Godzilla On My Mind: Fifty Years of the King of Monsters (review)

A story of fandom and anxiety starts this memorable book about the history of Godzilla in U.S. culture. As a nine-year-old boy in Detroit in 1972, the author dresses up as his favorite icon—Godzilla. Though thrilled with the getup his mother has crafted, Tsutsui is humiliated when the other kids don't recognize who he is. When someone steps on his tail, the performance is ruined even further and Tsutsui slinks home, "my tail—quite literally—between my legs." The costume will never be worn again and the fantasy has been shaken. But, the boy "did not stop loving Godzilla" (p. 4), and it is to understand the complex and varied reactions Americans have had to this Japanese movie monster for a half century that William Tsutsui, now associate professor of history at the University of Kansas (and author of Manufacturing Ideology: Scientific Management in Twentieth-Century Japan), has written Godzilla On My Mind: Fifty Years of the King of Monsters.

It is as an ambiguous figure—a Japanese movie monster badly dubbed into English—that Godzilla has circulated within American popular culture for a half century. Tsutsui, himself a diehard fan, freely admits his own bias all the while acknowledging the mixed nature of its reception and popularity. This figure first hit U.S. screens in 1956 as Godzilla, King of the Monsters, the U.S. remake of the Japanese original, Gojira, which debuted in 1954. Produced by Tōhō Studios with a huge budget and big names in the business (Tanaka Tomoyuki as producer, Honda Ishirō as director, Tsubura Eiji designing special effects, Ifukube Akira writing the musical score, Shimura Takashi playing the lead human role), Gojira was a blockbuster hit. The North American rights were bought cheaply ($25,000) by U.S. movie mogul Joseph Levine whose intention, it seems, was nothing more than capitalizing on a monster movie boom already peaking in the United States. Adding the American actor Raymond Burr and shooting these scenes in only one day, the U.S. distributors also streamlined the movie's content by one-third and sanitized the atomic storyline that Gojira so dramatically carried in Japan. In this remixed, Americanized version that grossed over $2,000,000 in profits, Godzilla was sufficiently popular to become a staple—through its franchising in movie sequels/spin-offs and its spread into other media such as comic books, cartoons, and advertising—in American mass culture for decades.

According to Tsutsui, the basic character as well as fundamental appeal of what turns out to be the longest-running film series in world movie history (a total of 28 films by Tōhō, the latest released in December 2004) have remained the same over the years. Godzilla/Gojira is "a man in a rubber suit, pretending to be a mighty, giant lizard, drawn inexorably to the cities of Japan" whose appeal is "broad, unpretentious, and timeless" (pp. 44–45). How, why, and to what audiences such a character has fed the popular imagination (and commercial pocketbooks) is what Tsutsui aims to excavate in Godzilla On My Mind. Writing in a reader-friendly mode shed of academic pretensions, the author is overtly dismissive of the "predictably hyperintellectualized theorizing of fan subcultures in contemporary America." Announcing that there will be "none of that here" (p. 143), Tsutsui's style is personal and friendly, but also scholarly in offering a solid history of the Godzilla movies—in terms of production, story lines, reception, movie culture—in both Japan and the United States.

There is much of great interest here, particularly in the way Tsutsui locates the cinematic monster against the backdrop of the cultural industries in both countries. In Japan, for example, Gojira was birthed during the heyday of the film industry in the 1950s and was targeted more to adult (than child) audiences to whom it offered a serious message about the dangers of (and Japan's...