Godzilla and Environmental Pessimism

Metaphor is a strange thing—the bastard child of insight and entertainment; it is a powerful tool of language used to portray meaning through extraordinary comparisons. The everyday is said to be exceptional; the mundane is made florid. But how is it that a man in a dinosaur costume can come to represent some of our deepest and most influential ideas? How is it that monsters fighting robots can be read as mankind’s eternal struggle? And how is it even possible to publish a near 2,000 word philosophical deep-dive into the evolution of, you guessed it, Godzilla?

It all started in 1954. The Japanese production company Toho released Gojira, a science fiction monster movie (known in Japan as a “Kaiju Film”—literally translating to “strange creature”) about the emergence and ensuing destruction caused by the eponymous, radioactive lizard. In the original story, Gojira is an ancient sea creature mutated by secret hydrogen bomb testing. He enjoys the occasional rampage, appearing unannounced onto the Japanese mainland to trample his arch-nemesis, Tokyo.

At first glance, the Godzilla franchise (romanized from the original Japanese Gojira soon after it broke into Western audiences) lacks depth. The Kaiju film genre is one of apparently adolescent appeal: monsters destroying cities and battling giant robots. But Godzilla is the exception to this rule; ever since its first release, the King of Monsters and his stories have been interpreted as allegories for many diverse ideas including nuclear holocaust, natural disaster and Japanese independence. Soon after the film’s release, producer Tomoyuki Tanaka stated that “The theme of the film, from the beginning, was the terror of the bomb. Mankind had created the bomb, and now nature was going to take revenge on mankind.”