Radioactive Dreams

This may be more than you want to know, but for the past few years I’ve been having the same few dreams practically every night, over and over. They draw on the same small number of traumas, but vary in intensity—sometimes rising to the level of nightmare, other times playing more like bland recitations of familiar verse. Plenty has happened to me in the years since the unpleasantries that inspired these dreams, including many things good and happy. My subconscious takes this into consideration, and makes sure it keeps producing dreams that are relevant to me right now, but it also keeps score of the things that remain unprocessed, and relentlessly needles me on them.

Don’t worry about me, I’m fine. I bring this up because I think something similar is going on in the “Godzilla” series. If a country’s popular cinema is its collective dreamscape, it doesn’t take Freud to figure out what’s going on with the signature franchise of Toho Co. Ltd., the largest film studio in Japan. In 1954, nine years after Japan became the first and (so far) only country to experience the atom bomb, a cinematic monster rose from Tokyo Bay to become the most enduring icon of the Atomic Age—and the most pliable. Across more than 30 feature films spanning over 60 years, he has served at various times as the horrible, unthinking blowback of humanity’s scientific overreach; as the planet’s vindictive punishment for our collective arrogance; as the physical embodiment of Japan’s suppressed past; and as a cheery do-gooder and protector of humankind. It’s hard to think of a franchise in which the basic narrative framework and thematic concerns have remained so consistent while the very meaning of the central character has changed so radically. Batman, for example, is flexible enough to accommodate both Adam West and Robert Pattinson, but they both fit under the broad category of “Good Guy.”

In Godzilla’s screen debut, he’s blowback. As Ishirō Honda’s Godzilla (aka Gojira, 1954) begins, fishing boats off the coast of Japan are being destroyed by an unknown but overwhelming force, and aquatic life in the vicinity is close to depleted. On a nearby island, the villagers warn skeptical mainlanders of a legendary sea monster known as Godzilla. In olden times they appeased the beast with human sacrifice, but now all they can do is pray. “If you ridicule our traditions, Godzilla will feast on you next!” says one elderly man (and like so much of the best-remembered Japanese cinema of the mid-twentieth century, Godzilla is about a clash between tradition and modernity). As it turns out, Godzilla is real, and he’s spectacular. Hydrogen-bomb testing has awoken him from his slumber and expanded him to 50 meters tall, and, inevitably, the irradiated monster makes his way to Tokyo.

Of the fifteen films in the series’ original 1954–75 “Showa” era, the first is one of the few to aim for something close to realism with its scenes of urban destruction. It’s also the only one to linger on human suffering. In one upsetting moment, we see a weeping woman huddled with her three small children, reassuring them, “We’re going to join Daddy! We’ll be where Daddy is soon!” After the second of Godzilla’s two rampages, Honda’s camera pans across the devastated landscape, then cuts to a montage of hospitals overrun with casualties. We see injured bodies crowded in hallways, and groups of newly orphaned children huddled together. Then and now, such images forcefully evoke the aftermath at Hiroshima and Nagasaki—events that the film addresses only once directly, in a startlingly flippant early scene where a woman on a train tells her companion of the reported monster sightings, “I barely escaped the atomic bomb at Nagasaki—and now this!” The film suggests a very particular moment in Japanese history, close enough to a trauma that still felt raw, but just far enough away that it has become a fact of life. And acceptable fodder for a monster movie.

The closest thing in the series to a canonized classic, the first Godzilla is also a relative stylistic outlier, with its somber tone, chilly monochrome photography, and comparatively down-to-earth, adult-oriented plot. Yes, there’s a monster, but there are no space aliens, monster brawls, or cute kids—those would proliferate in the ’60s. The first film’s success both at home and abroad set Toho to work creating a star system of irradiated beasties: Anguirus (a mutated Ankylosaurus), Rodan (a pterodactyl-like flying monster), Mothra (self-explanatory), and even King Kong, on loan from Japan’s new economic and political ally, the United States. In the fourth entry, Mothra vs. Godzilla (1964), the formula receives arguably its definitive expression. Now in rich, vibrant color, the visual style conveyed the spirit of the country’s Economic Miracle, while the film’s social commentary incorporated the rise of Western-style capitalist greed that had swept the country. In color, the rubbery monsters and their rampages became less realistic, more dreamlike. Honda and special effects artist Eiji Tsuburaya could no longer hide that their model buildings were empty on the inside, nor did they particularly try.

As the story begins, a giant egg has washed ashore, the result of nuclear testing on the outskirts of Japan. The egg is immediately claimed by greedy developers, who conspire to turn it into a tourist attraction. Also claiming ownership are the natives of another remote island—once a tropical paradise, now rendered almost uninhabitable by nuclear tests. “Calls to ban nuclear weapons are a dime a dozen now back at home,” says one of the human heroes, “but when you actually see something like this…” In a rapidly modernizing Japan, as in the United States, the unhappy side effects of empire happen out of sight, out of mind.

