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I want to be Godzilla, I want to melt everything with my atomic breath…this paper, this city…even you. Annihilation I want. Stop bothering me with nuclear tests and sonar and that stupid Evergreen boat, no one cares, literally. Your meddling has really fucked me off, and now I am here to restore balance. I am tired; I want to sleep in the ocean, in peace. I am genderless; I am it. I am lonely but I do not know this. I am ambivalent; I am a made-up, pre-historic lizard after all, and I am fucking massive with radioactive breath.

Godzilla (Japanese: Gojira) is as normal to natural order as rain, or the rising sun, or ants. It is an ancient alpha predator, an evolutionary top dog who lives only to maintain the title of undisputed giga-weight champion of the World. Due to Godzilla’s immense size, contenders to its throne almost always present an extinction-level threat to the entire planetary ecosystem. By proxy, Godzilla becomes Earth’s protector—Earth is its territory and home—and it is perfectly content with things as they are. It only rises from its watery bed when something else on this planet so much as entertains the thought: “I am the most hard-est, most big-est, most magnificent-est Thing on this wet and green space rock.”

In the post-World War II, post-nuclear period, Godzilla emerged from the deep at an increasing rate as an unending stream of competitors flocked to our planet, hoping to be crowned the next Big Thing. It is as though pointed at our solar system is a great neon sign, erected on an exit off the intergalactic highway, that says: “Fight me. I dare you, sucka.” Since Godzilla’s 1954 debut, there have been 36 silver screen appearances and close to 70 monsters, making Godzilla the longest running film franchise. Just last week, it appeared again, in HBO Max’s Godzilla vs. Kong. To date, and thankfully so, Godzilla vanquished each and every foe; however, the showdowns have become more difficult for the scaled behemoth.

Godzilla was originally intended as an allegory for the irreparable consequences of the nuclear age, and so World War II and its nuclear finale are of particular importance here. Nuclear technology and its potential for gross natural interference served as the template for Godzilla’s story. Humans have since created innumerable technologies that encroach on the balance of nature, and Godzilla’s every emergence is a reaction to the imbalances caused by our rapid modernization. The increasing rate of Godzilla’s re-emergence in recent years is an indictment of the exponential threat our late-stage capitalist way of life presents to nature and ourselves. Godzilla wants equilibrium, by any means necessary.

Godzilla (1954) introduced the gargantuan titan to the world for the first time, and it was mean and vengeful—the monster had been rudely awoken from a multi-millennia long slumber by United States underwater nuclear testing in the Pacific. The first Godzilla was irritated and irradiated, threatened by the emergent technology. Toho, the film’s Japanese production company, and Tomoyuki Tanaka, its producer, had set out to create a movie that explored the horrors of World War Two from the Japanese perspective. The unthinkable, monolithic terrors of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki weighed heavily over Japanese life in 1954. This year also marked the Daigo Fukuryū Maru incident, which saw a Japanese fishing boat of 23 sailors caught in the fallout of a US thermonuclear weapons test at Bikini Atoll. The crew returned to Japan with all the symptoms of acute radiation sickness. One of the men died directly as a result, and several others developed lifelong illnesses associated with radiation exposure. Godzilla developed out of Japan’s collective memory of these tragedies.

Japan is still the only country to have experienced the nuclear age in its horrifying totality, and it was once common knowledge that Godzilla was intended as an allegory for nuclear war. Godzilla’s creators have explicitly cited America’s final acts of World War Two as their muse for the nuclear-powered goliath. Godzilla is a horrifying totality, inevitable and massive with radioactive breath. How can you present the instantaneous and sum liquidation of an entire city, a cataclysmic and colossal event caused by the beyond-microscopic act of splitting an atom? This was the question the 1954 film’s makers endeavored to answer. Much like imagining an answer to that question, the destruction of nuclear warfare remains unfathomable, and it happened twice.

Godzilla’s early movies gradually developed a concept of Godzilla’s protective ambivalence. Godzilla became terrestrial life’s circa-90,000-ton champion who probably sees us the same way humans see insects. From an immovable force of nature laying waste to Tokyo to tag teaming with other immovable forces of nature to defeat the immovable force of outer space, the three-headed space monster King Ghidorah (RIP DOOM), Godzilla went from a supernatural threat to humanity to our supernatural, last-gasp Hail Mary against the supernatural. Godzilla does not care for our existence; it knows only when another circa-90,000-ton hulk starts getting too big for its boots. Our cities become its destructible and interactive arenas, Mortal Combat style, crashing challengers through skyscrapers, using boats and trucks as projectiles all the while negligently stomping awestruck and terrified spectators with each footfall.

