Godzilla Movies Work Better as Trump Allegory Than Metaphor

Calling a politician Godzilla is easy, even cheap. It lands instantly, costs the writer nothing and a web search for the phrase yields over a million hits: memes, editorials, merchandise, and a Politico piece from the last interregnum casting Donald Trump as Godzilla in exile. But that’s where the journey stops for most – at the armour-scaled silhouette and the atomic breath. It never reaches the part where the monster comes back in a sequel with a new opponent, a different challenge and new a new outcome.

That gap is the subject of a paper published in The Forum by Robert Boatright, a political scientist at Clark University in Massachusetts, and it turns on a distinction most of us last thought about in a literature class: What is the difference between a metaphor and an allegory? A metaphor tells you what a thing is like and then stops; an allegory adds a clock, saying not only what the monster is but how the story is going to unfold, which is a much larger promise and one the Godzilla comparison has been quietly making for years, according to Boatright.

Boatright leans on Lakoff and Turner’s account of metaphor as a way of organizing what we already recognize – a device that captures the features of its subject without promising that the subject will share its fate. Allegory is the greedier form. Animal Farm and Watership Down don’t merely describe what a totalitarian leader is, they lay out how totalitarian rule develops. That added dimension of time is exactly what makes them useful and, potentially, more frightening. Political writing slides between the two constantly (realignment theory, presidential regimes, the pendulum that always swings back). The slide is comforting because we have seen this before and so we know how it ends. But Boatright’s warning is that we may not, actually, since the people reaching for the metaphor have rarely bothered to check what the thing doing the representing actually does.

The Monster Nobody Follows Into the Sequels

So Boatright watched each movie. The paper offers a qualitative textual analysis of the Showa-era run, the films made by Japanese movie studio Toho from 1954 to 1975 – seven total “texts”: three read one at a time, the last four read together as a block (the full sequential story, according to the paper, runs through the first fifteen films and stops in 1989).

The readings are odd and specific. Godzilla Raids Again, from 1955, has scientists work out that the monster can be pulled off course by bright flashing lights, so Japan builds a flare system to steer him away from its cities; Boatright reads the flares as the tell-all literature about first-term staff removing documents from the president’s desk and finding him something else to look at. Mothra vs. Godzilla, from 1964, he offers as a parable of Liz Cheney and the January 6 select committee, with Mothra as the establishment Republican who dies protecting an egg she will not see hatch.

His case for why any of this counts as evidence is not that the films are secretly about American politics, but that they are available in a way the historical analogues political scientists reach for (Huey Long, William Jennings Bryan, Joseph McCarthy) are not. Thus, lessons drawn from movies are, in his words, “more likely to be used to interpret and respond to political events” than the references scholars prefer.

The mapping gets stranger when it stops being about Trump at all. By Destroy All Monsters, from 1968, every giant monster, or kaiju, has been quarantined on an island where humans can watch them, until an alien race called the Kilaaks gasses the monitoring facility and takes control of the monsters’ minds. The Kilaaks are slug-like creatures that appear to humans as women in silver robes and explain their goals at length while offering selected humans survival as servants. Boatright casts them as the conservative intellectuals who read Trump as a useful instrument – the people who wanted the administrative “deep state” taken apart and were content to have a monster do the dirty work.

Then come the robots. In the two Mechagodzilla films of 1974 and 1975, an alien race builds a machine that looks like Godzilla and destroys with far more purpose than he ever managed. Boatright suggests this is what Republicans were attempting after the 2020 defeat, with Ron DeSantis as the prototype: the same capabilities, more efficiently deployed, and less human. The paper cites a New York Times columnist making roughly that point about the Florida governor at the time. Whether this reading holds up is a separate question from whether it’s fun – but it certainly is fun.

What a Film Corpus Can and Cannot Settle

There, pretty self-evidently, is a problem with this whole apparatus, and to his credit, Boatright identifies it early in the method section rather than leaving it to trouble the reader. Every Showa film ends with repeated ways Godzilla is neutralized – frozen, sunk, or buried under an avalanche – while the political record of Trump only offers his one noisy exile to Mar-a-Lago after the 2020 defeat.

His answer is to treat the endings as aspirational, possible outcomes rather than forecasts. That’s a reasonable move for an essay that calls itself exploratory and openly declines to offer a comprehensive account of the films and their Trumpian equivalents, in one of the most important predicates in the paper. This idea is also absent from the press release, which states that the allegorical reading gives a far deeper and more informative representation of Trump than metaphor can, treating something the paper argues for, and hedges, as a property it simply has.

Which leaves the reader with a question the design can’no’t settle. Nothing in it separates a good mapping from a bad one. Republicans turn up here as Mothra, as Rodan, as the Kilaaks, and as a race of aliens disguised as cockroaches, depending on the film. The paper concedes this inconsistency without resolving it. And these allegorical mappings were also picked after the events they parallel, which is a comfortable position – perhaps a bit too comfortable.

None of which makes the exercise worthless. The closing point is the one worth keeping: hardly anyone can tell you what became of William Jennings Bryan and nearly everyone knows what became of Darth Vader. If the stories we actually carry around are the ones doing the interpretive work, then it matters which ones we know and whether we’ve sat through them to the end.

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