Kevin Cooney
Godzilla Minus One (2023) altered many fans’ perceptions of the eponymous kaiju. Gone was the childhood joy of watching a man in a rubber suit wreak havoc on meticulous scale models, now overshadowed by a new sense of awe and dread. No longer was the irradiated monster humanity’s savior. Instead, Godzilla emerged anew as a horror villain, a mindless, destructive force with a consistent, murderous, unblinking gaze. However, the human characters have often dominated the conversations about Minus One. Those trauma-laden survivors of war, who must now face the incomprehensible terror of the towering monster, usher Godzilla Minus One back to its horror roots. To understand Minus One’s horror, we need only turn to Jaws (1975) to see how fear and dread reflected in the eyes of characters elicit shock in the viewer.
The influence of Steven Spielberg’s work is unmistakable in Minus One. Directed by unabashed Spielberg fan Yamazaki Takashi, the film invokes Jurassic Park during Godzilla’s Odo Island rampage and later hints at Close Encounters of the Third Kind. However, the most significant impact, I see, comes from Jaws, an influence which elevates the kaiu-eiga into something much closer to its horror roots. The film’s small wooden boat, the Shinsei Maru, and its thrown-together crew both draw from Jaws while also pulling something subtle from the character’s eyes – either reaction or memory – to create tension beyond the immediate danger. For all its spectacle, Minus One lures Godzilla back to horror with the performances, through the eyes, of shamed-kamikaze Shikishima Koichi (Ryunosuke Kamiki) and Tokyo firebombing survivor Oishi Noriko (Hamabe Minami). The former calls to mind Quint’s (Robert Shaw) post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and the latter is shocked, like Martin Brody (Roy Scheider), by the proximity to the incomprehensible. This influence of Jaws, using characters’ eyes to create tension, is a revelation that enhances the audience’s appreciation of Minus One’s horror.
Haunted Eyes
Failing to die in combat was cowardly and denied him apotheosis – this was the cycle of pain and shame plaguing Shikishima in Minus One. To fail as a kamikaze pilot – a human weapon created by Imperial Navy Vice Admiral Onishi Takijiro because he “believed that the Japanese soul, which had been built up to possess a unique strength to face death without hesitation” (Ohnuki-Tierney 15) – was to return as a coward. To not die in a last-ditch attack was to lose a place in “Yasukuni Shrine, the pantheon of Japan’s war heroes where enshrined and deified, they would continue to fight alongside the living to protect the nation” – failing thus to become a “god” in the process (Straus 52). These were the cultural weights bearing down on Shikishima, who feared death yet could not figure out how to live without guilt. Then Godzilla slunk up from the sea to kill all but Shikishima and another member of the Odo Island detachment.
Over and over, Shikishima is battered by mentally exhausting and seemingly impossible-to-overcome psychological hurdles laid on him by himself, society, and finally, Godzilla. The result is a breakdown so powerfully performed by actor Ryunosuke that when not dissolving into body-shaking panic, all that is required is the vacant, lifeless stare of a traumatized survivor. Every shame – rehashing of his “failures,” or reminder of dead comrades – sends Shikishima into a deep abyss, a descent manifested in his eyes. Throughout Minus One, Shikishima returns to a mantra of torment, “My war is not over,” an overt vocalization of PTSD. While not codified by the psychiatric field until 1980, PTSD, labeled “shell shock” in World War I, was dismissed as a weakness. Renamed “combat fatigue” in World War II, PTSD rose to prominence during the care of the Vietnam War generation. Cody Parish and Kristen Ann Leer ably explored the clinical side of PTSD and its intersection with horror film trauma here at Horror Homeroom with “ I’ll Be Seeing You: Trauma as Uncanny Horror in Misery.” Acknowledging the combat trauma in the period context gives the viewer a better understanding of how much skepticism and ignorance Shikishima and Quint would have faced.
The haunted eyes of Shikishima and Quint
Shackled to the past, like Shikishima, is another World War II Pacific veteran, Jaws’ crassly charismatic Quint. Plagued by the grotesque spectacle of war, tough-talking and hard-drinking, Quint’s harsh persona softens into a ghostly focus when it is revealed he survived the U.S.S. Indianapolis disaster. In a legendary monologue, Shaw’s Quint recounts the sinking of the warship fresh off its mission to deliver the Hiroshima bomb. In slow, mesmerizing, horrifying detail, Quint relates the slaughter that took place in the waves, as innumerable sharks attacked and killed hundreds of his shipmates. While he survived, Quint has never reconciled or addressed the trauma in the Pacific. Instead, we can infer by his behavior that he retreated to drinking and anti-social behavior, perhaps magnifying already rough personality traits. Actor Robert Shaw, a writer himself, is said to have tightened the monologue after legendary director, writer, and military aficionado John Milius took a turn at reworking the scene. Shaw delivered the material in a way that conveyed the deeply buried pain that Spielberg seemingly understood by his focus on the character’s eyes to deliver the terror.
