Gareth Edwards’s Godzilla is certainly the mind-disassembling, -numbing, -swooning march of eyeball-defying images we’ve been conditioned to expect in late-spring/summer movies, and we should take a moment to appreciate how spectacularly it meets that expectation. Collapsing nuclear power plants, monster-births from skycraping eggs on ground-zero of said collapsed power plant, a three-hundred-fifty-foot beast whose equally beastly physics engine has it taking shots like a rope-a-doping Muhammad Ali, EMS shocks that ripple air like you could only imagine air rippling, GoPro-esque shots of HALO droppers knifing through a monster fight, and of course, that obligatory city-razing monster fight; these are some of the brain-sizzlers you’ll walk away from exhausted and awed, thinking, “My God, why even have actors?” A lame and enervate screenplay in frustrating combination with lame, enervate acting (Bryan Cranston, you who can make lines like, “You're hiding something out there! And it is going to send us back to the Stone Age!” tingle tear ducts, are a dazzling exception), feed or engender that last sentiment far too often.
But Godzilla doesn’t care about specifically these characters, anyway; the film cares about the hugeness of its monsters, its audience, and its ideas. Underneath all that image-fattiness, yes, there is the distinct aroma of allegory. It’s hard to miss. Ford Brody is hardly more than the figure of the “real” American soldier: he is young and jaded, struggling to maintain a too-young family, skeptical of his father, patriotic above all. Godzilla, too, is a figure at once of nature’s impartial order, its earth-bending, dumb power to actualize that order, and the relative powerlessness of science’s ordering in its face. The MOTUs are the figure of science in its hubris losing control of nature, and their presence baldly aims to stir recently ramped-up environmental alarm, to present via metaphor the cataclysmic results of human over-involvement. These figurations are distinctly relevant to an American audience, that is, these figures, particularly of the solider, are most resonant to American culture. And given the American Godzilla film tradition, capped previously by the 1998 Broderick-Reno film tellingly subtitled “Size Does Matter” and begun sensationally by Raymond Burr, laughable dubbing, offensive plot holes, and just about nothing other than monster-destruction camp in Godzilla, King of the Monsters!, Edwards’s Godzilla is the franchise re-imagined, mature, political, re-born. But Godzilla was not born as a gaudy, effects-focused film franchise designed to sate moviegoers’ appetites for big shit blowing big shit up. Godzilla, King of the Monsters! is a neutered version of Toho Studios’ 1954 film Gojira, a moving and painful anti-war, anti-nuclear allegory intensely inflected by and engaged with the literal and figurative wounds of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It is a haunting film about a haunted people and is deeply, deeply sad. How Gojira was mutated into the effect-fest Godzillas of the preceding decades is a familiar tale of the American box-office’s force of stupidification; that Gareth Edward’s Godzilla appropriates Gojira’s allegorical force, in a sense returning to the authentic roots of the franchise, but applies it to celebrate the uncelebrated heroes of the U.S. military, presents a troublesome moral dilemma well worth exploring.
The first frame of Gojira, sounded off with a booming daiko strike, is a gray shot of the Toho Company Ltd. icon, a rising-sun circle inscribed centrally with Toho's kanji spelling, backgrounded by shifting, thin rays of light. Another daiko strike, another, and the screen fades to black. There is silence and blackness, and then "Gojira" in blocky, chipped, and cracked white type, rushes up from the bottom of the screen to the center, settles there dominatingly as the first Godzilla roar of the film attacks and reverberates. In this starkness, the film’s serious identification as distinctly Japanese, post-WWII art is evident. The daiko percussion evinces tradition, attack, apprehension, boldness; Godzilla’s screaming cry evinces bombs; the stark silences between are the speechless aftermaths. It is not too much of a stretch to propose the filmmakers were this actively committed to applying the aesthetics of the bomb. Producer Tomoyuki Tanaka said of the film, “the theme of the film, from the beginning, was the terror of the bomb,”[1] and Ishiro Honda, its director, said he, “took the characteristics of an atomic bomb and applied them to Godzilla.”[2] Godzilla is the power of the bomb manifest: monstrously destructive and monstrously large in the minds of its victims’ psyches; and, aptly, first unseen. The bodiless roar, if we read it as its makers suggest we do, is the pyschological fear of the nuclear threat itself. The opening credits scroll by with their lines of bold white type on a black screen like a list of deceased. Akira Ifukube’s score comes in with a heavy, martial, driving first section, accented with hard-bowing cellos, which devolves into a chaotic conflation of strings punctuated at their most entropic point by Godzilla’s roar. It moves then into a section of daiko syncopating unsettlingly, almost randomly against a timid staccato line; then the first section returns in greater force. It is both militaristic and nationalistic, but subdued, unsettled by Godzilla, nuclear threat.
