Interview, uh, September 15th, 1958, uh, subject one, Matthew Patrick, subject Godzilla, whatever
the hell that is.
So, tell me, Mr. Patrick, what exactly did you see?
You don't understand, it wasn't, it wasn't a person, it wasn't human, at least not anymore.
How?
It was just a man in a suit.
No, no, it's something else now, it mutated, and it's coming for us.
Hello, Internet!
Welcome to Film Theory, the show that has the world's best imitation of the Godzilla
roar.
Ah!
That was my very lame Godzilla scream.
Listen, Toho is notoriously protective of that roar.
It's the best that we're gonna do, alright?
So we're all familiar with Godzilla, right?
King of the Monsters, been a mainstay in movie theaters for the past seven decades.
He's appeared in nearly 40 films and single-handedly pioneered the whole kaiju genre.
And of course, with that amount of history, you're gonna have a ton of different interpretations
of the character, from the big-budget American movies where he fights King Kong in the Monster
Verse to true low-budget horror masterpieces like this year's Godzilla Minus One.
But today, I wanna look at a completely different take on the character, one that's available
right here, right now on good ol' YouTube.com, a new analog horror series known simply as
The Man in the Suit.
You're not hearing that incorrectly, it's an analog horror series about Godzilla, or
at least the human inside of Godzilla.
And let me tell you loyal theorists, the story that it tells is simultaneously scary, tragic,
and heartbreaking.
It's an overcrowded genre full of cheap thrills, The Man in the Suit's covering some massive
topics with devastating themes, which is only made more impressive once you realize that
the channel's creator, unknowingly, is just doing this all on their phone.
Also, and uh, this is just a side note here, it recently came to my attention that unknowingly
was getting harassed by a small subset of the Godzilla fan community for the series,
and thinking about ending the entire thing.
To which I say first off, unknowingly, your work is great.
The story that you're telling, it's mature, it's thoughtful.
Don't let a small group of whiny, butt-hurt man-children diminish the great work that
you're doing.
I love those butt-hurt man-children.
If you are one of those people who harass someone's fan creation because the visuals
are bad, or the story isn't what you like, guess what?
You are a baby, and you need to go change your dipey.
Wah-wah man-baby, go back to your crib.
Valid constructive criticism, yeah, that's one thing, that is great.
It is valuable to creators across the board.
But sending death threats to a kid making a fan series on his phone because in your
eyes it disrespects your rubber suit lizard monster?
Guess what?
You're the real monster.
Oh boy, I went a little bit harder than I expected on that one, but I had to get it
off my chest.
You see, in case you missed it, I made an announcement over on Game Theory that these
next 10 weeks of episodes will actually be my final 10 weeks of hosting these channels.
Don't get me wrong, I'm still going to be around working on really cool projects in
the background, including a Lo-Fi related ARG that I'm just really hyped about, but
it's not going to be me recording these scripts every single week.
I talk about it in a lot more detail over there, in case you're curious as to what's
coming next, but the long and short of it is that my time as the film theorist is coming
to a close.
But I'm just going to tell it like it is.
And Toxic fans, you suck.
You have ruined so many series for so many people.
You are the worst.
Go home.
Let people enjoy what they want without you trying to gatekeep it.
And everyone else out there, don't feed the trolls.
Ignore them.
They'll go away to their lonely little holes.
Whew, kept that one pent up for a while.
Anyway, the man in the suit.
It harkens back to the earliest days of the Godzilla franchise, when all special effects
had to be done practically.
So to simulate a giant lizard terrorizing Tokyo, the filmmakers had a real stuntman
put on a big rubber suit and stomp through miniature models of the cities it was fighting
in.
However, working in these suits was a far bigger challenge than you might initially
realize.
They had no eye holes for the actors to see out of.
They weighed over 220 pounds.
Internally, they heated up to extreme temperatures, and they were so difficult to breathe in that
the crew often had to attach a tube to get the actor air.
A tube that had to be removed when they were actually filming the darn thing.
There was even one incident where an actor almost drowned when his breathing tube fell
out as he was being lowered into a pool of freezing water.
That right there?
It already sounds like a terrifying experience, but the man in the suit takes things a step
further, reimagining that claustrophobic experience as one that never ends, as the suit completely
consumes the person inside, turning them into a mutant monster themselves.
But underneath all of this monster business is actually a surprisingly heartfelt story
about pain, grief, and overcoming cycles of violence brought about by one of the worst
tragedies in human history.
Yeah, this is one of those series, friends.
