Godzilla at Fifty: PopMatters Blows Out the Candles

Phil Nugent — Tue, 13 May 2008 14:30:00 GMT

PopMatters celebrates Godzilla's fiftieth birthday with a jam-packed "special section" on the radioactive thunder lizard's oevure and cultural legacy. Thomas Molesky and Brian Ruh fill in the historical context; Steven Luc examines Godzilla's ability to be all things to all people; Mark Pyzyk ponders the levels of "self-loathing" that drive audiences to cheer the big fella on as he confounds our military and flattens our cities; Tobias Peterson and Will Harris wonder how he got so cute; Bill Gibron addresses the criticisms leveled by Mystery Science Theater 3000 that "the surly superstar from the land of the rising sun really coasted through a great many of his later films."

In the opening essay, Mike Ward tracks what a long, strange trip it's been through the chronology of Japanese Godzilla films, from the atomic-devastation metaphors of the original Gojira, as hia mama named him, to the self-conscious mythology addressed three decades later in Godzilla 1985, in which Godzilla is compared, by a scientist, to "a living nuclear weapon" and described by reporter "Steve Martin" (Raymond Burr) as nature's way of reminding us "how puny we really are in the face of a tornado, an earthquake, or a Godzilla." Writes Ward: "Maybe in Godzilla's case, overtly stating the theme is the same as contradicting it. If, in his unknowability, Godzilla stands in for the inexpressible horror of the atomic bomb, then expressing this metaphor outright — he's a 'living nuclear weapon' — robs it of its force. This is why mysterious quantities like the Oxygen Destroyer are no longer needed to defeat him. A volcano is now Godzilla's equal; which puts him into a known category, along with tornadoes and earthquakes. Godzilla is just another disaster." With so much to chew on, PopMatters could have been allowed to simply ignore perhaps the biggest disaster ever to tarnish Gojira's name, but instead, Ward addresses it head on, directly and succinctly: "Toho Productions' Godzilla could whip Roland Emmerich's Godzilla back to the Jazz Age."

The Screengrab : brian ruh

Godzilla at Fifty: PopMatters Blows Out the Candles