The United States Is Now A Prison

 

Japanese internment camp in the US

The story is still unfolding regarding the deportation of alleged Venezuelan gang members to prisons in El Salvador, despite a federal court judge's order to stop the deportation, even to the extent of turning the planes around.  Though the Chaos administration claims these people were outside the US by the time the order was given, the White House press secretary and others are asserting that the judge has no jurisdiction.  King Chaos invoked a 1798 law previously used a few times during a war, including the rationale for the infamous Japanese-American internment camps during World War II (and lest it be forgotten, at least one Italian internment camp.)  

This is the most blatant act of defiance of a court order so far. But there have been others, especially relating to border issues. Though no evidence has been presented that any or all of the deported and now imprisoned people were gang members, there is at least the appearance of eliminating danger.  Not so in the case of Dr. Rasha Alawieh, a medical specialist in the crucial area of kidney transplants, and a Brown University medical school professor.  On returning from a visit to family in Lebanon, she presented her valid visa and was detained, and then later put on a plane to Paris presumably to connect with a flight to Lebanon.  In other words, she was expelled, even though the US Customs and Border Protection officials who held her were informed that there was a federal court order to prevent her immediate deportation, and to provide 48 hours notice of their intentions.

  Later the judge who issued the order said from the bench that there was reason to believe his order was willfully disobeyed.  Again, a case of open defiance of the rule of law.

Except for the timely court orders, these are not isolated incidents.  There's a story on the Internet about a Canadian woman attempting to renew her work visa at the southern border who was summarily dumped into a privately run prison and left there in primitive and unsanitary conditions.  She encountered other women there who had no idea why they were being held, or even where they were.

There are many other reports of harassment at the northern border as well, including of Canadian citizens.  What a lot of these incidents have in common is people being jailed without being charged before a court, without access to attorneys, perhaps transported to a prison far away if not summarily deported. 

Given other circumstances, Canadians are not eager to travel to the US anyway, but this alone makes that dangerous.  It is dangerous as well for anyone to attempt to leave the country.  Brown University has already advised its employees to avoid foreign travel.  But even that may not be enough.  There are several reported and documented instances of US residents clearly on the legal path to citizenship being stopped at airports from domestic flights, detained and imprisoned.

 When the government uses arbitrary and unchecked power with impunity, eventually no one is safe. The United States is now a de facto prison run by lawless authoritarian thugs.   

R.I.P. David Warner and other actors 2022

When Alan Rickman died in 2016, stories emphasized his movie roles as villains, despite the actual range of the characters he played in dramas and comedies.  Yet the images and clips accompanying the stories often were from his only romantic lead (however offbeat a romance, in that his character is dead) in the wonderful film Truly, Madly, Deeply.

 Something similar happened when David Warner died in July 2022: stories focused on his villains, though he played more honorable characters, but the images were usually from his only film as an offbeat romantic lead, the 1966 Morgan: A Suitable Case for Treatment, known in the US also as simply Morgan! 

That movie, stylistically a quintessential 60s film directed in England by Karl Reisz, made a big impression on me when it came out.  Caught between working class communism he grew up with, and the self-satisfied world of the rich he married into, partly because he became a commercially viable artist, Morgan is a kind-hearted man who identifies his rebellion with the natural instincts of apes as well as the symbols of revolution.  He longs for his ex-wife, played by Vanessa Redgrave in her first film role, who is also torn between her accustomed comforts and Morgan’s rough charm.  The gap between his idealistic fantasies and reduced reality, as dramatized by his futile gesture of breaking up her wedding reception while dressed in an ape costume, gets him committed to a bucolic asylum.  

Warner’s character and performance in this film suggest what his 1965 performance as Hamlet might have been like: highly physical and mercurial, alternating catatonic brooding with sudden frenzies of speech and action.  When David Tennant was slated to perform as Hamlet in 2008, he made a short TV film in which he interviewed other actors who had played the role.  Most acknowledged that the greatest Hamlet of their lifetime was David Warner.

 Warner did play a lot of film villains, and eventually tired of it, but he also played Bob Cratchit in the 1984  George C. Scott version of Dicken’s A Christmas Carol, and the Klingon Chancellor modeled on Gorbachev (who also died in 2022) in the last Star Trek original cast feature film.  He played historical characters from Jack the Ripper to the young William Wordsworth.  He performed in at least two filmed roles in Chekhov plays: in the 1968 Sidney Lumet feature version of The Seagull, and a 1991 BBC production of Uncle Vanya.  He returned to the stage in the early 21^st century, playing King Lear in 2005, the traditional capstone to a career that includes a Hamlet.

 Warner’s voice was always a stage asset, and became the source of his many roles in animated and audio stories that included playing Doctor Who.  Because of Morgan (and the fact that I identified with both the character and the actor), I followed David Warner’s career with affection as well as appreciation and admiration. 

