Godzilla (1998) as camp de-extinction narrative

Godzilla is one of the most famous de-extinct monsters in global popular cinema. Fan loyalty to the original Toho Studios conception of the creature as a super-powered, dinosaur-like creature helps explain the negative response to Roland Emmerich’s 1998 Hollywood version, which re-imagines Godzilla as a giant, irradiated twentieth-century iguana. Emmerich’s film is plotted around the monster’s attempt to use subterranean New York City as a spawning ground. The creature lays eggs that later hatch into baby Godzillas that look suspiciously like Jurassic Park-style velociraptors. Indeed, the movie plays like an expanded version of the last twenty minutes of The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997): a dinosaur-like creature runs amok in a major American city and is eventually defeated by a plan involving its offspring. Emmerich’s Godzilla is famous for being ‘Godzilla in name only’, yet its extensive intertextuality with The Lost World foregrounds de-extinction themes and imagery. Furthermore, Godzilla (1998) emphasises human action - in this case, 1950s French nuclear tests in French Polynesia - as the cause of the mutant creature’s emergence. Humans causing de-extinction is a key feature of the entire Godzilla franchise and of similar creature features from the 1950s to the present. Akin to its 1950s predecessors, Godzilla’s light, intentionally (and sometimes unintentionally) comedic tone open it to camp readings of the kind analysed by Bridgitte Barclay, who writes that the narrative and aesthetic shortcomings of schlocky sf B movies ‘disengage the audience from the filmic world and expose the mechanics of storytelling, making the master narrative a story and thereby resisting it by showing it as such’. Godzilla does just that, deflating its own anthropocentrism and rampant pro-militarism via its blatantly derivative story, shoddy digital effects and ham-handed dialogue.

‘Leaving a record of their coming’

Creature from the Black Lagoon (Arnold US 1954), perhaps the quintessential and most enduring atomic-age creature feature, is a rich text for ecocritical analysis. Not only does the film heavily emphasise extinction and evolution in its narration and plot line, but the film is full of tensions that both calcify problematic Anthropocenic narratives and erode them. The film offers us a way of critiquing Anthropocenic histories and ongoing narratives without erasing racial and colonial injustices. It also offers us a way to imagine other stories - other ways of writing on our world - that engage material entanglements, disorient colonial and anthropocentric perspectives and create empathy. Recognising the film’s rocky Anthropocenic and extinction narratives enables a more fluid approach. Reading through water, emphasising evolutionary entanglements, brings into high relief past injustices against humans and nonhumans, and it engages a palimpsest effect, where an awareness of our muddled materiality helps us write over hierarchical pasts. Framing the film ecocritically by reading extinction and evolution emphasises the tensions of Anthropocenic violence (through colonial science and Anthropocenic erasures) and of positive material entanglements (through empathy and disorientation).

Climate change, ‘Anthropocene unburials’ and agency on a thawing planet

Three narratives from different historical moments - the US film The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953), the US/Canadian film The Thaw (2009) and the first season of the British television series Fortitude (2015) - disclose shifts in the imagining of prehistoric creatures emerging from thawing ice, and all three thus intervene in evolving discourses surrounding climate change, nature and agency (both human and nonhuman). Beast was released at what many scientists have declared the very beginning of the ‘Anthropocene’ - that geological era marked by humans as primary shapers of planetary life. An iconic film of the Atomic Age, Beast features a thawed creature from Earth’s prehistory, and the fault-lines are sharply drawn between it and the humans who unknowingly unleashed it. Although the consequences of nuclear testing (along with the notion of the ‘Anthropocene’) were decades in the future, Beast imagines those consequences with startling and destructive clarity. In the twenty-first century, the long-term effects of nuclear energy, and industrial global capitalism more generally, have become strikingly evident. The thawed creatures of both Fortitude and The Thaw have neither the visibility nor the separateness of the ‘Beast’ from 1953, however. Tracing increasingly entangled notions of existence, culpability and responsibility in the Anthropocene era, these twenty-first-century creatures incubate within human hosts, becoming interwoven with the human, and thus complicate familiar notions of agency.

