by Karin Malady

Heaven’s eye gazes upon a toyetic crowd screaming and running as Godzilla walks across the city. A single step of the monster’s slow gait outpaces the fleeing population, crushing them beneath. Monsters are larger than life. When the atomic breath destroys miles of people and buildings, the survivors can’t help but stare up in awe at the creature that obliterated their homes. Every time I look behind me, it’s grown. Yesterday, it was as tall as a palm tree. Today, it’s bigger than God. I keep wondering how much bigger it can get. What is Horror? Horror is what’s happening right behind you. It has this enthralling power to reveal visceral emotional truths about society and the times we live in. Even at its most conservative, it just feels right. Not teens getting murdered for having sex so much as these ideals manifesting as an unstoppable, supernatural killer. Society under empire is maintained through the constant threat of violence, yet we pretend this isn’t the context of how we live day to day. The world begins to make sense when the ephemeral forces behind our anxieties are made flesh. Godzilla Minus One (2023, Dir. Takashi Yamazaki) is first and foremost a Horror movie.

“A psychotic drowns where the mystic swims,” Nick Cage paraphrases Joseph Campbell in Mandy. When the walls speak, when every stranger knows your name, when the radio threatens your life… you begin to feel psychotic. When the TV talks to you, is it in the voice of The Artist or The Adversary? Everything feels dangerous when I fall into these episodes. Getting terrorized by objects and music would have me branded as crazy by most. Is it really that deranged when the architecture itself is designed to be hostile? Hit songs are imbued with cultural norms that I can’t fit into and every YouTube short is taunting me with a lifestyle I can’t afford. Maybe none of these things personally hate me but I can see the thing that moves their limbs and twists their words through black screens and tinny speakers clear as day.  I don’t know how I used to miss it so easily. Maybe, before tuning in to the right channel, it seems like a purely stylistic choice. Recent films and TV shows are full of actors talking directly to the audience as they look at the camera, but entertainment is rife with this phenomena throughout history. Hollywood has returned to the monologues of old, where characters have a one-sided conversation about the nature of life to be judged by a jury of the faceless. You have been called before the court to justify this, all of this! I gesture wildly. What do you have to say for yourself? Everybody wants a rock to wind a piece of string around.

That length of thread has been called modernism, postmodernism, and now metamodernism is catching on. After deconstruction became reconstruction, everything got caught in limbo. Metamodernism is defined by the unity of opposites. Taking apart the conventions that lead to the current moment while also clinging to them, justifying them, begging for them to remain. Recent films have inclinations to comment on everything at the same time, simultaneously. Encompassing the history of the genre, current events, and itself all while still being a fun movie if you don’t think about any of these things. “Look at how big and important we all are to participate in this process!” we’re told with all the subtlety and emotional integrity of the Nicole Kidman AMC ad. It gets hard to sort out what the real message is. What is Godzilla Minus One actually saying? Is it about the legacy of the Godzilla franchise? Is it about Japan’s cultural response to the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Is it about a community coming together in the face of disaster? Is it a fun, thoughtless romp of an adventure movie? Thanks to metamodernism, we can just say yes to all of these and move on. It doesn’t matter how they contradict, intentionality is dead. Yet, most importantly, it is also a movie that is about Right Now.

There’s something we can’t talk about on screen. Media culture has always been eager to jump on trends and current events. The Boys reads like a greatest hits record for the United State’s sharp increase in fascist tendencies and before that the Arrowverse’s Supergirl was grappling with that same beast. But the role of COVID-19 in all this is nowhere to be seen. It has to be danced around. The endless empty streets and sparse offices of Severance feel like the world we emerged into after lockdown. It sits with that eerie quiet that makes you wonder just how many people really are left. But it still can’t name names or point fingers. It can’t witness the beast. We feel the loss regardless of how easy it gets covered up. There are gaps appearing all over the place. Global capitalism is failing. One day all the coins are missing, and the next, all the computers stop working. Maybe things will be back to normal after a few days but it’s hard to ignore the symptoms. When something is on everyone’s mind but we can’t talk about it, that thing mutates into a monster. Normally, analyzing foreign movies requires a more in depth understanding of what is happening in that country. Living in a moment in time where the world is suffering in similar ways everywhere, bridging that gap is much easier. Godzilla Minus One bridges past and present, atrocity and pandemic, nation and world.

