Monster Men: Kaiju (Patreon)

“The old world is dying; the new one struggles to be born. Now is the time of monsters” - Antonio Gramsci

El Colosso, painted by Francisco Goya some time after 1808, depicts an enormous man - a giant, a colossus - towering over a valley as people, cattle and horses, covered wagons and riders, rush across the landscape in flurries of panic, clearly fleeing although without any cohesive sense of direction. The cyclopean figure’s presence on the horizon hasn’t simply driven a stampede but induced chaotic abandon.

Goya’s lifelong transition from realism to magical realism allowed his paintings to develop an increasing capacity to evoke something deeper than simple representational scenes. If these cattle were running away from a fire or distant explosions, it would fail to create the same sense we feel of something impossibly large, dominating our understanding of the world around us. Critics have understood the colossus who appeared several times in Goya's work, to be a a visual metaphor for the national mood of Spain during the peninsula war; his different postures and expressions aligning with the popular energy of the time. There is, however, something very universal about the colossus…

Monster Men: Kaiju

My name is Sophie. Welcome to Monster Men, a series about why we tell monster stories, where they come from, and what they mean. This time we’re talking about, well, monsters. I’ve called the essay “Kaiju” to evoke a specific kind of monster, and even one certain king of monsters in particular, but I don’t want us to lose sight of the men part of Monster Men here. This series is about monster stories, but at the root of all monster stories is something really interesting about how human beings behave.

The word monstrous has two common meanings: cruel, inhuman, terrible or unthinkable; and just plain fucking big. That’s why I’ve called this episode Kaiju (although we’ll play around with what counts as a Kaiju) because I want to talk about what it means when we tell stories about really big monsters. Monstrous, however, and the word “monster” for that matter, derive from a word that means “to show” hence demonstrate. A monster is a warning that you can’t help but see, a portent, a sign of something. A monster is scary, a monster is big, but a monster is also a way of depicting something, a way of understanding something.

Ya boy Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov famously said “there are decades where nothing happens and weeks where decades happen” and I don’t know about you but it feels a bit like we’re living through a decade of weeks where decades happen. I think in a time like ours where really big things keep happening on a societal scale, it’s often a lot easier for our minds to be able to conceptualise things that are happening as a single huge lad ripping the piss out of the city you live in.

So let’s not mess around, and start with the classic huge lad. Godzilla, a representation of the atomic bomb.

The original kaiju film, Gojira 1954, rather than focusing solely on the king of monsters himself, spends an enormous amount of time showing the consequences of the monster - the fire, the collapsing buildings, the people screaming in anguish as their loved ones are thoughtlessly destroyed. Watching the film, seeing the now very dated effects, I’ve seen many people draw the conclusion that the filmmakers wanted to avoid showing the very obvious guy-in-a-rubber-suit monster too much, but how much of a reasonable conclusion is that? After all, the rest of the movie isn’t just carnage, it has a plot that follows the people whose lives are being destroyed by the monster and the efforts to fight it. Even the carnage itself, which does make up a lot of the screen time uses effects which require planning, expertise, resources and materials. Still though, whole scenes and sequences divert our attention away from Gojira in a movie ostensibly about Gojira which is called Gojira to instead linger on the catastrophic human toll.

It’s as though the movie wants us to engage in a more holistic understanding of what Gojira means. Gojia isn’t just the big lizard, Gojira is the devastation, the destruction, the consequences. Any idea that the film wants to avoid accusations of schlock become quite thin and flimsy - the genre that this film spawned after all is ripe to bursting both with movies where guy-in-costume monsters get a deeply unfortunate amount of screen time and films where the monster is the only captivating part and the rest is sheer tedium. What sets Gojira apart, what makes it such a classic, why so many others tried to imitate it, is the epistemological approach that the film itself brings to the idea of the giant, imparting an understanding that brings out the deeper horror of the story:

The giant and its consequences cannot be meaningfully separated.

The nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki may have been approved by politicians, planned by generals, executed by soldiers, but to the millions dead and injured, the people working in rescure and recovery and the nation in mourning, the thoughts and internal machinations of the American war machine matter far less than what comes next. The nature of Gojira captures all too perfectly the exclusively post-facto nature of cataclysm. It would be beyond futile to sit and ponder whether or not Gojira has a brain, a capacity for feeling - a soul. The colossus isn’t evil because something that big can’t have the rationality that underpins the nature of evil.

