Get the message out

Movies are about messages, first and foremost. Making it into entertainment is just a way of opening the public’s mind when it’s most vulnerable, when people’s mental guard is down. Sure they want to make money, but that’s icing on the cake if they do. In reality it is propaganda for profit. Entertaining or educating you is the last thing on their agenda. I don’t dwell on this much but watching a handful of post-WW2 Japanese monster movies running on one of the cable channels brought it back to the front.

For example, “Son of Godzilla” My take is that here, as in all the early Godzilla movies, is that Godzilla of course is the United States, the sleeping monster that they woke up, and it almost spanked them back into the stone age. The baby is the naïve US public, needing the powerful government to take care of them in a hostile world that tries to eat them. Sometimes he turns out to be their friend in the end, otherwise he just stomps their cities into the ground. The other monsters of the genre are the other players on the world stage, some good, some not, all to be feared. The Japanese women all act like they have the emotional development of 2-year-olds and the Japanese men are totally emasculated, the soy boys of today only a gazillion years ago. They actually had them shooting cowboy-style lever-action rifles at the monsters to show how non-militarized they were, even their photographer had one. Compare this to the Tommy Gun toting guys of American monster movies of the same era, they were always depicted as tough-talking he-men, the kind of men who win wars….