Godzilla and the real world
Ugolnik, Anthony
OUR POPULAR ART BETRAYED US Godzilla & the real world ANTHONY UGOLNIK ARMS CONTROL EXPERTS tell us about the "real world" of arms control-a world inhabited by Mirvs, Marvs, and guided by...
...I want to talk about Godzilla, among other things...
...You haven't thought much about Godzilla, I'm sure...
...And we can look into these worlds after the bomb to see our own hidden imaginings...
...There is an urgency in the task...
...The next version is a breakfast cereal...
...He learns to use a gun and become confident at it...
...A vast genre of after-the-bomb novels, many of them massive best-sellers, fill out the way in which we organize this imagined experience...
...Some theologians have proposed Hiroshima as a place of pilgrimage...
...Nuclear deterrence...
...The virus is symbolically born of the Bomb in an era which yet didn't know what the full effects of the Bomb would be...
...They encountered the outcome of their own myths...
...Gently, without hesitation, they should light the match and hold it to the tip of a little finger...
...After Alas Babylon the theme of social survival repeats itself with regularity...
...They think it and embrace it...
...Humankind must survive...
...The Moral Majority minister of a Northwest congregation finances billboards which urge us to arm ourselves against the Satanic men-our Rodan, King Kong, our armies of the dead, the Russians...
...There is no hope in that film, which focuses on characters in an untouched Australia awaiting death by nuclear fallout...
...There is nothing purifying about survival in this novel...
...It is good to look at our imaginations...
...It bears fruit, this diseased imagination...
...I'm sorry, Mr...
...Perhaps something more elemental-ritual, ceremony-can succeed...
...survives intact...
...I don't think I believe in it, actually...
...As a religious believer, a teacher, a political man, I believe in ideological subterfuge on three counts...
...Humankind will not survive in a purified world-a cowboy or a Marlboro man or a French lord in his castle...
...DON'T underestimate the power of such paradigms...
...It has been thought many times-sometimes in surprisingly subtle and expert form...
...In short, he learns to become Davey Crockett-and in doing so we leave him a wiser man, purified somehow...
...I don't know much about the real world...
...Men go and come, but, as the title suggests, Earth Abides...
...Yes, I said Godzilla-that fire-breathing monster who perennially arises from the sea to invade Japan, usually on Saturday morning television...
...And we need a new sign, a new symbol born in our age to bring that home to us...
...Finis...
...Myths organize our experience, but by definition we usually don't examine them...
...The hero's brother is a Colonel in the Strategic Air Command...
...maybe they should lead a procession...
...Panic in the Year Zero features American Everyman, complete with station wagon, caught outside L.A...
...And he was reborn, many times...
...In 1957, based on Nevil Shute's novel of the same name, Gregory Peck and Ava Gardner await death in Australia in On the Beach...
...In the pain, in the excruciating focus of pain, may be held the key to peace in our times...
...The End...
...Yet Godzilla is a figure, an archetype-a myth of the nuclear age...
...Many so-called primitive rites of initiation, after all, enact rituals to prepare novices for significant events...
...For it's not true, as you see, that nuclear war is unthinkable...
...Much of our popular art, then, has betrayed us...
...So let's put aside the real world for a moment...
...Godzilla is simply a paradigm...
...Teh years after Hiroshima, in 1955, a nuclear blast takes place near a lonely atoll in the Pacific-do you remember the movie...
...We bear in the mutations that afflict our flesh the scars of our survival...
...The American cowboy gives way to the French medieval lord-but man survives...
...Godzilla smiles as he breathes fire...
...You who watch such films will know whom I mean...
...The book, Earth Abides, has fallen out of print but it was a powerful document in its decade...
...The cities of Japan crumble, of course, as the monsters battle each other to the death...
...On the Beach demands a kind of pessimistic resignation, a Nordic doom-of-the-gods determination to fight with the assurance of defeat...
...There we truly discover what is real...
...Godzilla, after all, made a bundle for his makers...
...We should perhaps all see Hiroshima, and accompany the pilgrimage with the smell of burnt flesh...
...wins a thinly populated world-but we have it to ourselves...
...Like our minds, they are capable of sin...
...We have achieved a kind of catharsis of terror embodied in a Tyrannosaurus Rex...
...With the advent of MAD-mutually assured destruction and the nuclear deterrent-the monster becomes our ally...
...If we accept the thesis that the artist bears some responsibility to his society, and I do especially when the subject is man's very survival, we have been lulled into a false dream...
...The woman, often a scientist-expert in en-tymology or radiation-deals rationally with the threat...
...It undoes the very work of God...
...My children watch a cartoon version of Godzilla now on Saturday morning television...
