MOVIE REVIEW: ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK (1981)

 Directed by John Carpenter

Produced by Debra Hill and Larry Franco

Director of Photography Dean Cundey

Production Designer Joe Alves

Editor Todd Ramsay

Music by John Carpenter and Alan Howarth

Written by John Carpenter and NIck Castle

Pervasive Atmosphere of Cool Cynicism by Post-Watergate Disillusionment and Cannabis

Starring

St. Louis as Manhattan

Kurt Russell as Snake Plissken

Dick Warlock as Stunt Plissken

Ernest Borgnine as Cabbie

Season Hubley as Girl in Chock Full O’Nuts

Adrienne Barbeau as Maggie

Harry Dean Stanton as Brain

Joe Unger as the Mysterious Taylor

Donald Pleasence as President

Lee Van Cleef as Hauk

Charles Cyphers as Secretary of State

Tom Atkins as Rehme

John Strobel as Cronenberg

Isaac Hayes as the Duke

Frank Doubleday as Romero

Ox Baker as Slag

Nancy Stephens as Stewardess

Buck Flower as Other President

…

“We left our country for our country’s good.”

-attributed to George Barrington, Australian pioneer, 1802

“If you love someone, set them free; if they come home, set them on fire.”

-George Carlin, Brain Droppings (1997)

…

Review by William D. Tucker. 

Did you know that in the 1990s, Manhattan was turned into a huge penal colony? 

That’s one of the things you learn when you watch Escape From New York. 

You see, America became a police state either because people started committing too many crimes and acting all crazy, or-what’s more likely-the government decided to criminalize most anything you could think of: drugs, disloyalty, birth control, abortion, foul language, public assemblies,  sex before marriage, non-Christian religion, atheism, sex during marriage, unions, sex after marriage, non-incumbent political parties-

I mean, cigarettes are still legal. That’s for sure. You get to see some throwback smoking-on-camera in this one. I bet Tom Snyder loved this flick. I’m even willing to bet that somewhere inside retro-future Manhattan, Snyder’s still hosting his show. Got to be. 

Of course, I’m just speculating about everything other than the cigarettes, because all we’re told is that the crime rate rose 400% in 1988, which sounds to me more like they just radically increased the number of things you could get sent up for, as opposed to a legit breakdown of the social order necessitating some kind of a police intervention. But maybe I’m wrong. I wasn’t there, you know. Yes, I was alive in 1988, technically, but I was living in a different reality than Escape From New York. I think. 

Air Force One is hijacked by a radical communist militant who has disguised herself as a stewardess, and this lady crashes the plane into one of the many darkened skyscrapers on Manhattan. The stewardess reads off a manifesto stating that she is crashing the plane into the Manhattan penal colony because she thinks the American government is a racist police state and that the figurehead of that police state-the President, natch-should be consigned to the very hell on earth he has constructed. Fair enough. 

Once again, we are reminded of just how easy cuddly ol’ Tricky Dick Nixon got off when we take the long view of history.  (To be fair what’s a few sideshow bombings of Cambodia, really, when you get down to it? It’s fine, it’s fine. I’m sure Jesus forgave Nixon all his sins before tossing him into the deepest pit of hell. It’s so fuckin’ fine. I could shit.)

Now, there is one big problem with 86ing the President under these circumstances. Apparently, he was en route to a three-way peace summit with China and Russia to perhaps end an ongoing World War III type of situation happening waaaay in the background of this modestly budgeted-but resourceful and imaginative-film. If the President can’t make his commitment to appear at this summit, then, well, the war might escalate. Maybe China or Russia or both will perceive America as a place where the culture and the government are in total free fall, and try to use that to their advantage. Remember, in politics, perception is everything. If your enemy perceives you as weak, as out-of-control, maybe they’ll pitch a nuke your way. See if you really are packin’ some kind of Raygun Ronnie Reagan orbital defense system. Maybe you’re nothing but a stuffed suit of clothes. Not the best look for Baldy Ol’ Eagleland. 

