"The Story of the Century": Gojira/Godzilla (1954)
Info
Also Known As: Godzilla, King of the Monsters! (1956 US Edit); Japan Under the Terror of the Monster (Spain); Godzilla - the Monster from the Sea (Sweden); The Monster of the Pacific Ocean (Portugal); Doom Awakened (North Macedonia/Czechoslovakia); Godzilla, the Monster of the Century (Greece)
Director: Honda Ishiro. Screenplay: Murata Takeo and Honda Ishiro, from a story by Shigeru Kayama*. Director of Special Effects: Tsuburaya Eiji. Composer: Ifukube Akira.
Runtime: 96 minutes (Japan), 80 minutes (US edit)
*Kayama’s estate prefers that his name be rendered in western order, from personal name to surname, so I have done so.
What’s it About?
This is the one that started it all, in vivid black-and-white. A series of disasters at sea leads to the discovery of a prehistoric, dinosaur-like marine creature that has been awakened, irradiated, and enraged by American hydrogen bomb tests off the coast of Japan. Before long, Gojira makes his way from sea to land, progressing on a rampage toward the heart of Tokyo. Only a scientist with a terrible secret may be able to stop the creature - if his fiance and her lover can persuade him to use it.
Monster Appearances: Gojira/Godzilla
Atomic Fire Blast Count: 11, though this is based on my interpretation of whether certain blasts are intended to be continuous across different shots. I’ve gone with my gut here.
Childhood Memories
It’s around Christmas, 2000 when I am forced to accept that stories aren’t real.
I am a five-year-old living in Reykjavik, Iceland, as part of my dad’s three-year assignment to the American embassy there. My maternal aunt has come to visit for the holiday. Her name is Deborah, or Debby for short, but my first word to her as a baby was “Boopy,” and so Aunt Boopy became my name for her. Aunt Boopy has promised me that one of my favorite cartoon characters, the Disney version of Tigger from Winnie the Pooh, will be accompanying her on her journey to see me. I am thrilled. I’ve never seen a cartoon character in real life before, only on TV during the limited amount of time a day I’m allowed to watch. I so badly want them to be real, despite all the evidence that they are make believe, created things.
And so, a day or two before Christmas, down in the guest room in the basement, my newly arrived aunt opens one of her suitcases to show me Tigger. “Here he is!” She says, putting on a show. The suitcase is already empty. I start crying, hard, and loud. I don’t remember whether the red-and-green M&Ms she’s brought with her make a difference to my mood.
Aunt Boopy was wonderfully indulgent toward me. She encouraged my childhood interests by dutifully gifting me videos, books, or toys related to them: at that point in time, Scooby-Doo, Winnie the Pooh, Looney Tunes, dinosaurs in general, The Land Before Time and Jurassic Park specifically, and Godzilla. (Wallace and Gromit, Arthur, and the Berenstain Bears were on the backburner at that point, and I might have already reached that phase of acting like I was too cool for Sesame Street.) Thankfully, I don’t think being spoiled made me much of a spoiled brat, though Boopy and I both recalled a solitary tantrum I had toward her in our local video rental store during one of my family’s visits home. (But more on Video Vault in a moment.)
As is apparent, Boopy and I were very close when I was a kid. After my family moved back to Alexandria, Virginia in 2002, I would have a weekly sleepover most Saturdays at her and Uncle Chuck’s apartment, only a few blocks from our house in Old Town. It was probably a month or so into my second grade school year that we started making trips back to Video Vault to rent their catalog of Godzilla VHS tapes. The American edit of Godzilla, King of the Monsters wasn’t among the initial tapes we checked out; I only learned of the film’s existence thanks to the trailer included at the end of the Simitar release of the later film Godzilla’s Revenge. I don’t think the thought of there being a first Godzilla film had really entered my mind.
My memories of the first viewing are scant beyond the scenes of Godzilla’s rampage. I remember the guy with the eyepatch setting off a device in the water near Godzilla at the end and creating lots of bubbles, and then the American reporter character intoning that Godzilla was dead. Godzilla was killed by bubbles? Seven-year-old me doesn’t really understand the whole plot with the Oxygen Destroyer. What I do know is that the film is very glum, and that Godzilla is the bad guy and loses, which is lame. Young me doesn’t like when Godzilla’s the villain, because I always root for him anyway. I think Boopy is present when the American reporter was on screen, in which case she probably identifies the actor as Raymond Burr for me. She was a big Perry Mason fan.
Two years later, in 2004, Boopy takes me to a very special event: the American premiere of the original, unedited Japanese-language version of the first Godzilla film, with subtitles. We attend the screening at the Old Town Theater, an independent movie theater several blocks down King Street. I enjoy the popcorn, but I don’t really enjoy the film. Beyond the Japanese language and the complete absence of Raymond Burr - it hadn’t occurred to me that he’d been added to the American version - I don’t really see much of a difference. It’s still too dark and serious, and too vilifying towards Godzilla. Unlike the ones where he’s the good guy and fights other monsters, it’s just not that much fun.
Analysis
A word of caution that section #6 contains references to suicide.
Gojira is, with the possible exception of King Kong, the most discussed, debated, analyzed, hyped, and signified giant monster film of all time. This isn’t just in terms of its own immense cultural significance, but also in terms of the seven-decades-and-counting ongoing film series and media franchise it birthed. Confronted with the mountain of material that has already been said about Gojira, what is there left to write about it?
If there’s an answer, it is to be found in the film itself, free of the baggage it would later amass. So let’s take the original, unedited Gojira on its own terms, from the beginning.
1: The Opening
The first image to appear to emerge from the black background that starts the film is a credit acknowledging the Japanese Coast Guard’s assistance in the production of the film. But the first sound doesn’t appear until the next image, the Toho Company logo. That’s when the sound of giant footsteps starts, a booming rumble that suggests the movement of something enormous.
And then the title rears onto the screen in big, stark white lettering: Gojira. A portmanteau of gorira (gorilla) and kujira (whale). A name that further indicates that whatever the film is about, its subject massive.
As if to finalize that impression, the appearance of the title is accompanied by the roar. The bellow of a huge beast, but unlike Kong or the Beast from 20,000 fathoms, this cannot be the sound of a creature of nature. It is melodious as a harp and harsh as sand, like a bass orchestra snarling in anger. It is larger than life.
Ifukube Akira created the sound of that roar, recording and modifying the sound of one of his assistants stroking a contrabass with a resin-coated leather glove. As the film’s credits start scrolling up, the roar and the footfalls repeat in turn. Soon they are joined by Ifukube’s theme for the film, an urgent, constantly escalating piece. Viewers might recognize Ifukube as a composer of western-style classical music, already lauded for his contributions to the concert hall and the movies alike. Even without that knowledge, the distinctive sound of his music already makes clear that this film is serious business.
There are other names that knowledgeable viewers would recognize. Tsuburaya Eiji, famed cameraman turned special effects expert turned pariah during the recently-ended American Occupation, the last thanks to his contributions to Japanese propaganda films during wartime. There’s Honda Ishiro, a war veteran, former POW in China, and more recently a director of well-regarded drama films from Toho Studios. Honda and Tsuburaya have collaborated before, on the anti-war films Eagle of the Pacific from the previous year and Farewell Rabaul from the same year. In an ironic twist, the former film even used footage from The War at Sea from Hawaii to Malaya, the most famous and successful of the fascist propaganda films Tsuburaya supervised the effects for. The War at Sea was directed by Yamamoto Kajiro, the filmmaker who mentored Honda before the younger man’s draft notice derailed his career for over a decade. Perhaps Honda and Tsuburaya’s collaborations are a way of bringing the cycle home, of dealing with their pasts.
There’s Tanaka Tomoyuki, nearly a decade into his successful role as a producer at Toho. There’s executive producer Mori Iwao, Tanaka’s mentor and the ringleader in pulling together the staff on the film. The cinematography is credited to Tamai Masao, whose work with acclaimed Japanese tragedian Naruse Mikio further signifies that Gojira is to be taken seriously. As if to reinforce the point, the cast list includes none other than Shimura Takashi, the veteran actor who was closely associated with Honda’s close friend Kurosawa Akira, already by that point the most famed Japanese filmmaker in the world. Earlier in 1954, Shimura had headlined Kurosawa’s wildly successful Seven Samurai. His presence is as big a marker of prestige as Toho could get.
The credits end, and the film begins. We open on a shot of a churning wake in the ocean. The trail is from a salvage ship, the Eiko-maru. Its crew lulls on deck, one of the sailors playing a melancholy song on the harmonica. The calm doesn’t last long - there’s a bright flash, then an ominous glow appears in the water. The soldiers panic as something attacks the boat and sets it aflame. The crew desperately radios an SOS before the burning ship sinks.
