Yesterday, amidst desperate attempts to salvage the remains of our republic with Bernie Sanders photoshops and, to lesser effect, vaccines—a new potential savior entered the fray:
The trailer for Godzilla vs. Kong.
If you haven’t seen it yet, it’s worth a watch. Action-movie fans will love the various explosions and a thing Godzilla does where he turns on an iPhone flashlight from his mouth. Peak TV lovers will delight at the appearances of Seven, Paper Boi, and a tie-undone, sleeves-rolled-up so-you-know-he-means-business Coach Taylor. And cinephiles will marvel at the cutting edge special effects leaping off the TV screen they had to move into an awkward corner of their apartment in order to fit a desk and equip with their friend’s parents’ HBOMax login.
There’s only one problem. Godzilla and King Kong, or “Kong,” as his friends apparently call him in this movie(?), shouldn’t be fighting a millennia-old battle to decide the fate of their respective civilizations.
They should kiss.
When we meet Kong in the trailer, he’s what the kids would refer to as “a big mood.” Physically exhausted, mentally broken, and with some pretty intense restrictions to his ability to move around freely. Who can relate?
“We need Kong,” says the sexy vampire my fiancé and her friend once spent hours trying to impress in a karaoke bar. “The world needs him.”
It’s hard to not find a kinship with the great beast. Many of us, too, were once free to galavant around the city, grabbing our friends by the waist and climbing the exteriors of buildings after bottomless mimosas in a crowded, hollandaise-soaked bar. (I am not sure if this is canon.)
But now, we’ve been reduced to this:
Captive, powerless, and yearning for a personal connection that is simultaneously just out of reach yet feels lifetimes away.
We are Kong. Kong is us.
And then, this guy shows up:
Godzilla, who isn’t afforded a cool nickname like Kong, blasts through the hull of a massive warship like a maskless Newsmax viewer entering the boxed wine section of a suburban Wal-Mart.
He’s the opposite of Kong. Freewheeling, destructive, selfishly barreling through societal norms (namely, the “don’t destroy society” one) with nary a hint of consideration for the damage he’ll do to others. He’s the platonic ideal of a monster.
And in that way, many of us are also Godzilla. Godzilla is also many of us.
The rest of the trailer devolves into some good old fashioned smash ’em up stuff, with Kong and Godzilla engaging in an extremely uncivil Versuz battle while Vicky from Vicky Christina Barcelona provides vital narrative exposition such as, “It’s Godzilla.”
But before all that, there’s this moment:
Make no mistake, Kong has a complicated past, and his treatment of the Empire State Building alone was enough to earn him a serious dressing-down at one of Governor Cuomo’s daily briefings. (Again, I am not sure if this is canon.)
But the face we see here is not one of a monster. This is horror at destruction laid before him. This is a desire for the right to live free from fear. This is humanity.
So Kong shouldn’t fight Godzilla.
He should kiss him.
Look, for the record, I believe Nazis should be punched in the face. Anti-maskers should be silenced by anti-fascists. And politicians inciting Godzilla-esque attempts to topple entire democracies should get the full…whatever they did to destroy Godzilla in the movies treatment. (As it should be clear by now, I have seen none of these movies.)
But if cinema provides us one thing, it’s a temporary escape.
So what if these monsters, who’ve become so indicative of our deepest divides, can do one thing that brings us together. One thing so many of us have yearned for after months of isolation. One thing, taken care of cleanly and peacefully, so we could get back to the messy work of repairing everything else.
“The word needs them…” hot vampire says in the trailer.
“…to kiss,” we whisper in return.
And they do. And for just a moment, we’re kind of OK.