What first drew my attention to the movie was that I heard it had one of the best human stories in any Godzilla entry. In the few Toho Studios Godzilla entries I’ve seen, those bits always charmed me so I was curious what other people want out of them. Unfortunately, too much of an edible tuned my brain into the Hell Channel and I had a very bad time. At one point, I told my brother, “It’s really interesting how they’re playing horror music over typical heroic speeches,” and when I went back to check out those scenes sober, I realized it was just normal emotionally manipulative music distorted by my senses. Despite how skewed the perception was, the insight I got from it was still informative. It was easy for me to be charmed at first. The performances are a blast and the spectacle is bombastic. My twee idyllic fantasy of having a found family blinded me as I watched protagonist Koichi recover from his trauma while he builds a new life with Noriko, a woman who barged into his house, and Akiko, the child she stole. The cantankerous older neighbor, Sumiko, butts in with her opinions but is happy to join their unit as well, taking on a grandparent-like role. His friendship with the crew of the dinky wooden vessel, the Shinseimaru, similarly warmed my heart. As time goes on, pieces fall into place and the illusion fails. A lot of ink has been spilled on the film’s nationalistic tendencies and historical revisionism. Takashi Yamazaki is a director that has been praised by Shinzo Abe and it’s easy to see why. His oeuvre is a romanticist celebration of Imperial Japan’s role in World War II obscured by a thin layer of hollow criticisms. When the themes and messages that contradict each other are sliced away, all that’s left is propaganda.

Godzilla Minus One isn’t a remake as much as it is a remix. Familiar images, symbols, and scenes are all smashed together in a new order to stealthily promote older attitudes. A family forms out of disparate pieces. A failed kamikaze pilot lets a woman live with him, she brings in a war orphan, and a neighbor inserts herself into their life. When invited over for dinner, the crew of the Shinseimaru are shocked to find out that they aren’t married and haven’t put a name to their relationship at all. But the components are all there: Mother, Father, Child, Grandmother. It’s just that, no one is actually related to each other. This patchwork philosophy doesn’t only apply here. In the main thrust of the movie, we see a community that has been abandoned by both their country and their strangely absent occupiers. But when everyone’s gathered in the same room together, it looks more like the government informing the public of their plan than an impromptu meeting of the people. A common scene in many Godzilla movies is obscured to garner sympathy. This is not a documentarian removed view of an official announcement, it’s a room you have a seat in so that the viewer can join the good fight. Here’s the big plan: in face of the callousness of the state, we’re going to address this problem so perfectly that no lives are lost in the attempt. All we have to do is the same things we’ve always done. That’s the deal you’re offered. Everything can be made right and whole again as long as you don’t make any mistakes.

When everything is on fire, it must feel like the world is ending. Whether that’s nukes, or carpet bombing, or countless forest fires where the sky is choked red through black smoke, surely the end is nigh. Phillip K. Dick, among his many great insights into the nature of reality, says this: “To fight the Empire is to be infected by its derangement … Whoever defeats the Empire becomes the Empire; it proliferates like a virus … thereby it becomes its enemies.” Here, part of this process is made clear. The Empire only exists because people believe it exists. Each person individually allows it to exist by buying into its promises and structures. With disillusionment in these things comes fear. Of death and the unknown. So it’s easier to beg for its comfort than to step forward. Koichi has concerns about the plan, “I still worry that for everything to work, we’ll need some kind of miracle to happen.” The camera pans to show us the cheerful community repurposing the tools of war: “Take a look out there. These guys know. They aren’t naive. They understand they’re putting their lives at risk to do this. And yet, their faces, they’re bright and beaming. That’s because they know this time, they have a chance to make a real difference. In the war, we were used to suffering everyday. But now, we get to do good again.”

