Heart of the Hollow Earth

I recently watched Apocalypse Now for the first time. It is undoubtedly the best and most beautiful film I've seen in some time. People generally regard it as the best Vietnam film. Though gritty and realistic in its details, and, to some extent, inspired by real events, it represents an almost mythical vision, floating from The Ride of the Valkyries to Dante's Inferno and man's primordial roots in the jungle.

What made me want to see it was a comparison someone made between it and my Tashyas story. Actually, as I've said, I was thinking about Herzog's Aguirre, the Wrath of God and Conrad's Heart of Darkness. As is well known, though, Francis Ford Coppola cited both of these as major influences on Apocalypse Now. As a matter of fact, it's fair to say that Apocalypse Now is nothing more than a film treatment of Heart of Darkness, translating the Company's involvement in equatorial Africa into that of the United States in Vietnam, each presented just as imbecilic, futile, and destructive as human endeavors tend to be.

I've started to regard Heart of Darkness as a kind of modern myth. It has two basic motifs: the dark journey inward, and the great man who goes native and betrays humanity. The moral is that civilization is a veneer over something very dark indeed. Like the plot of Red Harvest (which I regard as another modern myth), it seems to have become part of the dream-logic of our culture. Aguirre and Apocalypse Now have been mentioned; I'm reminded also of Ridley Scott's Alien (whose ship and shuttle are named from Conrad stories) and James Cameron's popcorn-selling sequel. And, as a very recent and not-quite-legitimate descendant, we have Kong: Skull Island, which I went to see at the $4.00 matinee last week.

It's pretty plain that the makers of Skull Island were wanting to evoke and/or perfectly willing to plunder the visuals and general atmosphere of Apocalypse Now. It opens at the close of the Vietnam war, and the first scenes are chock-full of in-your-face historical details that let you know exactly what era you're looking at, while the jungle scenes are overlaid with the predictable rock songs so that you don't forget that this is the Vietnam era despite the overwhelming chronological ambiguity. (Me, to my eight-year-old son: "They played a Creedence song in that movie I just saw. Can you guess which one?" Him, without a moment's thought: "'Run Through the Jungle'!")  It's one of those movies where the older, uglier, and/or more annoying actors tend to meet grisly fates, and the young, pretty, highly paid actors do not. There's one guy I knew was destined to get picked apart by pterodactyls or something from the first moment I saw him.

Well, so, kind of a stupid movie.* But, as you may know, I'm a sucker for movies about little people running from giant monsters, and this one is pretty awesome in that department.

One really cool aspect is the hint that all these weird creatures are coming out of gigantic caverns beneath the earth's surface, where MUTOs have apparently been thriving for millions of years. Skull Island is set in the same universe as that Godzilla movie that came out in 2014 (also stupid, but also quite enjoyable), and it seems likely that we're looking at appearances by Mothra, Rodan, and Ghidora in the near future. Bring on the MUTOs! All monsters attack! I'm giddy with excitement!

But back to the hollow earth thing. Since my earliest childhood, I've known deep down in my heart that the whole earth-is-just-melted-rock-until-you-get-to-China theory is false. I mean, no one has actually been down there, have they? It's much more likely that there are massive caverns inhabited by gigantic prehistoric creatures and forested with huge mushrooms. Otherwise, the planet would be mostly wasted space, and, if there's one thing we know about Nature, it's that she hates for things to go to waste.

So I was very interested to read some of the amazing hollow earth theories recounted by Ryan Harvey over at Black Gate in some of his Pellucidar posts. Clearly, I'm not alone in my deep-seated convictions. But the most interesting, I think, is the theory of Cyrus Teed, an amateur scientist who founded a religious sect (Koreshanity) in the belief that we are already living on the inside of the world. From his Cellular Cosmogony:

The sun is an invisible electromagnetic battery revolving in the universe's center on a 24-year cycle. Our visible sun is only a reflection, as is the moon, with the stars reflecting off seven mercurial discs that float in the sphere's center. Inside the earth there are three separate atmospheres: the first composed of oxygen and nitrogen and closest to the earth; the second, a hydrogen atmosphere above it; the third, an aboron atmosphere at the center. The earth's shell is one hundred miles thick and has seventeen layers. The outer seven are metallic with a gold rind on the outermost layer, the middle five are mineral and the five inward are geologic strata. Inside the shell there is life, outside a void.**

Teed established a commune in Florida in 1894, which finally fizzled out in the 1960s. The place is now a state historical site. Strangely enough, soon after reading Mr. Harvey's post, I met a professor who lives near the site and takes his students there on occasion. So when he started talking about this theory that we live on the inside of the earth, I actually knew what he was talking about and could respond intelligently. It's called social networking, people. "You see?" I told my wife. "Reading weird stuff on the Internet isn't just wasting time after all!"

