We Must Convey What the Video Cannot

A few days ago, the youtuber Big Joel released a rather profound video, We Must Destroy What the Bomb Cannot, which purports to be about Godzilla (1954). There's not much point in reading on if you haven't watched that video. In a one discord where this video was posted, a user complained of the video's incoherence --- indeed, of the growing incoherence of video essays in general. They weren't able to follow how the video jumps between seemingly unrelated points, and called for the video to be clearer, the make its arguments easier to parse. There are some easy and valid objections to a complaint like this --- this is entertainment, not information. Must every video essay be utilitarian and workmanlike? Is there no room for aesthetic, for evocation, for \vibes\*? And indeed, this is no formal argument, nor does it need to be. No lives hinge on his opinions on a 70 year old movie, no important problem will be solved and no utility gained by understanding some random youtuber with pretentions. If he's huffing farts, who cares. But is it just empty pretense? Is it just vibes for vibes sake --- are the discontinuities between the topics in the video a place for the reader to exercise their interpretative muscles, or just room for Henry to disguise his absence of an underlying point? Sure, I got something out of this video where others did not --- but what did I get out of it? - - - A good place to begin our exegesis is at the end. Although the video in its introduction claims to explore Godzilla (and the thumbnail supports this), his discussion of Godzilla is repeatedly intercut with discussion of two movies seemingly unrelated movies: Conspiracy and I'm Thinking of Ending Things. There is absolutely no segue between any of these topics. None of these intercut sections mention Godzilla or directly tie into any point made in the Godzilla sections. Nowhere when talking about Godzilla does Big Joel even hint at the existence of the other sections; I'm convinced you could out all of them, show the video to someone new, and they wouldn't notice the absence. What the hell gives? Well, if he's actually saying something, let's look at where they conclude. If nothing else, it will be a hint as to what the underlying, unspoken point is. The discussion of Conspiracy ends with: > Conspiracy, then, communicates one thing: that these men will speak > to each other, and that everything that they need to say will be said. > ("Does it tear your heart out?") There will be rituals and laws and > talk of sinister plans. ("Beautiful.") There will be the appearance > of meaning, but it can't exist here. ("I've never understood the > passion for Schubert's sentimental Viennese.") The very act of > communication exists only for its own sake --- to produce theater. Similarly: > I'm Thinking of Ending Things is a film that describes entropy --- > not the entropy of matter or energy, but the entropy of human minds in > relation to other minds. The process through which we become people > and unbecome people, through which we cease to be separate from one > another, through which subjectivity fails. > > The movie is filled with references and delusions and ideas --- > Oklahoma and "Baby It's Cold Outside" and poetry and Dairy Queen > --- and you want to tell a story with that. This is the janitor's > experience; this is about him, meaningful because of him, but the > thing about coherence as a concept is that it requires the ability to > cohere: to produce a unified whole, and the movie won't let that > happen. > > Toward the very beginning of the film, Lucy shows her landscape > paintings to Jake's father and this scene happens: > > ("How can a picture of a field be sad without a sad person looking > sad in the field?") > > How can you know something is sad without a person who's sad looking > at it? How can you create meaning without a person without a subject > and maybe the answer is simple: you can't. Finally, the video itself (barring some extraneous postscripts), ends dramatically: > As Godzilla dies he lets out one of his iconic screams, but here it > feels different somehow. Before Godzilla's noise was terrifying, > inhuman --- now in this moment we come to realize that none of it was > about us. He never wanted to menace anyone; he's an animal, this is > what he sounds like. > > To kill Godzilla is far worse than whatever Godzilla could have done: > it required starving the ocean itself of oxygen. Godzilla 1954 was in > no small part a response to nuclear testing compromising the fishing > yields in Japan's oceans. That is why he emerges after all: there are > no fish left for him to eat. And so it's striking that in order to > finally kill him, they must finish the job: make the ocean barren. > Godzilla is so big that to end him is to end life itself. > > We never get another real scene with Yamane. He gives his speech, and > then Godzilla wrecks Tokyo, and we never hear