As a lifelong Godzilla aficionado, I made sure to see Cloverfield on its opening night. I didn’t have high expectations, having learned my lesson back in 1998 from Tristar’s Godzilla. I remember watching in disbelief as the military easily dispatched the mutated iguana directors Roland Emmerich and Dean Devlin were passing off as the King of the Monsters, and leaving the theatre wondering how anyone could so badly misconstrue the Godzilla mythos. Gone were Godzilla’s fearlessness, invulnerability and atomic breath. In their place, they had given their creation the ability to run, burrow, and breed. The damn thing actually ran away from the army, for Christ’s sake! Worse than all this, however, was the monster’s inability to frighten the people beneath its feet.

The first Godzilla movie, Toho Studio’s 1954 Gojira, was a horror film that visually recreated the firestorms, radioactive fallout, panicked populations, and general helplessness the Japanese people felt in the final days of World War Two. In that film, if in no other, Godzilla was an idiotic god of death, cinematically embodying the terrors of nuclear warfare. Even as a child I understood this subtext. In contrast, Tristar’s Godzilla didn’t have a whiff of diabolical divinity. Kyle Smith put it perfectly in a review he penned for issue 33 of G-Fan magazine: “If Emmerich and Devlin ever get to film the Book of Revelations, I can’t wait to see how fast God runs.”

Well, Godzilla lovers, rejoice: Cloverfield gets right everything that Tristar’s Godzilla got wrong. Cloverfield’s monster may not look anything like Godzilla or bear his name, but it’s Godzilla nonetheless.

The Cloverfield monster dwarfs all previous Godzillas, and the military is impotent before it. Beyond this, I’m not sure what I can say about the beast. Until the final scenes we catch only partial glimpses of it, and its bizarre physique precludes easy categorization. I know it was titanic and terrible, but I’m hard-pressed to say what it actually looked like. The movie is filmed in a documentary style similar to The Blair Witch Project. Several frantic twenty-somethings use a shaky, hand-held camcorder to film their flight through a devastated Manhattan, doing their best to avoid the creature, the parasites that scuttle from its hide, and intense artillery fire.

Though the monster is indescribable, the movie’s iconography isn’t: collapsing skyscrapers, massive dust-clouds, and crowds of wounded and terrified New Yorkers all demonstrate that Cloverfield bears the same relationship to 9/11 that Gojira bears to Hiroshima and Nagasaki. To understand these movies, we have to understand group trauma. Luckily, after watching Cloverfield I happened to read Martha Stout’s The Paranoia Switch: How Terror Rewires Our Brains and Reshapes Our Behavior—And How We Can Reclaim Our Courage (Sarah Crichton Books, 2007). Stout is a psychologist who specializes in psychological trauma, and her insights can decode these movies and the traumas they represent.

Trauma is neurologically rooted in how our brains process sensory information. Information from our senses travels through a brain structure called the thalamus to the amygdala. The amygdala evaluates the emotional content of this information and then sends it along to the hippocampus. The more emotional importance the amygdala places on the information, the more the hippocampus is activated. The hippocampus then organizes this information according to its emotional priority and integrates it with existing information about similar experiences. This allows higher parts of the brain, such as the cerebral cortex, to construct memories we experience as comprehensible wholes. These memories are dynamic, so that we can reflect upon and sometimes reevaluate them. Stout writes that “our neurological sorting and integration process allows our memories to be informed, coherent, and meaningful, rather than chaotic and flooded with empty details.”

This intricate system breaks down when sensory information is extremely stressful or traumatic. The amygdala assigns overwhelming emotional significance to such information, so much significance, in fact, that the hippocampus can’t process it. Rather than increasing to accommodate this significance, the hippocampus’s activation actually decreases, and so the hippocampus can’t organize the information or integrate it with other memories. Portions of the traumatic memory are therefore left incompletely processed. The higher systems of the brain can’t turn this fragmented information into meaningful patterns, so they largely ignore it. The memories remain in an incoherent state as sensory images and bodily sensations, making it hard to recognize them as being memories at all. Instead, they’re experienced as undefined feelings and lingering negative moods, typically highly charged with anxiety.

Because these memories can’t be integrated, they aren’t dynamic. Stout describes them as “stuck”, as “unchanging, sealed off from being updated by subsequent, less traumatic experience, and inexpressible in language. They are wordless, placeless, and eternal, and long after the traumatic event itself has receded into the past, the neurological record of trauma—the paranoia switch that is now ‘stuck’ in the brain—consists of anonymous, free-floating traces of strong emotion, image and sensation that can ‘trigger’ irrationally suspicious and inappropriately frightened reactions in the individual. These traces of memory cannot be modified by conscious thought, or by discussion with other people.” The indefinable Cloverfield monster symbolizes this threatening subliminal incoherence.

