Destroy All Monsters - An Introduction
By Liz Glass
To introduce the film Destroy All Monsters, I would like to begin by talking about the American western. In her 1993 text, West of Everything: The Inner Life of Westerns, literary critic Jane Tompkins writes,
“From roughly 1900 to 1975 a significant portion of the adolescent male population spent every Saturday afternoon at the movies. What they saw there were Westerns. Roy Rogers, Tom Mix, Lash LaRue, Gene Autry, Hopalong Cassidy…In 1959 there were no fewer than thirty-five Westerns running concurrently on television, and out of the top ten programs eight were Westerns. John Wayne, the actor whose name is synonymous with Western films, became the symbol of American masculinity from World War II to Vietnam…The arch-images of the genre—the gunfight, the fistfight, the chase on horseback, the figure of the mounted horseman outlined against the sky, the saloon girl, the lonely landscape itself—are culturally pervasive and overpowering. They carry within them compacted worlds of meaning and value, codes of conduct, standards of judgment, and habits of perception that shape our sense of the world and govern our behavior without our having the slightest awareness of it.”
Throughout Tompkins’ text, she dissects the archetypes of the Western with the purpose of defining and describing a certain standard of American masculinity as reflected and learned from these on-screen characters. The ideal American man was the strong and silent type (a la John Wayne). He pursued his goals and ideals tirelessly, and was not adverse to using violence when it was well-deserved. The American West was a harsh world, but it was not without reason and order. It was fathomable, and though its huge expanses of empty space dwarfed the small figure of man, in the end it was not the landscape that was the adversary—it was the reckless bandit, the raucous Indian, and the renegade pioneer. Foes on a human scale.
The archetype of the American Western provides an interesting backdrop to thinking about more contemporary issues through the lens of the 1968 film Destroy All Monsters. Standing in for a broad genre—the monster movie, the epic though sometimes campy sci-fi film—Destroy All Monsters was the kind of film that the rest of the adolescent males were watching on Saturday afternoons during the 1960s and 70s. Presented on TV through programs like “Creature Double Feature,” Destroy All Monsters and other monster movies created quite a different vision of the world, and of conflict, than the Western. Though directly related to the aftermath of WWII, the monster movie provides, perhaps, a more realistic view of the conflicts that we face in our contemporary world.
I was first made aware of Destroy All Monsters, the movie, through researching Destroy All Monsters, the proto-punk noise performance outfit consisting of artists Mike Kelley, Jim Shaw, Carey Loren and Niagara during the mid-1970s in the outskirts of Detroit. Lifting their name from this movie, Destroy All Monsters created films, noise recordings, drawings, and performances that would seem foreign to the watchers of the Western that Tompkins described. Anarchic, confusing, impossible, showy, and downright bizarre, Destroy All Monsters channeled the imagery and personality of the monster movie into their creative output.
To tell you a bit about the movie itself: Destroy All Monsters is the ninth film in the Godzilla series, directed by Ishiro Honda and released in Japan in 1968. The film was dubbed in English a year later and released in the US in ’69. While there were many Godzilla movies that came before and after it (with 28 in total released between the original Godzilla: King of the Monsters! or Gojira in 1954, and Godzilla: Final Wars as recently as 2004), within the original Godzilla series, Destroy All Monsters is chronologically last—meaning that in the fictional timeframe developed by Honda, Destroy All Monsters happened after the others.
Set in the mysterious future of 1999, Destroy All Monsters opens to an idyllic moment. The monsters that had ravaged cities and terrorized citizens in the previous Godzilla films had been vanquished and subjected to human control. We see them living peacefully on an island in the Japanese archipelago called Monsterland in something of a monster-zoo (minus, we must imagine, the endless visitors and school groups). Godzilla, of course, is there, along with a host of other monsters—including the flying beast Rodan, the dragon-like Manda, and Mothra, who elsewhere appears, more logically, in moth form, but in this movie resembles a large caterpillar of sorts. The peacefulness of Monsterland is quite abruptly dissolved as some mysterious mind-control gas infiltrates the control unit on the island, where watchful Japanese scientists monitor the monsters’ actions. Soon enough, the monsters are out of control—attacking the world’s cities simultaneously: London, Paris, New York, Bejing, and finally Tokyo. The monsters and their masters have been taken over by aliens from the planet Kilaak, these once peaceful creatures are turned against earth by this threatening alien force. Battles ensue as they always do, and in the end, the nations of the world regain order over these otherwordly combatants, the monsters returning through instinct to aid the humans in battling the alien monsters brought in to do the Kilaaks’ dirty work.
I won’t say more about the plot—though I haven’t hidden much, as the narrative structure of the movie hardly has the ins and outs of a Shakespearean drama—but I would like to point out a thing or two about the Godzilla genre more generally, and to circle back around to the Western, where we began. First of all, to place this and the other Godzilla films within their context, we must note that Godzilla himself was created out of the aftermath of a nuclear explosion, given his monstrous form by way of radiation, and was brought into the fictional world just nine years after the atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Like the American Western, the monster movie relied upon the idea of a new frontier—but rather than the rugged open landscape of the American West, the territory here is made up of the possibilities (unknown still, but possibly more horrifying) of scientific warfare.
The adversaries within this new frontier don’t exist on the human scale of the Western; the monsters stand in for the more unwieldy dangers that became frighteningly real in the aftermath of World War II. Looking expansively—and perhaps this is takes it too far afield—it seems as though many of the world’s problems have increased in size, mass, and fiery possibilities since WWII and Godzilla’s subsequent birth. We may have conquered the West, ended the Cold War, and lost our fear of the bomb, but it seems that other international disasters have developed to fill the void: economic meltdowns, environmental disasters, ideological conflicts and stalemates that run so deep and complex that they are almost as unfathomable as the idea of confrontational beings from space.
While both the Western and the monster movie remain, of course, fictions, recalling Tompkins’ idea of the cowboy-as-American man made me think about the way that we approach our conflicts as a nation and a global community. While maybe the monster movie supplanted the Western in the case of the artists of Destroy All Monsters and for many others who came of age during the Vietnam War and its aftermath, it seems as though the cowboy mentality still serves as our governing principle. If the American men who remain in power today were raised with the image of the solitary cowboy as their model, what does that mean for the way that we confront conflict and crises as a nation? Are we fighting space monsters with rifles, battling atomic-level problems with a horse and a rope?
