Wrestling with Godzilla: Intertextuality, Childish Spectatorship, and the National Body

Abstract

Godzilla certainly is an intertextual beast. Especially with the 2004 release in the United States of the uncut 1954 original, viewers must be reminded of how that film intersected with many contemporary issues and texts, ranging from the H-bomb testing in the Pacific to King Kong, thereby formulating a popular cultural reaction to the atomic bomb, America, World War II, and the cold war. Recalling such original intertexts, however, should not serve to corral and restrict readings of the film and its subsequent series. As a monster stomping over the years through a variety of cultural, political, and social contexts, Godzilla has been intertextual precisely because it has always broken free of attempts to enclose its semiotic wanderings in a single text (or to confine it on Monster Island, for that matter). There have always been other contexts that problematize efforts to fix Godzilla’s meaning, and which therefore point to complicated forms of spectatorship that might not only create alternative meanings for the giant lizard, but also celebrate this wandering textuality. Godzilla can offer one window onto what we could call the dual monsters of textuality and spectatorship in Japanese film history, offering an example of the historical struggles over what movies mean and who determines that.