It’s as if all the elements on my windowpane—the mites, the moth, the gecko—are staging an adaptation of this monster movie specifically, a 1964 kaiju film that I haven’t seen since I was twelve years old. And how faithful will it be, the adaptation, I wonder? I try to remember the film’s ending, but memory fails me. I can’t even remember who vanquished whom. All I can bring to mind are stray images from the climactic battle, fought in broad daylight, as I recall, on the sandy beach (I think) of the seaside city that Godzilla had been terrorizing. What I seem to remember is Mothra flying in place in the blue sky above Godzilla, hovering in the air beside him, and maintaining that stationary flight—just as my moth had—by beating her wings into a blur, such that the rapid blinking of these vast wings (not pale brown like my moth’s wings, but the deep orange of late pumpkin or dehydrated urine, and decorated all over with black eyespots) was powerful enough to generate heavy wind, downward gusts of vortical and (in Mothra’s case) gale-force wind, which not only sustained Mothra in her hovering, but actually knocked Godzilla over, after he could no longer go on stubbornly shouldering it and digging his talons into the sand. And I seem to remember how beleaguered and small Mothra looked as she struggled to hover in place, how as her great wings beat she was blown back by the recoil of the gusts she was unleashing and how she had to fight (curling her thorax into a comma of strain) just to stay put. As for Godzilla’s counterattack, I have no trouble at all recalling the blue-white beam of his iconic atomic breath, a cheaply animated flame effect that was employed in every film, postproductively rotoscoped from out of the costume’s open mouth, where it gushed forth in steady streams of flicker and glow, half-laser blast and half-bile, like some lightsaber of chyme that Godzilla was vomiting onto his enemies (he even sometimes doubled over, so that he could better direct the flow of his own atomic breath, spewing it across all the tanks at his feet), which energy beam you could always tell he was charging up whenever a cartoon blue aura began to outline his dorsal plates, and which was hot enough to melt the shells of the tanks. Whether or not it was hot enough to melt Mothra I am powerless to recall. I suspect that the reason I can’t remember the outcome of that climactic battle is not only that I haven’t seen the movie itself (or any Godzilla film) since I was twelve years old, but also that, when I was twelve years old, the totality of my exposure to Toho’s Godzilla films consisted of a single sleepless evening: a Saturday that same summer, a week after I saw the American version, when a cable station was broadcasting a midnight marathon of the original Godzilla series (including Mothra vs.