So charge up that atomic breath, loyal theorists, as we begin to unzip the secrets of the man
in the suit.
Now, before we actually hop into the discussion, I did want to acknowledge up front that the
series includes fictionalized versions of real people who actually existed.
This includes the real actors who played characters like Godzilla and the other kaiju.
These aren't just anonymous stunt people.
However, the man in the suit is also clearly set in an alternate universe, dealing with
events that never actually happened, even if they are happening to real people.
I just wanted to clarify that because when you're dealing with these sorts of online
analog horror series or ARGs based on dramatized versions of real events, it's best to clearly
separate the real fact from the fiction.
So in classic analog horror fashion, the actual plot of the man in the suit isn't exactly
the easiest thing to follow.
Everything's told to us through VHS tapes uploaded by an anonymous American cameraman
who worked on some of the original Godzilla movies back in the day.
And it was far more disturbing than you might think.
The original actor hired to get into the Godzilla suit became obsessed with it, staying in costume
the entire time that he was on set during breaks, even taking it home after work despite
being told not to.
The producer on the film says that it's almost like the suit was talking to the actor.
Eventually, the actor started calling himself Goji, a nickname borrowed from Gojira, the
Japanese name for Godzilla.
Now, he might chalk all this up as an actor taking his role very seriously.
I mean, this guy could very well be the Jared Leto of kaiju films.
But quickly, things start to escalate, taking a turn for the worst.
Goji's breathing becomes strange, and he stops moving entirely for minutes on end,
despite the crew's best efforts to keep him on track.
Eventually, they decide to take a look inside the suit to check on Goji, but what they found
inside was no longer human.
Goji's flesh and bones had grown into the suit, flesh filling all the empty space inside.
His organs rearranged, and he's lost his vocal cords, though he could still see out
of the suit's eye sockets with bloodshot eyes.
The suit has become his new skin, his new body.
The man and the suit have become one.
Of course, instead of doing everything they can to help this obviously suffering man that
they had literally transformed into a monster, the production company Toho just decides to
keep this turn of events secret from the public, partly out of fear of being sued, but mostly
because Godzilla was just making him a whole lot of money.
They had merch to sell and movies to make, baby, so the show had to go on.
And now, hey, they had themselves an actor fully dedicated to the part.
However, as the years roll on, it becomes clear that Toho has no real control over the creature.
During the filming of the sequel, while shooting a scene between Godzilla and a new monster
called Anguirus, Goji ends up attacking his co-star, biting into his suit, causing the
other actor to bleed.
The stunt performer inside screams out in pain, and when the crew opens up the Anguirus
suit, they find that it, too, has been transformed into a monster, just like Goji.
Toho decides to cover up this incident, too, in an attempt to tame Goji so they can continue
making Godzilla films.
It doesn't work.
They even try removing the man from the suit with power tools, but still nothing.
One time, the monster even manages to escape the studio.
Still, nothing is enough.
While filming the 1962 film King Kong vs. Godzilla, Goji gets enraged by the use of
an American character like King Kong, drowning the actor in the Kong costume during one of
their fight scenes.
In an attempt to keep Goji from biting other stuntmen, the studio creates a puppet for
their next monster, Mothra.
But they don't consider that Goji may just bite anyone in any sort of prosthetic.
A woman inside a prosthesis for one of Mothra's larvae is bitten, and just like Goji and Anguirus
before her, also becomes one with the suit.
Eventually, the situation gets so dire that the government of Japan gets involved.
Intent on covering it all up and studying these mutations more closely, radioactive
material starts growing out of Goji's blood, with some claiming to see eyes within that
material.
Despite all of this, Toho continues on, intent on making more movies, and when the anonymous
cameraman sees the concept art for King Ghidorah, the next monster Godzilla is going to fight,
he decides to step in and try to stop it himself.
And yeah, when it comes to the main story beats for the man in suit, that's more or
less it so far.
Unknowingly I said that the series isn't completed yet, so there is more to come, but
I think that there's more than enough here for us to dig into and explain what exactly
the series is trying to say.
First things first, what exactly is making Goji do all of this?
What's transformed him from an actor in a costume into a beast?
Well according to one expert character in the series, she believes that this mutation
is the byproduct of radioactivity.
This is the work of radiation.
The man in the suit doesn't fuse with the suit instantly.
His body explodes in the suit, then it reshapes itself in the suit.
Now if you know anything about Godzilla as a franchise, all this talk about radiation
should be making your Geiger counters go off.
See, when Godzilla was first created, he wasn't just some city-sized monster of the week for
a horror movie.
He represented something much darker than that.