...But few myths end with universal destruction...
...Only the novel-A Canticle for Liebowitz by Walter Miller, which makes virtually every neglected classics list-is true to that realization...
...His natural sensitivity becomes reserved for the insiders, the townspeople who worship in the white-frame church and embody a way of life.The theme of the novel, is not a natural, but a social purification-note the biblical overtones of the title...
...But again, the nuclear holocaust leaves us a strangely purified world-one in which the survivors deal with the world on terms that hearken back to another age, an age cleansed of the very technology that brought us to the crisis...
...What disappears is the threat...
...He learns to fend for himself in the mountains...
...but the terms have changed...
...All the details of nuclear arms race notwithstanding, these value-bearing artifacts of our culture teach us how to feel about nukes...
...This is the mythos, reaffirmed again and again...
...The Survivalist movement, with its magazines and mail-order catalogues, its legions and summer camps, act out the fantasies of the sickened, beguiled soul...
...Abandoned for a time by military order, however, the brother must take on the task of survival in his small town...
...Army with flamethrowers at his command, takes charge by saving said female scientist, now screaming lustily with the top buttons of her lab coat open, from a charging Praying Mantis...
...The fact is that masses of people in this country have prepared themselves to survive...
...Godzilla becomes our savior...
...Those Bavarians marched through the Nazi death camps after the war...
...Godzilla meets Rodan...
...Ten years later, this theme of purification endures in different form in a second popular novel...
...In this Continental novel, interestingly enough, it is not American individualism, a kind of National Rifle Association self-sufficiency, that prevails, but a medieval communalism and an established hierarchy that survives and pulls us as a species through...
...King Kong...
...This is the best novel of the genre, and the only one that teaches us that survival would be a fate, not a destiny...
...But the real message is otherwise, God, guns, and guts-but mostly white male guns and guts-will save us, the Blonde Screamers, from the monster unleashed by the mushroom cloud...
...We laugh because we recognize the truth of the image...
...The interesting thing about the novel is its treatment of the things which endure-the landscape, which is the novel's recurrent theme, is beautiful, yet indifferent to man if not hostile to him...
...There are no ambiguities here...
...In 1949, on the very threshold of the Cold War, Carl Sandburg recommended a book by George R. Stewart as a best book of the past ten years...
...The men who survive do so with respectful obeisance to Nature-as hunters and gatherers...
...Our ruination turns the world into a kind of National Park...
...The apes reflect us, and in the Darwinian reversal we perceive our own misconceptions of ourselves...
...Strangelove...
...But we don't really believe in it...
...A hero, Isherwood Williams, with of course a woman by his side, founds a small settlement and we see modern man rediscover the way of life appropriate to our continent-the way of the American Indian, re-asserting itself amid the rusting hulks of our technological age...
...After crunching through a village or two, he even manages to save a child from the tanklike threat of Rodan...
...Franklin Schaffner in his gentler satire, Planet of the Apes, makes a comment no-less clear in 1968...
...Good old American values will pull us through...
...Most of us may be inclined to support the Catholic bishop in Amarillo who counsels his flock to leave the nuclear arms industry...
...In that first film, in 1955, Godzilla inspired terror and employs tens of thousands in mob scenes before he retreats back to the sea...
...They survive a Holocaust and relive once more a new middle ages, a new Renaissance, and ultimately a new modern age in which we destroy ourselves yet again...
...Alas Babylon, now in well over thirty-seven printings, has over one million copies in print...
...The next year, in 1963, Stanley Kubrick directed the masterful, dark satire Dr...
...They should take a match...
...Slim Pickens straddling the bomb in rodeo style comments on the "real world...
...THE BURDEN OF ART and the burden of language itself is precisely that...
...This, you see, is the "real world" we learn about from the arms control experts...
...Those Bavarians learned something, to be sure...
...Other films deal with the threat in less archetypal ways...
...We don't worry about society," says the survivalist in a recent interview, surrounded by her boxes of supplies and cradling her rifle...
...In Robert Merle's best-selling 1977 novel, Malevil, a small community of Frenchmen survives in a medieval French castle after a nuclear holocaust...
...Americans should have seen what the napalm they so glibly mentioned could actually do...
...Keep it there without flinching...
...Smell the nail burn...
...He still crunches down houses and all that-he's still a destructive son of a gun-but he now protects us from more destruction...
...Myths are more important than they are made to seem...
...Since I accept the principle that language itself is ideologically generated, each of us projects a worldview whenever we address a question...
...The brawny male, who usually totes a handgun and eventually commands whole brigades of the U.S...
...Horribly, grotesquely, they actually look forward, some of them, to the "unthinkable...
...Godzilla, once the embodiment of our terrors, comes back...