Gojira’s crisis-sentiments, delicately wrought, are not easily unpacked or partitioned; the characters do not fall easily into progressive/conservative, good/bad camps: these characters are simply not afforded that in the face of sense-defying destruction. Their thinking reflects rampant ideological doubt in Japan post-bomb, which sentimentally is similar in kind, but far different in degree, to post-9/11 sentiment. America, invaded and damaged, still made its black-and-white judgments, often codified them; yet the domestic destruction was not so extreme as to render a previous life and its values untenable. Gojira shows a people unable to hold, a rubber band snapped. This is exemplified in the first sequence of the film, in which a tuna fishing boat – the same type of boat whose crew was exposed to and contaminated by radiation in the famous Lucky Dragon Number Five incident – explodes in a frothing sea-circle of Godzilla radiation. Another search ship follows and suffers the same fate. Back in mainland newspaper offices and the ship’s company headquarters, a crowd of the fishermen’s families steadily grows desperate with fear and anticipation as the news leaks out – three survivors, wait for more news. A close-up of a poor man and woman, both dirty and terrified, resonates as a picture of sad doubt; an exhausted editor, slouched over, fatigue and disappointment in his voice, naively wishes out loud they found out what had happened to the boats; a riled-up crowd rages outside a press office shouting, demanding truth and transparency, and finally bursts through. The sequence ends with one of the wrecked fishermen washing up on the shore of his own village. Family members rush to his frothy body bloodcurdlingly shouting his name; with his final breath this Masaji says, “he did it … a monster” and dies in his brother’s arms. These are the lingering, visceral post-crisis images Americans are so familiar with, with which the Japanese would have been too only nine years removed from the bombs at Gojira’s release.
Godzilla, an old man tells us in the following scene, must be the culprit. The elder is swiftly pooh-poohed: (in translation) “the old man and Godzilla,” a young woman tells us, “both relics from days past!” The old man returns that such denial leaves her vulnerable to Godzilla, an ancient god formerly worshipped and fed young girls during bad fish seasons. In that later scene, he continues to explain that all that remains of the old traditions is the exorcism ceremony we get to watch--it is a strange masquerade in a kind of ancient kabuki tradition. Godzilla’s casting as folk-god sets him as distinctly Japanese, a former Japanese god in a faded regime of Japanese spirituality. In that, he is also an agent of re-awakening, a symbol of re-legitimized tradition. But, most immediately, tradition is an explanatory force opposing modern forces like science and media. Media-as-skeptic particularly in this segment is emphasized: immediately after the death of the fisherman, a helicopter, punctuated at the center of its silver shell with a Japanese flag (it sticks out as gaudily nationalistic on the steel backdrop), lands and unloads a team of journalists searching for the town’s "story." It is to one of the reporter’s incredulous ears the old man tells of Godzilla’s godliness and location within their folk-tradition: “Godzilla,” the writer can only say in disbelieving response. It was Godzilla. That very night, the consequence of forgotten worship manifests as nature’s vengeance, and a storm of supernatural ferocity overwhelms the village. The scene culminates in a shot of the journalists' helicopter swept up and flipped onto its side like a toy.
Gojira’s Godzilla is the living history of perhaps the greatest folly of mankind: its devastating disturbance of nature. Godzilla is the destruction of the bomb absorbed by nature and returned as its most lethal weapon. Nature is punishing humanity, and the film makes this scientific as well as folkloric fact. Dr. Yamane, a world-renowned paleontologist, finds radiation and a trilobite in Godzilla’s footprint; Godzilla himself, modeled after the monster from the famous monster flick The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms[3], looks like a blown-upright T-Rex. Yamane concludes, supported by some spurious scientific evidence, that hydrogen bombs have dislodged Godzilla from his deep-sea habitat and directly exposed him to A-bomb-level radiation. Many characters cite this exposure when reasoning out Godzilla’s seeming imperviousness to human firepower: if he survived the bomb, he can survive anything, they say. In the end, complicating the "sides" of the oppositional forces, it is Dr. Serizawa’s man-made Oxygen Destroyer – an invention spoken of in the same hushed tones as the bomb – that destroys Godzilla. America is not specifically mentioned here (or anywhere in the film), but its condemnation is obvious. Serizawa, knowing the power of his weapon, refuses to use it out of fear politicians will appropriate its powers for destructive purposes--his soliloquy on this is a horizon-gazer yet manages to be earnest. Even though Tokyo has been razed, even though Godzilla has struck the city with nuclear-force, Serizawa staunchly refuses, and even when he eventually, reticently agrees to expose the Oxygen Destroyer, he burns his blueprints and notes and kills himself during its deployment. The Destroyer is contained by the force of responsibility and honor. The film is not anti-science--it knows that we are too far along that road to reverse our step. It is only irresponsible science that created the monster, that created nuclear weaponry, and it is responsible science that will destroy him.