It would take a book to begin to describe the importance of Sidney Poitier’s movie performances in the 1960s, just as the Civil Rights movement was moving into unavoidable prominence.  No history of the racial attitudes and official changes in those years would be complete without referring to A Raisin in the Sun, Lillies of the Field (for which Poitier became the first black recipient of the Best Actor Oscar), Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner, To Sir With Love and In the Heat of the Night.

 His career began in the 1950s, though he was a Blacklist victim for part of that decade.  In addition to more popular movies like The Defiant Ones, he was in some lesser known films I saw on television and loved: Go, Man, Go (a low budget look at the origins of the Harlem Globetrotters) and Paris Blues ( Blacklisted director Martin Ritt’s look at American jazz musicians in Paris, with comment on race issues, costarring Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward as well as Diahann Carroll and Louis Armstrong.) 

After the mid-1960s when he was the biggest box office draw in Hollywood, he turned to directing, producing and playing occasional lead and supporting roles, as well as political activism.  The only comparison I can come up with concerning his onscreen charisma and distinctive line-readings and physicality is Marlon Brando.   In 2009, his list of honors—and his work for racial justice—were capped by receiving the US Medal of Freedom from President Barack Obama.  He died in January 2022 at the age of 94.

 There aren’t too many actors left from the classic Hollywood period before 1950, so I take special interest in the ones whose names get one more mention as their deaths are announced. 

Angela Lansbury is the most prominent among them, for her career started in the 40s with two best supporting actress nominations, but it extended well into the 21^st century on stage as well as television, where she was best known for her 1980s series Murder She Wrote.

Marsha Hunt

 Beginning at age 17, Marsha Hunt appeared in Hollywood films of the late 1930s through the 1940s (including the Laurence Olivier and Greer Garson version of Pride and Prejudice, and the 1944 film None Shall Escape, regarded as the first film about the Holocaust), and was Blacklisted for most of the 1950s.  She did theatre and played a few movie and TV parts in the 1960s and afterwards, and in the 1990s appeared in an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation.  She remained a political activist and humanitarian.  She was 104.

 Mildred Kornman was one of the last surviving cast members of the Our Gang comedies in the 1920s and 30s, though she had a non-speaking role.  She was a bit player in 20^th Century Fox films of the 1940s, and a magazine model. She was 97. As a child actor, Mickey Kuhn was the last surviving cast member of the 1939 blockbuster Gone With the Wind.  He appeared in other major films in the 1940s and early 1950s. He was 90.  Faye Marlow played a few leads and supporting roles in 1940s movies and early 1950s TV before becoming an author.  She was 96.  Nehemiah Persoff was a sometimes familiar face (when not disguised) if not a familiar name in supporting roles in more than 200 television shows as well as movie roles, including a few in the late 1940s. He was 102.  

Irene Papas in Zorba the Greek

Memorable performers from 1950s television passed away in 2022, among them: Tony Dow (Wally on Leave It To Beaver), Dwayne Hickman (Dobie Gillis), Tim Considine (Disney’s The Hardy Boys and various Disney movies), June Blair (Ozzie and Harriet—she played and was David Nelson’s wife), and comedian Pat Carroll (Sid Caesar, Danny Thomas shows.)  Actors in 1950s movies include Akira Takarada (Gojira), Hardy Kruger, Linda Lawson, Georgia Holt, Andra Martin and Greek actress Irene Papas, who went on to a film and stage career of more than 50 years.  Bernard Cribbins began his movie and TV career in this decade and it never stopped until he did—he’d become a beloved icon in the UK.

Yvette Mimieux

 Actors who helped characterize the 1960s include Nichelle Nichols, Yvette Mimieux , Henry Silva, James Olson, Mitchell Ryan and Ann Flood as well as European actor Monica Vitti (Antonioni films.)

Sally Kellerman & J. Caan

Actors first associated with the 1970s include James Caan (The Godfather), Louise Fletcher (One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest), Sally Kellerman (M*A*S*H), Howard Hesseman, Dani (Truffaut films), Bo Hopkins, Ruth Madoc, Stuart Margolin (The Rockford Files), David Birney (Bridget Loves Bernie); Emilio Delgado and Bob McGrath (both Sesame Street perennials), Bob Elkins, Susan Tolsky, Jo Kendall and Mary Alice, who began her long film, TV and stage career in this decade. 

William Hurt

Known best for their work in the 1980s and 90s are William Hurt, Fred Ward, Paul Sorvino, Ray Liotta, Anne Heche, Tadeusz Bradecki (Schindler’s List), Kirstie Alley (Cheers), Robert E. Mosley (Magnum P.I.); Al Strobel, Kenneth Welsh and Gary Bullock (Twin Peaks), Mary Mara (Nash Bridges), John Aniston (Days of Our Lives), Estelle Harris and Kathyrn Kates (Seinfeld), Jack Kehler and comedians Judy Tenuta and Bob Saget.  In the 2000s: Robbie Coltrane (Hagrid), Helen Slayton-Hughes, Leslie Jordan, Gary Friedkin; Tom Sirico and Bruce MacVittle (Sopranos.)