Let’s be as clear as possible here before we get any wires crossed. The dropping of the bomb, the act, the intention, most certainly the dropping of a second one in a world that already contained the observable unfolding consequences of the first - that is evil. What the use of the giant does however, for the story, for the representation of the atomic bomb, is make space for the suffering of those hurt to exist away from the willful evil of the choice to hurt them. The victims of the atrocity are allowed a narrative that gives them room without the need to find the moral weight of the people who did this to them. The movie ends when Gojira’s body sinks to the bottom of the ocean. Nothing more needs to be said.

Similarly, 2008 film Cloverfield created space for Americans to engage with the horror of the September 11th attacks through the lens of a big monster destroying New York. The film utilises shaky, unprofessional and ramshackle mobile phone and home video footage to reflect the piecemeal impression of the event that Americans had at the time from random snippets of footage, and the way that the camera loses track of people communicates the very real terror and confusion of people not knowing where their loved ones were as thousands were dying and buildings were collapsing around them. People appear and disappear and we don’t know if any of them are alive if they aren’t currently on screen.

In a very tangible sense, Cloverfield deals with 9/11 for an American audience in the same way that Godzilla allowed Japanese audiences to consider the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki - the question of the agency and intentionality of the perpetrator is entirely removed, the only thing that exists, the only thing that matters, is the monster and its consequences.

This, I think, is especially interesting considering the long term political effects of 9/11 on America - the immediate short term and ongoing long term islamophobia and its association with American patriotism. In one sense we could say that Americans were divided broadly between two reactions to 9/11. The first reaction saw part of the population wondering what could inspire the attacks, why someone would hate America so much and so viscerally as to want to kill thousands of people, which led many onto further understanding of the role of America on a global stage, the anti-war movement, and in many ways the modern American left. The second reaction was to say “I don’t care why someone would do that, I just want them to hurt too”. The existence of a reasoning and motivation behind mass death allows for a conflict between the people who want to interpret and assess it and people who simply want revenge, and I think that it’s fair to say that the senseless violence of giant monsters in giant monster movies is all the better for being so senseless - the audience can find a common solace and understanding in simply mourning the dead, simply hating the monster, simply sitting in the tragedy.

Slavoj Zizek once called 9/11 the “ultimate artistic expression of a passion for the Real” - meaning that for many politically unconscious liberals living in the supposed “end of history” the attacks were a violent awakening to the fact that history was still very much happening and couldn’t be escaped. I think this idea of 9/11 as performance, quite besides Zizek’s usual flippant and contrarian way of describing things, is unhelpful because it misses the monster for the monstrosity. The horror, the shock and terror intended and then caused by the attacks, wasn’t like the cultural reception to a piece of performance art. There was no discrete performance and then discussion and afterthought - the evolving response both in culture and in governmental policy was more than a country frightened by a shocking apparition - the giant and its consequences cannot be meaningfully separated.

Now kaiju, in japanese, means “strange beast” and we’re going to break from kaiju tradition more and more throughout this essay, but in the strictest sense I think people tend to expect a kaiju to be a city-destroying monster that isn’t simply a large version of a real animal, in the same way that Godzilla isn’t quite just a big lizard. The name Gojira is a portmanteau of Gorilla and the japanese word for whale, even. Before we get really wacky and start just straight-up describing giant humans as a part of the kaiju tradition, though, I think there’s a whole pantheon of kaiju that don’t usually get acknowledged for the strange beasts they are.

HP Lovecraft’s monsters are always strange, they’re usually described by the author - who was very good at ambience but not very good at evoking visual imagery - and other authors aping his style as combinations of existing animals. Cthulhu, the most famous lovecraftian monster, is a squid, on a man’s torso, with bat wings and the legs and tail of a dragon. I know that’s not really what Cthulhu looks like, don’t fucking @ me you pedants, but the point is, being chimeric, beastly, terrifying and huge, lovecraftian monsters fit actually very neatly into the world of kaiju.

Lovecraft was a hermit and shut-in for most of his life, and absolutely terrified of everything outside his house, so when we talk about big monsters representing big things in the world, it isn’t too surprising that ol’ HPL wrote a lot of stories about enormous monsters. He sadly didn’t have much particularly incisive commentary to offer with his big monsters, because again, he didn’t have much of a clue what the fuck was going on out in the real world, but the sense of a universe full of monstrous forces that could ruin your mind and body and soul without even blinking set a lot of writers on a path to telling what I think a lot of people agree are better stories. So while Lovecraft’s own stories aren’t that interesting to analyse for the meanings of giant monsters, stories inspired by Lovecraft often are.