Manhattan, in the movie reality, is a desperate place. The electricity’s been cut off. A wall has been built around the island. All the rivers and canals have been mined. There’s a completely militarized National Police Force that patrols the penal colony with attack helicopters equipped with rockets and machine guns. And this is where all the criminals end up-everybody’s here. No one’s been left out. Murderers. Rapists. Thieves. Counterfeiters. Embezzlers. Dissidents. The wrongly accused. The sick. The mentally ill. People who couldn’t pay their rent. Women who shot their rapists. Anybody who isn’t strictly heterosexual or cis-gendered. Income tax evaders. Income tax protesters. Narco-entrepreneurs. People who’ve been unemployed for too long. East coast intellectual elites. Mild critics of the government. Strident critics of the government. People who used to be in the government prior to the current administration. The loyal opposition. Civil rights activists. War protesters. And they’re all left to fend for themselves, to make the best of a tough situation. As Jaimie Lee Curtis tells us in voice over, “There are no guards. Only the prisoners and the worlds they create.” 

The prisoners of Manhattan have figured out ways to kludge steam engines and mini-oil refineries out of the cars and infrastructure left behind from before the lockdown. Rival gangs and tribes have piled up junkers to form little Berlin Walls between the different ad hoc power blocs. They’ve got shivs and baseball bats with nails driven through the heads and garbage can lid shields and  Molotov cocktails-oh, yes! The DIY spirit is truly ascendent despite the total lack of government. Maybe it’s because of the lack of government. Hard to figure. 

This new Manhattan is a fearsome place, tho’-you won’t catch me going there voluntarily. You’ve got hordes of people living in the sewers and the subways who’ve gone not just feral-but full-on cannibal. They emerge in the dead of night to raid medical supplies, building materials, and meat. People meat. Just don’t eat the brains. You don’t want to fuck with rogue prions, now. Unless you’ve gone full zombie. In that case, eat your fill. 

There’s no government, but there is royalty: the Duke of New York played with a sullen, creepy intensity by Isaac Hayes. I’m not sure, but I think the Duke is just one warlord among many in Manhattan. We don’t get any official back story on the Duke, but he has adorned himself with a sort of community theater looking Napoleonic outfit. In my head canon, I imagine him as a guy who came to Manhattan scared out of his mind, and so he holed up in some abandoned apartment where all he had was a biography of Napoleon. This became his self-help regimen: he imagined himself as a great conqueror, and so he found the will to carve out his own piece of hell. 

The President survives the plane crash, and is kidnapped by the Duke. A group of national cops goes on a commando mission to get the President back, but they are warned off by the Duke’s Number One Guy: a freaky-deaky dude named Romero, who seems to have fashioned himself into a kind of punk rock Nosferatu. Remember, it’s just the prisoners and the worlds they have created, so maybe that’s a way of saying that each inmate has resorted to living in their heads . . . until their dark dreams have broken loose-no doubt a liberation for some, and a nightmare for others. 

Romero definitely seems to be in his element. Here’s some more gratuitous head canon: tho’ the movie predates the advent of widespread live action role playing, maybe in the parallel timeline a kind of analogue of those vampire and werewolf LARP games evolved. Romero could’ve been a LARPer, pre-lockdown, and now he’s living his best life inside the new Manhattan. 

Romero tells the super-pigs to fuck off, and shows them a finger sliced off the President’s hand bearing a ring with the Presidential seal. Super-pigs do the backdown. The President’s now in the clutches of the Duke and his people. 

The Police Commissioner of Manhattan-a Bob Hauk-decides that taking the island by main force will just end up with a dead President, and so he turns to super-badass motherfucker Snake Plissken-conveniently in pre-processing for transfer to the penal colony on charges of armed bank robbery-to execute a solo penetration mission and rescue the nine-fingered chief executive. Snake isn’t just a violent criminal. Snake’s ex-special forces, a master of killing people, breaking shit, and survival under hellish circumstances.  He ran some kind of heavy shit down in Leningrad. 

