Deathiversary Week 2015: Day 7

I got sick, I was behind schedule, and the alcohol wasn't helping any. In my attempt to be more focused and pointed in my thoughts this year, as unlike last time I fully expect there will be a next year and some things can go unsaid for now, my entries were very short and centered on only a handful of notes that, over time, became less and less exhaustive. Still, even with that, writing these pages became an enormous hassle for me as my cold or flu or whatever it was was so destructive, since I wasn't really possessed of the will to oppose it.

My plan for this day, nearly two months ago, was to, after I came back home (I was out drinking with my mom) to watch Godzilla 2000: Millennium and MAYBE GxM and then devote the whole day tomorrow, the 16th, I thought, to finishing up the last couple of Millennium films and then finally revisit gino 2. That was my plan. It fell apart when I realized it was already the 16th, the Deathiversary, and I had actually missed it.

It is a strange feeling, missing a holiday of your own creation. Surely there is no one else who should have their shit together better than me, but such was not the case. I was so devastated that I gave up completely, and I haven't touched this until today, nearly two months later.

So how did it happen? First of all you need to understand something about dates: they're not important. "Yes they are," I imagine you saying, "I need to know them so I can go to wo-OH!" Yep. No work, no school, no obligations, no friends, no circadian rhythm, no nothing. Without these things time is just a fluid that seeps in and out of my windows, occasionally brighter, but never with any real meaning or purpose. It all blends together for me, and as such it was only two days before the beginning of Deathiversary week when I actually noticed what day it was and began preparations. But I was doomed from the start, because my computer was wrong, and this is the only possible way I can keep track of the time. So, basically, if my computer was, say, something on the order of 30 hours in the past, then my entire world, as far as I know it, is 30 hours in the past. At any point if I had someone or something around that challenged my perception of time, I could have caught it and adjusted appropriately. But I don't have those things, and so I didn't realize what had happened until it was too late.

This was absolutely devastating to me, but now, two months later, I can finally finish this. I finished at Godzilla's first death, not his second, but it was a good enough stopping point as any. It leaves two major milestones open: seeing G2k for the first time (the actual movie, of course, not the Americanization) and re-watching gino 2 and reconfronting its horrors. It will be two years later that I finally do this with the 29th Godzilla movie about to drop at any moment (all I know is "summer"). But I need to get these articles finished now, finally, because it's time to go to Hell.

Oh, and quick disclaimer: except for one additional note, I don't know where all the stuff I wrote down about the drinking game rules ended up, so the lists here are simple copypastes of GvsMGII with one rule added for Destroyah. I just didn't feel like leaving that part out for some reason. I can't remember if I was actually drinking when I watched these, but probably not.

21. 1994 - ゴジラvsスペースゴジラ • Godzilla vs. Space Godzilla

Drinking Game Rules:
1 Drink - In case any chemical, geological, meteorological, or psychical, other than physical, sign of G's action is confirmed
2 Drinks - In case any physical sign of G's action such as voice and motion is confirmed
3 Drinks - In case G appears
4 Drinks - In case G's landing on any specific coast of Japan is positive
1 Drink - Godzilla uses his Atomic Ray
2 Drinks - Nuclear Pulse!
3 Drinks - Spiral Fire Ray!
1 Drink - When the Godzilla Theme plays
1 Drink - During a conference scene
1 Drink - When direct casualties of monster attacks are shown
1 Drink - Appearance or arrival onto a mysterious or monster inhabited island
1 Drink - If Godzilla can't be located or reappears in a totally different place
1 Drink - When a Kenji Sahara character appears
1 Drink - Hiroshi Koizumi plays a scientist
1 Drink - Whenever Kumi Mizuno is being awesome
1 Drink - If a fight ends with either the losers running away or the monsters falling off a cliff into the water
1 Drink - When Godzilla wins
1 Drink - Gratuitous English
1 Drink - A wild Kenny appears!
1 Drink - Mechagodzilla falls over
1 Drink - Any time G-Center or a G-Center equivalent is able to watch the movie on their viewscreen
1 Drink - When Miki Saegusa closes her eyes and thinks really hard
1 Drink - If the Mothra fairies sing her theme song
2 Drinks - If the Mothra fairies sing a different song

