Growing Up Godzilla

Godzilla will stomp into theaters this weekend, doing his part to tear down lots of cities and rake in lots of money. I've seen it, and later you can check out my review at Plugged In come Friday and some extra thoughts right here that very same day. But in advance of the big day, let me tell you about my very first Godzilla movie.

I was a Godzilla fan before I ever saw one of his movies. Our school library had a series of books about classic movie monsters, and when I was around 9 or 10, I checked out the book on Godzilla about 17 times. I knew all the characters: Rodan, Mothra, Ghidorah, the works. Their city-stomping ways fascinated me, and I wonder if maybe these Japanese Kaiju have always held a special charm for kids (as frightening as they’re supposed to be). They're big. They're bad. They can destroy whole cities like we might tear down a stack of blocks. Such overwhelming power. Such mighty feats of strength. For kids who don't have much of either, Godzilla and company would be pretty attractive. No one would ever send Ghidorah to bed early. Godzilla would never get bullied on the playground.

No wonder Godzilla—Japan's ultimate scaly villain in 1954—morphed into a hero after a movie or two. Kids needed the big guy in their corner.

When I was in fourth grade, we heard that Godzilla vs. Monster Zero was coming to a local, late-night horror-movie showcase called Shock Theater. The movie wouldn't start 'til 10:30 and probably end after midnight, but all my friends with permissive parents said they'd be watching. And so I asked—no, begged—my parents if, just this once, I could stay up and watch it, too.

In a complete departure from the parenting principles I'd grown up with, they said yes.

It was a stunner, and I felt curiously grown up. Never mind that my dad was going to watch it with me, or that a couple of my stuffed animals were on call, too—just in case I got scared. The fact that I was going to stay up past midnight—watching Shock Theater, no less—was a big marker on my way to adulthood. Today, late-night television. Tomorrow, the driver's license.

It proved to be a terrifying night.

It wasn't the movie: Monster Zero, I think, was kinda lame for a kid looking for some Shock Theater-like thrills. But somewhere after Monster Zero (Ghidorah) destroyed one city but before he destroyed this other city, my dad went to bed. Went. To. Bed. Never had I been shouldered with such hefty responsibility, to be awake and safeguard the house alone before. It was, again, a strangely thrilling moment … and absolutely horrible, too. When he said goodnight and left me alone in our gloomy basement family room, I felt like I was being treated like an adult, and I knew I was nowhere up to the challenge.

I watched the movie to the credits, walked to the television and turned it off. The house was as still as a tomb. I flipped off the lights to the family room and watched it go black. I inched up the hallway stairs, straining my ears for the sound of any strange skittering sounds or raspy breathing, then turned off that light, too. My heart was pounding. I was clutching my stuffed bear 'til the stuffing nearly oozed out his ears. But room by room, I turned off the lights—turning some on along the way so I'd never be in total darkness—until I reached the safety of my bedroom.

It was the first time I realized what an empty, dark house really looked like. Felt like. Before, my parents were always on patrol as I softly fell asleep. Tonight, I was on my own.

I felt like an adult, and it was horrifying. I was not strong or powerful like a movie monster, ready to deal with invaders from Planet X. I was scared. It was like I had a premonition of adulthood. Someday, I'll need to turn off the lights by myself all the time, I thought. What an awful thought

I suppose I should say something spiritual here. Maybe how we're all children of God and we can just relax, 'cause he'll watch over us in our metaphorical dark houses. He’s always on patrol. And I think that's true. But sometimes, God's presence can be a difficult thing to feel. Sometimes we can feel very alone in a dark and too-quiet world. We feel the pressures around us. The fear pressing in on us. Out from us.

When we're children, I think there's a time when we imagine that adults don't get scared. If only that were true.

But we deal, I guess. We have to. And I think with God's help, we learn how to cope. We're a little like the folks in Godzilla movies, maybe. The ones who aren’t screaming. We're surrounded by forces and fears we can't control and barely comprehend. But we move forward—with fear, yes, but with hope. Hope that becomes a wary confidence. Even courage. And maybe that hope is something that God gives us. Maybe our worlds will look pretty bad at times, like something big and fire-breathing trashed it all. Maybe we'll see some serious destruction when the sun comes up. But the sun does come up. And with each new day we're given another chance to help put things right.