You have to remember that the first Godzilla movie was released all the way back in 1954,
nearly 70 years ago.
And while that might seem like ancient history to us millennials and zoomers, this was a
particularly important moment for Japanese culture and history.
Think about this time period.
It was less than a decade after the end of World War II, and the US deployment of the
two atomic bombs that devastated the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
This is where Godzilla comes from.
A monster literally created from nuclear radiation from an atomic bomb test mutating a prehistoric
lizard living under the Pacific Ocean.
For the original audience of this film, the idea of a kaiju like Godzilla being an unintended
consequence of nuclear waste would have been a very real, legitimate fear, considering
that we had no idea what the long-term effects of this level of nuclear radiation were.
But that's just the surface-level reading of Godzilla.
There's a deeper one here that not only has the King of Monsters standing in as a
product of mutation, but as an allegory for the nuclear bombs themselves.
As the director of the original film put it, if Godzilla had just been some animal,
it could have been killed with traditional weaponry.
Sure, it would still be a threat, but not the true terror that we see present on screen.
Godzilla is the atomic bomb.
The destruction that he leaves behind, it's indiscriminate.
He's an unstoppable force, devoid of morality, destroying anything and everything in his
path and leaving nothing behind but rubble.
This is also why the powerful beam attack that Godzilla shoots out of his mouth is called
his atomic breath, even sometimes being depicted as creating a mushroom cloud similar to a
nuclear explosion.
Godzilla is both metaphorically and literally a nuclear weapon.
And this is what Unknowingly and the Man in the Suit is using as a jumping off point for
their story.
Don't believe me?
The connection is further driven home during the video Suit Trial, where we see Toho experimenting
with Goji to play on audio tracks to see how it reacts.
During one such test, we hear Goji spew in some garbled mess in what appears to be English.
At first, it's very difficult to make out, but if you listen closely, speeding up the
audio track, you realize that Goji is actually reciting a quote from famous physicist J.
Robert Oppenheimer.
The main architect of the American atomic program and the leader of the Manhattan Project.
Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.
This is a very real thing that Oppenheimer said years after the bombings of Hiroshima
and Nagasaki, showing immense guilt for the unspeakable destruction that his scientific
breakthroughs caused to not only the people of Japan, but potentially every human on the planet.
Fun fact, by the way, Oppenheimer actually said this quote in 1965, at least four to
five years after this point in the Man in the Suit takes place, but hey, we've already
established that it's an alternate universe, so who knows, maybe things just happened in
a different order in that timeline.
Regardless, this is still an incredibly heavy and important historical quote, and given
what we know about the history and symbolism of Godzilla as a franchise, there is clearly
some level of deeper connection here.
Thankfully, unknowingly has left us plenty of breadcrumbs to follow.
In classic analog horror fashion, there's more hidden in each of these uploads than
just the videos themselves.
For instance, if you take a peek down below the videos, you'll find some text in the
description written in Japanese, and we can learn a lot from what's said down there.
Like here, in the very first episode's description, it reads as follows,
Godzilla may be a monster, but he seems different to me.
He is rather a god.
I will be the meat of the beast.
I will be the host of Godzilla.
I will live in this beast, because he is the only one who can help us.
There is no god.
Just me.
Goji.
From this, we can tell that the Man in the Suit clearly sees himself as a separate entity
to Godzilla, but he's willing to sacrifice his identity to give Godzilla form, to merge
his flesh with the suit to become something new, to become Goji.
But why?
What's the whole endgame here?
Well, in the description of the Anguirus suit incident, if you translate the Japanese, you're
treated to a conversation between two entities.
At first, I thought this might be a conversation between the suit and the man inside of the
suit, but given that this is on a video about Anguirus and how he was transformed by Goji,
the two people in this back and forth have to be the Goji entity and the man inside of
Anguirus, his first victim, the first person that was transformed by Goji's radioactive
bite.
The man inside Anguirus cries out in pain, calling for God to ease his suffering, but
only Goji answers, telling Anguirus that he knows that he lost his family and that Goji
can make him whole again, that he can take revenge and kill those who wronged him.
And if you're guessing that those who wronged us could be connected to the atomic bomb,
well, you'd be right on the money.
See, Anguirus isn't the only person who lost family during those tragedies.
In the video titled Mailed Message, our American protagonist is sent a VHS tape presumably
created by Goji himself.
Not entirely sure how Goji was able to make a tape with his tiny little stubby arms, but
hey, that's a mystery for another day.
