Just yesterday I saw Colossal (2017), a terrific little female empowerment fantasy that happens to hinge in part on its white American heroine’s personal problems writ large as giant rubber-suited monsters rampaging through downtown Seoul, South Korea.
I returned home to the discovery that some find this premise infuriatingly racist, and in the particular words of one person with whom I’ve occasionally had heated debates, that it is a manifestation of Hollywood mania for showing the subjugation and destruction of non-whites.
I am now going to explain, step by step, why this thesis is ridiculous. I won’t get to Colossal in particular until late in my argument, as my argument requires foundation and I intend on building a strong one before I get to my point.
The venerable movie trope of giant monsters destroying cities has never been limited to regions of Japan. It’s possible to name multiple films where giant monsters have assaulted San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, small southwestern towns, London, Ireland, Rome, and (in a particularly awful movie) Copenhagen. Sometimes, multiple films in each of those locations. Tokyo, too, quite a few times, but also all those other places.
And what pretty much all of those manifestations have in common is that they were all made, all of them, by the civilizations whose towns were being destroyed. In each of those cases the center of human habitation was us, and the giant rampaging beast an invader. There’s a limited exception to movies set in small American towns beset by things like giant spiders, that were probably financed in Los Angeles, a different “civilization,” but really, that’s stretching the point. Low-budget monster movies take place in small towns to isolate the protagonists from the cavalry. This explains why the small town under assault in Tremors was just a bunch of houses clustered together in the middle of the California desert, which is to say that because it was, we could get to see how the situation could get handled by a couple of dufus local handymen and not by the national guard.
The point was still that we were the plucky humans and that the monster was something we had to fight.
This is incidentally why so many of these films, and so many disaster films, feature the destruction of landmarks, why the Statue of Liberty and the White House have been blown up, or knocked over, or otherwise destroyed, so many times. There’s a perverse joy to this, but honestly: it’s about recognizing the icons that get smashed.
Almost always, in this genre, the monster is after us. We are the people on the ground.
This is why, on the two separate occasions when Hollywood took a shot at its own version of Godzilla, that big mutated lizard did not attack Tokyo again. He attacked Manhattan on the first occasion and San Francisco on the second – the same San Francisco that, fifty years earlier, Ray Harryhausen assaulted with a giant octopus. Just as Manhattan was the same city once attacked by The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms. As it would be attacked again by the monster from Cloverfield.
The existence of those movies, alone, establish that the smashing of nasty foreign peoples is not the point. If we make ten movies where giant robots or alien invasion fleets or monsters smash Manhattan or Chicago or Washington DC or whatever, and then for story reasons set one like Jurassic Park off the coast of South America, it does not, necessarily, mean that we have a special hatred for the people of South America. It means that that particular movie needed a jungle, and Central Park’s wild section is not it. (And besides, by the sequel, one of those dinosaurs ran amuck on our mainland, meaning your premise can use some work.)
I hereby concede the partial exception of King Kong (almost all versions), because the classical King Kong is not a monster-invades-us story as a we-fetch-monster-and-stupidly-set-him-loose-in-our-city story. King Kong is also structured around superstitious natives – and honestly, “superstitious” is not quite the right word for them, if you think about it; their belief that they live at the sufferance of a testy giant gorilla is an actual provable fact, closer in their own context to science – but if you want to say that the effect is somewhat racist, I don’t disagree with you. Racism is certainly baked into the King Kong story’s DNA. It would be foolish to argue otherwise. A strong case could be made that the story remains interesting for other reasons that compensate. But let us agree to put King Kong, in particular, aside. It is its own creature. In almost all other manifestations, the monster comes to us without us giving it a ride.