‘We will change’

One of the many threats accompanying climate change is that of deadly viruses being revived or uncovered when the permafrost melts, as in the 2016 uncovering of anthrax in Siberia. Blood Glacier (Kren Austria 2013, originally Blutgletscher) addresses this in creature feature form, telling the story of something nasty emerging from the natural world (in this case, microorganisms emerging from a melting glacier) to threaten humans and human superiority. Blood Glacier reflects a larger twenty-first-century creature-feature trope of prehistoric creatures emerging from thawing ice as well as an expansion of ecohorror beyond familiar nature-strikes-back anxieties or fears of humans becoming food for animals. Instead, the microorganisms discovered within the glacier change people (and other animals), causing mutations and leading to the creation of new combinations of species. The film juxtaposes these environmental concerns with one character’s past abortion, which comes to represent another, more personal, challenge to Western values. As a result, the film asks questions not addressed by other similar creature features: Which life has value? What does the future look like, and who decides that? The film therefore addresses the ethics of bringing life into being, gesturing toward the responsibilities inherent both in bearing children and in choosing not to bear children. These questions are addressed in the end of the film, with the birth and then adoption of a mutant baby. By bringing these issues of reproduction and environmental futures together, the film asks us to consider how our past and current choices help shape the future - both personal and planetary. The conclusion of the film serves in part to reinforce heteronormativity and reproductive futurism, both of which stake the future on the replication of the past through traditional relationships and by reproducing ourselves and our values through our children. Simultaneously, however, it gestures toward new possibilities for queer, nonhuman, mutant kinship and care.

Playing human

While Indian cinema has a rich tradition of ‘creature features‘, these films have traditionally drawn from Indigenous myth and folklore, rather than engaging with the environmentalist themes that are a staple in Western creature features. S. Shankar’s 2.0 (2018) marked an important moment in Indian cinema as the first true example of a mainstream Indian film that is unequivocally categorisable as ecohorror. However, the emergence of such a film text is not devoid of a historical context, nor is the near-absence of environmentalism in previous Indian ‘creature features’ devoid of reason. This essay is an attempt to trace how a film like 2.0 emerges within the Indian cultural context, how it assimilates prefigured Indigenous ideas as well as culturally translocated and subsequently Indianised ideas, and what new meaning is created in the process. My discussion primarily revolves around the theme of anthromorphism, which is commonly used in the visual and narrative portrayal of monsters in ‘creature features’. My arguments, while inter-linked, are divisible into four broad parts. Firstly, I locate the differences in Indian and Western ‘creature features’ in the differing cultural perceptions of anthropomorphism and anthropomorphised beings. For this, I draw on Paul Ricoeur’s theory of threefold mimesis, which links narratives to particular cultural repositories, and James Clifford’s notion of ‘traveling cultures’, which describes the modification of those repositories through cultural exchange. I locate the Indian economic liberalisation in the 1990s as an important historical juncture for the modification of the cultural repository. To make my case, I refer to existing criticism of Indian sf, marking the shifts from the post-colonial era through the post-1990s era. Secondly, I engage with the visual form of 2.0’s monster, focusing on the incorporation of both nature and technology in its design, and how it is significant. I draw from Western posthumanist theory, especially Donna Haraway’s concept of the ‘humanimal‘, and compare it with the Indigenous ecocentric imagination of the world where humans and nonhumans are kindred figures. Thirdly, I argue that the film, both at the narrative and visual level, constructs a vision of the Anthropocene that is not anthropocentric. It accomplishes this by consciously de-centring human characters, shifting the focus to everything that is of humans. Fourthly, I consolidate the previous argument by analysing how the film makes use of humour, especially dark humour, in order to accentuate its decentring of humans by the anthropomorphised, or human-like. Looking ahead, I propose the likelihood of 2.0 being the first of many Indian ‘creature features’ that mark a cultural shift from the mythological paradigm to the environmentalist paradigm. As such, a close analysis of the film as text and its corresponding context, focused on how it draws from and modifies its cultural repository, is significant in terms of laying the groundwork for future discussion.

Avant-garde encounters with the Anthropocene

David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: The Return (2017) departs from the series’s origins as a detective thriller/primetime soap pastiche to reveal the sf creature feature lurking in its DNA. In The Return’s most celebrated hour, Lynch ventures deeper into experimental filmmaking by soaring into a recreation of the first atomic test at Alamogordo, now commonly cited as the Anthropocene’s origin date. Following the blast, Lynch introduces a creature feature backstory for the entire series via three indelible creatures: the blackened human-hybrid Woodsmen; the winged frogs that enter the mouths of their sleeping prey; and BOB, the series’s original villain. My essay examines how Twin Peaks has transitioned from being, in part, a show about a forest that needs protecting to an art film about a universe reeling in the aftermath of human-made ecological imbalance - a permanent rift that even the most determined authority figures (local law enforcement, the military, the FBI and other government agencies) can’t hope to remedy or comprehend. I also analyse how Lynch’s disruptive avant-garde filmmaking in The Return resists didacticism in favour of providing visceral and ambiguous ways to engage environmental crises.