Kaiju are the heroes we deserve.
Early in Michael Dougherty’s recent Godzilla: King of the Monsters, Japanese scientist Dr. Ishiro Serizawa, portrayed by Ken Watanabe, argues against destroying Godzilla and his fellow giant monsters—called “Titans” in the film. Serizawa is asked whether he intends for Godzilla to be humanity’s pet. “No,” Serizawa replies. “We are to be his.” The film takes Serizawa seriously, and neither its protagonists nor antagonists seem to dispute Serizawa’s fundamental contention: humanity has lost the rights to its autonomy given the catastrophic effects of human intervention on the Earth, and the Titans are the only beings that can reverse humanity’s impact, acting as a kind of “antibody,” in the film’s words, for the planet itself. In this way the film echoes the Gaia hypothesis, championed recently by French anthropologist Bruno Latour, the idea that the Earth can be seen as a holistic system with its own particular vitality, even intentionality, which humans seem to disrupt continually. In this framing, Godzilla and his fellow Titans are a natural corrective despite their science fiction origins, a radioactive medicine for a damaged Earth that can no longer sustain us, its most toxic inhabitants.
Serizawa’s character is so committed to this idea that he eventually sacrifices himself to revive a temporarily defeated Godzilla, detonating a nuclear bomb to empower the monster to defeat the even more monstrous King Ghidorah, positioned by the film as an invading alien who, unlike Godzilla, does not have the best interests of the planet in mind. This sacrifice inverts that of a previous Dr. Serizawa, the one in the very first Godzilla film, Ishirō Honda’s magnificent Gojira, released in Japan in 1954. In Honda’s film, Daisuke Serizawa, as portrayed by Akihiko Hirata, is a troubled scientist whose discovery of an “oxygen destroyer” provides the only means to defeat Godzilla, who has emerged to level Tokyo in the wake of atomic testing in the Pacific. This Serizawa, too, sacrifices himself, but to destroy Godzilla, not to save him.
Honda’s film is bleak and unsparing. A popular rumour at the time was that the director had interspersed real footage of the devastated post–atom bomb landscapes of Hiroshima and Nagasaki with his scenes of Tokyo after Godzilla’s rampage, a rumour that was all the easier to believe because Honda’s film was so interested in scarred bodies and destroyed buildings. In the original film, Godzilla incarnates the radical destructive potential of nuclear violence, laying waste to Japan in ways that are simultaneously intentional and incomprehensible. In this sense the giant monster is almost sublime, its aesthetics somewhere at the edge of conventional understandings, magnificent and terrifying all at once. Why is it, then, that audiences took such pleasure in watching Godzilla’s acts of destruction? By the 1960s, giant monster movies had become their own genre in Japan, called kaiju (from the Japanese word for “strange beasts”) films, and scenes of Godzilla and his fellows destroying carefully modelled Japanese cities were de rigueur for the genre. Godzilla in particular was so popular with children that he was eventually given his own son, Minya, who imitated his father by blowing smoke rings instead of atomic fire. Godzilla, then, is both excitement and terror, a favourite imaginary playmate of young children and Japan’s symbol, par excellence, of the decimation that violence and science bring when coupled together.
The pleasure of Godzilla, in other words, lies in watching him destroy us. Godzilla could not exist without radiation, one of the few common elements in all his incarnations, both Japanese and American. Created by the nuclear age, Godzilla grows beyond anything that could be imagined by the scientists of the twentieth century. And then he lays waste to cities, destroying his own creators, and because he is the product of nuclear violence, humankind’s most destructive weapons can do nothing against him. The pleasure of Godzilla is moral, the erotic thrill of watching us get what we deserve from something both monstrous and divine—“God-Zilla,” after all. Even the most recent Japanese Godzilla, Hideaki Anno’s 2016 Shin Godzilla understands this, staging Godzilla’s radioactive rampage to sombre, almost elegiac music and thrilling in the beauty of the fire and smoke that the kaiju leaves in his wake. Godzilla might be the “villain” in Honda and Anno’s films, but he is the only being we’re there to watch, the site of pleasure, the object of our desire. He is Freud’s death drive come to life, and, as Freud was obsessively aware, with Thanatos there is also, always, the remainder of Eros.
Until Godzilla: King of the Monsters, at least. The recent American Godzilla movies produced by Legendary, concerned as they are with nodding to the Japanese originals, have also been attempting to define a somewhat different mythology for the monster. In Legendary’s canon, Godzilla is one of the race of Titans who once roamed the Earth as primordial beings and, the most recent film implies, proto-humanity’s original gods. Godzilla can be understood through the language of evolutionary biology as an “apex predator,” dominating all other species simply as a function of its own nature. This Godzilla’s interest in humanity is peripheral, and he avoids the overt urban destruction of his Japanese predecessors, focusing largely on dominating other monsters and asserting his status as “king of the monsters.” Though he is still a radioactive being, the films put far less emphasis on Godzilla’s radioactivity as a kind of human original sin, instead continually emphasizing Godzilla and the other Titans’ origins in the Earth’s deep past. And, as Ishiro Serizawa asserts to the film’s audience, the proper relationship we as humans should have to such a being is subservience. It is no coincidence, then, that the film ends with a scene of the remaining titans bowing to a victorious Godzilla: the natural hierarchy has been (re-)established, and humans are no longer on top.
This is, of course, just as moral as Japan’s Godzilla films, but it is not the sensuous morality of deserved destruction. It is, instead, a particular kind of future for humanity, one that is reminiscent of the philosopher of science Donna Haraway’s recent science-fiction speculations. In her monograph Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, Haraway imagines a future in which humans will give up their species autonomy, blending themselves with animals, with insects, arachnids, and other non-human beings in order to survive, as she puts it, “on a damaged planet.” As a necessary rejoinder to what Haraway characterizes as the “prick story” of the Anthropocene, its male, human-centric story of a greatness gone tragically too far, Haraway speculates about how humans can “stay with the trouble” instead of continually anticipating their own extinction, blending themselves with other beings in a kind of churning compost that finds new ways of living—indeed, new ways of existing—in the compromised ecologies of our planet. Even if Legendary’s film ends with Godzilla as a new king, retaining a grasp on hierarchy in a new form, I would submit that there is a deeper and more interesting pleasure buried within the seeming submission of the film’s human characters to a non-human force. This Godzilla, unlike those who have come before, promises the almost anarchic pleasure of giving up our autonomy as a species in order to make way for other kinds of life, learning to live with them rather than to dominate them. Godzilla is not the force of our own destruction, but, instead, a path toward a continuing—and perhaps radically transformed—existence.
