Popular Culture Review Vol. 12, No. 2, August 2001 | Page 49

Toho’s G odzilla 45 losophy can be seen on Zillafag’s personal webpage, Godzilla: Out and Proud, where he performs a close reading of the film Godzilla vs. Megaton (1973) which reveals that Godzilla is actually gay. While this reading is clearly not intended to be taken seriously, Godzilla does make a very serious statement, “BE OUT! BE OPEN! AND SOMEDAY WE WILL BE FREE!,” which suggests that simply entertaining the possibility of Godzilla being gay could help to forward gay rights. This strategy of performing close readings in order to transfonn Godzilla into a marginal figure can also be seen in fan debates over Godzilla’s gender. For ex ample, many fans claim that Godzilla is actually female; according to the films, they argue, the original Godzilla died in the 1954 film and the monster in the sequel, Gigantis, the Fire Monster (1955), was supposed to be his mate, who re mained the star of the series through 1975. Other fans, such as Barry Goldberg, take this textual analysis a step further, using the time travel narrative of Godzilla vs. King Ghidora to show that Godzilla’s origin is constantly being rewritten, that there is no continuity in the series, and that therefore neither position can be ad equately supported. This lack of continuity thus forms a gap or a contradiction in the text, and discussions of Godzilla’s gender become an attempt to resolve this contradiction, to reseal the gap by re-inscribing continuity where it is lacking. What this debate exposes, however, is that such activity is fruitless because it re quires an interpretive foundation among fans which is absent: Goldberg’s argu ment is a convincing one, but it effectively erases the text as a source of interpre tation, thus preventing discussion on this or any other issue. Jenkins uses Stanley Fish’s notion of an “interpretive community” to ex plain how a fan culture becomes “institutionalized,” how it develops into an active community of readers: “A certain common ground, a set of shared assumptions, interpretive and rhetorical strategies, inferential moves, semantic fields and meta phors, must exist as preconditions for meaningful debate over specific interpreta tions” (89). While American Godzilla fan culture is clearly attempting to resolve the contradictions and ambiguities in the text, it seems to lack this interpretive groundwork. It is a culture without a dominant metaphor, representing a new prob lem for fan ethnography. For many fans, the number of contradictions and ambi guities in the text seems insurmountable, and they prefer to simply enjoy these films at a level beyond interpretation, as unintelligible comedies. For others, these ambiguities mark a cultural prejudice which they hope to undo, and the promise of their reading formations is an “acultural” or non-judgmental interpretation. Ac cording to Bill Warren, for example, to complain that Japanese science fiction films fail to “meet American standards of realism is being culturally jingoistic” (129); therefore, if viewers are able to “watch [these] pictures . . . with at least an effort toward being acultural, the films are far more rewarding on every level” (670). And for yet a third group of fans, these claims of cultural awareness have