Mike Mignola, creator of Hellboy, often plays with giant monsters in a way that's obviously Lobecraft inspired. Mignola's most famous works are Hellboy, in which the titular hero Hellboy travels the world discovering its various occult secret realms and wrestling with his destiny and role in the world, and The BPRD, a Hellboy-universe series about various characters within the Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense (see Monster Men episode 1 for thoughts about supernatural versions of the FBI). His heroes are often big guys, not giants per se but larger than normal. Hellboy is a big guy with a big punchy fist that he uses to fight often much bigger guys.

In the 2000s, with the knock-on effects of the September 11th attacks having transformed American politics, with the introduction of the DHS and the ramping up of the security state, the events of The BPRD series showed a sort of supernatural mirror of contemporary American life. Fungal bioweapons transform unsuspecting citizens into frog monsters, occultist doomsday cults emerge as giant monsters crawl out of the earth and destroy cities, and immortal nazis try to seize power in the emerging hell world. The real life release of the comics between the chaos of 9/11 and the dread of the worsening climate crisis is pretty easy to track in the stories of the comics themselves, with the BPRD itself receiving blank cheque funding from the US government as more and more paranormal bullshit unfolds. This kind of cosmic horror with a very political bent comes naturally enough from Mignola, whose two biggest inspirations have clearly always been HP Lovecraft and Francisco de Goya.

Mignola’s stories don’t always focus on giant monsters explicitly, but there’s always the sense that there’s something under the surface just about ready to erupt into apocalyptic mayhem, and his heroes, while by no means giants themselves, are often larger than life, physically powerful fighters with only blunt tools at their disposal. His stories are always about the bigger forces not immediately perceptible to the naked eye.

Hellboy’s two weapons of choice are a comically oversized hand canon and his sledgehammer-like stone right hand, but as his story develops we learn that he is the descendant and heir of both King Arthur (on his mother’s side) and Satan. He’s also the adopted son of the head of the BPRD, which obviously doesn’t give him a hereditary role, but does make him very significant in the organisation and gives the reader an ongoing sense that maybe at some point he could return and lead them all to victory, though he probably never will. Hellboy’s great potential destinies weigh heavily on him throughout his arc, as he sees that being big and powerful doesn’t solve his problems - on the contrary the more responsibility he’s given, the more easily it seems he can unintentionally hurt innocent people.

I really think that giant monsters or not - though there frequently are giant monsters - Mike Mignola is one of the best writers of giant myths working today.

Another incredible lovecraft-adjacent monster story is the McManus Brothers Netflix movie The Block Island Sound. The monster of the film is never shown on screen, but its effects are enormous and the ways that it messes with the central characters makes them seem tiny and insignificant, with the film comparing the human beings the plot revolves around to helpless fish being studied for environmental research. The movie is about Harry, a man on Block Island, about an hour’s boat ride from Narragansett, Rhode Island. Harry’s dad is seemingly suffering from a neurodegenerative illness and keeps waking up with no memory of what he’s done, or disappearing without telling anyone. Harry’s sister Audry comes to the island on behalf of the EPA because scores of fish keep washing up dead, and while she’s visiting their dad disappears, and later his body also washes up on the shore. After this, Harry starts experiencing the same symptoms as his dad, and we slowly realise that something in the water is somehow controlling Harry, making him sick and desperate and luring him out into the open ocean. The movie leaves us with Audry’s explanation to her daughter that the EPA has to take some fish to study them so it can understand all the fish better.

The tension throughout the film between the small-town - or small-island, I suppose - thinking of the Block Island residents and the mainland visitors isn’t seen from Audry who might seem the natural stepping-stone character, but rather from Harry, whose mind is rapidly deteriorating. It doesn’t make rational arguments for a mistrust of the government, but rather emotional arguments for how the government and government bodies make people feel studied like marine life for environmental research. Even if the research is important and overall beneficial, the imperceptible nature of the big thing that can so easily uproot and interfere with people is scary.