I have in my notes for in the column for additional drinking game rules the somewhat cryptic notation "theme song" and nothing else. Off-hand, I can't remember any particular musical cue that stands out to me from this movie that isn't the Godzilla theme, which is already on the list. Hattori is a great composer, and I really loved his G2k score in particular, especially the "two scientist friends" cue that played during the Organizer G-1 discovery, but he's not exactly... memorable. And GvsSG is even worse off because it's so out of place with the movie... or maybe that's not fair, since how could anything really fit in with this mess?

Unfortunately, because of the monumental drop in momentum here a lot of what was behind these notes I took I only vaguely remember and for those I do I don't really feel like getting into them now, it might have to wait until next year. So, instead, I'll handle each thing as a mini-paragraph (compared to how long these usually are).

Little Godzilla is Minilla. This is obvious, yeah, but when you think about Junior you don't think "oh well he's that stupid little baby" you go "oh yeah that full grown adult Godzilla" because that's why he's so important. But we get caught up in Minilla being... well, mini, because nominally we've only ever seen him as such, and so he tends to get treated as a totally different monster ala Mothra Leo because of this unique trait of his that "Godzilla" doesn't share. With the exception, of course, of Junior, who is Godzilla. But in this movie his design really is just a Heisei version of Minilla, which, as it's clear this is a fully mutated Godzilla now (Godzillasaurus doesn't grow to 30 meters tall), we can look back on Minilla as what he is, a child Godzilla and not some... thing. Which, at least this was the norm when being a "G-Fan" was still a thing, is a very difficult thing to grasp since seriously fuck Minilla. There's an interesting theory that popped up in one of those Japanese Toho monster encyclopedias about Minilla that I want to mention right quick. I have, before, attempted to use ASG as an explanation for why there are two Minillas (Minilla was born in 1967 yet the adult Godzilla we see in 1999 is still accompanied by a child "Minilla"), equating the Lagos Island Godzilla with Rozan who had to, you know, return to her home planet. The theory I mentioned is that adult Minilla isn't simply in DAM, but appears from Hedorah onwards which, as the growth pattern seen in the Heisei movies tells us, makes way more sense. This still doesn't explain what the hell happened to the second Godzilla, but it does nicely explain Godzilla's somewhat odd shift from "begrudging ally" to straight up superhero.

Someone (probably some dumb boy) asks Miki "do you ever think of anything besides Godzilla?" No. Besides being a recurring character, the reason why Miki popped up all the time - because she understood Godzilla far better than anyone - has a lot to do with the affection for the character, I think. I mean, Godzilla is all I've got anwyas, but if I could communicate with him telepathically? Holy shit I'd never do anything else, are you kidding me? A good example of how much this movie sucks is that this weirdly introspective moment about the audience very quickly becomes "YOU NEED A MAN, MIKI." God this movie is awful.

Speaking of romance, it's so dumb. The Yuki-Gondo romance in particular makes no sense at all. Chisaki was closer to Col. Gondo and she was able to move on and join the non-lethal Project T, while Yuki became a fucking crazy person who thinks he can kill Godzilla with a... blood... coagulant. Okay. These people hate each other the entire movie and you'd think they'd be bonding over the loss of their friend but its been 6 years now, and not enough development is done to make their relationship make any sense. It just sort of happens and you're like "oh... well I guess everyone has to pair up now." God this movie is awful.

This movie relies a lot on GvsB and it's kind of sad. The two '89 Toho monster movies didn't do so hot financially, despite them both being amazing (in their own ways, of course) and supposedly this is what led Kawakita to his drinking problem, which appears to have ultimately killed him. But by now (the original story was finally published in '93) word was getting back to Toho that yes, people did appreciate Biollante and yes, it was probably as good as things were ever going to get, and finally Kawakita's efforts were officially vendicated when, by a democratic process, it was revealed Biollante really was the best, and I don't have to feel heretical about putting it over the original. It reminds me of Silent Hill 2. It's just the best one and, really, it's never going to be like that ever again, especially now that Konami is no longer a thing. The way that later games in the series, like SH4, seem to lean on SH2 so heavily in order to remind people of a much better game is reminiscent of how much this movie wants to be a sequel to Biollante. But, like SH4, in its attempts to remind us all of the previous work just make it sink in further how awful the current thing is. And I mean SH4 is great and all, so maybe that comparison isn't totally fair, but... idunno, something feels wrong here.

