boas, nas palavras do consultor: "Daria pra fazer um estrago no bicho, mas não sei se a gente ganharia"” 13 Original: As forças armadas mobilizam o seu armamento mais pesado. A quilômetros de distância do Rio de Janeiro, sistemas de artilharia Astros II descarregam foguetes de até 300 mm contra o monstro. Unidades mais distantes lançam os novos foguetes AV/MT-‐300 "Matador", guiados por GPS e com autonomia de até 300 quilômetros.

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certainly, operated automatically. A fear that is aimed towards a fictional creature but based in arguments of real military equipment and economic-‐political circumstances. As Bryan Meadows puts it: “metaphor and metonymy are not just poetic expressions, but they actually play a primary role in shaping our understanding of the world around us. Furthermore, metaphoric thought delves deep into our conceptual level of consciousness and, in turn, influences our speech at the textual level.” (MEADOWS, 2005: 2)

By the basis of Ideology, the appropriation of linguistic structures conveyed into structured-‐structuring practices by a formatted discourse, underlying the Habitus and embracing the whole of social interactions and construction of reality, the warn can be made: War is a Fairytale.14

6. Conclusion Long believed by the absolute idealism and neo-‐Kantian chains of thought, the ideology was commonly sought inside individual consciousness, as an entity that was just perceived by means of its external manifestations, but that was the one in charge of formatting and understanding the world. Bakhtin was one of the fundamental figures in later Russian Formalism to bring this element back to the table, and although not so commonly studied, his contributions into criticizing most of the most common reminiscent conceptions from classical philosophy still impregnated in philology, are indeed enormous. Bakhtin brought the ideology to the world as the effect to which the causes can -‐ or should– not be determined by epistemology. And the close contact from philology and early Psychologism to the studies of culture risked being locked within rusty and dangerous concepts of determinism and naturalism. The – now disembodied -‐ ideology is a human construct that occurs and is only manifested by means of interaction, and not a structured entity, fully neutral, in inertia, waiting for decipherment. The logically appropriative aspect of the description of all and any reality must be considered carefully, in respect to all potential complex dynamics of these dialectical interactions that forge the world and the cultural description of reality. These are precisely the elements that lead to the confusion between a believed authentic political formulation, and what is supposed to be innocent to politics, such as the whole system of entertainment. Both correspond in equal balance to every process of depiction of reality by means of discourses, and as economy underlies every modern human social practice, politics lies behind every economic discourse and vice-‐versa. Hence, in these fissures demanded by the management of social time, the proper behavior for consumption of happiness and leisure, the dynamics of the whole of the entertainment industry, are where

14 Very influential is Lakoff’s 1992 and 2003 discussion of the American administration’s political discourse during the First and Second Gulf Wars. In these two writings, he gives us the conceptual metaphor WAR AS A FAIRY TALE where the source domain FAIRY TALE is mapped onto the target domain WAR. The WAR AS A FAIRY TALE framework presented to the American audience a hero (the U.S.), a villain (Saddam Hussein), and a victim (in 1992, Kuwait;; in 2003, the Iraqi people).(MEADOWS, 2005: 3)