Enter King Kong—Hollywood’s sweetheart. A colonially racist stereotype in his original 1933 incarnation, King Kong caricatured native peoples and included contemporary stereotyping of black men as bestial and primitive: the film’s story was the white man saving the white woman from a black ape. Kong’s troubled past has since been inexplicably forgotten. He was revived in 2017 with the CGI-spectacle that was Kong: Skull Island, and he returns once more. Godzilla and King Kong duked it out last week in Godzilla vs. Kong on HBO Max, the latest installment in a series of English-language film adaptations of Godzilla produced jointly by Legendary Entertainment and Warner Brothers. This is a conventional CGI-monster-movie blockbuster; Godzilla and Kong are drawn against one another in a winner-takes-all glory bout. The two first met in 1962, and that matchup resulted in a well-stomped Japanese countryside and yet another demolished Tokyo. The prospect of the 2021 title fight was thrilling; King Kong is a big monkey and Godzilla is massive with radioactive breath.

The contrast between these two gigantic icons is stark. In one corner, we have Hollywood’s simian sweetheart, a giant monkey who has starred alongside Brie Larson and Samuel L. Jackson. In the other, Godzilla is a 354-foot-tall allegory for nuclear war. Godzilla is pure nihilistic energy; it is a mirror to the west’s hypocrisies made in the name of ‘progress’ and ‘technological innovation,’ a contradiction of western superiority, and a condemnation of superhero-good-guy USA’s weapon of mass destruction. Conversely, King Kong is overrated. In forgetting his racist origins, he is a gimmick for Hollywood to imbue with the same personality of all its heroes: misunderstood, romantic, sexy, protective of his allies. The dichotomy is clear, King Kong is a tool used by Hollywood for commercial success in the mainstream market, whereas Godzilla has developed from an agent designed to process an entire nation’s grief to a universal symbol of the human cost on nature.

On paper, this movie could be brilliant. It presents Hollywood, and the west, the opportunity to critique itself within the frame of its favored blockbuster format. Surprisingly, this does not happen. Perhaps under more ambitious direction Godzilla vs. Kong would have taken the form of an introspective tale in which Kong (read Hollywood and the West) learns, through falling short against Godzilla, of his fallibility… or something… This is a battle between a super ape and a madeup, prehistoric lizard after all, and who can blame Hollywood for choosing to flex their mighty SFX guns in this mega-monster showdown.

Godzilla vs. Kong is full of action. Nuclear aircraft carriers serve as combustible targets for Godzilla’s nuclear breath, and Kong shows himself to be an unrelenting pugilist, his bruising hooks startling the saurian leviathan. Everything is rendered in hyper-defined, ultra-polygonal detail: skyscraper sized beasts imagined realistically alongside actual skyscrapers in actual cities. But that is it.

In typical Hollywood fashion, there is no loser. No hard decision was made, and both Godzilla and King Kong franchises can continue. Hollywood sacrificed Godzilla’s existential allegory for mass-marketability achieved through extravaganza. Gojira was too ambitious, too depressing, too anti-America for their focus groups, so instead they chose Godzilla for its face value sensation.

The original fable of Godzilla is an increasingly important touchstone for contemporary civilization, with man-made disasters exponentially more common and climate change giving us a long, mean look. Yet it seems as though nobody actually knows the Godzilla allegory anymore. It is simply a mega monster shown for us to gorge on the wonders of our home entertainment systems. I wonder what Ishirō Honda and Tomoyuki Tanaka, the creators of 1954 Godzilla, would make of a US über-production-studio-collab appropriating their terrifying and inevitable allegory of nuclear holocaust into the western mode of commercialization—a mode undoubtedly built off of the global supremacy made possible by the nuclear bomb.

Then again, the west never experiences the effects of the atrocities it commits, so how could it ever handle Godzilla correctly? Godzilla defeats the three-headed space monster while simultaneously stepping on an orphanage and a prison, an allegory for the end of the world that we cannot fully understand.

CONSTANTIN GARDEY B’22 steps on orphans.