Our first scene on land introduces our first named characters, Emiko (Kochi Momoko) and her lover, South Seas Salvage employee Ogata (Takarada Akira). Their planned date - a performance by the “Budapest String Quartet” - is deferred as Ogata receives word of the SOS from the ship and is called into work. We don’t get to know either of them much at this point, but they provide a glimpse of ordinary life on shore, a brief moment of human connection before the chaos that is about to unfold. Because two rescue ships also erupt into flames and sink beneath the waves. The Salvage company is flooded by the family members of the lost crew. When a report of three survivors comes in, the family members clamor for names, not unlike families of soldiers during wartime.
2: Odo Island
A raft with more survivors washes ashore on Odo Island (spelt Oto in some translations) off of the south of Japan. Though Odo Island is fictional, viewers familiar with Honda’s work would recognize it well enough. The Odo Island scenes were filmed in Ise-Shima, the famous pearl region of Japan, whose inhabitants Honda had filmed for his documentary short Ise-shima (1949) and his first feature film The Blue Pearl (1951). Similar themes to those works almost immediately make themselves apparent, as the local village elder blames the islanders’ empty fishing hauls on the local deity Gojira. A young woman pulling in a fishing net laughs off the old superstition, and the elder warns her that Gojira will eat her for her disrespect.
The connection between Honda’s earlier film and Gojira is reinforced shortly after our introduction to the superstition. The very same ceremonial dance troupe that had performed in The Blue Pearl returns to play Odo Island’s own masked troupe. The troupe performs a dance by torch-light, and the village elder explains to visiting reporter Hagiwara that the ceremony is all that remains of the local rites meant to placate Gojira, which used to involve sacrificing young women. It isn’t clear if the elder considers the shipwrecks and the lack of fish to be related, but it’s clear that to him and those who think like him, the latter is just a recurrence in an unbreakable pattern of history. The modern world is just a blip in comparison with the long reign of a sea god who must be appeased.
The appeasement fails utterly.
An angry, rain-strewn wind extinguishes the torches used to light the dance. The wind is the harbinger of a fierce typhoon that hits the island that night. One of the survivors from the raft, Masaji (Yamamoto Ren), lies next to his mother (Mano Tsuroko) and younger brother Shinkichi (Suzuki Toyoaki), each on their sleeping mats. A swinging lantern in the room is lit, symbolizing the shield of warmth and safety from the raging maelstrom outside. But Masaji is wide awake, nervous, as though the force that sank the ship might come after him. It does.
Mixed with the rain and thunder is the sound of the booming footsteps we heard over the credits. Shinkichi and his mother wake up. Despite his family’s warnings, the young man steps out into the rain to investigate. This saves his life. After Shinkichi steps out, something shakes the house, and the lantern falls. Masaji looks up at the giant, unseen force that tears apart the house, and screams. Shinkichi screams as his house, and his family, is destroyed by something we don’t see.
Awake, the townspeople flee their village as it is demolished. In the last shot before the storm and the scene fade, we see the helicopter that brought Hagiwara from the mainland. It has been crushed, crumpled like paper, its chassis falling apart in the rain. Whatever force has avenged itself against Odo Island, modern creations are just as helpless against its might. Perhaps this is some sort of punishment from the gods, against a people who dared to abandon their blood-soaked traditions.
Of course, most audiences at the time would know full well that Gojira was some kind of giant monster. Even if the film’s months-long publicity campaign hadn’t alerted them to that fact, there was also a radio drama adaptation of the script that was broadcast early in the year. The poster art displayed Gojira’s dinosaur-like appearance for all and sundry to see.
And yet, none of that takes away from just how eerie the storm sequence is, right from the rainy wind that signifies the dance ceremony’s failure. Part of it is that it is staged brilliantly. For examples of its technique, you have the contrast between the apparent safety of the house and the searching expression on Yamamoto’s face, the pitch-perfect use of light and shadow during the actual destruction, and Ifukube’s moody score accompanying the sounds of the storm. But the scene’s power goes deeper than its craftsmanship. Perhaps it’s the mythological backdrop, the notion that what we are seeing really could be some violent retribution against a people who dared to abandon their blood-soaked traditions.
Even more chilling, though, is the idea that it makes no difference what the people of Odo Island did or didn’t do. Take the shipwrecks into account and the scope of the destruction goes far beyond divine grudge settling against one island. The very real possibility presents itself that the destructive force wielded by the still-unseen giant monster has no target. If the promised monster has some sort of divine power, then it is a scorching fury beyond anything that can be reasoned with in mythological terms.
So it becomes science’s turn to provide an answer.
We move to Tokyo, where a bus decorated with the banner “Odo Island Disaster Petition Group” pulls up to the Diet Building, the city’s capitol. The islanders, including Shinkichi, present their accounts of something huge destroying the village and list the human and livestock casualties. The government officials we see appear to look on with a condescending expression. After Hagiwara states his reluctant agreement that something other than a typhoon caused the damage, zoologist Yamane Kyohei (the aforementioned Shimura Takashi), takes the stand. Professor Yamane references the (fraudulent) discovery of abominable snowman footprints and the deep cavities in the ocean as evidence of phenomena yet unknown by humankind, and recommends a proper scientific investigation party be sent to Odo Island.
Soon, the boat carrying said party leaves port, replete with a boat launch ceremony to see it off (I’m not knowledgeable enough to say whether that was normal practice for a low-key trip). Professor Yamane stands on the deck next to his daughter, none other than Emiko. Ogata is by their side. They bid farewell to a man onshore who wears an eyepatch and is dressed in all black. Unlike the cheering crowd around him, he doesn’t smile. This man is Dr. Serizawa, (Hirata Akihito), and he will emerge as the key human figure of the film. On the ship, Ogata shares his suspicion with Emiko that his friend, and Emiko’s fiance, made the rare trip outside his lab to see them off in case their ship sank, and he would never see them again. In spite of the calm waters and the sunny sky, the possibility feels real.
3: Discovery
The ship makes it to Odo Island unharmed. Yamane leads the science team as they investigate the ruined village. They make the alarming discovery that some areas, including the water supply on this side of the island, are contaminated with high levels of radiation. But the traces are inconsistent, as though the source of the radiation had moved.
More bizarre, though, is the discovery of a living trilobite inside what Dr. Yamane believes is a giant footprint. He picks up the trilobite with his bare hands despite the risk of radioactive contamination, his unbridled scientific amazement momentarily overwhelming his sense of safety. This is a character beat we will return to later, because the third and most important discovery is about to reveal itself.
An islander in the hills above sounds the alarm, striking a bell over and over. Everyone down below rushes up to see what the matter is. And that’s when Gojira pokes his head over the hilltop. We finally meet the monster.
Ferocious, cuddly, or both?
The villagers and scientists panic and run from the scary yet ever so slightly adorable dinosaur creature looming over them. Yamane and Hagiwara both attempt to take a picture of Godzilla before they make a break for it, but they trip into each other and spoil their chance, a funny beat that I’d never noticed until this viewing. Emiko receives what is thankfully her only damsel moment in the film, tripping and letting out a scream as Gojira turns his attention to her. Ogata grabs her and helps her away, while Gojira turns the other way and disappears behind the hillside. He leaves in his wake a pretty cool matte painting of his giant footsteps on the beach, leading back into the ocean.
Following the brief appearance of our star monster, we move back to the Diet Building. Here, we are treated to one of the great pleasures of well-heeled science fiction blockbusters: A-list actors presenting absurd pseudoscience as fact. In this case, we have Kimura Takeshi as Yamane delivering the film’s lecture on the possible origins of Gojira, including such delightful claims as the notion that both dinosaurs lived two million years ago and that trilobites lived alongside them. It is Yamane who proposes naming the creature after the Odo Islanders’ god, giving him his name.
Yamane creates the biggest stir when he presents evidence that Gojira was awakened from undersea slumber and irradiated by American hydrogen bomb tests, based on the presence of strontium-90 in the soil samples left in the monster’s wake. Immediately after his presentation, the room devolves into a heated debate between two opposing caucuses. One caucus, made up primarily of stern-looking middle-aged men, argues for the suppression of the findings on Gojira. Their argument is that the revelation of Gojira’s existence and probable nuclear origin must be kept secret to prevent a panic, though their more pertinent concern appears to be the damage to Japan’s “political life, economy, and foreign relations.” The opposing caucus is mixed-gender and led by three very vocal women, who argue that the truth must be made public regardless of any social or diplomatic inconvenience caused. The debate quickly escalates into an argument and finally a cacophony of shouts. Yamane and his fellow scientists observe the results with dismay, their scientific work dragged and crushed between the gears of politics.