To sum the last twelve hundred words up: yes, Gojira is a tightly-packed and rich allegory of nuclear war, a fragmented culture looking to ease the hurt of mass trauma by marrying it to an epistemological tradition which will never accommodate it, a film replete with figurations aimed at a distinctly Japanese audience--and yes, Gareth Edward’s film pays homage to Gojira just by attempting to be allegorical, which attempt also confirms, thankfully, that the director did his homework. But before dubbing Roland Emmerich and company infernal philistines or poor film students, we have to acknowledge that this Gojira is not at all a part of the American Godzilla film tradition, and we certainly have to acknowledge there’s a chance Emmerich and co. never even saw it.
Those two acknowledgements are outcomes of the same story. Gojira was imported by Jewell Enterprise’s Harold Ross and Richard Kay, aptly described in ClassicMedia’s DVD sleeve as “two Hollywood bottom-feeders,” and, euphemistically, “shrewd.”[4] These were B-level producers looking to ride the commercial coattails of King Kong and 20,000 Fathoms to a quick buck, and Gojira happened to feature a big monster. They imported the beast and hardly any of the nuclear-allegorical material, looking not to confront Americans with starkly political, reflection-inducing, and anti-American material – box-office-flop material, in other words – but to delight and sizzle brains. Footage that had to be kept for the sake of setting and plot, which too was re-cast as some clunky, husband-adulteress-young-buck love triangle as thin and distasteful as a dirty penny, was dubbed over with insipid summations of Gojira’s themes. The scene in which Dr. Serizawa heatedly defends the Oxygen Destroyer’s political anonymity, originally an emotionally-dense confluence of personal responsibility, global crisis, and an unarticulated horror for Hiroshima/Nagasaki, is reduced to toddler-ish lines like “Give me it!” and adolescently chivalrous and cliche-ridden lines like “Do it for her!” Dr. Yamane’s analysis of Godzilla’s origins is turned into the stuff of a fifth-grade science project. The dubbing on the original footage as a whole is preposterous; the shoddiness of the American footage is legendary. The story goes that director Terry O. Morse, who also edited this Frankenstein’s monster of a film, shot all of the new material in one day[5]. This might be more set-myth than truth, but it could not have taken more than a week: there is nothing cinematographically intriguing beyond static shots of Raymond Burr, a parody of American masculinity, sitting, looking, shooting condescending quips his Japanese interpreter’s way. This lack of directorial creativity alone might excuse Raymond Burr’s sleepwalk of a performance. In the ultimate scene, after Serizawa has killed himself in destroying Godzilla (in honor of his estranged wife’s love in this film), Raymond Bur – who plays a news reporter stiffly narrating this whole thing to us while sending home blatantly sensationalist, racist news updates – stares blankly, attempts an understanding look, we can only suppose, at the weeping Japanese. Raymond Burr’s final message, delivered in a campy voiceover is: “the menace was gone. So was a great man. But the whole world could wake up and live again.” In Gojira, Dr. Yamane’s more prophetic and relevant message is, “if we continue testing H-bombs, another Godzilla will one day appear.” The difference in these statements is the whole difference between the films.