The Block Island Sound became one of my favourite horror movies as soon as I saw it, and I think it really helped me understand HP Lovecraft and lovecraftian horror better. Lovecraft’s stories use big monsters and unknowable forces because, as I said, HP Lovecraft himself didn’t know much about the outside world himself, but there’s something really human about his fear and mistrust of enormous forces outside his control. There might be entirely rational, scientific and good reasons for the existence of the EPA, but to fishermen who rely on fishing to live, their presence and their power can be scary even if it makes sense, because people don’t have any agency over the whims of the state.

We live in a big world that contains big things and we just don’t get a say over what those big things do to us.

It’s probably obvious that I’m bouncing around a little in talking about Kaiju stories, and that’s because it’s still ultimately a very pulpy genre full of egregious schlock. Very few kaiju movies really stand the test of time, despite the potential for really thoughtful stories. To really understand the nature of giant monsters I think we need to think more about giants. So to talk about giants we need to go back further and talk about the stories that have stood the test of time already, have been passed down from generation to generation.

In these old isles we have quite a few giant stories. Stay a while, let me share some with you.

In the north lie hills that some say are sleeping giants.

There’s a mountain up in the northwest called The Wrekin, and there’s a great old tale about how it got there. You see the Wrekin once was a giant on his way to Shrewsbury with a big shovel full of dirt to tip on the town and fuck it up. Fuck shrewsbury, I guess. He got to about Telford when he realised he was a little lost, but anger and determination to absolutely annihilate Shrewsbury unabated (relatable) he saw a cobbler coming the other way. Now the cobbler was actually coming from Shrewsbury where he had just been round mending shoes, collecting old ones he could take scraps from and so on - more like Shoesbury, am I right?

So the Wrekin asks the cobbler for directions, and the cobbler, coming from Shrewsbury where he has lots of friends and customers and being a shrewd sort - Shrewdsbury, if you will - thinks “hang on, I don’t like the look of this visibly furious giant with a giant shovel full of dirt asking for directions to Shrewsbury” so he says “If I’m not mistaken, you’re on your way to absolutely fuck the shit out of Shrewsbury with that shovel full of dirt, and who can blame you really, but listen here: it’s actually quite a long way to Shrewsbury, and I notice you have no shoes. Now I can direct you there, but if you get there, and you tip all that dirt on Shrewsbury, and you wipe out the whole town, but your feet are all cut up from walking, then in a sense, won’t Shrewsbury have won?”

So the giant, seeing his point, sits down and agrees for the cobbler to make him some giant sized shoes from his bag of leather scraps, and as the cobbler works and chats to the Wrekin, the giant gets sleepy and decides to lie and have a little nap - a snoozebury, if you will. And so that’s why the Wrekin is there, and one day the giant may well wake up, and destroy Shrewsbury, and rid the world of evil once and for all.

There are tons of myths about giants being an essential part of the formation of the landscape.

It’s quite common and often theorised that giants of old English folklore should be understood as the original inhabitants of the land, the reason that the large features of the land got where they are. Geoffrey of Monmouth, for example, wrote in The History of the Kings of Britain - a sort of fictionalised folkloric history of Britain - that at first Britain was entirely populated by giants before the mythic founding kings arrived and killed them all to make it safe for people. However, I think there’s something pretty essential about the character of these giants that we’re ignoring if we just think of them that way. Even in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s telling after all, there’s something very political going on with the giants if they represent a sort of native element of the land that has to be conquered and defeated for the sake of human life.

Giants are almost always aggressive and destructive, to the point where the term “gentle giant” is a conscious deviation from the norm. A giant is so big it can’t help but tear through the landscape carelessly treading on things, buildings, people, unless it’s a special, gentle giant in which case it considers its actions carefully and avoids such natural chaos in its wake. In the case of Geoffrey of Monmouth and the native giants of Britain, there’s something in the idea that these enormous wild brutes used to roam free until the noble and valiant kings came to tame them. Ol’ Geoff was a cleric responsible for a lot of the spread of the myths of King Arthur, and needless to say a devout monarchist, and his perspective on history clearly set the aristocracy as the heroes of the human struggle.

Moreover, the popular myths of giants that evolve out of telling and retelling, the stories from the naturally opposite side of the coin from Geoffrey’s perspective, often paint giants as capable of reasoning, speaking, understanding, and so on, but stubborn to the point of stupidity, greedy, obtuse and obstinate.

I want to tell you about Jack The Giant Killer, the myths from which Jack and the Beanstalk was originally adapted, but there’s a little context to do with the Welsh and the English you need first.