Also, why is that reporter in Fukuoka so obsessed with hell? Is that some sort of in-joke with the writers? Is she possessed by demons? Is this not-so-subtle religious commentary? A foreshadowing of Godzilla in Hell? Man, that would be cool...

22. 1995 - ゴジラvsデストロイア • Godzilla vs. Destroyah

Drinking Game Rules:
1 Drink - In case any chemical, geological, meteorological, or psychical, other than physical, sign of G's action is confirmed
2 Drinks - In case any physical sign of G's action such as voice and motion is confirmed
3 Drinks - In case G appears
4 Drinks - In case G's landing on any specific coast of Japan is positive
1 Drink - Godzilla uses his Atomic Ray
2 Drinks - Nuclear Pulse!
3 Drinks - Spiral Fire Ray!
1 Drink - When the Godzilla Theme plays
1 Drink - During a conference scene
1 Drink - When direct casualties of monster attacks are shown
1 Drink - Appearance or arrival onto a mysterious or monster inhabited island
1 Drink - If Godzilla can't be located or reappears in a totally different place
1 Drink - When a Kenji Sahara character appears
1 Drink - Hiroshi Koizumi plays a scientist
1 Drink - Whenever Kumi Mizuno is being awesome
1 Drink - If a fight ends with either the losers running away or the monsters falling off a cliff into the water
1 Drink - When Godzilla wins
1 Drink - Gratuitous English
1 Drink - A wild Kenny appears!
1 Drink - Mechagodzilla falls over
1 Drink - Any time G-Center or a G-Center equivalent is able to watch the movie on their viewscreen
1 Drink - When Miki Saegusa closes her eyes and thinks really hard
1 Drink - Anytime the original movie is referenced, visually or otherwise
1 Drink - If the Mothra fairies sing her theme song
2 Drinks - If the Mothra fairies sing a different song

So this is as far as I got, up to Godzilla's death. The first time. Kind of fitting, in a way. Two short points: before Miki calls Junior to fight Destroyah he, and the other Godzilla as well, are headed towards the Bering Sea. Junior, if you remember was born near the Aleutian Islands, and the other Godzilla, born on Lagos, was teleported there, so it's sentimental, I s'pose, to both, but it's where Junior's egg was laid by the female Godzillasaurus meaning not only is Junior returning to his ancestral home like a salmon or something, but the Lagos Godzilla probably understands this a place to mate. He might also be headed there because he knows he's about to die. Okay, this is actually a pretty solid thought for it's own paragraph, I lied. Whatever. The other thing falls under another thing I was going to talk about anwyas.

Dr. Ijuin shares some similarities with two other important scientists in the series, Dr. Serizawa and Dr. Shiragami. His discovery was just that, a discovery, his "micro-oxygen" was something that already exists in nature. Exactly what it is they're vague about, and in this way they sort of future-proof themselves, since I don't think they're talking about an isotope. Dr. Serizawa, too, merely discovered something that was already there because of his work on oxygen, and was convinced there were was a beneficial application for it. Dr. Ijuin approached it from the opposite angle, and it seems as though the two did probably discover the same thing, only Ijuin came right out about food production and evaded the accusations about the Destroyer, even though he later conceded that he absolutely could create another Destroyer given the time and resources. He would have never volunteered this information had the situation with Godzilla not been so dire, and that leads me to the similarity he shares with Dr. Shiragami, as he almost repeats his line that there's no room for sentimentality in science. Serizawa would have killed himself, and he did, actually, but Ijuin already knew it was a lost cause anwyas. Shiragami lost everything, and in the end he regretted what he had become, and the monsters he made, because he was only human, but both he and Ijuin knew that even if they took a bold stand, someone else would create a new Destroyer or A.N.E.B.. We're already the parents of Godzilla, and remember, this isn't Honda's utopian future anymore.