 Finally, actors who mostly graced the stage include Joan Copeland (sister to Arthur Miller), Robert LuPone, Rae Allen and Doreen Brownstone.  May they all rest in peace.  Their work lives on. 

Soul of the Future: Atomic Cinema Gets Real

"In the Trump era, there is no past and no future, no history and no vision, only the anxious present."
Masha Gessen Surviving Autocracy

In my ongoing Soul of the Future series,
this is the last of several installments on stories about the Bomb, this time mostly in the 1960s through the 80s.

I'm posting it just as the US and Russia are about to enter nuclear talks, and the Trump administration is threatening to start exploding nuclear bombs again.

It is also a time in which apocalyptic problems of pandemic and economic hardships are the background to a long overdue reckoning on racism, particularly involving police and deadly force.  Nevertheless, the truly apocalyptic problem of our time--the climate crisis--has not gone away.  Each year and each month is getting hotter, carbon continues to pollute the atmosphere in record amounts, as forests burn in Brazil even faster, the poles melt and the atmospheric and oceanic conductors that govern our regional weather and climate show more signs of deforming.

So this post ends with a few observations on why similar stories aren't being told about this new apocalyptic challenge of the climate crisis. The present includes the future as it includes the past. Remember the future; anticipate the past.

While American movies dealt with the Bomb mostly through atomic monster and space invasion flicks in the first decade after Hiroshima, there were fictional stories that the public could read and see that tried to dramatize the realities and likely consequences.

Most of these were stories published in the science fiction pulp magazines, beginning in the 1940s, even before the first actual atomic bomb test in 1945.
 Such stories began to appear as early as 1941, months before the U.S. got into World War II and years before the Manhattan Project that developed the Bomb had started.  Military secrecy did not end the appearance of these stories, though reputedly the FBI visited the author of one  published in Astounding magazine in 1944, interested in how he knew so much.  (These 1940s and 50s were the years, by the way, that many prominent s/f writers had degrees and practical experience in sciences and engineering.)

Many of these stories dramatized the destruction and ultimate doom of humanity caused by atomic warfare, which was widely forecast by scientists and military experts.  Just a year or two after World War II ended, nuclear doomsday became such a persistent pulp magazine theme that (according to James Gunn in his history of sci-fi pulps, Alternate Worlds) stories about the post-atomic horror were “almost impossible to place in a science-fiction magazine” because there were so many.  But, he added, such stories were also becoming impossible to avoid in mainstream magazines.

Major science fiction writers like Robert Heinlein, Theodore Sturgeon and especially Poul Anderson contributed such stories.  Anderson in particular wrote one apocalyptic fiction after another, with titles like Un-Man, Cold Victory and After Doomsday.  As he emphasized in his non-fiction book, Thermonuclear War (1961), these times were “the most dangerous in the history of mankind.”  At least, to that point.

“Astounding after the war was a very black magazine,”science fiction chronicler Brian Aldiss writes of the premier sci-fi pulp. “Many stories were of Earth destroyed, culture doomed, humanity dying, and of the horrific effects of radiation, which brought mutation or insidious death.” He cites titles like "There Is No Defence," "And Then There Were None" and  “Dawn of Nothing.” “So pervasive were these themes over the next decades that even in a science fiction novel for juvenile readers (Return From Luna by D.S. Halacy), a teenager’s adventures with an expedition on the moon turned suddenly somber when nuclear war erupts on Earth.

Even early television occasionally aired Bomb-themed stories, though they were often Civil Defense-approved sanitized versions of thoroughly survivable atomic attacks.  An episode of the popular series "Medic" (starring Richard Boone), in 1955 was somewhat more realistic about the medical consequences (I remember watching this at age 9.)  

But with a few low-budget exceptions, movies stayed away from depicting effects of the Bomb.  In his book Apocalypse Movies, Kim Newman makes the valuable point that the B movie divisions of major studios tended to glorify the military in their Bomb-theme movies, while independent films revealed more of the real horror.  So it isn't surprising that when the first major Hollywood movie about effects of a global nuclear war was made in the late 1950s, it got none of the cooperation from the US military that Hollywood films usually received.

The movie was the 1959 release On the Beach, starring Gregory Peck, Ava Gardner, Anthony Perkins and Fred Astaire (in his first dramatic role.)  Produced and directed by Stanley Kramer (known throughout his career for socially conscious films like Judgment at Nuremberg, Inherit the Wind and Guess Who's Coming To Dinner), the movie was based on the 1957 best-selling novel of the same title, by British/Australian novelist Nevil Shute.

The premise of both novel and movie is that a nuclear war has killed everyone in the northern hemisphere. US Navy Captain Dwight Towers (Peck) sails into the harbor of Melbourne, Australia, in the atomic submarine Swordfish which has been submerged and escaped the lethal radiation.  He arrives at an Australian Navy base, where the Australian characters all know that air currents are slowly carrying the deadly fallout to them. They have five months to come to terms with the fact that death is inescapable, that they are among the last living humans because humanity has destroyed itself. 