King Arthur was a Welsh myth originally used as a point of national pride and to some degree a rallying cry against English oppression and persecution. This was so much the case that English people would stage executions and funerals of King Arthur in front of Welsh folk in order to try and dispel the idea laid out in their lore that he would one day come back and liberate them from English rule. Although Jack is Cornish in the English telling of the tales of King Arthur - it should be clearly stated that the Cornish have their own long and complex history of struggle with the English as well as conflict with the Welsh - it’s possible that Jack the giant killer was originally a Welsh story as well because Jack is the cousin of King Arthur.

No matter the exact origin, Jack is a folk hero just like King Arthur, and it’s interesting to examine the fact that the giants Jack battled have a very pointedly aristocratic character, and most certainly not a positively depicted one - two of them even kidnap Jack to their castle at one point.

We should consider something in the story of Jack that is true of a lot of giants and a lot of stories of giant magical beasts as well - Cormoran, the first giant that Jack kills, is a blight to the local people because he keeps eating their livestock.

Basically, Jack is this skinny little twink, and he rocks up the local people like “I can kill that giant for you, all I need is a shovel and a bugle and a sword” and the folks are like “no fucking way look at this guy. You know what, have the stuff and piss off” - Jack goes to just outside Cormoran’s cave and spends all night digging a big deep trench, and then just before the crack of dawn he starts playing the bugle really loud, and it wakes the giant up. The giant tries to go back to sleep, Jack plays it louder, the giant starts yelling for Jack to piss off, Jack plays it EVEN LOUDER. Finally Cormoran rushes out of his cave and falls straight into the trench where Jack hops on his head and kills him with the sword.

I think it’s pretty interesting and relevant in the context of rebellious and insurrectionary folklore, that Cormoran the giant was taking the villagers’ livestock. Giants of this kind love to take the sheep and cattle, sometimes the women, sometimes the gold of the local people as a tribute so that they won’t use tremendous violence on the people who can’t fight back. If you were telling this story as a part of a people living under feudalism or aristocratic landlords or foreign occupation, there’s a lot in it for the idea of fighting back. Both Wales and Cornwall have much more extreme terrains than the parts of Britain from which their aristocratic oppressors came, so the idea of using a big trench that the enemy would unthinkingly charge into if you taunt them enough feels almost like an instruction for how to fight back.

It’s worth making further distinctions about Britonnic, Welsh and English mythology, because English people have no culture, are clapped, and are cancelled. In all seriousness, the modern conceptions of what English “culture” and old English myths are was almost entirely constructed post hoc by, well, one kind of awful fascist or another. It is a point of frustration, curiosity and much discussion that we don’t really have old sources for the culture and mythology of England before the Normans, and a lot of the myths, like King Arthur, that are seen as English or British actually come from the Britonnic people that the English fought to oppress and eliminate.

Geoffrey of Monmouth was writing The History of the Kings of Britain at a time when the Welsh were still very actively resisting invasion by the English, and the transformation of King Arthur from a Welsh national hero to an English one was an act of quite willful informational warfare. He was stealing Arthur from the Welsh.

As it happens, Arthur was actually described like a giant in some of the Britonnic versions of the myths as well - it’s very common that fictionalised historic figures who represent a sort of group identity become bigger and more physically powerful in retellings of their stories. In some of the oldest civilisations on record, the earliest gods were just semi-historic kings or queens who were seen as representative of a kingdom or a city-state who were described as stronger and bigger than ordinary people, perhaps also possessing magical powers. Of course in the French court romances and more modern versions of Arthuriana, Arthur is a pretty normal, not to say normal-sized king, but to the Welsh he was often larger than life in correspondence with his sociopolitical significance.

We’re going to dive further and further into interpretations of these myths now where we talk about the common themes that pop up throughout giant stories, and before we do I’d like to reaffirm the dedication that we have here in the Monster Men series to avoiding syncretism. Stories don’t come from one singular source, nor do they contain one singular hidden meaning. In many Britonnic myths for example, there are lots of giants who are basically just dudes - besides their unusual size there’s nothing particularly giant about them. They don’t steal livestock or say fee fi fo fum, they’re just characters in the stories who happen to also be really big. Part of that is because there’s a sense in those stories that the people to whose culture these stories belonged descended from the giants, that being a giant was just a normal thing that used to be part of everyday life but disappeared at some point.

