Good Boy (2025), A Lynchian Hound-Led Halloween Film

 

By Joe Gibson

 

Introduction

 

This article includes some spoilers, mostly labeled in advance.

 

Good Boy 2025 (there have been other films by this same title in 2022 and 2023) is essentially a haunted house movie where the dog is the main character whose perspective and reactions frame our understanding of the story and dictate its trajectory. This is the directorial debut of Ben Leonberg, the real life owner of the dog, Indy, and it has a very small cast mainly consisting of Indy (the name is the same for his character), his owner Todd, and a couple other characters. (Leonberg has directed shorts and has credentials for both receiving a degree in filmmaking as well as teaching filmmaking to others, but a first feature film is still a milestone.)

 

From the moment I learned this movie existed, it was one of my most anticipated movies of the year, and, having learned more about it, I find it very impressive. The film took about three years to film because Indy is just a normal dog, not a trained actor, and, if you watch the film in theaters right now, there will be a section at the end where Leonberg talks about how they shot some of those scenes.

 

Review

 

The film is incredibly atmospheric, firmly planting you in a vulnerable perspective. The camera is low to the ground as it is for Indy, who is also the only character that the camera does close-ups for. The sound design plays up the sound of house creaks and windshield wipers because that is how it would be for the dog (also the flickering and pulsing of lights viscerally follows the flow of the supernatural). However, it would be imprecise to say that Indy is the POV character as the camera follows him rather than protruding from his intentions. We see the shadows come into view behind him a few seconds before he senses them so we are in a privileged perspective relative to Indy, where we know what might happen, but we are still stuck on his level unable to do anything to change what he is going through.

 

The film to prove this point also mixes reality with the surreal, ripping us from Indy’s nightmares to a Shadow Man’s hunt for Indy to dreamlike visions of another dog. Consequently, this is at least a little Lynchian; I do not expect great debate over that point. More than anything else, the film wants you to be able to feel the horror it creates without a grounding human presence (human faces are largely out of focus in this movie to allow Indy to step up as the true star), and so Leonberg’s directing takes literally every opportunity it can to build and codify that suspense. 

 

However, that is where it becomes very important that the POV character is not technically Indy but us along for the ride. As Leonberg reveals if you stay to the end of the theater experience, they did not have Indy act out these scenes or respond to scary stimuli (they lured him around the set with quacking noises); they are just constantly juxtaposting suspense with Indy’s neutral face to get a response. This is not mathematical precision but a function of the audience establishing emotional continuity, and I get the sense that Leonberg felt like if he eased up even a little on the suspense at all, the illusion might be shattered. (At only 72 minutes, even if you find the game tiresome, it is not that long.) 

 

Personally, I found that formula effective the entire time, but there is also eventually some progression. Consistently, the film executes its scares through lingering on juxtaposing images until something appears in the background like Michael Myers, then pulling back to Indy’s movements, entrenching you in a slow building suspense. Then, late into the movie, it hits you with two back to back jumpscares when the threat becomes more tangible. From this point onward, the reality defying visions and distortions of physical object permanence get more frequent, pulling us deeper into the house and its secrets.

 

Though this all is very interesting, the meat of my reviews are usually the logical consistency of characters and plot, but, while there is a lot to talk about with that, it is also very difficult because of the Lynchian nature of this film’s presentation and its leading man. The movie does not have the capability to explain the details of the haunting as they occur because Indy is a dog, just weaving him through open-ended imagery, confrontations with a Shadow and increasing stakes and obstacles all while still showing him yawn, piss, eat, whine, bark and sleep.

 

 

Interlude

 

I am about to discuss some of the finer details of the movie’s plot, but I will give you every opportunity to leave before I get to those details. First, I should say that I do not think any embargo exists on spoiling this film especially if doesthedogdie.com was allowed to report on this movie before the official release, and, even if it does, I am not any kind of official reviewer of horror media that gets early screenings on contract to withhold specific details or negative criticism. The only reason I got to see this on the 2nd and not the 3rd is because theaters around me had the film open today. Any civilian could have joined me, and any conversation we have in a public forum would have the potential to be this in depth. I strongly advise you not to read the rest of this if you have not seen the movie yet. In a year of great movies, this is still a remarkable experience you should not deprive yourself of. 

 

In any case uh, when I got to the theater, I was alone and then realized the full extent of my actions; I was watching an atmospheric indie horror movie not only in a party of one but in a completely empty theater. And then for some asinine reason, a Lego commercial decided to use zombies to make its pitch (I don’t like zombies). Before it could prime me for terror too much, I realized the commercial was self-defeating. These were not Haitian Zombies (which I tolerate) but Romero Ghouls, and they, stuck within their involuntary impulses, started to gravitate toward the Lego commodities, literally replicating the critique of consumerism that is Dawn of the Dead but unintentionally this time. 

 

Anyway, the film still did suck me into its POV, but I was not terrified. It was more a feeling of resignation to whatever was going to play out. I have stalled long enough. Proceed beyond this point if you wish, but do not say I did not give you every opportunity to avoid spoilers.

 

(Some of) The Plot

 

The film starts with a cold open demonstrating Indy’s perceptiveness and Todd’s illness, splicing in organic exposition to show the backstory of these two characters. Indy, as an expressive character growing in knowledge over the course of the story, does enforce his will on the plot in ways to make him a three dimensional character. Indy’s loyalty to Todd is the central idea to this story, motivating most of the scenes. Though I hesitate to fit it into the traditional Hero’s Journey structure, Indy crosses a threshold exiting the car and going into the scary house because Todd asks him to, and Indy will fight more to save Todd than for his own survival.