Hauk reads off Snake’s permanent record, and we find out that ‘S.D. Plisskin’ is the dude’s government name. Snake’s the name he’s given himself. Snake also wears an eyepatch. I like to think Snake carved out his own eye, just so he could keep everything two-dimensional, but I’m the only one who thinks that. Hauk dangles a full pardon for all crimes committed on US soil if Snake sneaks into Manhattan and extracts the President. Hauk has Snake by the balls. Snake takes the job.  

So much of this movie is about a man on a mission. Snake has his objectives laid out, he even has a much pared-down version of those Q-sequences in the 007 movies, where all his gadgets and weapons are set out before him while Tom Atkins exposits the basic rules of the DIY tribes of the new Manhattan. Snake gets a big watch with a countdown to doomsday clock. He has a walkie-talkie so he can stay in contact with mission control. He gets a submachine gun. I caught some ninja stars on the equipment table on the rewind. Snake’s bringing some serious party favors. 

Hauk doesn’t trust Snake, nor should he. So, in his hard-boiled wisdom, he has a doctor inject our hero with a pair of tiny explosive devices that slowly dissolve in the bloodstream until their lethal cores are exposed and cause fatal internal hemorrhaging. What’s interesting about this scene is that it is not clear that Hauk was going to tell Snake the truth. First, he flat out lies to Snake telling him he’s about to get some kind of powerful antibiotic that will protect him from the unsanitary environment of the new Manhattan. But then the doctor goes off program and insists that Hauk tell Snake the truth. This is a moment-maybe one of the few-where somebody actively resists some manifestation of the corrupt American government-Police Commissioner Hauk is the avatar of corruption in this instance-and tries to operate according to a credible ethical code. Yes, the doctor has already violated his hippocratic oath to do no harm-but he owns up to his crime to the degree that he can. I’m always struck by the doctor’s tiny act of resistance. It’s something. 

Once Snake finds his way to Manhattan, we get a lot of impressively wide shots where our hero wanders in the middleground of elaborately bombed-out areas of the big bad city while distant figures move furtively in the deep background. One shot even glides past a listless wino intrusively breaking into the foreground of the shot as he stares at the impressive action figure of a man that is Snake as he stalks towards the background to get a look at the burning wreckage of Air Force One. 

Another shot stretches out ahead of us with jealous green streetlights-somebody’s hooked up to some rogue juice-as Snake stalks deeper into the metropolitan labyrinth. 

And the deeper in we get, the more the new Manhattan seems to become a kind of repository for eclectic bits of cinematic fantasy: 

A drag show where the band consists of some bedraggled cowboys who look like they escaped from the legendarily dysfunctional set of Heaven’s Gate; which is the fire, and which the frying pan, eh?

Adrienne Barbeau looking like a seductive enchantress as she descends the stairs into a subterranean antechamber to a bizarre hybrid of library and oil refinery bearing a proper burning torch as though she were in the depths of Frankenstein’s castle. 

We even get a Karnov-looking pro-wrastler in the middle of a smoky indoor gladiatorial arena. 

Westerns. Gothic horror. Lethal bloodsport. DIY oil rigs in the middle of libraries. There’s something for everybody in the new Manhattan. 

(I found myself thinking, “Maybe the American police state has become so repressive, because it has no way of incorporating the rebellious and fanciful side of the collective human psyche. It has to partition it off into a very harsh place where it’ll fester and grow and take its own path. Maybe China and Russia and the White House will come to regret the loss of the authentically human spark and endeavor to play at some proxy wars and start hustling in weapons and big ideological promises and trash bags full of cash-call it Manhattan-stan-in order to claw back what they were once so eager to excise from the body politic. In the end, everybody still wants to be in New York . . .”)

