Godzilla

After seventy years of sequels that reinvented the ‘Unstoppable Titan of Terror!’ as everything from a friend of children to a defender of the planet, the radioactive monster Godzilla made a sensational comeback last year in Godzilla Minus One.  We covered its remarkable theatrical success in several CineSavant columns:  July 15 ’23,  September 5 ’23,  December 5 ’23,  March 9 ’24.  It was so popular, it was reissued in a reworked B&W version.

The new picture enhanced the reputation of the original 1954 movie that started all the fuss. It was the late 1980s before most American fans could see the very different original Japanese version Gojira, which didn’t star Raymond Burr and wasn’t told from an American point of view. Criterion released a decent Blu-ray of Gojira in 2012, and now gives us a 4K Ultra HD upgrade using a new, much improved Toho restoration-remaster.

We knew Godzilla from our childhood as Godzilla King of the Monsters, on 14-inch TV screens.  ^*  When we were old enough to hear about the war and the Bomb, the TV viewings raised a lot of questions. Why would the only country ever to suffer nuclear attacks produce a fantasy thriller about their national trauma?  We didn’t know that our American version of the movie had shifted the film’s focus away from social comment, to straight spectacle.

This original Japanese-language Gojira leans much more heavily on human issues and post-atomic moral questions. Other Japanese films that had dramatized the bombings, such as 1953’s  Hiroshima, were not popular. Gojira put its real terrors at a fictional remove, in the form of the ‘giant monster’ movies then making a Hollywood comeback.

The story is pitched at a sober adult level, beginning with a deadly incident at sea. Japanese sailors are irradiated and their ship sunk by an unknown flash of light and heat; then more vessels are destroyed. Searching for the cause, scientist Dr. Yamane (Takashi Shimura) travels to the tiny island of Odo, and is confronted by a colossal water dragon. It soon comes ashore in Tokyo, leaving a broad wake of death and destruction. Conventional weapons prove useless, which puts the mysterious, secretive Dr. Serizawa (Akihiko Hirata) in a bind. He has perfected a terrible weapon called an ‘Oxygen Destroyer’ but feels morally compromised and refuses to use it against the monster. He argues that if the device’s existence is revealed, governments will rush to exploit it as another weapon of mass destruction. Serizawa’s fiancée Emiko Yamane (Momoko Kôchi) begs him to reconsider — innocent civilians are dying.

Unlike some science fiction fantasies, Gojira has a human connection to engage mainstream audiences. A romantic triangle is orchestrated along familiar lines. Scientist Yamane’s beautiful daughter Emiko (we love Momoko Kôchi’s endearing, Gene Tierney-like overbite) is in love with Akira Takarada’s handsome young salvage operator. But she’s technically engaged to Dr. Yamane, a morbidly-obsessed scientist who does bad things to goldfish in his Rotwang-like mad lab.

Director Ishiro Honda balances the personal drama with a wider communal consciousness. The general population subsists as best they can under a new atomic threat. A woman on a bus says that she narrowly escaped Nagasaki, “and now this!”  Businessmen affected by the closing of the shipping lanes complain loudly. In the Diet, politicos try to downplay the crisis so as not to offend the Americans. That ignites a fierce protest from a female representative: “The truth is the truth!”

Producer Tomoyuki Tanaka may have been inspired by Ray Harryhausen’s The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, but his movie’s special effects approach is very different. Toho’s resourceful technicians found clever ways to combine their rubber Man-in-suit-a-saur with live action and elaborate miniatures. Audiences everywhere were impressed by the images of Godzilla crushing Tokyo underfoot. What he doesn’t flatten, he sets on fire with his breath, irradiating everything with Strontium-90. Toho’s first sequel came right away, upping the stakes with a two-monster championship bout. Later sequels tamed and expanded the franchise, adding new monsters for a series of increasingly juvenile epics. But every schoolchild of the ’60s still knew that Godzilla was a symbolic substitute for The Bomb.

Splitting Atoms, or Splitting Hairs?

The movie was made soon after the end of the American occupation. Japanese films were no longer subject to harsh U.S. Army censorship, yet routinely deferred to their new postwar allies. How could a Japanese film company make such a self-flagellating spectacle?  Critic Tadao Sato suggests that the vision of Tokyo once again in flames allowed Japanese audiences to deal with the communal guilt still felt over the war.

It is interesting to note that Gojira does not demonize the U.S., or directly imply that the monster represents America. Godzilla is stylized as a new force of nature, a dragon that breathes Atomic fire. The arms-length remove of fantasy allows viewers to infer what they will.

The wartime nuclear bombings were still spoken of in hushed tones, but the Japanese couldn’t miss one salient topical reference in Gojira, a direct allusion to the recent, controversial  Lucky Dragon 5 incident. A Japanese tuna boat was irradiated by fallout from the Bikini Atoll Hydrogen bomb test. Critic David Kalat’s commentary maintains that the film is passive-aggressive anti-American. But by 1954 two other nations were testing atom bombs. Gojira’s text decries nuclear destruction but doesn’t openly blame any individual country, not even the United States.

The radioactive horror-beast is instead repeatedly allied with ‘science run amok.’  The film’s messages charge nuclear scientists with a moral responsibility to prevent the misuse of their discoveries by politicians and militarists. For a pacifist statement, the movie exonerates Dr. Serizawa, and makes a big deal of his (very Japanese) noble sacrifice to benefit mankind. But not even  Robert Oppenheimer could come up with a responsible way to resolve the cloudy moral issue of the bomb.

Daisuke Serizawa’s solution to the dilemma satisfies sentimentally, and not much more. His ‘Oxygen Destroyer’ appears to be some kind of matter-disintegrating technology. If he’s so intent on its peaceful uses, why has he fabricated a plug-and-play practical weapon?  Serizawa determines that his super-weapon will have this one monster-dissolving trial, and then be lost forever. That’s nonsense, as other scientists will find his secret soon enough. A genie set loose can’t be put back in the bottle, but a bottled genie will always find a way to get out.

Dr. Yamane ends by wondering, ‘gee, what if another Godzilla comes?’  Should that happen, it’s a safe bet that everybody will want to reverse-engineer an Oxygen Destroyer, post haste.

A giant mass of National Guilt, Anger, Frustration and Fear.

Gojira is given a prehistoric origin, complete with the evidence of extinct Trilobites. But the monster’s symbolic function gives him a special distinction: he’s a semi-mythic cultural fantasy. ‘Mother Nature’ betrayed by transgressive science, perhaps?  He rises from the sea not to eat or spawn, but for the express purpose of trashing The Things Of Man. Is Godzilla a post-modern version of a traditional Yokai demon, writ large?  Note his skin, which is not reptilian-scaly, but a billowing indistinct mass. His visual appearance is that of a walking atomic mushroom cloud.