Godzilla and the atomic bomb – a capitalist monster

80 years ago, on August 6th and 9th, 1945, the US military threw atomic bombs to the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The detonations also marked the end of the Second World War in Asia. With hundreds of thousands of dead, they also became a symbol of the horror of a nuclear war that continued well into the 20th century. The atomic worsening of the dialectic of the Enlightenment passed into collective awareness: in the West, the bomb became primarily the symbol of destructive potential technical progress, in Japan it became a trauma.

When in March 1954 the crew of the Japanese fishing boat “Happy Dragon V” fell victim to the Fallout of the US atoma tests on the Bikini Atoll, Japan’s public consciousness returned to Japan’s public awareness: a pop-cultural manifestation: a gigantic monster layer that climbed out of the sea and destroyed civilization. Godzilla is generally considered a cultural processing of the atomic bombing, corresponding to an unimaginable evil that broke out through Japanese society. At the same time, Godzilla justified the genre of the Kaiju, i.e. the giant monster film and became the most durable film franchise in general, whose adaptations to the last film “Godzilla X Kong” extend. If one takes the thesis seriously that Godzilla is essentially social trauma work, the numerous reinterpretation and new findings of the figure and their symptoms are still meaningful to this day.

Destroyers and protectors

Eight months after the boat incident, the first Godzilla film ran in Japan in Japan in 1954 to become a box office hit. In it, the roaring monster, the name of which is a combination of the words for gorilla and whale, is awakened by atomic bomb attempts from an ancient sleep and then devastates Tokyo with atomic heat beam. It is the pure evil that has to be defeated among great victims to heal the proud Japanese – and at least post -fascist – national soul. Godzilla is an enemy violence, the superiority of which wore the clear traces of those opponents of war from the west, but with which one was in reconciliation and economic approach. This approach included a cultural transfer, for example the mass success of Godzilla was also listed in an American theatrical version, but cut so that no images of the destroyed Japanese cities could raise criticism of the US course.

In the following years and several sequels, Godzilla experienced a central reinterpretation in Japanese cinema: he became a national symbol and savior in the following years and several sequels. In this way, the first 15 films of the so-called Showa relay until 1975 reflect the ambivalent national history between the end of Japanese imperialism with the defeat in the Second World War, which the emperor announced to the people after the atomic bomb drop, as well as the enormous “economic miracle” of post-war period. If the Japanese “people” had to submit to Godzilla’s superiority, he soon stood in the fight against other monsters, against three -headed dragons, deep sea monsters, giant cancer, giant moth or the monkey King Kong. The inferiority of the then imperial imperialism in modern capitalist structures is compensated for in over -identification with economic performance, as a replacement of the broken national pride – a mechanism that may seem too familiar to the Germans.

The ambivalence of this relationship with the abstract rule shows itself in the figure of Godzilla himself, which occurs protective but no less threatening and each of his fights attracts a trace of devastation. From the beginning, this destruction has been genetically for the monster film: cities are razed to the ground, bridges torn down, electricity pylons are uprooted. The resentment against civilization and the discomfort of modern society is lived out by the ancient natural beings here. To this day, a forbidden desire is to see the skyscrapers in the kicks and strokes of such megawes. At the same time, however, Godzilla also fought as a deputy in major social conflicts against Monster, which resulted from pollution, invasion or biotechnology.

Humility before the primeval monster

Godzilla combines ambivalent feelings of fainting, fear, revenge or rage of destruction and channel them into one, you can say classic modern rule formula: humility. Against the (atomic) megalomania of mankind, only a return to mystical pre -civilizing forces and their natural order. And this is the great authoritarian promise, because if you submit to these powers, you will only win real strength. This idea runs through the further development of Godzilla films and appears in a modified form even in the late US film films.

In 1998 Roland Emmerich took on the fabric in the first Hollywood staging. His “Godzilla” was torn by the reviews and mocked as Gino among fans – an acronym from “Godzilla in name only”, i.e. Godzilla. The monster is fantasized here as a mutated lizard that emerged from French (!) Atomic bomb tests in the Pacific. In the course of the film, however, the mutant still turns out to be a natural creature, namely as a careful mother who only searches for their offspring under the Madison Square Garden in New York.

The much more successful film adaptation from the so-called monster verse series, which began with Gareth Edwards’ “Godzilla” in 2014 and was received positively until Japan, is again tied to Godzilla as a prehistoric nature. In this version, the US atom tests of the 1950s-which have already been attempts to kill the primeval monster Godzilla-unfortunately, other beings aroused other beings. Those nuclear parasites are now causing devastating devastating devastation worldwide. Humanity reaches its limits here, because these atomic parasites cannot be combated with the nuclear weapons, but they are the only enough strength against the giants. As in the first Godzilla film from 1954, the scientist Ishiro Serizawa (Ken Watanabe) embodies the dilemma: In order to keep the commanding admiral from the hopeless nuclear strike, the researcher warns with his father’s clock, which had stopped on the morning of August 6, 1945. “The arrogance of man is that he believes that he has nature under his control,” says Serizawa. “Nature has an order, a force that rests the balance”. Godzilla “is this force”. And so people have no choice but to let Godzilla fight against the monsters.

The naturalization of capitalism

Where man has brought nature out of balance and it should now – highly destructively – back to harmony, people are consequently degraded. As helpless, they watch the events that are no longer their history in the real sense, but determined by powers that have grown over their heads. At the same time, they have become insignificant how the woodcut -like characters of the films from the monster verses, which were criticized in numerous reviews.

The motif of a natural force that is supposed to compensate for human excesses is also increasingly found in films such as »Jurassic World« from 2015. Here it is genetry dinosaurs who were bred out of profit greed, against which only the real Tyrannosaur Rex can help. The perverse excess is regulated by a return to a healthy level – an idea that should above all be a delayed answer to the global financial crisis in unleashed “predator capitalism”.

However, behind cultural pessimism, which supposedly will return to the natural order, is only the naturalization of capitalism. The intended compensation is not the overcoming of those conditions that led to destruction, war and nuclear death, but the return to where the (capitalist) world still seemed okay. This ideology of moderate capitalism is nothing but cheap reconciliation with the destructive conditions: not only because the actual horror – to stay in the picture, the attack of a monstrous giant lizard – is going to the problem instead of a problem. Rather, capitalism paves the door and gate as a supposed nature of the regression, as the last Japanese Godzilla film of the so-called Reiwa relay, “Godzilla Minus One” from 2023, impressively shows.

The Oscar-winning film was mainly celebrated internationally for its gripping plot, which, in contrast to the Hollywood productions, would offer characters with depth and a real processing of the Japanese war trauma. Basically, however, a nationalist heroic epic from the picture book is told that thrives excellently on the metaphysical good-evil conflict, to which Godzilla has been made over the decades. The focus of the action is the deserted Kamikaze pilot Kōichi Shikishima (Ryūnosuke Kamiki), whose “cowardice”, not to have sacrificed himself in the suicide attack for the Japanese war, had Godzilla escaped in an attack on a military base. Shikishima then lives with the “shame” for years, experiences the Japanese economic upswing, but the perfect world is haunted by Godzilla’s attacks. Only his victim in a final suicide attack can end the trauma.

Of course, the film has a happy ending, including the view of an eternal repetition of the fight against evil. Godzilla is declared an enemy here again, but an inner one. This reinterpretation is also a kind of return to the roots, but it also bears the signs of a time of regression, the warlike world market competition and strengthening nationalisms. With all of this, it should not be forgotten: We have created the monster that the world has been in changing forms for 80 years now.