I love Big Lizards.
Dragons, dinosaurs. Kaiju.
I think it’s because nothing scares you when you’re that big. Nothing is a real threat when you’re 100 feet tall and weigh more than a house. More than an apartment building. You’re the biggest goddamn thing around and no one can tell you shit.
You can trample anything in your way. Or eat it.
A lot of things are scary these days, and sometimes I wish I was a giant monster, breathing fire. I wish I was Godzilla. I wish I could be a consequence of humanity’s hubris.
Godzilla, as the stories generally go, is a fish. Or a lizard. Or a whale? He’s something minding his own business. Or he’s an ancient being, left to his own peaceful devices deep in the ocean. Regardless, he’s taken from his peace by nuclear testing. Bikini Atoll. The destruction of all he knows for the furthering of mankind’s wrath.
Godzilla proceeds to punish humanity through utter destruction. It requires the abandonment of pride and the cooperation of all humans to overcome him, and even then, he usually just heads back home. Godzilla can’t be conquered, not really. The most we can hope for, now that we have violated the will of nature, is coexistence with a godlike being who eats radiation.
Godzilla stories, then, are examinations with how that coexistence might look. How do you witness the most violent devastation possible and keep going? How do you find the will to live, knowing it’s out there?
Through the promise of peace in a really big moth and her two faerie sidekicks. Through silliness, and horror. Through a story about a scientist who tries to preserve some memory of his daughter and ends up creating a plant monster. You find a way because the alternative is too unimaginable.
And, look, it’s just fun to watch a couple of really big made-up creatures duke it out in the middle of a city. It’s fun to watch the ray beam go off and slice through the world. It’s fun to imagine a living thing who doesn’t answer to anyone, who chooses to harm or help humanity because he can. None of us, on average, ever get the opportunity to change the world in such a massive way. There are too many problems in our world that are caused by people who will never see any consequences. There isn’t a punishment that will get doled out to those who brought us climate change, or deforestation, or fucking microplastics. In the real world we have to find a way to just live with the knowledge that a handful of people have real power to make things better for everyone, and they choose not to do so.
Sometimes when I am frustrated at work, or stuck in traffic, or feeling bad about the world, I imagine I could tear down a building.
And then I feel better.