Monster and Memory: Godzilla and the Unearthing of Grief in the Wake of Nuclear Disaster
Humanities
Nuclear Pacific
This paper seeks to examine the usage of artistic visual technologies as tools of mourning. Specifically, this paper complicates Freud's concept of Screen Memory, which he argues is a sublimation that acts as a stand-in for an event that is too traumatizing to be faced directly, arguing instead that the original Godzilla (1954) allows for trauma to surface. It is through this surfacing that a platform for collective grief presents itself for postwar Japan; a nation still grappling with the aftermath of two nuclear bombings.
