When I was in the fifth or sixth grade, I went to the movies one rainy Saturday afternoon with the young savages who lived across the street. We didn’t go to see that particular movie; we went because it was too wet to play baseball, the theater was within bike-riding distance, and the star was a monster.

The feature turned out to be a re-release of the American version of Godzilla, which had extra scenes added to the Japanese original to include Raymond Burr as an American reporter who witnessed the monster destroy Tokyo. We thought it was one of the worst movies we had ever seen. Everything about it screamed cheap and hokey. Had it been about five or ten years later, and had we been a little older, we might have appreciated the flick as camp, but at that time we thought it was just plain bad. In fact, we thought it was so bad we sat in the front row of the largely deserted theater and hooted our way through it. The theater management probably agreed with our critique, because the ushers never warned us about our behavior.

According to this account from the UCLA Asia Institute about a lecture given by William A. Tsutsui of the University of Kansas, however, it turns out that some would consider us Philistines instead of savages. Tsutsui tries to make the point that Godzilla is an extremely successful cultural export and a Japanese cultural icon. The monster has been featured in a Rose Bowl parade and won an MTV lifetime achievement award. Mia Farrow has declared it to be her favorite movie.

Of course, one could make the point that MTV and Mia Farrow are being facetious, are airheads, or are facetious airheads, but those possibilities seem to elude college professors.

The article notes:

Only a handful of scholarly essays on Godzilla have appeared, and few “have attempted to contextualize the film historically.” In his talk, Tsutsui set out to correct that: “I would argue,” he declared, “. . . that the Godzilla films can provide us valuable insights into Japanese culture since World War II.”.

You know you’re headed into no-man’s land when someone tries to “contextualize” a monster movie, and I’m not sure how valuable the insights about Japanese culture are, unless you’re the kind of person who watches a Rose Bowl parade or the lifetime achievement awards on MTV.

Tsutsui insists that the Godzilla movies have featured some consistent themes in the more than 50 years they’ve been made. These include anti-Americanism, Godzilla as a defender of Japan, the vulnerability of Japan, and an ambivalence towards science and technology. He also seems to think the original was made just as much for adults as it was for pre-teen boys, and that later films in the series have tried to return to adult themes. Considering that adults in the United States actually have discussions about which of the Star Trek TV series they prefer, perhaps he has a point.

Tsutsui also can come across like a…well, like a college professor. Consider:

Professor Tsutsui turned to the question of the “message,” if any, of the Godzilla series.”The first Godzilla film clearly had a strong anti-nuclear message. . . . Yet it becomes increasingly hard to conclude that the films have had a consistent message over time .. . . The only constant about the Godzilla films is a deep ambivalence, a kind of moral and intellectual ambiguity, that precludes drawing any firm, unitary conclusions. The message of Godzilla,” Tsutsui explained, “. . . is complex and reflects . . . a fundamental ambivalence on the part of the Japanese when they look at issues like modernity, technology, science, nature, politics, and the world outside Japan.”

Well, there’s another possibility that the professor overlooked. Could it be they’re mostly just monster movies? I’d be curious (up to a point) to hear Tsutsui try to explain what he means by the fundamental Japanese ambivalence toward nature, not to mention the rest of those nouns.

The article is worth reading if you watch your step in the intellectual quicksand. It provides interesting information on the so-called Godzilla franchise over the years, some harmless collegiate exegetical pipe dreams, and some curious trivia. It turns out that the monster’s name (Gojira in Japanese), may have been the nickname of an overweight studio publicist, created by combining the words for gorilla (gorira) and whale (kujira). The original Godzilla suit weighed 200 pounds. North Korea’s Kim Jong-il is such a fan that he commissioned his own giant monster movie, Pulgasari, in 1985. (Is anyone surprised?)

You’ll still have to deal with some other minor annoyances. The author needs to look up the word “voyeuristic” in the dictionary before being allowed to use it again, and only a college professor could come up with a phrase like “military porn” and expect to be taken seriously, but we can brush those aside.

I swiped the image of the movie poster from their website. If you can’t read Japanese or the writing is too small, the poster is for the “overseas version” of the film with Raymond Burr (pictured at the bottom). This early reverse import was also big at the Japanese box office. You might want to check out the links at the bottom of the article, too.

The site focuses on Godzilla the movie, so they fail to mention the stage play Godzilla, by Yasuhiko Ohashi, which created a minor stir when it was published in 1988. (I’m surprised he didn’t get busted for copyright infringement.) That play may well provide us with as many “valuable insights into Japanese culture since World War II” as the movie.

In the stage version, the character of Godzilla is played without costume, and he appears as a normal human being. The premise of the play is that a young woman brings Godzilla home to meet her parents because they intend to get married. The parents are concerned about their daughter’s choice in mates—they worry about what the children will look like and whether Godzilla’s huge body will crush their flimsy Japanese dwelling. Godzilla is eager to please, however, lighting his future father-in-law’s cigarette with one breath.

It’s hard to miss the metaphor for international marriages in Japan. I read it with the idea of translating the script into English, but was a bit disappointed in the second half. It got off to a great start, but then Muthra and all the other Japanese monsters make appearances, turning the play into a parody of itself. But if college professors think the movie mocked by me and the young savages is in fact high art, maybe I should reconsider.