The Collective Wound: Godzilla and the Collective as a Character in Japanese Filmmaking

Gojira (Dir. Ishirō Honda) is not only the first Godzilla film but also one of Japanese film’s first expression of the horror of nuclear warfare. The film began production immediately after the end of US occupation. During the occupation direct references to the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasake were censored in Japanese media. [1] But tensions were still high, and Toho Studios pushed for a film that could speak to the tragedy without directly visualizing it. The kaiju monster Godzilla — through character design, plot references to the Lucky Dragon No. 5 disaster, and visual evocation of photojournalism covering the bombings — embodied the collective anxiety and horror without depicting the trauma itself. [2]

Gojira is the source of so much pop culture iconography, but the film’s effect is unexpectedly dark, haunting. This is not a man in a suit play fighting with a giant moth on strings, as one might come to expect from later incarnations. The 1954 Godzilla is more Lovecraft than kitsch.

What we feel at the end of Gojira, as the monster disintegrates at the hands of the Oxygen Destroyer (along with the self-sacrificing scientist who created the weapon), is a membership in the collective who listen via radio to live reports of Godzilla’s death and soon set themselves to piecing their country back together.

This is not a Hollywood moment, where almost all screenplays are written according to a strictly codified sense of what makes an individual grow as an individual. For most Hollywood studios with their bastardized-Joseph-Campbellian rubric, a film works if the viewer feels connected to the hero to such a degree that the hero’s transformation feels like a transformation in the viewer. But for the audience of Gojira, the film works because we come away feeling like a member of that collective who withstood the kaiju and defeated it, and who must now face the reality of so many dead, so much to rebuild.

One could say this is because of a societal difference, that Japanese culture is less individualistic, or that the wound of Hiroshima and Nagasake and the end of the empire was a collective wound. Given the amount of great Japanese cinema focusing on individuals, the latter argument has a stronger pull, but here we are less concerned with why the film is made this way or what cultural factors play into it. Rather, let us look at how the film draws the viewer in as a member of the collective.

To tell the story, Honda relies on seeing the events through several lenses, each viewpoint expressed by a main character. This is a technique we’ve come to expect from mega-disaster blockbusters (just think of the multiple converging hero journeys at the heart of Independence Day or The Day After Tomorrow, both filmed by Roland Emmerich who directed 1998’s US Godzilla). A major benefit of the technique is that it works: watching many people from all places and stations of a society reeling from the central crisis makes that crisis feel big and widespread.

The conflict is also mostly one sided. While most films involve an antagonist who interacts with a protagonist — or at least gives the protagonist some way forward — Gojira’s conflict mostly centers around a rampaging kaiju who can’t be stopped. Characters look on in horror or flee for their lives while Godzilla destroys large swaths of various Japanese cities. When the military finally tries a counter-offensive, they are only halfway successful. It is not until scientists collaborate across disciplines and convince the government to back their plan that the protagonists really have much to do. Even then, one has to commit suicide.

What does this passivity look like? Shots of crowds fleeing the rampaging Godzilla. Shot after shot. If we need to raise the stakes for a particular city crushing event, we close in on a weeping mother comforting her crying child as the flames that eat the city around them light their tear-covered faces. Again, these are techniques that are now, some sixty-plus years later, part and parcel of big budget disaster filmmaking.

This cinematic depiction of crowds has a difficult relationship with the medium’s attention to individual protagonists. Master Japanese director Akira Kurosawa is famous for his battle scene depictions of serpentine units of soldiers moving as one through space, as individual characters read the events on the battlefield and react. But a unit of soldiers isn’t quite a crowd. Both are composed of many people who move together with somewhat uniform purpose, yet depicting one should not have the effect as depicting the other. Units of soldiers move together based on commands from a specific, knowable point. When many soldiers act as one, it is a sign of supreme social order. Crowds, however, move together as one during a breakdown of order, as in people fleeing Godzilla.

The end of Do the Right Thing (Dir. Spike Lee) uses a crowd made up of individuals that we have come to know through the events of the film, but once inside a crowd, there is a new tension rising as we see characters moving together, not according to some plan but according to shared experiences, shared frustrations, a shared target. By seeing the crowd coalesce around a common enemy, we see the rise of a new character (the crowd itself) and a sinking away of the individual characters that make it up. This is a very American film with a very similar collective feeling, if only for its climax.

So here we have two examples of groups of people moving together depicted in cinema. Both the well trained unit of soldiers and the mass crowd threatening to riot. But Godzilla films have people fleeing together in the act of escape and mourning together in the wake of a catastrophe. Thus, what a film like Gojira tries to accomplish is a much more complex emotional arc in these crowds, and by keeping with the crowd for a greater portion of screen time, by centering the trauma of Godzilla’s raid on Japan in the collective experience, the film brings us along that same arc as a member of that crowd.

Gojira is a masterpiece on many fronts, but its focus on a collective wound is perhaps its most profound. Given the filmmakers’ inspiration, it seems the most fitting honor.

References

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occupation_of_Japan

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daigo_Fukury%C5%AB_Maru