Now, I should remind you-remind myself-that so much is left unsaid in this movie. All the background details are just that-background. The main action is Snake and his mission, but you can well see how you could derive a whole tabletop RPG sourcebook by scanning its ninety-something minutes over and over. You may already be aware that Snake Plisskin was the inspiration for the video game character Solid Snake in those Metal Gear and Metal Gear Solid games. Hideo Kojima-the former creative lead behind everything Metal Gear-has claimed that Escape From New York  was a big influence-although I think Kojima appropriated more material from the much-maligned Escape From L.A., if you look into it.

Snake is the perfect video game protagonist: the dude can move, he can fight, he can pitch a blade into a dude’s skull, he knows how to shoot, he can climb, he can jump, and he has just enough stripped down humanity to fill up a few cutscenes if you need some of those. Kojima’s knockoff version is way chattier, and, frankly, way more of a normie. The more I think about it,  Solid Snake strikes me as some fucking dad cosplaying as an actual tough guy. Solid Snake seems to like people, and he seems to want people to like him. Snake Plisskin’s fuck dispenser broke down long ago.

And yet . . . Snake does start to get it by the end of his mission. It may not be enough to save the world. It’s barely enough to save himself. But he does start to see the world just a tiny bit beyond his own narrow survival trip.

When given the chance to speak to the President, Snake asks him what he thinks about the fact that lots of people have died as part of the rescue mission. It’s hard to know for sure, but Snake seems to be asking about all the dead, friend and foe alike, since all the people who’ve been shipped to the new Manhattan have basically been forced into a desperate war of all-against-all by a totalitarian regime. Snake isn’t really mad at the people he’s been obliged to kill in order to achieve his mission. He’s mad at the overall perma-fucked reality he finds himself fighting to survive. 

And Snake gets an answer.

It’s a shitty answer, but he gets it.

Be happy you get even that. 

 

As with a lot of fantasy settings, the new Manhattan seems like a fun place to go crazy for a few days, but you wouldn’t want to actually live or die there. 

Or maybe you would. 

Unlike present-day Manhattan, you could probably afford the rent. 

That’s for goddamn sure. 

MOVIE REVIEW: THE SHAPE OF WATER (2017)

Directed by Guillermo Del Toro

Written by Guillermo Del Toro and Vanessa Taylor

Produced by Guillermo Del Toro and J. Miles Dale

Cinematography by Dan Laustsen

Edited by Sidney Wolinsky

Music by Alexandre Desplat

Starring
Sally Hawkins
Octavia Spencer
Richard Jenkins
Doug Jones
Michael Shannon
Michael Stuhlbarg

Review by William D. Tucker

The Shape of Water is a Cold War era science-fiction fairy tale about monstrosity, romance, interior states of fantasy, and the break down of perfect systems of control whether they be American capitalistic militarism or Soviet totalitarian communism as agents or assets within those systems break under pressure, find love, decay in their given jobs, or some combination of these factors. The movie bounces back and forth between different levels of harsh external reality and interior fantasy.

We begin in the depths of some lagoon, and zoom into the submerged hallway of an apartment building. The water drains away, and we realize we are in a kind of dream, or some more elastic than normal reality all in tones of green. When the narrative voice over comes across the speakers, and the opening credits of actors, producers, and craftspeople appear on-screen it actually kind of brings us back down to reality because we get our bearings: we're watching a narrative movie with actors playing characters conceived in a screenplay written by humans, produced by humans, directed by a human. We, the audience, exit the zone of uncertain surrealism, and begin to navigate the Cold War, pre-Kennedy assassination world of The Shape of Water.

Our protagonist is a mute-but not deaf-woman named Elisa Esposito (Sally Hawkins), who works nights as a janitor inside a top secret government facility in Baltimore rather cleverly called Occam Aerospace Research Center. Elisa was abandoned as an infant, seemingly bearing the scars on her neck of some horrible mutilation which has left her mute. Elisa's partner on the night shift is fellow janitor Zelda Fuller (Octavia Spencer), who confides every last detail of her mundane marriage to Elisa, who is happy to listen since she lives alone and seems to live vicariously through Zelda, and her neighbor Giles (Richard Jenkins), a middle-aged commercial artist who also lives alone. Giles and Elisa both live in neighboring apartments, and they constitute each other's primary form of social life. If Giles were heterosexual and thirty years younger, he would've proposed to Elisa by now, and maybe Eliza would've accepted-but this reality isn't so simple for these good-hearted, struggling people.