There is some talk about the war, though no one for sure seems to know what happened or even who started it.  They occasionally wonder how humanity could create the conditions for its own extinction.  But the characters mostly just adapt to their circumstance in their normal lives (they have little oil, for instance, and rely on bicycles, horses and electric trams.)  Towers and the Australian military maintain discipline and chain of command to such an absurd extent that towards the end Towers is officially appointed head of the US Navy everywhere, as he is the highest ranking officer left alive, once his commander elsewhere in Australia is about to succumb to the radiation.

Gregory Peck, Anthony Perkins, Fred Astaire

About halfway through the movie, The Swordfish goes on one last mission to the Arctic and down the US West Coast, to test a theory that the radiation might be dissipating (it isn't) and to locate the source of radio signals coming from San Diego, beeps from a telegraph key but in no discernible pattern. 

 The ship pauses briefly in San Francisco Bay, with indelible scenes of the periscope focusing on empty streets and undamaged buildings, and where a seaman jumps ship to spend his last few days in his hometown.  In San Diego they find the signals are being keyed by a cola bottle tangled with a window sash, randomly striking the key as the wind blows.  

There is more detail in the book about the war, and the use of what Shute calls cobalt bombs, hydrogen bombs that kill with huge amounts of long-lasting radiation.  In the movie there appears to be little damage to buildings and infrastructure in San Francisco, which could mean it was not itself hit by bombs, or that these fictional bombs had the reputed (if unproven) characteristic of neutron bombs, of killing people but not destroying things with short-lived radiation.   

 In the book it is even clearer how most of the characters act with calm and heartbreaking grace.  The movie as well tells the story of ordinary people--like those watching in the movie theater-- facing certain doom, but without gruesome scenes (even bodies are never seen) that might alienate viewers, or pulse-pounding action to distract them. 

This depiction of the characters' behavior seems to reflect the more Stoic culture of Australia and the kind of diffidence that Shute usually presented in his novels but also (according to Shute) to make the point that nuclear war can happen to good ordinary people living their lives, through no fault of their own.  However, it also models behavior in crisis, as well as showing the human race at its best, as it ends.



As the radiation approaches, there are drunken revelers and religious revivals in the city, as well as people calmly registering for their suicide pills, to avoid the lingering radiation sickness. The movie ends with the Swordfish returning to the sea, and shots of the now empty Melbourne streets, and the abandoned revival banner now meant for us: "There is Still Time...Brother."

Even towards the end, characters can't keep themselves from planting gardens and planning for a cancelled future.  Each character has an arc of coming to terms in their own way. But it is this constant evocation of ordinary life coming to an end that gives this film such power.  

Though Kramer's lyrical powers as a filmmaker were not quite up to Shute's writing, he hit exactly the right notes with the musical score, particularly the repeated theme with the melody of the Australian tune, "Waltzing Matilda."  An orchestral version was released as a record, and made it to #47 on the Billboard charts.

The film was not a box office hit but eventually reached a large audience on television. It was more influential among opinion-makers. In a sense it was an ice-breaker, making the subject more acceptable for the movies, and making it generally more acceptable to question and even oppose nuclear weapons.  Nobel Laureate and anti-Bomb activist Linus Pauling said, “It may be that some years from now we can look back and say that On the Beach is the movie that saved the world.”

A full Hollywood production with major stars, On the Beach was filmed almost entirely in and around Melbourne, Australia, partly because the US military refused its cooperation, specifically any Navy ships. So even at least one of the scenes set in the U.S. was shot in Australia.  The submarine used in the movie belonged to Australia, refitted slightly to look like an atomic sub.  Its interior was a set designed from photographs of the real thing.  

The Pentagon had objected, not to the portrayal of the American military characters (their behavior is exemplary), but to the film's premise that nuclear war could end human civilization.  Official policy was still that war involving nuclear weapons was "survivable."  That conclusion was not shared by many scientists and others.  On the Beach became the first major nuclear-themed movie to dramatize nuclear war as apocalyptic. It would not be the last.  

If On the Beach changed the dialogue with empathy, the next important nuclear war-themed movie changed it with ridicule.  In the early 1960s, director Stanley Kubrick became obsessed with the subject of thermonuclear war.  He is said to have read Herman Kahn's 1960's book On Thermonuclear War which (unlike Poul Anderson's book of a similar title) provided rationales for nuclear wars. 

Kubrick bought the rights to a suspense novel about an accidental nuclear war and began preliminary work on a script, but soon the absurdities inherent in the realistic events convinced him to transform it into a satirical comedy.  So he began a new script with the novel's author Peter George and writer Terry Southern, that became the 1964 release Dr. Strangelove. 