It is here that I must give credit to Ed Godzisewski and Steve Ryfle, primary authors of the biography Ishiro Honda: A Life in Film, From Godzilla to Kurosawa, an amazing book that I’m using as one of the main information sources for this blog. The authors observe that the female-led caucus reflects one of the primary policies of the 1945-1952 American Occupation of Japan, that being the enfranchisement of women in perceived accordance with liberal western values. At the same time, it is the fusty older men in the opposing caucus who are making the argument in favor of not rocking the boat in favor of America - for it is certainly America that is being referred to in the male speaker’s reference to Japan’s political life and foreign relations.
The American Occupation was enacted to transition Japan toward a modern western-style capitalist democracy; in practice, it turned the defeated nation into the USA’s economic and diplomatic catspaw to use in the newly minted Cold War. There were and are plenty of horror stories from the occupation, from American G.I.s abusing Japanese civilians with impunity to political suppression of anything inconvenient to the United States’ interests. (We’ll touch on an example of the latter in a minute.) And of course, the idea that the United States was a paragon of feminism in the forties, fifties, or present day is a laughable notion.
But just because the United States government was pushing policies that reflected its own interests onto Japan doesn’t mean that all of those policies were inherently malign. There are precisely zero good-faith arguments against granting women’s suffrage, which the Occupation-led Japanese government did in late 1945 following grassroots organizing by female activists and an edict from General MacArthur. Honda Ishiro himself was married to a very strong-willed, outspoken woman in Honda Kimi, and was already known for his interest in making “women’s pictures” showcasing the plight of women in Japan. As a director, Honda would hardly have been an enthusiastic participant in a reactionary screed against women’s empowerment.
So by depicting the female-led caucus as the one we recognize as the voice of reason, Honda and his collaborators smartly draw a line in the sand. Gojira is very implicitly critical of America’s influence on Japan, but not from a knee-jerk place of nationalist resentment. Rather, the film is quietly angry about the political relationship’s impact on people. The women leading the caucus represent not the imperial Japan of old but current and future generations, in which women would (theoretically) have equal say. And these representatives of post-war, post-Occupation generations are shown to be championing truth and justice regardless of the ruffled feathers it would cause the US or Japanese governments. By positioning the women’s caucus as the one in the right, Gojira stakes its argument on broader humanist grounds than a simple conflict between traditional Japan and its American conquerors. The cause of the women’s caucus is the cause of building a better future than America or wartime Japan could provide.
Nonetheless, the furor between the representatives in the Diet Building meeting doesn’t bode well within our story. So far, Gojira’s victims have been those on the lower rungs of Japanese society: working class sailors and remote village communities, those who have to fight to be heard. This is the first time that the halls of power tackle Gojira in any form, and we see from the condescending way the Odo islanders are treated that the government is still distant enough from the issue to treat it as a mere annoyance.
The actual substance of the debate was cut from the American release of the film, with only the furor at the end left in.
The existence of Gojira does make it to the press, as we find out in the next scene. A woman and two men on a commuter train discuss the newspaper headlines, involving a total of seventeen sunken ships and the establishment of a disaster response center to deal with Gojira. I think it’s worth transcribing the whole conversation, at least according to the translation on the Criterion release. (For those not acquainted with the niceties of home video/niche streaming service labels, Criterion is basically marketed as The Gentlemen’s Choice of international/art film collections. They’ve released the first nineteen Godzilla films on blu-ray or streaming as of this month, and once put out a DVD of Michael Bay’s Armageddon for some reason.)
The Criterion edition of Gojira.
WOMAN: This is awful. Atomic tuna, radioactive fallout, and now this Gojira to top it off. What if it shows up in Tokyo Bay?
MAN #1: It’ll probably go straight for you first.
WOMAN: [Gently shoves Man #1] You’re horrible. I barely escaped the atomic bomb in Nagasaki, and now this!
MAN #2: I’ll have to find a place to evacuate to.
WOMAN: Find me one, too.
MAN #1: Evacuate again? I’ve had enough. [Checks watch]
It is here that Gojira makes explicit its connection to the Daigo Fukuryu Maru or Lucky Dragon No. 5, the tuna fishing vessel whose fate was arguably just as much an inspiration to the film as the atomic bombings themselves. On their final voyage, the crew of the Lucky Dragon lost their nets in the ocean and abandoned their usual course. On March 1st, 1954, the ship’s new course took it within range of the radioactive fallout from the Castle Bravo hydrogen bomb test at Bikini Atoll. The ship returned home with the crew suffering radiation sickness and their remaining haul contaminated with radioactivity. When the crew’s radiation sickness was diagnosed, the American government ignored the request for treatment instructions from the medical team examining them. One of the crew died not long after reaching shore, and the other survivors would suffer lifelong health complications. The prospect of radioactive tuna reaching the market sparked a panic. The United States’ main response was to downplay the incident, even going so far as to smear the crew as Soviet agents sent to embarrass their rival and gather information on the composition of the hydrogen bomb used. The incident inflamed anti-nuclear and anti-American sentiment in Japan. It was also on producer Tanaka’s mind when he looked down at the ocean on a flight back to Japan, and formulated a film about something lurking in the depths.
The Lucky Dragon No. 5 today.
Meanwhile, the references to evacuation and shelters call back to even before Hiroshima and Nagasaki, to the United States’ air raids on Tokyo during World War II. The deadliest of these attacks, Operation Meetinghouse on March 9th and 10th of 1945, claimed up to more than 100,000 lives and left millions of survivors homeless; it remains one of the deadliest acts of war in modern history. In referring to the air raids, Gojira situates its nuclear inspirations among a long line of horrible experiences suffered by civilians living in Japan. (Indeed, the incredibly destructive Great Kanto Earthquake that devastated middle Japan in 1923 was still in living memory. So was the Kanto Massacre that followed, in which mobs, vigilantes, and complicit authorities slaughtered hundreds of Koreans living in Japan as well as political leftists and Japanese or Chinese civilians who were mistaken for Koreans.)
If one was in the habit of criticizing art for being on-the-nose, the train interlude would certainly give them ample ammunition. But just as striking as the earnestness of the dialogue is the tone of it. The conversation is casual, even playful. There’s a certain resigned air to it, an attitude of “of course the people of Japan have to deal with a giant monster now.” It exists to highlight the absurdity of the scenario in a gently mocking way, yes, but also to illustrate that absurdity has become the norm. And yet the scene doesn’t come across as cynical, which would have risked undermining the raw emotion found in the rest of the film. In its own way, the interlude is an expression of the film’s optimistic streak, embodied in the man checking his watch: people endure horrible events, but life does go on. The optimism isn’t straightforward, nor could it be within the film’s downbeat, bleak tone. But it’s present, a note sounding under the fear of nuclear annihilation that animates the film on the surface.
The train scene was also excised from the American release of the film.
4: Response
The Japanese navy launches depth charges into the ocean to kill Gojira, to the upbeat martial tune of what will become Ifukube Akira’s iconic “Monster Zero March” in its later iterations. In most monster movies, such destructive force would be enough to end the threat. Certainly, it’s tough to imagine King Kong or Them!’s Giant Ants surviving such blasts. Shortly thereafter, we see clips of downtown Tokyo, lit up neon at night, modern life free to go on now that Gojira’s threat is seemingly distinguished. A pleasure cruise crosses the dark waters of the ocean, its passengers partying blissfully, a far cry from the melancholy atmosphere of the salvage ship at the beginning. But here, too, the thunderous footsteps sound. The passengers scream as Gojira, alive and well, surfaces from the water and submerges again (perhaps appeased by the party atmosphere, he spares the vessel).
At the Gojira Disaster Relief Center that has been established, officials ask Professor Yamane how the monster can be killed. Yamane responds that nothing can kill Gojira as the creature “was baptized in the fires of the H-Bomb and survived,” and that anyway, studying such a unique creature and its incredible survival abilities should be the priority. This is more than an opinion, but a deeply held principle for Yamane the zoologist.
Meanwhile, Emiko Yamane and Ogata discuss their future. Emiko is ready to reveal to both her father and Dr. Serizawa her intention to break off her marriage arrangements with Serizawa, whom she loves dearly as a childhood friend but doesn’t feel the same romantic connection toward as Ogata. By happy accident and/or screenwriting efficiency, Hagiwara has been assigned the same day to interview Professor Yamane’s future son-in-law to check out a tip that he might have a way to beat Gojira, and the reporter hits up Emiko for access to Serizawa. Emiko agrees to introduce Hagiwara and resolves to have the difficult conversation with Serizawa after the interview.
