Soul of the Future/ Monsters From the Depths: Godzilla (part 2)

Broadly speaking, everything not in consciousness inhabits the unconscious.  It includes personal memories and motivations as well as cultural assumptions and unresolved elements of personal and common experience.   Particularly powerful are those emotions and beliefs that are suppressed or ignored by personal and collective consciousness.

All of these elements are from the past: the personal past, the cultural past, the human and animal past, back beyond even imagined time.  When not in consciousness, these elements are unseen, undefined, seemingly not there anymore. As Carl Jung said, "The unconscious is really unconscious."

But they are there.  They may make themselves known in the present.  And they are another factor that shreds the idea of the future as something completely new.

So to remember the future, anticipate the past.

The original Gojira film of 1954 indirectly dealt with conscious lies and information that was available to consciousness, especially in its evocation of nuclear bomb radiation, at a time when nuclear weapons were widely tested and deployed, and seemed the most obvious threat to the future.

But Gojira also expresses complex and even contradictory emotions suppressed from Japanese consciousness most specifically, as Japan struggled with the rapid changes begun by the US Occupation after World War II that further transformed traditional culture.

In Part 1, we left the film after Professor Yamane reported to the Japanese government that Godzilla was a prehistoric beast both driven from its habitat and transformed physically by nuclear bomb tests.  Some government officials wanted to keep this information secret, while others insisted the public be informed.  Without saying anything more about it, the next scenes showed that the media was fully reporting on Godzilla, and the military efforts to stop it.

The first effort--bombing its undersea haven with depth charges--fails.  Godzilla then makes a series of forays--first into Tokyo Harbor and then onto land, each time met with escalating military attacks.  The final foray is the most extended, as Godzilla rampages through several sections of Tokyo, destroying much of the city.

The first destruction in the film was the equivalent of the atomic bomb blast--bright light and waves of force through the air (although how all this directly relates to Godzilla is never explained.)  When Godzilla comes ashore, it causes fires that rage out of control--the second destructive effect of the Bomb.

By this time it has already been established that Godzilla is radioactive, and leaves deadly radiation in its wake.  But in this final attack, Godzilla reveals another feature--the "atomic breath" that seems a kind of combination of heat and radiation.  Godzilla has become the Bomb, not simply in essence but in action.

The destruction of Tokyo is the film's long centerpiece.  It is very thorough, for the filmmakers constructed scale models of existing buildings to be destroyed.  For citizens of Tokyo, these would include familiar landmarks, with those who saw the movie in the city's largest downtown theater witnessing the destruction of the building they were in at that moment.

After the attack, the imagery of the destroyed city intentionally suggested photos of Hiroshima--particularly one image, which the US version extracted and put at the beginning of the film.   But it was still unmistakably Tokyo, which had another set of resonances.

For like some 80 other Japanese cities, Tokyo had also been devastated towards the end of World War II, not by a single atomic bomb but by many powerful but non-atomic bombs.  In a single raid on Tokyo in March 1945, American bombers killed upwards of a hundred thousand people, and left the city burning.

While it is tempting therefore to see Godzilla as representing a monstrous US, the emotions appear to be more complicated.  Many Japanese felt culpable for the suffering, death and destruction unleashed by the war promoted by their leaders, and for the savage actions of their military.  There was shame and guilt about the war itself, as well as shame for losing it.

In addition, according to literary critic and professor at Waseda University Norihiro Kato in his 2006 essay, "Goodbye Godzilla, Hello Kitty," the Japanese people never resolved their feelings about the more than 3 million Japanese soldiers and other victims who died in the war.  Heroic defenders of their country or innocent victims during the war, the soldiers in particular "came to be viewed as participants in a shameful, aggressive war..."

So conflicted feelings buried in the unconscious become expressed in a ritual reenactment of Tokyo's destruction.  The relationship, obvious in the imagery, is confirmed in one brief scene (largely cut from the US version) in which a mother huddles in a doorway with her three young daughters, promising them that they will soon join their father, a fairly explicit suggestion that he was killed in the war.

The scenes immediately after Godzilla's Tokyo rampage are almost unique in what became a series of atomic monster films.  They depict a triage center, and linger on the dying and injured, and their families--particularly children.  (To its credit, the US version includes these.)

 They are a plot device, but also an expression of empathy for the victims.  Those feelings or considerations were not often given much weight in the first decisions about the Bomb, as they don't seem to be in decisions about war and bombing otherwise.  These feelings can be driven into the societal and individual unconscious--for unwanted positive feelings can be suppressed just as can unwanted negative feelings.