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the discourse of the ‘evil’ fundaments the value of the ‘heroes’ and the morals in movies are coexistent to those of the labor time or every other social sphere. The entertainment understood as the fear-‐maintaining-‐machine is nothing but a practical way to demonstrate that the presumably serious political engagements one can fall into, are all in accordance with already disposed discourses of social values and dynamics as developed by the entertainment. And as Bakhtin remembers, it is not from the power of one man in control of the information, but the whole process of the construction of these Monologues actually lies in a historical tendency that modernity borrows from enlightenment era, and the modes of description and formulation of truth. And this is the one of the major contributions of the Semiotics of Culture in studying these ideological signs and their distinct levels of relations. Godzilla, primarily created in Japan in response to the nuclear attacks occurred in 1945 is but a cultural text, a reflexive-‐refractive graphical element with inner structure, content and social functions. In the last movie with the same character, he was literally geographically dislocated to United States, and the prefiguration of the character of an enemy is made explicit within the movie and the way the military-‐based plot is developed. It is the US Army against Godzilla, a threat from far away, that risks the order and progress of American society – “America Under Attack”. The depiction of the heroes in uniforms with flags is not accidental though, and the effectiveness of the internal hidden discourses in the plot – as using the chimera to demonstrate the war power of United States – is made obvious by episodes where supposedly non-‐fantastic media news trace parallels of military power against Godzilla, as in the Brazilian case brought in this article. There was a time where propaganda was something intentionally enforced and constructed, but the new configurations of these enforcements tend to be the ones in which individuals pay for receiving such political-‐economic instructions about a very specific, carefully mastered, kind of reality.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY ALTHEIDE, David (2009) Cultures of Fear; A Critical Reader. Pluto Press. London, UK. [54-‐69]

BAKHTIN, Mikhail (1973) Marxism and Philosophy of Language. Seminar Press, NY, U.S.A.

BANG, Karen (2012) Racism and the Birth of the KKK During the Early Twentieth Century. University of South Florida. U.S.A.

BEASLEY-‐MURRAY, Tim (2007) Mikhail Bakhtin and Walter Benjamin Experience and Form. Palgrave MacMillan, NY. U.S.A.

BOURDIEU, Pierre (1990) The Logic of Practice. Stanford University Press. Stanford, CA, U.S.A.

LOTMAN, Yuri (1978) Text and Function. New Literary History, Vol.9, No.2, Soviet Semiotics and Criticism: An Anthology. Johns Hopkins University Press. [233-‐244]

MEADOWS, Bryan (2005) Critical Approaches to Discourse Analysis across Disciplines. Distancing and Showing Solidarity via Metaphor and Metonymy in Political Discourse: A critical study of American statements on Iraq during the years 2004-‐ 2005. University of Arizona, U.S.A. [1-‐17]

OSBORN, Bob (1990) PROPAGANDA TOOL: THE HOLLYWOOD WAR MOVIE AND ITS USURPATION BY TV. USAWC MILITARY STUDIES PROGRAM PAPER. U.S. Army War College Carlisle Barracks, Pennsylvania 17013. U.S.A.

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APPENDIXES

Fig. 01. UOL Portal Article page 1.

5/20/2014 Especialista imagina ataque de Godzilla ao Rio: "Não sei se ganharíamos" - Notícias - UOL Cinema

http://cinema.uol.com.br/noticias/redacao/2014/05/20/especialista-imagina-ataque-de-godzilla-ao-rio-nao-sei-se-ganhariamos.htm 1/3

Especialista imagina ataque deGodzilla ao Rio: "Não sei seganharíamos"Guilherme Solari

Do UOL, em São Paulo 20/05/2014 06h00

Antônio Gaudério/Folhapress e Divulgação

Montagem mostra ataque fictício do Godzilla ao Rio de Janeiro

Imagine que os kaijus -- os monstros gigantes japoneses -- resolvessem dar uma

trégua para Tóquio e atacassem o Rio de Janeiro. Como as forças armadas

brasileiras reagiriam?

Essa foi a pergunta que o UOL fez a Alexandre Galante, consultor de defesa e editor

da revista "Forças de Defesa" e do site Poder Aéreo. Galante imaginou um cenário

hipotético de ataque e como as forças armadas brasileiras reagiriam com base em

seu arsenal atual. As perspectivas não seriam boas, nas palavras do consultor:

"Daria pra fazer um estrago no bicho, mas não sei se a gente ganharia". Veja

abaixo.

Ataque de Godzilla ao Rio de Janeiro

1. Primeiros sinais de perigo

Aviões de patrulha marítima de longo alcance P3

Orion cobrem a costa brasileira. Equipados com

boias com sonares, captam as primeiras indicações

de que algo estranho e gigantesco está se

aproximando do continente.

