" Gojira is a very complex movie," Estebe notes, "mixing scenes of panic and burning cities that could be anywhere in 1945 Japan and scenes showing radioactively-contaminated children in hospital which specifically remind audiences of the atomic bombings. Watching Godzilla was a mass exercise in catharsis. Godzilla was not just unusually potent anti-nuclear power propaganda, it was the first major expression in pop culture of the unspeakable tragedy Japan had endured. " Gojira was one of the first movies showing and remembering the dramatic experience of Japanese civilians at the end of World War II when atomic bombings and strategic napalm bombings on all the big industrial Japanese cities killed millions of civilians." During this period there was a ban imposed by American forces on information about the Hiroshima and Nagasaki nuclear bombings and their aftermaths-namely the radioactivity-induced diseases," Estebe said in an interview. "Japan was occupied by the US army until September, 1952. Claude Estebe, a Japanese visual culture scholar, explains the truly massive impact of the film of the time. In the guise of a typical Hollywood-style "monster movie," they made Japan, and ultimately the world, experience the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki all over again."Īnd that was the explicit intention of the film. In his Study of the Effects of the Atomic Bomb on Japenese Culture, John Rocco Roberto writes that "In producing Gojira, special effects master Eiji Tsuburaya, producer Tomoyuki Tanaka, and director Ishiro Honda accomplished a feat unequaled at the time. We see people suffering, really suffering, and feel pity and remorse instead of the gleeful schadenfraude today's horrormeisters aim for. Godzilla is unlike most other monster movie in this regard. Lodged within it is an ancient trilobyte, long thought extinct-nuclear power has unleashed somthing terrible and primal. Then, Godzilla's footprint is monitored for radiation, and it's off the charts. Right from the beginning, we're treated to not-so-subtle metaphors about Godzilla. We're told almost immediately that the beast, which resembles a cross between an ape and a T-rex, and whose Japanese etymology actually suggests as much, has been awakened by H-bomb tests. Also striking is how the film opens to an almost casual quietude not a premeditated lull so common in the thrillers of today with their desperately premeditated calm, but quick, disjointed shots of the daily routine on board, paired with a seaman's plaintive guitar pluckings. Before the sailors know what's hit them, they're gone. The explosion, the flames, seem to come from the sea itself. So it makes sense that Gojira begins with a fishing vessel appearing to spontaneously combust. The atomic nightmare wasn't relegated to World Wars it was an omnipresent threat. It was also a reminder to occupied Japan that the bomb was still very much alive. The bomb drenched 23 men in fallout, making them the first civillians to be subjected to weapons-grade radiation in peacetime. But it was an incident that occurred six years later, in 1954, when Americans accidentally tested an hydrogen bomb too close to a Japanese fishing vessel, that inspired Godzilla. The nuclear bombs the American armed forces dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki left an open, festering wound in the fabric of Japanese society. Godzilla was made in the early-to-mid-1950s. The result is a goofy, disjointed film that was nonetheless extremely popular-it was Godzilla, after all.įirst, some background. Maybe that's because I was only familiar with the version popular here in the states, Godzilla, King of Monsters! (1956). That film features some of the same footage as the original, but Hollywood studios cut large chunks out to make room for a new plot following an American reporter in Tokyo. I was expecting a Mystery Science Theater 3000-type setting, with a giddy crowded theater making wise-cracks at the shoddy special effects and bad acting. Let's clarify. I'm talking about Gojira, Ishiro Honda's original 1954 Japanese cut. It screened at the Film Forum this week, where I watched it for the first time. Because that's clearly what Godzilla was: A somber, cautionary tale about nukes. The world's most famous kaiju-Japanese for 'strange creature'-remains for many the cultural embodiment of nuclear hubris, and they returned to him perhaps to be reminded of what seemed at the time an unheeded warning. There's a reason that, after the 2011 meltdown at the Fukushima Daishi reactor, Google searches for 'godzilla' spiked in Asia.
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