I saw Godzilla Minus One recently. This was the second big film explicitly addressing the atomic bomb I had seen at the cinema within the space of about six months. The first was Oppenheimer. I liked both films. I think they were both very good and effective at what they were trying to do.
Oppenheimer featured almost no context about Hiroshima, Nagasaki or even Japan in general. But I don’t think this is a failure of the film. The film, as I see it, is about Oppenheimer’s life and, to a slightly lesser extent, what the atomic bomb means in the mainstream American imagination. I think it does a good job of showing that Japan is (and was) not a primary consideration in either case.
This is brutal and monstrous, but I think it is the reality. I also think this was always one of the selling points of the atomic bomb; that it would render war a vague, almost theoretical entity, confined to distant shores.
I know some people would say that Oppenheimer could have taken the opportunity to educate Americans further about Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But, if there is a gap in knowledge (and I agree that there is) why should the responsibility to solve this fall on the shoulders of a mass market film instead of the elementary school system? Why should this knowledge gap become a concern only with the release of a popular film?
Godzilla Minus One is almost entirely about what the bomb means in the Japanese imagination, and Japanese post war trauma. I doubt it will get the same attention or critical response in either the UK or the US as Oppenheimer did. I would be very surprised if it attracts a fraction of the viewers that Oppenheimer did in America. There have been lots of Godzilla films, but many of the remakes have taken the idea of the monster and turned it into a thing which wreaks damage on an American city. This is particularly fantastical because the American mainland has never been bombed by another country. But I wonder if the idea of a devastated Tokyo is simply less interesting, and therefore less marketable, to an American audience.
America barely features in Godzilla Minus Zero, and actually I felt it could have been a bigger presence. But then maybe the American role in the atomic bomb doesn’t need to be spelled out because everyone knows it already.
One other thing I did think about Godzilla Minus Zero is that the monster could have looked more prehistoric. There are scenes where it lights up bright blue and looks very futuristic, this calls to mind radiation and emphasises that the monster is a mutant. But one of the strange things about the atomic bomb is that it was (and still is) the most unimaginably futuristic technology, but also essentially prehistoric in its nature.
The atom bomb was developed using a mathematical framework which was so cutting edge at that time that only a few people in the world could understand the equations. This hasn’t really changed so much. The ideas which underpin the atom bomb are still not widely taught because most people don’t know enough maths, or understand maths well enough, to be able to make sense of the equations. I had to do years of set theory and calculus at university to then take advanced classes in relativity and quantum mechanics. Most people will never have this experience. (I don’t think you need to be in a university to do this, but I do think it is very conceptually difficult and you need a lot of time.)
Lots of branches of this research have still not been solved. Or there are working solutions which involve ideas like the universe being constituted of 15 different dimensions and all kinds of strange things like that, which is very fun and mind bending to think about if you have time. Sadly most people don’t.
But anyway, in that sense I think it’s fair to say that the atom bomb still feels futuristic to us. But then all of the ideas that underpin it came from thinking about the fundamental nature of particles and forces, and how matter came into being and having the properties it does, which really means going back to the start of the universe and trying to understand that. And that’s what I mean by the prehistoric nature of the atom bomb.
And so I thought Godzilla worked so well as a metaphor for the bomb because it was this reptilian dinosaur. It looked like a creature I associate with a time before humans, the early earth, which was not the early universe, but it sits in the same space in our imagination I think. And I thought the blue light didn’t suit this.
I also found myself thinking about why the atomic bomb is interesting subject matter right now. For next time xxx
Recently:
Was interviewed by one of my favourite writers Mark O’Connell for Interview Magazine about Lazy City. Mark is one of the best book critics (although he doesn’t do this so much anymore, sometimes with pieces like this, which has some similar themes to this substack) so this was a very smart conversation, nothing to do with “which bits are based on you, eh”.
You can buy my novel, Lazy City here.