 

Following the cold open health episode, after they discharge Todd from the hospital, he decides to leave his apartment and go to his deceased grandfather’s house complete with a graveyard of his many family members that died young in the forest nearby. The grandfather’s house functions as a Gothic Old Dark one, and, while the entity seems to be following Todd there, it becomes clear that his grandfather’s death and the reputation of weird happenings at this house are tied to this. Todd’s name means death, so the stakes are clear.

 

As ghostly visions of a Shadow Man and an older dog correspond to opening doors and disembodied whining, Indy will have to figure out what happened to the grandfather and his dogs and what awaits them in the cellar. Todd, to an extent, is in his own movie getting denied a certain type of healthcare and using candles and incense for homeopathic therapy. When they go into the forest, a character in the distance reveals he is a foxhunter and offers warnings to our heroes.

 

Still, Todd isolates from society and his sister, and barely interacts with the foxhunter, going deeper into the possession of the Shadow, even shutting Indy out from being able to help him to increasing degrees. In these lonely moments, the dog Bandit enters the story, overlaying his memories with our experience of Indy’s perception (we view Bandit and Indy overlaid after Indy finds projections of Bandit’s bloody bandana, and Indy proceeds as if he genuinely perceived those events happening). The Shadow Man’s aura is pervasive; cutting through Bandit’s scenes by being the villain of that story to the point that it took me embarrassingly long to realize that the wisest interpretation of those scenes was that Bandit is actually a good guy.

 

I mentioned there are two back to back jump scares, and I will clarify that on a set-up and pay-off level, one of those is easily predictable because one of the horror movie VHS on the television screen shows that type of scare happening. The foxhunter also repeatedly foreshadows that fox traps are in the area, which we see pay-off late into the movie. The storytelling in that regard is careful, so I really do not know what to do with “Indy has a chain on him that he can’t remove that suddenly transfers to being around Todd” except for magic, unreliable narration or some kind of subtextual reading.

 

I like things to make sense, but I also cannot tell you how much of those confrontations with the Shadow and Bandit were dreams (dogs sleep a lot throughout the day). The ending is actually probably the best place to further that discussion, but the original disclaimer about spoiling the plot would magnify when discussing the ending. Please do not finish this essay before watching the movie, but it is here for when you do.

 

The Ending (Major Spoilers Past Here)

 

I know the discourse surrounding this movie very much relies on the notion that the dog’s survival is the only acceptable and watchable conclusion. (Some have gone even further, declaring that nothing bad can happen to the owner either because it would make the dog sad or that nothing at all should happen to scare the dog, at which point we don’t even have a movie.) However, I have had a more nuanced perspective this entire time. From a dog’s perspective, Indy fighting tooth and nail to his very last and saving his owner, then dying in his arms, would be a glorious worthy end. Even so, there is a logistical error.

 

What can a dog do to defeat a ghost/demon? Dogs may very well be the most pure creatures on this Earth, but the utility of a horror movie based around them is their comparative powerlessness, physically, emotionally and intellectually. I praised the Lynchian dreams before, but with those come questions about the true nature of what he is facing. The flashes of supernatural situations snapping back into the mundane, are they just visions, or does Indy, with the memory of a dog, merely forget fighting his way out, or is it Todd or Bandit saving him most of those times? Each of those means a different thing.

 

 

Going back into the film, the dialogue between Todd and his sister Vera would probably clarify more about what happened to their grandfather, and it is possible I might be able to find something more out about how much power Bandit has as a potential Big Good/Mentor character in this story, but there are deliberate holes here at least to my understanding. I have previously reviewed the atmospheric Noriaki Yuasa directed The Snake Girl And The Silver Haired Witch, which had a similar amount of supernatural and mundane wire crossing that led to logical questions about how the plot actually happens. The contradictions made Sayuri necessarily an unreliable narrator, but I posited that because it was the villain casting doubt on her perspective and Shojo manga (the source material’s genre) focuses on systemic lack of trust in women and girls, the decision was done to match supernatural events to mundane subtext (https://planninecrunch.blogspot.com/2024/09/plan9crunch-review-snake-girl-and.html). Whether or not that makes sense, we need to consider what else this movie is saying than just “here’s a dog and his owner and a Shadow Man trying to kill them.”

 

Alright if you’re still here, you get to read the ending now (I just can’t shake you, huh). Indy survives, but Todd does not. Todd finally understands the full scope of what is happening to him as he melts into the goopy skeletonized Shadow Man, praising Indy as a good boy but telling him he can’t save him. Vera arrives and finds Indy, with the implication that she takes him with her. I still have not spoiled that much about the individual scenes and set-pieces, but I genuinely cannot help myself trying to at least pose some interpretations for this movie. (It was really jarring to see Indy fail to save Todd, but I think it makes sense and also might hint at deeper subtext.)

 

Now, I am pretty sure the Shadow Man was in the cold open, and, even if he weren’t, the physical symptoms of Todd and his grandfather match as well as their ultimate fates. The affliction, whatever it is, affects Todd young, as many of his relatives in the graveyard have died young. There is also a non-zero chance that his grandfather is the Shadow Man, and the idea of Todd becoming his grandfather symbolically has some directorial merit to it. The grandfather predominantly appears through his VHS tapes in the television screen, but there is a notable scene framing Todd’s anguished head in the screen where his grandfather’s would be. Up until that point in the movie, that is technically the clearest view of Todd’s face. (Until the end, no human character gets to really show their face, which matches the Shadow Man in aesthetic.)

 

These similarities mean something, and, though this is a supernatural movie, pending a rewatch, I think it is a valid interpretation that the reason this film has an unreliable narrator that cannot save the day might be because any inheritable affliction that causes Todd to die young would be horrific for a dog to see. Indy grew up as Todd’s dog and now has to witness this dramatic decline of mental and physical health. As I write this, I am having difficulty locating what would necessarily change if this film were just an artistic depiction of a dog’s perspective on his owner’s decline and death. Let me put it this way. Lynchian works meld the mundane and macabre into a surreal dreamlike existence that makes you question how much of what you are witnessing is actually a dream. That mechanism would also work in the inverse; how much of these supernatural happenings are just the way that a dog sees the mundane events?

 

Throughout the movie, Todd coughs up blood, but he also takes unspecified damage to his arm (Indy notices a bandage), sleepwalks, bangs his head on the wall, stops breathing, witnesses himself sleeping and merges in and out with the violent Shadow Man. This is a verifiable cacophony of physical and mental symptoms to where I would not even attempt a diagnosis, but a hereditary illness is killing him and robbing him of his sanity, with his last moment being declarative clarity that nothing can save him. Can you really tell me that I am wrong for wondering if there is a more literal meaning for all of this?

 

Conclusion

In summation, this is a very moving and suspenseful movie positioning us with the dog while also maybe having some kind of deeper meaning that further discourse can help us arrive at. You may find the movie tired and repetitive for just how much of it lathers on that suspense, but this is an experiment from an indie filmmaker (and I also think the execution makes it a masterpiece). Please support this movie’s theatrical run; I do not really know where else you can see something like this movie except if you vote with your dollar that this kind of tense captivating experience is an aspect to modern horror. Let us know your thoughts on the movie in a comment, and thank you all for reading but curses if you read this far without watching the movie first.

First Impressions On Heart Eyes (2025)

 

By Joe Gibson

 

I am aware that 8 months after release is a little late for some “First Impressions”, but, as it is the Halloween season, I am not exactly sure I want to go through the effort of a more in depth close-read review when I could otherwise watch a lot more horror films this month (and select for review from there). And that’s really it. I don’t want to call this a review for pedantic reasons, but I still want to share my thoughts on the film. 

 

Opening in theaters February 7th of 2025, a movie equal parts romantic comedy and slasher film would have been an ideal date night scenario (for whatever reason, it underperformed with couples and did not exactly break-even), but I did not elect to see it at that time. Actually, looking over the early to mid-2025 film releases, I’m pretty sure I didn’t even go to the theater until July this year. In any case, I was excited to watch Heart Eyes. I liked Mason Gooding from his role in the Scream movies, and, back when I was in the target audience, I enjoyed I Didn’t Do It, a Disney Channel show starring Olivia Holt (the other lead of this film). I liked that show because I was a dumb kid, but for what it is worth, I Didn’t Do It was the closest thing Disney Channel had to complex metatextual storytelling in those days because each episode started in medias res and then filled in the context with semi reliable narrators, ending with a plot twist.

 

The film features Christopher Landon as producer with a writing credit, but Josh Ruben directed the movie. Landon is behind a lot of recent slasher hits and almost directed Scream 7, but Josh Ruben seems to be a lot less accomplished. Still, he also directed Werewolves Within, a film that I have not seen yet but have been wanting to for a little while and will eventually get to. Philip Murphy and Michael Kennedy also possess writing credits on this film, and the latter is a frequent collaborator of Landon’s.

 

Olivia Holt plays the main character of this movie, but the end credits use the same billing trick as the television show Bones, having Mason Gooding, the male love interest, to the right and above her name, with hers at the bottom left. (That way, if you read left to right or up to down, they're both first billing and whatever.) But yeah this is a romantic comedy slasher horror movie relying on meshing the disparate elements and also shared tropes into a cohesive product, a challenge to be sure but not an insurmountable one. It wears this inspiration on its chest when it has the romantic comedy beats positioned in between slasher bits where there is the opening kill and then a meet cute or intimate confession of backstory between the leads and then back to slashing and then seemingly defeating the slasher right into chasing down the lover at the airport. A character even refers to the main relationship in this story as "crazy stupid love, actually” within a monologue listing off the names of other romcoms, so the meta references popularized by Scream remain intact.

 

 

Heart Eyes or The Heart Eyes Killer (HEK) wears some kind of leather mask that reminds me of Jason Voorhees' mask even though that was a hockey mask (I think the resemblance for me comes from the brow crease on HEK’s mask or, looking at it now, maybe just the nose bump). Notably, the mask has red night vision Heart Eyes, hence the name. Heart Eyes hunts lovers on Valentine's Day in a different city every time, employing the use of hunting knives, throwing knives and a crossbow to knock out their intended prey and whoever gets in their way. Consequently, the movie has a high kill count, but the heroes also survive really long against a person who can shoot a crossbow very precisely. (It is not impossible to make it work, but I appreciate the comparative restraint of Scream where Ghostface usually only gets a gun in the third act to raise the stakes or in Scream VI where he gets it for one tense scene and then the third act.) 

There are some genuinely interesting shots (shifting perspective and focus mid action scene or using Heart Eye’s vision gimmick in certain scenes), and the director does a good job at eliciting actor performances to serve the tonal balance of absolute contrived romantic sap and tense slasher storytelling. Notably, compared to his Scream character, Mason Gooding is a lot more vulnerable to taking damage in realistic ways here.

 

I was kind of able to figure out the twist in this movie, and part of this blog post will go over my thought process and the clues or red herrings I noticed on a first pass. However, this was difficult because, as I realized watching this, I understand now at least some of the tropes and shortcuts Scream will use in its mysteries but not for other derivative franchises. The first I Know What You Did Last Summer film caught me off guard for not committing to the same type of killer reveal as Scream, and based on the spoilers I have for the film Thanksgiving, it is also possible for these films to just have a solution that does not add up logically (unless the sequels start retconning accomplices like the Saw films). So I did not know going in to err on the side of Scream or IKWYDLS or even Thanksgiving. I will say though, as a hint for any Scream movies if you want to guess them, across all 6 mainline installments, the most surefire method for that is ignoring whatever red herrings the film throws at you and just doing a head count of who is accounted for during every scene.

 

I found it very interesting how, during the opening scene, Heart Eyes killed the couple in a way that inverted the genital symbolism. In art but especially slasher art, penetrative killings are leveraged as phallic imagery, and, as the majority of slasher villains are men but slasher heroes are women, it becomes a way to explore brutal and visceral power dynamics often through knives or machetes or blade hands, all of which penetrate to kill. Heart Eyes uses their blades and arrows to kill the three men in the opening scene. But when the final girl of the opening escapes them by crawling into a wet cylinder, the walls close in on her, crushing her to death. (Incidentally, that cylinder was an industrial wine press.) That is already pretty blatant yonic imagery, but then the red water starts gushing out of vents or holes in the bottom of the machinery, putting a menstrual spin on the death. I have not seen as many slasher films as I would like to, but this seems atypical to me. 

Anyway, when the main detectives stumble upon this crime scene, the dialogue of this murder mystery also frames each of them as suspects but in the reverse way I would expect. The man says “it was probably my incel archetype that did this,” and the woman says “but what if it was a woman like me,” which is really weird because most films would just have them accuse the other person to get this point across efficiently.

 

It is ironic that the film underperformed because one of the romcom elements framing this whole thing is that both of the leads work in marketing for a jewelry company, and Olivia Holt’s character Ally made an advertisement mixing romance with death that bombed and pretty much cost her  job. Life imitating art imitating life, and all that. Through that introduction, the film does weave a compelling story for the heroine with a through line about her fears of intimacy and blood contrasted against her love interest, Mason Gooding’s Jay, who, true to the romcom genre is a bizarre mix of red and green flags because he is clearly analyzing her in every scene and very active in pursuing her (also incidentally a freelancer that was on site for each of Heart Eye’s previous sprees) but also very chivalrous and charismatic.

 

Alright so yeah, in a way that kind of tests your patience in a similar way to IKWYDLS, one of the main cogent suspects for the killer is the love interest (this is Jay, like Ray in IKWYDLS). Jay is not ultimately the killer, and I do not feel bad spoiling that because neither the trailer nor the film felt like pretending he could be. Of the rest of the cast, Ally has a friend named Monica who has a mysterious boyfriend Ally has not met, and Ally’s boss is a Kentucky Fried Tulsi Gabbard looking character with a horde of other employees, and there are five notable characters within a police department as well as Ally’s ex boyfriend and his new girlfriend who have ties to the opening kill victims. 

 

 

Going in, there were a few characters I exonerated for having their motives or introductions revealed too late to be cathartic, and actually I was kind of sort of wrong about one of those (but the strategy overall helped me sift through the red herrings and side characters). The motive is part of the reveal though, so more than that, it was about means and opportunity, and hilariously, though this movie has multiple killers, one of my suspects based on availability still ended up being one of them. (The utility behind having multiple killers is clearing guilty suspects and then prompting fan discussion on which one was in the mask during ambiguous scenes; it is really funny to me that not only could the character that ended up being Heart Eyes have done it alone, but dialogue also tells us exactly who did each scene.)

 

Though the ultimate killer reveal helped some staging inconsistencies (it strains credibility that Heart Eyes could have teleported into Ally’s closet unless there were at least two and one of them had the resources to find out her address quickly), it also creates a contrivance in how a wedding band that has the killer’s initials is important to the investigation into the only other character with those initials (Jay). The killers even reveal that they did not intentionally target Jay from the outset though as turns out to be lucky for them, he was in the same city as each of their previous sprees. Also, pending a rewatch to see if there was better foreshadowing, the film just kind of lies to us about the killers’ motivations until the end, making the motive almost unpredictable. (Obviously, you cannot give away the motive that early one, but the mystery genre is basically just literary Deconstruction in action, and for that to work, there has to be a misspeak in the text that points you to reversing your assumptions about the innocent/guilty binaries in the story, however subtle it is.)

