Freud suggested monsters are external, anthropomorphic manifestations of the internal threats we are too fearful to face. Originally applicable to the boogeyman beneath our beds, crafted in the likeness of an individualized anxiety, his theory was later applied in the analysis of cinema. When dialogue surrounding serious social problems becomes terror-induced taboo, a filmic menace appears in the creeping shadow of our unspoken uncertainty.
For six decades, Godzilla has been the gamma-rayed mammoth storming the room where the ills of nuclear capacity have been swept under the carpet. The overarching message of the franchise is clear: humanity has unleashed a scourge into the environment. The unified body of the beast itself, however, is a nuanced cumulus of emotions and associations.
On March 1st, 1954, a Japanese fishing boat happened into the path of a hydrogen bomb test being conducted on the Marshall Islands by the United States government. One immediately ailing crew member described the scene to Time Magazine:
"We saw strange sparkles and flashes of fire, sparks and fire as bright as the sun itself. The sky around them glowed fiery red and yellow. The glow went on for several minutes--perhaps two or three--and then the yellow seemed to fade away. it left a dull red, like a piece of iron cooling in the air. The blast came about five minutes later (with) the sound of many thunders rolled into one. Next we saw a pyramid-shaped cloud rising, and the sky began to cloud over most curiously. The thought of pikadon flashed through my mind, I think, but we were busy and i went back to our nets."
Only months later would Godzilla be introduced to the world, appropriately destroying a fishing boat in the Pacific Ocean.
"We saw strange sparkles and flashes of fire, sparks and fire as bright as the sun itself. The sky around them glowed fiery red and yellow. The glow went on for several minutes--perhaps two or three--and then the yellow seemed to fade away. it left a dull red, like a piece of iron cooling in the air. The blast came about five minutes later (with) the sound of many thunders rolled into one. Next we saw a pyramid-shaped cloud rising, and the sky began to cloud over most curiously. The thought of pikadon flashed through my mind, I think, but we were busy and i went back to our nets."
Only months later would Godzilla be introduced to the world, appropriately destroying a fishing boat in the Pacific Ocean.
As intangible as the shell casing after a detonation and ephemeral as the moment of an explosion, the monster remains unseen in its first film attack. Directly analogous to the bomb, its presence is represented by a blinding light reflecting from the seawater it boils and signs of devastation on the deck of the boat engulfed in flames. Godzilla as a pitiless byproduct of human engineering is a notion fortified in later scenes, where the creature first becomes visible. Ingesting energy from electric towers or readying itself to spew heat, the flame-shaped plates along the monster’s spine glow and buzz as routinely as a coil element. Physically revealed, however, the monster generates another layer of meaning. “Out of suffering have emerged the strongest souls; the most massive characters are seared with scars.” wrote Kahlil Gibran. If there is a case to made for endowing the literally massive character of Gojira, as he was first known, with the enduring soul of the Japanese people, it is indeed found in his searing scars. Keloid scars are growths created when collagen inhabits a wound and spreads beyond the wound’s original boundaries. Godzilla’s skin was designed to appear a blanket of such cicatrix, unifying him with the similarly marred survivors of the 1945 atomic attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The beast may represent the machine but the ghost that begins to emerge is a human spectre.
Once personified, Ishiro Honda’s Godzilla roars a swath of cathartic rage through the very real and repressive silence of censorship in Allied Occupied Japan. As per Professor Yamane’s lament in the film, that the kaiju or “strange creature” should be kept alive and studied, scientists harnessed nuclear power to replace fossil fuels. Godzilla’s gestational period in the Art Department of Toho Studios, Tokyo coincides with the birth of world’s first nuclear power plant opening on June 27th, 1954 in Obninsk, Russia. While the apocalyptic possibility of nuclear war remained a palpable threat throughout the remainder of the 20th century, the actual calling card of nuclear catastrophe came, time and again, as a result of in our inability to keep nuclear energy wholly contained within reactors around the globe. That the 60th anniversary of the Godzilla franchise be marked by a fresh installment seems appropriate. That the milestone film follows in the wake of the Fukushima Daiichi meltdown-- irradiating the waters of the Pacific Ocean since March 11th 2011--seems painfully synchronistic.
Long-term environmental repercussions at Fukushima, and the potential for similar disasters elsewhere, are topics seldom trending in social media feeds. Progress reports of the clean up effort in Japan are rarely offered by mainstream media outlets. An edition of PBS’s Frontline, “Nuclear Aftershocks” is aptly subtitled “Have We Turned Our Backs on Nuclear Energy?” When asked in the documentary whether renewable sources of energy will ever replace nuclear power, MIT Professor Ron Ballinger, though admitting his bias as a nuclear engineer, suggests that “unless we become a pastoral society where the energy use density is low enough” atomic energy will always be necessary to gird the grid.
With no new nuclear facilities having been approved when the documentary aired in January 2012, Charles Ferguson, Physicist and President of the Federation of American Scientists, shed light on the tentative approach to fueling the future. Ferguson suggests nuclear power will be phased out only by default, as many of the 104 nuclear plants in the United States must retire in the next 20 years and new reactors are not approved. Sustaining the industrial and technological based lifestyle we want, without the energy we fear, remains an impossibility. Fuse desire with dread and the result is often a paralyzing reluctance to face the crux of a difficultly head-on.