I don't know whether I can blame Monster Zero for this, but when I was in junior high, I noticed something interesting in my sleep patterns. If I was spending the night at a friends' house or at summer camp or something, I could never go to sleep until I was sure that everyone else was. I wanted—needed, really—to be the last guy awake. And I'm still that way. I won't ever go to sleep if there's someone in the house is stirring still—watching a movie or reading a book. It's physically impossible for me to do so.

I'm the adult now. And maybe that night with Godzilla and Monster Zero taught me that, as an adult, I need to be vigilant—the guy on patrol--because no one else is going to do it for me. I'm the one who turns out the lights.

Jack Bauer has a Secret, and its Name is Batman

Fox's upcoming Gotham looks pretty interesting.

Fox released the first TV trailer for its gritty Batman prequel during Monday's premiere of 24: Live Another Day, where we saw Batman and multiple evildoers in their Muppet Baby phase. Penguin looks like a strangely skinny high schooler with a thing for umbrellas, the Riddler an up-and-coming accountant, Poison Ivy a cross between a second-grade botanist and the girl from The Ring. Bruce Wayne looks all of 10, and the future Commissioner Gordon is an idealistic rookie.

But it and the extended trailer (below) make the new fall series look like, for a Batman dweeb like me, must-see-TV.

And how appropriate that Fox would choose 24 to premiere the trailer. After all, Jack Bauer is Batman.

Well, not really. Jack eschews both capes and huge Swiss bank accounts. Batman never carries a gun and never kills, while Jack has killed around 270 people (and counting) and likely belongs to some sort of "gun of the month" club.

But they really are the same sort of hero now. Both are grim and tortured souls who work in the shadows. Both seek justice by skirting the law. Both have, at best, an uneasy relationship with the law agencies they're supposed to be working with. And at times, those relationships can become positively adversarial—even though everyone involved is fighting on the same side. Both, I suspect, have some serious issues that a good psychologist could help with—but neither have the time nor inclination. Both like their gadgets.

And both, of course, have become dark legends—their mere names striking fear in the hearts of men.

What draws us to heroes like this, I wonder? Never mind the success of Iron Man at the box office, Batman is America’s best known, most popular superhero, and has been for decades. And even though 24 never got incredibly huge ratings, Jack Bauer is perhaps the most recognizable character to come from television in the last couple of decades—capturing our imagination like few before. There’s gotta be something in their very darkness that pulls us to them, I think. They’re the toughest of the tough, but broken, too.

Perhaps they borrow from the world’s first heroic template. In Homer’s The Iliad, I’ve long felt that Hector—the doomed would-be savior of Troy—was the story’s real hero, not mighty Achaean Achilles. But perhaps both have passed on their literary genes to Jack and Batman: Hector, with his self-sacrificial willingness to give his call for his city and country. Achilles and his unmatched prowess in battle offset by his penchant to nurse deep wounds in the sanctity of his tent.

Or maybe they play on a deeper, even spiritual level, they remind us a little of us.

In God in the Streets of Gotham, I wrote this:

In most superhero stories, the line between good and evil, the gulf between light and darkness, is clearly defined. … But there’s a part of us, maybe a small, nagging, unpleasant part, that treats those stories with suspicion. We know the line is not that bright; the gulf between “us” and “them” is not that wide. We feel not just the hero inside us, but the villain . . . the darkness. Batman, a guy who doesn’t just wear a black hat, but one with pointed, horn-like ears, is a representation of our own selves, a strange, graphic allegory of the soul, with Gotham City a microcosm of the fragile, fallen world through which we struggle to make our way. Gotham itself feels bad—Old Testament bad. We can catch a glimpse of ancient Sodom or Samaria when we see its streets, and we feel its sin press on us with an almost physical presence. Batman, as we’re told in The Dark Knight, isn’t a perfect savior for the city; he’s the one it “deserves,” in all his imperfection. He walks perilously close to the line.
 And yet there’s something inside the guy that sets him apart. He may look bad, but it’s not what he looks like that matters. It’s what he does, and what he stands for, that counts.
How curiously biblical Batman is in this way. He’s not much like Superman, but he is something like Moses, David, and Peter. The Bible doesn’t sugarcoat our heroes for us or tell us they’re anything but pretty sorry, flawed folks. And yet God takes them and makes them special, even great, just as he does with us.