Another approach to empathy for human consequences can be seen in this movie's interlocking subplot involving Professor Yamane's daughter.  While the family scenes are perhaps the most characteristically Japanese elements of the movie, mixing traditional and modern values, they can be seen as part of the human counterpoint to the Bomb.

All of this becomes tangled with the spectre of the Bomb, a monster who lurks in the depths of the unconscious, ready to maim, kill and destroy.  Who is responsible for unleashing it?  While this movie does not directly implicate human villains, it does bring forward, by indirection and contrast, a theme that is more prominently and variously explored in other atomic monster films, and in other related films of the era, as well as in science fiction itself.   That theme is the role of the Scientist.

It is generally considered that science entered fiction with Mary Shelley's 1818 Frankenstein: or The Modern Prometheus.  This story has itself inspired a long and various series of monster movies.  But the original story focused not on the "monster" but his scientist creator: he is the Dr. Frankenstein of the title.

In using electricity--the apparent spark of life--to reanimate dead matter, what Dr. Frankenstein did would be described by some as unnatural, ignorantly and arrogantly upsetting a balance that could well have unforeseen consequences, and by others as usurping the role of God in creating life.  It is believed to be a boundary humans should not cross--inviting punishment from God, the gods, nature or the unconscious.

From its beginning, the atomic bomb was widely seen as just such a transgression. Since Shelley's Dr. Frankenstein, or a little later when the Scientist acquired that name and title, the public view of scientists has been complex and contradictory.  When finding and applying cures for terrible diseases, they are wonder-workers and benefactors.  When inventing new technologies, making new discoveries or proposing astonishing new theories, they become geniuses and celebrities, intimidating but admired.

But they are also feared, not only because of the break with the past they engineer and represent, but because of the power they unleash, and its consequences on ordinary lives.  For example, some believe that the scientists who advocated eugenics to strengthen the human race in the 19th and early 20th centuries--decades before the Nazis--scandalized and scared people particularly in the Southern US, resulting in a hostility towards scientists by Christian fundamentalists that remains to this day.

Even folk morality that sees arrogance as dangerous, or the wisdom of the Greeks that saw hubris as tragic, can be applied to the Scientist.  A more psychological approach might suggest that irrational emotions and motivations from the unconscious are often rationalized, so that one may think that a motive or belief is based on reasoning, when it actually expresses something powerful erupting from the unconscious.  That includes the motivations for denial.

All of these apply to the atomic scientists--as some of them (notably Robert Oppenheimer) eventually realized.  With their faith in "pure science," they did not see that their own obsessions and fascinations with their work was overriding or simply obliterating considerations of the consequences of that work.  Oppenheimer came to believe that his darkest emotions, suppressed from consciousness, nevertheless motivated him.

The scientists at Los Alamos of course knew they were working on an enormously destructive weapon, but that hardly makes them unique.  Many scientific discoveries (including some basic physics) and technologies were accomplishment by those on the payroll of some ruler attempting to gain a military advantage.  The difference, if there is any, might be that many such discoveries were eventually applied to much more, and lasted long after the weapons they enabled had crumbled to dust.  While the US government and industry talked a lot after the war about the peaceful uses of the atom, all the atomic bomb itself seemed to lead to was the hydrogen bomb, which an atomic bomb ignites.  So it is not surprising that the figure of the mad scientist returned to doomsday fictions, including some later atomic monster movies.  But not in Gojira.

This film Gojira features two scientists.  The first is Dr. Yamane, the elder paleontologist who spends most of the movie deeply saddened and angry that everybody wants to just kill Godzilla rather than study it--especially to learn how it survived the thermonuclear inferno.

The second is Dr. Serizawa, a haunted young research scientist.  Working alone, he has accidentally discovered a process which destroys all the oxygen in water, killing all life.  The drama of Gojira becomes whether Dr. Serizawa can be persuaded to use the Oxygen Destroyer to kill Godzilla.

There are a few notable aspects to this young scientist.  For example, he is the only major character identified as a war veteran, which left him with physical scars that several characters mention, and resulted in his black eyepatch.  He is also a scientist working alone--already an anachronism--in a below-ground laboratory that in appearance suggests older film depictions of Dr. Frankenstein's lair.

All of this surprisingly sets up a complete reversal, for Dr. Serizawa is anguished with the knowledge that his discovery can be used as a weapon, and he is determined that its secrets do not wind up in the hands of any military.  He clings to the hope that he can still redeem his work, that his process can be turned to some good end, but in the meantime, he keeps it a complete secret--until he divulges it to Dr. Yamane's daughter, Emiko, to whom he has been betrothed since childhood.

