Kaijus and Covid
The first post-Covid theatre movie I saw was Godzilla v King Kong. It’s been an hour. During some of the virtual images flashed in parts of the movies, I thought about the microscopic image of Covid that every other news article seems to use (the ball with red blooms coming out of it). The more I thought about it, this fictional world and the real world have a lot in common. Both dealing with the emergence of a new form of life that threatens our own and a global society living in the shadow of the next outbreak (catastrophe) or the next strain (species).
Art is often a response to current events, although the movie was probably in editing when Covid reached Hollywood. It would be easy to see this as a response, but its closer to a coincidence. Or maybe blockbuster movies are most generally set in some state of emergency or another.
Still the parallels persist. Giant kaijus are something we can mobilize against, so massive we can send armies and bombs at it. Microscopic monsters can’t be shot or blown sky high. As armies are powerless to stop the kaijus, we feel powerless to react to family and friends getting sick and dying.
Where kaijus attack cities and terrorize people, unmasked herds invade state and national capitols, terrorizing the very country they claim to be patriots of. Claws, teeth, and fire breath replaced by nationalist flags and heavy breathing.
In the movie, we find humans are the root cause making everything worse. Surprise, surprise, during our emergency humans exacerbated Covid by denying it, by helping it spread and evolve. Anybody who visited a crowded beach or bar in 2020 was almost certainly the reason others were infected and subsequently died.
The industrial magnate in this film was a wealthy man with hubris. Its money and confidence that appears to be the leading cause of holocausts both in fiction and reality. In reality though, it wasn’t just wealthy people leading the way in denial and anti-scientific sentiment, urging on their followers with angry speeches. It was also police, armed service members, actors, blue collar workers that attacked the American Capitol, and a similar group prior to that approached the Michigan Capitol. Covid allowed us to see the infiltration of our protective services by people actively looking to harm American democracy.
There was no sense of cohesion nationally or globally, no clue to division or togetherness in the fictional world of crazy kaiju action. That’s fair, because its fiction. The vibrancy of reality allows us to learn more about who we are and how our countryfolk will act.
If you want to see more movies on the big screen, I suggest you get the vaccine.