Minus One and Counting
What a difference seven years can make, or one election night, one last day on earth. Shin Godzilla (2016) was in many ways the definitive (and valedictory) movie of its decade, a triumph of civil society in which not military force so much as enlightened bureaucracy defeats the monster. Mavericks working within the system will save us; that’s the moral when unorthodox young cabinet secretary and aspiring future prime minister Rando Yaguchi works with independent young U.S. special envoy and aspiring future president Kayoco Anne Patterson to run interference on an international plan to nuke the monster and Tokyo along with it, by putting a bunch of science-nerds and cultural outliers in a room to figure out a better way. Japan’s aging, accidental leader (promoted by being the only one left alive) is smart enough to get out of their way and the day is saved.
The next day is anyone’s guess, as Godzilla, literally frozen in place, stands dormant over Tokyo. Of course in the real world the monsters woke up soon after; I know America is not the world, that’s one of Shin Godzilla’s main points as it shows Japan stepping out of the U.S.’s shadow, but it’s hard not to see this movie, whose director based it on an Aaron Sorkin model, as an epitaph for the West’s entire neoliberal program of the preceding quarter century. Those years of armament, authority, bigotry and lethal greed all gathering strength but casting a shadow that too many thought ostensible economic stability, apparent peace (on your own shores) and insistent good intentions could indefinitely keep at bay. That whole Clinton-Blair-Obama, smartest-guys-in-one-room mindset ran out of ideas the same year Shin Godzilla came out, and it’s been one systemic collapse and mass catastrophe after another, orchestrated or allowed by unfit geriatric figureheads, ever since (in most of the world, though this movie was based on Japan’s own real-life prequel, the earthquake/tsunami/nuclear meltdown mismanaged by that country’s “leaders” in 2011).
It’s one of many sobering elements of Godzilla Minus One (2023) that a period piece set in the late 1940s now feels so much more timely. This is the movie of its decade, an anti-blockbuster of cascading mass loss. We really have become a smarter species, even though that wisdom is taking a long time to travel up to the people in charge; the almost universal praise of, and dialogue with this film as a testament of collective trauma shows a maturation of the worldwide audience’s, and our beleaguered global population’s, emotional intelligence. But the question needs to be asked, how did we all become so educated in this trauma, and why does it have to be our primary shared language?
Our main search in life is for someone else who understands what we’ve experienced (much more, even, than someone who can do anything about it; this in fact is why bad leaders who channel their supporters’ anguish without actually helping them are so successful). I recognized Noriko’s feeling not of survivor guilt but survivor duty, the obligation to make something of a life that others she loved did not get to hold onto, because I’ve seen those fights and been given that charge; I recognized Shikishima’s delirious belief that the happiness he finds with Noriko and Akiko must be a dream, because I’ve wondered if the person I found happiness with could possibly be real after the loss I never anticipated but knew for sure had happened. These are feelings shared and multiplied amongst everyone who lost loves and lifetimes on 9/11; whose homes and countries have been swallowed by the sea, or whose families have crashed on teeming shores that no longer welcome them; who were spared, alone, by the random fate of pandemic’s calculated neglect; or who have had to leave those lying under rubble from Kyiv to Gaza. Godzilla Minus One is not really about the past, but it’s about pasts that won’t let us go.
We move on from them as far as we can let go ourselves, and for that, first there are feelings we have to let out. This is the purpose that Godzilla Minus One serves. Releasing all of his illusions if not yet embracing hope, Yōji at one pivotal point says “This country never changes. I wonder if it can.” The irony for an American viewer is that Japan itself definitely did, like Germany; setting on a path of pacifism and democracy after sinking to the worst of warlike dictatorships. These were countries with no real democratic or nonaggressive traditions beforehand, but whose own behavior shocked them into something truly new. My own country, by the end of WWII, had a long history of civil society behind it, and that’s what I fear is the source of our own inability to change; no matter how battered our freedoms can become, or reckless our militarism, we can always assure ourselves that there is a “normal” to get back to. Our fevers occasionally pass, but that status quo is left narrower each time (and higher than more people can reach).
Godzilla Minus One arrives at a time when the authority and ability of civil government is approaching a shambles like that of firebombed Japan; the metaphorical menace of Shin Godzilla was not overcome, and it feels contemporary when the ex-general tells his volunteers in the new movie that “the government of the U.S. and the government of Japan will not help us.” But here, in this fantasy, as in (imperfect) self-governing populations in Syria, in Kurdistan, in Mexico and in consensus-based temporary encampments in the U.S., it’s not everyone-for-themselves, but everyone-for-each-other. The “Minus One,” for me, refers to one less life wasted on guilt, or vengeance, or handed over to someone who won’t value it. The monster doesn’t get my vote. I’m reporting for my survivor duty.