This Godzilla, Godzilla, King of the Monsters!, the brainlessly campy and Burr-led film with the body-suit monster is the cornerstone of the American Godzilla tradition. In fact, hardly any American knew that another Godzilla existed, that this weird movie was actually a hydrogenated version of any movie at all, let alone one with serious anti-nuclear allegorical thrust. There are reasons for this; foremost is that Gojira was not available, even for most film critics, until 2004, when Rialto Pictures ran the film in select theaters to celebrate its 50th anniversary, and was only made available commercially in 2006, when Classic Media released “The Original Japanese Masterpiece” two-disc set. The sad reason behind this sad reason is Gojira wasn’t commercially available because it wasn’t commercially viable. No one wanted to see real destruction, real war sadness, and after the box-office success of King of the Monsters! American Godzilla became that character, the King of the Monsters, the body-suit, a menace, the nuclear dinosaur with a blind, raging hatred for Tokyo; a Japanese import so “other” in its aesthetic its poor production could be ignored, or rather, taken up as part of its “other” aesthetic. Japanese film (films by Kurosawa, Ozu, and Honda, among others, aside) came to be synonymous with this type of camp. Toho Studios, smelling profits, abandoned Gojira’s politics and quickly pushed out Godzilla Raids Again, a poorly-crafted vehicle for Godzilla-destruction that started the now-accepted tradition of enemy daikaiju ("giant strange monster" in rough translation). Gojira’s resonant allegorical features remained only as recycled exposition. By the time the first twenty-year stretch of Godzilla films, called the Shōwa period, concluded with the not-terrible, Honda-directed Terror of Mechagodzilla, aliens were attempting to take over the world with a mechanical Godzilla and a creature called Titanosaurus, and Godzilla was the lonely sentinel preventing their advance (a complete role-reversal). He had developed powers of flight and magnetism along the way; in later series he’s got precognition, superhuman speed, and, ironically, the ability to fire atomic pulses; he’s been a children’s hero, a villain, and a guardian, but never the towering figure of the bomb he was in Gojira.
This is the tradition that led to Emmerich’s 1998 film; these are undoubtedly the films Emmerich was looking at. These are also the films that make Gareth Edwards’s project so tricky. After all, he is trying to make a happy marriage of three entirely different kinds of movie. To the American Godzilla traditionalists, it’s a Godzilla film if it’s got some good old-fashioned monster fights, an adequate Godzilla-roar, some campiness, and if Godzilla razes a city, preferably Japanese, in the process of doing whatever he’s enlisted/chosen to do. For the Emmerich fans, or since they’re pretty scarce, the Hollywood summer-blowout fans, Godzilla has to be big and epic: size does indeed matter. For the recently-formed contingent of Gojira fans, the film must also mean something, be allegorical, and most crucially, pay respect to the subject matter and artistic/political intensity of the original masterpiece.
Edwards’s film surpasses the Emmerich film by a significant margin, is mostly good enough for the American traditionalists by virtue of a brain-rattling roar, some killer monster-fights, as well significant time in/destruction of Japan; but there’s a serious moral flaw in the film for the Gojira-appreciator. Sure, Serizawa is “in” the film, and sure, Godzilla reprises his role as Nature’s avatar, here adapted to contemporary concerns. But the fact alone that the hero of the film is a soldier of the U.S. military, the same military whose incineration of over one-hundred thousand Japanese is the very mass-wound that created this monster and constitutes the nuclear-allegorical voice of Gojira in the first place seems to this viewer an ugly and bitterly offensive insensitivity. Edwards’s white doves, his careful and incessant hedging against such an interpretation – his inclusion of atom-bomb footage, Serizawa’s urging the military to not use the bomb, the military’s ignorance and eventual admission of failure, the significance of nuclear considerations in general, Brody’s rescuing of the Japanese child – cannot distract from the fact: there is Ford Brody, the U.S. soldier, celebrated in the same shots as Godzilla, nuclear devastation manifest. It doesn’t matter that post-9/11, we too, as Japan did in 1954, have a crisis in our recent past that affects and fills our hearts with grief. This film does not fully recognize that by engaging with Gojira’s allegorical elements to any extent, it necessarily evokes them, involving the entire complex of a people devastated by an exclusively American brutality. Just like Godzilla, King of the Monsters! did, Godzilla ignores Gojira’s scenes of victims weeping and screaming out for their lost families, the pain of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The film does not say enough about the lives destroyed by America, does not have the guts to indict itself, and by no stretch of the imagination does it adequately address the shame America should still feel for its actions. If I’m wrong and no such shame exists, then Dr. Yamane’s words have already proven prophetic: Godzilla has already risen again as American cultural exceptionalism.
[1] Gojira, The Original Japanese Masterpiece DVD. Steve Ryfle. Ishiro Honda. Booklet. Yūrakuchō, Chiyoda, Tokyo, Japan. ClassicMedia. 2006.
[2] Gojira, The Original Japanese Masterpiece DVD. Steve Ryfle. 2006.
[3] Gojira, The Original Japanese Masterpiece DVD. Steve Ryfle. 2006.
[4] Gojira, The Original Japanese Masterpiece DVD. Steve Ryfle. 2006.
[5] Gojira, The Original Japanese Masterpiece DVD. Steve Ryfle. 2006.
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