But it's strange, isn't it, how many "alternative" scientific theories (hollow earth, Atlantis, spiritualism, etc.) of the turn of the century gave birth to subgenres of fantastic literature? One wonders what theories Burroughs was familiar with in creating Pellucidar. At any rate, he was apparently unfamiliar with the shell theorem, first proved by Isaac Newton, which states that, at any given point in a spherically symmetric distribution of mass, only the mass closer to the center than the point contributes to the gravitational force at that point; all other mass can be ignored because its gravity cancels itself out, so to speak. The upshot is that, inside a perfectly hollow spherical shell, there would be no gravity at all; if, as in Pellucidar, there were a massive sun-like body at the center of the hollow, everything would fall into that body and burn. Of course, there would be nothing to keep such a body in its place at the center.

Speaking of Pellucidar and stupid movies, I recently watched At the Earth's Core, an Amicus production starring Peter Cushing and Doug McClure, with my kids. ("Hi! I'm Doug McClure! You may remember me from such films as At the Earth's Core!") Not so great, but the kids loved it. We also recently watched The Valley of the Gwangi, a Ray Harryhausen film about cowboys trying to capture dinosaurs for their wild west show in Mexico. It has same basic plot as King Kong (another modern-myth candidate) and ends with an allosaurus stalking a cowboy, his girlfriend, and a boy named Lope through an empty cathedral, which is pretty awesome.

Kong-derived stories seem always to feature some kind of dark journey upriver to primordial beginnings, which we saw as a key element in the Heart of Darkness myth. And so we're brought back to the primordial beginnings of this post, that is, Apocalypse Now.

* At one point, a search party happens upon a letter that a guy who got eaten was writing to his family. They make a big deal about how they're going to see that his widow gets his things. It's a solemn moment, but I couldn't help but imagine how that would go: "Ma'am, I'm very sorry to inform you that your husband was killed in action. Well, no, actually it wasn't in Vietnam. No, he survived that. What happened was, we were sent on this special mission to a secret unexplored island inhabited by prehistoric monsters, where he was eaten by a giant lizard creature. I'm so sorry for your loss."

** Actually, I imagine that there's probably prehistoric creatures on the outside.

King of the Monsters

So, I went to see Godzilla. My assessment: it wasn't half bad, and could have been a heck of a lot worse.

That's a compliment, coming from a curmudgeon like me. I enjoyed it. Nothing about it annoyed me exceedingly. There were a number of stupid plot points, like the decision to ship a nuclear warhead by train and then by ship directly through the path of a marauding, radiation-devouring MUTO when it would have been quite easy to have flown it around the creatures to its destination on the other side of San Francisco Bay, but, well, whatever. It's a movie about giant monsters.

I haven't seen a huge number of kaiju movies, but I have seen some of the old classics, and this entry strikes me as being very much in the same vein. The force/character Godzilla has been called a personification of the ghost of guilt and dread that hung over post-war Japan in the wake of the bombs. This movie therefore very appropriately begins with archival "footage" of the Bikini Atoll test in 1954, which, as a nice touch, is the year the original Godzilla came out.

My grandfather, who was in the navy, was present at the Bikini tests, though he never mentioned anything about massive unidentified terrestrial organisms. Later on my grandparents lived in Japan, and my dad has talked about experiencing earthquakes out in the countryside, watching the road undulate as ripples ran across the land. He's also talked about the atmosphere of the country less than two decades after the war. It's no surprise that kaiju movies originated at that time and place.

