Bill Bria
As part of the marketing campaign for Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, dozens of billboards and standees were put up around the country featuring a countdown clock to the movie’s release with the tagline “In (insert number of days, hours, minutes and seconds), the world forever changes.” One of the ironies within that clever campaign, as well as the film itself, is that although the world is changed forever on an almost daily basis, these massive changes are hardly noticed by anyone while they’re happening. What’s more, if anyone does happen to notice them, there’s a natural defense mechanism within human beings known as denial, which allows them to dismiss any troubling observations about where we’re headed.
As such, popular culture is no different, and it’s rare to see the arts dealing with a topic head-on while it’s still fresh. That’s where metaphor, allegory, and the like come into play, tools that allow storytellers and audiences to ruminate on these topics and themes without tipping things too far into a polemic. In retrospect, it’s no surprise that fantasy, horror, and science-fiction grew in popularity in the wake of such cataclysmic events as the two World Wars at the beginning of the 20th century. While those genres had certainly existed before, their prevalence — which we’re well used to today — didn’t really begin until there was such a widespread need for them to help us deal with issues too disturbing to face directly.
Nolan’s Oppenheimer is correct in its thesis that J. Robert Oppenheimer’s “Manhattan Project” to build an atomic bomb forever changed the world. To that end, the bomb’s deployment by the US military on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August of 1945 affected not just the entire world, but the national psyches of the Japanese and American people in very different ways. Two science-fiction classics released just under a decade following those incidents, 1953’s The War of the Worlds and 1954’s Gojira aka Godzilla, reflect these feelings and fears with panache. The Paramount Pictures-produced War of the Worlds and Toho Studios-produced Godzilla not only represent each nation’s perspective, but also essentially swap perspectives, exploring the prospect of atomic devastation from each other’s point of view.
To wit: in Gojira, the ancient creature disturbed by hydrogen bomb testing known as Godzilla is clearly intended to represent a natural destructive force unleashed by man-made, unnatural causes in much the same way as the atomic bomb. Certainly, the mention that Godzilla was cajoled to attack Tokyo due to underwater hydrogen bomb testing makes this connection apparent; so does the creature’s atomic breath, as well as scenes featuring survivors who’ve contracted radiation sickness in Godzilla’s wake. All of these elements line up with the Japanese’s perspective as the country enduring numerous horrors after being bombed in 1945.
Yet Gojira was made just a few months after a far more recent incident: the disaster that befell the fishing vessel Lucky Dragon No. 5 on March 1, 1954. Showered with radioactive fallout from a nearby U.S. military H-bomb test, the ship’s crew were not only made sick (and, in the instance of one crew member, killed from poisoning) but its catch of fish was contaminated. This incident certainly continued the theme of the U.S.A. endangering other countries with their tests, but it also inspired the Japanese to begin an anti-nuclear movement full stop.
Thus, the major storyline for the human characters in Gojira revolves around Dr. Daisuke Serizawa (Akihiko Hirata), a fictional scientist who director/co-writer Ishirô Honda and co-writer Takeo Murata make into an analogue for the real-life Oppenheimer. In the film, he discovers the only way to defeat Godzilla is with his own devastating weapon of mass destruction, the Oxygen Destroyer. While Godzilla’s rampage of destruction must be ceased at all costs, Serizawa is equally if not more worried about the new arms race his weapon would start upon using it, leading him to try and find a way of using the Destroyer to stop Godzilla while also keeping the weapon out of the military’s hands. The fictional Serizawa’s solution is to do what the more naive and feeble Oppenheimer and his cohorts could not: destroy every bit of research regarding the Oxygen Destroyer, including himself. The plea that the somber and tragic ending of the film makes isn’t aimed directly against the West, necessarily, but is rather a humanitarian one, hoping that all nuclear weapons development and testing will cease.
Fear of nuclear testing isn’t quite at the center of The War of the Worlds; in fact, the American protagonists of the film really don’t seem all that preoccupied with radiation poisoning. They also don’t seem afraid of an arms race per se; while Gojira’s main concerns regard armament and the progressive ruining of the planet, The War of the Worlds feels like a subtextual admission that America got lucky discovering and using the bomb first. The film exploits the fear that not only could a greater power have beaten the U.S. to the punch, but it still could. That greater power comes in the form of invading Martians, the concept adapted from H.G. Wells’ 1890s novel. Where Wells was reflecting on then-pressing issues of colonialism and imperialism, director Byron Haskin and writer Barré Lyndon update the story to explore America’s fear that any weapon capable of standing up to the A- or H-bomb would likely mean the end of the world.
Just as the once-mighty Japanese military saw Hiroshima and Nagasaki devastated without warning, War of the Worlds sees Los Angeles decimated within a comparably rapid amount of time, creating a paranoid fantasy for the Cold War era, wherein a desperate foreign power unscrupulously destroys in order to establish dominion. The biggest moment of horror isn’t the vaporization of innocents nor the reveal of the Martians’ bizarre alien visages; it’s when the military deploys its full atomic might against the aliens to absolutely no avail. From there, the sense of impending apocalypse only grows, adding human frailty, cruelty, and incompetence to an equation that spells certain doom.
Until, of course, Wells’s deus ex machina ending, which sees the Martians defeated by simple bacteria they were not immune to, making War a flip-side companion to Gojira: in one film, nature saves, and in the other, it punishes. Both are a reaction to the massive imbalance of nature foisted upon the world by the bomb’s creation, and both are ultimately deeply spiritual movies. In Gojira, the characters admit their culpability in the horror they’ve unleashed, and in War of the Worlds, the characters deep down wish to be forgiven and absolved for their sins. The fact that both sentiments are still true (and, moreover, still relevant) speaks to why these stories are still being told — and why sci-fi in general is still popular today. We have not escaped the long shadow of the bomb, and we perhaps never will.