One night, Elisa and Zelda are cleaning a chamber of the gothic research center containing an open pool when a high tech cylinder is wheeled in containing a humanoid fish man creature (Doug Jones, who played the similar Abe Sapien in the two Del Toro directed Hellboy movies) overseen by Colonel Strickland (Michael Shannon) a super creep in a suit who's in charge of the fish-man at the research center. Elisa sees the creature through the plate glass of the cylinder and there's an immediate connection between the human and the seemingly non-human. Or less-than-human? Or more-than-human? Later, we find out that the the fish-man-referred to as "the asset'"-was kidnapped from his home in a river in South America, and that this creature is believed to offer new modes of existence to the human race which could make them more durable in outer space . . . but the only way to know is to dissect "the asset."

Complications arise. Colonel Strickland reveals himself to be a white supremacist and a  sexual predator. Elisa establishes an unexpected rapport with the fish-man. Not to mention there's a Soviet agent in the house. The Soviets may try to steal the fish-man, or destroy him to prevent him from giving up cosmic secrets to the Americans. Everyone sees some precious dream within "the asset," who is characterized as having been once worshiped as a god in his native land, and may possess paranormal power.

Along the way, conflicts involving sexuality, class, race, white supremacy, and the oppression of women during 1960s America boil forth from the soul of this intricate dream of a film.

I don't want to give away too much, here, you really should just see how it plays out for yourself.

The Shape of Water is my personal favorite film I've seen in an actual movie theatre this past year. Only Get Out, Logan, Blade Runner 2049, and Detroit came anywhere near moving me the way this movie did. It's also a strong return to form for Guillermo Del Toro, who's previous films-Crimson Peak and Pacific Rim-were gorgeous visual spectacles, but came up short in the script department, falling back on the tropes of gothic romance novels and mecha anime. Entertaining, sure, but somewhat insubstantial for me. This is easily his best movie since Pan's Labyrinth. Nothing comes easy for any of the characters-good, evil, in-between-in this story. Even the repulsive Colonel Strickland is shown in context as an effect of a system of brutality more than a cause, though Strickland himself is absolutely complicit.

The Shape of Water even has my single favorite line of dialogue of this past year's cinema . . . which I wouldn't dream of spoiling!

Be good to yourself. Go see it.

MOVIE REVIEW: GODZILLA 1985, a.k.a THE RETURN OF GODZILLA

Directed by Koji Hashimoto

U.S. Scenes Directed by R.J. Kizer

Music by Reijiroh Koroku

Additional Music by Christopher Young

Cinematography by Kazutami Hara

A Toho Production

Starring

Kenpachiro Satsuma as Godzilla

Keiju Kobayashi as Prime Minister Mitamura

Hiroshi Koizumi as Professor Minami

Raymond Burr as Steve Martin

Ken Tanaka as Goro Maki

Yasuko Sawaguchi as Naoko Okumura

Yosuke Natsuki as Professor Hayashida

Review by William D. Tucker. 

Godzilla 1985 is the first movie I remember seeing on the big screen. I was maybe three years old, and it was an intoxicating experience. I don't recall being scared when I first saw it. I was awed. I saw the entire modern edifice of civilization, its skyscrapers, its ultra-tech military toys, its pathetic Cold War Great Powers gamesmanship, its nuclear reactors, and even its nuclear weapons utterly obliterated by a giant, quasi-humanoid dinosaur with crazed, hurting eyes that breathed blue fire, and roared in a way that I always wished I could imitate whenever I was at home with my Godzilla action figure.

That roar was a sound that no human could make. I was convinced. Godzilla was real. Godzilla was unstoppable. Never mind the fact that he gets dropped into a volcano and buried under a massive, demolitions-triggered avalanche--I knew he would be back.