Meanwhile, backed by composer Akira Ifikube’s blaring orchestral themes, Godzilla reappears to wreak havoc on Japan. As in the first film, he’s a big, dumb wrecking machine. This would change as the years went on, with Godzilla first becoming humanity’s grudging ally against various alien threats, then its unambiguously heroic defender. Somewhere in the middle of this evolution came Destroy All Monsters! (1968), an all-star monster rally set in the distant year of 1999. The film envisions a future in which the United Nations have successfully contained all of Earth’s monsters on a remote island. (Somehow, Godzilla’s infant son Minilla has not aged a day since 1968…) Harmony is disrupted when an alien race harnesses the monsters, setting them loose on all of Earth’s capitols. As the American ad copy put it: “GODZILLA attacks New York! RODAN devastates Moscow! MANDA obliterates London! and MOTHRA smashes Peking!” Again, it’s not hard to see what’s going on here: The secure and prosperous postwar global order is just one button-push away from obliteration.

The “Godzilla” series reached the height of its popularity in the early to mid-’60s. By the late ’60s and early ’70s, it suffered the usual audience erosion that afflicts aging franchises—further abetted by the rise of television in Japan, which had a devastating impact on the local film industry. It was during this period, when the series was becoming strictly children’s matinee stuff, that Jun Fukuda became its primary director. A modest journeyman capable in many genres, Fukuda professed no particular affinity for his giant-monster assignments: “I don’t think that any sequels to the first Godzilla should have been made,” he told Cult Movies magazine in 1994. Asked in the same interview which of his “Godzilla” films was his favorite, Fukuda replied, “None of them.” Asked if there were any films with which he was especially unhappy, he replied, “Many.”

You can spot the Fukuda entries by their jazzy musical scores, which undercut potentially dramatic moments with a certain We’re just having fun here spirit. You can also spot them by their silliness. In one film, Godzilla briefly talks (via speech bubbles in the Japanese cut, and an actual human voice in the English-dubbed version); in another, he slides across the countryside on his tail to kick an enemy in the stomach. For some purists, Fukuda’s films represent a betrayal of the spirit and politics of Honda’s films, but these irreverent, energetic movies made a lot of kids happy. After a handful of explicitly kiddie-targeted entries, Fukuda’s Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla (1974) was an attempt to steer the franchise back in a direction that was… well, “adult” is the wrong word for a film in which Godzilla fights a giant mechanical doppelgänger controlled by aliens. At any rate, it successfully squares Fukuda’s superhero Godzilla with Honda’s more awestruck perspective on the monsters and their lore.

After one more movie in 1975, Godzilla hibernated for nine years. When he awoke in The Return of Godzilla (1984), he was the villain again in a back-to-basics entry that erased all but the first film from its chronology. A lot had changed. For the first time, Tokyo’s modern skyscrapers towered over Godzilla, and in the late Cold War context, the monster was putting Japan in a complicated position between two squabbling, trigger-happy global superpowers. This relatively sober entry launched the seven-film “Heisei” series, which revived some of the series’ most beloved monsters with high-tech (but still gloriously rubbery) special effects. As with the “Showa” era, the “Heisei” cycle grew increasingly family-friendly, but it went out strong with Godzilla vs. Destoroyah (1995), in which the first film’s oxygen destroyer must be rediscovered to kill the dangerously irradiated monster.

Though Toho made a mint exporting its monster movies, the reputation of the “Godzilla” series in the West was always a little déclassé, and its “bad movie” categorization has often seemed just a bit racist, as if Tom Servo and Crow T. Robot really thought they were smarter than those crazy Japanese for spotting that Godzilla was a man in a rubber suit. Roland Emmerich’s Godzilla (1998), the first American crack at the franchise, seemed to run away from its inspiration, reconceiving the monster as just another Jurassic Park T. rex. If nothing else, the lamentable Hollywood film renewed interest in the monster enough for Toho to respond with its six-film “Millennium” cycle, produced between 1999 and 2004.

Of this mixed bag of films, the cumbersomely titled Godzilla, Mothra and King Ghidorah: Giant Monsters All-Out Attack (2002) is a highlight—the darkest entry since the original, and the meanest Godzilla of all time. In a new take on the mythology, Godzilla is now the physical embodiment of the thousands of Japanese souls who perished during the Pacific War, taking sadistic revenge on a country that sent them to their deaths and quickly forgot them. To defeat the monster, humankind must look even further into the past to the prophecy of the “guardian monsters”—Mothra, King Ghidorah, and that special little guy Baragon—who will rise to save the earth. In one scene, a group of ignorant young people on an island retreat start chatting about the 1954 Godzilla attack, saying, “It wasn’t that poor creature’s fault, right? How on earth could they do such a thing?" and “Godzilla would be great as a pet!” Within seconds, the poor kids are flattened. 

Those of us old enough to remember the weeks after 9/11 will remember the pundits who wondered if moviegoers would ever again be able to accept action movies with city-scaled destruction. Of course, it didn’t take long. When a successful American branch of the “Godzilla” franchise was launched in 2014, there was no mistaking what its CGI city-destruction evoked. In our current moment, it’s impossible to rewatch the 1954 original and not think of the destruction of Gaza. Though Godzilla and his fellow kaiju are such specifically Japanese phenomena, the specter of what they represent touches everywhere. As Raymond Burr so memorably stated in the American cut of The Return of Godzilla, “Nature has a way, sometimes, of reminding Man of just how small he is. She occasionally throws up the terrible offsprings of our pride and carelessness... to remind us of how puny we really are in the face of a tornado, an earthquake, or a Godzilla.”

Will Sloan is a writer based in Toronto, Canada. His book Ed Wood: Made in Hollywood USA is available from OR Books.