Not quite to Colossal yet, we note the other contributing factor to its premise: the fact that an awful lot of the cinematic precedent here is Asian. The entire trope of the giant monster being fled by screaming crowds of Asians comes from just how many of these movies were made in Japan, and that’s a historical accident that began with Gojira, famously a film that presented the giant monster as explicitly a metaphor for the atomic holocaust that had rained down upon that country a decade earlier. (Again, to the makers of the film, the giant monster was the threat from outside, the people on the ground their value of “us.”) The historical accident that turned this originally one-shot fantasy into a franchise and then a trope was the discovery that little kids, worldwide, liked seeing big rubbery monsters stomp on buildings, and indeed were willing to consider them the heroes of their own movies, which is how come the Godzilla movies became a series of wrestling matches between that “good” monster and the various “bad monsters” he had to defend Japan from – a trope that was imported to America wholesale, in the second attempt at a Hollywood Godzilla movie. Because, again, to the people making that movie, the imperiled people on the ground were “us,” and Japan had nothing to do with it, even if we had to respect Japan’s expertise in the matter enough to import Ken Watanabe, as the guy with enough common sense to say, “Let them fight.”
So in addressing whether Colossal is racist, we first have to ask why the movie required giant monsters at all, when if the makers had to inflate the Anne Hathaway character’s problems as some geeky sci-fi trope, we could have just as easily had them manifest as flying saucers firing ray beams over Los Angeles.
Answer: yes, they could have.
But they went with giant monsters, which provided other dramatic possibilities important to the film, like the body language on the part of the monsters echoing the body language of Anne Hathaway and the man with whom she has the most pressing conflicts on the ground.
So, next question. If they had to go with giant monsters, why did it have to be Seoul, South Korea? Would the movie have played out any differently if the monsters had materialized over an American city, thus absolutely destroying the premise that it expressed deeply-held cultural imperialism over Asians in particular?
Why, no it wouldn’t have. You could have had Anne Hathaway and her problems in upstate New York, and the monsters manifesting, again, in Los Angeles. Same story, beat by beat, and all your offense on Seoul’s behalf disappears in a puff of smoke.
So why an Asian city?
Well, the fact that there were dozens of movies about Asian cities being attacked by giant lizards, and giant turtles, and moths and smog monsters and so on might have something to do with it. It’s an allusion that every single person watching the film is going to get. And it has less to do with your contention that the movie makers wanted to attack and subjugate Asians than the fact that Asians just happen to have made more movies that looked like this, using that imagery, than any culture in the entire history of the planet.
Colossal uses an Asian city because that’s the trope the movie repurposes for its own story about one troubled woman. No other reason.
And why Seoul, in particular, instead of Tokyo? When South Korea hasn’t made a great number of films in this subgenre (even if two they have made, The Host and Sector Seven, are terrific)?
I have absolutely no idea. Honestly. Maybe Seoul was easier for location filming (if there was in fact any). Maybe there was some Korean financing.
Maybe somebody just happened to love Korean movies, something I understand and endorse with all my heart.
So once again.
Your outraged thesis that the movie is racist could use some work.
Comment By: Christopher Bennett
April 26th, 2017 at 9:19 am
I haven’t seen the movie yet, alas, but it seems to me that part of the reason for setting it on the other side of the world is to make it more unbelievable that it could be connected to the main character, or to underline the idea that our actions can have unexpectedly global consequences, or something like that.
For what it’s worth, the COLOSSAL kaiju bears a slight resemblance to the title creature from the 1999 South Korean monster movie YONGGARY (aka REPTILIAN, an even worse “remake” of the 1967 film currently featured as episode 9 of the new MYSTERY SCIENCE THEATER 3000 season).
Comment By: Adam-Troy Castro
April 26th, 2017 at 9:19 am
I am not quite brave enough to post this in the thread of one particularly prickly person who advanced the racism thesis.
Comment By: Glenn Hauman
April 26th, 2017 at 12:18 pm
To answer your question why Seoul instead of Tokyo: a threatened lawsuit from Toho, I understand.
Comment By: Christopher Bennett
April 26th, 2017 at 1:19 pm
That’s odd. It’s not like Toho has ever had a monopoly on films about kaiju attacking Tokyo. Daiei’s Gamera certainly had a few rampages there.
Comment By: Ian McDowell
April 27th, 2017 at 11:18 am
Christopher Bennett, they do pretty much now. The sued Subway into replacing the maninasuitasaurus in their Five Dollar Footlong commercial with a giant robot. They will sue anybody who depicts a bipedal dinosaur kaiju attacking a city, even in a parody. Doesn’t matter if they have a chance of wining, they throw money at the suit until the other party settles.
