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Professing love for Godzilla movies
Published September 10, 2006
I love Godzilla movies.
Of course, as a kid, there’s nothing better than a film where a giant dinosaur-style creature destroys everything in sight, but I have always retained an affection for the various films depicting the “King of the Monsters”’s alternating missions of destroying Tokyo or saving it from destruction at the hands of another massive city-destoying monster.
The films, with their bad dubbing, goofy special effects (summed up by the equally fun and pitiful phrase “man in suit”) and poor writing, were not exactly award-winning material, but then again, films like “Citizen Kane” don’t have giant moths or three-headed dragons, so no movie is perfect.
Imagine my surprise, then, to find that the original “Godzilla” had a slightly deeper subtext.
Made in 1954, less than a decade after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the original Japanese version of “Gojira,” as the fire-breathing beast is known across the Pacific, was meant, not only a giant monster film, but as a meditation on the horrors of nuclear war and its effect on mankind.
Even the origins of Godzilla--awakened from prehistoric slumber by atomic testing that both mutated him (thus the whole radioactive breath issue) and enraged him--are directly tied to the hydrogen bomb.
The Japanese, still reeling from their defeat in World War II and the end to their expansive plans for empire, immediately embraced the film, and thus Godzilla has endured for 52 years now.
Of course, whenever Americans release a foreign film on our own continent, we have to fix such things as meaning and depth, so an American character was introduced through newly shot footage (Raymond Burr, who would go on to much better work as TV’s Perry Mason) to give Americans someone white to root for and the majority of the atomic metaphors were wiped clean, reducing the film to little more than another generic monster film.
And that’s the way Godzilla remained for 50 years.
I recently bought a new DVD of Godzilla, however, and have had a chance, for the first time ever, to watch the previously unavailable original Japanese “Gojira,” and you know what?
Perhaps we should leave foreign films alone in the editing room.
In a world where atomic proliferation is not only still occurring, but happening in such places as North Korea and Iran, where India and Pakistan, intense enemies religiously and racially, point nukes at each other daily and old Soviet nukes disappear, perhaps to one day appear in the hands of opportunistic terrorists, the idea of Godzilla is not only not dead, but more relevant than ever.
Is a movie where a man in a rubber monster suit destroys cardboard skyscrapers going to change any of this? No, most likely not, but when typhoons and hurricanes remind us of the destruction that nature inflicts upon a race already keen on self-destruction, the threat of a creature like Godzilla, while a bit hokey to modern sensibilities, remains more relevant than we might like to think.
So while my childhood monster might not be rising out of the Tokyo seas any time soon, I can still watch his old movies and think that the horror of Godzilla pales in comparison to what we may do to ourselves one day.
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