The Kaiju and Our Response
First and foremost, this is an incredible depiction of the kaiju as reasonless force of nature and consequence of atomic age warfare. You can divide the 40-odd movies in the canon between ones where Godzilla is A Guy vs ones where Godzilla is Tidal Wave of Horror. This is a pitch perfect expression of the latter.
I enjoy plenty of the Guy entries, but the latest Hollywood offerings are sad expressions of Hypermarvelization. Humans ought to exist in a Godzilla movie to anchor the viewer and lend scale to the destruction. A Stranger Thing kid looking into the camera and saying “that just happened” does not do this for me.
The mechanics on Odo island falling to the ground screaming and drooling? This is the proper depiction. This takes the kaiju seriously. The panicked open-fire from the bunker? Incredible. So many wars have been started by one jittery soldier with an itchy trigger finger. We all pay in the end.
Who’s Up Tryin’ to Get Their Postwar Trauma Examined?
Minus One is about the aftershocks of war. I think it does an exceptional job of portraying the human struggle to rebuild, both materially and psychologically, after a world-shattering event. The human characters are surprisingly complex and compelling, especially for a recent Godzilla movie.
But now we get to the question of who’s in the frame and who isn’t. This is a World War II movie in which only Japanese people exist. These people are either Veterans or Civilians. The US military is never seen, only referenced. The countries and people occupied by Imperial Japan? Beneath mention.
The original 1954 Godzilla makes at least some attempt to account for Imperial Japan’s crimes. We are meant to understand that Dr. Serizawa was working with the nazis to develop the oxygen destroyer. He struggles with guilt for his role in the war and chooses to die alongside Godzilla rather than risk his knowledge fueling the arms race. Dr. Noda is just…a really smart former naval scientist. He was definitely not doing human experiments for Unit 731 in Manchuria! Fundamentally, the film posits that World War II, like Godzilla’s attack, is something that happened to Japan, not circumstances in which the country had any hand.
We are now in the Greatest Generation Mythmaking Zone.
It’s Not As Much Fun to Pick Up the Pieces
The film portrays the US occupation and the Japanese government as a remote forces. Characters repeatedly bemoan how the burden of reconstruction has fallen solely on the populace. But this isn’t strictly historically accurate for the 1945-1947 period. You can reasonably argue that the US/Japanese government provided insufficient assistance to struggling civilians. But during this time, the US exercises a heavy hand in shaping postwar Japan. They conduct military tribunals, bar officers and far right nationalists from public office, and implement economic reforms including land reform and breaking up monopolies.
In the film, Cold War tensions with Russia are portrayed a reason why the US won’t assist Japan in managing its crises. In fact, the opposite was true. During this period, socialism is ascendant in Japan (and many of its former colonies). This prompts the US to adopt the “Reverse Course” policy, which reinstates far right nationalists in positions of political and economic power as a bulwark against communism.
The Deathless Kamikaze Run
Minus One is an attempt to grapple with the construction of postwar Japanese national identity. It is not completely above self-critique, but that critique is exceedingly narrow.
Upon his return to the ruins of Tokyo, Kōichi is harangued by Sumiko for failing to complete his kamikaze mission. She tells him that, if men like him hadn’t failed to do their duty, then maybe Japan wouldn’t be in this mess. Initially, I thought this scene was meant to demonstrate how veterans were unjustly left to account for imperial failures borne of avarice and overreach. But this isn’t exactly correct.
As the film progresses, Sumiko’s critique is refined: Kōichi ought to be be forgiven for a failure to self-sacrifice but only because that sacrifice would have been meaningless in context. He failed because the Empire failed to engineer conditions in which his sacrifice would have been effective or meaningful. The moral thrust of the movie is that Japanese men should absolutely still be expected to sacrifice themselves under the proper circumstances, but they also shouldn’t necessarily die in the attempt.
As the final confrontation takes shape, so does the critique of Imperial Japan: it was disinterested in the lives of its subjects and treated them (soldiers in particular) as expendable. The solution to existential, external crises as represented by Godzilla is structurally identical: a hierarchical military exercise. But it is distinct from the Imperial model in that it is a) voluntary b) attempts to minimize casualties and c) has popular support.
All of this is condensed into the metaphor of the Deathless Kamikaze Run, a concept so fucking mind blowing I am still struggling to deconstruct it. Have we passed through the trauma of war only to arrive at a new level of neoliberal hell? A kinder and gentler nationalism?
In fact, what followed was a brutal anti-communist purge, 70 years of de facto uniparty rule, and a postwar order in which economic imperialism largely supplanted the military variety. I’m sure some regard that as a success but, as the final scene reminds us, Godzilla will eventually be back to restart the wheels of history. The proliferating crises of today show that you don’t have to scratch neoliberal capitalism deeply to reveal the imperialism underneath.
Who Gets to Imagine the Past?
Although it obviously wasn’t the director’s intent, I spent a lot of this movie thinking about Gaza. With so many scenes of desperate people picking through rubble trying to eke out of a living, it was impossible to avoid the comparison. But that comparison breaks down at the point we see civilians rebuilding. If the film’s central question is “how can we move on after a catastrophe,” its reach and profundity are limited by the narrow scope of the “we.” The more interesting question for me is: “what do the civilians of a shattered empire deserve?”
It’s probably okay if I don’t get to see a movie about that question. It will likely be answered for me soon enough. But what about those who have never been allowed to rebuild? What about the multitudes whose catastrophes are not just ignored but engineered by the empires of this era and every one before it? I hope against hope that a time will come when they can write their own stories reflecting on the past from a safe and stable present. Perhaps that movie will have a different ending.
SONS OF THE MIDWESTERN DARKNESS 