What’s interesting about stories falling into a common framework, or being comprehensible with the same sets of ideas isn’t that it hints at a secret conspiracy of human culture, but that similar cultural conditions can produce stories that we can interpret using the same tools. Culture is not a monolith but rather comprises the infinitesimal actions of individuals and when people tell and retell stories because they feel real and true to them, they mirror the sociopolitical moment those individuals live in, so map onto real things about the real world in a delightfully messy and complicated way.

There was a sense in Britonnic myths, not so much the point of any stories but just a feature of the culture, that giants shaped the earth by dying or going to sleep, like the Wrekin, and so when we live we come from the earth, and when we die we return to it. When Geoffrey of Monmouth wrote that the noble kings of England had slain the giants it was a mirror of the eradication of indigenous culture by the anglo-saxons and the Normans, but for Geoffrey, who grew up on the Welsh border with these myths, it was also a way of representing the Welsh and Britonnic understanding of their connection to the land. It’s a double-edged sword, because it’s portraying the slaying of the giants as a good and necessary part of history, but also a noble-savage kind of idolisation of the older mythology.

Because of this idea, which is present in a lot of cultures, that giants are a part of our ancient ancestry, and because of the mechanism I mentioned earlier by which historic figures get bigger and stronger and turn into giants in retellings of their stories, it can sometimes come together that giants play a role in the fundamental construction of the universe itself, but also have a complex relationship to power and politics.

While the original Greek titans were part of a myth of primordial formation, starting with the heaven and the earth having children who were the titans, each representing ethereal concepts like time or memory, and then those titans being overthrown by the olympians, there’s something even in their stories that can easily be understood through the lens of ruling people. Cronus, the leader of the first titans and son of the sky and the earth, learned from his parents that he was one day going to be overthrown by one of his own children. Because of this, he began to devour every one of his children as soon as they were born, so they’d never have the chance to kill him. It was only because his sixth child Zeus was hidden from him at birth that Zeus grew to be big enough to eventually overthrow Cronus.

If we were to imagine, just for a minute, for fun, why not, that the story of Cronus had something to do with the state, or say, kingship, then we could say that the position of being in charge, being the leader, being the king or the state or whatever, is necessarily deeply inhuman. It requires a kind of unthinking evil that can’t reasonably be expected to reckon with the nature of its own actions or existence.

I wouldn’t be the first to notice this of course. Peter Paul Rubens has depicted Cronus devouring one of his children, in a painting titled Cronus devouring one of his children, and it really is a distressing scene, the poor helpless infant being ripped at by the old man seemingly almost devoid of any feelings or personality, the task of slaughter routine and meaningless as he does what he has to do to stay in charge, his humanity if it was ever there reduced to nil by the brutality he has to embody. This painting, one might think, is the zenith of this story’s telling, the most human connection to the suffering of this harrowing myth. One might think that, if one was a fucking hog and a swine who had never heard of ART BEFORE.

You see, the absolute fucking GOAT Francisco de Goya also took a little crack at depicting the titan cannibalising his own children, and he did it during his infamous Black Paintings, a series he created his during retirement in a community for deaf people. Secluded and presumably reflecting on his life during which he had seen war, starvation, the horrors of the Spanish inquisition, he painted the Black Paintings on the walls of his own home, and that’s when he created Saturn Devouring His Son.

Cronus Devouring One of his Children by Peter Paul Rubens, Saturn Devouring His Son by Francisco Goya

Goya’s paintings transitioned across his career from depicting the scenes of turmoil and suffering in Spain to using magical realism to depict them through story and metaphor, but they remained always very angry works of art. The way that he saw the Spanish state cannibalise its own population to stay in power stuck with him his whole life, and it’s chilling to imagine the old man Goya sitting in his dining room, where he painted Saturn Devouring His Son, looking at the eyes of the titan, tormented by the eternal horror of having to devour his own children to dodge the fate of prophecy. The child doesn’t even have a face, or a head, the entire painting is about Saturn and the unthinkable horror of his situation.

All of this brings us back around to how we think about Kaiju movies, the modern giant myths.

