In light of the release of “Godzilla: Minus Zero” and lots of us thinking back on “Godzilla: Minus One,” I thought I’d share something I wrote for my own processing the last time I watched “Godzilla: Minus One” earlier this year.
Recently I rewatched “Godzilla Minus One.” When I first saw the movie, it blew me away. I already loved Godzilla. But I had no idea how powerful and emotional the storyline of this film would be. It covered themes of horror, trauma, shame, courage, war, and more in profound ways. Naoki Sato’s score even referenced Gorecki’s Third Symphony (in the track “Elegy”) which struck something deep in me. But this time, the story hit me differently, as I saw myself in the main character. He grappled with shame and trauma following WWII (Godzilla functions as a physical representation of the trauma of WWII and the nuclear bombs dropped on Japan). I have been grappling with the shame and trauma of divorce, and how parts of my community responded to it.
In both cases, there is ambiguity (from my perspective, which is the only one I can share here). If he had fired his 20mm gun at Godzilla on Ono Island when he first encountered Godzilla, would he have saved the men on the island from death? Or would he just have angered Godzilla? For me, I was left with a lot of ambiguity about what was or wasn’t my fault in the breakdown of the marriage. In both cases, trauma was involved, and affecting decision making. In both cases, communal shame was put on us. He should have died as a kamikaze. I should have (fill in the blank).
One thing that is interesting about the main character is that he is fundamentally a good guy (we see this early on, when he takes care of a baby that is just dropped into his life). But, he believes he is a bad guy. He lives with a heavy burden of shame, carrying around pictures of the family members of the people on Ono island he believes died because of his failure to act (though it is not entirely clear if shooting Godzilla with his 20mm gun would have actually killed Godzilla, or just made him more angry… and if one of the other men hadn’t panicked and started shooting, perhaps things would have turned out better). Shame is an incredibly isolating experience. It makes it feel like there is no hope for your life, and that you don’t deserve any happiness or care that comes your way. Even if it seems obvious to everyone around you that you’re a decent person just doing your best, for some reason that truth does not sink into your own bones. You feel like a fundamental failure, and perhaps you wish for death.
The movie makes you think about how we stay stuck in shame even when it is not helping us or anyone around us. Of course, part of that is from trauma, which embeds itself even in our bodies, in ways that are notoriously confusing and disorienting (the movie depicts that viscerally). Another way we can be bound in shame is by believing cultural lies. “Godzilla: Minus One” interrogates a cultural lie in Japan during the war: that life was expendable, and nobody should question the moral logic behind kamikaze warfare. This is the worldview the main character assumes without question, and it is reinforced by people speaking shame over him. It keeps him trapped in shame that he sees no way out of. It will take a massive paradigm shift to free him from this. He needs to realize that it was never fair for him to have been placed in that situation, where he had to choose suicide for a lost cause, or a life of shame. However, he cannot achieve this paradigm shift on his own. It takes the community coming to a new understanding, and speaking truth over him and others. They realize that life had been treated too cheaply. We see this powerfully when the mechanic who once hated him and blames him for the deaths on Ono island installs an ejector seat in his fighter plane, so he can survive his attack on Godzilla rather than die in the process. Sometimes it takes a word that we cannot speak to ourselves. We need our community to speak truth to us, with experiences and sometimes rituals that help restore our sense of wholeness and belonging.
I don’t know all of the parallels between “Godzilla: Minus One” and my own story, because I don’t understand everything that happened in my story yet. How was trauma involved? What false narratives or paradigms or misinformation do I have in my mind? How does God see things? At what point do we have to just move on, because the important thing is survival, as Noriko’s parents told her? Some things are just God’s business in the end, and we will have to trust in God’s mercy and live with that (1 Cor 4:1-5).
But I do know that, from a Christian perspective, a core part of salvation is the overcoming of shame. Jesus’ resurrection fundamentally means that hope is always alive. The paradigmatic picture is Peter, who is ashamed that he denied Jesus three times, but then is reinstated by Jesus and given hope and purpose and a sense of belonging. Jesus’ forgiveness is actually a creative forgiveness. He not only forgives something in the past, but in doing so, like in the Japanese art of Kintsugi, he creates new hope, beauty, and possibility in the present, that comes as a “glad surprise” (to quote Howard Thurman… and Steve Bell borrows the phrase for a song / album of the same name). That is the essence of the gospel — the real tragedies of this world don’t get the last word. In my seminary homiletics class, I read a book called “Telling the Truth: The Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy, and Fairy Tale” by Frederick Buechner, that makes this point eloquently. Comedy / fairy tale are not merely silliness, but the absurdity of creative grace that breaks through and makes a way where there seemed like no way.
I am still working through shame and trauma. But I felt a little bit more hope after watching “Godzilla: Minus One” again, because it reminded me that the narratives of shame that take up residence in our minds and hearts and bodies don’t have to get the last word. There is another story, a story of salvation, where the monster of shame is destroyed by the true God, and where even in the midst of moral and spiritual injury, God invites us to find rest and healing in his grace and redemptive power, and to be part of a community that can share that peace with us and others, in word and deed.