I knew Godzilla was real. Even though the movie was obviously fake. Tanks, mobile anti-Godzilla missile batteries, fighter jets, and those articulated mobile laser beam satellite dish things that never do any damage but are always trotted out, at vast expense to the Japanese taxpayers, to zap the giant monsters--all were clearly radio controlled toys. The skyscrapers were all obviously models rigged to fall apart and explode in exact ways. The Japanese actors were all clearly dubbed into flattened-affect English, although the Japanese Prime Minister's face quivered with genuine emotion as he faced the prospect of a third nuclear annihilation by a missile meant to assassinate Godzilla. All of this transparent artifice conspired to create a kind of fantasy zone where a story this outrageous could safely play out, where an audience could sit in the dark and let a Devonian beast of doom sweep away a world made grim by nuclear weapons, Reaganomics, Secret Soviet Nuclear Cities, and the doldrums of sitcom idiocy. To a child, radio-controlled toys are cool. Giant monsters spitting fire are awesome! Crumbling-exploding model buildings are superneat! And what about that disgusting mutant sea louse that attacks the guy on the derelict boat at the very beginning?! Realism is not necessary or sufficient for whimsical fun.

And then there were the US-only "added value" scenes with Raymond Burr as a journalist and a bunch of guys no one ever heard of as the military functionaries voyeuristically observing Godzilla's rampage via telescreen in a Strangelovian bunker somewhere in the bowels of the Pentagon. One of the voyeurs is a red-haired smartass who at one point remarks of Godzilla's rampage through downtown Tokyo, "That's quite an urban renewal program they have going on there!" Raymond Burr's character, named Steve Martin, offsets laughing boy's Airplane!-esque wisecracks with such grim pronouncements as this,

"Nature has a way sometimes of reminding Man of just how small he is. She occasionally throws up the terrible offspring of our pride and carelessness to remind us of how puny we really are in the face of a tornado, an earthquake, or a Godzilla. The reckless ambitions of Man are often dwarfed by their dangerous consequences. For now, Godzilla-that strangely innocent and tragic monster-has gone to earth. Whether he returns or not, or is never again seen by human eyes, the things he has taught us remain . . ."

Godzilla is famous for his grudge matches against other giant beasts such as the pro-human lepidoptera Mothra, the malevolent space-born King Ghidorah the Three-Headed Monster, Hedorah the Smog Monster(a.k.a. Hedorah the Shambling Pollution Metaphor), the freakish pteranodon Rodan, and his shiny cyber-doppelganger Mechagodzilla.

In Godzilla 1985 the primary antagonist is not a fellow giant beast but the high tech, heavily armed VTOL craft the Super-X which has been secretly under construction by the Japanese government in anticipation of World War III. The Super-X is equipped with missiles, vulcan cannons, high powered laser beams, and cadmium bombs which the powers that be hope will shut down the biological nuclear reactor that is speculated to be at the heart of the beast. The Super-X is piloted by a hotshot crew of dudes in orange jumpsuits who could pass for a dedicated Devo cover band.

The Super-X comes close to killing Godzilla with its cadmium bombs which it fires down Godzilla's throat with a (circa 1985) high tech aiming system that makes total war seem like a big budget video game. Godzilla suffers a titanic case of heartburn and acid reflux. Drooling stomach acid, he slumps against the base of a towering skyscraper. "Wonder Lizard is down for the count!" cheers Corporal Smartass.

Too soon, my bro!

