It does as it pleases and continually destroys
Sean T. Collins on Godzilla and America
Please read this extremely powerful and heartbreaking piece from the other day if you haven't yet.
Luke O’Neil
I believe they say sending out a newsletter on a holiday isn't "best practices" but it's been in the 50s and raining in the northeast all weekend and since that's the only region of the country that is real I can only imagine it's also like that for everyone.
Hell World Chief Godzilla Reporter Sean T. Collins joins us today to write (again) about Godzilla. In particular the 1984 (underappreciated classic?) The Return of Godzilla.
"Who dropped those bombs? Who set off those test explosions throughout the Pacific? The United States of America, leader of the free world," he writes.
"Godzilla is an emblem of what it’s like to be at the mercy of forces completely beyond your control, set loose by people who do not pay the price for what they’ve done. It’s a living atomic superpower, pursuing goals unintelligible to outsiders and leaving a trail of destruction, intentional and otherwise, in its wake."
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More from me down below after that.
If you missed this newly relevant Collins piece please read it it's a fun one.
Luke O’Neil
It does as it pleases and continually destroys
by Sean T. Collins
“It was man that created that monster. Mankind is far more monstrous. Godzilla could be said to be a nuclear weapon. What’s more, a living nuclear weapon. It does as it pleases and continually destroys.”
– The Return of Godzilla (1984)
Like a flag or a cross or a cartoon frog, Godzilla is a symbol onto which many meanings may be projected. As a kid mostly familiar with its battles against other kaiju, the genre the original film jumpstarted, I always saw it as a marvelous hybrid of monster, superhero, and pro wrestler — Smaug, Superman, and Hulk Hogan rolled into one. Godzilla meant power, yes, but also justice and kindness. It stomped on Tokyo only to teach valuable lessons or throttle King Ghidorah neck by neck by neck.
What meaning may we assign it today? In its most recent piece of filmed media, Apple TV’s quite good series Monarch: Legacy of Monsters, Godzilla has a surprisingly personal application: Its accidental rampages, immensely destructive even though they’re in service of a greater good, represent the vicissitudes of fate that separate people from their loved ones due to death or estrangement. This leads to some of the most achingly romantic material on television, believe it or not. Here Godzilla serves the role of the Second World War in Casablanca, the force that drives people together only to force them apart again.
Monarch is a spinoff of the so-called “MonsterVerse” series of films from Legendary Pictures, which have also added King Kong as a permanent fixture. The lizard and the ape first tangled in 1962’s King Kong vs. Godzilla; a persistent legend holds that who won depended on which country you watched it in, but Godzilla was firmly a villain at the time, so Kong always swam away victorious. Now the two are, if not friends, then allies with a begrudging respect for one another, holding their respective spheres of influence safe from far worse threats. A little too much has been made of this being a uniquely and revealingly American interpretation of the character, as though Godzilla hasn’t been portrayed similarly in Japan on and off for its entire career.
Luke O’Neil
But it’s the “off” that I want to focus on here. Here in the hallowed halls of Hell World I’ve written about the recent Japanese Godzilla movies Shin Godzilla and Godzilla Minus One, the most acclaimed films in the series since the 1954 original. Shin speaks to the then-recent fears of the Fukushima disaster and the coming of climate change; Minus One addresses the past trauma of Japan’s destruction during World War II, which the film argues is the fault of an authoritarian government that saw the lives of its own people as disposable. (The protagonist is a kamikaze pilot who shirked his duty. That movie doesn’t mess around.)