The Social Contract
Scream, Ghidorah, scream
There’s a great ripping zipper-noise that boils slowly from the bottom of the soundscape whenever Godzilla is making ready to do his thing, quite literally so in the case of the IMAX screen, I mean it seems to come from somewhere below the bottom of the earth and then wind its way upwards as though threatening to tear that 6-storey screenin half. The sound is, to me, one of the great sensual experiences of the human lifetime. Some things you feel in your gut and some you feel in your soul; like any good couple of minutes of beats on a well-played didgeridoo, Godzilla’s thrum is the latter.
The noise is deployed to great effect in all the superlative, modern Godzilla movies — the 2021 American entry, Adam Wingard’s Godzilla vs. Kong, or the two most recent Japanese efforts, Takashi Yamazaki’s Godzillas Minus One and now Zero, luxuriate in the effect more than once. (When MechaGodzilla gets all huffy back at Godz and Kong during the former, it’s like a red-on-blue onscreen orgasm detonating over Hong Kong.)
Sometimes the aural effect of a kaiju kaijuing is all I need to make sense of the world (I recall this feeling, particularly, during a mid-pandemic viewing of James Gunn’s The Suicide Squad, when Starro turned up). The sound mix of Godzilla Minus Zero is punishing — it might be the loudest film I’ve ever seen, where the secondary dimension was always a sense that yes, this is the exact right amount of loud. I have no idea how one sound-mixes like that. It must be a very human art.
There is a competing sound effect in Godzilla Minus Zero, which is King Ghidorah’s absolutely demented scream, and the needle-sharp sound of its (her? I know the name says “King” but I don’t buy it) lightning, when it punching a hole in the universe at something approaching the speed of light. Everyone loves Godz, but I love King Ghidorah, depicted here as an outright psychopath who just happens to be a kaiju. It/she is just as angry as the moment feels, “the moment” in Minus Zero being “the war is over and we won the big battle but we all have to keep going and rebuilding and making sense of it anyway.” Like Daenerys burning King’s Landing, Ghidorah is here to say: you wanna act like a pack of assholes? Watch my crazy.
Whatever societal kaiju broke containment ten or so years ago, it sure is wearying. Acting like a pack of assholes seems to be the dividend a plurality of mankind paid itself, with the evident expectation that the bill was never coming due and that the rest of us weren’t strong enough to matter — that things had just changed, and that mutual cooperation wasn’t actually a thing, and that not going ahead and taking your pants off in public was just loser behaviour. It’s all very wearying; every loud car, every mean-spirited shrieker, every motorcycle on the sidewalk. It wears one down. Scream, Ghidorah, scream.
Bookending my Friday afternoon artist date with Godzilla, I was voraciously tearing through page after page of John Carreyrou’s book about Elizabeth Holmes, Bad Blood. I’d just finished Dracula the night before. The sanguine conjunction was unintentional. To think I very nearly hadn’t read this book — I’d had it out from the library since I saw the movie, and very nearly returned it unread for lack of time; and now here it was, the exact page-turner I needed. Maybe I just sought a bit of straight, American, journalistic prose in the wake of Bram Stoker’s gorgeously wrought (and langorously repetitive) horror novel.
I love Bad Blood, even as I am gobsmacked by it: fully recognizing that all portraits are incomplete portraits, I must nonetheless here report that Holmes is lying from before the beginning, in this account. I mean she is literally pretending something exists, that doesn’t and won’t, before the story even starts. The question, forever unanswered, is whether she was knowingly, cunningly lying to effect a longer-term goal (many will say that this is the mechanism of raising venture capital for a startup); or whether she is so powerfully delusional that she genuinely believed that believing in a thing makes it so. You know, like Tinkerbell.
Holmes arrived at an idea for what she thought was a pretty magnificent thing-that-should-exist, back in the aughts, and I ain’t here to quibble on that point. It should exist. A lot of things should exist. It just seems, again by either omission or actual diagnosable insanity, that she never understood that something being something that should exist does not, by default, alchemically translate into its being something that does exist.
Early in the book, an analogy is made that stuck with me all the way through: yes, what the Theranos blood-testing machine was meant to do was theoretically possible. So is living on Mars. That doesn’t make either premise any less of a potential multiple-trillion-dollar, multiple-dozens-of-years work effort, with high risk of failure throughout, in order to actually get there.
Speaking of lunatics who think (or are lying to their investors) that living on Mars is within their grasp: yeah, last week felt good in a lot of ways. I suspect it felt much better for those down south than it did for those of us up here, who are suffering (or outright ignoring) the dismantling of our own sovereignty, rights, and culture by a far less obvious creep at the helm of our country. But the Great Correction, Trump Edition, whiffed of hope. I can’t get the idea out of my head that, taken with a few other markers worldwide, it whiffs of a potential wind change that has wider reach than just America. A larger hope: that we’ve gotten past the tipping point in the broken social contract; the point at which it is now officially, widely, bad enough that there can no longer be any meaningful coalitions in democratic societies besides the ones that say “fix this.” “We can’t go on like this.” “We don’t want to be like this anymore.”
