By Keri O’Shea
For as long as there have been sources of tremendous anxiety and terror – things too incomprehensible or too unseemly to be met head on – mankind has used the medium of monsters to come to terms with them. It’s the oldest trick in the book. As long ago as the eighteenth century, the spectre of takeover by the rabble under the banner of revolution was prompting cartoonists to represent this threat as a monster – a colossus, all too able to cross the sea from France to Britain, were it not stopped in its tracks. Literature, as it swung into Gothic mode, reinvented or even invented an array of monsters in line with the contemporary concerns of the day, with perhaps Victor Frankenstein’s lumbering Creation – a creature often viewed as ambiguous, rather than evil – the best known example of monster-as-anxiety of them all. Frankenstein’s Monster, incidentally, made for one of the first examples of the monstrous to cross from the written word onto the silver screen. The novel formed the basis of a short film as early as 1910, though it was in the 1930s and 40s that cinematic monsters had their first true heyday, with the Creature, the vampire, the werewolf, the mummy and the cryptozoological marvel of King Kong all finding their way to appalled, but engaged and engrossed modern audiences. Horror had transformed itself into popular entertainment in a new medium and made itself into a lynchpin of big studio success, but it retained its potential as a pressure valve, a way of handling the unconscionable, or at least the unpalatable – sex, death, disease, conquest and war.
This was not just true of Hollywood, as much as its successes reverberated around the watching world. Certainly, the team behind Godzilla (1954) or, to give it its original title, Gojira, wold have been aware of King Kong (1933), the story of a prehistoric and, shall we say, single-minded giant that decimated New York after science disturbed him in his own natural habitat. However, though the physical scale of the creatures is similar, Gojira is a very different movie, and its tale is borne out of a very different sent of concerns – though it’s just as true that this particular Jurassic monster operates as a pressure valve for his own milieu, a milieu with unprecedented issues.
Gojira is a quintessentially Japanese entity. As a nation which consists of so many islands, the sea figures significantly in an abundance of malign Japanese folklore (in entities such as the Ikuchi, the Isonade and the Umibōzu) and – as a country which has an ambiguous relationship with its land and its seas, with a cataclysmic history of earthquake and tsunami – it’s little wonder that its first foray into monster movies should use the sea as a basis for terror. However, acting as a balance between old and new, folklore and history, is the monster’s role as a conduit for Japan’s pent-up horror and frustration post-World War II.
Having been prey to the devastating nuclear attacks on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan had to wait for an opportunity to make any sort of reply. These attacks may have precipitated Japan’s surrender and the end of the war, as such rendering them justifiable in the eyes of many, but even accepting this, and also accepting that many Japanese still haven’t come to terms with their own nation’s war atrocities preceding the Hiroshima bombing (if they’re aware of them at all) it’s not difficult to see how the event tore through Japanese national consciousness – yet, as the Americans occupied the country until the 1950s, any expression of the feelings held by the Japanese, in popular culture or elsewhere, was muted. Accordingly, when Gojira was made in 1954, it came stacked with references to what the country had been through (and, incidentally, when America bought the rights to the film from Toho Studios, it excised all mention of nuclear attacks, as well as altering the title to its better-known incarnation – Godzilla: King of the Monsters. It seems that, in the aftermath of war, each side has its own inconvenient truths).
The film starts with a group of fishermen off the coast of Odo Island, making their way back with their catch when a brutal burst of light and a vast disturbance in the water wrecks their vessel. In a clear nod to the nuclear testing which took place off the coast of Japan even after the end of WWII (although it is not succinctly spelled out at this stage) the men are burned, and most drown. The authorities launch a rescue, as relatives on-shore wait desperately for news of survivors from the boats in the area, but it seems that there is more going on than simply a nautical accident. Older residents of Odo, when they see the empty fishing nets next being brought back to shore, suggest that it’s a portent for the return of a folkloric monster they call ‘Gojira’. A series of disasters does seem to point to something more being amiss, leading to scientific experts from Tokyo coming to Odo to investigate. “Today’s world is still full of mysteries,” says one of our key players, Doctor Yamane – and true enough, he and his team soon see the gigantic creature for themselves. The creature must be stopped, of course, stopped from assaulting the major cities – but how do you kill a creature not only impervious to thermo-nuclear charges, but now imbued with radioactive strength? The secret lies with one scientist.
