And all these streets leading
so crosswise, honking, lengthily,
by avenues
stalked by high buildings or crusted into slums
thru such halting traffic
screaming cars and engines
so painfully to this
countryside, this graveyard
this stillness
on deathbed or mountain
once seen
never regained or desired
in the mind to come
where all Manhattan that I’ve seen must disappear.
New York, October 1958
When Allen Ginsberg looked out at the Manhattan skyline from ‘on top of the RCA Building’, he saw the mess of a city—its yellow taxis, halting traffic and crowded pavements. In Ginsberg’s ‘red eyes’ these are the things that make up Manhattan. The only thing missing, I think, is a giant lizard threatening to level it to the ground.
Such an appearance wouldn’t be as peculiar as one might think. After all, four years before Ginsberg gazed lovingly at Manhattan, Godzilla appeared for the first time on the Tokyo skyline in Godzilla (1954). The first film to set the legendary lizard loose on the world, Godzilla (1954) would come to the U.S. in 1956 with a new title, Godzilla: King of the Monsters!, where it would premier less than a kilometre away from Ginsberg’s spot ‘on top of the RCA building’. So, where’s the big lizard, Allen?
The 1950s became the decade of monsters destroying cities. Them! (1954) set two giant ants loose on Los Angeles. The Deadly Mantis (1957) brought a prehistoric praying mantis to Washington D.C. And The Blob (1958) unleashed a gelatinous, well, blob, on Phoenix, Pennsylvania. How could we even think of mentioning New York City without referencing the Empire State-climbing King Kong? In fact, it was the re-release of King Kong (1933) in 1952 which would inspire Toho Productions to invest in the production of Godzilla.
These films, and their destructive monsters, stepped through cities still crippled by the impact of World War II. As such, their roars echoed with the power of allegory. How better to fathom the destruction of war than by seeing it confined to the safety of a screen? How better to understand the inhumanity witnessed and perpetrated during wartime than by seeing something non-human, something literally monstrous, create war-like destruction? The destruction of a city in these films is a spectacle. Terrifying to behold, and deeply cathartic, it allows post-war audiences to picture violence and destruction in safety, with the kind of giddy joy one has in seeing big bugs wander through big cities.
This year these monsters made a glorious return in Godzilla vs. Kong (2021), the fourth instalment in Warner Bros’ self-titled Monsterverse. The film smashed all box office predictions, raking in $400million at the box office. Despite its seventy-year separation from the first Godzilla, Godzilla vs. Kong still roars with allegorical significance. Not only is it a rare example of the kind of box-office success seen before 2020 closed down cinemas, it also offers a glimpse into how audiences experience films like these following 2020. What does it mean to see a city destroyed by a towering beast when we have witnessed cities abandoned during lockdown? How does it feel to see civilians run from a horrifying monster when a pandemic forced us to run on the spot, restricted to our homes?
Earlier this week, Patrick McGeehan of The New York Times wrote that ‘New York City is Reawakening’. And he’s right. Masks are no longer compulsory in the city, musicals are re-opening and businesses are welcoming customers for the first time in months. But, as McGeehan also acknowledges, the city that awakens is vastly different to the one that closed down last March. In fact, all cities, and our perception of cities, has changed irrevocably in the wake of the pandemic.
When Allen Ginsberg writes of New York City’s yellow taxis, or towering skyscrapers, he’s working in the language of symbols. New York City is made up of all these individual parts, he seems to say, and yet they represent something more than themselves. New York City is more than its infrastructure, its transportation, or its buildings. It is the ‘Big Apple’, it is ‘where dreams are made of’. It is New York City, after all.
When a monster destroys these taxis, or collides with these towering skyscrapers, it threatens to compromise this symbolism. Often, such symbolism is nationalistic in vein. Postcards of Australia will feature the Sydney Opera House for the same reason that postcards of the U.S. will feature the Empire State Building, as if these buildings, and the cities they are in, represent a national identity. And so, when King Kong towers on top the Empire State, he is flouting this symbolism, even threatening to demolish it. How can this building be printed on a postcard when a big monkey threatens to break it?
When the pandemic first hit, many people left cities. Cities became dangerous and infectious. Then, as the pandemic continued—in fact, as it continues—cities became sites of crisis. Under the strain of the pandemic, hospitals struggled, infrastructure fell into disuse and businesses simply closed down altogether. We began to care less about our city’s architectural symbols, and more about those parts less likely to be aestheticised—our local cafes, clinics, hospitals and public transport. Plus, in leaving the city, we dismantled the symbolic power of cities. No, in fact, many of us don’t need to go into the city for work. Yes, cities can house the homeless if required. By exposing the fault lines beneath the aestheticised city, the pandemic challenged its position at the centre of our economic, political, and social lives. So, what happens if King Kong tries to climb the Empire State Building again?
There is a reason that Godzilla vs. Kong has enjoyed such unparalleled success. In watching the film, I found a cathartic swell of joy in seeing these two monsters indiscriminately destroy a cityscape. Not only because the sense of threat usually evident in these scenes of destruction were dulled by current conceptions of the city, but also because the destruction on screen represented the less spectacular, but equally destructive, effects of the pandemic faced in cities around the world. It is hard to imagine, even now, the scale of disaster that businesses, hospitals and workers encountered during the pandemic. But on screen, the erosion of healthcare systems finally looked as damaging and destructive as it felt, as our morning doomscrolling told us it was. Finally, we can see the immense scale of the pandemic’s impact in a way that allows space for us to visualise its destructive force, while also offering the cathartic safety of being a hammy disaster film we can stop watching whenever we want to.
In the wake of these destroyed cities, or our destroyed preconceptions of cities, I don’t propose a Walden-style return to the woods. Nor do I propose a re-energising, or ‘reawakening’, of the city as it was before 2020. Just as Godzilla vs. Kong ends with a chance to rebuild cities, so too will our perception of our cities evolve and rebuild. This changed perception will respond to the ways in which the pandemic offered a challenge to the importance of cities, and their status as powerful symbols. We no longer require a towering skyscraper to symbolise our progress, or a new Crown Casino with views of the Harbour to declare our power. We now know what these symbols disguise—the structural, systematic and cultural fault lines that can buckle under the slightest pressure. We also know how other fault lines—the inability to house the homeless, renew infrastructure, or allow different working habits—were falsely upheld. No wonder there’s so much enjoyment in seeing a city so beautifully destroyed. There’s a collective anger at, and mourning for, these symbols, and so an unbridled joy when we see them fall.
So let Godzilla bring that urban monster to the ground. Let Kong wield their sword through downtown. We don’t need cities to symbolise what they used to. As Ginsberg writes: after all ‘I’ve seen [they] must disappear’.
Guy Webster is an academic and writer living on unceded Wurundjeri land. His work has been published by The Conversation, Horror Home Room, and Review 31, and he is currently finishing his doctorate at The University of Melbourne on 20th Century modernism and conceptions of fear. He tweets too much as @guytothewebster.