Sterling Hayden as General Jack D. Ripper

The story becomes no more absurd--or less plausible--in summary: officials in Washington learn that a strategic bomber group has gone past its fail-safe point and is on course to douse targets in Russia with nuclear bombs.  They have been sent using a plan that allows lower level commanders to issue bombing orders, by a deranged officer who alone knows the recall code.  

Slim Pickens, last actor to be cast in a scene Kubrick
dreamed up at the last minute, now the film's most iconic
image.

The US President calls the Soviet Premier and explains the situation, as the Soviet ambassador is invited into the War Room.  The US cooperates with the Soviets to shoot down all the bombers but one.  The recall code is finally sent but the bomber doesn't get it.  It heads for its target.

Meanwhile the Soviets reveal they have implanted a "doomsday device" that will plunge the world into nuclear holocaust if they are attacked (this device, which also used cobalt-wrapped hydrogen bombs, was a thought experiment by Kahn.) 

 Arguments ensue, the US people discuss surviving destruction by retreating to mine shafts and the Soviet ambassador engages the doomsday device.  When the US bomber gets through and drops its bomb, it essentially blows up the planet, to the tune of a 1940s song, "We'll meet again." 

"Satire" or even "black comedy" are weak words to describe what Dr. Strangelove is.  It describes not only nuclear war as insane, but the people who cause it as, in various ways, insane.  It implies as well as the entire society that allows them to be leaders is itself insane. 

This in itself was not a new thought. That society was insane became a notion at least as far back as between the world wars, as evidenced by Dadaism.  But the Bomb seemed to seal the deal, and made the notion more mainstream,

For example, three books published in the mid-1950s (by psychologists Rollo May and Erich Fromm, and social commentator and historian Lewis Mumford) made the same analysis: the system of nuclear weapons was evidence and expression of an insane society, as well as a major contributor to driving it mad.  By the mid-1960s (which also happened to be the golden age for popular satire), this was a widely held view.  

Peter Sellers as Dr. Strangelove

But it had never been so thoroughly presented in a Hollywood film.  Sterling Hayden's General Jack D. Ripper, whose delusions about the enemy messing with his "precious bodily fluids" begins the nuclear bomber attack on the Soviet Union, is the most obvious and best-remembered portrait of insanity.  

But no less insane is Peter Seller's hyper-rational Dr. Strangelove himself, based on a combination of Herman Kahn and the future Secretary of State Henry Kissinger.  (His pedigree as a German scientist with residual fealty to "my Fuhrer"--Seller's most brilliant character note--also suggests the German scientists in the American rocket program, like Wernher von Braun.) 

George C. Scott as Gen. Buck Turgidsen

Equally crazy as well is George C. Scott's infantile commanding Air Force General Buck Turgidson, a figure based on several actual top military leaders, especially General Curtis LeMay.  Accounts of White House deliberations during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 confirm Scott's portrayal as representing the attitude of these Generals that a first strike on the Soviet Union would amount to (as Turgidson says in the movie) "getting our hair mussed" with millions of dead (what Kahn had dubbed "megadeaths.")  Their attitude was expressed sincerely by an American General who said that if after a nuclear war there are two Americans left and just one Soviet, then we win.

But no less insane are the overgrown cowboy who rides the Bomb like a bronco, Major Kong (played by the actor whose name sounds like the fictional ones: Slim Pickens) and one of the most minor characters, Colonel Bat Guano (Keenan Wynn) who won't enable a crucial phone call to be made to stop a thermonuclear war because it would involve damaging "private property"--a soft drink machine.  

Insane circumstances also made the rote mechanistic behavior and cool, precise astronaut diction of the bomber crewmen (played by James Earl Jones and Frank Berry) seem functionally insane.  Meanwhile the only sensible characters (President Muffley and Group Captain Mandrake, both played by Peter Sellers) became straight men and enablers. (Apparently a crazy President was too scary a thought.)  Some are clearly exaggerations—and yet, none is truly unreal.  

Dr. S. opens with US gov footage of plane refueled
in mid-air to suggest sexual subtext

Some of the insanity is prompted by the characters' comic lack of awareness about sexual anxieties, which adds to the movie's hilarity and popularity.  The movie brilliantly mixes cerebral satirical and "low" comedy (though the classic slapstick ending of a huge pie fight in the War Room didn't make the cut.)

The performances, which Kubrick encouraged to be over the top, contrast the emotionally childish and mentally wounded humans with their sober and deadly technology.  It can be argued that the film's ending--the destruction of the world to an at best ironic old tune ("We'll meet again/ don't know where, don't know when") leaves the viewer off the hook, even if it is in the same spirit as the rest of the movie. 

 It was quickly followed by another Hollywood film, this time a drama with a similar if not completely apocalyptic plot, Fail-Safe (1964), directed by Sidney Lumet and starring Henry Fonda. This time humanity is taken to the brink by a technological accident. 

