Speaker
Description
This paper examines how crisis is represented in the films Shin Godzilla (2016) and Godzilla: Minus One (2023), arguing that manmade crises can only be resolved through proactive manmade solutions and cooperation, not relying on tradition or hoping the crisis will resolve itself. These films do not depict Godzilla as Earth’s best defender, a superhero, or a father figure as many of his films do, but rather as a living natural disaster, a walking nuclear warhead who seeks only to destroy.
In Japan, Godzilla has always been a way to examine crisis, trauma, and Japan’s place in global politics. Shin Godzilla tackles the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant disaster of 2011, using Godzilla as a metaphor for how a small crisis can snowball into an international disaster if left unchecked or held up by bureaucratic red tape. As the Japanese Prime Minister and Diet hesitate at every turn, Godzilla continues to evolve into new forms and eventually lays waste to Tokyo, killing most of the government in process, leaving only younger junior ministers alive to fix the problem. Godzilla: Minus One lays bare the scars of war, examining how a personal crisis can affect entire nations, as a former kamikaze pilot grapples with his guilt and post-traumatic stress as the American occupiers force Japan to handle the threat of Godzilla alone, even as Godzilla lays nuclear waste to an already exhausted nation.
This paper contends that Godzilla functions as a multimodal metaphor for crisis, and these films offer new frameworks for understanding disaster and interpreting institutional response/institutional failure. Within these new frameworks, kaiju cinema can be used as a new lens to examine crisis, trauma, and even recovery on a personal, inter-personal, national, international, and global scale.
Short Biography
Dalton Cooper is a Ph.D. candidate and Teaching Assistant at the University of Texas at Dallas. He has spoken at conferences across the world, most recently presenting at the First Annual Representation of Diversity in Mediated Popular Culture in the Twenty-First Century Conference held at Erasmus University in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. He holds an undergraduate degree from Texas Tech University and a Master’s degree from the University of North Texas. Dalton.Cooper@utdallas.edu
| Keywords | Kaiju, Godzilla, Japanese Cinema |
|---|---|
| Dalton.Cooper@utdallas.edu |