Foto: Reprodução

2. Batalha submarina

Os quatro submarinos IKL 209 classe Tupi

investigam a anomalia. Eles estão equipados com

os Mark 48, torpedos pesados da marinha norte-

americana. O combate é iniciado e, por mais que

tiros diretos machuquem o monstro, com seus

poderes de regeneração os ferimentos logo se

recuperam. Apesar de serem considerados

embarcações ágeis, os submarinos brasileiros têm

pouca chance contra o kaiju.

Foto: Reprodução

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3. Esquadra a postos A marinha percebe que algo está muito erradoquando perde contato com os submarinos, um porum. O porta-aviões São Paulo, único porta-aviõesdo Brasil e navio-almirante da marinha brasileira,fica estacionado no Arsenal de Marinha do Rio deJaneiro, na Ilha das Cobras. A esquadra émobilizada para atacar a criatura junto do efetivona base naval da Ilha do Mocanguê, na ponte Rio-Niterói.Foto: Reprodução/Site Forças de Defesa

4. Batalha naval A esquadra abre fogo contra o monstro conformeele emerge das águas. As corvetas e fragatasatiram mísseis antinavio MBDA Exocet e comcanhões Vickers 115 mm. A onda gigante causadapela criatura tomba parte das embarcações, asdemais são explodidas pelo "bafo radioativo" domonstro.Foto: Reprodução

5. Ataque aéreo A aeronáutica mobiliza seus caças, em especial daBase Aérea de Santa Cruz. Os bombardeiros A-1AMX e os caças F5 M atacam com bombasincendiárias e bombas de perfuração antipista.Helicópteros AH-32 Sabre também atacam junto decaças Super Tucano. As partes vitais do monstro,como o pescoço, recebem tiros dos precisosmísseis nacionais MAR-1, que são atraídos pelaradiação da criatura.Foto: Reprodução

6. Evacuação Milhões de civis tentam escapar do Rio de Janeiro,transformando as rodovias em estacionamentos, ea população tenta fugir a pé com os poucospertences. As autoridades também organizam umaevacuação. Aviões Hércules de transporte pesadoe o C-105 Amazonas de transporte tático levantamvoo da base aérea do Galeão, abarrotados desobreviventes.Foto: Divulgação/Site Poder Aéreo

7. Artilharia pesada As forças armadas mobilizam o seu armamentomais pesado. A quilômetros de distância do Rio deJaneiro, sistemas de artilharia Astros IIdescarregam foguetes de até 300 mm contra omonstro. Unidades mais distantes lançam os novosfoguetes AV/MT-300 "Matador", guiados por GPS ecom autonomia de até 300 quilômetros.Foto: Reprodução

8. Sem opção nuclear A criatura sobrevive a toda a artilharia pesada queas forças armadas têm a seu dispor. A próximaopção seria a utilização de uma bomba nuclear. Noentanto, o Brasil não possui armamento atômicopor ter assinado um Tratado de Não-Proliferaçãode Armas Nucleares. É tempo de tentar uma últimamissão desesperada.Foto: Reprodução

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9. Forças especiais em ação

As forças armadas reúnem seus grupos de elitepara embarcar em uma operação especial eimplantar armamentos manualmente na carapaçado monstro. São escolhidos mergulhadores decombate do Grumec, fuzileiros da Comanf e oPara-SAR. Os homens treinados para missõescomo infiltração, resgates, sabotagem atrás delinhas inimigas, demolição e explosivos saltam deparaquedas sobre a criatura.Foto: Reprodução/Site Forças Terrestres

10. O dia seguinte

Tão subitamente quanto apareceu, a criatura voltaao mar, mas as consequências do ataquepermanecem. Copa do Mundo e Olimpíadas sãocanceladas, o Ministério da Defesa implementauma doutrina de mobilização militar para aumentaro contingente das forças armadas e reforçar asegurança em cidades costeiras.Foto: Lucas Lacaz Ruiz/Estadão Conteúdo

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Godzilla in Rio de Janeiro And the Industry of Imaginary Warfare

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