The Footprint is Radioactive! (大蜥蜴)

Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.
-J. Robert Oppenheimer, lead scientist of the Manhattan Project, quoting the Bagavad-Gita in reaction to the first atomic explosion. Los Alamos, July 16, 1945. On August 6 and 9th of that year, two similar bombs were dropped on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing 214,000 people, most of them civilians.


If [it] is used even once, politicians from around the world will see it. Of course, they'll want to use it as a weapon. Bombs versus bombs, missiles versus missiles, and now a new superweapon to throw upon us all...
-Akihiro Hirata, playing the part of Dr. Daisuke Serizawa-hakase in Godzilla (Gojira), directed by Ishiro Honda. Toho Film Company Ltd., Tokyo, Japan, 1954.

Life as a grad student, particularly one who has nothing more to do than hand in an 80-page document after four completely stress-free summer months, is, to be fair, honest, and equitable, one of the most ambitious and glorious states of existence there is.

Such an existence is so glorious, in fact, that it leaves plenty of spare time for those of us with wandering eyes and lazy minds who wish to do nothing more than read fiction, browse the internet, watch movies, attend concerts, and flip about the vast stimulating ocean of colour that is T.V.

Had you been surfing the tube late Saturday night/Sunday morning, as I was, being an ambitious grad student myself, you would have noticed two things:

1. Very little of any worth is on at 3:30 A.M., aside from "free sex chat" infomercials and the irritating grate of the snow channel; and
2. Despite the appealing offer of "five minutes free!" worth of phone sex (plus $20 for each additional half-hour), the venerable and decidedly unsexy CBC instead aired something of some worth: a grainy black-and-white film, made in Japan, that only a cinématiste would have bothered watching at such an ungodly hour. Complete with horrible acting, a ridiculous script, and the worst special effects since Plan Nine from Outer Space caused several hundred eyeballs to bleed out of their skull cavities, Godzilla appears to be, by any modern estimation, a completely unwatchable film.

I was thoroughly engrossed as soon as I spotted it.

Old Lizard, Old Movie
Let's be clear: Godzilla (Gojira in Japanese), released by Toho Film Company Ltd. in 1954 and filmed on a "budget" that was at least a fiber or two short of a full shoestring, is a ridiculously entertaining pile of steaming Japanese celluloid. The film's special effects, which look like they were composed by a toddler with a limited collection of lego trucks and barbie dolls (and one big lizard suit), do the film no great favours. Nor does the director's decision to juxtapose the stiff, inexpressive rubber lizard suit of great city-levelling fame with a chorus of ovebearing performances that run between banal (A scientist, having just inspected a giant footprint with a geiger counter, stands up, looks around for a few seconds, and then proclaims: "The Footprint is Radioactive!") and pure camp ("We Must Kill The Beast With The Oxygen Destroyer!").

(I use Title Caps here because I feel this is the closest written approximation to the ecstatic, near-Biblical effort the actors put into delivering each line of script).

And for those of you who missed the picture when it first hit theatres, let's recap: a 127-million year old lizard is awakened by U.S. atomic bomb testing, decides to destroy Tokyo one screaming civilian at a time, breathes both fire and ice from its rubbery mouth, and is found to be impervious to every destructive device created by man save a silly little ball called the "Oxygen Destroyer" — which does just that; destroys oxygen — the ball itself allegedly invented by an equally silly little scientist named Dr. Serizawa, who wears a silly little eye-patch, is in love with another character who does not love him back, perhaps because of the eye-patch, perhaps because of the silliness, and who ends up committing suicide while frolicking about at the bottom of the ocean by cutting his swimsuit's vital oxygen tube, only after, of course, killing the giant lizard with the Oxygen Destroyer — and, oh, oh the irony.

(On an aside, according to IMDB.com the name Gojira is "a combination of the Japanese words for gorilla (gorira) and whale (kujira). It was originally a nickname given to an immense man who worked as a press agent for Toho.")