A Soviet nuclear missile which had been launched in the hopes of preventing Wonder Lizard from bringing down the Iron Curtain is intercepted by another nuke launched by the USA. A massive atmospheric nuclear blast triggers an EMP, interfering with the live feed into the secret bunker of the Pentagon, shorting out some of the navigation systems on board the Super-X, and causes a formidable lightning storm which launches a lightning bolt at Godzilla. The bolt jumpstarts Godzilla's heart. He shakes off the dust of ruined buildings, and rises to his full height. He fixes his hateful eyes on his foe, the Super-X, and charges into battle. The Super-X unleashes a storm of ordinance and death rays, all of it detonating harmlessly against Godzilla's super-tough hide. Godzilla scorches the Super-X with a withering blast of radioactive fire, and the hope of the Japanese military-industrial complex sputters and sinks towards the asphalt. Godzilla delivers the coup de grace by crushing it with a skyscraper. Exit Devo cover band.

At age three, the battle between Godzilla and the Super-X was without a doubt the coolest thing I had ever seen. When Godzilla dropped dead after swallowing the cadmium bombs, I thought that was it. Then the whole nuclear missile plot kicked in, and the suspense of whether or not Tokyo would be annihilated by the Russian missile supplanted the saga of the radioactive lizard. But not for long . . . and when the revivified beast finally crushed the Super-X I was deeply gratified. Once again, the bogus progress of an arrogant high tech civilization had been shown up for a sham. Wonder Lizard marches on!

In the end, humanity triumphs when the military-industrial complex prostrates itself before the university scientists. The eggheads come up with a plan to lure Godzilla away from Tokyo by transmitting modified bird frequencies into the beast's brain. The logic, I suppose, is that since dinosaurs evolved into birds, Godzilla somehow has a rapport with the sounds that birds make. Or maybe the scientists were able to use their DNA sampling supercomputers and sound manipulation software to extract the ancient dinosaur mojo from the birds and transform it into signals that would attract Godzilla. Toho Science at its finest!

The signal lures Godzilla to the precipice of Mount Fuji. Explosives are detonated. He falls into the churning magma, soon to be buried by a second wave of high explosives. Godzilla unleashes a piercing, high-pitched version of his scream. The music swells, and Raymond Burr eulogizes "that strangely innocent and tragic monster" in a sonorous voice over. Exit Wonder Lizard.

Watching this movie again, it still gets to me. It imprinted itself upon me at a very early age, and I suspect it was the beginnings of my anxiety about world annihilation. All throughout my childhood and adolescence I had recurring dreams of the world being destroyed by nuclear bombs. I was always fascinated by imagery of nuke tests and displays of military firepower. As a teenager, I read H.P. Lovecraft and was captivated by his mythos of giant rubbery beasts from distant stars waging cataclysmic war across the face of the primeval earth. Reading At the Mountains of Madness I discovered humanity's true origin: our species evolved as a by-product of menial work organisms bred for slave labor by the Great Old Ones. The menials were among the few survivors of those disastrous conflicts. Most of the Old Ones were killed, some fled to the stars, others went into hibernation. Was Godzilla a Great Old One? Maybe a distant relation. If Godzilla was a Great Old One, maybe his desire to inflict damage on humanity grew out of his resentment at the ascendancy over vast gulfs of time of the former servitor organisms. Godzilla lashes out at humanity to remind us of where we come from . . . yeah, I know, that's not what the Godzilla movies say about his origin. This is my homebrew fanfic version, take it or leave it.

In recent years, I've rediscovered the joys of old monster movies. In particular the Godzilla films, but also other Japanese sci-fi and fantasy films. In my adolescence, I lost track of my sense of humor, and could no longer tolerate these movies' distinct retro-charms. The beyond-lame 1998 Hollywood movie directed by Roland Emmerich did not help. This disinterest continued well into the 21st century until around 2005 when I saw Godzilla Final Wars. I tracked down a VHS copy of Godzilla 1985 and was instantly transported back to the age of three, and realized this movie was my Citizen Kane, my Rosebud of a sort. It's hard for me to be too analytic about it, although certain rather adult sentiments and ironic reflections have worked their way into my understanding of the movie. Watching it now, it acts as a strange kind of magnet drawing forth from the depths of my consciousness my three year old self, not totally obliterated by time and neuronal demolition and reconstruction (Neuronal Renewal Program . . .?), and I view the movie not alone but with this ghost of my three year old self.