As a child, I was terrified of machines. Cars passing in the street; lorries passing on the motorway; the band-saws and sanders in the technology classroom at school. I can remember asking my dad whether it was possible for a person to have a phobia of big machines – never having been very good at trusting my own perceptions, I required outside confirmation that the fear I felt was real. He thought about it for a moment and said, “Probably,” but of course, it wasn’t a phobia. It was perfectly rational to be scared of objects that were so much bigger than me, so far off a child’s human scale, and could so easily grind my squishy little body into paste.
The thrill of seeing crocodiles at the zoo carried a ghost of that same fear. I’ve always loved a creature feature – the cheesy, ridiculous ones included, but the best bring back that prey-animal prickle down the spine. They remind us that the world is only human-sized and human-centred because we’ve manipulated our immediate environment to make it seem that way. Sometimes those efforts backfire. Fossil fuels rendered the vast distances of the earth accessible and passable in a way they hadn’t been for most of history, but also brought about climate change – one of those things so counter-intuitively vast Timothy Morton had to coin the term ‘hyperobjects’ to think about them. War is another.
I think a shadow of that perception is one of the things people are looking for in monster movies. I think the absence of that awe and terror is what they’re talking about when they complain that the monster is never “just a monster” anymore, but always a metaphor. (For trauma, usually.)
Of course, it’s impossible to write a monster that’s “just a monster”, the same way it’s impossible to write a character who’s just a person, or curtains that are just blue. Every bit of narrative construct that an artist puts into their work is doing a job, not just existing – creating character, or atmosphere, or plot, or, yes, acting as a metaphor.
I get it, though. A monster that’s too comprehensible is robbed of some of its power. The word monster has roots in the Latin monstrare – to show (or demonstrate) – but we don’t need monsters to show us things that are easy to comprehend and digest. For the metaphor to work as a monster, it still needs to threaten our sense of safety, and of self.
All of which is to say, in a roundabout way, that Godzilla Minus One is really fucking good.
I thought about doing the usual end-of-year roundup as my last newsletter of 2023, but honestly, I’m sick of making lists of my publications by this point, so instead I just want to talk about a movie I loved. If you want the list, it’s on my website here.
Godzilla Minus One begins by taking us to a Japanese island air base in the dying days of Word War II. Kōichi Shikishima, a kamikaze pilot, has avoided his “duty” by claiming mechanical issues with his plane. While the mechanics at the base examine it – and, of course, find nothing wrong – Shikishima notices strange deep-sea fish bobbing near the surface of the sea. The washing-up and making-visible of these creatures, normally hidden from human sight, gains a significance as ominous as the Jaws music, inevitably heralding the appearance of Godzilla.
More recent American Godzilla movies have leaned into eco-horror, with the titular monster becoming a kind of planetary protector – a necessary, if not quite noble, counterweight to human overreach. Godzilla Minus One makes no such concessions to sympathy. The movie’s first Godzilla attack is a set-piece of sheer malice. Godzilla, not yet grown to full size, doesn’t simply stomp, heedless, through the fleeing humans, but picks them off one by one, flinging the terrified soldiers into the air with malignant satisfaction. There’s an inhuman intelligence to the creature, and an actively hostile one. It certainly isn’t killing out of necessity, tossing aside its prey like sucked-dry bones. Shikishima’s prey-animal paralysis, when he’s urged to shoot at the monster but freezes instead, feels like the only possible reaction in the face of a predator several apexes above us.
Of course, metaphor creeps in here, too. At this point, the war is already lost – one of the soldiers wonders momentarily whether Godzilla is another new American weapon – and Godzilla’s killing for sport echoes the cruelty of the sacrifice Shikishima has been ordered to make, lives thrown away for the sake of an illusion. Later on in the movie, a former Japanese naval captain comments that “our country has spent lives too cheaply”. Here, the monster is the machinery of war and imperial power writ small, scattering lives like loose change.
Shikishima returns to the firebombed wreckage of Tokyo haunted by guilt at failing to sacrifice his life in the war effort, and at failing to shoot at Godzilla. Probably, neither would have achieved anything, but he's paralysed nonetheless. He befriends a young woman – like him, made homeless by the bombing – and the orphaned baby she’s adopted. Gradually, they build a home and a life together. They fall in love, but Shikishima, haunted by his twin failures, refuses to act on his feelings. He carries with him the family photos of the men who died on the island, clearly viewing a family and relationship of his own as a reward he doesn’t deserve. At times, his survivor’s guilt is so intense he cannot believe he is still alive.
This dehumanising view of himself as a broken cog in a machine, of warmth, life, and human community as payment for duty done and not simple necessities, has embedded itself in him. When Godzilla returns, stronger, stranger, and more horrifying, to smash apart the few fragile points of connection Shikishima has allowed himself, it seems like an inevitability.
By using its monster sparingly, allowing this small-scale, individual story to play out in the wreckage left behind by war and Godzilla, the film lends the creature far more meaning when it comes. These are the human effects of something inhumane and vast and cruel, both monster-as-metaphor and monster-as-vast-incomprehensible-other. It’s not so much that the monster is trauma, but that trauma is the result of something truly monstrous. The ending is slightly too neat, but even that can’t spoil it – it’s a great movie, by turns blisteringly angry and genuinely touching. See it, if you can.
Writing news
Not much this month! My ghost story, "Crumbs", came out in the winter edition of
New Welsh Reader
at the start of December -- you can get a copy
.
What I've been reading
I'm just under halfway through
On the Bright Road
by Paddy Figgis, a novel about a man who retreats to a Welsh cottage, believing that he's dying, and finds his life overlapping with and bleeding into that of a woodsman known only as the Tracker in the post-Roman past. According to the internet, this book barely seems to exist, but it's strange, captivating, and incredibly well-written.
What I've been watching
I finally got around to
Don't Worry Darling
this month. Despite a decently tense first half and the ever-enjoyable Florence Pugh, it fizzled out rather disappointingly.
What I've been listening to
Baby Queen's
Quarter Life Crisis
is exactly the kind of angst-pop I would've been feral for at twenty, and I still rather like it now.
That's all from me for this year. See you in 2024!
JL