Godzilla is exciting on the big screen, but what’s the real meaning of the character?
Amanda Kennell, assistant professor of East Asian languages and cultures at the University of Notre Dame, looks into the backstory.
Amanda Kennell, Ph.D. researches Japanese media to help us understand the modern media environment, including in particular new technologies and the popular media that blanket the average person’s daily life. Her book, Alice in Japanese Wonderlands: Translation, Adaptation, Mediation (2023), uses Japanese adaptations of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland novels to describe how the Japanese media ecosystem works today. She is currently working on a book about how popular media affect the way we interact with the environment. Dr. Kennell’s work has been published by the British Museum, the International Journal of Comic Arts, the Journal of Adaptation in Film & Performance, the Journal of Popular Culture, The Conversation, and The Washington Post, among others.
Understanding Who Godzilla Really Is
Today, media surround us so densely that there aren’t enough hours in the day to consider all of them thoughtfully. Yet, because those media are a major part of our lives, misunderstanding them can have major effects. Recently, I teamed up with a colleague who studies business ethics, Jessica McManus Warnell, to examine the intricate relationship between Japan, nuclear disasters, and the Godzilla film franchise.
Many people in North America associate the Godzilla films with a gigantic, roaring monster that tends to destroy Japanese cities. That image isn’t wrong, but it is an incomplete picture. The first Godzilla film was released in 1954 in the wake of World War II’s nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Nuclear power drives the film’s story; Godzilla is said to have been sleeping peacefully until awoken by nearby nuclear bomb tests. The damage wrought by Godzilla’s irradiated breath is thus ultimately our own fault.
Later Godzilla films make our culpability even more obvious, with Godzilla aggressively defending Earth against anyone who threatens it – humanity included.
In 2011, the Fukushima region of Japan was struck by an earthquake and tsunami, which then caused a nuclear meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant. Japanese Godzilla films released after the Fukushima disaster have rebooted the franchise in contemporary and even futuristic settings to help viewers think through our responsibilities in a world that is increasingly damaged by human activity. Watching Godzilla films without considering the environment is therefore missing the point.
Read More:
[The Conversation] – Godzilla at 70: The monster’s warning to humanity is still urgent
Leave a Reply