The intrusive reliving of past trauma is integral to PTSD, and for Shikishima and Quint, their renewed personal terrors are expressed through their memory-laden stares. Shikishima attempts to exorcise his recent trauma through self-punishment, while Quint’s buried shock seems to manifest itself in his antisocial behavior. Both characters become still and intense when pressed on their experiences. They hover on the edge of a remembered abyss, and the monsters they fight now, Godzilla and the shark, reinvigorate the terrors of the past, melding into a new, strange psychological monster that itself might debilitate and find ways to kill.
Terrified Eyes
For one 24-hour period in March 1945, close to three hundred United States bombers flew to Tokyo with one mission – burn the city to the ground. According to Mark Clapson, American aircraft dropped 1,665 tons of incendiary bombs on Tokyo, killing over 100,000 people, with thousands “burned alive, others suffocated as the oxygen was consumed by fire,” leaving one million homeless and turning 16 square miles “to ashes” (101). This is the background from which Yamazaki drew the character of Noriko, a survivor of the firebombing that left her family and friends dead. Entrusted with orphaned Akiko, Noriko’s unbreakable belief in the importance of living fully for those who survived the war initially grates on Shikishima. However, they quickly become a found family, with Noriko and the morose soldier taking on traditional gendered roles. She is a survivor with dignity, persistence, and levels of compassion for the mentally traumatized Shikishima, which proves not only endearing but also makes what occurs to her later in the film shocking and terrifying.
Jaws’ Martin Brody (Roy Scheider), newly appointed Amity Island chief of police, does not have such a poignant backstory. Fleeing from New York’s 1970s-era crime, Brody and his traditional American family of wife, two kids, and a dog seek peace on the small island. His tranquility is interrupted and washed into the sea with the arrival of the killer Great White. While not immediately in the creature’s maw, the pressure on Brody to keep the public safe and meet the commercial demands of town leaders increases the character’s tension. After then witnessing the shark’s bloody rampage, almost at the cost of his son’s life, Brody becomes personally invested in killing the shark. Yet, it takes a final incident to flood Brody – and, by proxy, the viewer – with shock and fear.
On the train to her new job in Tokyo’s Ginza district, Noriko’s war-time trauma is compounded by the reality of Shikishima’s phantom monster, Godzilla, which she has heard of but never seen. Through the window of the halted railcar, Noriko’s reaction is frightening, as there is panic in her eyes. Evoking the double glance of Close Encounters of the Third Kind’s Barry Guiler (Cary Guffey) to the off-screen presence of aliens in his rural home, Noriko’s eyes twitch right, drawn to hurtling debris, trolleys, and people, only to instantly twitch back to take in the lumbering, destructive kaiju. She whispers, “Is that…Godzilla?” as the monster levels entire city blocks before mauling Noriko’s train.
The terrified stares of Brody and Noriko
Scheider’s now iconic reaction to the stalking shark produces a jump scare without a trace of direct violence. Scheider’s Brody back peddles, cigarette dangling from his lips, in stunned silence at the monstrous animal that was, a moment before, an arm’s length away. Drained of life, Brody backs into the Orca’s cabin, never taking his eyes off the stern, and mumbles the iconic, “You’re gonna need a bigger boat.” The fear in Brody’s eyes is quickly matched in astonishment as Quint and Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss), once oblivious to the threat, struggle to comprehend the shark’s size and intentionally malevolent behavior. The power of Brody’s reaction continues to startle viewers, even though the moment is cemented in cinema history. The quick shock and struggle with comprehension unsettle the film watchers accustomed to the preceding calm narrative beats.
Hamabe’s performance mirrors Scheider’s in terrified amazement. Noriko’s eyes are wide and confused before dissolving into shock. Whether the director’s cue or the actor’s initiative, Noriko’s double take is stunning in its panicked authenticity. Noriko’s eyes express terror, like Brody’s in Jaws, which has long been absent in Godzilla films. Both characters freeze and react. Initially incapable of fight or flight, the witnesses to the monsters in front of them evoke the paralyzing phenomenon of a monstrous gaze.
Malevolent Eyes
Writing about a Godzilla film without mentioning the iconic kaiju is impossible. The monster ebbed and flowed through incarnations and personalities for seventy years. Originally malevolent, Godzilla slowly softened, becoming humanity’s ally in a fight against alien monsters and fellow earthly kaiju. Nevertheless, Minus One changed the way the viewer sees Godzilla. The slightly bug-eyed creature of the 1970s disappeared, replaced by an unblinking monster that eclipsed even the darker incarnations of the 1990s and early 2000s.
