On the third of November in the year 1954, Toho studios, in the country of Japan, released a movie that changed their direction as a movie company and launched a very popular and successful film franchise. The movie was Gojira, and it went on to become the first in a long line of giant monster movies for Toho studios. The director of the movie, Ishirô Honda, drew inspirations from several areas to create this goliath monster born of radiation. However, throughout the long line of sequels Gojira, or Godzilla as he is called in America, has been a symbol of several different and varied things throughout the years. We will take a hard look at four points in the long line of the movies where more than a monster steeping on buildings was the message the movie makers were trying to get across to the audience. Godzilla’s origin can be traced to two tragic events that happened to Japan. The bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki with atomic bombs near the end of World War II devastated the country. Ishirô Honda, who severed in the Japanese military, witnessed firsthand the aftermath that the atomic bombs had done to the cities. Peter H. Brothers in his novel, Mushroom …show more content…
In this movie, Gojira is no longer the large threat to the nation that he had been in previous movies. In this movie Gojira is busier having a one on one confrontation with the giant monster, Rodan. While the two of them are battling each other, a new threat appears in the form of the three-headed winged hydra, Ghidorah. While Gojira and Rodan are battling each other, Ghidorah is laying waste to Japan. Mothra is enlisted once again, not to battle Gojira or Rodan, but to bargain and convince the two of them to join her in the fight against Ghidorah. With Mothra now a symbol of peace and cooperation, she parlays with the other two
Monsters are supposed to scare people and represent their fears. In most monster movies, the monster is a huge, ugly, non-human beast that terrorizes the city and destroys everything. But in the 1985 film The Stuff, the monster appears to be an innocuous dessert; what does that say about the fears of society? Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, an expert on monster culture, explains this and more in his article “Monster Culture (Seven Theses)” reprinted in the textbook Monsters in 2012. Cohen’s first thesis of monster culture, The Monster’s Body is a Cultural Body, argues that “The monster’s body quite literally incorporates fear, desire, anxiety, and fantasy, giving them life and an uncanny independence” (12). According to Cohen, the outward appearance of the monster reflects the fears and anxieties of the culture from which it originated. The first thesis says that the monster is not just a monster; it embodies the things the society wants to cast out as different from it, made into flesh.
Monsters like Godzilla are important for humans who are coping with a fear of death. The use of monsters is to lessen the fear of that pending imminent threat and or distress of waiting for a catastrophe to happen. The symbolism in these films shows how humans see other humans as monstrous. They have no other way to represent that so they show it through huge threatening, bugs or monsters. In movies
In 1954, Japan debuted the world’s first radioactive “king of all monsters”, Gojira. Gojira director, Ishiro Honda, sets the first scene with a destructive power emerging from the sea that would ignite a burning panic throughout Japan and force catastrophe in its wake—much like the atomic bomb it was birthed from. Gojira had a single purpose, to rampage across Japan and decimate everything in its path. As much as they tried to stop the monster, Japan’s defenses fell victim to Gojira’s indestructibility. As Japan’s last resort, they found hope in Dr. Serizawa’s emergence of new science and technology to dismantle Gojira. In the end, the bittersweet success of defeating Gojira with Dr. Serizawa’s Oxygen Destroyer was not dared to be forgotten or thought of lightly. Because if placed in the wrong hands, nuclear weapons testing may continue and another monster might appear again.
When first seeing Godzilla, the idea of a dinosaur comes to mind, yet the idea of a prehistoric dinosaur living during this time seems implausible. After some speculation by Dr. Yamane, he proposed that Godzilla was the result of gradual evolution of an ancient sea creature, while, simultaneously undergoing genetic alterations due to the exorbitant amount of radiation that filled his habitat. Since the bomb testings left Godzilla’s habitat in shambles, it ventured out from its dwelling place, and as a result, lead to the destruction of two Japanese cities. From the theory presented by Dr. Yamane, parallelisms are drawn between Japan and Godzilla since Japan was also the recipient of two atomic bombs from the Americans during World War II. Because of these atomic bombs, Japan was turned from a once beautiful island, to a radiation wasteland. On August 6, 1945, the first atomic bomb, named Little Boy, was dropped on Hiroshima, and three days later, August 9, 1945, the United States dropped another atomic bomb, named Fat Boy, on Nagasaki. Japan was in shambles as the streets were lined with the dead, sick, and few surviving citizens. As time passed, one can say that the nation of Japan was reborn from a land of radiation. Similar to Japan, Godzilla was created from a habitat that was created by testing atomic bombs. By destroying its underwater habitat, the
The first conventions were that we see are the ‘revealing of the monsters’ and the use of ‘isolated houses’ where the monsters are based. This left audiences feeling panicky. These films had to rely on the music, yet they still lack the big horror genre fear factor. Through the talkies little changed, they still had the monsters, the same monsters, the same storylines, but the Atomic Phase of the 1950s soon had a impact. Sci-fi and hammer movies took centre stage, Godzilla (1954) and The Blob (1958) box office hits.
Callicles comes with a hedonistic belief that pleasure is to be associated with “good” and that pain is to be associated with “bad”, which means a good life is the one full of many pleasures. To refute Callicles belief, Socrates first uses the example of health and disease to explain to Callicles that good and bad cannot happen with a person at the same time, yet pain and pleasure can happen simultaneously. To further enforce his point, Socrates uses the concept of a coward and the brave to provide another argument that pain and pleasure cannot be the deciding factors for what is a good life. In both of his arguments, I believe Socrates is successful based on my personal belief that if someone or something is result in pain, it doesn’t mean that it is bad, and that everyone, good or bad, is capable of feeling both pain an pleasure.