Maybe the same could be said for Jack Bauer, too—a guy who’s tougher and badder than we’ll ever be. And yet we see in him the darkness, and light, in us. Someone who has hurt people and who’s been hurt. Someone who makes a ton of mistakes every day. And yet someone who’s still striving to do right in spite of it all.

24: Jack Bauer, the Worst Messiah Ever

I don’t watch much television. But tonight I make an exception. Why? Because Jack Bauer wants me to.

You don’t mess with Jack. Made famous by Kiefer Sutherland on Fox’s long-running show 24, Jack Bauer makes Chuck Norris look like a tofu-eating yuppie. In eight full seasons, the guy has killed his boss, cut the hand off his partner and threatened someone with a towel—all to save the world repeatedly from terrorists and duplicitous politicians and dirty bombs. I’m sure he could do something about climate change if he had more bullets. He makes even baking cupcakes look tough:

And now, after a four-year hiatus, Jack is back with 24: Live Another Day. I admit it: I’m a little giddy.

I’ve watched 24 from the beginning, every action-packed, sometimes ridiculous minute of it. When I worked at The Gazette (the daily paper here in Colorado Springs), me and a clutch of 24-loving editors and reporters would rehash the whole show the following morning: The shockers, the one-liners, the narrow escapes from rampaging cougars. Talking about 24 was almost as much fun as watching it. And when I moved to Plugged In and reviewed the thing from a Christian perspective (and given all 24’s torture and stuff, it’s not really the sort of program Plugged In can give a hearty thumbs up to), I had to smile when some 24-loving readers skewered me for not “getting” the show at all.

I got it, I think. Or, at least, I appreciated it. Each season—each episode, really—was predicated on one thing: Just how far would Jack go this time?

The answer always surprised us. And over the arc of the 24’s run, we not only watched Jack do some terrible things, but suffer as well. He buried his wife and alienated his daughter. He lost nearly everyone he was ever close to. Every season, Jack’s job consumed a little of his soul.

"In the early years of 24, after the 9/11 attacks, the common take was that the appeal of Jack Bauer lay in his strength," writes Time's James Poniewozik. "He was tough, decisive, and effective, offering the fantasy of security in an insecure time. But in the long run, I don’t think Bauer’s most important function was to fight our battles; it was to feel our pain. Season after season, he would suffer physically and spiritually, he would lose friends and lovers (and sleep), he would save the country and get run out of town. He was like a psychic pincushion, a sponge soaking up all the toxic emotion of the era, committing our sins and swallowing the guilt until he seemed 100 years old."

He is television’s ultimate suffering savior, I suppose, as tortured as anyone he takes a towel to. He’d do anything to save the world, it seems, including sacrifice his own life.

But a Christ-like figure, he’s not. He knows it as well as anyone. While a blameless Jesus carried our sins, Jack (in Poniewozik’s words) commits them. He is a doomed hero, a savior in a world without grace or mercy or forgiveness. Jack might call himself a necessary evil, and Bauer apologists would agree. The theory goes that sometimes to take out the bad guys, you need someone willing to get his hands dirty.

But a necessary evil is still an evil. Jack may be a savior of sorts for a purely physical world. Maybe he saves our skins. But when it comes to souls, he can’t even save his own. For that you need grace and forgiveness and the healing power of God.

No, Jack’s not a Messiah. He’s just a guy like us—a flawed sinner who tries to do what he can to make the world a better place in his own brutal way.

Hey, I’m thrilled Jack’s back. I’m rooting for him to be thanked for all his hard work and get a medal or something. After saving so many people, it’d be nice for him to find some salvation himself.

But I’m not counting on it. For that, the powers that be would not just have to acknowledge Jack’s sacrifices, but forgive his crimes. And 24 is not a very forgiving show.

Noah: Snakes, Tubal-cain and the Slithery Nature of Evil

Of all the things most hotly debated in Darren Aronofsky’s Noah, perhaps nothing’s stirred more controversy than all the snakes.  