“May peace and light return to us…”
It’s curious that one of the chief criticisms levelled at Gareth Edwards’ Godzilla this year was that it was far too family-focused, too aligned with the fate of one small group of people in particular, because that is exactly the same focus offered up in the original. In fact, although it gets the low-key treatment you might expect from 1950s Japan, at the heart of the film’s plot is a love triangle. Doctor Yamane’s daughter, Emiko, has formed an attachment to the dashing alpha male Ogata; it’s not a conventional boy-meets-girl, however, as Ogata is not currently her intended. They each try to find the right moment to tell her father about her change of heart, somewhat ignoring the fact, at least at first, that there is a third man involved. His name is Doctor Serizawa, and to be fair to Emiko, he’s clearly not a man for heart-to-hearts. War-injured (WWII cost him an eye) and clearly troubled by the nature of his research work, he comes across as a deeply damaged man. However, the unhappy personal circumstances of these three people (four, if you count Yamane, himself desperate to preserve the creature) is what eventually allows Japan a way out of its crisis. Emiko struggles with her conscience, but eventually reveals what she knows – that Serizawa has a weapon which could conquer even Gojira. Serizawa, in his agony, eventually agrees to use his ‘oxygen destroyer’ against the lizard – but his horror of more war, of his invention ever being used to inflict harm against others, leads him to the ultimate sacrifice.
The understated suicide of Serizawa is, to my mind, still a very affecting sequence. It’s all too easy to scoff at the creature FX or the premise itself from a rather pampered modern point of view, but the human element in this story is unmistakably tragic. A broken man, devastated by war, abandoned by his partner and on the precipice of gifting the world yet another weapon of mass destruction, Serizawa decides instead to burn all of his notes and then, having set up the weapon on the ocean floor, he severs his lifeline, ensuring he will never surface again. No one will get the technique for making the oxygen destroyer; no ‘politician’ (referred to as ‘devils’ in this film) will ever get to use it, but his death is the only way to guarantee this. It’s a tragic end for a quiet, but assured man. His final words, for all of this, are words of acceptance. He wishes Ogata and Emiko happiness; he observes the weapon working against Gojira, then he is no more.
The poignancy of all this is enough in itself – less is definitely more here – but the gravitas of the scene owes so much to the accompanying music (the film was scored by Akira Ifukube). The score throughout Gojira is remarkable; the last song, in particular, is one of the greatest ever used in a film soundtrack. Serizawa’s suicide is touching in its modesty, but the soundtrack provides all of the emotions absent from his composure. It’s a bombastic, heart-rending piece of music which I always find moving.