Hagiwara’s interview goes poorly. Serizawa denies that his research has any relevance to stopping Gojira, but Hagiwara responds that a contact in Switzerland heard otherwise from a German scientist. “I don’t know any German scientists,” says Serizawa, a little too defensively. And here, the film tips its hand. It would have been easy for Gojira to avoid acknowledging the recently defeated Japanese Empire’s own fascist, expansionist activities. Most Japanese films about World War II at the time avoided any focus on the crimes that Japan committed against citizens of other nations, or its status as an ally of Nazi Germany and Mussolini’s Italy, in favor of chronicling the suffering of Japanese civilians and soldiers during the war. That suffering was immense, and obviously deserves recounting and commemoration, but so was that of Japan’s victims. And such a narrow focus can easily be twisted to avoid examining the full context of the war, or even to deny Japan’s international war crimes outright, as the Japanese government largely continues to do. (A sin which is also largely true of the United States and many other countries in regard to their own bloody pasts and presents, in both policy and in the films they produce.)
Gojira never directly refers to the Axis powers or Japan’s recent status as a fascist empire, and that’s a fair point of criticism of the film and the majority of its studio-produced cinematic contemporaries. But by referencing the context of Japan in World War II, however indirectly, Honda and company further reposition their story away from any kind of reactionary, nationalistic tract, cementing it as a film concerned with the well-being of the entire human race. The film knows that Japan was capable of causing the suffering that America visited upon it, and more than willing to inflict it. The film acknowledges that any research Serizawa was doing during the war, however well-intentioned, would have been in the context of serving the fascists. And the line of dialogue sets up a crucial character beat for later: Serizawa is a man who knows that science can be made to serve evil in the name of the powers that be.
Hagiwara’s interview gets nowhere. Emiko pulls him aside and suggests he return another time. Once the reporter leaves, she herself expresses curiosity about what Serizawa has been working on. Solemnly, considering. Serizawa asks if she can keep a secret, and would swear on it. Nonchalantly, not realizing the terrible burden she is about to take on, she says yes. Serizawa takes her down to his cellar and into his mad scientist-type lab. In short order, he points her to a fish tank, into which he drops a small pearl-sized capsule. We do not see what happens after the capsule starts to bubble and opens, but she is horrified by it and recoils into Serizawa’s arms. Outside the lab, she swears to keep what she saw a secret from the world and, by extension, the audience. She leaves without disclosing her relationship with Ogata, too shaken to say anything.
At her father’s house, she is greeted by Ogata and the orphaned islander Shinkichi, who has been adopted into the Yamane household. They can immediately tell by her face that something’s wrong, even though she denies it; in the chaos to come, she gets the chance to pull Ogata aside and tell him that she didn’t disclose their relationship to Serizawa, but for now she keeps mum. Professor Yamane enters, oblivious to the tension around him. Emiko serves tea in the dining room, and all four of them sit. For a moment, the room is silent, tranquil if uneasy. For a moment, it’s possible to pretend that the world is normal.
Then a siren sounds, followed by the now familiar footfalls. Gojira is advancing toward Tokyo.
Gojira rises out of Tokyo Bay and approaches the shore. Japanese Self-Defense Force (JSDF) ground troops open fire with heavy machine guns. They haven’t learned their lesson yet. Bullets do nothing.
Gojira makes landfall. Walking inland, he steps in front of an oncoming commuter train and derails it. Irritated or angered, Gojira attacks the train, smashing the cars and even picking one up in his mouth. (Contrary to legend, he does not eat it.) Gojira demolishes the train tracks and a bridge, before he returns to the sea with a single roar. The sequence is relatively short, more of a teaser for what is to come, but several aspects of it leap out as important. Shots of terrified civilians fleeing or witnessing Gojira’s wrath take up just as much screentime as those of the monster trashing his surroundings. Even though we don’t directly see any commuters die, many surely perish, and the survivors’ fear is given just as much weight as the spectacle of the monster wreaking havoc. Given how vast the scope of Gojira’s next urban rampage will become, grounding the city’s destruction in human terms from the start is crucial to ensuring its emotional impact.
The next day, a plane lands carrying international experts who have come about the giant monster problem. The JSDF erects a giant barrier of electric towers around the perimeter of Tokyo Bay. The residents of the shoreline are evacuated - more shades of the air raids a decade before. We have the first example of a scene iconic to the genre in a Japanese kaiju (giant monster) movie, as tanks and military vehicles roll out to take up the positions from which they plan to kill the monster.
At the Yamane household, a report about the evacuation plays on the radio. Ogata tells Emiko that he’s going to ask her father’s blessing for their courtship. But when Professor Yamane arrives home, he’s in no mood to talk.
Earlier in the film, upon watching a television report on the navy’s depth charge bombardment, Yamane requests to be left alone and goes to sit in his room, in the dark. In his room, we see that he has a snazzy model of a Stegosaurus skeleton on display. Keeping Gojira alive and studying his survival abilities is more than a matter of detached scientific interest for Yamane. Gojira is a miracle, a creature of the sort he’s spent his career hoping to discover, except actually alive in the present day. He is an entirely unique living thing, as far as anyone knows. Yamane is not callous towards his fellow humans. When Gojira comes ashore toward the train tracks, we see him run up to the troops stationed there and advise them not to shine spotlights on the monster in case they enrage him. But he wants to find a way to study Gojira as well, to contain his threat rather than jump to outright destruction.
So he arrives home now and vents about how the military can only think of killing Gojira, and what a waste of a once-in-a-lifetime scientific opportunity that would be. Ogata, quite reasonably, points out how dangerous Gojira is and compares him to “the H-bomb hanging over Japan’s head.” Yamane accuses Ogata of wanting to kill Gojira too, demands he get out of his house, and storms off in a fury. Needless to say, this rather puts a damper on Ogata’s plan to ask Yamane to be his father-in-law. (For his part, he admits to Emiko that he “wasn’t very tactful.”)
Yamane is clearly in the wrong not to overtly prioritize civilians’ safety over Gojira’s, not without a concrete alternative strategy to keep Gojira contained. And yet the film does not judge him for this. Where American science fiction films of the period often portrayed scientists who wanted threats studied rather than destroyed as delusional or outright antagonistic, Gojira gives the space for Yamane’s hope to keep everyone alive to be valid. It is a remarkable show of compassion and thoughtfulness on the filmmakers’ part, and one that will pay further dividends at the end of the film.
And this is where the casting of an A-list, “serious” actor in the film pays off. Shimura Takashi had already gained international acclaim for his work with Kurosawa Akira in films such as Rashomon and Ikiru, and in 1954 had headlined Kurosawa’s seismic hit Seven Samurai as the samurai band’s wise, experienced leader. So casting him as Professor Yamane gives the character sizeable gravity. After his presentation in the Diet Building, Professor Yamane doesn’t actually contribute much to the plot beyond advise from the sidelines, and his attitude of total pacifism ends up at odds with where the story goes. But Shimura flits perfectly between the modes of boyish enthusiasm, kindly paternalism, gruff disapproval, and quiet melancholy that makes up Yamane’s character, and grants him as much weight in the film as the more plot-relevant Serizawa. Simply put, this is what happens when you cast a pro at the top of his game. And the success of Shimura’s performance ensures that even when Yamane’s idealism tips toward stubborn naivete in the face of the improbability of containing Gojira, the desire for a better outcome hangs over the film. It is not something the characters can realistically achieve in this particular story, but it lurks on the margins, a glimmer of possibility that is never completely erased.
Which is fortunate, because everything is about to go to hell.
5: Devastation
A radio report announces that Gojira is approaching the shoreline. Our last shot inside Yamane’s house is of two canaries in a cage, chirping in innocent ignorance. The last moment of calm before the storm.
Gojira approaches the electric barrier. Operators stand by at the main switchboard, ready to throw the switch that will expose the monster to twenty thousand volts. Military tanks and cannons aim silently. It’s difficult to imagine King Kong or the Giant Ants surviving such a trap.
Gojira does survive. He doesn’t even seem particularly phased, just angered. He rends the nearest towers apart as the military opens fire to no result. Then Gojira does something we haven’t seen him do since the start of the film, offscreen, to the salvage ship; he breathes fire. It appears more as a mist of projected steam, and appears to do more damage by temperature than force, but it melts the electric towers in its range like wax. Then Gojira advances into the city as terrified civilians flee, and the real horror begins.