I hope so. That would be nice. It would still take decades to undo the smear of the last ten years — the breaking of that social contract in the first place; the “fuck your feelings” of it all — but it might point the arrow in the right direction before it’s all too late. I wonder whether the smart move in democracies like our own is to get ahead of the curve — for corporations and governments to stop skating further and further to the right like Carney, before a Great Correction comes for you too. Wake up to the fact that it was Twitter that was the echo chamber; that there’s a lot more people tired of the bullshit than there are rage-baiters screaming about Black people in the The Acolyte. That — like Holmes’ blood machine or Musk’s flying car — there’s no there there. Look how many major publications and major corporations and major rich people worked their entire asses off to force this election further into the fascist shitstorm, and failed. Can you imagine how much counter-pressure there must be to that shitstorm, for that to have happened?*
*Late-breaking edit: in terms of not skating to where the puck will be, we have the Rock Faced Boy replacing James Gunn with a Christian family entertainment producer at the head of DC Studios. Literally lol
That the American Nazi and its unelected leader went down swinging with Anakin Skywalker memes and, for some reason, a hentai-inflected Hogwarts schoolgirl they want to fuck, is just… um… icing on the cake? I don’t know. I don’t even know what the cake looks like anymore. Even A More Civilized Age had to issue an about-face on the Anakin thing as card-carrying members of the “I can fix him” brigade (even as they made ready to moisten their seats with talk of the Chosen One’s arrival in the Star Wars: Zero Company video game).
I’ve always felt uneasy with the millennial (and younger) generation’s latent embrace of “Anakin would have been fine if the Jedi Council hadn’t been so mean” as some kind of borked emo rallying cry. It’s a misread of the story, for one thing, not that Lucas’ murky dramaturgy ever did anyone any favours in that regard. But maybe I’ll crib from something I read this week and say that Star Wars as a brand has never felt more over to me than it did this week, when it joined Harry Potter on the list of “things the Nazis are using to prop up their limpid grievance addiction.” The nostalgia project, bought and paid for by every entertainment company in America, was always headed in this direction. You can only milk false memories of fragile happiness for so long.
I was thinking of something else while watching Godzilla Minus Zero: that it’s no small feat, so expertly building a new, vivid artistic idea inside something that also so perfectly engages with all the nostalgia markers of a piece of pop culture. People try this all the time, now — people make movies about trying this. I think we should be doing it less, for general reasons; and now for a specific one: if you can’t do nostalgia-bait as well as the handful of people who have really nailed it, why even bother?
But I’ll also allow: if it’s Ghidorah screaming, or Godzilla roaring, or the sheer dreadful anguish of the characters in Minus Zero reckoning with their survival of a nuclear war and a Godzilla attack and there’s another monster now and she’s even crazier, what??, maybe it expresses something horrid and knowable at the very heart of the mess of the last decade of our lives: that the anger down there is real. That we don’t have to contain it. That we can, all of us, scream.
The cashword is:
From A to Zygon
The Harry Potter Shit List
Updated November 7, 2026
- Rafe Spall
- David Threlfall
- Leo Bill
- Andrew Brooke
- Daniel Fearn
- Laura Smyth
- Molly Hewitt-Richards
- Jasper Talbot
- Hannah Chinn
- Harry Gilby
- David Ellison
- Ynon Kreiz
- Hans Zimmer
- Lenny Rush
- Billy Barratt
- Rupert Grint
- Kit Harrington
- Nicholas Hoult
- Bel Powley
- Tim Horton’s
- Peter Serafinowicz
- Warwick Davis
- Lambert Wilson
- Anton Lesser
- Andy Greenwalt
- John Lithgow
- Janet McTeer
- Nick Frost
- Paapa Essiedu
- Simon Pegg
- Johnny Flynn
- Daniel Rigby
- Bertie Carvel
- Hugh Laurie
- Tom Felton
- Matthew McFadyen
- Riz Ahmed
- Mark Addy
- Michelle Gomez
- Keira Knightley
- Alex Hassell
- Iwan Rheon
- James McAvoy
- Ruth Wilson
- Bill Nighy
- Cush Jumbo
- The New York Times
- Francesca Gardiner
- Jon Brown
- Mark Mylod
- Casey Bloys
- David Zaslav
- J.K. Rowling
Furthermore and finally
- Hey, speaking of liars, and fascists. (Typebar Magazine)
- It’s come to my attention that you aren’t watching The Lowdown. Watch The Lowdown. (Hulu)
- And now I have to buy the Kubrick box gufuclkjasd;fiuas;doiuf;lkn ;hoioaiy!!!!!! (Shiny Things)
So,
- For obvious reasons, one of my favourite TikTok channels is Grandad Joe, who is 93, British, and cooks everything in lard. This is maybe my favourite video of his ever, because he casually drops that he’s had 2 heart attacks on the back of all that, but it’s okay because they didn’t kill him. (TikTok)
- Never missing, ASIS Film Models has gone all-in on Biddy Blas. Now do Goli & 02-R0. (ASIS)
- On a similar note, here’s my latest in an ever-dwindling supply of toy reviews:
