Real Monsters: COLOSSAL & The Portrayal Of Patterns Of Abuse

It’s mid-June, and there are months of new releases left before the year ends, but I already feel comfortable calling Colossal one of the most significant films of 2017. It’s not a perfect film, but it’s a remarkable one, and one that has very few clear precedents in American cinema. Monster movies are hardly anything new, but Colossal is unflinching in presenting the dangers of toxic masculinity and patterns of abuse in a way very few recent American films have been, lately or ever.

In a fascinating inversion, Colossal bears very little plot resemblance to recent kaiju films, but instead uses the central concept of the kaiju as a means of examining dynamics of self-control, cyclical patterns of abuse, and how people respond to power. American cinema, action movies and monster movies in particular, is often far more concerned with valorizing hypermasculinity than it is with interrogating how this culture of applauding violence and machismo leads to toxic masculinity. It’s a behavioral pattern in which masculinity is reified by way of domination and violence, physical or otherwise. There is no quarter for expressions of toxic masculinity in Colossal, that rare film which is concerned with women facing trauma without fetishizing their pain, and without excusing men for the damage they do.

Nacho Vigalando’s newest film stars Anne Hathaway as Gloria, an online journalist struggling with alcoholism who, in her introductory scene, is kicked out of her boyfriend’s, Tim (Dan Stevens), apartment, because of her out of control nights of drinking. Unemployed in New York City, Gloria goes to her hometown in upstate New York to crash in her parents’ empty house.

It’s here that she meets Oscar (Jason Sudeikis), a childhood acquaintance of Gloria’s, who immediately integrates himself into Gloria’s life by offering her a series of increasingly outlandish gifts: a ride home, an unused television, a job at the bar he owns, and finally an entire house’s worth of furniture. The first night Gloria returns to her hometown, a giant kaiju appears in Seoul, South Korea, identical to one that appeared 25 years prior.

Before long, Gloria realizes, by watching the kaiju mimic her own motions, that the kaiju is a manifestation of her own subconscious. She immediately goes to show Oscar and his two friends, Joel and Garth, prompting Oscar to realize that he, too, has the ability to manifest a giant creature in Seoul, his being a colossal robot. With this realization, Oscar begins terrorizing Gloria with the threat of violence, using his capacity for physical violence against both Gloria and the entire city of Seoul as a means of controlling Gloria.

A More Real Monster

Colossal is a monster movie, yes, but the monster isn’t the colossal being wreaking havoc in Seoul. In Colossal, the real monster is Oscar. A fair bit has been written about Colossal’s depiction of toxic masculinity, but while toxic masculinity is certainly present in Colossal, it is the film’s depiction and condemnation of abuse that stands out as the film’s strongest thematic element.

Sudeikis’s Oscar is frightening because his behavior is realistic and recognizable. From his first appearance in the film, he is trying to exert control over Gloria through a series of escalating attempts. What starts with Oscar giving Gloria unsolicited gifts and refusing to take no as an answer becomes Oscar trying to force Gloria to drink when she has attempted to stay sober, which becomes Oscar threating to kill people to maintain his control over Gloria.

The shift in Oscar’s actions from overly generous favors to verbal and physical violence, and then the return after violent outbursts to further generosity, evokes Lenore E. Walker’s seminal theory of cycles of abuse, in which the behavior of abusive individuals cycles from rising tension, to an incident of abuse, to a reconciliation, to a period of calm, before returning to rising tension again.

Throughout the movie, Oscar does harmful things to assert his control and then apologizes, often by giving gifts that reinforce his own position of power in the relationship, only to grow aggressive again, before that aggression once again culminates in an act of violence against Gloria. Further, Oscar is threatened by other men having any sort of relationship with Gloria, because he views her as an object to be dominated and possessed, and sees Gloria’s interactions with other men as threats to his ability to assert control over her.

As such, Oscar’s response to discovering that Gloria slept with his friend Joel is to intentionally terrorize Seoul, forcing Gloria to enter a physical altercation with him to try and prevent further destruction. When Tim comes to town to reconnect with Gloria, Oscar sets off an explosion in his bar and tells Gloria that if she leaves with Tim, he’ll destroy part of Seoul and kill civilians every day until she returns.

Tactics of Abuse

The rhetoric Oscar uses against Gloria—that if she doesn’t do what he wants her to do, whether it’s drinking or staying in town against her will, whatever he does will be her fault—is a classic tactic of abuse, and Vigalando’s script is uncompromising in presenting and condemning this. The friendship between Gloria and Oscar is abusive and unhealthy throughout the entire film, and while the first half of the film is dominated by a period of calm and rising tension, the second half of the film sees the entire cycle of abuse repeated, with escalating tactics of emotional, psychological, and physical violence.

One criticism of the film I’ve seen reiterated on multiple counts is that Oscar’s violent, controlling behavior comes out of nowhere. I disagree; Oscar’s behavior is consistent from the beginning of the movie, but the violence of this behavior is revealed through repetition. As the dramatic stakes in the film shift, first through Gloria’s realization of her own culpability in the monster attack on Seoul and then through Oscar’s discovery of his own colossal robot, so to do the stakes in Gloria and Oscar’s relationship.

Both characters change in response to this newfound power, and these shifts show who these characters are at their cores. Gloria sees the kaiju as a source of guilt, and her initial wonder transforms into remorse when she falls down while manifesting the kaiju, causing massive destruction when the kaiju falls in  populated part of Seoul. This catalyzes in Gloria both a desire for radical self-improvement and a determination to prevent further destruction in Seoul, even if she can’t effectively atone for the damage she’s already caused.

Conversely, Oscar views his robot as a source of power, both over Seoul as an abstract he can terrorize and over Gloria as a specific victim. Upon the discovery of Oscar’s robot, he shifts his abusive tactics from manipulating Gloria through generosity to using the threat of destroying Seoul to control Gloria. The second half of the film might be darker tonally than the first, but this is not a radical change in behavior for either Gloria or Oscar, but rather an exploration of the ways in which having power changes each character.

Oscar’s behavior doesn’t come out of nowhere, but rather the power he finds in the form of the robot allows him to control others through the threat of violence, the evolution of his earlier manipulative behavior. And, as we learn in the final piece of the film’s recurring flashback, this is how Oscar has always been, he’s just been waiting all along for the opportunity to get violent again.

Control, Power, and Catharsis

Colossal doesn’t excuse any of Oscar’s behavior, but condemns him for it, which is what is genuinely radical about this film. Instead of normalizing violent behavior, Vigalando is critical of the dynamics of abuse, and acknowledges both the pervasiveness and the violence of these dynamics. In turn, Gloria has two major obstacles to face in the film, her own internal struggle for self-control and her external struggle with Oscar to control her own life. At its heart, Colossal is about control and about power, and Gloria’s struggle with both.

The film gives empathy to Gloria’s twin desires to control her own struggle with alcohol abuse and to break free from a destructive relationship with Oscar, presenting a protagonist whose goal is to wrest self-control from her inner demons and from those around her. Gloria is a radical and flawed heroine, whose response to the power she discovers is to work for accountability to herself and to the damage she has inadvertently done. The film carefully balances these two obstacles, insisting that Gloria must take responsibility for her internal struggle, but never holding her accountable for Oscar’s actions.

Vigalando’s script is careful not to downplay the danger inherent in abusive relationships, but also the danger in attempting to escape abuse, and never condemns Gloria for not leaving sooner. In the end, Gloria leaves Oscar and her hometown behind her, but she is not able to do so without a genuine threat to Seoul being actualized, or without weaponizing the kaiju at the heart of the film against Oscar.

This recognizes the very real danger faced by survivors of abuse in attempting to leave abusive relationships of any kind without trivializing it, deftly using in-universe specific logic to illustrate the bravery of what Gloria does. This honest depiction of a woman dealing with alcohol abuse and trapped in a dangerous and abusive friendship ultimately provides a cathartic sense of empowerment, thanks to an ending that sees Gloria overcome both of her demons by utilizing the kaiju itself.

Realistic Portrayal of Abuse in a Fantastic World

Colossal is not hugely concerned with realism, except for interpersonal relationships and power dynamics, which the film examines with a keen, critical eye. Colossal looks at the ways in which supposed nice guys use to hurt the people around them, while examining how people respond to having power over others and look for power over themselves.

At times, the metaphor of the kaiju is clunky, particularly in the final flashback which seeks to validate and explain the existence of the two kaiju, but the concept is fresh, and the ending, which unifies the elements of the kaiju, of Gloria’s struggle for recovery and self-control, and Oscar’s abusive tactics is genuinely thrilling. There are few films which aim to take aim at the topics Colossal does, but Colossal is a triumphant example of what filmmaking about trauma faced by women which doesn’t focus on watching that pain, but rather on overcoming it, might look like.

We live in an incredibly violent world, and, often, offers a break from that violence. Not escapism, per se, not a denial that violence plagues the experiences of marginalized people, but rather an inversion: violence happens, but here is a story where it is overcome and in which there is safety, at last. Here is a story that is about the violence inherent in our lives, and about how it will not last forever. Colossal does this. It provides an escape, in the form of safety; Colossal allows its audience catharsis.

It shows us the violence so many women recognize, and it ends with escape, with safety, with empowerment. This kind of storytelling, that which Gloria and Nacho Vigalondo both give us, is the kind of story I want to go to the theatre and keep hearing.

What other contemporary films tackle subjects often considered taboo, such as abuse, in cathartic ways, or is Colossal radically original in approaching the subject in the way that it does? Feel free to discuss in the comments!