Of Terror and Monster
"If my device can serve a good purpose, I would announce it to everyone in the world! But in its current form, it's just a weapon of horrible destruction. Please understand, Ogata!"
- Daisuke Serizawa ("Godzilla", 1954)
What is it about monsters that fascinate people? Gareth Edwards's "Godzilla", currently showing at theaters, brings back a force of nature, a by-product of the Bikini atomic experiments. (In this latest update, Edwards chose a meltdown of a nuclear plant, similar to the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster of 2011, triggered by the TÅhoku earthquake.) It was another remake, the original version released in 1954, written by science-fiction writer Shigeru Kayama. This was no coincidence, as sci-fi was that genre where readers - and moviegoers - find all kinds of monsters. Most of them reflect our jittery, but we are transfix on these creatures. They reflect our thoughts.
In 1870, Jules Verne published "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea", a groundbreaking novel of sort. The French author, hailed by some as the Father of Science Fiction, described an unfamiliar world where Captain Nemo, a scientific genius, roamed the sea inside his submarine, the Nautilus. No one have an idea what the depths of the ocean look like, so Verne's prophetic imagination revealed Antarctic ice shelves, real corals of the Red Sea, and what remained of (the submerged continent of) Atlantis. (There was no Discovery Channel back then.) But it was the giant squid, which attacked the Nautilus and nearly killed Nemo, that captured the readers' attention. In fact, this was the episode that they would remember. It was of enormous size, which frightened everyone. But they couldn't keep their eyes off.
Robert Louis Stevenson's "Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde" (1886) was the most telling, of how a respectable gentleman named Dr Henry Jekyll and Edward Hyde, the novella's sinister figure, were related. Stevenson was intrigued by the idea of how personalities affect an individual, which could be both good and evil. Nothing huge came out of nowhere, but Hyde's menacing nature will prompt readers to think. It's no different from the squid, even Godzilla.
"Mankind had created the bomb,” producer Tomoyuki Tanaka said of Godzilla, “and now nature was going to take revenge on mankind”.
Beneath the fear was something unpleasant, made grotesque by our own deeds (or thoughts). The humongous squid may be a representation of Nemo's misanthropic nature, while Hyde was someone that Jekyll couldn't introduce in a refined society he lived in. (It was the Victorian era.) As for Godzilla, he was the poster child of nuclear age and space race, which producers couldn't get enough of. (Thus the proliferation of films on such themes.) The prospects were exciting, even promising. But these monsters were like shadows, lurking on every corner, reminding us of our apprehension. Writers sensed this, and in the case of Tanaka's film, which launched a franchise, they were reminders of the tragedy from the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Sad but true.