Arguably the best Godzilla film, Hideaki Anno’s Shin Godzilla depicts the giant as an evolving terror. At first, Godzilla is like a giant tadpole, just a head and a tail in the ocean, but as it moves in towards the land causing devastation in its wake it grows and develops more features. Throughout the film, we see incredible shots that don’t necessarily remove the monster but show us the consequences in a way that make it clearer what the monster is supposed to evoke. People run screaming down a crowded intersection, shingles vibrate off a roof as Godzilla passes nearby. We can’t help but understand Godzilla first as a tidal wave, then as a seismic event, then a nuclear meltdown. The human reaction is so much more in the state infrastructure response as well. We see a city in a life or death struggle with a disaster. The city doesn’t use bombs and guns and missiles to defeat Godzilla, it uses trains and supply chains and concrete mixers.

The nature of the metaphor evolves just as the monster physically transforms. Is Godzilla  tidal wave? No. Is it an earthquake? No. Is it a nuclear power station in meltdown? No. Godzilla is all of these things and none of them because Godzilla is, itself, the Fukushima Nuclear power plant disaster.

This relates to a piece of modern philosophy that can help us understand Kaiju movies a lot better. Godzilla is what Timothy Bloxam Morton would call a “hyperobject”. Hyperobjects, unlike regular objects, are things so large that they evade immediate perception.

The atom bomb was an object - it had physical limitations and was immediately perceptible - however the atom bombing was and still is a hyperobject. The decision to drop the bomb can barely be figured into an understanding of the thing itself because the bombing is such a vast and complex entity with such far-reaching and adhesive qualities that it exists in the world like a giant - unthinking and amnesiac, inseparable from its consequences.

9/11, likewise, exists now as a hyperobject, its tendrils snaking into practically every facet of modern American politics. This is a really important feature of the hyperobject, its adhesiveness. Everything touched by a hyperobject becomes part of it.

The regularly cited example is climate change. If we imagine you ordering something online, you are a person with microplastics in your bloodstream using a computer full of rare earth minerals mined with ecologically devastating practices using electricity that more likely than not comes from fossil fuels to order something that will have to be shipped to you creating further emissions. Everything involved in that scene is climate change in one way or another.

In the original planning for Shin Godzilla, the monster was going to, at one point, leak acidic blood from its gills and down into a jam packed underpass below where people would get exposed to it, and then the film would follow them in a B plot as they developed a mysterious illness from their exposure.

Now this was dropped from the film, and obviously we could say it’s a cut-and-dry allegory for radiation sickness, but understanding Godzilla as a hyperobjective monster, this communicates the adhesiveness of hyperobjects really well. When you touch Godzilla, you become Godzilla.

Kaiju movies, at their best, aren’t just allegory for a disaster, but communicate the nature of hyperobjects through film by slightly altering the imperceptible hyperobject into a technically perceptible but not immediately perceptible giant monster. You have to get really far away from Godzilla to see all of it, just like you need to take a look at so much global data to understand climate change, even where its effects can be immediately obvious.

Okay, now we have a good understanding of hyperobjects and kaiju as hyperobjective monsters, I want to get to where this essay was always leading, perhaps the pinnacle of my media analysis career so far. I need to discuss one of the most politically important films of the last 100 years, Godzilla vs King Kong. No, I’m really going to do a straight-faced sociopolitical analysis of a film whose central conceit is that the hollow earth is real and King Kong lives there.

For those unfamiliar, King Kong vs Godzilla, the 4th film in Legendary Pictures’ MonsterVerse franchise, is about King Kong - big monke - fighting Godzilla - big lizard. The film is a capitalist media product, more akin to a pro-wrestling match than a classic work of art. It’s a crossover event, bringing two franchise mascots together to first battle and then resolve their differences to team up against a common enemy. Towards the end of the film, it is revealed that a state military contractor has manufactured a mechanical terror to defeat Godzilla, a robotic replica of the king of monsters known as mecha-Godzilla. Mecha-Godzilla immediately turns evil and Kong and Godzilla have to work together to beat it, and then with a newfound respect for Kong and by extension humanity, Godzilla returns to the sea.

Again, the film is a popcorn flick, best enjoyed after exposure to your favourite substances and with little attention to the finer details, but in bringing together these franchise mascots, the filmmakers cannot avoid bringing in their metaphorical and subtextual contexts. You can’t have Godzilla without Godzilla as a metaphor for nuclear war, nuclear power, and nature’s wrath against humanity for introducing the horrors of nuclear energy to the world. You can’t have King Kong without the context of Kong as a primate protector of the natural world, a sympathetic gentle giant misunderstood by industrial western imperialists, the context of King Kong from Kong: Skull Island as a metaphor for the guerilla warfare - or should I say gorilla warfare - of the Vietnamese against American military invasion. King Kong - more like Comrade Kong.

