Cycling Godzilla

April 16th saw the release of Ikoria: Lair of Behemoths, the newest Magic expansion, through WotC’s online platforms only (the tabletop release has been delayed due to the pandemic). Not only does the set bring back one of Magic‘s best mechanics, cycling, the set features an alternate-art series in which certain card names and artworks are replaced with Godzilla and his fellow monsters, including Ghidorah, Gigan, and my personal favorite, Biollante.

Needless to say (or maybe not), this is my favorite of the alternate art series they’ve been doing lately, because while I enjoyed the constellation gods of Theros and the storybook adventure illustrations of Eldraine, I absolutely fucking LOVE Godzilla movies.

I think a lot about what makes cinema cinema, and while I’ve cited the original Star Wars trilogy as a seminal work in the development of my cinematic sensibilities, there’s also Godzilla. And while in many ways the Godzilla series made Star Wars possible in the first place, I’m going to try to argue Godzilla on its own terms as a unique and defining feature of the cinematic landscape. I should point out that I’m not an expert on Godzilla films; in this case, I’m writing simply as a fan who thinks Godzilla deserved better than to be directed by Roland Emmerich.

Godzilla first appeared in Ishiro Honda’s 1954 nuclear allegory Godzilla, a film eventually recut (with images of Raymond Burr inserted) into Godzilla, King of the Monsters (1956). Since then, Godzilla has appeared in over 30 films in the U.S. and Japan and ventured across media forms [1], including now appearing in Magic: The Gathering. It’s quite a versatile monster, equally at home destroying a city or being cycled by me so that I can draw into Zenith Flare.

Godzilla was certainly not the first giant monster movie, but it has become the most iconic giant monster, against which all others are measured. Godzilla is the very essence of cinematic scale, although ironically its vertical stature contrasts with cinema’s widescreen horizontality (in some way it seems more at home on a Magic card). But that contrast may indeed be part of its appeal. King Kong climbed the Empire State Building before the advent of widescreen; but the development of Godzilla has been simultaneous with the development of widescreen as film’s standard shape. Godzilla’s perpendicularity to the screen shape makes it a special kind of cinematic uncanny, one that has had a profound influence on what Kristen Whissel has called “the new verticality” of cinema. [2]

It’s for this reason, among others, that I think Godzilla contrasts with a film series like Star Wars, one based more on the horizontal space (literally, outer space in this case) than vertical space. Ditto the Marvel Cinematic Universe, whose strict linearity suggests a kind of horizontal sprawl, no matter how much characters fly. Indeed, following Whissel’s arguments about the horizontal as “temporal and historical continuity” that is “ruptured by the upsurge or fall of a vertically articulated mass” [3], film heroes typically only engage in verticality to rescue society’s horizontal axis, whereas Godzilla’s pathbreaking role as villain-hero enables it to exist as a continuing representation of social rupture and simultaneously its antidote.

The paradoxical relationship of Godzilla to society — hero and villain, stabilizing force and disruptive force — is part of its unique place in the cinematic landscape, and the literal one. J. Hoberman calls Godzilla “an insert”, saying that “Sharing space with Godzilla is inconceivable” and adding that “two wildly different representational codes are shown on screen.” Godzilla is a figure that is both unrepresentable and hyper-represented: the very essence of cinema’s relationship to the objects it records.

One of the Ikoria alternate art cards is “Spacegodzilla, Void Invader”. Wizards of the Coast renamed the card from “Spacegodzilla, Death Corona” in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic [5]. This is a no-brainer of a decision for WotC, although ironically it may have ensured that the first Ikoria printing of “Spacegodzilla, Death Corona” (apparently readied too late to be corrected) will become a sought-after collector’s item.

This incident is interesting mostly because Godzilla has always been a fictional contemporary to real-life tragedy. From its origins as an embodiment of nuclear destruction to more contemporary allegory of events like Fukushima, Godzilla and its fellow monsters are not shy about their relationships to real horror. It’s a bold irreverence often absent from U.S. culture; Nick Pinkerton wryly points out that “It is difficult to imagine an American film being made nine years after 9/11 in which a big rubber monster would emerge from the footprint of the Twin Towers”. It’s this observation that explains why the Spacegodzilla card was bound to be changed, just as post-9/11 films digitally removed the Twin Towers from their skylines. So although Spacegodzilla is no longer the “death corona”, the original card stands as a testament to Godzilla’s impeccable historical timing.

Sources

All card images taken fromhere (except the “Death Corona” one, taken from here.)

1. Steve Ryfle, “Reign of Destruction”; supplement to Criterion Collection release of Godzilla: The Showa Era Films, 1954 – 1975
2. Kristen Whissel, “Tales of Upward Mobility: The New Verticality and Digital Special Effects”; in Film Theory & Criticism, seventh edition, edited by Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen
3. ibid.
4. J. Hoberman, “Godzilla: Poetry After the A-Bomb”, Criterion Current
5. Wizards of the Coast, “Statement on Spacegodzilla”
6. Nick Pinkerton, “Bombast: The Immigrant and Godzilla”; Film Comment