Perversely, these fragmented memories are triggered more easily than integrated memories. In situations that even vaguely resemble the original trauma, our incoherent memories will drown out our integrated, dynamic, and balanced memories, leading us to behave in irrational and self-destructive ways.

We usually think that psychological trauma is a purely personal experience, but it’s not. Our limbic systems—the primitive parts of our brains that process emotional information—wordlessly communicate through our facial expressions, tone of voice, and body language. We’re constantly transmitting emotional information to other people. When we receive this information, our limbic systems begin to mirror the emotional states we perceive in others. We then transmit our new emotional states, keeping the cycle of “limbic resonance” going. Since we experience traumatic memories as negative emotional states, limbic resonance can spread trauma like a disease, a process that’s accelerated by highly visual media like television.

9/11 is a case in point. Stout refers to research carried out by the Pew Research Center, the New England Journal of Medicine, the American Heart Association, and the Los Angeles Times to show how quickly trauma spread throughout the American population following the terrorist attacks. Immediately after the attacks, 80% of a random sample of American women and 60% of a random sample of American men felt depressed, with respondents saying that they suffered from recurring images of horrifying events. Three to five days after the attack, 44% of Americans sampled reported at least one clinical symptom of post-traumatic stress disorder. In the month following the attacks, people with defibrillators implanted surgically because of preexisting heart conditions had more than twice as many life-threatening heart rhythms. Two months after the attacks, 31% of Americans sampled felt that their personal sense of security was still greatly shaken. About one in five believed they would likely be hurt or killed in a terrorist attack such as the bombing of a building or a plane, and one in four believed they would be hurt or killed by an act of bioterrorism. The more television people watched, the more vulnerable they were to these kinds of stress reactions.

National traumas like 9/11 often incite what Stout calls “limbic wars,” cultural upheavals driven by unprocessed traumatic memories. Following a significant national trauma, authoritarian “fear brokers” exploit the nation’s altered emotional state for financial and political gain, aggravating and perpetuating the original trauma. This leads to scapegoating as the fear brokers demonize a segment of the population, encouraging people to blame this segment for their nation’s ills. Scapegoating is part of a larger process of cultural regression as hatred and vengeance poison public discourse, leading to a contraction of civil liberties and greater support for aggression against foreign and domestic “enemies.” Eventually, this stage gives way to a backlash against the limbic war’s irrationality and injustice. The fear brokers’ influence wanes and they’re often punished for their opportunism. In the final stage, the nation experiences regret and guilt for what has happened, feelings that soon give way to denial and forgetting. Afterwards, people find it hard to remember why the fear brokers, who seem so ludicrous and grotesque in hindsight, seemed so credible in the moment. The lessons that could have been learned from the limbic war are lost, leaving the nation as vulnerable to a new limbic war as it was to the last.

This is where movies like Gojira and Cloverfield can perform a valuable public service. By distilling the imagery associated with group traumas into a fantasy form they facilitate limbic resonance with those traumas. Even after the limbic war ends they make it possible to remember what it was like when it began. The fantasy element is crucial because it relocates the trauma from mundane history into an eternally relevant mythic realm. From there it can easily be accessed by future generations of viewers, viewers who will experience, however peripherally, the essential nature of the trauma.

Gojira and Cloverfield are mythic embodiments of collective trauma. As myths, they can bypass the layers of denial that are part of the forgetting stage of the limbic war, communicating the emotional content the denial is designed to silence. They’re like messages placed in bottles by traumatized limbic systems, messages that untraumatized limbic systems can later read and understand, just as I understood Gojira’s subtext when I was only eight years old.

There’s one important difference between Gojira and Cloverfield, however. In Gojira’s final scenes, Dr Serizawa, a tormented scientist who’s found a way to turn vast stretches of the ocean into acid, decides to kill himself as he unleashes the only prototype of his weapon against Godzilla, thereby preventing anyone from using the technology ever again. By shouldering the full weight of moral responsibility for his discovery, Serizawa symbolically restores the ecological and spiritual harmony that was upset by the military and nuclear hubris that created the monster. As the film ends, another scientist warns that if nuclear testing continues, more Godzillas will be created; in other words, Serizawa’s moral victory is fragile, and to preserve it the global community needs to remember the lessons their trauma has taught them.

There is no comparable moral victory in Cloverfield, suggesting perhaps that whereas Japan in 1954 was integrating the collective trauma of World War Two into a meaningful and ethically viable frame of reference, America in 2008 has barely begun to integrate the trauma of 9/11. Fittingly, Godzilla dies at the end of Gojira, but there’s every reason to believe that the Cloverfield monster survives the end of its movie, and that it’s still out there, thriving in the depths of America’s unending limbic war.