Something that only struck me while revisiting the film for this essay: in the world of the film, would Gojira’s ensuing rampage be as destructive as it is had he not been exposed to the electric voltage? He attacked the train previously, yes, but as far as he knows it crashed into his foot. He knocked down a bridge to return to the ocean, but it was in his way. The idea of Gojira as non-destructive unless provoked doesn’t really hold water when looking at his ship-sinking habit and attack on Odo Island, true, but it’s rather expected that he would protect his territory and wander where he sees fit. In fact, it is only after the depth charges are launched that Gojira comes to the mainland at all. Did the JSDF’s military actions escalate Gojira’s anger? Would he have been as violent as he is toward Tokyo if the military had attempted to redirect rather than kill him? In the film, it’s a moot point, anyway. Because as an enraged god would, as an H-bomb would, as the Allied air raids did, Gojira turns Tokyo into a sea of fire.
Nothing in any previous giant monster movie compares to the sheer scale of the destruction here. Even the Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, for all that it terrorized civilians and left the streets of New York City deserted, ultimately spared most of the major architecture. Not Gojira. We see him breathe fire on fleeing civilians just as readily as he blasts tanks into scrap. As the sequence goes on, all of the wide shots of the sequence show the horizon of Tokyo in flames. The city attack scenes in the American monster movies represented a nation’s fears of what would happen if an entire modern city was threatened by destruction. The Tokyo attack in Gojira is the work of a country that experienced it for real, multiple times over. And again, the tragedy goes beyond the nuclear bomb, one of the most heartbreaking beats in the sequence is of a woman desperately clinging to her children, seemingly trapped, reassuring them that they’ll see their father soon. Whether their father was killed in the air raids or in combat, the context is all too clear.
The shot of the woman and her children was not translated or subtitled for the American release of Gojira, but it was left intact.
Above, I seem to have described a sequence that is almost grueling in its grim sobriety, the kind of film that many viewers would put off as being “just not ready for.” And yet it is also the case that Gojira is first and foremost a popcorn film, designed to wow viewers with the spectacle of the monster, the destruction he causes, and the expensive special effects that bring it all to life. (Indeed, Gojira was the most expensive Japanese film at the time of its release.) Simultaneously asking the audience to be awed by the demolition of an entire city and genuinely horrified at the death toll on display is the sort of line that many well-meaning filmmakers have failed to walk. Gojira finds the balance thanks to its acknowledgement of the bleak absurdity of the scenario.
Gojira engages with its inherent absurdity in a few ways during the Tokyo attack. At least one of those ways is unintended on the part of the filmmakers, namely that some of the special effects are, well, “cheesy.” We should qualify what exactly we mean here. As mentioned above, the film’s visual effects are anything but cheap. And special effects director Eiji Tsuburaya was no poverty-row showman pushing tawdry displays toward undemanding audiences, but a respected master of his craft. So successful had his previous miniature effects been that Occupation officials had mistaken sequences from the propaganda film The War at Sea from Hawaii to Malaya (1942) for genuine documentary footage.
But suitmation, the process where kaiju or mecha (robots) are portrayed by stuntmen in costumes on miniature sets, was pioneered for use in Gojira. Tsuburaya and crew didn’t just have the tasks of depicting military vehicles in combat or constructing realistic looking landscapes, they had to integrate them with the shots of the giant monster they were bringing to life. Gojira’s visuals are more uneven than those of King Kong or even The Beast of 20,000 Fathoms, films that saw stop-motion specialists operating at the peak of their craft; the 1954 film is making it up as it goes along. This leads to unintended aspects like the fact the goofy-looking Gojira puppets, used for head motions that the incredibly heavy and stiff suit was incapable of, look noticeably different to the suit’s head (there was no way to scale the suit’s mold to puppet-size to keep the appearances identical). Or the way that the fire trucks that crash and topple into a building in one sequence look a lot like model kit toys, complete with an immobile miniature fireman on them. There are also many shots that look fantastic within the aesthetic of suitmation. All of these, impressive or comical in result, are part of the same laborious and experimental effects process. (Tsuburaya himself was quoted as saying that it is more important for a special effect to be entertaining than convincing, a philosophy we will have much cause to celebrate over the course of this project.)
As a whole, the handcrafted nature of the effects serve to call attention to the constructed nature of the film, as does the footage being black-and-white in the first place. Rather than be immersed into a brutally realistic recreation of the atomic bombs and air raids, the audience is wowed by the successful effects and charmed by the misfires. And yet the underlying imagery of a shadowy city beset by bright white flames is so strong that the emotional punch comes through anyway, ably assisted by the horrified reactions of the human bystander’s and Ifukube’s menacing soundtrack. We are watching an impression of the horrors the Japanese populace faced, able to engage with it “safely” through the showman presentation of Tsuburaya’s effects. Gojira doesn’t need “better” special effects because it channels the feeling of the devastation, the spirit being more important the letter.
Another aspect of the effects is that Gojira is simply a compelling character to watch. The jerky, aggravated motions of the monster, both of Nakajima Haruo and Tezuka Katsumi in the suit and the charming array of goofy-looking puppets used when the shot requires a wider range of head motion, lend him a rather feline temperament. Gojira swats at things in his path that annoy him. He bites buildings and trains out of what seems like curiosity as much as aggression. One memorable moment finds him staring at a cage full of birds in a high-rise window, seemingly transfixed (I’m not sure if the scientific consensus that birds evolved from dinosaurs was a widespread theory in 1954, but Gojira seems almost to be reacting - in confusion? recognition? - to his descendents here). Gojira’s cat-like mannerisms, accentuated by the non-reptilian design feature of tiny, pointed ears on the side of his head, help to ground him as an animal that is irate and out of place. As much as he’s a terrifying force of destruction, he also exhibits petty, recognizable emotions. He is not humanized to the extent that the mammalian Kong was, but Gojira gains a certain sympathetic air, one that will pay off in the climax.
The partially unintended absurdity of the visuals combines well with the bleak humor to be found in the Tokyo rampage sequence. The most famous example is when Gojira demolishes the Diet Building, bringing blunt closure to the film’s lampoon of the Japanese political process. Another less-discussed moment comes when first responders receive instructions on where to deploy to fight the fires Gojira is causing, seemingly a good distance away. The responders look up, and Gojira is right there, looming over a building, ready to blast his atomic breath. The gag of the monster’s sudden appearance provides a bitterly ironic comment on the impossibility of containing such a disaster on the go - it will spread before you know it.
The capstone to the sequence’s dark sense of humor comes in the form of a group of news camera crews filming Gojira’s rampage from a tower. The first time they appear, one reporter narrates that what they are seeing “Is absolutely unbelievable, yet it’s unfolding before our very eyes…for those watching at home, this is no play or movie. This is real, the story of the century!” Here, Gojira playfully underlines its own artifice. The film acknowledges the inherent absurdity of using the attack of a giant dinosaur to comment on the atomic bombings of Japan. But is this scenario inherently more absurd than two cities going up in huge explosions that look like mushrooms? With the difficulties present for filmmakers to directly address Hiroshima and Nagasaki without invoking the ire of the United States, Gojira attempts to convey Japan’s story of the century through an equally absurd scenario, something more real than reality.
The news team’s presence pays off in the culmination of the entire sequence, as Gojira approaches their tower and another reporter narrates the team’s imminent demise. “There’s no time to run. Will we survive? It’s getting closer! This looks like the end!” Then, as Gojira grabs at the tower and bites it, “It has the tower in its hand. What power! This really is the end. Farewell, ladies and gentlemen!” Then the tower topples, and the camera follows the POV of the reporters as they plummet forty stories to the ground. It’s a fourth-wall-breaking moment that’s simultaneously horrifying, bleakly absurd, and still packs a visceral punch even today. It’s possibly my favorite scene in the film.
Gojira makes his way back to Tokyo Bay. Yamane, Ogata, Emiko, Shinkichi, and other survivors watch from a safe vantage point across the Bay. Dr. Serizawa watches too, from a TV in his lab.
Shinkichi’s presence in the film is somewhat of an oddity. After his adoption by the Yamane family, he largely recedes to the background, and doesn’t even speak up to oppose Dr. Yamane’s insistence that the monster that killed his family be kept alive, for example. But here, as the camera lingers on the burning city, Shinkichi curses Gojira, over and over, under his breath. Perhaps this is all that the main cast member who has experienced the most destruction and loss that Gojira has caused needed to say.
The crowd’s mood lifts as a squadron of jet fighters attack Gojira and seemingly drive him off. But in truth, Gojira is already heading out into the water, and he seems little more than agitated by the jets’ missiles, like a cat swatting at an annoying bug. The one hero moment the Japanese military seems to get is in fact as hollow and ineffectual as everything else they accomplish in the film. The crowd’s momentary cheers fade as they realize that Gojira will come back, and they have no way to stop the monster. Ogata and the Yamanes look on in silence as we fade to black.