The only way to avoid this is to adopt the strategy of that Ladders commercial a few years back that used The X From Outer Space — license an obscure monster from a competing studio. Because Toho didn’t sue that monster back in the early 60s, they can’t now.
The director’s pitch for COLOSSAL was that it would be “the cheapest Godzilla movie ever.” He illustrated his pitch with the image of Godzilla. In his treatment, the monster was a bipedal dinosaur type complete with a tail, and it was set in Tokyo. Toho’s nixing that was inevitable.
Comment By: Glenn Hauman
April 27th, 2017 at 11:18 am
You’d be amazed how many corporate entities sue over something that’s obviously fair use.
Comment By: Adam-Troy Castro
April 27th, 2017 at 11:18 am
See Groucho Marx’s famous letter to Warner Brothers, which had sent him a cease-a-desist order trying to stop him from calling the next Marx Brothers film, A NIGHT IN CASABLANCA. He mocked them mercilessly for thinking they could copyright a city…and well, since A NIGHT IN CASABLANCA exists, you pretty much know how it worked out.
Comment By: Adam-Troy Castro
April 26th, 2017 at 12:18 pm
There you go. COLOSSAL is so racist that it had to change cities because one foreign maker of giant monster movies wanted complete ownership of any films about giant monsters attacking their own country.
I’m telling you.
Comment By: Ian McDowell
April 27th, 2017 at 11:18 am
I’ve not seen the film yet and don’t have a dog in this fight. The only person I’ve seen make the racism charge (and that’s a gross simplification of what she said) is Arinn Dembo and I’m not sure who how this refutes the particular points she raised.
Comment By: Adam-Troy Castro
April 27th, 2017 at 11:18 am
Ian McDowell, this is a fine manifestation of “let’s you and her fight.” Seriously. When I see an argument that strikes me as silly, if I want to lock horns with a proponent directly, I have no problem tagging them myself. I am not saying whether it was or wasn’t Arinn, but honestly, I *have* seen it elsewhere, and it’s the premise I assault.
Comment By: David Vineyard
April 26th, 2017 at 9:17 pm
With so many genuine things to be offended by you have to put in overtime to be offended by giant monsters in Tokyo or Seoul where they have made giant monster movies trampling their own cities often to comedic effect since the 1950’s.
I suppose if the giant monster was trampling Vancouver it would be an insult to Canadians and geese.
Comment By: Wrong
November 19th, 2020 at 6:07 am
Wrong. The movie IS racist because the destruction of Seoul and the deaths of countless Koreans (much of which don’t even get the recognition of screen time) is merely used as a metaphor, prop, gimmick, etc. for two white people working through their little first-world self-esteem issues.
While Anne Hathaway and Jason Sudeikis are trying to “find themselves” or whatever, Asian people halfway around the world are getting killed by their monster / robot avatars. The fate of Seoul and its millions of people hinges upon the little drama that’s being played out in Mainhead, New England–a town more significant than Seoul because the movie was made for an American audience.
This movie is a “sci-fi comedy” because it’s funny to some people (racists) that random antics by two Americans is somehow inadvertently causing thousands of Koreans to die. This “quirky” premise only works if you’re racist and see Koreans as so foreign and exotic that they’re not human and not worthy of human concern, but are rather more like ants that a person might accidentally step on.
It’s racist because it dehumanizes or at least reduces the value of life of Koreans as merely props or devices used to advance the story. It’s also racist because in real life, hundreds of thousands of Koreans literally died in the Korean War because the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. were working out their political rivalry via proxy wars.
Comment By: Nyx
February 22nd, 2022 at 6:47 am
I watch a lot of arthouse and difficult movies but this one I just couldn’t get. Why do these boring white people suddenly have the power to kill innocent Koreans? From the start, I did not get how Tim left but then there were a bunch of arty type people in his place once he walked out? The girl suddenly got powers because she made a city diorama? So average dull New Englanders have superpowers to kill off Asians? To what end? The addiction metaphor, ok, I guess? It is ok to kill the fictional other? No wonder Japan wanted nothing to do with this. Seems badly thought out. Unless it is supposed to be a dream or something.