Serpentine Squiggles

We Must Convey What the Video Cannot: a Big Joel Companion Piece

Time for something else out of character for this blog.

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 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: to produce a unified whole, and the movie won't let that happen"? "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: 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.

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 end of the world destructive, 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 have a monster, he towers over the world and kills people and destroys everything, but he could also redeem us. Godzilla could save us from the bomb, because he is the one thing that the bomb can't kill.

To finally loop back around and at last establish what the hell Big Joel is illustrating, I prepose that Godzilla here is identified with a kind of premodern state of meaningfulness (or at least an symptom thereof). Godzilla comes from a world before there were bombs, and humanity used to be able to live in balance with it. Godzilla is immune to the bomb, and he could save us, teach us how to resist the destructive potential of the bomb.

Instead, Godzilla is dead and we have killed him.

The interpretation that Big Joel is constructing here comes into focus when we next ask: what does the bomb represent? Well, could it be the nihilism incurred by the advancement of technology (the very advance which leads to atom bombs, an explosive outpouring of content that destroys rather than creates meaning?

I think that it's not an accident that, in the first true section of the video (what I called interlude 1), one of the first things Big Joel brings up is drawing comparison to social media.

In the end, does the feeling that we are living in a world that's come to an end with too much in it , so much that it hinders constructing any meaning — is that not a notion that resonates? How about the feeling that all the speech we have, all the debates about what to do and what's right, all the words are meaningless theater and we cant change what's been ultimately decided?

Put simply, I don't think this is a video about Godzilla. Big Joel has failed to convince me he's faithfully and solely examining the contents of the film. But what I think it's doing, to reduce it, is so much fanfiction. He's using Godzilla to construct his own story based on it. It's a remix, sampling other movies, and I think his mix is a rather compelling exploration of what meaninglessness is and feels like.

To me, the video fits together, the different incoherent parts click, and you couldn't cut out these seemingly irrelevant interludes without destroying the meaning.

So I think I'll finish this write up, concisely sum up what it is i got out of the video, by returning to the title. Surely we can understand what this video is about if we can simply answer this question: what does Big Joel mean when he says "we must destroy what the bomb cannot"?

What it means, ultimately, is the metaphorical bomb (the explosive outpouring of meaning characteristic of the modern world) brought great destruction, but it didn't destroy us. We could have moved on, found some way to cope and coexist with this altered state. But we haven't.

The "must" is, I think, not imperative, but fatalistic. What goes up must come down, entropy must increase, and we must destroy what the bomb cannot.

Are we doomed to plunge deep into meaningless incoherence? Godzilla (1954), viewed through this transformative, warping lens Big Joel puts around it, begins to look like it says yes.

As preemptive postscript, it's worth returning to how I first defended it: this video delivers vibes, not an argument, and the distinction is important when you exegete it to this extent, put all its subterranean machinery into full view.

I think it's obvious that Big Joel doesn't really think speech is all always meaningless theater, so what did he mean when he spoke interlude 2's conclusion? This much should be clear to everyone: his meaning is that this is picture (he interprets) Conspiracy to paint — not that he himself believes it.

Fundamentally, what I think what happened is that Big Joel watched Godzilla (1954) and he got sad and he wanted to express that sadness, articulate and embellish its nuances. He's not a nihilist, but Godzilla, I guess, gives him nihilist feels and that's what makes it hit different.

It's an interesting interpretation, one that says more about Henry than it does about the movie itself; this video is a literary product in itself, and I think this squares with how he's talked about how he goes about analyzing movies, as explained in previous videos [TODO: find a quote of him saying this].