But distraught after helping to nurse victims of Godzilla's Tokyo attack, Emiko betrays his secret to Ogata, the young man she is now in love with, and together they try to persuade Serizawa to prevent further rampages by using his device to kill Godzilla.  He explains why he cannot, suggesting that even if he destroys his notes, he might be forced by some government (using torture, it is implied) to recreate the process.

But after seeing a broadcast of a girls' school singing the Prayer for Peace ("May we look to tomorrow with hope/May peace and light return to us,") Serizawa relents: he will himself use the Oxygen Destroyer just once.  He immediately burns his research, but that is not the end of his plan.  He insists on taking his mechanism himself to the bottom of Tokyo Bay, and after he is satisfied that Godzilla is about to be destroyed, he cuts his lifeline and dies with the atomic monster in the depths of the sea.

The scientist--metaphorically the creator of the Bomb--chooses to die with the consequence that became the Bomb, in order to prevent his knowledge from being used to make an at least equally devastating weapon.  He consciously realizes that humans are unlikely to resist the motives from the unconscious leading to violence, and he makes a conscious decision to die rather than become the instrument of more death.

An unquestioned premise of the civilized life of humanity in the past ten thousand years or so is the absolute right of human dominion over animals and the rest of life.  But for hundreds of thousands of years before that, humans lived with animals and plants as part of their daily conscious life.  Humans identified themselves with animals, and that relationship is one basis for some human religious beliefs as well as science, art and ethics.  But in cultures and societies that use and serve industrial and technological processes much larger than any human individual,  the complex relationships with other organisms sinks deep into the unconscious.

This is another conscious theme in Gojira.  Several commentators have pointed out the repeated shots of birds in cages and fish in tanks, perhaps symbolizing nature as a captive of atomic science.  That proves to be a feature of Godzilla as well--exiled from its natural habitat and transformed into an unnatural monster by nuclear explosions.

The movie's last scenes are singular in the atomic monster genre.  Godzilla is located, apparently asleep in the depths of Tokyo Bay.  Even when the divers approach it, the creature is slow to respond.  The long underwater sequence (including the successful use of the Oxygen Destroyer, Godzilla surfacing for one last cry before turning to a fleshless skeleton) is accompanied by dirge-like music.  There is no pulse-pounding soundtrack here, none of the movie's signature march music; only an extended requiem.

There is a brief moment of celebration on the boat above when the monster is vanquished, but the music doesn't change.  When it becomes known that Dr. Serizawa has sacrificed himself, the mood is again somber, and the dirge continues.  There is no dramatic confrontation, no sense of triumph.  It is instead a moment of tragedy.

The last images of Godzilla are not of the destroyer, but of simply a creature. The filmmakers likely noticed that despite his destructiveness, King Kong became something of a sympathetic figure, and his death was sad, perhaps even tragic. Like King Kong, and unlike many other atomic monsters, Godzilla had mammalian eyes and a recognizable face.  Attributing human identification to this sort of anthropomorphism has some truth to it, but ultimately it is too reductive.  There is more that is stirred from ambiguous memories lodged in the unconscious.  In any case, that Godzilla had this effect on viewers is undeniable, with something like 30 more films over the next 65 years--in which Godzilla is often a hero-- as evidence.

This is another complex feature of the Bomb, which might be characterized as irony or paradox or ambiguity, or simply a statement of consequences.  The Bomb derives its power from humans unlocking a basic secret of nature, and one of its effects is to either destroy natural life or hold it captive.  This is often consciously ignored, but in Gojira and some other films of the period, it is expressed in a way that evokes feelings.

Gojira ends with a peculiar monologue by the elder Dr. Yamane as he gazes into the deep, apparently speaking only to himself.  He doubts that this Godzilla was the only creature to be changed by atomic testing, and that somewhere in the world another Godzilla might appear, especially if nuclear testing continues.

This ending did not appear in the US version of Godzilla.  That film concludes with the voice of Raymond Burr urging the world to "start living again."

This suggests some of the differences that would be obvious in American movies about atomic monsters that flooded movie theaters--and especially Saturday matinees--throughout the middle 1950s.  But they also evoked emotions regarding the Bomb in the US, and paved the way for movies that took further steps into consciousness.

To be continued...

The first Gojira/Godzilla post is here. Prior posts in the Soul of the Future series can be accessed by following this link, or the "Soul of the Future" label below.