The tape explains that the man in the suit once lived in Hiroshima and happened to be
on a business trip the day that the bomb detonated above the city, which in turn killed his wife
and children.
Goji blames all Americans for his incredible pain, knowing that they cheered when Japan
surrendered, and now he wants to take everything from the Americans in return.
And suddenly Goji's behavior in other parts of the series makes a lot more sense.
This is why he became so hostile during the production of King Kong vs. Godzilla.
It was a co-production with American producers and American characters.
And at least in Unknowingly's universe, American crew. This enraged Goji, who saw the entire
production as a betrayal of not only himself, but of Japan as a whole.
As another quote hidden in the video description says, he sees everyone involved as filthy
traitors, playing with him like a toy, forcing him to work with the people who killed his
family.
And this anger is why the situation eventually boils over during the filming.
The script called for King Kong to win, and that's what happens in the real world version
of the movie.
But here, when the two tumble into the sea, only Goji emerges, having drowned the actor
playing Kong, eliminating someone that he saw as a traitor.
Now all of this makes for a really compelling story, and I'm kind of amazed by how much
detail and nuance is packed into what appears to be a simple series of slideshows.
But what is this story trying to tell us on a thematic level?
Why did Unknowingly make this in the first place?
Well, when you start putting everything together, it's clear that this is a tale of two parts.
Grief and vengeance.
On the one hand, the man in the suit is clearly a tragic character.
In one moment, he lost both his family and his country.
That kind of grief is hard to heal, but it's easy to fester, becoming anger, frustration,
hatred.
That is the path forward that Goji pursues, embracing this symbol of the very thing that
took his family from him, and directing it towards the people that he believes actually
hurt him.
But to what end?
What will that actually do?
If he manages to accomplish his goal, to exact his vengeance, will it bring his family back?
No.
It will cause more pain.
More suffering.
And not even on the people that Goji wants to see suffer.
Think about the people that Goji has actually hurt in the series so far.
He's bitten two actors in costumes and drowned a third on set.
But all of these people were themselves Japanese.
In his effort to get revenge on the people that he believes hurt him, that killed his
family, instead, he's only succeeding in hurting the people that are trying to help,
who themselves were already hurting.
In post-war Japan, we actually see this bear out in the crime statistics.
Right after the war, when anger against the Americans would have been at its highest,
crime rates were among the highest in Japan's modern history.
These sorts of crimes wouldn't have hurt the Americans, they're just hurting their
fellow Japanese people.
But the saddest part?
This drive for revenge, to extract vengeance and pain on America for dropping those bombs
at the end of the war?
It's not something that unites Goji with the rest of his country.
When he finally escapes Toho's studio and explores the outside world for the first time
in a decade, Goji is shocked to see how the rest of Japan has chosen to deal with the
pain from the tragedy.
Instead of a country preparing to strike back, he finds a country that's more or less at peace.
As goji says, quote, this place, the outside air, the cars, the windows, the house, did they
just move on?
Will we forget?
That right there?
It's a valid question.
Will they just forget?
Thankfully, this is a case where we do have an answer.
We as a species cannot and should not forget the unstoppable destruction of nuclear weapons.
Several years ago, I was fortunate enough to visit Japan and took the opportunity to
visit the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, and it was an eye-opening experience.
It was sobering to see the full extent of what the bombs did to Japan, and it was moving
seeing and hearing the stories about what people went through as they tried to survive
in its aftermath.
But the biggest takeaway that I had of that entire trip was how the nation chose to remember
that unspeakable tragedy.
This wasn't a case of, look at these awful things that the Americans did, instead it
was, look at the horrors of this power that we've unlocked.
We as humanity cannot let this happen to any other nation or any other people ever again,
no matter what.
After World War II, Japan has famously never sought to make nuclear weapons, and they've
even gone so far as to adopt the three non-nuclear principles, promoting the peaceful use of
nuclear energy and work towards global nuclear disarmament.
Japan's chosen to take what many consider to be the darkest moment in human history,
and they've dealt with that grief in a way that ultimately benefits us all, tries to
protect us from our own power.
Those crime rates that I mentioned a second ago, in the 50s they plummeted, and they remained
low for decades.
This led to a boom in Japan's economy, which in turn led to the creation of technology
that ultimately benefited everyone.
They didn't let the cycle of violence continue, they didn't just feed into the darkness
and fuel the anger.
They didn't become the monster, the man in the suit, like Goji did.
And now, we all, as a society, are better for that.
The question now is, what does it take for all of us to step out of the suit?
But hey, that's just a theory, A FILM THEORY.
Aaaaaand cut.