...OUR POPULAR ART BETRAYED US Godzilla & the real world ANTHONY UGOLNIK ARMS CONTROL EXPERTS tell us about the "real world" of arms control-a world inhabited by Mirvs, Marvs, and guided by MADness-mutually assured destruction...
...Watch the skin curl...
...In short, he embodies myth...
...deserts of New Mexico, monster-men buried beneath the ice of the Arctic...
...We take care of number one...
...A la Ray Milland, he learns to tote a gun again and protect his supplies against the inevitable marauders and motorcyclists...
...an associate professor of English at Franklin and Marshall College in Pennsylvania, is a Fellow this year at the Institute for Ecumenical and Cultural Research, Collegeville, Minnesota...
...The monster in tromping over factories, crunching houses, tossing subway cars amid screams, enacts our greatest fears and purges us of them...
...Raymond Burr has now retired...
...But Godzilla, our monster, wins...
...The U.S.A...
...Godzilla arises from the depths of our own strained imaginations, terrorized by the prospect of the Bomb...
...We need experts to explain to us the means of our own potential destruction, the Mirvs and Marvs...
...The army rushes to the rescue...
...New Japanese heroes have Godzilla as their ally in the quest to save the Japanese versions of the Screamer (no longer Blonde...
...Pat Frank places the scene of survival in Central Florida...
...He learns to protect his family against marauding gangs of bike freaks...
...Nuclear holocaust is the antithesis of creation-a moral black hole...
...And Godzilla arises from the deep to invade Japan, under the directorship of Ishiro Honda and Terry Morse, and to wreak thrilling destruction until our own Raymond Burr, taking a leave from Perry Mason, is able to contain him...
...Art fails us...
...White males save us from the terrors of the Bomb, even in Tokyo-accompanied always by that figure known in the trade as the Blonde Screamer...
...Motorcycles and guns, in their phallic simplicity, survive the maelstrom intact...
...And in the rebirths something interesting happened...
...And our diseased imagination projects for us A world devastated of all life but ourselves, all fulfillment but our own...
...Of course we oppose nuclear devastation...
...Soon-to-be television actors like Raymond Burr and Peter Graves save us from the destruction that they wreak...
...The Holocaust, Hiroshima, the Bomb in all its grisly epiphanies-these experiences confront us, but they do not unite us...
...In 1947 Stewart images most of America depopulated by a deadly virus...
...The world has been purged of the blight of man's technology...
...Ultimately, not only the brother, but the whole military structure of the U.S.A...
...FILMS EMBODY the mythos, but novels constitute its sacred text...
...Panic in the Year Zero, directed by and starring Ray Milland and featuring Frankie Avalon (but not Annette Funicello), is more typical of the nuke genre...
...He and his family survive through a learning process...
...Trueheart," she says with petulant contempt as she examines a massive slice of ant thorax,"but this cannot be an insect of any known species...
...Our very souls, our imaginations become seared by the massive trauma of this ordeal by fire...
...During the Vietnam years, those who served as medics used to wish that the American people could be marched, one by one, down the antiseptic halls of the Burn Ward at Fort Sam Houston...
...The film often fades out with a pious platitude uttered in a deep voice about "Man's inability to fathom the mysteries of the world around us...
...The monster becomes less terrible if he faces another monster...
...We need only sit back with a box of anxiously crunched popcorn to watch the drama of our fears played out for us...
...But the United Way threatened to blacklist Catholic charities...
...Rodan...
...Nuclear war has reaffirmed the American man in the wilderness and, amidst regrettable destruction, has eliminated many of the pressing urban problems of our society...
...In the "real" world, our diseased imaginations affect our behavior...
...Monsters unleashed from other alien sources...
...The structure endures...
...And, as satire is wont to do, it exposed the underlying myth and gave testimony to its power...
...Death, incidentally, was noble...
...Incidentally, in many of the novels and films people on motorcycles are impervious to nuclear attack, especially if they ride in packs...
...Our survival will alter the conditions of our existence...
...Small arms and sidearms, rifles and ammunition, keep a way of life intact...
...Raymond Burr contains Godzilla, he does not destroy him...
...And yet when we look at the literature born of our greatest fears, we sense a profound betrayal...
...In A Canticle we see mankind in an order of monks dedicated to the preservation of knowledge we have misused...
...It dares to make meaningful that which has no meaning...
...Lots of monsters were awakened from the deep by nuclear tests in movies of the fifties-giant ants, giant spiders in the anthony ugolnik...
...Perhaps, before any "realistic" discussion of the arms race, those who cherish realism could simply enact a small ritual concession to the real...
...after a nuclear war...
Vol. 109 • November 1982 • No. 20
