War

Godzilla is back, and we’re called to the fight  

The series of films is being re-released, just in time for us to absorb anew what they really depict, for post-war Japanese and us alike 

by Michael Nenonen  

By Michael Nenonen

On September 19 2006, a DVD version of the original 1954 movie Gojira will appear in Canadian video stores and rental outlets. Until now, the only way Canadian audiences could see the movie was in the form of the heavily-edited American 1956 version entitled Godzilla: King of the Monsters. This badly-dubbed version not only deleted Japanese footage but also added scenes with Raymond Burr. In the process, the original’s aesthetic power was diluted, transforming a somber meditation on the horrors of industrial warfare and nuclear bombardment into a run-of-the-mill giant monster film. I’ve always loved the Godzilla series, but lately I’ve been questioning my affection. My doubts were triggered by a short passage in William Tsutsui’s book, Godzilla On My Mind: Fifty Years of the King of Monsters (Palgrave McMillan, 2004). Tsutsui wonders if Godzilla movies aren’t a form of “military porn.” In the real world, the Japanese military is shadowed by Japan’s history of imperialism, by its apocalyptic defeat in World War II, and by the constraints placed on the Japanese Self-Defense Force (JSDF) by the US-imposed constitution. In Godzilla movies, the Japanese soldiers who defend Japan from the monster’s assaults are unencumbered by any of this historical baggage. Is the series’ popularity explained, at least in part, by its portrayal of a Japanese military that’s free of guilt and shame? The question’s a good one, especially given the influence that the JSDF has over the series’ scripts.

I’d never looked at Godzilla films in this way before, but the more I thought about it the more sense it made. There’s something fundamentally militaristic about the Godzilla series; in fact, the series may express the psychological core of militarism even better than movies such as Apocalypse Now and Full Metal Jacket.

Before dismissing this seemingly preposterous assertion, consider the ideas presented in Barbara Ehrenreich’s book, Blood Rites: Origins and History of the Passions of War (Henry and Hold Company, 1997). Ehrenreich is that rarest of all things, a respected journalist who holds a PHD in Biology. Blood Rites presents an interesting hypothesis about the evolutionary origins of war-fever, that strange condition that brings out the best and the worst in the human condition.

Ehrenreich points out that war generates a kind of religious ecstasy. It makes us feel like we’re part of a greater whole, encouraging loyalty and selflessness towards members of our own “tribe” while directing our collective aggression towards our “enemy,” an enemy that’s almost always portrayed as diabolically powerful and fundamentally inhuman—in other words, an enemy that’s almost always portrayed as a monster. She shows that this ecstasy makes a great deal of sense, given the conditions in which humankind evolved.

For millions of years our ancestors were hunted by creatures that were stronger, faster, and far more vicious than they were. Long before we were hunters, we were prey. To understand just how imperiled we were, we need only look to modern-day apes. A 1991 study found that leopard predation was responsible for 39% of deaths among chimpanzees in a five-year period. Baboons, who are savage fighters in their own right, lose 25% of their members to predators each year. Early humans, in a world where predator populations were much higher than today, would have fared even worse. They would also have evolved strategies for dealing with predators that are similar to those used by our primate relatives today.

When a predator enters their territory, many apes drop whatever they’re doing and begin to work in concert with the other members of their troupes. Their arousal levels peak, they issue warning cries to one another, they cluster together, and they work as a team to drive off the threat. Baboons and chimpanzees, for example, have both been known to collectively attack invading leopards. The repeated success of this pattern of emotional arousal and behavioral response would give it an edge in the evolutionary selection process. Those primates with a predisposition for banding together for the purposes of collective defense will have a better chance of passing on their genes than those who don’t. Ehrenriech suspects that this predisposition still exists in varying degrees in each of us.

Early humans likely had a love-hate relationship with their predators. On the one hand, these superhuman creatures were consummate destroyers, slaughtering our ancestors with near-impunity. On the other hand, since our ancestors probably scavenged from the beasts’ kill sites, the predators were also providers of meat. Fear and admiration for the monsters would have mingled in our predecessors’ hearts, laying the foundations for the early religions that were fixated on predators like bears, as well as those later religions devoted to wrathful Gods with a taste for animal and human sacrifices.

With the development of projectile weapons like bows, humans became far more effective hunters, and hunting, which may have initially been conducted by the entire tribe, increasingly became a masculine privilege. This set in motion the development of warrior elites. Ehrenreich argues that the rise of warrior elites coincided with the extinction or massive depopulation of predator species. Since the hunters initially emerged to protect their tribes from these predators, the predators’ disappearance threatened the hunters with the loss of status and employment. They responded by running protection rackets: the hunters became warriors who protected their own tribes from rival warriors while stealing the resources of other peoples. The warriors of other tribes thereby became the new predators in our psychological vocabulary. In the process the warrior elites took control of their societies. Once this dynamic was set in motion, it infected one society after another, as tribe after tribe was forced to militarize in order to protect itself from the predation of its warlike neighbors. Like a cultural organism, the institution of warfare began to evolve. It has continued evolving ever since, mindlessly exploiting and shaping whatever economic and political systems we’ve developed.

Beneath its many cultural manifestations, the underlying psychology of warfare remains rooted in our predisposition to rally together in an ecstasy of terror, courage, and awe in response to a predator’s threat. Perhaps this explains why so many people in the West see terrorism as a devouring, inhuman monster with powers of destruction rivaling those of the Soviet Union, the previous “predator” in the Western zeitgeist, and why “the War on Terror” inspires such mythology-soaked groupthink among otherwise rational people, rendering them so vulnerable to the manipulation of warmongering scoundrels. This may also explain the appeal of Godzilla movies, which depict in purest form the archetypal struggle of tiny primates against godlike marauders.

And yet, Ehrenreich suggests, if there is a creature that threatens to devour humankind, or a Godzilla ready to incinerate us, it’s not any specific human enemy, but rather war itself, a monster of our own creation that long ago escaped our control. If our civilization is to survive, we have to defeat this destroyer. The odds are stacked impossibly against us, but, as Ehrenreich asks, “What have all the millennia of warfare prepared us for, if not this Armageddon fought, once more, against a predator beast?”