Busan Midnight Movie: Gappa, the Triphibian Monster (3/13/21)

This week on the Busan Midnight Movie: Gappa, The Triphibian Monster, aka Monster from a Prehistoric Planet! Explorers searching for exotic animals to populate a publishing magnate’s theme park discover Gappa, a heretofore unknown prehistoric beast! Only Gappa is freshly hatched and its parents are not happy to see it taken away.

This is a movie I wrote about briefly almost 13 years ago when I was doing the PD Project, the precursor to the Misery Mill. Back then I noted,

The movie can be pretty shocking though. A female scientist is asked why she isn't at home making babies and the film has Japanese people in blackface. There is some craziness going on here.

What a difference time makes! I’m much less sanguine about the blackface now, so actively uncomfortable that I debated whether to use the movie or not. Honestly, in a few years’ time, I probably would drop it from the schedule even if I had already announced it.

Here’s what I wrote about this movie and then cut from the episode’s script:

Tonight's feature is Gappa, the Triphibian Monster and let's address the pigeon-faced beast in the room: blackface. The immediate defense of it would be "consider the context," and certainly context matters. This is a Japanese film so it does not have the same cultural associations with blackface that people from the United States would have. Still, they chose to use skin tone to differentiate the islanders from the Japanese characters, as though the shirts vs skins dichotomy of the costumes wasn't enough. The filmmakers wanted to use that idea of "blackness" as "other" and that's why the islanders look the way they do. Even if you're okay with that idea, the film has Americans playing Americans instead of Japanese people done up as mimes. That suggests that it's not that the filmmakers couldn't hire black people for the roles, it's that they didn't or wouldn't.

And context works both ways. We should not only consider the context of when the film was made but also the context of when the film is being shown: right now. Even though I'm pointing up the problematic aspects of this film, I'm still choosing to show it, still implicitly saying to my audience, "eh, you can look past this." And there are a couple reasons for that. One is laziness: I wanted to do kaiju movies all month long and, unless I wanted to do Gamera movies every week, this was what was available. I just have to hope that by announcing, "this is here and it's not okay" I'm at least mitigating some of the harm done by choosing to show this, but I have to acknowledge that I still chose to show it.

But the other reason I chose to show it is specifically to have this discussion. In the community of midnight-movie aficionados, part of the pleasure we take from these old films is that "they don't make them like this anymore," but that phrase does a lot of work. Of course it means there is a pleasure in seeing ways of telling stories that we don't use anymore. For instance, part of the appeal of old westerns is the amazing stunt work on horseback. The Western is a good example, though, because when some people say "they don't make them like that anymore," they're talking about the kind of politics that used to be portrayed on screen and lamenting their absence. The racial and gender politics in this movie--and we haven't even said a word about that "shut up, quit your job, make babies" exchange--are what that part of the audience wants. What they miss from these old films IS the overt racism, misogyny, and every other kind of hierarchy and bigotry that used to be not only the norm on screen, but violently enforced off of it. Whenever we showcase these films without highlighting and calling out those elements, we leave a space for that subset to thrive and, even worse, start spreading and normalizing the even worse aspects of their ideology.

There is a lot to recommend this film: the cinematography is fantastic, the landscapes look amazing, and, when the monsters finally arrive in this second half, they look great. Plus all the city-smashy stuff is a lot of fun. But it's no fun if we're telling our friends and neighbors to ignore problematic aspects of a film and certainly no fun for them to have to wonder, whenever things like overt racism pops up in a film and we DON'T say anything about it, if that's not what we're actually tuning in for.

So, with that unexpectedly heavy aside finished, let's return to the second half of Gappa, the Triphibian Monster.

That was cut due to time because the whole thing is as long as the entirety of the content I write for other episodes. However, it was something I wanted to say and to share. One of the things I think about when doing this midnight movie stuff is that you have to engage with the text somehow. I could say that post-MST3k it’s no longer enough to just show the movie, but the reality is these movies are readily available. What makes the experience of watching them with the framing device of a host better than just watching the movie itself? The host has to add something to the experience.

When you have a movie with problematic content like this, that kind of engagement is doubly important. As Stewart Lee notes, you’re cultivating an audience, drawing the boundaries around who is and is not included in the experience. If you let moments of explicit racism, sexism, homophobia, or a whole host of other things go unremarked, you’re telling your audience that people who take issue with those things aren’t welcome, that you don’t want them.

At the end of the day, I want, not just in my audience but in the broader community I’m a part of, to spend time with the people who would stand up and call those things out.

Wrap Up:

The Good: amazing print. The version I watched for the PD Project so long ago was a pan-and-scan 4:3 crop that was dramatically faded. This print is so good you might think you're watching a good movie.

The monster design. The improved print also lets us enjoy the high-quality monster design. The Gappas look like kaiju versions of gargoyles and that’s a twist I hadn’t seen before. Also, when I watched this for the PD Project, I described one of the monsters as something “choking on a starfish,” but in the improved print it’s clear the monster is carrying an octopus to feed its baby. Great detail!

The Bad: really? After all that?

Additionally: Pretty boring. Despite the beautiful cinematography, there’s not much action on screen, not even much activity with the monsters until the second half. On top of that, the characters are whisper-thin. Some reviews on IMDB describe this as a satire of kaiju films, but it feels much more like an unambitious pastiche, like the characters are just there to fill out a checklist rather than provide any story or interest of their own.

Production note: I was so happy to find clips of the Gappa giving the side-eye for the trailer. Being able to juxtapose those shots with the examples of blackface and misogyny in the film was a lot of fun for me.

Gappa, the Triphibian Monster

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