6: Destroyer
And now there’s only sadness.
The camera pans across the ruins of the city, small fires still burning. And then we see the casualties. The hospitals are overcrowded, full of the sick and dying. A doctor reads a young boy with a geiger counter, and the device goes off like crazy. A little girl sobs inconsolably as her dead mother is put on a stretcher and carried away. Emiko, volunteering with Ogata at the hospital, gives the girl a reassuring lie that “Your momma will be back soon.”
It’s nakedly emotional filmmaking, accompanied by Ifukube’s achingly sad score, designed to break the audience’s hearts. And it works, because what it depicts is raw and honest.
Emiko can’t take the tragedy any more, and so she breaks Serizawa’s trust. She pulls Ogata aside and tells him about what she saw in the doctor’s lab.
We flash back to the scene in question, where the capsule that Serizawa drops in the fish tank opens. The tank fills with bubbles, and shortly all of the fish in it are dissolved down to the bone.
When Emiko has recovered enough from the shock, Serizawa explains to her that his device, the Oxygen Destroyer, is based on a new energy source that he found during research into oxygen. The actual science as described makes no sense, but the gist of the matter is clear. While Serizawa hopes to find beneficial use of this new energy, so far he has only been able to harness it for destructive ends, and is terrified of what might happen when the information is released: that his device could be turned into a weapon in the vein of the hydrogen bomb. He tells Emiko that he is prepared to destroy his work and take his own life to prevent his discoveries being misused, and Emiko promises to keep his secret.
In the present, Emiko breaks that promise. She believes that the Oxygen Destroyer is the only way to kill Gojira, and so she and Ogata go to confront Serizawa and convince him to allow its use.
Emiko is barely able to meet Serizawa’s eyes as Ogata bluntly requests to use the Oxygen Destroyer. Serizawa keeps up a pretense of ignorance before Emiko confesses her betrayal. Serizawa goes down to his lab and locks himself in; Ogata forces the door open and rushes to stop Serizawa from destroying his notes. Ogata is bloodied and falls during the struggle. Serizawa, remorseful, helps a distraught Emiko bring Ogata to a chair, where Emiko tends to his wounds.
If Serizawa did not know or suspect Emiko of having an affair with Ogata, the look on his face as he observes her taking care of Ogata reveals that he sees what is between them now. I’ve always interpreted it that Serizawa was ignorant of the situation, and that his marriage arrangements with the Yamane family were an emotional parallel to his similarly doomed endeavor of finding a peaceful use for his research. Guy Mariner Tucker, the late author of the indispensable kaiju film making-of resource Age of the Gods (1997), had a different interpretation. Tucker speculates that Serizawa suspected Emiko and Ogata all along, and that he showed the Oxygen Destroyer to Emiko in part to ensure her romantic loyalty, by sharing a burden only the two of them would carry. Such frankly unhealthy, manipulative behavior would certainly add shades of gray to Serizawa’s character and make him harder to like, if not to sympathize with. That reading would also frame the direction of his character arc as a morbid redemption of sorts. Ultimately, the exact context of Serizawa’s reaction to the obvious connection between his fiance and his good friend is ambiguous. In either case, Serizawa now sees that Emiko’s heart belongs to Ogata, a revelation underlined by the fact that Emiko betrayed the former’s ultimate trust in favor of the latter.
Serizawa, ashamed, asks Ogata’s forgiveness, but stands by his refusal to allow the Oxygen Destroyer’s use. He states that if the device “is used even once, the politicians of the world won’t stand idly by. They’ll inevitably turn it into a weapon.” Looking haggard and tired, he continues that even if he destroys his research, “We human beings are weak creatures…[the information] is still in my head. As long as I’m alive, who can say I wouldn’t be coerced into using it again?” This scene marks Gojira’s most overt engagement with the Cold War that looms over the entire film. Since the end of World War II, Japan had been a pawn in the nuclear conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union. There is a compelling historical argument that one of the reasons the United States deployed the atomic bombs as a way to “claim” Japan was to pre-empt a Soviet ground invasion that would have claimed Japan for the Stalinist regime, a rival empire in all but name. The atomic bombs signaled not an end to international war, but a shifting of the conflict, as the USes A and SR squared off for territory and influence. Serizawa refers to the context of the nuclear arms race when he comments that “A-bombs against A-bombs, H-bombs against H-bombs…as a scientist - no, as a human being - adding another terrifying weapon to humanity’s arsenal is something I can’t allow.” The Oxygen Destroyer could become just another loaded gun held in the race toward Mutually Assured Destruction.
But Serizawa’s conscience goes both ways. He can’t totally refute Ogata’s insistence that the only way of stopping the horror of Gojira is in his hands, and that more people will suffer if he does nothing. The doctor drops to his knees, hands clutching his hair, expressing regret that he ever invented the Oxygen Destroyer. It’s a moment of inner turmoil that could have come across as melodramatic, but feels totally authentic and earned.
Then the television in Serizawa’s lab, which had so far been silent in the scene, suddenly pipes up with a broadcast of a “peace prayer” sung by a girl’s choir in Tokyo, played over footage of the devastated city and the recovery efforts. The film cuts from the footage playing on TV to shots of patients in the hospital and then to the choir singing the hymn, which is set to possibly the most powerful and haunting piece in Ifukube’s score. Thus it is that a development that is incredibly contrived on paper works beautifully in practice. On this viewing, I realized that there really is the feeling of deus ex machina to the television: that higher powers are hearing the choir’s prayer and conveying it to Serizawa, or perhaps it is the filmmakers themselves willing the character to follow his heart. Either way, even if the scene makes no sense, it feels right; and that’s arguably more important for the sake of an audience.
Serizawa, overcome with emotion, switches off the deus ex machina television. He has made his decision: he tells Emiko and Ogata that “you two win.” He will allow the Oxygen Destroyer’s use for what he vows will be the first and last time. So he begins gathering up all of his research and putting them to a burner in the lab. At the sight of her lifelong friend destroying his life’s work, Emiko bursts into tears (in a jarring cut that frankly is rather comically melodramatic), but Serizawa reassures her that this is the only way to keep his device out of the wrong hands. Thus it is that the prize material of his career crumples and darkens to ash.
And so we come to the climax. A search boat carrying our leads and a bunch of reporters tracks Gojira by geiger counter to the middle of Tokyo Bay, where Ogata the experienced diver plans to carry down the Oxygen Destroyer, now encased in a cylindrical tank. Professor Yamane has no objections left. He has seen too clearly the destruction and loss of life that Gojira can cause.
At the last minute, Serizawa insists on being the one to make the dive - this Oxygen Destroyer is the last one left, and he needs to make sure it’s detonated properly. Professor Yamane and Ogata attempt to talk him out of it, but Ogata relents on the condition that he goes with him. Yamane cautions the two of them to be careful, and Emiko tells Serizawa that she’ll pray for him; Serizawa merely looks her in the eyes and nods in response. Emiko helps a crew member lower the two divers into the water. They are connected to the ship only by the air lines on their diving suits.
Serizawa and Ogata drift down into the depths, Serizawa carrying the Oxygen Destroyer. They are diving into danger and approaching the final reckoning with the monster. And yet it is not a thrilling or menacing piece that plays on the soundtrack, but the same slow, tragic theme that played during the montage of devastation following Gojira’s rampage in Tokyo. Shortly, the divers find Gojira, sleeping at the bottom of Tokyo Bay. He stirs, and his movements are gentle, placid. He moves toward the divers, and while the sight is certainly menacing, the creature seems as peaceful as he’s ever been. There’s something tired and melancholy about the creature, perfectly in tune with the soundtrack.
And so the realization hits for the viewer that Gojira is as much a victim of the hydrogen bomb as anyone. Here he is, all alone at the bottom of the ocean, far from his own prehistoric time, presumably exhausted from his rage. Here, Gojira gives to its non-mammalian monster what King Kong, Them!, and The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms could not give to theirs: sympathy. Gojira isn’t just a monster. He’s a character, and a tragic figure on a scale even grander than King Kong. Yamane’s earlier regard for Gojira’s life, the charming effects used to portray him, and Ifukube’s repeated music cue come full circle. Honda Ishiro once said that “Monsters are tragic beings. They are born too tall, too strong, too heavy. They are not evil by choice[…] After several stories such as this, people end up having a kind of affection for the monsters. They end up caring about them.” Gojira, for all the damage he’s caused, is a creature we feel sorry for.
