Godzilla/Gojiro:
Evolution of the Nuclear Metaphor
Nancy Anisfield
Answering his own question, “Why do the Japanese sympathize
with [Godzilla] while the Americans see him as little more than a comic
icon?” (Noriega 64), Chon Noriega first points out the difference
between American and Japanese concepts of the Other: Western thought
keeps the Other externalized and separate as a way of defining the Self
by contrast. Japanese thought seeks to maintain both Self and Other
within the culture by immersing the Self in the Other (Noriega 68). In
the Godzilla movies, the positioning of the monster “Other”
differentiates the Japanese films from their American releases.
Godzilla films equate the monster with the atomic bomb, and
Noriega shows how the Japanese versions, by symbolically repeating the
trauma of Hiroshima, establish the monster as an “archetype of Japanese
horror that explicates the present.” For Americans, however, the Other is
overcome, and Godzilla’s death “represses American guilt and anxieties
about nuclear weapons” (Noriega 68). The Japanese embrace the
bomb/monster into their cultural conscience, whereas Americans push it
away.
What, then, would be the significance of a new Godzilla, an
American creation who is totally immersed in American culture—
contributes to it, reflects it, and ultimately even ingests it?
Mark Jacobson's Gojiro (1991), a satiric novel derivative of John
Gardner's Grendel, revises the Godzilla (Gojira) story, illuminating it in
the narrow glow of the self-absorbed final quarter of the twentieth
century. Gojiro is still a product of nuclear testing gone awry, but he is
also a suicidal and reluctant movie idol. He journeys to Los Angeles,
depicted in images suggesting a post-nuclear world. Searching for his
identity and soul, Gojiro’s quest leads him to Hollywood moguls, atomic
scientists, Southwest Native Americans, genetically damaged children,
whizz-bang technologies, and a forlorn, reconstituted dodo bird. Despite
its imaginative texture, much of the novel and its characterization of the
monster is not completely new. It is the logical next step in the Godzilla
series—the evolution of a classic movie monster. Moreover, this shift in
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