They’re significant, for sure. We say a black snake slither out of a green one in the Garden of Eden—Satan out to give Adam and Eve a rough time. Thousands of snakes slither into the ark shortly before the Flood. Evil stowaway Tubal-cain chows down on a snake while hiding aboard the ark. And then, of course, you’ve got the snakeskin used as a magical talisman by Noah’s extended family—a glowing symbol passed down from generation to generation.

Aronofsky’s snakeskin has encouraged some Christians to believe that Noah’s “Creator” isn’t God at all, but the devil. By holding onto an aged snakeskin from the Garden of Eden, Noah and his family were following Lucifer’s pipe.

Not so, says Noah co-writer Ari Handel in Relevant Magazine:

When Adam and Eve are expelled from the Garden, it says God gave them a garment of skin—sort of a parting gift from God to mankind as we leave Eden and go out into the world. So we wondered what that was—and as we looked at commentaries about it, one of the common ones was that it was the skin of the snake. We wondered why that would be, and it occurred to us that God made the snake. The snake was good, at first. But then, the Tempter arose through it. In our version, we have the snake shed that skin, and the shed skin is the shell of original goodness that the snake left behind when it became the Tempter. It’s a symbol of the Eden that we left behind. It’s a garment to clothe you spiritually.

That’s pretty much how I interpreted the whole snakeskin thing when I watched the movie. And the symbolism of Aronofsky’s serpent echoes throughout the movie.

As Handel says, the snakeskin that Noah makes such a big deal about is the shell of God’s beautiful creation. Evil, somehow, slithered out of that creation and infected the world.

That’s in keeping with what Augustine taught the early church. Satan can’t create anything on his own. Evil isn’t a thing in itself as much as it’s a perversion of the good. It’s God’s creation twisted in ways that God never intended. Sex is great—unless it manifests itself in adultery or porn or whatever else falls outside of God’s design. Lies are, by definition, a twisting of the truth. To kill is to rebel against creation itself. Evil has to come out of something good: It has no other option.

Satan slithering out of God’s green snake fits with Augustine’s thoughts on the matter. But, of course, evil crawls out of more than just legless reptiles. It comes out of us, too.

In a critical turning point in Noah, our titular character comes to a realization that evil is not just in prime villain Tubal-cain and his crew. It’s in Noah, too. In fact, that evil’s buried in his whole family. There’s a snake inside all of us—an inescapable corruption that a flood won’t be able to completely cleanse. It’s a big revelation for Noah, and he begins to believe that to get rid of Satan’s serpentine influence forever, Noah’ll have to get rid of (directly or indirectly) anything that has a hint of evil inside.

But even though both Noah and Tubal-cain have some badness inside, Aronofsky—in my interpretation, at least—makes a critical distinction between the two of them. See,

Tubal-cain is in a state of rebellion.

Noah, whatever his faults may be in the movie, tries to do as he believes his Creator wills. Tubal-cain has no such goal in mind. While Noah wants to be a tool in God’s hands, Tubal-cain wants to hop out of God’s toolbox, run away and do whatever tools would otherwise do. More simply: Noah lives for God. Tubal-cain lives for himself. “Damned if I don’t do what it takes,” Tubal-cain says. “Damned if I don’t take what I want.” And so takes God’s creation, perverting it and twisting it for his own ends.

And then, curiously, he wonders why God has been out of touch. “I am a man, made in Your image,” he prays bitterly at one point. “Why will you not converse with me?”

When Noah feels like he failed God (which he doesn’t), it’s not out of rebellion, but weakness. He wasn’t strong enough to carry out what he believed to be the Creator’s terrible will. But Tubal-cain never wanted to follow God anywhere—not if God’s goals differed from his own. Just like Satan, really. It's interesting that, when you look at Tubal-cain's armor above, it looks a little ... scaly.

It’s telling that, when Tubal-cain smuggles himself aboard the ark, he kills an animal and eats it to regain his strength (a no-no in Aronofsky’s environmental fable). What animal? A snake, of course: He bites off its head and swallows it. Just as the rebel Satan came out of a snake, so the rebel Tubal-cain consumes one. He destroys a unique bit of God’s creation in rebellion. And so doing, he metaphorically takes a bit of Satan inside himself … the deed itself, not the snake, poisons the meal.