Monsters are disturbing hybrids whose bodies do not want to be included in any systematic structuration. The monster is, therefore, dangerous. It always appears at times of crisis as kind of the third term that creates more problems. The power to avoid and undermine has run through the monsters blood since the classic times. The monster also resists any classification built on hierarchy or just binary opposition and instead demands a system that allows mixed response and resistance to integration. The geography of a monster is wide and always full of cultural debate that can never be
Monsters and the Moral Imagination, written by Stephen Asma, presents many possible outcomes as to why monsters are the rise. Mr. Asma discusses why monster portrayals could be on the rise in movies, books, and stories throughout his subsection Monsters are on the Rise. Perhaps the rise is due to traumatic events in recent history such as the holocaust or the terroristic attacks of 9/11 in
The modern Godzilla now was greatly linked to science and the environment, an area that was increasingly indefinite and devastating. It represented our generations fears of the unknown and what according to Dendle "it means to be human"(Dendle 177). Throughout his essay, Dendle focuses on the changing nature of the Zombie monster as it gradually re-morphs itself upon newer audiences. In a sense, the changing nature of a monster represents the changing nature of humanity overtime. In the twenty-first century English remake of Godzilla by Gareth Edwards, the monster has drastically changed as Godzilla was now a millennial beast representing our own culture moment. Japan and Russia, now strong economic allies of the United States have simmered down tension, and negotiated peace, thus killing the 20th century Toho-produced Godzilla and the American Zilla that represented the terrors of the atomic bomb. This millennial monster now represented the events that cursed the Millennial generation like the spread of HIV/AID, an unheard of deadly disease that plagued Americans especially during its early development as it became a death sentence to those who were infected, the Year 2000 problem (Y2K), and the surge of the supernatural brought out by the imaginations of a well-informed, tech-savvy generation. In the 2014 film of Godzilla, the fears of the generation
For instance take Godzilla, in “Japan’s Nuclear Nightmare: How the Bomb Became a Beast Called Godzilla” author, Peter H Brothers tells us some history behind the making of the monster. “Godzilla was made in Japan less then a decade after atomic bombs devastated the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Still reeling from the trauma of atomic annihilation and the subsequent effects of radioactive poisoning, a team of Japanese filmmakers created a monster that embodied the fears and anxieties in Japan resulting from Nuclear Warfare” (51). Godzilla is a prime example of monsters symbolizing a societies fears. “We create monsters as a reaction to the fears we experience and our inability to control the world around us” (Asma 61). Our inability to not have control of our fate and what other people are going to do will never change, but creating Godzilla gave the people of these
Jeffery Cohen's first thesis states “the monster's body is a cultural body”. Monsters give meaning to culture. A monsters characteristics come from a culture's most deep-seated fears and fantasies. Monsters are metaphors and pure representative allegories. What a society chooses to make monstrous says a lot about that society’s people. Monsters help us express and find our darkest places, deepest fears, or creepiest thoughts. Monsters that scare us,vampires, zombies, witches, help us cope with what we dread most in life. Fear of the monstrous has brought communities and cultures together. Society is made up of different beliefs, ideas, and cultural actions. Within society there are always outcasts, people that do not fit into the norm or do not follow the status quo. Those people that do not fit in become monsters that are feared almost unanimously by the people who stick to the status quo.
Peter H. Brothers’ “Japans Nuclear Nightmare” compares the movie Godzilla to a devastating period in Japan’s history: The Atomic Age. The bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the United States destroyed Japan. In this article, Brothers wants to educate the audience and accomplishes this by using ethos and pathos. He uses ethos by appealing to ethics and to show right and wrong to the Japanese culture and community. He also uses the rhetoric of pathos to appeal to the audience’s emotions. Pathos is one of the easier ways to capture the audience and the author does that by using imagery and symbols. Brothers’ connects
Imagine waking one day to witness the tragic state of hundreds of thousands of homes being left in ruins, along with the ashes and rubble of major cities, and the casualties of millions of citizens. This was evident on August 6, 1945 in Hiroshima, Japan when the first ever atomic bomb dropped. A mere three days later, and Nagasaki, Japan was also bombed, and the world was taken by storm. Even though WWII is in the past, the long-term effects on Japanese citizens and the debate on possible outcomes of the war is still discussed decades after the events. According to Peter H. Brothers in “Japan’s Nuclear Nightmare: How the Bomb Became a Beast Called Godzilla,” these events inspired film director, Ishiro Honda, to create the monster movie Godzilla,
However, I greatly enjoyed the back and forth between depicting Godzilla’s various rampages and the fallout of said attacks. It really gave the viewer a sense of consequence. “Its roster of frightening images — cities in flames, overstuffed hospitals, irradiated children — would have been all too familiar to cinemagoers for whom memories of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were still less than a decade old, while its script posed deliberately inflammatory questions about the balance of postwar power and the development of nuclear energy.” The stomping of buildings and nuclear blasts were not just there to be flashy and action packed, there were severe consequences to Godzilla’s actions, as could be seen when we were given a close look at the many patients within a hospital. We see children with grave injuries, and the pain on the parents’ faces when they realize they may not make it out of this alive. It is a level of depth and emotion that I personally wish was displayed in more large-scale monster
In Godzilla's footsteps: Japanese pop culture icons on the global stage. Tsutsui, William M; Ito, Michiko. Ed. of the. [2006]