How was Wired magazine to have known that Godzilla would prove such a flop? With a three-month lead time, the United States’s pre-eminent futurists are bound to make a few wrong guesses. Putting Godzilla on their June cover, in anticipation that the flick would live up to its hype, probably seemed like a good bet.
Just as good a bet as the “new economy” their Godzilla cover heralds. For if they can’t predict the success of next quarter’s movie, why should we trust them to predict the success of next century’s global economy?
Godzilla must have looked like a sure thing. But like so many of the business world’s faulty assumptions about the global marketplace, the Godzilla gambit proved disastrous – and for precisely the same reasons.
Let’s look at just the movie, for the moment. Although most critics are pointing to Godzilla’s poor ticket receipts as a sign that the age of the special effects blockbuster is over, the real reasons for the movie’s failure are much simpler: this was a bad blockbuster, with bad special effects.
Simple lesson one: if gee-wizardry is your trump card, you’d better be doing something that hasn’t been done before or better.
Even if the special effects had been up to today’s standards (as set, I’d argue, by the brilliantly rendered giant insects in the fascism satire Starship Troopers) Godzilla would have still needed a story or character capable of sustaining our interest.
In theory, the delightful B-movie monster that we have all known and loved since the 1950s should have fulfilled this purpose. Why didn’t he? And why couldn’t a still-relevant story about the dangers of technology survive this high-budget adaptation?
Because neither Godzilla the monster nor Godzilla the fable can be fitted into the mould of an American disaster movie. Godzilla is Japanese, damn it. Not everything bigger and more American is going to be somehow better or more profitable.
The Godzilla movie myth emerged from a nation that had survived a nuclear holocaust. The monster was less the enemy of the Japanese than he was the embodiment of their own defeated spirit, rising like a giant sumo wrestler to avenge the carnage wrought by Western technology.
He is not nature, but a manmade freak of nature, with his own personality and free will. This is why he failed so miserably when cast in a role equivalent to the mindless tornado in the American-style natural disaster movie Twister.
It is an identical set of blind spots leading today’s technology pundits into equally absurd assumptions about the ability of US economic models to improve – no, overtake – the global economy.
That’s why Wired chose Godzilla as cover- reptile for its “Here comes the new economy!” issue. According to the Wired- promoted “long boom” scenario, new technology and open markets will allow the economy to reach the colossal proportions of Godzilla and, presumably, the box-office Hollywood hit in which he was about to star.
The “new economists” believe that the development of new technologies will fuel the creation of essentially infinite wealth and the new economy depends on the seamless integration (read: absorption) of the world’s economies into the American capitalist system. But not everyone’s “bottom line” is money.
This is because, like the doomed Godzilla team, new economists fail to recognise the personality and humanity of the societies they hope to absorb. To the techno- capitalist, the economy is like nature or the weather. There is no personality within. It’s like a tornado. Our only choice is to join in or get out of the way. Human or government intervention is seen as inefficient meddling. The only policy is no policy. Let nature run its course.
But like Godzilla’s film-makers, the new economists will keep technicalities (like Indonesia or Singapore) in the dark and underground so we can’t see the mat lines (or labour practices). It can’t last for long. The new economy will probably have as much trouble absorbing Asia as Hollywood did abducting its monster. c Douglas Rushkoff
Douglas Rushkoff can be reached at
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