him talk about not > killing Godzilla again. He doesn't come around, he doesn't change > his mind in some emotional moment, there's simply an absence there. > It's as though Yamane can't, the film can't acknowledge what it's > doing, what it's saying to us. > > Godzilla meant everything. But that's kind of the problem. In the end > we must destroy what the bomb cannot. And we can look at this semantically, A = A style, and rearrange this into a syllogistic thesis. Godzilla meant everything; Godzilla is what the bomb cannot destroy. In the end, we destroy the meaning of everything. This video is about the unraveling of meaning, and it almost seems to comment on itself. Oh, "coherence ... requires the ability to cohere," does it? "to produce a unified whole, and the movie won't let that happen." And yet, "there's simply an absence there ... the film can't acknowledge what it's doing, what it's saying to us." Clever Joel, we see what you're doing there. You're refusing to produce a coherent whole, you won't acknowledge what you're saying. "I made it bad on purpose!" Certainly, if we leave it there, we've already come to a justification for the video's oddities. It's word painting, expressing a concept by demonstration as much as description. But that's not fully satisfying, is it? What is Joel refusing to say? What would a coherent whole of this video look like, if it could even exist? - - - I pulled a little bit of trickery on you (or rather, I almost forgot): there's actually three cutaway sections. The first one talks not about a movie, but a art exhibition called Inflamatory Essays. That section concludes: > It is easy to imagine the end of the world happening through in > absence: an occurrence after which nothing remains. But to look at > this piece is to see in other possibility: a world with no substance, > not because nothing is there, but because everything is --- every idea > that could be had, every claim a person could make. This series of > essays represents the point at which there is no thread left to > follow, no meaning left to hold. There is too much and none of it > tells us anything. But I should be getting on with it, shouldn't I? Let's wrap this up. At this surface level, with every conclusion laid side by side, it's easy to see what every thread except Godzilla is circling around. We've already said it: this is a video about meaning. - Interlude 1, Inflammatory Essays, paints a vision of meaningless, not because of the absence of a point, but overabudance of them, all contradictory and incoherent. - Interlude 2, Conspiracy, serves, according to Big Joel, to gives a different vision of meaninglessness: pointless gestures, communication as theatre, No meaning to be be had because the outcome's already been decided - Interlude 3, I'm Thinking of Ending Things, is used by Joel to underscore both these points, and he invokes it to talk about entropy and incoherence as things that resist the creation of meaning, centering a human subject as the basis of meaning Still, how does this all relate to the big lizard? There's some very surface level, almost coincidental throughlines you can trace. Interlude 1 ends by talking about the end of the world --- certainly, atom bombs are a destructive end of the world, and fittingly, this section is immediately followed by a discussion of the bombs themselves. Interlude 2 talks about empty speech, debate and discussion that's pointless because it does not and will not do anything to stop a violent conclusion, the destructive orders given by a higher authority --- and I find it very suggestive, then, that the Conspiracy section is then immediately followed by Joel talking about a guy who tries to argue that we shouldn't kill Godzilla, to no effect. Finally, Interlude 3 talks about how you decide what something means, whether something can evoke an emotion if it's not a exibiting that emotion; then, in the next section, Big Joel reframes Godzilla as something without human intention, that didn't mean to menace anyone. Despite this, I think there's more insight to be gained by looking instead at the mini-conclusions in the two interrupted Godzilla sections. The first, (coming right before Interlude 2) concludes: > Is there another, ancient world that could have dealt with Godzilla, > could have lived with the monster? In this way, through this tension, > Godzilla becomes unfixed in time, representing two opposing forces: > Godzilla is modernity, but he is also the culture that modernity > destroyed. Godzilla is the bomb, but he is also a memory of the world > without bombs. The second section (right before Interlude 3) concludes: > Less than a decade prior the world was revealed to be a place far more > vulnerable than anyone could have imagined. A city was decimated, > around a hundred thousand people died, and all because of one bomb. > Three days later, it happened again, and since that day, the bomb only > got more powerful. Here we ha