Serizawa taps Ogata on the shoulder, signaling that his friend should surface. But Serizawa stays behind, even as Ogata screams his name over his suit’s communication line. Serizawa confronts Gojira alone. He activates the Oxygen Destroyer and drops it on the Bay floor. The device releases its deadly content into the bay, causing the whole body of water to fill with bubbles, like a fizzy soda (only deadly). Gojira writhes in agony, as presumably every other sea creature in the bay dies and dissolves away; one final mass death in Gojira’s path, this time caused by a human.
Up on the ship, Ogata frantically attempts to contact Serizawa. Serizawa responds: “Ogata, it’s working! I hope you two will be happy. Farewell.” Then he pulls out a hidden pocket knife and raises it to his air tube. Alarmed, Ogata and the crew pull up Serizawa’s line. It comes up severed.
Gojira surfaces from the bubbling mass. He gives one final deafening roar to menace the ship. Then he sinks back down to the bottom of the bay and dies. He dissolves to a skeleton, and then to nothing.
A newscaster on the ship crows: “What emotion! What joy! Victory at last! I saw Gojira’s lifeless corpse sink into the sea with my own eyes! This victory belongs to Dr. Serizawa, the scientist of the century!” It is an announcement that feels similar to those wartime newscasters might have made, when the media cheered every military action and spun them into further propaganda.
But the grieving main characters know better. There is no happy ending here, just tragedy in the name of preventing more tragedy. A teary-eyed Ogata reiterates Serizawa’s last wish for their happiness to Emiko, who collapses into sobs; theirs is a romance that will be forever marked by the shadow of Serizawa’s death. Shinkichi and even Hagiwara shed tears. Yamane’s reaction is quieter, lowering his hat in a salute, his face showing apparent understanding why Serizawa did what he did. A little later, he muses that he can’t believe that Gojira was truly the last of its kind, and that “If nuclear testing continues, then someday, somewhere in the world, another Gojira may appear.” Everyone on the ship jointly salutes Serizawa in mourning, as the film fades to a shot of the ocean, and then to black.
And the audience knows better, too. Nothing good comes from war. Nothing good comes from the existence of superweapons. There are only chance survivors, and the scars that remain, and the hope of changing society before there’s a next time.
7: America
Gojira wasn’t christened Godzilla in international territories until two years later, with the 1956 release of Godzilla, King of the Monsters! in US theaters. This shorter, edited version of Gojira featured new footage directed by Terry Morse and featured Raymond Burr as Steve Martin (no, not that one), an American reporter on a layover in Japan when Godzilla attacks. The revised story posits Martin as a friend of Serizawa and the Yamanes, and has him interact with the story via conversations with faceless body doubles for the original cast, phone calls with the characters, or simply editing him into the original scenes. And of course, Gojira was translated into the incredibly snappy, powerful-sounding Godzilla.
King of the Monsters would be used as the basis for many releases in other foreign markets. This meant in practice that until the twenty-first century, the American edit or cuts derived from it were the only widely available versions of Gojira in most of the world. That this is no longer the case means that we can probably cut the American edit some slack. Now that the original Gojira has largely supplanted King of the Monsters as the definitive version of Godzilla’s first film, we can engage with the edited cut as an interesting curio rather than as the main representative of the original’s themes and the arbiter of its critical reputation.
In doing so, we can readily admit that King of the Monsters has its strengths. The choice to open the film with Steve Martin trapped in the rubble of Tokyo is a striking one. We then cut to the scenes in the hospital, with Martin edited in as one of the wounded. The images of disaster followed by the pathos of the hospital scenes immediately creates interest; what could have caused this? Beginning in media res and treating most of the film as a flashback narrated by Martin is a bold structural choice. And the first part of the “flashback”, as Martin arrives in Tokyo only to learn of the shipping disasters, actually increases the sense of eerie mystery present in the opening of the original. We’ve already seen the damage that whatever Godzilla is has caused, and so the spookiness of the destroyed ships, knowing where it leads, hits even harder than in the Japanese edit. From the start, King of the Monsters has a greater sense of stakes and of danger. Raymond Burr’s voiceover narration is more than a little cheesy, true, but his journalistic scene-setting is even consistent with Honda Ishiro’s intention that Gojira take a documentarian approach to its subject matter.
The problems with the adaptation become apparent the further we get into the film. The scenes featuring the Japanese cast are either narrated over by Burr, presented as is with insert shots to show Martin asking his guide Tomo (Frank Iwanaga) to translate for him, or dubbed into English outright (by a cast that included a young James Hong, the beloved character actor whose most prominent roles include the villain in 1986’s Big Trouble in Little China, the adoptive goose father in the Kung Fu Panda series, and the family grandfather in 2022’s Everything, Everywhere All At Once. The more you know.) The problem is that Burr’s narration ends up flattening the impact of many scenes, placing them at a greater remove from the audience. The effect of the storm sequence, now with Martin and Tomo sleeping on the island in a tent, feels reduced by Martin’s voiceover. The emotional beats of the story tend to suffer the most, as you’d expect when Martin is on hand to explain the plot to us rather than let us experience the characters’ dialogue for ourselves.
Enough of the character scenes survive intact (if dubbed) that the emotional arc of the film is legible, but it is severely diminished. And occasionally, its presentation is outright bizarre. Hagiwara’s interview with Serizawa is omitted entirely, which means that Emiko turns up to tell Serizawa that she has something important to talk about (her relationship with Ogata) only for Serizawa to overrule her with an unprompted declaration that he has something to show her that’s “far more important” than whatever she wants to talk about. He then shows her the Oxygen Destroyer essentially out of the blue. Afterward, he never asks Emiko what it was that she wanted to talk about, because in the original version he didn’t know she wanted to discuss something in the first place. The effect is that Serizawa comes across as a bit of an asshole in this edit (I wonder if this take on the character influenced Guy Tucker’s interpretation above), and Emiko as weirdly passive for not following up at all. Relatable human behavior this is not.
The emotional shortfall could have been made up for if Steve Martin had been a more dynamic character, but the insert structure of the film, with Martin a foreign friend of Serizawa and the Yamanes who comments on the action at a remove, largely precludes this approach. To his credit, Raymond Burr takes the role seriously and never once plays down to the material (and charmingly, the actor would be a lifelong ambassador for the character and series even during the decades that the films were treated as disreputable B-movie schlock.) But the actual story still belongs to the original characters. That leaves Martin as essentially an entirely reactive protagonist with no compelling arc to speak of, and yet the film continually frames him as the main lead. The presentation of the human story in the original can be stiff in the early going, but it’s leagues more effective than the American version frequently defaulting to Burr making a Very Serious face as things happen around him. The actor eventually runs out of compelling variations on the one expression, basically.
Steve Martin's early stand-up material was a lot more serious in tone.
Refocusing on the white lead’s perspective brings us to the most common criticism of King of the Monsters. It is undoubtedly the case that the film censors, tones down, or outright omits much of the original’s anti-nuclear and anti-war context. As mentioned above, most of the scenes that explicitly reference the Japanese experience with nuclear weapons are omitted entirely; other moments are left in but untranslated, their meaning left opaque to an English-speaking audience. Any discussion related to the Lucky Dragon incident is completely gone. Equally as damaging, to my mind, is what the edit does for Serizawa’s character. His anguish and fear about the Oxygen Destroyer being used in the Cold War, aka the entire emotional and political crux of the climax and his ultimate motivation for sacrificing himself, is here reduced to a simplistic fear of the weapon falling “into the wrong hands.” As a result, so much of the resonance and the power of the ending is just gone here, a loss underlined by the revision to the film’s final monologue. The ship-wide salute to Serizawa in the original was maybe too neat a gesture to end the film on, true. But there, the contrast between the newscaster’s ecstatic attitude with the grief of the protagonists and Yamane’s somber warning rather belied any simplistic sense of unity to the scene. In this version, Steve Martin reports that “The menace was gone. So was a great man,” and concludes with the comforting lie: “But the whole world could wake up and live again,” now that the monster had been defeated and brushed under the rug; just like Kong, like the giant ants, like the Beast. Out of sight, out of mind for the American populace living next door to ICBM silos.
All of this is obnoxious at best, and speaks very poorly of America’s political and racial attitudes that the adapters felt the changes to be necessary. Only a couple of years after Kurosawa Akira’s Seven Samurai garnered international acclaim and Inagaki Hiroshi’s deeply middlebrow Samurai I won the Oscar for Best Foreign Picture, the film by their Toho peer Honda was denuded of much of its power and taken by scornful American critics to be just another monster movie, without even the acknowledgement of the original’s ambitions that accompanied its own mixed reviews in Japan.
