Godzilla, according to a recent article in Science Daily, is not scientifically accurate. No surprises there, you might think. But, mischievously, the research behind the article accepts that the monster is, in fact, a ceratosaurid dinosaur: a surviving relic from the Jurassic. The puzzle, the article explains, is not that Godzilla is living alongside us in the modern world. What’s much stranger is that having appeared in Gojira in 1954 at a mere 50 metres tall, Godzilla has challenged scientific theory by reappearing, just 65 years later, in
Godzilla: King of the Monsters 2 at a whopping height of nearly 120 metres. A team of concerned researchers from New England’s Dartmouth College has calculated that Godzilla has evolved at 30 times the rate of other organisms on earth – and this despite its body size remaining fairly stable for the prior 150 million years.
 |
| source |
With 35 movies on its CV so far, Godzilla has been growing up in public, and film fans have certainly remarked on its fluctuating size before. But, it seems no one had previously thought to look at Godzilla’s growth through a scientific lens. Fans and film critics alike have explained away Godzilla’s rapid increase in stature as simply a reaction to buildings becoming taller: just a visual filmic device. Our Dartmouth researchers though, having established with the scientific principles of evolutionary theory that normal evolution is not at play, then switch to a cultural lens. Godzilla’s first appearance, they say, was a manifestation of human anxiety, post-World War II. Fear of nuclear annihilation, and of environmental destruction. The original monster, after all, emerged from the sea when its habitat was destroyed by a nuclear bomb. And according to film historians, the texture of the original Godzilla suit was designed to look, not like a dinosaur, but like the scars of Hiroshima survivors.
In fact, despite decades of subsequent kitschy remakes and pop-culture references, the original 1954 Gojira was a protest against American H-bomb testing in the Marshall Islands,
tests which followed the horrific A-bomb drops on Japan during the war. Scenes of the destruction Godzilla has wrought on Tokyo, at the beginning of Gojira's trailer, are a stark analogy of the devastation of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Film producer David Kalat has described Gojira as a “contemporary folk myth for the nuclear age”.
 |
| source |
No surprise then, that the Dartmouth researchers find a correlation between the annual military spending of the USA and the body size of Godzilla, between the first movie and the latest. Based on this, Godzilla is described as “the embodiment of our collective anxiety”, and by ‘our’ you’d have to assume they mean America’s. The article's lack of attention to Godzilla’s origins in Japan’s anti-American outrage is striking.
Some might find the researchers’ thesis trivial, or silly, and certainly from a scientific perspective there is little knowledge to be gained by trying to impose an evolutionary theory onto an imaginary creature. But, from a cultural perspective, what the authors describe as the “sudden strong and selective pressure on body size” that has caused the massive growth of the Godzilla monster puts our precarious environmental situation – and our fear of it – in the spotlight. For 65 years, we’ve been telling the story of this gigantic and unpredictable monster, which threatens human life and crushes human civilisation. Where did it come from? We made it, the story goes, by damaging the environment, and we will need all our human cleverness to survive it – in some stories finally killing it with a weapon so dangerous that it too puts the whole world at risk.
What do audiences absorb from movies like this, in terms of inspiration, reassurance, or catharsis? It’s impossible to say. But Godzilla, surprisingly persistent, keeps coming back from the dead in movie after movie: the monster created by our reckless disregard for the environment that we live in. You can kill the monster, as the fans say, but it just won’t go away.
