Where gorgons breed

By David Blake

When King Kong was gunned down from the top of the Empire State building long ago one of the great takes of the 20th century occurred. Will Godzilla's death, entangled among the steel entrails of the Brooklyn Bridge and targeted by nuclear devices, prove as potent an image? Hardly, because the idea behind the two visions is different. Kong really died free to hit back; Godzilla was captured and executed. Kong was a male. He loved Fay Wray, star of the movie. Godzilla died a victim of nuclear transmutation, a push button creation, while Kong was created by the Old Man of the Mountains, God Himself.

Humanity's vast encumbrance of disbelief never applied to monsters. Their sexual power is as deep as the oceans they sometimes inhabit. They are real. Neptune ruled a terrifying kingdom as vast and varied as Jupiter's. Monsters are intimate with humans. They haunt our dreams and we are force fed with inexplicables from birth to death -- the great chaos of the womb to Father Christmas or Robert DeNiro at our bedsides as we breath our last.

Godzilla, due to human error deep and Pacific nuclear tests, has turned into a sort of mule, a vast blue-tongued lizard, neither male nor female, but an egg-laying species, on the prowl for a nice, cozy place to deposit its eggs and continue its survival line. After a bit of trouble from Japanese fishing boats, it ends up on the other side of the planet, in the East River and settles for Manhattan as a warm nesting place to start a family -- in the metro deeps, under Madison Square Garden. What a nursery.

And then the fun begins. W.C. Fields, the comedian, once said: "Never act with children or animals; you can't win." In this film one might have added monsters. Godzilla begins the big pendulum sway from one form of reality to another, and since none exist anywhere according to Plato, you can end up a mad horse by the time the film ends.

The humans in the story are a crappy lot. Hero-scientist and monster watcher is cold, unforgiving and self-satisfied. The heroine, razor profiled, is a cheat, liar, an expert manipulator. Her introduction to us is: "I began nice, but found nice is last." Nasty is first. So she made the quick change, and nasty she is. And, of course, she wins. She steals the top secret tapes her scientist boyfriend is saving for the New York Police Department, especially to help absolve France from any blame for the results of their highly controversial submarine nuclear explosions in the South Pacific. The heroine announces on TV, to a terrified nation, the full story of Godzilla's birth and its egg laying project in Manhattan.

New York goes berserk, along with the polluted politician who is running for mayor and sees his big chance in the mayhem Godzilla creates. But Godzilla has disappeared. They attempt to draw it from its lair with the smell of rotten fish, its chosen diet. The humans get mixed with the fish smell, and Godzilla's eggs begin to crack open into babies, not 12 as expected, but hundreds, all sniffing fish or humans as fish. Godzilla, a frantic parent, makes heroic efforts to save its children, bursts from its hiding place and goes to battle. The nation is alerted, recruited, and Manhattan is militarily out of bounds for the rest of New York. Madison Square Garden is to be destroyed.

So comes the climax -- a hair-raising chase through Manhattan with Godzilla in pursuit of the police and the laser blonde heroine.

Never did the beautiful old Big Apple look as alluring as it did in this show, mostly under rain. What are they who dash around under umbrellas, people or mushrooms or monster maggots from another nuclear era in Chernobyl? Maggot or monster, everything looks unreal -- quite hysterically not there, but filling sight, ear and emotions with actuality. Only the smell of the chase -- gas fumes, sweat and Godzilla's own body odour -- are missing. Probably, with the next production, the smelly era will have arrived. The Big Apple skyline remains. No one, not even Godzilla, has nuked it as yet.

The chase through the city speeds up to frenzy. Special effect movies have reached high levels. Perspective has been reinvented; weight and mass, always oppressively present in movies, are gone. Scale has gone. And any possibility of criticism has faded, leaving the viewer, on high doses of adrenaline and freedom to escape into the purely visual.

And blood flows. The Battle of the Apple, of the Babylon of the Western World, flows. Fish food for Godzilla flows. And so do the buildings, sliced to ribbons by the lashing tail and searing claws of the monster. Down Central Park rolls the toppled tiara of the Chrysler Building, gleaming like a Lipschitz sculpture. A moving moment. Nothing like chaos to heat up the blood stream.

But whose bloodstream? All this film stuff is a can of fish. Stars are false flesh, buildings are brown paper bags full of rubble. What's to be done with the humans in the movie when they are much less likable than the monster who only sought a nook in which to rear its eggs? Yet when it looks at a man face to face, all it gets is liquid fire or an old nuclear missile left over from last year's bargain sales. What a reputation homo sapiens has. No wonder we have so few visitors from the nearer constellations.

Finally Godzilla dies. He dies in a heap of viscous red matter topped by a suppurating creamy mayonnaise, like a Lucien Freud painting of an old, jumpy rock star. It is sad enough to hear Siefried's Funeral March as the creature's last blue eye, large as a blue lagoon in Penang, closes in death. The intolerable complexity of the machinery of life has come to a crash halt. A primal force in the hands of a flawed race is dangerous. The Gita has it in prime force: "I am become Death the Destroyer of worlds."