Thankfully, the unwatchable film is worth watching. One reason is the presence of my favourite favourite Japanese actor, Takashi Shimura (of Seven Samurai fame). Even though Shimura had no doubt been instructed to overact along with everyone else in the lizard-pic, he handles theatre bill well, employing silence, subtle facial expressions, and long gazes into sweet nothingness (or, perhaps, a fine Japanese dame in the production crew) to punctuate the verbal outbursts and foot-stomping sessions served up by the script. And while every character on screen calls for an immediate end to Godzilla's sushi party, Shimura's character protests, explaining that Godzilla should be studied, not killed, if only so we can find out how anyone on earth created such a big lizard suit.

Gojira is coming!
Rather than simply serve as an oasis of sobreity in a movie that is otherwise silly beyond belief, however, Shimura's resolve to 'save' Godzilla instead introduces us to an analogy that lies at the core of the film. In a crucial scene, two of Godzilla's main characters act against Shimura's wishes — they go to Dr. Serizawa's laboratory in hopes of getting the Oxygen Destroyer. But the invention is so destructive, the young Serizawa argues, that its use anywhere will alert the entire international community to its existence, a community that will want to copy it, that will demand it, and that may even kidnap Serizawa so that he may be forced to produce new plans, new documents, and new Oxygen Destroyers. Such a device, in the wrong hands, could bring the end to humanity, he argues — too hefty a price to pay just to stop just a single rampaging rubber lizard.

In the end, Serizawa uses the Oxygen Destroyer against Godzilla, burns the device's schematics, and kills himself. These are convenient plot devices that successfuly end the movie; not-as-convient are the analogies drawn between the Oxygen Destroyer and the Atomic Bomb, between Godzilla, the Pacific War with Japan, and the dominance of the "nuclear threat" over the power politics of the last sixty years.

Indeed, when all of Godzilla's overacting and cheap special effects are washed away, we are left with is a deeply serious film about the dangers of nuclear war and the weakness of man.

Enter Kim
Just yesterday, both of these were put on international display: North Korea launched seven medium- and long-range missiles into the Sea of Japan, essentially threatening the world with possible nuclear annihilation. Kim Jong-Il's brutual regime remains commited to its own survival, and the international community remains committed to thwarting it.

Elsewhere, Pakistan, India and China continue to develop their respective nuclear programmes. Russia and the former states of the Soviet Union continue to have difficulties securing and tracking their own arsenals. Israel denies the existence of its nuclear weapons, and Iran, quick to draw lessons from the invasion of Iraq and the longevity of North Korea's Kim Family Regime, is now threatening to become the first Islamic state in the Middle East to possess the bomb.

Most political scientists and nuclear proliferation experts today argue that the advent of the atomic bomb stabilized the international system — preventing a World War III, for example, and shifting international focus to transnational conflicts in the second and third worlds.

This was not an accepted truth in 1954. Dated as it may be, Godzilla brings us back to the laboratories of the Manhattan project and puts us in an environment where, facing a threat of unprecedented scale, the development, construction, and use of an equally unprecedented weapon was ordered.

Taken in today's context, the "wrong hands" Serizawa was so afraid of can be closely aligned with North Korea, with Iran, and with Pakistan's Abdul Qadeer Khan, who sold nuclear technologies to (among others) terrorist organizations, weapons dealers, and all sorts of regimes we in the West would normally classify as totalitarian, autocratic, and "rogue." The era in which only the great powers control nuclear arms has long since passed, of course, but it may only be now that the repercussions of atomic technology in "the wrong hands" — i.e., terrorists — may become clear and present. The lukewarm successes of IAEA nonproliferation efforts, the failure of the Treaty on the Nonproliferation of Nuclear Weapons, and the stalemates of the bilateral and mulilateral talks in North Korea should all serve as a wake-up call for the West. But we're still asleep. The U.S., the UN, and the whole of the international community still chooses to ignore India and Pakistan's nuclear ambitions, capabilities, and dangerous first-strike policies; Israel's nuclear arms remain undeclared and unmonitored; the ABM treaty has been thrown out without a suitable replacement; and no movement has yet been made toward a realistic solution in North Korea.

Godzilla raises questions: can mankind be trusted if given the ability to destroy itself? Can nations and groups be trusted to work together, responsibly, or will the weakness of man prevail? And what would it take to move us toward the former and away from the latter?

These are questions that still need answers. The footprint is radioactive, indeed.