We get to do good again. Together, we’ll all shed our disillusionment and rejoice in the promises and myths of the state. As long as we all play our parts perfectly. We can’t step out of line. We can’t make any mistakes. If even a single life is lost, it will all be for nothing. Thomas Ligotti’s words push into my thoughts, “you talk like a traitor under [this world’s] incessant torture.” There is no war without casualties. For genocidal imperial projects, there is no return to being good. What does it take for the plan to go off without a hitch? They have to reinvent the kamikaze pilot. Koichi begins as a kamikaze pilot who avoids his fate by getting his plane checked by mechanics. The movie is quick to forgive him for his “cowardice” and say that it’s the government’s callousness that’s the problem. Yet also, the film seeks to affirm his cowardice. He lines up a perfect shot with a plane’s gun at Godzilla that could potentially risk his life to save the mechanics he bonded with, but he freezes and all but one of them dies. The rest of the film is his journey to become a genuine kamikaze pilot. Defeating the monster hinges on it. After he loses Noriko in an attack, he wants to seek revenge. But his friends leading the attack won’t let him play his part. So this time, when he flies off on his own into the mouth of a monster, it’s of his own volition. No one coerced him or made him do it: he chose to do it on his own this time. If the kamikaze pilot did not exist, we would have to invent it. Maybe the plane has an ejector seat this time so he can live if he times it right, the message is still the same. Here is the cost of that comfort they bribe you with: you have to be willing to die for it and you have to be willing to kill for it.

For years, the previous prime minister of Japan was the center of various memes and jokes focusing on his comments on the nation’s declining birthrate. It was often painted as some sort of uniquely Japanese phenomenon, but since the birthrate in the United States has rapidly fallen since 2020 we’re beginning to see more of the same here. It’s deeply entwined with the attacks on trans rights and women’s reproduction. To hold on to power in the dying world it’s built, the imperialist project needs a labor force. It needs people to be beneath it. It needs us to play our parts perfectly. It needs us to believe in it, like some sort of fucked up demonic Tinker Bell. When Koichi survives his kamikaze and is reunited with his wife, the family unit is made whole again. Turns out she somehow survived getting hit point blank with atomic breath. They may not be your typical family, but as long as everyone plays the same parts, everything is going to be ok. Elsewhere, deep under the sea, the monster mutates. There is no way forward that involves fleeing to the past. There are families longing for isolated communes faraway from all the outsiders. This is what’s at the heart of your cottagecore dreams, girlies. When you subscribe to the fantasy, you should ask whose fantasy it was to begin with.

The nuclear family allows for the structures of society to be repeated in miniature. Each house a doll house. The isolation allows for any number of abuses to happen unseen. Child Protective Services exists but only if the violence ever leaves the home is it punished. Hierarchy is imposed, and then taken away, and then longed for. Heterosexuals joke about their partner reflecting their parents but is this not the family unit working as intended? A virus replicating itself, just like the Empire does. The process of repeating its myths with perfection and sincerity is what gives way to the problems that got us here in the first place. The family and the state are both built on a rotten foundation. What defines masculinity and femininity in the United States changes from decade to decade, as long as they are defined culturally and not personally, they will take whatever form they need to recreate the family unit. We can’t queer the nuclear family.

The truth of it is that the end of the Empire is inevitable. The imperial project maintains its existence by repressing the things that threaten it: autonomy, difference, and dissent. A pressure builds underground until it bursts forth to consume that which denied it. Empires are destroyed by the things they repress and we are too. We have to sit with the evil, we have to accept it as part of us. We have to admit that the Horror is real and the monster is right behind us. Moving forward means being able to live with the ugly things. It’s scary because it’s a dark road. We don’t know where we’re going but that’s why it’s so meaningful to take that step. Having faith in humanity doesn’t mean we all have to do everything perfectly together. It means we have to look each other in the eyes and meet each other where we are on the road to liberation. We’ll make mistakes and sometimes people will get hurt. Just because we occasionally can’t avoid it is no reason to get callous. It’s our reactions to having done so and how we move forward from there that matters most. Even those who’ve clung to power can, should they relinquish it, find liberation too. That’s what the shaman says.