Lessons from a Terror
I’m not sure it’s going to end up in my updated show at this rate because I’m struggling with it, but I’m working on a poem about the 1975 film “Terror of Mechagodzilla.”
It’s the first Godzilla film that ever had a woman credited as the primary writer.
I didn’t know that when I watched it though and honestly wouldn’t have guessed that a woman wrote the film based on my first watch.
This movie has arguably one of the most active and present female characters in the Godzilla series in Katsura. However, she’s actually an evil robot. She falls in love with the lead male character over the course of a few days and seemingly out of nowhere. We see her boobs (they’re fake, but still) for no reason. And (spoiler alert) she dies at the end after they connect her brain to Mechagodzilla and the evil robot is defeated by Godzilla.
This all screams typical patriarchal nonsense, right?
In A Critical History and Filmography of the Toho’s Godzilla Series, the author notes that Ishiro Honda (the OG Godzilla director) noted Yukiko Takayama’s screenplay was poetic, but not cinematic, and he was “obliged to rewrite it extensively.”
So there’s that.
Even still, in my process, I’m reminded of a formative memory from a literature course during my time at William Jewell College.
We were reading Beowulf, which is not exactly known for being a feminist work. And my fellow classmates and I were lamenting how few lines the Queen had in the text. Our professor asked us to reconsider the quality vs. quantity of her lines. True, the Queen didn’t speak a lot, but when she did they were formative for the plot and other characters.
The one who is speaking the most, isn’t always the most powerful. Or, said another way, often the quality of our words can matter more than the quantity. Which feels particularly meaningful as a creative living in the era of social media asking for constant production.
There was no man in that room telling us that the Queen (and by extension, we) were less than the male characters. We read that into the story ourselves. While of course, systemic problems with sexism are real and need to be addressed. I think there’s something to be said about how we’ve internalized so much of the bullshit that we start to see it everywhere regardless of what’s in front of us.
The truth is that a woman wrote Terror of Mechagodzilla and that shapes how I look at it, even if a man had influences, too. Maybe now, I can interpret the cyborg love story as being a metaphor of what it’s like to feel like a woman trapped in her rigid, assigned roles but trying to connect, make a difference, and fall in love anyway.
This is the kind of nonsense that English majors think about.
Don’t forget to grab tickets to Godzilla’s Not a Dinosaur at the Westport Bowery on June 27th!
