Though, naturally, the men and Godzilla cannot be moving in the direction of just any regularly sized moth. If human beings and a giant lizard were coplanar with a tiny moth on my windowpane, it would throw everything out of scale, disrupting the reality of the film. Rather, what I must try to imagine—in order to maintain the illusion—is that the moth, no longer a small insect, is in fact the same size as Godzilla. My only option, it would seem, is to cast the insect in the role of Mothra, that monstrous and lepidopterous island deity who appeared in her own series of Toho Company Ltd.’s films (which tended to portray her not as a monster, but as a benevolent protector or guardian angel of her island worshipers, a Phoenix-like symbol of resurrection and rebirth), and who also showed up from time to time in the Godzilla movies, typically to engage the so-called King of Monsters in battle (most famously, and originally, in Mothra vs. Godzilla). Indeed, this bit of casting should work out perfectly. Because if any monster movie is being microscopically restaged on my windowpane tonight, it is without a doubt Mothra vs. Godzilla. Was not the plot of that movie that Godzilla, roused from the sea by typhoon waves, arrives to terrorize a beachside city, where mobs of Japanese civilians flee helplessly through the streets, and where the whiplash swishing of his infinite tail halves buildings at a blow (they collapse like scythed grass), and where the impotent Japanese air force sends squadron after squadron of sleek and expensive fighter jets to launch missile strikes against Godzilla (only to find that these same sleek and expensive fighter jets are, to Godzilla, ‘as flies to wanton boys’), and where it really begins to look as if that implacable lizard is going to stomp each and every building into the ground, until at last one brave group of civilians (the protagonists, in fact) fly to a nearby island where Mothra lives and beg the island’s animistic natives for a minute of Mothra’s time, beg them, that is, for the privilege of paying court to their monstrous and lepidopterous deity, whom the visitors are finally allowed to supplicate, and who finally agrees (Mothra does) to flutter over to the mainland and defeat Godzilla, or, failing that, at least to retard his awful rampage? And is that not the very thing that the men on the surface of my windowpane appear to be doing? Their little crowd of gray dots has been moving steadily toward Mothra: they seem to be fleeing Godzilla for her, for the goddess or guardian angel that—to them—the brown moth must appear (a life force perfectly matched against the gecko’s incredible death force). And once they do eventually reach her, their last resort, surely, will be to beg that insect to combat the giant lizard on their behalf. At this point I actually lean forward in my desk chair, as if in a theater seat, genuinely enthralled.