 

I would recommend the movie all in all. Though it is not cleverer or more inspiring than the original Scream, this is a good movie, and it is good in both of the desired genres (which already makes it a better slasher than Scream 3). My main issues with it come from the logistical issues of some plot beats, but those exist in the base genres as well, so making the movie adhere to logic actually risks disrupting those tones. 

 

If I ever actually re-view this movie through an analytical lens, the yonic vs phallic nature of those opening scene deaths would be a good start (in which case I’d probably have to use Freud…who would actually enjoy the part of the movie where one pathetic character calls their lover mommy). I will say though that the film bookends the opening scene in the mid credits scene. In both circumstances, one far off character films two others in a wedding proposal (though I would not call this exactly sequel baiting). Despite some very inventive kills, the gore is rather tame COMPARED to other slasher movies. There is a fair bit of blood shown from minor injuries for realism but also to tie into Ally’s arc. It is rated R and so has the obligatory amount of F bombs. I have no idea if this film will get a sequel, but watch it if you like slashers or romcoms or if you hate both and have a morbidly romantic curiosity.

 

A Marxist Analysis of Ultraman Omega Episode 9

By Joe Gibson

 

…There are probably a lot of points of preface I should bring up before I actually launch into this.

 

Disclaimers

 

First, I recently reviewed what I initially thought were the first 9 episodes of the series Ultraman Omega, airing now, that you can read here: https://planninecrunch.blogspot.com/2025/08/some-truncated-thoughts-on-ultraman.html. The last episode I covered in that post was actually a recap episode very cheaply made from the use of stock footage and even from a writing standpoint but still arguably helped flesh out the characters and their relationships in an important way. However, if I review the back half of the show in another blog post, I would be putting myself at a disadvantage rereviewing a ninth episode mathematically, logically, neurotically, etc. It makes more sense to me to review the 9th episode as its own thing so I can still feel like I got through 9 episodes of the actual story in one chunk. That said, how do I keep this entertaining/justify the existence of a solo episode review amidst episode chunk reviews?

 

One of my favorite types of essays to write for Plan9Crunch is the ‘wacky premise followed through.’ Though “Who Is The Better Savior of Humanity: Jesus Christ Or Gamera” is an objectively absurd question, there is a conversation to be had there at least once (and you can watch that here: Gamera vs Jesus Christ: Who Is The Better Savior of Humanity? April Fools 2025). Viewing an episode of children’s Monster Of The Week television through a Marxist lens is silly enough to get a click but also still a fruitful challenge for me, a 20 year old undergraduate with only passing knowledge and some textbooks’ knowledge of Marxism, to do properly. (So this also requires active research from me, which I think makes this premise slightly funnier.)

 

Marxism, while a political ideology, is also a strain of literary criticism and, like Structuralism or New Criticism, is a tool to understand stories both in terms of their content and the consumer culture they exist in and further through their marketability. Tools (whether for literature or labor) exist to be used when they fit for the job, and just because I use a hammer to strike a nail does not mean I am about to pick up a sickle. I find each version of literary criticism silly and exclusionary in its own way, but I have attempted to use Jungian Structuralism to understand Gamera films, Radical Ecofeminism to understand Nosferatu 2024 and close-reads for many of my other reviews because they work contextually, so why not try this?

 

Analysis

 

Ultraman Omega Episode 9 is titled The Kanenari Kaiju Park because essentially the CEO of the Kanenari Corporation wishes to build a theme park around a sleeping kaiju to rake in the profits. This episode contrasts the views of Sorato, Kosei, Ayumu and the CEO surrounding this kaiju and even serves as Sorato’s introduction to the concept of money (he is not only an extraterrestrial but an amnesiac one, so neither he nor I know if his original society functioned on a monetary system). This episode also exists in the context of tokusatu entertainment where, via costumes, practical effects and some computer generated imagery, performers act as the kaiju and heroes in battles to entertain and sell toys every week. Both the content and the real world existence of this show will be necessary for this analysis.

 

After a cold open discovering the monster Gubila and then the theme song, this episode opens with how Kosei is broke before payday and thus he and Sorato (who both have advanced hunger needs from their work as the Metokaiju and Ultraman respectively) have to fight over a banana with rock/paper/scissors. In an earlier episode, we met Kosei’s boss, a seemingly very benevolent fatherly boss that was letting Kosei live in the warehouse while he figures out if he wants to keep the job and even gives an extension on that offer. He is absent here but implicit to this episodic conflict as the employer. 

 

Sorry, let me rephrase that. A compassionate person characterized as the ideal boss still cannot administer a fair wage to meet his employee’s needs, causing infighting between the poor and hungry labor force that keeps Japan from getting destroyed by kaiju every week. This seems like either an accidental or intentional criticism of capitalism, and this episode goes on to interrogate the characters’ views on money through the materialist concept of understanding life and money through food. 

 

You may be thinking that this commentary is in vain because the hunger of Kosei and Sorato is a comedic cartoon side effect of their heroics and not just class commentary. If the joke functions consistently as is, why read anything else into it? Well, for one thing it keeps coming up in the series and is clearly important to the beginning, middle and end of this episode, but also Marxist literary criticism has a multi-pronged approach to the anthropological use of literature, the expression of political revolution and struggles, and how the form of the literature codifies the ideology. Basically, that means that for this exercise, I have to analyze not only blatant class commentary but the passive literary devices of form including subtext and also the interaction of the art itself with the labor. And let’s do that last one first so it is out of the way for the rest of this.