Fail-Safe did not have the same impact, possibly because Dr. Strangelove came first, but probably also because the novel by Eugene Burdick and Harvey Wheeler it dramatized was a thoroughly-discussed best seller two years before, especially when it was serialized in the Saturday Evening Post during the Cuban Missile Crisis.  

So it was Dr. Strangelove that at the very least encapsulated if not defined attitudes about the insanity of the Bomb and the nuclear arms race.  The nuclear mystique was ridiculed away.  A hit when it was released,  Dr. Strangelove remains high on lists of classic films and film comedies.

Needless to say, the Pentagon did not cooperate in the making of Dr. Strangelove either. The interior of the U.S. bomber was designed by extrapolating from a magazine photo.  Stock footage (for the opening montage) and background landscapes filmed for this movie plus airplane models comprise the external flight scenes.  And the War Room was entirely invented, although its absence in reality reportedly surprised and disappointed Ronald Reagan when he became President.  There is a much smaller War Room in the White House now.

I saw Dr. Strangelove at a moviehouse when it came out, at least once.  But I also saw it several years later in San Francisco, paired with The War Game, arguably the first film to confront the likely realities of atomic warfare as experienced by civilians where they live.  

The War Game was commissioned by the BBC for television in the UK in 1965.  It was written and directed by Peter Watkins, a feature film cinematographer and documentary filmmaker.  It depicted events in the UK immediately before, during and after a thermonuclear exchange, using both an impressionistic and a documentary style.  The aftermath is particularly brutal, with radiation sicknesses and deaths, looting, food riots and eventually a complete breakdown of society. The music it ends with is a version of "Silent Night."

The BBC refused to air it.  It was released as a film in 1966, playing mostly at film festivals and in a few moviehouses, like the one where I happened to see it in 1967.  It nevertheless won the 1967 Academy Award for Best Documentary, and a similar award in the UK.  Roger Ebert called it "one of the most skillful documentaries ever made." 

 (Director Peter Watkins was just previously the cinematographer for the 1965 Beatles film Help!  He urged John Lennon to use his influence on behalf of world peace, which led Lennon and Yoko Ono to their 1969 peace campaign, and the song "Give Peace A Chance.") 

The War Game was the first to dramatize the effects of thermonuclear war on ordinary people, not as the easily survivable and limited tragedy as depicted for example in the 1954 US television production, "Atomic Attack" broadcast on the Motorola Television Hour.  But it would be some twenty years before it had a widely seen successor.

The Vietnam War blunted attention to the Bomb, but the US and Soviet nuclear arms buildup in the early 1980s returned focus to nuclear threats.  The theory of "nuclear winter" was proposed by Carl Sagan and other scientists that asserted that even a relatively small number of nuclear explosions would block enough sunlight to lead to planetary-wide death of huge proportions. The Nuclear Freeze movement (which referred to freezing the number of nuclear weapons) further emphasized the issue.

After The China Syndrome (a feature about a nuclear plant meltdown starring Jane Fonda) was a box-office hit (partly because shortly after it hit theatres, the meltdown at Three Mile Island happened), the ABC television network started developing a television movie about the effects of a nuclear war on a midwestern US city.  

The Day After, directed by Nicholas Meyer and starring Jason Robards, aired on Sunday November 20, 1983. The movie followed a cast of characters in Lawrence, Kansas, before, during and after a nuclear attack.  There were battles over censored scenes and cuts made to the film before airing.  Nevertheless it was the most graphic representation of nuclear war to reach a wide audience, almost 40 years after Hiroshima.

As the main character, Jason Robards was a confident and wealthy doctor, husband and father.  His family in Kansas City obliterated by the Bomb, he remained in the Lawrence hospital dealing with the medical effects (similar to the 1955 Medic episode), especially radiation.  When he becomes a victim himself, he revisits his demolished home, tries to drive away a family squatting there but he is offered food.  The final shot of his character, white hair falling out, embracing another old and dying man among the ruins, is this film's most indelible image.

The movie was castigated from the right as disloyal, and the New York Post branded director Meyer a traitor.  It was criticized from the left for not depicting nuclear war as hellish enough, though the movie ended with a printed declaration that an actual nuclear attack would be far worse than the one depicted, which only added to its impact.

The US military refused assistance in making the film because it left open the question of which side had launched missiles at the other first.

The Day After holds the record for the largest audience for a movie in television history.  One of its fans was President Ronald Reagan, and it reportedly led him to accelerate talks with the Soviet Union that led to a nuclear missile treaty.  The movie was shown around the world, including in the Soviet Union.

Threads

There were two more notable dramatizations of nuclear war effects in the 1980s. The BBC produced Threads in 1984, which followed the consequences into the next generation of an ordinary UK town of Sheffield.  It was notable also as the first depiction of nuclear winter.  

It ends with survivors struggling in a burnt-out world, and a 12 year old giving birth screams at the sight of her stillborn baby.  It was a harrowing ending to a truly horrifying film.  The Guardian review called it "the most terrifying and honest portrayal of nuclear war ever filmed."

