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Shaken by Gojira
I would have had a lot more fun if I had gone to Andy's football game.
Sometimes, there are movies that can help you understand things by making you feel them. Until now, my best example of this was "Apollo 13", because after I saw it, I finally understood why my father used to drag my sister and I out of bed at ridiculous hours of the morning to watch the space shuttle launches.
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gmskarka and I went to see the original "Gojira" at Liberty Hall here in Lawrence last night. It was the actual original, uncut, unedited, no Raymond Burr, from 1954. They showed it as part of the three day seminar that KU is hosting for Godzilla's 50th Anniversary, which meant that there was a brief introduction before the film and a discussion afterwords. We weren't able to stay for the discussion because we're both fighting off the creeping crud, but I wish we could have, because this is the kind of film you need to talk about after you see it.
A little background here: I have been a fan of the Godzilla movies from childhood. I have seen the American release of the first Godzilla film so many times I've lost count. I had never seen THIS movie. I knew going in that it would be different, all in Japanese with subtitles, and footage that had been removed from the American cut. And I "knew" that it was an attempt to deal with the aftermath of the bombs that we dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and that it was much more serious than the American film. So when the speaker gave his introduction, and told us that Japanese audiences had left the theatres in tears when it was first released, I sat there and thought, well, of course they did, that's totally understandable, they had been bombed only a decade before it was made. He went on to tell us that we would probably laugh at the bad special effects, and we all settled in to watch a bit of history.
No one laughed at the special effects. Godzilla was scary. Really scary. We did laugh, but it was at the social aspects of the film, scenes that were obviously placed by the director as release from the tension of the monster attacks. (The best one of these was where the young man who wants to marry the head scientist's pretty daughter starts the conversation in which he intends to ask her father for her hand by stating that he thinks Godzilla needs to be destroyed, something to which the scientist is adamantly opposed. After her father orders the young man out of his house and storms out of the room, the young lovers sit quietly for a moment, then the young man says "Well, I guess I shouldn't have said that. I'll ask to marry you some other time." The audience exploded with laughter.) But it's really hard to laugh at Godzilla destroying Tokyo when scenes of the monster are intercut with things like a mother cowering with her three children and murmuring "We'll be with Daddy soon" over and over to them as she watches their death approaching.
Then the biggest hit came for me. It was only on screen for a couple of seconds, but it made my heart stop. One of the buildings that Godzilla smashes in Tokyo was built with narrow vertical supports all along the outside of the building. In short, it looked like one of the towers of the World Trade Center. Watching it fall, complete with twisted spires of metal reaching into the sky, brought back everything that I had felt on the day the towers were destroyed. We lived in New Jersey by then, but we had plenty of friends who lived and worked in NYC. One of my co-workers spent most of her day on the phone, trying to stay in contact with her sister who was freaking out because her husband was a firefighter. (Still is, thankfully.) Most of the rest of us spent the day huddled around radios and televisions, watching the horror unfold in front of us, worrying about our friends and family members who were in the City, and listening to the engines of the fighter jets that were circling overhead.
After the film was over, and Godzilla was killed by "the Oxygen Destroyer", a weapon so fearsome that the scientist who created it killed himself as well so that the knowledge of how to create another would be lost forever, I kept thinking about that scene. Gareth phrased it this way, and I don't think I could write it any better, so I'll quote him, "Take how we felt about those buildings and people, then multiply that by a city, two cities, more..."
It made me want to cry.
Sometimes, there are movies that can help you understand things by making you feel them. Until now, my best example of this was "Apollo 13", because after I saw it, I finally understood why my father used to drag my sister and I out of bed at ridiculous hours of the morning to watch the space shuttle launches.
gmskarka and I went to see the original "Gojira" at Liberty Hall here in Lawrence last night. It was the actual original, uncut, unedited, no Raymond Burr, from 1954. They showed it as part of the three day seminar that KU is hosting for Godzilla's 50th Anniversary, which meant that there was a brief introduction before the film and a discussion afterwords. We weren't able to stay for the discussion because we're both fighting off the creeping crud, but I wish we could have, because this is the kind of film you need to talk about after you see it.A little background here: I have been a fan of the Godzilla movies from childhood. I have seen the American release of the first Godzilla film so many times I've lost count. I had never seen THIS movie. I knew going in that it would be different, all in Japanese with subtitles, and footage that had been removed from the American cut. And I "knew" that it was an attempt to deal with the aftermath of the bombs that we dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and that it was much more serious than the American film. So when the speaker gave his introduction, and told us that Japanese audiences had left the theatres in tears when it was first released, I sat there and thought, well, of course they did, that's totally understandable, they had been bombed only a decade before it was made. He went on to tell us that we would probably laugh at the bad special effects, and we all settled in to watch a bit of history.
No one laughed at the special effects. Godzilla was scary. Really scary. We did laugh, but it was at the social aspects of the film, scenes that were obviously placed by the director as release from the tension of the monster attacks. (The best one of these was where the young man who wants to marry the head scientist's pretty daughter starts the conversation in which he intends to ask her father for her hand by stating that he thinks Godzilla needs to be destroyed, something to which the scientist is adamantly opposed. After her father orders the young man out of his house and storms out of the room, the young lovers sit quietly for a moment, then the young man says "Well, I guess I shouldn't have said that. I'll ask to marry you some other time." The audience exploded with laughter.) But it's really hard to laugh at Godzilla destroying Tokyo when scenes of the monster are intercut with things like a mother cowering with her three children and murmuring "We'll be with Daddy soon" over and over to them as she watches their death approaching.
Then the biggest hit came for me. It was only on screen for a couple of seconds, but it made my heart stop. One of the buildings that Godzilla smashes in Tokyo was built with narrow vertical supports all along the outside of the building. In short, it looked like one of the towers of the World Trade Center. Watching it fall, complete with twisted spires of metal reaching into the sky, brought back everything that I had felt on the day the towers were destroyed. We lived in New Jersey by then, but we had plenty of friends who lived and worked in NYC. One of my co-workers spent most of her day on the phone, trying to stay in contact with her sister who was freaking out because her husband was a firefighter. (Still is, thankfully.) Most of the rest of us spent the day huddled around radios and televisions, watching the horror unfold in front of us, worrying about our friends and family members who were in the City, and listening to the engines of the fighter jets that were circling overhead.
After the film was over, and Godzilla was killed by "the Oxygen Destroyer", a weapon so fearsome that the scientist who created it killed himself as well so that the knowledge of how to create another would be lost forever, I kept thinking about that scene. Gareth phrased it this way, and I don't think I could write it any better, so I'll quote him, "Take how we felt about those buildings and people, then multiply that by a city, two cities, more..."
It made me want to cry.