On Godzilla and the Nature and Conditions of Cultural Success; or, Shedding the Skin

Attention conservation notice: 1100+ words of Deep Thoughts on a creature-feature monster and cultural selection, from someone with no qualifications to write on either subject. Expresses long-held semi-crank notions; composed while simultaneously reading Morin on diffusion chains and drinking sake; revived over a year after it was drafted because Henry was posting about similar themes, finally posted because I am procrasting finishing a grant proposal celebrating submitting a grant proposal on time.

Godzilla is an outstanding example of large-scale cultural success, and of how successful cultural items become detached from their original meanings.

Godzilla's origins are very much in a particular time and place, namely Japan, recently (if not quite immediately) post-WWII and the national trauma of the atomic bombings and their lingering effects. This is a very particular setting, on the world-historical scale. It is now seven decades in the past, and so increasingly gone from living memory, even for the very long-lived population of Japan.

Against this, Godzilla has been tremendously successful culturally all over the world, over basically the whole time since it appeared. I don't mean that it's made money (thought it has) --- I mean that it has been popular, that people have liked consuming stories (and images and toys and other representations) about it, that they have liked creating such representations, and that they have liked thinking about and with Godzilla.. (In contemporary America, for instance, Godzilla is so successful that the suffix "-zilla" is a morpheme, denoting something like "a destructive, mindlessly-enraged form of an entity".) Necessarily, the vast majority of this success and popularity has been distant in time, space, social structure and cultural context from 1950s Japan. How can these two observations --- the specificity of origins and the generality of success --- be reconciled?

To a disturbing extent, of course, any form of cultural success can be self-reinforcing (cf. Salganik et al.), but there is generally something to the representations which succeed (cf., again, Salganik et al.). But, again, Godzilla is endemic in many contexts remote in space, time and other cultural features from immediately-post-war Japan. So it would seem that whatever makes it successful in those contexts, including here and now as I write this, must be different from what made it successful at its point of origin.

It could be that Godzilla is successful in 1950s Japan and in 2010s USA because it happened to fit two very different but very specific cultural niches --- the trauma of defeat culminating in nuclear war, on the one hand; and (to make something up) a compulsive desire for re-enactments of 9/11 on the other hand. But explaining wide-spread success by a series of particular fits falters as we consider all the many other social contexts in which Godzilla has been popular. Maybe it happened, by chance, to appeal narrowly to one new context, but two? three? ten?

An alternative is that Godzilla has managed to spread because it appeals to tastes which are not very context-specific, but on the contrary very widely distributed, if not necessarily constant and universal. In the case of Godzilla, we have a monster who breaks big things and breathes fire: an object of thought, in other words, enduringly relevant to crude interests in predators, in destruction, and in fire. Since those interests are very common across all social contexts, something which appeals to them has a very good source of "pull".

This is not to say that Godzilla wasn't, originally, all about being the only country ever atom-bombed into submission. But it is to say that we can draw a useful distinction between the meanings successful cultural products had originally and those attached to them as they diffuse. It is analogous to the distinction the old philosophy of science used to draw between an idea's "context of discovery" and its "context of justification", though that had a normative force I am not aiming at. (For the record, I think that many of the criticisms of the discovery-justification distinction are weak, mis-conceived or just flat wrong, and that it's actually a pretty useful distinction. But that's another story for another time.)

For Godzilla, like many other successful cultural products, the "context of invention" was a very historically-specific confluence of issues, concerns and predecessors. But the "context of diffusion" was that it could appeal to vastly more generic tastes, and make use of vastly more generic opport