Sigh. No, COLOSSAL is Not Racist. Step by Step, Here’s Why Not.
Posted on April 26th, 2017 by Adam-Troy CastroJust 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.