• Full list of Godzilla movies
  
• List of Godzilla-related movies
• Monsters in Godzilla films
• Itami Juzo, the series creator
  

• Empire of Godzilla
• MonsterZero

2003-12-22 (sent to David Galin): The perspective I suggest has a natural and a cultural component. Godzilla has a natural history in our ancestral environment, yet the monsters imagined in Godzilla had a strong resurgence in Japan after the war, and may have served an important therapeutic purpose for Japanese culture.

First, it may seem natural and inevitable that people in widely different cultures should imagine a monster like godzilla -- a very large and ferociously dangerous reptile, like a dinosaur.

Yet imagine for a moment that our evolutionary past was dominated by predators that dissolved our ancestors by spraying highly acid digestive juices on them. These predators burrowed underground and attacked by spraying us through elephant-like trunks out of a hole in the ground. In this ancestral environment, we never had to run away from a creature that chased us, and we were never bitten into. Our strategy of dealing with the underground acid-sprayers ranged from staying out of areas where they were known to hide out to keeping our guard at all times to attacking them by throwing burning sticks into their holes. Just imagine a world filled with predators, but completely different predators.

The argument is simply that with such a past, our movies would not be filled with gigantic reptilian mosters. Such movies would have no mass appeal. Perhaps a fringe audience of movie feinsmeckers would cultivate this genre and appreciate the rare imagination of its creators. Mainstream movies would elaborate on variations of monsters that devour their victims by first spraying them with digestive acids, in an endless panoply of insiduous ways.

In short, the argument is not against the self-evident appeal of godzilla-like monsters -- an appeal that appears to require no justification, as it seems so transparently natural. The argument is that this natural appeal is itself historically contingent on humanity's ancestral environment.

Secondly, why Japan in 1954? The Godzilla tradition, which now includes two dozen movies and is still going strong, started in Japan right after the second world war. The challenge to the Japanese psyche after the war was to to comprehend and to make thinkable what had happened to them: the instant obliteration of two entire cities by atomic bombs. Atomic bombs are evolutionarily unprecedented and wholly unlike anything that has ever happened to our ancestors. This leaves the psyche at a loss as to how to respond -- a loss that would be expected to be experienced as paralyzing and traumatic. The destruction was so vast and sudden that capitulation was instantaneous, marking an end to ways of thinking and feeling, modes of respect and authority, values and priorities that had sustained and directed Japanese culture up to that point.

The Godzilla movies provide a way for Japanese culture to integrate into the psyche, in a way that the psyche intuitively grasps, the emotionally inexplicable horror of the destruction by atomic bombs. By making Godzilla the monster that is born out of the atomic explosion, through the pseudo-technical cause of genetic mutation, Godzilla becomes the embodiment of the bomb. The repeated havoc caused by Godzilla provides the audience -- and the culture collectively -- with an emotionally credible embodiment of the destructive power of the bomb. This embodiment is effective only because it resonates with an evolutionary past where large reptiles were over tens of millions of years your most dangerous adversary. By mapping the bomb onto a superstimulus version of this ancient predator, the mind is given a controlled way to reexperience the horror of the attack. Against the backdrop of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Godzilla is sufficiently terrifying to create the kind of emotional response that would appear to be appropriate to the bombings, yet which the bombings may nevertheless have failed to fully trigger. Faced with that unprecedented destruction, the emotions fall numb; there is nothing to grab on to, nothing resonates. (The Japanese have a word for this numbed response; I don't recall what it is. I remember reading a comic strip that tried to portray what it was like to live through it.)

In contrast, the monster the atomic bomb gives birth to -- the baby as it were of the bomb (there's a good title -- the Baby of the Bomb) -- is eminently imaginable. The reason this is so is that our brain likely contains structures that are designed by natural selection to respond to large dangerous reptiles with a particularly full, rich, and rounded emotional subjectivity, a subjectivity designed to evoke a coordinated action to observe, evade, and if possible hurt and incapacitate or kill the creature. These emotional resonances are experienced as sufficient and adequate: they fully capture the complex and diverse significance of the adversary, and its relation to yourself and to the people you love and care for, what you subjectively experience as your kind.

It is this rich and subjectively sufficient response that is sought recruited by Godzilla, in order to integrate the incomprehensible and unprecedented destruction of two entire Japanese cities at the end of the war. By linking Godzilla to the bomb, the audiences are provided with a subjective phenomenology of having grasped the full significance of what happened -- of having fully felt and emotionally understood the threat facing them.

Key elements of this interpretation are likely to be old hat; the new part would just be the evolutionary details. I did a quick google without finding much -- the Godzilla series' creator, Itami Juzo, was into psychoanalysis (Freud and Lacan); cf.
http://www.faqs.org/faqs/movies/Itami-Ozu-Japan-FAQ/

Mark Rose, at the time the managing editor of Archaeology, writes,

"The basic story is that an atomic bomb test on remote Lagos Island in the South Pacific awakens and mutates a dinosaur survivor into Godzilla (in one film he is  identified as being in the Godzillasaurus family--this is taxonomically incorrect, however, since the proper family designation would be Godzillasauridae and Godzillasaurus would be the genus). The 1954 Japanese release Gojira became (with the insertion of clips with Raymond Burr as journalist Steve Martin) Godzilla, King of the Monsters (1956). "The finished film became not only a great epic of monster mayhem, but a reflection of the humiliation bred by Japan's aggression in WWII and subsequent defeat. Godzilla himself became an embodiment of the nightmare of atomic destruction, fresh from the horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In the end, the monster is destroyed through the mortal sacrifice of a pacifist scientist" (Video Hound's Complete Guide to Cult Flicks and Trash Pics [1996])."

Rose, Mark (1999). Godzilla's attacking Babylon! Archaeology. Source.

The solution is in fact morally complex: a scientist has invented a horrific machine, but keeps it secret because he fears people would use it for evil ends. In the end, he agrees to use it against the monster, since nothing else suffices, but sacrifices his own life in the process, since he still feels his invention is a terrible thing. This solution allows the Japanese to participate vicariously in the ethical decision of using a piece of horribly destructive technology and concluding that it can be used against this evil created by the bomb, but once it's done its job it should never be used again.

I'd love to hear your thoughts.

Warm wishes,
Francis