I adore Saturdays.

Nick and I get big, steaming cups of chai and mammoth blueberry muffins, then settle in to watch Japanese Kaijū films. If you're not a fan of such empyrean lunacy, it's difficult to fully articulate the appeal.

Kaijū means something kind of like "strange animal" or "weird beast" in Japanese. Most westerners simply use the term "monster," when they mean kaijū, but that word doesn't quite sum it up. The most famous are the daikaijū, or "giant monsters" and Godzilla (Gojira) is of course the best known and served as a painful catharsis for a nation (and a world), still trying to process the atomic attacks at Nagasaki and Hiroshima. Daikaijū are not about fearing for your life; they're about fearing for your species.

Unlike most western monsters, which are personal and prey on individuals (think Dracula, Wolfman, Freddy Krueger and Frankenstein's Monster), daikaijū are usually cinematic manifestations of group terror. Most westerners have a hard time mustering sympathy for an entire city as it gets squashed; they're more likely to care about Mike and Suzy as they run from Jason Voorhees. There's probably a word or three already concocted for this preference, but I like to call it Cinematic Population Dissociation (CPD) and it's the reason that so many people need individual characters to be in danger (usually a newly-forming hetero couple) in order to see the monster as a real threat.

CPD may arguably also be responsible for the mass dislike of many sequels. Think about some recent series and their receptions: The Matrix sequels, The Star Wars prequels, and the latest installments of Pirates of the Caribbean, just to name a few. These were instances where the narrative was taken somewhat away from the central story of a handful of individual characters, and brought into a larger world of mass populations, metaphorical cinamatic stand-ins for humanity herself. Whatever reasons people may give for their dislike of these sequels, you can bet that an inability to be moved by the plight of the species itself is large, resounding part of their distaste.

There are a handful of westerners, who were fortunate enough to be born without CPD, and I'm proud to count myself amongst them. Luckily for me, I have a CPDless boyfriend, too. It means we get to enjoy all the population/species-driven sequels that everyone else thought were useless, and it means that we get to kick back with our muffins and chai, to watch giant weird beasts wrestle and destroy cities in the process.

Today, we'll be watching either Godzilla vs. Hedorah (Gojira tai Hedorâ, directed by Yoshimitsu Banno, 1971) or The Mysterians (Chikyu Boeigun, directed by Ishirô Honda, 1957) or both, if I'm lucky.

Later, yo.

M-A