Godzilla, the season's most politically interesting film!

 

So the Force of Nature said, Dad, after Yoga, let’s go see Godzilla. He’d already explained that it was a special showing at the Rex. We’d been there before, when he was nine, to see Pokemon. I said, fine. Monster movies were a staple of my childhood, and it gave me a kick that the force of nature wanted to see the new Godzilla.

And being a cinephile, the FON told me, as we walked to the metro stop to take us on the 8 to Bonne Nouvelle, that it was nominated for an Oscar. Best picture? I asked sceptically. No, best special effects.

The Rex theatre is a big structure that has obviously seen better times. Paris is a cinephile paradise, but the cost of running a movie theatre, even for a chain, means that outside some Gaumonts in Malls, the screens are comparatively small. I love me the MK2 willingness to show the obscurest foreign films, but their theatre spaces aren’t exactly fit for cinemascope.

Well, it turns out that Godzilla matinees hold no charm for the Parisian – only five other people saw the film with us. Their loss. For it was, oddly, one of the most political films of the year.

When I saw Godzilla back in the day, as a kid, I saw it on tv – I have a flickering memory that it might even have been in black and white. As a kid, the concept made me a bit queasy. I knew that atom bombs burned off your skin and did something so that women gave birth to deformed children – or so I had been told. In contrast, this monster born out of radioactivity seemed toylike, and the moviemakers seemed to have a good time destroying the movie sets of the city and having crowds run screaming hither and thither.

Perhaps casting a maturer eye on those first Godzilla’s would reveal the political subtext,

In the case of the new Godzilla, the political subtext was also the text. And an interesting text it was? It combined the pacifism that was the official Japanese doctrine until the U.S. forced the government to change course in the late fifties, against the majority opinion of the nation, with the formation of a revolutionary force. From the liberal point of view, this force was vigilantism. From the point of view of a leftist politics, it was something much more interesting, a sort of Soviet that forms in the interstices of government action – or rather inaction. In thrall to the Americans, and not wanting to provoke the Soviets, the Japanese government does nothing. So the Japanese people arm themselves and overthrow Godzilla.

The nuclear shadow over this film is, evidently, Fukushima – a symptom of the government’s bondage to corporations. The truth about Fukushima is, even now, an uncertain thing. The extent of the longterm damage from that collapsed nuclear power plant is hard to gauge, as the government stands as an impediment to any clarity on the subject.

Adam and I talked about Fukushima and Chernobyl on the walk home. I mentioned the wild divergence between the Greenpeace estimate of the death toll from Chernobyl and the Soviet estimate, which was soon adopted by the International Atomic Energy Agency. It is the one Soviet data set that, magically, is accepted by even Cold Warriors in the West.

And we know why.

Anyway, the redemption of the ex kamikaze pilot, who is guilty for not fulfilling his mission, is a nice life affirming thread that is all about what politics should be about, and rarely are about: making for a life more abundant.