Serizawa is overt in his reasoning for self-sacrifice, but his is not the only reference to war in Gojira. War runs throughout the film, an almost spasmodic urge to document and dramatise the events of the decade before, even if via the ‘safe’ medium of entertainment. Little wonder that the American censors stripped away so much of this discourse. From the nuclear testing which unleashes the beast in the beginning, to the expressed fear on behalf of the Japanese that the spread of knowledge about Gojira could “harm international relations”, to the woman on a tube train bewailing the threat to Tokyo by Gojira, saying she “went through enough in Nagasaki” – the film is a fantasy, sure, but the language is all post-war trauma. Then, there are all-too familiar scenes and sounds of mass destruction throughout: the sirens, evacuations, the fleeing crowds, fire storms, mass casualties. Serizawa was right – Japan had had enough of war. But then, only a cataclysmic weapon could prevent more and more destruction. Only his weapon could kill Gojira. That’s the unhappy contradiction at the heart of the film, and perhaps more than that, an oblique reference to the difficulties of truly starting anew. As Yamane warns, once you open the floodgates on these types of weapons or this type of warfare, nature can’t just wipe the slate. There could be more Gojiras, he warns…
As for Gojira itself, it’s easy to overlook this monster’s qualities now, so deeply entrenched is he in global modern popular culture, but this is a remarkably novel beast, one which reflects the peculiar circumstances of his conception. He’s a ‘Jurassic monster’ ostensibly, a dinosaur awoken from the ocean floor by nuclear tests, but not destroyed – Gojira is very much alive, and he’s pissed off. But what is he, really? A bipedal dinosaur living submerged somehow? Mentioning the science of the study of Earth’s great pre-history, and the age of the colossal giants – the Jurassic epoch – is all well and good, but here we have a creature that shouldn’t be, let alone a creature capable of surviving a nuclear explosion (or indeed using nuclear energy as a weapon of his own, assuming that’s what his death-breath is – which makes him more like a dragon than a dinosaur). Then again, the locals seem to know what he is already, which transposes him into the folklore of the island, even makes him into a folk devil, a creature that has risen from the depths before. Yet, the predictions of the locals that Gojira will come to land because there is no food doesn’t seem to be borne out by the way he behaves when he reaches Japan. He’s not there to eat, simply to destroy. He’s not hungry, he’s seriously ornery.
He’s not evil, though. Gojira doesn’t seem to act out of malice. Like many other monsters before, his behaviour is ambiguous – he doesn’t have a grand plan, rather he stomps through (a magnificently well-realised, miniaturised) Tokyo simply because that is what he does, and because of what has been done to him. Later incarnations of Gojira/Godzilla have pitched the monster differently, but there’s none of that in his first incarnation, and the film is all the stronger for it. Equally, Ishiro Honda’s film understands that less is more – Gojira occupies rather less full screen-time than you’d first think, and his scenes benefit hugely from the film being shot in black and white, as he looks like more of a believable being, part of the surrounding landscape even as he ruins it, and rendered more striking by the abundant use of shadow throughout. Yes, it’s a guy in a suit. But I think Gojira, in the first film, is still a formidable presence on-screen.
He’s also a monster with a massive legacy. Gojira is one of the most instantly recognisable Japanese cultural exports, as well as the source of a seemingly endless array of films back home in Japan. Rarely has he been the ambiguous creature he is in Ishiro Honda’s original vision, though; over the years, he’s frequently been recast as a hero, saving the world from a whole host of other gargantuan monsters. As the originator of an entire genre – the ‘kaijū eiga’, or simply ‘monster movies’ – it’s perhaps not such a surprise that this particular monster has gone through a few changes via a whole host of TV, comics, cartoons and similar, but he remains one of the most versatile in how he gets used in a film’s plot. You can see the influence of this film on modern horror and sci-fi too, particularly in films like Cloverfield and Monsters. The popularity of Gojira is such that, even this year, sixty years after its first appearance, it’s still deemed suitable for a big-budget American remake (which turned out to be a damn fine, fun film, by the by). Not bad going. The word ‘Godzilla’ has even entered the English language, usually used to refer to anything gargantuan in scale – in a similar way that ‘Frankenstein’ is a prefix for any sort of harmful science. Quite something, to turn into an adjective…
Gojira is now part of the bedrock of our pop culture consciousness, and this can make it harder to consider its impact – but as it reaches its sixtieth birthday, it seems our taste for monsters on screen isn’t going anywhere. We owe so much of that to Gojira. It’s also a film which still deserves to be considered on its many merits, not least of which is how it provided an outlet for the frustrations and terrors of a nation. In that, Gojira (1954) gives us a monster in the truest sense of the word, as well as a game-changing movie.
