Representing Pasts – Visioning Futures

Abstract

Godzilla, known as a hero in Japanese monster films and a global icon in popular culture, is associated with the conflict of representation between the Japanese national identity and the Western understanding of this Japanese monster. As Godzilla became a global icon, the audience response and film critics of Godzilla films in Japan and the US are different. Those perceptions about this monster are linked with the contexts of the film industry between Japan and Hollywood, the history between Japan and the US after the Second World War, and the social and cultural difference between Japan and the West. I will examine the first Japanese Godzilla film, Godzilla (1954) and its Hollywood re-edited version, Godzilla: King of Monsters (1956) in order to understand the cinematic body of monsters in relation to national identity. I shall ask in this paper, what is the relationship between the monstrous body and the construction of national identity in the Japanese and American social contexts, if the national subjectivity is grounded in racial and cultural difference and the techno-organic monstrosity is concerned with the disruption of difference? On one hand, the concept of national identity is derived from an “imagined community” with shared experiences and authentic history, and on the other hand, the physical body embodies and sustains this collective identity through social rituals. Thus, the hybridity of the monstrous body may or may not limit the understanding of national identity and its racialisation. In particular, cinema as a modern ritual of mass communication reinforces the imaginative nationhood, and the excessiveness of the cinematic body is amplified through performance, costume, and special effects.