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