GODZILLA | Light Force Network

Submitted by Inigo Montoya on Fri, 2024-03-01 12:11

Forums:

Image by Bruno /Germany from http://Pixabay.com

What Does Godzilla Mean? The Evolution of a Monster Metaphor -

Every age has its monsters. The Babylonians had the Scorpion men of Gilgamesh. The Egyptians had Osiris’ personal executioner, Shezmu, a Luca Brasi figure who delighted in crushing human heads in a wine press. The early Greeks sailed an Aegean sea rife with a phalanx of Cyclopes and Gorgons. The enlightenment produced Frankenstein, science’s first monster, spawn of Faustian alchemy, an argument for the limits on man’s incursion into the realm of God. In our age, at least the part since invention of the bomb, we have had Godzilla who, his many pretenders aside, stands alone.

Godzilla transcends humanist prattle. Very few constructs have so perfectly embodied the overriding fears of a particular era. He is the symbol of a world gone wrong, a work of man that once created cannot be taken back or deleted. He rears up out of the sea as a creature of no particular belief system, apart from even the most elastic version of evolution and taxonomy, a reptilian id that lives inside the deepest recesses of the collective unconscious that cannot be reasoned with, a merciless undertaker who broaches no deals. He arrives alone, the ultimate gunslinger, with a free will all his own, the greenest thing ever seen.

That said, even a 400-foot-tall monster can be said to have a history.

The standard liberal, i.e. “serious,” birthdate of the king of monsters is usually listed as August 6, 1945. As described in the great 1980 song by the Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, it was on that bright summer morning that a B-29 Superfortress piloted by Colonel Paul Tibbets, who named the plane after his mother, Enola Gay, planted the kiss that “will never fade away.” The A-bomb dropped on Hiroshima sent a flash brighter and hotter than a thousand suns, which, in addition to killing 100,000 people, caused a simple monitor lizard who was just minding his own damn business to mutate into a really pissed-off SaurusDude bent on global destruction.

“Now I am become Death, the destroyer of Worlds.” - misquote Bhagavad Gita

In Inshiro Honda’s original 1954 Godzilla with its subtitles, elegiac score, and murky black and white that seems to peel from some far future Dead Sea Scroll. It seems important, a global cry for help.

The idea of Godzilla as exclusively an Atom Age metaphor would have been premature in the Japan of the early 1950s. It was less than a decade after the war. The Japanese eugenic project, aimed at establishing a ruthless hegemony of superiors over the nonentities to the West, had failed. The emperor was deposed, stripped of divine status. The homeland islands were occupied by a massive, doughy race of loud-mouthed, baseball-loving lugs that propriety demanded be treated as rightful victors.

During his movie-star period, Godzilla, the king of monsters resembles no one more than the king himself. Like his reptilian contemporary, Elvis was a force of nature, a race-mixing elixir straight outta Tupelo capable of putting people in touch with what they most craved and feared. Appearing in 28 films in 50 years, Godzilla experienced a similar domestication, with his character often played for laughs and even verging toward Barney territory.

Many students of the Godzilla metaphor tend to dismiss these films as frivolous cashing in on the monster’s legacy on the part of rapacious Toho executives (no doubt true), but this is to overlook the deeper resonance the monster stirs in the heart of its adopted Japanese homeland. The embodiment of a rueful past and uncertain future would have to be met head on, and since Godzilla was basically indestructible, heartfelt apologies and eventual coexistence seemed the only way. The surprise was Godzilla’s magnanimity, his spirit of clemency and compassion. Not only would he forgive Japan for losing the war, but he would become the nation’s protector. He would allow himself to play the fool to the delight of children born into a world where a single press of a button meant apocalypse. Whoever imagined a beast marginally related to the serpent of the garden had such heart or sense of fun? The former destroyer became the savior. Still, it didn’t pay to become too comfortable. No matter how goofy he might seem, the tacit understanding is that the beast retained all his weapons, ready to turn radioactive badass at any unpredicted moment of time.

Indeed, if there is a current film that Godzilla could be compared to, it would be Noah, with Russell Crowe in the embattled title role. But it is clear who the real monster is: God, the supposed supreme being who, seeing the world he made and finding it unsatisfactory, decides to smash it in the manner a petulant child knocks over a castle of blocks. Noah does his job here, following all those complicated instructions of how many cubits of this and that to use to build his boat, and he succeeds in repopulating the new world to be. But what all those innocents who died to satisfy God’s apparent whim? Who might they appeal to gain justice? Who might protect them? There’s an idea. Godzilla vs. Yahweh. Now that would be worth seeing.