 

Interrogating anthropological criticism of this episode and the series as a whole, this type of art exists to entertain, and it employs a lot of labor to do so. Suit acting is a very grueling line of work and dangerous with the pyrotechnics involved in the battle scenes on top of the risks of pro wrestling in the sweat lakes generated in the suits themselves. Special effects artists in Japan are also very notoriously underpaid and overworked (one of the major reasons a film like Godzilla Minus One can cost less than 10 million dollars to make). Ultraman exists in a very special zone of this though where the toy company Bandai has a stake in Tsuburaya Productions, and toy “commodity” commercials air within the YouTube uploads as part of the 28 minute video. Not only does this production model hide the faces and withhold capital from the workers, the toy sales will then further alienate the consumers from the quite dramatic labor cost of producing those scenes. 

 

When the children at home recreate the fight scenes, they will be alienated from the means of production of those fight scenes in that they will not have to create the suits and buildings or physically act as them and suffer the costs of fighting or animating. This is almost more dramatic than the example of the factory worker only making a component piece and never seeing the whole or the example of alienation where we do not make our own pants from scratch anymore. Furthermore, the delusion of consumer choice with the vast amount of Ultraman toys, reissues, repaints or even card games would, from a Marxist’s perspective, trick the proletariat into accepting the status quo through the illusion that whichever toys they buy are an expression of their individuality or status. Worse still are the scalpers that find a way to turn the toys into capital through reselling at higher prices.

 

All that said, some shows still do make an effort to be less toyetic and give actual meaning to the character of the Ultra, the personalities of the monsters, or the efficacy of the weapons. Whether or not that improves anything for a Marxist is unclear to me at this time, but it does represent a contradiction in how the show is being made and what it is trying to do. Rekiness, the first meteokaiju in this show, is one of the most expressive characters and is the power that working class Kosei gets to change the world, yet usually appears in a miniature CG form that resembles the transforming toy you can buy on the market right now. Technically speaking, there is an inherent contradiction here, but that is actually sort of expected within Marxism.

 

In Marxism, the concept of dialectics refers to how contradictions (be them the way workers like Kosei are fooled into valuing capital over their own labor when what he really needs is enough food or more philosophical arguments) develop themselves and also negate in order to create new concepts. I cannot myself wrap my head fully around dialectics because Marx did not invent them as a philosophical concept and while dealing with the preexisting baggage of that term still did not define it better than previous thinkers. And that is all I am able to really say about dialectics. They are surprisingly difficult to explain, but they do seem to fit here as a Marxist mechanism for analyzing the contradiction inherent to Toyetic Characters, yoyoing between mere capital and storytelling. Any deeper into that topic already gets us into the ideological criticism of a story’s form and structure, exemplified through defeatist Western Marxist writings, so let us discuss that and then we’ll get to how the episode actually conveys concepts of revolution once we’re done.

 

One of the main emerging criticisms of Ultraman Omega is how it seems to be very cheaply made with reused suits, an Omega costume that broke in episode 2 and many battles in a random forest environment. (I have seen the claim that it is actually more expensive to film in that particular forest for whatever reason, but the point stands without that last common critique.) Gubila is this week’s Monster of the Week, and Gubila, the drill nosed whale has the honor of reappearing so weirdly often that people speculate he might be Tsuburaya Production’s favorite kaiju. 

 

 

In any case, Gubila keeps appearing and recently came back as Oka Gubila, a new form with I think slight modifications to “enhance” its look and threat level. However, this is the Oka Gubila suit referred to as only Gubila with no acknowledgement that it is not the original Gubila. The contradiction of reusing suits in different contexts as both new and old or same and different is a constant throughout this show and could play into the dialectics we talked about earlier, but one of my sources in the research for this essay also brought up the idea that Marxist cultural critique includes not only how the art is politically expedient but in the ideology of the audience.

 

Whether or not Tsuburaya Productions thinks the audience is bored of Gubila is unclear (why give him a new form in his latest episode if base Gubila were resonating, and conversely, why take that form away if it rehabilitated a character). The top comments on the YouTube upload are all positive, some even specifically praising Gubila, but the vocal fans disdainful of Gubila would be more important to the planning stages of the episode. It would change the rhetorical situation of the episode if the average audience member’s viewpoint falls on a spectrum from “Gubila enhances the text so I will focus less on metatext” to “Gubila is such a drawback I have to think of why they would possibly include him.” For my own part, I most recently saw Gubila as a sympathetic kaiju in Ultraman Orb, so I did not expect the darker twist here until it happened. It should suffice for now to say that Gubila is also one of their most commercialized kaiju, getting a new toy for every New Generation appearance, so any author intending to make a criticism of toyetic capitalism would choose Gubila for this story and any fan sick and tired of Gubila would zero in on that possible subtext as well.

 

As far as the form of the episode, it is pretty straightforward; nothing is told out of order, and the arcs of Kosei, Ayumu and Kanenari play out subtly with split focus with the guiding throughline of Sorato understanding capitalism through their different outlooks. There are some contrivances though, and those should be helpful in analyzing the form of this episode.