The current Godzilla opens with a nuclear disaster that makes one think of the catastrophic, tsunami-triggered Fukushima meltdown a few years ago. Godzilla himself, when he finally strides ashore in Hawaii, creates a tsunami in urban Waikiki, the visual handling of which reminded me very much of the chilling footage that emerged from the Tōhoku earthquake, further strengthening this connection. On the American side, we have a MUTO hatching out of the Yucca Mountain waste repository in Nevada.

The tone of the movie is dead serious, which is fine with me. I immensely enjoyed last year's Pacific Rim – it's symptomatic of my lowbrow tastes, I suppose, that I've seen Pacific Rim several times now, but haven't the least interest in watching the Hugo-winning Gravity – but, in view of Godzilla's subject matter and inspiration, I think this more joyous approach would have been inappropriate. The 1954 Godzilla was actually rather grim.

And it doesn't bother me that the MUTOs are defeated through no action of the human principals, for this also is quite canonical. Just the other day I watched Ghidora, the Three-Headed Monster with my daughter, and it reminded me of the 2014 Godzilla at several points, most of all through the role of Godzilla as a force of restoration. The massive coincidence involved in having the main protagonist, a military bomb expert, be the son of the guy who first caught on to the cover-up, and actually present at the hatching of the MUTO, is also no stumbling block. Ghidora, after all, features a detective looking for a missing-princess-turned-Venusian-prophetess, brother of a journalist covering a group watching for extraterrestrials, whose love interest is a professor studying the "meteorite" from which King Ghidora hatches.

There are some beautiful visuals in this film. I especially enjoyed the overgrown, ruined Japanese city behind the quarantine zone, and the unearthly night scenes of the monster battle in San Francisco. There are also some really great shots of Godzilla swimming under aircraft carriers, etc. The cinematography is generous: it gives us a lot more than it need have.

Part of the score is provided by György Ligeti, whose work is known to me chiefly through the haunting monolith scene in 2001: A Space Odyssey. This might have been an inspired choice for Godzilla, but unfortunately the viewer has been assaulted with so many action set-pieces by that point that the element of dread mystery has been squandered.

In that connection, it's apposite to note that many reviewers have compared Godzilla to Spielberg movies like Jaws and Jurassic Park. We have the slow build-up – which is typical of the old kaiju movies, and works perfectly here – but also the slightly bland, well-rounded plot. I'm no huge fan of Spielberg, as I like little eccentricities and inspired wing-shots as opposed to mainstream spectacles for mass consumption. But, as I said, the formula certainly works well here.

The main human protagonist is a thing of cardboard, as are most of the characters. That's a disappointment, but of course the real protagonist of a Godzilla movie is Godzilla himself. The people are just witnesses. And that's my only serious criticism of this movie: Godzilla's "character" (such as it is) is not fleshed out. We need more information about his motivations. Why, exactly, does he rise from the deep to destroy the MOTUs? How is this related to his "awakening" in the 1950s and the Bikini "test"? In Ghidora we have thought-processes related to us by tiny telepathic pop singers from Infant Island; we don't need that here, exactly, but Dr. Serizawa (the token Japanese character) could at least have said something coherent on the subject. It doesn't have to be all spelled out, but the movie is supposed to be about Godzilla, after all, and not these insectile MUTOs.

Anyway, I enjoyed the movie quite a lot. It's definitely something to see on the big screen. There's talk of a sequel featuring a monster island. A writer at HuffPo has offered the unsolicited opinion that this would be a mistake, as Jaws II and Jurassic Park II were disappointments. But this is Godzilla, the King of the Monsters, not a shark or a mere dinosaur, and I for one would welcome such a film. If there's anything the world needs now, it's movies about giant monsters rampaging across the earth.

UPDATE: Mr. Ryan Harvey, who knows much more about you-know-who than I do, reviews Godzilla in glowing (and much more eloquent) terms over at Black Gate. As struck by the visuals as I was, he makes a comparison I wish I had made, namely, between the nighted city scenes toward the end of the movie and the engravings of Gustave Doré. To the right we have God's defeat of Leviathan as described in the Book of Job; but in Godzilla, of course, the leviathan is the god.

Says Mr. Harvey: "Although Godzilla '14 tells a complete story, it feels like the start of a fourth series—the Legendary Era—that could stretch on for ten more films and fly off in astonishing directions that include alien invasions, three-headed space dragons, and fighting robo-replicas."

May his words prove prophetic!