Godzilla: 70th Anniversary Screening
Circle Cinema
November 16, 2024
I underestimated Godzilla.
The massive lizard is a massive part of pop culture, as you know unless you are under one year old. The Japanese kaiju is an American icon in his own right, a literal household name endlessly lampooned in comedy, video games, action figures, and series such as Cloverfield, Pacific Rim, The Simpsons, even Rugrats. He might be given a cabinet position any day now, who knows.
Arriving precisely at showtime for a screening of Godzilla at Circle Cinema, I was greeted with a line out the theater’s door. A long line made sense, as their online reservation system was down and Jinya was serving appetizers inside, but I hadn’t expected a sold out showing. People of every age and skin color had queued up not for a modern American Godzilla, or even a Godzilla vs. Favorite Kaiju bout on the silver screen, but for what started it all: the original Godzilla, which premiered in Nagoya in 1954.
As I finally hit the register to buy tickets and popcorn from the unfortunate lone clerk, I asked a woman in front of me who she was attending with. They were her sons—one an excited ten-year-old who had only seen Godzilla on TV, and the other, half his age, exclaiming “I’m gonna be him for Halloween!” Securing the intergenerational vote of kaiju approval, the mother told me she is also a fan.
Since I showed up on time for a sold out film, I had to sit in the front row. “He’s gonna look so goddamn big,” I said to myself.
A hand on my shoulder had me turning around to see local death metal aficionado Cooper Wingo sitting behind me. Coop plays in death metal groups Ectospire and Reeking Mass, the latter of which recently opened up for PNW band Oxygen Destroyer, a kaiju-themed quartet that takes its name from the Godzilla killer in the 70-year-old movie I was about to watch. Add death metal to the pop culture impacted by The Green One.
As the lights dimmed and black and white illuminated the screen, the tone of the film offered a stark contrast to the rock ‘em sock ‘em Godzilla who’s come to fight the likes of King Kong in multi-million-dollar spectacles. This was a film made with limited resources but boundless passion.
Also: it’s a horror movie, in the same way Twister is a horror movie. Just as Twister’s Okie cyclone is a natural terror exacerbated by manmade climate change, so is Godzilla. In the film, no one wants to believe that Japan’s underwater H-bomb testing has destroyed an ancient monster’s habitat. But those versed in history know that mankind has run afoul of nature and assumed its wrath.
Godzilla expert Bill Tsutsui, Ph.D., author of Godzilla on My Mind: Fifty Years of the King of Monsters, was on hand for a Q&A after the screening and offered the insight that while America used its “Oxygen Destroyer” (the atomic bomb) for real in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the film’s Japan used its fictional version only once to save itself, after which all knowledge of it was destroyed in order to save humanity.
For further film analysis, I implore you to seek out Tsutsui’s work. To conclude my analysis of this showing: Godzilla looked so goddamn huge on that screen. After the film’s long setup highlighting the limits of diplomacy (during which I wondered how those two kids I met in the ticket line were dealing with the bureaucratic script thus far), the beast finally hit land to a doomy score reminiscent of Black Sabbath, though pre-dating them by 14 years. Although a crude “man in a suit,” he was truly imposing, especially from my strained vantage point. People behind me laughed, as I looked on in genuinely frightened awe. I’d never been more happy to be sitting in a “bad” seat.