 

Kosei very abruptly almost craps his pants when he is about to eat the same luxury food he dreams about, having to leave the room (nothing sets this up, and, given that the only food we know him to possess at this time are bananas, nature’s antacid, there is no reason this should be happening in the first place). Instantaneously, he happens upon a flyer revealing the Kaiju Park and gets back to the group just in time to contradict Kanenari’s lies that he only intends to keep the kaiju safe from the government with the proof in his hand. Kanenari, while Kosei was gone, was trying to convince Ayumu to work for him to care for the kaiju, so the contrived discovery of the poster also reveals the broken premise of his plan: that Kanenari wanted to lie to Ayumu about what her job was while publicly marketing it. Here’s the thing though. Taking these plot holes as intentional Marxist short cuts, they actually make sense on their own and as advancing themes in the episode.

 

Kanenari wants to market the Kaiju Park to an audience in the thrall of a commodity fetish (the same way he wants to capture our trio with luxury food). That target segment of the population probably describes Nariaki from the recap episode best of all but mainly fits Kosei within the earlier set-up, so in a moment of capitalism failing, his marketing was too successful and too targeted for his own good. Also consider that the framing device for every episode trailer, the sensational newscasters interpellate the populus to value the kaiju, and Kosei himself literally collects the meteokaiju that you, the viewer, yes you should pay good money to see fight in the stage shows. Kanenari is Tsuburaya Productions, and Kosei is the viewer having to unravel this exploitation. 

 

But also, Kanenari’s desired end for Ayumu is literally Marxist alienation: he wanted to employ her labor on the veterinary component of running a zoo without her ever seeing the larger whole of the product. An incomprehensible, contradictory scenario that only makes sense under dialectical materialism. Also, Sorato as the actual POV character has to be the one that stays behind so he can get exposition from Ayumu about CEOs and wealth while also witnessing the alluring and disgusting parts of how Kanenari conducts himself.

 

In ideological criticism, as I understand it, the central conceit is that art is indirectly political, through reifying the status quo but also being able to criticize it through satire that interplays between the art, artist and audience but is not actionable for revolution. This kind of metatextual critique seems to fit that idea, but, again, I am not a Marxist and had to carry out research new to me for this. Please leave your thoughts on how well I am presenting this, and if any of you can explain dialogism in a way to help me understand whether it better fits Sorato relearning heroism while learning Kosei’s language in this show or Ultraman Geed, for instance, being literally being inspired to be a hero by a television show and its merchandise, please clarify that as well.

 

Alright so when it comes to Marxist literary criticism, what you probably expected going into this was “how can I make this story about heroic worker characters rising up against the constraints of capitalism,” and that is an important part of Marxist political literary criticism we will discuss in a moment. Still, it technically would not be essential to this type of analysis as portraying capitalism failing without the presence of revolutionary characters can still be a Marxist appeal. That is just a truism of all the critical theories; a work that deliberately fails the Bechdel test to prove a point about the patriarchy is still feminist. The original King Kong functions as a valid critique of colonialism and the Slave Trade all while using the popular 30s trope of conflating lustful gorillas with Black men. Especially for a Marxist, storytelling is an innovative type of thought, and it is one of the greatest tragedies how rigid it became as either supporting or contradicting consumerism outright. However, in this case, at least on an individual scale, this is the type of story with an actionable Marxist revolution.

 

Focusing on the arc of Kosei and Sorato, that opening image is one of comedic desperation. Rather than a system “from each according to his ability to each according to his needs” involving Sorato, Kosei, his boss and even friend Nariaki who lives above them we met in the recap episode, Kosei genuinely believes that he has to fight out who gets the rationed banana between him and Sorato. Kosei attributes this newfound poorness as Sorato’s fault, but, since episode 3, they both have had advanced metabolisms. Kosei thinks about what he would do if he were rich, naming off  luxury foods like steak and sushi and fried shrimp (breakfast, lunch and dinner respectively) because this thought started with hunger, finally settling on a new fishing rod and traveling the world. Living in a society valuing capital above labor has interpellated Kosei with a false consciousness that values money and status. Specifically, Kosei has a commodity fetish because his desire for food translates into luxury food, and his fantasy progresses to more items, wanting more and more commodities. Kosei fantasized about those food items because of their exchange value, not their caloric suitability to his needs (use value).

 

Kosei is not the root of this issue, so the episode introduces us to Kanenari, the CEO of one of the largest companies in Japan and a very rich man, single minded in his devotion to money and pursuit of commodities. The marketable experience of stumbling upon the sleeping Gubila will become capital, he brings forth those same commodity foods to seduce Kosei, Ayumu and Sorato to his team, and a conveniently timed phone call reveals that he sees employees as products to do their job (which is help him make more money).

 

The trio convene wanting to get close to the kaiju so Sorato can identify it, but guards discover them and bring them before Kanenari, when he tries to recruit them with the aforementioned lunch. Sorato follows the leads of Kosei and Ayumu in bowing to Kanenari as well as in his initial understanding of capitalism, instructed in how much money Kanenari makes by government employee Ayumu but trying to contextualize that in an amount of bananas because of the practical example of poor worker Kosei. Sorato also witnesses how Kanenari can yell at an underling and complain that useless employees are the worst thing in a world where terrorizing kaiju exist but then be nice to Ayumu and make a humanitarian case for her working for him. In Sorato’s shoes we see how odd it is that such an unpleasant man is at the top of this hierarchy dictating capitalistic choices, but through Ayumu’s perspective we understand that that is just the way it is. When Kosei and Kanenari verbally spar about the ethics of the kaiju park, Sorato shares what he has learned.

