A Monstrous Burden
CLAIRE STANFORD is the author of the novel Happy for You. Her work has appeared in Black Warrior Review, The Rumpus, The Millions, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from the University of Minnesota and a PhD from UCLA, and she is currently an assistant professor of English at the University of Nevada, Reno.
Before watching Godzilla for the first time, in the spring of 2021, I had expected a hokey, formulaic monster movie, the kind of breezy entertainment typical of the genre, with its cartoonish plots, B-movie acting, and schlocky special effects. But Godzilla, released in Japan in 1954 and the first of what would become a franchise of 36 films, strikes a markedly different tone. It is a somber and mournful movie, I quickly realized, and distinctly unschlocky.
It opens with a close-up on the wake of a boat followed by brief scenes of the sailors onboard, young Japanese men who are about to fall victim to what we later realize is a nuclear blast—a blinding light, a fire. Other Japanese ships at sea begin to disappear. At first, these disappearances are a mystery. But soon the source of their destruction becomes known, as an enormous prehistoric lizard emerges from the depths. Gojira, as the creature is called in Japanese, has been living in a hidden sea cave, but repeated underwater hydrogen-bomb tests have driven him to the surface, not only angering him but also making him highly radioactive and giving him his characteristic atomic breath. Over the course of the film, Godzilla rampages across a rural island and then, more menacingly, across densely packed Tokyo. He