This time the BBC did air it, and a few years later paired a re-broadcast of Threads with the first UK broadcast of  The War Games in 1986, 20 years after it was made. Threads also played in the US a few months after its UK airing.  It was reputedly the most watched basic cable movie in history.  That may be where I first saw it. 

Jane Alexander in Testament

Another such film was Testament, made for PBS in 1983 but not broadcast immediately.  It was released to theaters first, and aired in 1984.  It starred Jane Alexander, and depicts the slow dissolution of a small town in northern California, just outside the blast area of San Francisco, as its residents succumb to radiation and societal breakdown.  But it is mostly centered on one family, the poignancy of their emotions and actions, a much more realistic counterpoint to the family in the 1954 TV episode "Atomic Attack."  

Each of these films builds in one way or another on the previous ones.  Testament has the bravery of ordinary people of On The Beach. The characters decide on suicide, but can't go through with it.  The ending--a melancholy birthday paired with a birthday party in the innocent past--suggest the same message to viewers: It is not too late.

President Kennedy with Curtis LeMay and other generals
during Cuban Missile Crisis.  He defied them and proposed
the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, the first step away from the brink.

And so far, it has turned out not to be.  President Kennedy broke through with the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty in 1963, which had wide public support that surprised political and military leaders in the US and USSR.  It's likely these films contributed to this consciousness.

Meaningful arms reductions accelerated in the 1980s, continuing after the dissolution of the Soviet Union.  The issue has receded in current times, though there are still enough nuclear missile to destroy the world, many of them ready to launch.  That receding has some bad effects, particularly the minimizing of what nuclear bombs really are.  How the nature of the Bomb is different from other explosives and weapons is the implied or dramatized message of these films, including the atomic monster movies.   

But if the perceived threat of instant nuclear Armageddon that hung over every minute of the 1950s through the 1980s has all but ended, one contributing factor is the perception of nuclear war as insane and suicidal that these stories--in print and on film--reflected, articulated and spread. 

So comes the question of how all this applies to our future, and to the phenomena that most threatens it: the climate crisis, and effects (including pandemics) of an overweening human world dependent on a deeply wounded and distressed natural world.

Where are our climate crisis stories?  Nicholas Barber and David Wallace-Wells are among the recent writers asking that question.  They both list examples of the plethora of pop culture Armageddons and dystopias, especially in film and TV, caused by everything except a deformed climate.  Wallace-Wells calls this an "incredible failure of imagination."  But is that what it is?

Both Barber and Wallace-Wells mention the one counter-example: The Day After Tomorrow, released in 2004--and a box office hit.  It was the first and so far seemingly the only climate crisis-themed feature film.

One could argue that the pattern of stories confronting the climate crisis is the opposite of the Bomb stories pattern, in that a fairly literal Hollywood movie happened early (if you can consider 2004 as early for an oncoming crisis known since at least the 1950s.)

  Made by the same team that created the hit Independence Day, this film dramatized a set of possible and extreme effects of sudden climate cataclysm, providing or at least referring to the actual science of climate change as it was known in 2004.

  Though made and marketed as another future fantasy disaster adventure movie (the team went on to make 2012 and a version of Godzilla), its very title--obviously playing off the nuclear apocalypse of The Day After-- signaled a serious intent as a cautionary tale.  There is still time, brother.

At the time The Day After Tomorrow was both hailed and criticized by climate scientists.  It took liberties with scientific theories at the time, particularly in the time frame of its major disaster--the sudden deep-freeze of much of North America.

  Today, scientists are much more worried about other phenomena than the possible movement of the Atlantic currents that precipitate the movie's crisis, but they've learned not to rule very much out, as the climate is deforming far faster than most models predicted.   On the other hand, the opening scenes of climate effects--splitting glaciers, monster hail and sudden huge tornadoes--have been since seen on television news.  What was fantasy is now documentary.

But though there have been nonfiction stories and documentaries, plus some fiction (notably Kim Stanley Robinson's 2017 novel, New York 2140, and his Science in the Capital trilogy of novels in the 1990s, which he edited and combined into Green Earth in 2015), Hollywood and all the new and old television entities have arguably not followed up on The Day After Tomorrow. 

Barber suggests there haven't been other climate themed films because they don't fit into the Hollywood film form.  Could it be, he asks, that climate crisis effects are so immense in extent--global, in fact-- that "it’s just too big and overwhelming for a two-hour adventure" and "it can’t be fixed by a hero defeating a villain?"

Maybe, but probably not.  There weren't heroes defeating villains in the later Bomb movies (though that was a reassuring feature of the atomic monster flicks.) And it's hard to define "failure of imagination" in this context.

The atomic era movies can suggest some of the reasons why there haven't been climate crisis films.  Let's start with two.