 

Amidst Kanenari appealing to his operation as fiscally responsible and safe because he has the money to hire experts to enforce his capitalistic perspective as common sense through the Marxist concept of cultural leadership, Sorato questions this status quo, asking why Kanenari needs money, stating that money is for exchange and then asking what he plans to exchange it for. Society has interpellated even us viewers with the idea that having a lot of money makes sense, but, acknowledging Marxist materialist realities, money exists to help us get bananas. Ayumu ends up taking a version of Kanenari’s offer, and it seems she listened to Sorato’s words because she chooses not to get paid for the work and only stays there to help Sorato identify the kaiju.

 

Because he is Ultraman, Sorato knows all or at least most of these kaiju from previous excursions. However, because he has amnesia, he has to rely on physical sensations to remember the names and abilities of each MOTW. A partial view of Gubila’s backside is not enough; he has to be in the same area as the beast, usually smelling them (possibly as antitheme to alienation from the means of production). That said, the major weakness in this reading is that this time, and this time alone, a full body thermal imaging render procured by Ayumu is enough to jog his memory. To be fair, Gubila has a pretty distinct silhouette, and the audience might question if Sorato could see his body and not realize who he is. I’ll yield further deliberation of this plot point to you all however you choose to comment or engage.

 

Sorato has a drive to understand the world and, since Kanenari did not answer him, he tries to research his statements to understand why he needs so much money. The CEO’s public statements amount to equating money with happiness, but Sorato can tell that Kanenari does not seem very happy (how he lashed out at the useless employee over the phone). Later on, when Sorato reflects on this whole adventure, he notices how Kosei managed to be happy even despite lack of money, which we will return to after the kaiju fight.

 

One of the most interesting aspects of this conflict is what exactly Kanenari thought he was accomplishing with a Kaiju Park of all things. Gubila is a sleeping kaiju, and he was going to make money off of a circumstance wherein people could see and get right up close to a kaiju with no threat to them. The people would continue to go to the park and line his pockets with cash, staying unaware of how they are being exploited yet growing more confident that they are not in danger because look at it sleeping there, a slave of the corporation, much weaker than them, the people paying money to see it. In this scenario, the consumer feels he has more power than the kaiju or the businessman, neither of which is true.

 

Before you tell me this is irrelevant speculation, Gubila actually is counting on this. His scheme this time is playing dead so as to build a crowd around him of smaller and weaker prey to gorge on. This is far from the sympathetic Gubila I remember or the “cute” character the radio show hosts were hoping for. Sorato knows this but only remembers in the story after he realizes how transparently backwards Kanenari’s priorities are.

 

When Kanenari trips in front of a hungry Gubila, he tries to pay off the monster to leave him alone, but before this episode can have a character literally “eat the rich,” Sorato grows into Omega, and Kosei helps the CEO up. When Kanenari sees Kosei and Ayumu go back to rescue employees so “useless” they could not escape, it inspires him to do the same.

 

The episode allows Kanenari to grow as a character, which is interesting. At the same time, he does not actually resolve Kosei’s hunger because Kosei never got to eat the food he offered earlier, and Kosei and Sorato still have to fight over a banana in the final scene, proving that this newly humanitarian CEO still did not seek out the heroes of the day to compensate them, so this is not even really a redemption for him. This could speak to what I brought up earlier, how the audience’s expectations are important to the story, and a writer of children’s television probably thought that tempered optimism was more important than radical realism.

 

I mentioned the phrase “from each according to his ability to each according to his needs,” and Omega and meteokaiju Trigaron genuinely do exemplify this at least in a way. Kosei and Sorato are doing everything they can there to actually save everyone who needs it, and Trigaron only joins the fight to help Omega when it is clear he needs it. Omega only asks Kosei to turn Trigaron into his Armor form when his color timer starts blinking, the last moments he can fight and first moment where his need fairly supersedes Kosei’s.

 

 

Finally, we return to the warehouse for another game fighting over the banana, and Sorato comments that Kosei was happy in the game and at other points, showing that happiness is separate from how much money and capital you have. In realizing he can share the banana and imparting that knowledge to Kosei, Sorato becomes the proletariat abolishing private property at least within their household. Sorato also was only able to learn and articulate this lesson because of experiencing this capitalist society.

 

Oh, and also Kosei having the meteokaiju at his disposal represents the concept of arming the proletariat for revolution. That's the meme answer to this topic.

 

To close, I also want to say that this episode follows the trajectory of episode 8 in fully understanding how the core trio functions, in how they all contribute something important to their investigations and how each are driven by altruistic values. Ayumu has witnessed another strange Sorato ability so she had better figure out who he is next episode, and the suit actors are getting even better at injecting Sorato's personality into the kaiju fight choreography (the moment where he asks for the Trigaron armor is specifically very endearing). Though I can analyze the show in this Marxist way, I will not say with certainty I think it is intended; still, I have no idea if they have some complicated reveal planned for the significance of Sorato’s hunger just given how often they keep bringing it up.

 

Sources (improperly cited because picking a style guide here would mean I have to commit to one in the essay itself)

Chapter 8 of The Fourth Edition of Robert Dale Parker’s How To Interpret Literature

https://www.historicalmaterialism.org/marxist-literary-criticism-an-introductory-reading-guide/

https://www.marxists.org/history/erol/periodicals/theoretical-review/19791002.htm