- Godzilla. I begin with Godzilla because this monster was the one that first put the idea in my head. Godzilla started in 1954 when Toho released the first movie. It was a giant monster that burned Tokyo. Now, history students might recall that Japan was just recovering from losing WWII, and that the end days of the war were not pretty. Fear was fairly rampant in some areas of Japan, especially among children and people who lived in cities. Aside from the nuclear weapons used on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, there were firebombings of some major cities as well. The firebombings were particularly deadly because so much of the architecture was built from wood. So, a generation of Japanese grew up with the fear and the unsettling expectation that they might wake up to find their entire city, and everyone they knew, going up in a gruesome nightmare of fire and smoke. Then, just nine years later, Godzilla emerges from the ashes of a burnt-out collective unconscious. Japanese film at the time was heavily regulated by the government, in large part to prevent the Japanese people from glorifying the empire and the war effort. A similar approach was taken in the deNazification of Germany. The point is that films could not come out and explicitly name what the Japanese feared or hated, or tell a story based on the actual war effort, so the fears and anger became sublimated, only to emerge in monstrous form. Godzilla could not be mistaken as a piece about the war, or about the empire, but the chilling fears that a monster that levels cities can evoke provided a channel for the collective fear and anger of the Japanese citizenry. So, Godzilla came to represent the fear of nuclear holocaust, of firebombings, and, more interestingly, of the United States, the perpetrator of the violence. I find it very flattering, actually, because later, as Japan and the US became more friendly, and the US became a sort of military protector of Japan (Japan's military being disbanded under US protection, as part of the surrender) Godzilla transcended the role of monster and became a kind of protector of Japan, fighting off other, more dangerous monsters. Godzilla eventually became a kind of cultural icon, even a role-model. I think that this strange reversal of Godzilla's perception is the biggest indicator that Godzilla is us.
- King Kong. If you ever see the original 1930's version of the movie (my favorite) you will notice the fairly obvious racial overtones. All I'll say on this is that King Kong was perfectly adjusted to his native environment, but when he was brought to the US, put on display in shackles and leg-irons, and presented with a tempting white woman, King Kong was no longer in his element, and unfortunately, the cost of the chaos that ensued from his displacement was shared by a great many of his victims.
- Zombies. What is it about zombie hordes that frightens people so much? We often call people who fall for the other political side as brain-washed (or brain-dead) zombies. Traditionally, zombies are the result of a kind of Haitian ritual in which the victim is buried alive and thereafter shunned from society when he is dug up again. According to the Serpent and the Rainbow (purportedly non-fiction) the author interviewed a zombie. The man seemed rather slow, but the gist of it was that he was cut off from friends and family and no longer considered part of the community, but something other...something else. Zombification was usually a punishment for people who did not contribute to the community or who were otherwise shunned. The families of people who had zombified members were ashamed of them, and did not talk about them. So, what does this have to do with the undead zombies of the movies? Not much...at first glance. Really, when you think of a zombie, you think of someone who is "infected" or otherwise changed from a living breathing pillar of the community to a ravenous, disorganized, idiotic, sick eater of brains. I find it particularly relevant that zombies eat brains, for zombies, in my opinion, represent the victims of meme warfare. We live in a time when meme warfare is rampant, the more so that most people can't even recognize it or know that it is going on. Various kinds exist to day, for instance, Gramscianism: the slow frog-boiling introduction of Marxism into Western culture. Zombies, therefore, represent people who were once like us, but who have been converted to the other side, and now exist only to eat our brains, or to destroy us, or preferably, to convert us. The horror they inspire is the horror of seeing your country overrun by people whose purposes are utterly alien and inimical to your own. You barricade the windows and doors, but they still manage to get in. Each one of them is an idiot, but the hordes of them pounding away can eventually bring down the mightiest bulwark. You can't kill them, or if you do, more pop up in a seemingly unending deluge of hostility and mindless activism. For some reason ACORN comes to my mind. But they're more like the infection than the victims. But, remember that zombies are both victims and carriers of the infection, so maybe the simile is not so far off.
- The Frankenstein monster. During the age of Enlightenment, and the post Enlightenment period, there was a groundswell of scientific endeavours that found new ways to reduce nature's miracles to scientifically identifyable processes. I believe that this might have given rise to an underlying fear that the entire universe might, itself, one day be proven godless, and that the entirety of being might come down to mechanical and chemical processes. I think that in some people, this possibility raises a kind of unspoken and inchoate fear or nihilism, the fear that nothing really has any meaning or significance, but is just a bunch of processes. Enter the Frankenstein monster. Dr. Frankenstein proved in his seminal research that one could create life from knitting together a bunch of body parts and infusing them with electric current, thus proving that the miracle of life itself no longer held any mysteries, was not miraculous, but scientifically definable and reduceable to a bunch of processes. The resulting creature, a creature of consciousness ex nihilio, was obviously without a soul, for it was not a creation of God, but of man, or more precisely, of the physical elements. The question that arises from this monster is obvious: if this creature has no soul, then how can I know whether or not I have a soul? I think this is a much more profound and unsettling fear than the others because it is buried so deeply into our makeup that we seldom even question it. Do I have a soul? What if I look deep inside and find nothing? What does it mean?
- Dracula. In some places in Europe, vampires were actually believed to be real. There are several different myths involving them, but generally, there was a fear that when someone died, they might turn into a vampire. They would sometimes unearth the corpses and find them with fresh blood on them, or with elongated fangs, or with bloody fingernails, etc. They would then cut the heads off of the monsters and sometimes bury them face-downard, and sometimes put a stake through the heart. The idea was that if they were facing downwards, then when they attempted to claw their way to the surface, they would claw deeper into the ground. The stake through the heart was merely a method of pinning them to the coffin, much as you might pin a bug in a collection. It was not just anyone who might become a vampire, though. It was people who exhibited vampiric behavior in life, as, for instance, children who grow up into adults but still lived with their parents. These people were likely to become vampires. In essence, the vampire was a symbol of social loafing, of someone who takes and takes from others but gives nothing back: a parasite. Now, how better to parasitize humans beings than to develop extraordinary skills at manipulation? This is what we see in modern vampires, a kind of sexy attraction, which is designed (or evolved?) specifically to make them more effective at the one thing they do for their own survival: feed off of others.
Won't you open the door?
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