 The first is politics, and all the money and power expended to form public opinion.  The US government went to great lengths to make questioning nuclear weapons seem disloyal and stupid.  Though Republicans went farther in its demonizations, there was so much at stake and so much of US industry, science and universities were invested, that the mainstream of both political parties--much less polarized than today--maintained the fortress of enforced silence, along with the necessary lying.

Climate seemed a bipartisan issue for awhile, but the flashpoint might have been the 2006 book and film An Inconvenient Truth by the Democratic presidential candidate who won the popular vote in the 2000 election, Al Gore.  Soon after that, no Republican could recognize the reality of the climate crisis any more than they could admit that trickle down economics never works.  The influence of big money from the fossil fuel industry, working behind the scenes as well as overtly, cannot be underestimated.  Hollywood studios today are no longer independently owned.

As noted above, the US military withheld its assistance to movies that questioned nuclear doctrine, and the right wing--and even moderates--questioned the patriotism of those who questioned the sanity of nuclear weapons.  That's one reason that, during or soon after the Blacklist, the undermining of the official view was done by giant ants and fire-breathing and irradiated creatures from prehistory and, not incidentally, from mythology.

The second reason is psychology, principally the denial that is both the villain and (in different contexts) the heroic quality of atomic war films.  Wallace-Wells suggests an interesting twist: ecopsychology. The climate crisis and related deformations of the natural world that sustains us and all present life challenge our psychological relationship to nature, as it has solidified in the industrial age.  In 1930 Ortega y Gasset wrote that a defining feature of modernity was the inability of the mass of humanity to distinguish between the natural and the artificial.  That's only the beginning of our warped relationship with the natural world.

Climate crisis denial appropriates the psychological term as well as the simple meaning. Denial in its most complete sense--denying that something exists or is threatening, etc.--is partly a product of helplessness.  People felt helpless about nuclear weapons, because they are beyond the power of an individual to stop, the weapons are in themselves so overwhelmingly powerful, and because the politics and paradox of deterrence forced them to accept nuclear weapons.   People feel helpless about the climate crisis because it is beyond the power of individuals to stop it, it is so enormous and complex, and because it seems that addressing it will have a steep cost in the present, for an uncertain future benefit.  

However, as we are learning in connection with the intractable problems of racism, once the feeling of powerlessness goes, the denial goes with it.  Perhaps a sign of the sense of powerlessness abating is when a realistic (as opposed to metaphorical) story on film or TV is made and is as influential and popular as On the Beach, Dr. Strangelove or The Day After.     

In any case, while I share the frustration and am also puzzled by the avoidance of climate themes, it seems some of these apocalyptic films can be regarded as the equivalent of the atomic monster movies--symbolically and metaphorically about climate crisis effects, particularly the breakdown of society and the stark division of rich and poor.

This is obvious in The Hunger Games series and similar stories but also in the once-fashionable vampire genre and the still prevalent zombie genre.  Together they form the same picture: the blood-sucking vampire rich and the mass of blood-drained undead zombies.  (Apparently Kim Stanley Robinson noticed this at about the same time I did, but he has a bigger platform.  As well as the patent on Zombies v. Vampires.)

The similarity to atomic monster movies breaks down however in terms of cause: the monsters were awakened and augmented or caused by the Bomb, these movies said; but in contemporary apocalyptic and dystopic stories, the failure to mention a deformed climate as a cause significantly weakens their function as cautionary tales, the There's Still Time, Brother effect.  

However, just as Bomb themes in print preceded them on film, science fiction writers are publishing climate themed stories, already pigeonholed as "ecofictions" and "cli/fi."  Perhaps one of these will inspire the next climate crisis feature.  As was the case with nuclear weapons in the 1980s (if not before), there is a vast public ready for the right stories.

Wallace-Wells argues that it may already be too late--that the realities of the climate crisis are becoming too obvious, and will soon be all-consuming, for anyone to be interested in cautionary tales and climate fiction.  Maybe, but maybe not. While it is true that one might not want to watch a movie about nuclear war while living in or after one, climate crisis effects are so various, so local and so long in time, that the appetite for these stories may in fact increase.

The ultimate question is: can climate-themed stories make a difference to the real future?  A few months ago it would have seemed very unlikely, even as it still seems it might be too late.  But as we've learned recently, things can change radically very fast... And Kim Stanley Robinson has a new near-future novel coming out later this year that deals in part with climate themes, called The Ministry of the Future.  Who knows--maybe there will be an actual Secretary of the Future in 2025. 

At this point you may be wondering whether any of this applies to pandemic-themed stories.  The short answer is that the taboos that barred the way to nuclear and climate themed stories don't appear to be in force, at least not yet. 

 Besides, there should be no problem for Hollywood to fit pandemic stories into existing genres, or combinations of them: from the medical procedural and the race for a cure to the scary extreme, which would be the zombie apocalypse stories. There have already been successful pandemic films, like The Andromeda Strain and Contagion.  Our current reality may make new fictions of this kind too scary.  But Hollywood is very likely to try a few.  If they can get back to making movies anytime soon.

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.