Rawle, Steven ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7908-8249 (2024) The Dark Pedagogies of Kaijū in the Anthropocene. In: Rawle, Steven ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7908-8249 and Hall, Martin ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5671-8175, (eds.) Monstrosity and Global Crisis in Transnational Film, Media and Literature. Cambridge Scholars Publishing, pp. 169-187

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Abstract

Kaijū (Japanese for ‘strange beasts’), or daikaijū (large strange beasts), have experienced something of a resurgence over the past decade or so. Transnational films based on RKO’s King Kong and Toho Studios’ Godzilla films have presented the monsters not in their traditional metaphorical guise as harbingers of nuclear or environmental disaster, but as restorative creatures, Titans set to restore balance to a crisis zone created by humans. Jonas Andreasen Lysgaard, Stefan Bengtsson, Martin Hauberg-Lund Laugesen argue in Dark Pedagogy: Education, Horror and the Anthropocene (2019) that ‘the human responses to exposure to terrible nonhuman reality’ in the face of climate disaster oscillate between denial and insanity leading to human extinction. Such responses, they argue, help motivate ‘educational practices dealing with environmental, sustainability and climate change issues’ (p. 8-9).
This chapter explores the ramifications of the ‘dark pedagogies’ in recent kaijū cinema, from Godzilla (2014) to Shin Godzilla (2016) and Godzilla vs. Kong (2021). This is not to explore how the monsters embody metaphors of global catastrophe, but to explore how these films provide a dark pedagogical strain of humanity’s growing sense of irrelevance in the face of the climate emergency. Across many kaijū films, human agency becomes a secondary consideration – the giant monstrous figures are rarely destroyed by human intervention. The kaijū, or Titans, themselves provide restorative succour and glimpses of hope, only for the cycle to repeat itself again while humanity witnesses its own vain attempts to deny the threat or counteract it with ‘mad science’. That such threats care little for human agency or the arbitrary lines of nation borders (the films take place across several continents), the hyper-object kaijū do less to warn us of our hubris and impact on the environment, than to show us, in gothic fashion, our helpless against such a catastrophe of our own creation.

Item Type:	Book Section
Status:	Published
Subjects:	P Language and Literature > PN Literature (General) > PN1990 Broadcasting P Language and Literature > PN Literature (General) > PN1993 Films
School/Department:	School of the Arts
URI:	https://ray.yorksj.ac.uk/id/eprint/10467

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