At the same time, while the political heart of Godzilla is heavily reduced, it is not removed outright. Even though the substance of the debate in the Diet Building is missing, Professor Yamane still up and says that Godzilla was awoken by the H-Bomb. Then, one takes into account the scenes left in. The boy setting off the geiger counter is one of the earliest images in the recut. The scenes of Japanese civilians suffering because of a monster created by radiation are omnipresent. The American version does muffle the film’s political inspiration, but frankly, any attentive viewer would be able to figure out what the original Japanese filmmakers were up to. Indeed, the critical interpretation of Godzilla as the embodiment of the nuclear bomb’s effects on Japan was already common before the original was released abroad to confirm their intent.
It could have been worse. Later American adaptations of certain Japanese monster films would gut the original cast entirely in favor of new footage with white American stars, using only the monster footage and leaving the substance of the story entirely by the wayside. Terry Morse and his collaborators did not take that approach. They clearly made an earnest attempt to preserve much of the original content, even as they butchered nearly all of its nuance in the process. But so much of the human imagery remains, and its power shines through. As does that of what are ultimately the most powerful sequences, Godzilla’s urban rampages, which the shorter runtime bunches up in proximity so that you get maximum bang for your buck in regards to the monster’s presence. (Rewatching King of the Monsters for the first time since 2007 or so, I was very amused to realize that despite the American version being sixteen minutes shorter, Godzilla first appears later in the runtime due to the reorganization of the film’s structure. No wonder I thought it dragged as a kid.) And the sounds, as well; Morse and company made the incredibly wise decision to retain the original sound effects and Ifukube’s score, leaving the impact of the film’s soundscape intact and cementing what Godzilla sounded like around the world. Even with the underlying subtext on a gag order, the scenes of Godzilla captivated audiences and turned him into a beloved movie monster.
Frankly, Gojira is enough of a masterpiece that even its bastardized translation made its impact and turned Godzilla into a global icon. In the meantime, the original would lurk in Japan, its full power waiting to be unleashed on the rest of the world years later.
8: Someday
It is the summer of 2006. I am eleven years old, sitting on the swing hanging from the tree at my paternal cousins’ family cabin next to the water at Deep Creek Lake, Maryland. Albert Einstein once stayed just down the road and is said to have visited our deck when he got turned around during a rowing trip on a foggy day. I don’t know if there’s any proof to back up that story, but I hope it’s true. It makes a great anecdote for guests.
I’m rocking back and forth gently on the swing, legs on the ground, reading bits of William M. Tsutsui’s Godzilla on My Mind. I had received the book from Boopy last Christmas, along with a long-awaited American DVD copy of Godzilla: Final Wars. The other film I know for sure that I received that Christmas was The Land Before Time X: The Great Longneck Migration, the latest in a series that I increasingly recognize is made for an audience younger than myself, but still enjoy for its sense of adventure and the characters. (Well, Ducky and Spike are great; Cera, not so much.)
I am conscious of my getting older. My elementary school only goes up to fifth grade, and in autumn 2006, I will need to go elsewhere for middle school. The tableau that defined my life for the past four years is going to change, for better or worse, whether I like it or not. I’m in the double digit age range now. Adolescence is on the horizon, and with it so much I don’t understand. What will happen to me? Will I become a completely different person, like the teenagers I see whose behavior seems alien to me? And will the stories and characters I love now have a place in my future? (Keep in mind, this is the mid-2000s, before the internet became fully ubiquitous or all of the top-grossing films of the year were comic book movies. It isn’t cool to like cheesy old monster movies. I still remember the weird, disapproving looks from certain authority figures whenever I’d go on about Godzilla in school.)
Godzilla on My Mind is a scholarly volume as much as a memoir about liking weird monster movies. It’s above my reading level in many areas; there are adult references that my sheltered young self doesn’t understand at that point (references to phallic/yonic imagery and such). I’ve been flipping through it piecemeal since December, so I doubt the realization I have while reading a chunk on the swing hits me out of nowhere. Doubtless it built up over the months. But I recall it being there, on that swing, that I dove fully into the portions of the book that explain the allegory behind the original, uncut Gojira. I believe this is the point in my life where I learn what symbolism is. And a whole new world opens up for me.
It becomes clear that there’s a world of depth I hadn’t comprehended in the goofy old monster I love. It becomes clear why Gojira had to be as sad and as dark as it is. It becomes clear why Godzilla had to start as the bad guy. I understand how the makers of Gojira poured their grief and fear and nightmares into a giant monster, a story that could express their emotions better than reality would allow. Through Godzilla, the realization dawns, the epiphany that will form a bridge between the child I’d been and the person I will become:
Stories have power.
And Gojira, as a single story, has considerable power. The first catch is that the film is a single story, with a beginning and an end. It wasn’t built to spawn follow-ups for seven decades and counting. And most importantly, it isn’t the version of Godzilla I fell in love with as a child. Godzilla as a good guy, a children’s hero, a defender of nature and Earth, who teams up with other giant monsters to fight the bad guy monsters? That’s the Godzilla I fell in love with. And Gojira the film in no way gestures toward the path to that character. There’s a lot of connective tissue to get from A to B.
Which brings us to the second catch. Dr. Yamane’s warning of future Godzillas would come true in a metafictional sense as well as in-universe. In response to the film’s success with audiences, Toho would produce sequels - intermittently at first, but a decade later the Godzilla film series would become an annual tradition. Even during the series’s periods of hiatus, there has never been a time when a Godzilla film of some sort hasn’t been in development. The character has expanded into books, television, comics and manga, video games, toys, branded snack products, and every branch of media imaginable.
Gojira was a film of its time, its quality partly a result of the urgency behind its creation and partly due to the collection of talent that was brought together at that exact point in the Japanese film industry. Its resulting mix of artistic earnestness and populist showmanship made it a financial hit. As happens under capitalism, the finance won out. Godzilla would return many times, further and further from the original work. How many iterations of Frankenstein, Dracula, or any of the great works of genre fiction have truly captured the depth of the originals? How could the soul of Gojira possibly remain intact in the face of the pressures of endless commercial exploitation?
Reading about the series, it would be easy to assume that the vast majority of the thirty-five-plus Godzilla films are mere fluff, entertaining at best but largely lacking the substance of the original. Even among fans of the films, there are only a handful of entries that are held anywhere near the esteem of the 1954 film. In the 1998 Official Godzilla Compendium, the one authorized english-language guidebook to the series released in the twentieth century, authors J.D. Lees and Marc Cerasini state that “In truth, only a few of Godzilla’s many adventures have carried a serious message…[the rest were] created and executed strictly as escapist fantasy fare.” Even Godzilla on My Mind reiterates this view, in a segment I would quote here were my copy not buried in storage that I didn’t unpack in time for publishing this essay.
So there you have it; even the experts have weighed in. The later works, while often fun popcorn cinema, just don’t have as much to say as Gojira.
Or so it would seem.
Happy 70th, Godzilla.
This essay is dedicated to the memory of Deborah Palmer-Mills (1947-2021).
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We Call It Godzilla will resume on January 4 next year. In the meantime, my regular-length essay on Godzilla Raids Again will be available to backers on my Patreon once it launches this week. Watch this space.
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This is a really remarkable essay on Godzilla/Gojira. I really like the format of blending your personal reflections with a analytical recap and some broader observations. It made me itchy to revisit the film (still the only Godzilla I've seen). I hope you are able to keep this going!
ReplyDeleteYou mentioned a couple of books that helped open the kaiju world to you. One I want to shout out is 1998's Monsters Are Attacking Tokyo by Stuart Galbraith IV. It's branded and marketed as playing up the "disreputable B-movie schlock" angle as you say, but once you open it, it becomes clear Galbraith was going for something else. This book came out before the original Japanese film had ever had a major media release in the US -- certainly well before the Criterion Showa Era Godzilla release triggered a major reevaluation in film discourse. The book is an enthusiastic defense and promotion of the integrity of the series as real art, not just dumb spectacle. Galbraith flew to Tokyo interviewed many surviving people involved in the production -- some of whom said they were never interviewed about the film before. The book has a lot of discussion of the Honda-Tanaka-Tsuburaya relationship and their various complementary talents. I imagine much of what Galbraith discusses is covered in more detail in books you've seen, as I gather the book was more of "groundbreaking" a new spin on the Godzilla franchise than an authoritative take, but if you ever see it, I recommend giving it a look (used copies run about $10 online).
Thank you so much, Dan! Introducing or reintroducing these films to a broader audience is definitely a hope of mine with this project - fingers crossed I can inspire you to watch a second Godzilla film sometime, too. :) I'd heard of Monsters Are Attacking Tokyo but I wasn't aware it was that easy to find, by comparison Age of the Gods is long out of print and I was only able to find a single, falling-apart copy in my inter-library loan system. Big thanks for the tip, I'll look into that.
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