Ultimately the lesson here seems to be that we are unable to stop making mistakes so long as we haven't learned enough from them yet. When the Showa Godzilla films were made, the civil rights movement was in full swing, hippies were all over the place, and the world was moving slowly from the nightmare of WWII into a brighter future of liberty and knowledge. We thought things would get better and, to some degree, they did. But by the 80's, complications in the Cold War and the oil crisis were an indication that we haven't really learned anything. When the Cold War ended, the former Middle Eastern allies of the United States became our worst enemies, and so the process continued, and even today in the era of the United Nations and the Antarctic Treaty, crazy megalomaniacal dictators pepper the globe, Russia is still objectively evil, and the United States still has more nuclear weapons than the rest of the world combined. If, tomorrow, we discovered the cure for cancer, do you think we'd have treated everyone within the next week? The next year? How much would big pharma charge, do you think? How much is a life worth? The problem is we, as modern people, always seem to think we know what the answer is, but inflation is still happening and we don't even seem to be cognizant of it. This is far from the post-war utopia Honda imagined, it might as well be WW4. It's disheartening for me to ask these kinds of questions, because I understand now that as long as they're being asked by a dinosaur, no one's really taking any of this seriously, and Godzilla's dead. Killed by commerce. We deserve it.

"Godzilla's just a hobby for me." Indeed. There's nothing wrong with this, I can't expect everyone to be like I am, nor do I want them to. There's only so much room inside Godzilla's temple, and for most it's nothing more than a quaint relic of the mythology of a long lost era, one where we were naive enough to think a monster could somehow change things. Godzilla, who has stuck strictly to his guns as a fully owned subsidiary, is very much still a commercial avenue, even if that's all he is now, but even when there was something... else... going on, marketing and merchandising were still a part of his survival in culture. The same could be said for Superman and, folks, Superman's not going anywhere. The hobby of Godzilla can enrich people, give them something to think and talk about, and make some enterprising folks a lot of money, but at the end of the day it's still just a facade. On the other side of that facade is me, Godzilla's human avatar on Earth. Personally, because I understand Godzilla at a greater level than... well, almost everyone, I don't really think it's weird that I'm not Japanese, because Godzilla isn't about lines. But there is another person like me who is, and I don't know her personally, but I found out about her from one of those "Japanese fans react" articles on the geek-blog-o-sphere, which I'm going to copypaste here:

"Godzilla is neither friend nor foe, but something beyond our control," says Shizue Horie, 54, whose love affair with Godzilla started when her father took her to see one of the early movies.

The original she has seen many times. "Where it all began," she said.

She feels her life has been defined by Godzilla. She met her husband after a painful divorce through their mutual interest in Godzilla. And she has taken her children and their friends to Godzilla movies. She gets teary-eyed, remembering when the Japanese Godzilla series ended a decade ago.

"It's as though my job was over," she said.

 You don't have to be much more than a "hobbyist" to know that last line was mistranslated. The more appropriate translation is "my mission is over." To Shizue, Godzilla was everything, it was her life, and when her life fell apart, it was Godzilla who helped her put it back together. Now she's married, and has children, and suddenly happens. For me, it was everything, but in Shizue we see someone who is able to let go. Godzilla was her life, and now that that chapter has closed there's more for her to do. But I'm Shizue, am I? Nope, I'm still here. Godzilla is dead and I'm still here, I've got nothing left, and I've got no chance. It seems appropriate to me that the Japanese avatar has a life of her own to lead, while the American one is just kind of fucked. It's difficult for me to talk about this sort of thing, because I don't really know how to impress how little everything else matters to me compared to Godzilla, for everyone else he's just a "hobby," but he's all I've got, and then hollywood took him from me.

The good news, though, is that I'll get to follow him through hell and, eventually, join him.