So when you make these giants fight each other, you are telling a story where humanity relies on a guardian who represents a return to nature and a synergy with the natural world against an enemy who represents the way that the planet has become more hostile and inhospitable to us as a consequence of modern invention. When they then team up to defeat an abomination of the public-public partnership military industrial complex of the modern capitalist state, you aren’t telling an apolitical story.

As I’ve said, I’m not above criticisms of the film - chief among them that they absolutely fucked up the size of Chairman Kong. King Kong is supposed to fight Godzilla as an underdog and use his cunning and wits, not just his muscles. They made the monke too big. Monke too big!!!

But nonetheless the film is telling a modern giant myth that has a real resonance with the world of giants we live in today. The hyperobjective monsters that dominate our imaginative landscape and our political life are at war, and we are for the most part, just tiny spectators, our largest measure of agency just to try to form an alliance with the best monster we can pick. When the state tries to a monster, it is immediately and inherently evil.

Another giant of old Britonnic folklore, the Green Man, could fit into our modern giant myths and perhaps even the Legendary Pictures’ MonsterVerse quite easily. The Green Man, a giant with a face of leaves, is a symbol of the natural world and the cycle of rebirth and renewal. He walks through the world and everything he touches blossoms and turns green. In an obvious sense, the Green Man is a hyperobjective figure of nature itself, his adhesive power of renewal an almost perfect inversion of Shin Godzilla’s radioactive blood.

I’m not asking for a Legendary Pictures Green Man movie, in fact I would hate that, but I would like the giant myths we tell today to have more gentle giants, because we need to appreciate that not all hyperobjects are to be feared. We should tell stories about the good giants who struggle for something better, and perhaps give people a giant of nature, a giant of humanity, a giant of our connection to one another and the earth to believe in.

To get current: I’ve been researching and writing this essay for over a year now, and I feel a little sad to be moving on from it as well as satisfied to be done. I’ve been thinking for such a long time about how we relate to big, big things, and there’s something very appealing and enchanting about imagining the perspective of a giant. Feet on the ground, head in the clouds, moving over enormous distances in a single stride. It’s not a simple power fantasy, or just about being significant in the world, but also about how much more of the world you could take in at once with a bigger perspective on everything. I think about it when I fly in planes, I think about it when I see pictures from space, I think about it when I go up tall buildings. I am aware that as a person with lots of people watching me, I have a little of the experience of a giant in my real life - lots of people can see me in a way that I can’t escape, and unless I go to lengths to keep my interactions and conversations private, everyone will hear them and will want to express opinions and takes on everything that I do, thinking that because they are, as it were “small” that I can’t see them saying it, but I can. So should I pretend not to know? Should I try to include these strangers too, in the hopes that I can make them understand me better? Pretty soon I imagine myself stumbling through the town, lashing out clumsily trying to fix things but causing more damage than I can control or contain.

Something that really stuck with me, when I was talking to a friend for this project who has a lot of academic knowledge about the Welsh and Britonnic myths I talked about here, was something she said in passing. She said that the Britons told stories about the giants they were descended from because there was a sense that we used to be giants, but over time we were made small. Their giants weren’t rich and powerful, they were a symbol of connection to the land, and a connection to each other. They were big because we understood that their relationship to the world, both input and output, was big, and that when they died and their bodies returned to the earth it was changed permanently. They didn’t leave the world how they found it, and they were remembered by those who came after.

The monsters we live alongside now aren’t human, and I think human beings contain a sense that we have been made small, if not by these things then at least by comparison to these huge things without mind, memory or centre. Capitalism, climate change, nuclear disasters, terror attacks and so on will never be gentle giants, they’ll never be able to consider their actions or account for them, and they cannot be meaningfully separated from their consequences. We need solutions to deal with the giants that terrorise us now, but we also know that we can’t construct some artificial monstrosity to fight for us, because once unleashed who knows what it will do. Right now we need to understand that either we will find sympathetic giants that emerged organically from the world we live in, or else eat the terrible giants from the inside, and perhaps once again we can become the kind of people who shape the world by having connections and community and human richness.

We don’t live in an age of heroes, nobody slays giants alone.