The striking, unflinching eye is a consistently eerie device hinting at an unnatural life form. The potency of an unblinking Godzilla is reminiscent of Diana Eck’s reflection that Indian gods can be recognized on earth “by their unblinking eyes. Their gaze and their watchfulness is uninterrupted” (7). Godzilla’s behavior and omnipotence, engorged by humanity’s reckless and blithe use of weaponized science, approaches that of a divine abyssal monster set upon the world to punish. The Shinsei Maru chase is made terrifying by Godzilla’s piercing gaze locked on the crew and vessel. Godzilla’s supremacy, muscular power, and nuclear breath are joined by calculating raging eyes, which, like the ancient Greek gods, “causes paralysis and terror of the fiery gaze, taking away [individuals] ability to act” (Lovatt 324). Like the power of Godzilla’s piercing yellow, unyielding eyes, the possessed ‘dead’ eyes of the shark in Jaws provoke the same terror and paralysis.
The malevolent eye of the monster
Brody flinches and freezes when the shark rises from the bloody chum, its glassy, black eye as prominent as its toothy mouth. Quint’s later monologue explores the cold, detached power of the shark’s eye: “Sometimes that shark looks right at ya. Right into your eyes. And the thing about a shark is he’s got lifeless eyes. Black eyes. Like a doll’s eyes. When he comes at ya, doesn’t seem to be livin’. Until he bites ya, and those black eyes roll over white.” The disengaged, deep black transitioning to ghostly white creates a horrific entity between lifeless and possessed. When Godzilla is blasted in a maelstrom of irradiated boiling water, his animalistic eye disappears, replaced by something alarmingly ever-aware, suggesting a metamorphosis beyond natural mutation or selection.
Conclusion
There is a visual exchange between the human and the monster in Jaws and Minus One. It is not a casual or unconnected glance but an intense phenomenon where “in mutual gazing, each person both gives and receives in the same act and receives moreover what the other person is giving” (Heron 243). Fear pours from the human stares, and the monsters emit death from their gazes. In Jaws, the shark’s scant screen-time – chalked up to the prop’s continual breakdowns – enhances its presence. It is there, below the water, shimmering but never in clear focus. Initially, the shark reveals its menace only through the terror of the witnesses and victims before connecting its gaze to those characters. Watching Minus One’s version of Godzilla elicits a frightening response for obvious and restrained reasons. For all of its bulk, colossal menace, and withering atomic breath, Godzilla’s at its most terrifying when the monster looks straight at the character. Moreover, by our emotional investment in the characters and witness to the senseless devastation, the monster also stares at us.
Works Cited
Clapson, M. 2019. The Blitz Companion. Pp. 97–118. London: University of Westminster Press. DOI: https://doi.org/10.16997/book26.e.
Eck, Diana L. Darśan : Seeing the Divine Image in India. 3rd ed., Columbia University Press, 1998.
Heron, John. “The Phenomenology of Social Encounter: The Gaze.” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, vol. 31, no. 2, 1970, pp. 243–64. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/2105742.
Lovatt, Helen. The Epic Gaze : Vision, Gender and Narrative in Ancient Epic. Cambridge University Press, 2013.
Ohnuki-Tierney, Emiko. “Betrayal by Idealism and Aesthetics: Special Attack Force (Kamikaze) Pilots and Their Intellectual Trajectories (Part 1).” Anthropology Today, vol. 20, no. 2, 2004, pp. 15–21. JSTOR.
Spielberg, Steven, director. Jaws. Universal Studios, 1975.
—. Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Columbia/EMI, 1977.
Straus, Ulrich A. The Anguish of Surrender: Japanese POWs of World War II. University of Washington Press, 2011. Project MUSE muse.jhu.edu/book/81414.
Yamazaki, Takashi, director. Godzilla Minus One. Toho Studios, 2023.
Related: On the ‘black eyes’ of horror in Jaws and Halloween
Kevin Cooney is a Harvard University FAS graduate and contributor to the 2021 British Science Fiction Association-winning anthology Worlds Apart: Worldbuilding in Fantasy and Science Fiction. His diverse interests and writings include examinations of religion, class, or the environment in genre literature and film (science fiction and horror.) He has previously published for Horror Homeroom on “The Lithic Nightmare of The Keep,” and on Tangina Barrons in Poltergeist – as well as in our special issue on found-footage horror. His work can be found at https://linktr.ee/kcooney.”
