Godzilla On My Mind: Fifty Years of The King Of Monsters

PALGRAVE, 256 PAGES, $13.95

FOR HAVING been around half a century, Godzilla movies (28 of them and counting) have produced precious little by way of written commentary, especially when compared with the likes of Star Trek or the James Bond films, both of which have inspired veritable libraries of articles and books.

Fortunately, among those few books written about Godzilla, there have been some very good ones. David Kalat's A Critical History and Filmography of Toho's Godzilla Series is a detailed film-by-film analysis, in which Kalat looks at each entry not only in terms of how it relates to the rest of the series, but historically, in terms of how each reflects what was going on in Japan (and at Toho Corp.) at the time. And Steve Ryfle's popular Japan's Favorite Mon-star is a more colloquial approach to the same material, gathering together dozens of interviews with producers, directors, writers, actors and special-effects people, together with Ryfle's own essays and sidebars full of interesting what-not to create a well-rounded (and sometimes contradictory) portrait of the series as a whole.

University of Kansas history professor William Tsutsui tries a completely different approach in his new book, Godzilla on My Mind, taking a very personal look at these films both as an academic and as an obsessive lifelong fan (he opens the book, in fact, with an anecdote about coercing his poor mother to sew him a Godzilla costume for Halloween).

On the one hand, Tsutsui quotes a number of academic papers that have attempted to analyze what Godzilla "means" in Freudian, Marxist and poststructuralist terms-but more often than not, he seems to quote them simply in order to make fun of them. Regardless of the fact that he's an academic himself, he spends a lot of time in the book dismissing any theory that tries to make more of the Godzilla pictures than is necessary. They're just fun, mindless entertainment, that's all, he insists, and anyone who tries to turn them into something serious is a silly ass.

(While I personally disagree with him on that, there's no question that people who argue that Godzilla represents the repressed sexual urge or the evils of capitalism are going a bit overboard.)

Tsutsui is primarily writing as a wide-eyed fan within the geek community. This allows him-much to the frustration of any would-be readers who don't happen to be obsessive Godzilla fans-to make obscure references to scenes in less popular series entries, without providing much by way of context or plot. Very often he'll drop in a title like Godzilla vs. Megalon as a reference point without any further explanation, assuming his readers will know why the Megalon reference makes sense. I may be an obsessive fan myself, but there were a few times he even had me scratching my head. In short, it often feels as if Tsutsui has written a 250-page zine article aimed at G-fans and no one else.

Stylistically, he writes with a clean, conversational prose which leans much closer, again, to fanzine than seminar paper (which is a relief), though I was a bit put off by his overuse of variants of the word "cheese" to describe gaudy, low-budget films, and his insistence on dropping in "yada yada yada," "Ewwww!" and other bits of contemporary linguistic detritus in a desperate reach for humor. Likewise, apparently unable to bring several sections of the book to any clean ending, he'll simply close with a pointless line like, "Rock on, Godzilla!" or "Go figure," which grows tiresome after a while.

All that said, however, the book does have a lot going for it (again, if you happen to be a Godzilla fan). For one, its release date allows it to take into account what's known as the "third series"-Godzilla 2000 and the films that followed-all of which were (obviously enough) unaccounted for in those earlier books. It also allows for the requisite (and repeated) potshots at the 1998 American version. In one chapter, Tsutsui takes a serious and sensitive look at the culture of Godzilla fandom, and what psychological forces may have driven so many people to latch on to a man in a big rubber suit. And though he makes fun of most of the academic commentaries he cites, he does reveal, even while mocking them, that there actually is a growing subsection of academics who are starting to take these films more seriously.

The sections of Godzilla on My Mind I found most compelling, though, were the autobiographical nuggets Tsutsui has scattered throughout. Most of the commentary on the individual films was material I was already familiar with. Even his analysis of fan culture was something I could have extrapolated, given what I know about other fan subcultures. But the personal material was interesting, from his childhood trips to Japan to a description of his office, which is apparently overflowing with Godzilla feck. Much of his experience with and reaction to these films was familiar, only in that his experience so closely mirrored my own. Even if I disagree with many of his appraisals, and even if his use of "cheese" as an adjective bugs me, he puts more of a human face on things than those earlier works. Assuming putting a human face on a giant radioactive lizard makes any sense. o