What we all have in common

I have thousands of pages and hours of recordings that I will never read, hear or see again, and many that I will never read, hear or see, period, but each of them is a connection to who I am.

A book I have never read, or a record or CD or DVD I have never played, still represents a moment when I reached out thinking, “This looks interesting. I wonder if I’ll find something in it worth sharing.”

That’s what creative expressions are — an attempt to share something the creator thought was worth sharing.

And the existence of each item in my collection is a clue to who I am — the fact that I sought it out provides a hint about me, for better or for worse. The same can be said about each of your possessions.

Perusing a friend’s bookshelf or other collections can tell you a lot about what’s important to them. It’s why we ask things like “What’s your favorite movie? What kind of music do you like? What’s your favorite color” — always seeking clues to who we are. It’s also a search for common ground; we delight in hearing, “Oh, I love that song, too! Oh, the part in the story where that happened, were you as deeply touched as I was??”

Huh. Common ground. We are always seeking common ground.

Here I go into the evil of contemporary politics again: We are assailed daily by people who want to separate us — the opposite of the search for common ground. “You there! Retire to your little box and don’t come around here no more!”

But in our creative works, we find things worth sharing, the things that unite us even in our distinct individuality and uniqueness. When a film or a song or a dance or a play connects with us, we see our common humanity and we share something worth sharing.

I saw a wonderful movie the other day and looked for more information about it, which led me to one review where the writer said, “It’s too bad that actress is a communist — that ruined it for me.”

He didn’t see that a person with abhorrent opinions still made a human connection, because that’s what creators and their creations do — they show us reason after reason to love our neighbors and even to love our perceived enemies. There are concepts that rise above our creations and lead us inevitably to our Creator.

W.B. at the Movies rocking and rolling

This is my week for learning more about seventies rock. I took to Netflix the last few days to watch Bohemian Rhapsody, the fine docudrama about Freddie Mercury and the rest of Queen, and then Becoming Led Zeppelin, the new documentary about that band’s formative years.

A common denominator in both stories is the value of collaboration and how the contributions of all four band members creates a greater whole. Jimmy Page talked about the importance of being able to hear what everyone is doing as the songs were mixed. Guitarist Page and singer Robert Plant were the “front men,” but Led Zeppelin would never have been Led Zeppelin without bassist John Paul Jones and drummer John Bonham laying down the foundation.

And there’s a key moment in the Queen saga where Freddie goes off as a solo artist and comes back to his friends after it does not go as well as he hoped. He delivers a heartfelt monologue about realizing that he had become FREDDIE MERCURY because of the push-and-pull, the creative friction with his bandmates.

Somewhere in there I heard the observation that great rock bands don’t fail, they break up. These films about two great bands illustrate that dynamic — when everyone contributes as a unit, magic happens, as long as the individuals can keep their egos in check.

These two films tell powerful stories about the power of creative collaboration.

Godzilla as metaphor

The first trailer for Godzilla Minus Zero dropped this week, and I’m definitely looking forward to the release of this sequel to Godzilla Minus One, scheduled for Nov. 6, 2026. I have a friend who can’t resist reminding me that my interest is mystifying, so here I go trying to explain again.

I fell for Godzilla for all the reasons little boys are attracted to such things — a giant monster, explosions and destruction, what’s not to like? — but I became a huge fan of the first and last Japanese films when I began fully to understand the metaphor.

Japan was crushed at the end of World War II by the use of nuclear bombs against the civilians of two of its cities. The devastation Godzilla wrought on-screen was similar to the nuclear devastation — in fact, the creature is depicted as an ancient dinosaur revived and mutated by the nuclear bomb tests in the Pacific Ocean.

The first Godzilla film, produced in Japan in 1954, is a distinctly anti-war and anti-nuclear movie. The scientist who discovers a way to kill the monster at first refuses to deploy the weapon because he fears what politicians would do if they ever got hold of the technology, and the movie ends with a grave warning that if the Pacific testing continues, more monsters could emerge from the sea.

The film was so on-point that Americans edited the story for its 1956 U.S. release to make it more of a monster-fest like King Kong or Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein. The Japanese version was not available for general distribution here for 50 years, and by then various sequels had turned Godzilla into something less than a metaphor for nuclear war — more of a superhero, or sometimes a supervillain, than an harbinger.

Godzilla Minus One is my favorite sequel because it returns the monster to his original role as an existential horror, and because the story focuses more than ever on everyday humans trying to cope against the backdrop of a nation devastated by war and now an otherworldly creature.

I can’t imagine this sequel, set two years later, being as good as the last film, but it has the same director, Takashi Yamazaki, and the trailer has at least two moments that promise similar themes. One is an American voice over what looks like the first film’s climax ordering, “Abort third drop — repeat, abort third drop.” Does the new story suggest the U.S. was about to unleash a third nuke, this time on the flotilla that was trying to kill the monster?

The other moment shows Godzilla slowly stalking past the Statue of Liberty, the monster having arrived at the doorstep of the nation that invented nuclear devastation.

Godzilla is not for everyone, and this interpretation of Godzilla is not even for every Godzilla fan — there’s a huge subset of fans who prefer to see Godzilla fighting other monsters rather than exploring the beast as a consequence of monstrous human behavior.

I, for one, am hoping Yamazaki is planning to deliver a continuation and expansion of the themes from his first masterpiece. If he does, Godzilla Minus Zero could be another triumph.