Recently I watched Iron Man on blueray at a friends house. This friend is a superhero nerd like I have always been a monster nerd….I love any sort of monster movie, no matter how cheesy and crude. But in viewing Iron Man I was immediately struck by the similiarities to the emergence of the Godzilla movie genre at the end of WWII.
Ed. For all the people voting 'yes', that America can 'win' (wtf that means) in Afghanistan, please leave your win-plan as a comment.
tyvm
The first kaiju eiga, Godzilla, King of the Monsters (Gojira, 1954), is a stark reenactment of the Second World War. Three of the men central to the film’s creation had each been involved in the war. The director, Ishiro Honda, had served in the Imperial Army in China where he was taken prisoner. Eiji Tsuburaya, director of special effects, had mastered his techniques with miniatures while making reenactments of naval battles for propaganda films, reenactments so successful that during and after the war they were often mistaken for actual combat footage. The film’s music composer, Akira Ifukube, had written marches for the Imperial Army and Navy. In the movie they made, Godzilla represents more than the A-Bomb; Godzilla is the United States itself.
Godzilla’s very name emphasizes the monster’s foreign nature. Gojira, as he is called in Japan, has his name spelled in katakana, the written characters used in Japan to represent foreign words. The katakana rendering could easily have been written as the hiragana spelling instead. The course of Gojira follows the war in the Pacific as seen from the eyes of an ordinary Japanese. At first, there are reports of ships sunk, representing Japan’s naval defeats and the destruction of its merchant marine fleet by US submarines. The government debates releasing this news, just as the wartime government heavily censored the reports of such defeats as Midway. The ship losses are disturbing, but not immediately threatening. Then Godzilla emerges on Oda Island, which stands for all the islands lost to the US, in particular Okinawa, the closest. Godzilla/US now threatens Japan directly. The monster’s attack on Tokyo mirrors the destruction wrought by the US Air Forces. Japan’s armed forces are helpless against the power of Godzilla. Japan’s fighter planes drive back Godzilla temporarily, but clearly without harming the kaiju. Unlike the real war, this allegorical one ends with a Japanese victory as Dr. Serizawa’s kamikaze attack in Tokyo Bay destroys the enemy. Yet the real threat presented by the US was not defeated and continued to be depicted in subsequent films.
In Iron Man wunderkind playboy Tony Stark flies to war-torn Afghanistan with his friend and military liaison, Lieutenant Colonel James Rhodes, for a demonstration of Stark’s new weapon, the “Jericho” missile. Afterward, Stark’s military convoy is attacked and he is critically wounded. Stark finds himself the prisoner of an Afghan terrorist group known as the Ten Rings (Taliban). The Ten Rings leader, Raza, offers Stark his freedom in exchange for building a Jericho missile for the group.
During his three months of captivity, Stark and Dr. Yinsen secretly build a crude suit of armor powered by a miniature arc reactor, which Stark builds to power his chest electromagnet, which is preventing shrapnel frags from reaching his heart. The terrorists finally grow impatient and give Stark 24 hours to finish. The deadline expires before the suit is fully activated, so Yinsen distracts the guards while Stark powers up the suit. The now-armored Stark battles his way out of the caves and finds the dying Yinsen, who tells him not to waste his life. Stark burns all the terrorists’ munitions and flies away, only to crash in the desert; Stark survives, but the prototype suit is destroyed. After being rescued by Rhodes, Stark announces that his company will no longer manufacture weapons. Stane advises Stark that this may ruin Stark Industries.
Stark begins focusing his energies on building an improved version of his suit as well as a more powerful arc reactor for his chest. Later, during Stark’s first public appearance after his return, reporter Everheart informs him that Stark Industries weapons, including the “Jericho”, were recently delivered to the Ten Rings and are being used to attack Yinsen’s home village. The leader of the Ten Rings is revealed to be some sort of “foreign agitator”, in keeping with american mythology that Afghans really long for judeochristian democracy and western culture. Stark also learns that Stane is trying oust him from his own company. Enraged, Stark dons his new armor and flies to Afghanistan. The Ten Rings fighters prove no match for Stark, and they are quickly dispatched.
The villain of Iron Man is the Souless Rapacious American Military Industrial Complex. Stark flies in and rescues the Afghan villagers from the “foreign” Ten Rings (Taliban) terrorists using the same American Military Techno-magicks that were being used to kill the villagers.
The moral is Good and Just America triumphs over the Souless Rapacious American Military Industrial Complex and its evil allies, the Ten Rings (Taliban).
But the true Godzilla of both Iron Man and the Terror Mosque controversy is Islam.
More than two-thirds of Americans oppose the building of the Islamic Cultural Center near Ground Zero. This in spite of the facts that the project is legal under private property laws and freedom of speech and freedom of religion constitutional laws.
Why?
Because America just lost in Iraq, and is losing in Afghanistan. And all our fabuloso technology can’t save us from the eventual humiliating defeat coming down the pike. Iron Man techno-triumphs over the Taliban clone Ten Rings in the movie, just like Dr. Serizawa’s kamikaze attack in Tokyo Bay destroys the kaiju. But exactly like Godzilla, the Taliban and al-Qaeda keep coming back again and again, indestructable.
The Wikileaks documents have revealed that Afghanistan is immoral, unjust and unwinnable. It is becoming gobsmakingly obvious that America lost in Iraq, and Iraq is becoming just another islamic state with increasingly close ties to Iran.
And in response the more-than-two-thirds majority of the American people have fused all muslims, all Islam, into an icon of monstrous terrorism.
So the opposition to the cultural center is really opposition to Islam, the deathless undefeatable kaiju that will haunt the american psyche for as many years as the King of the Monsters has haunted the Japanese.
The enemy that America could not defeat with technology.