"The outlandish metaphors of the science-fiction and horror genres are useful vehicles for imagining the unimaginable, speaking the unspeakable. In pop creations like "Godzilla," the blunt metaphors, like the monsters themselves, tend to develop minds of their own: they run rampant, flattening even the sturdiest intentions. The most peculiar thing about Godzilla as a metaphor for the bomb is the creature's simultaneous status as a legendary beast of Japanese islanders' mythology: surely a more precise representation of the disaster that befell the country at the end of the Second World War would be an agent of destruction from far away, unheard of even in legend, not this native, almost familiar monster. Is Godzilla, then, also on some subterranean level a metaphor for Japan's former imperial ambitions, which finally unleashed the retaliatory fury that leveled its cities? Maybe. But the runaway metaphor of Honda's Godzilla isn't nearly so easy to pin down. It's more ambiguous, more generalized and perhaps more potent than that. And its significance can be glimpsed only in the Japanese version of the movie, because what Honda's "Godzilla" is most fundamentally about, I think, is a society's desire to claim its deepest tragedies for itself, to assimilate them as elements of its historical identity. The world of the uncut, un-Americanized original "Godzilla" is literally insular. There's no occupying army, no heavy-set Caucasian reporters, no United Nations representatives, nothing but Japanese people, screaming at, worrying about and ultimately vanquishing their Japanese monster. By the end of the picture, Godzilla himself seems already on his way to becoming a beloved figure. Dying, the beast sinks into the sea with one last plaintive roar, and Honda gives him the sort of send-off our westerns used to reserve for those stubborn old gunfighters that history kept leaving behind. All that's missing is "Shall We Gather at the River." Having claimed this monster as its own, Japan or at least, the Toho film studio was then free to export it. Toho cranked out dozens of prehistoric-creature features in the next couple of decades (many of them directed by an increasingly unengaged Honda), and the anguished resonances of the original "Godzilla" were never heard again. The metaphor had slipped its moorings and headed far out to sea, refitted as a tacky cruise ship. It's no wonder the jocular, mega-budget American remake landed with such a spectacular thud in 1998: even the Japanese hadn't believed in their metaphor for ages, and had long since turned their home-grown monsters into lovable entertainers. In Honda's berserk "Destroy All Monsters" (1968), for example, we find Toho's repertory company of scary creatures warehoused on an island called, none too imaginatively, Monsterland, where they live in slightly crotchety coexistence with each other, like retirees in a managed-care facility. For part of the movie, they're permitted to revert to their old, bad, global-destruction-threatening selves, but it's not their fault; they're being controlled by space aliens. And in the end, the Toho monsters, like tag-team wrestlers, get together to administer an old-fashioned scaly-tail whipping to the space creature Ghidrah. Godzilla, our hero, raises his stubby arms in triumph, while his son, who looks disturbingly like Barney the dinosaur, does a happy dance."