Jonah Goldberg has a
fine piece up today detailing the 9/11 colorings of the new
Godzilla-by-way-of-The Blair Witch Project flick
Cloverfield, connecting the new film's spirit to the
"deeply significant" original Japanese version of Godzilla, which
premiered "less than a decade after the bombing of Hiroshima
and Nagasaki, a mere two years after the formal end to American
occupation, and amidst an enormous controversy over a Japanese
fishing boat damaged during American nuclear testing in the Bikini
Atoll." Goldberg adds: "Obviously, later Godzilla movies were silly
affairs, and if there's a Cloverfield 7: Bug-Lizard Meets
Frankenstein, that will be silly too. But this
movie is not." More:
Self-consciously evocative of 9/11 - it's set
near ground zero - Cloverfield portrays self-absorbed young people
who are suddenly yanked out of their comfortable lives. In the
first scene where the monster is revealed, the decapitated head of
the Statue of Liberty comes screaming out of the sky. That's hardly
subtle symbolism for the end of America, or at least the end of
America as we know it. The military is portrayed as caring,
competent, and brave as it battles a monster who is, in the words
of one harried soldier, "winning."
I haven't seen Cloverfield, but in my write up of the U.S.
release of the "Director's Cut" Japanese version of
Godzilla a few years back I did note how much more
political and poignant the film was once you took Raymond Burr back
out of it:
In the Japanese version, the atomic bomb is front and
center. The characters refer to it constantly, and make it clear
that Godzilla is just a continuation of suffering for them. "First
the black rain, then contaminated tuna, and now Godzilla," one
woman laments. Others complain that the orders to evacuate are too
reminiscent of the recent past. On a subway train, moments before
being eaten, another woman looks hopefully toward the future and
shrugs off the threat of Godzilla. "Not after I survived Nagasaki,"
she says. "I treasure life."
American critics ate this version up for the obvious
reasons--specifically, it did all the up-front thinking for them
and lent itself to a "relevant" review, even if, as I noted, it was
more fascinating to me at least that "nine years after
the end of World War Two, we've got a Japanese film glorifying a
kamikaze mission against Godzilla, which today's critics all seem
to agree is a stand in for bad ole Uncle Sam." I don't blame
Japanese filmmakers, to be clear, but it is always interesting to
parse what Andrew Ferguson
might call the "wised-up" American debunking of any positive
attributes of American history or culture. Often as not the
debunking exists for no other reason than today's "wised-up" are
programmed with no other way to approach anything,
cultural or political than to scoff knowingly. My closing argument
went like so:
If America is Godzilla, then later films in the series
follow our relationship more accurately: Godzilla becomes a hero to
the Japanese, protecting them against the foreign monsters that
would otherwise destroy them. The American Godzilla doesn't look so
bad when you've got a North Korean Mothra shooting missiles over
your country and threatening to turn your homeland into a "sea of
fire."
See also my defense of "torture
porn."
topics:
Movies, Military, North Korea
