peppermintfables

Posted by Art Tavana

http://henryjenkins.org/blog/2026/2/21/global-genresmy-whole-bloody-affair-why-kill-bill-vol-1-is-punker-than-kill-bill-vol-2

This contribution is part of a series of posts on genre and the ‘global shuffle’. This post contains sensitive language.

I've never seen the Ramones live. I’ve only heard the stories of four leather-clad nerds who played harder and faster than any band in recorded history. Henry Rollins said they sounded like “musical assault.” Nobody sounded quite like this prior to 1974; the year the Ramones made their debut at club CBGBs in New York. The Ramons played fast, didn’t talk much, and wrote songs that evoked Nazi imagery, teen violence, and self-harm. They rejected the hedonistic cock-rockism of bands like Led Zeppelin and The Rolling Stones. The Ramones were angry nerds, which is why the “cock rock” purists at Rolling Stone and NME said they were “dumb,” “unoriginal,” and “repetitive.” One reviewer described the Ramones as “the sound of 10,000 toilets flushing.” The Ramones responded to the critics with what Michael Enright called “cartoonish violence and ironic posturing.” Guitarist Johnny Ramone strapped booster rockets to the rhythm and blues and launched it from CBGBs up toward Rolling Stone headquarters in midtown; Joey Ramone crooned about teenage lobotomies, sniffing glue, and what The Queers later described as “love songs for the retarded.” When the Ramones appeared as cartoons on the cover of Road to Ruin (1978), the critics called it “juvenile” and “camp,” but the Ramones were mocking the self-seriousness of ‘70s hard rock, and they were serious about it (purposefully blending the lines between Hanna-Barbera cartoons and genre violence).

“For me, punk is about real feelings,” Joey Ramone said. The Ramones moved bodies with down-stroking guitars, love songs, cartoon violence, and angry nerd shit that felt, at the time, revolutionary. The Ramones were progenitors of what film scholar Linda Williams described as “body genres” that activate visceral reactions. But cinema, we’re told, is not supposed to move bodies like the mosh pit at CBGBs. “Gratuitous” spectacles cause you to cheer or stomp your feet, not cinema. Williams challenged this sort of high art snobbery in her 1991 essay “Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess,” arguing that genres like horror and porn deliberately produce bodily responses (e.g., physical jolts or gasps). Film spectatorship, for Williams, was not a disembodied experience. Williams graffitied across the accepted narratives of film scholarship a decade before Tarantino released Kill Bill Vol. 1 (2003), his fastest and most “gratuitously” violent body genre film, and one of the punkest films of the 2000s; nothing before or after has matched its blend of velocity and cartoonish rage (the product of a director who sat atop the angry-male nerd kingdom of weebs). Kill Bill Vol. 2 (2004), released six months after the original, was, by comparison, a much more mature and methodically paced melodrama with Tarantino complicating The Bride’s trauma and her relationship to Bill, the man who attempted to kill her (and their baby). In the first film, The Bride’s trauma is unleashed with pornographic levels of rage—never complicating or interrogating The Bride’s vengeful wrath the way Vol. 2 does. Vol. 1 is a much more Japanese film (this will be explained).

In terms of average shot length, Kill Bill Vol. 1’s snap zooms and rapid cuts ditch long hangout scenes and extended verbal sparring in films like Reservoir Dogs (1992) and Pulp Fiction (1994). In contrast to the dialogue density of Kill Bill Vol. 2, Vol. 1 is more kinetic and physical—a visual feast that bursts into gustatory sizzles, cracks, and bone-crunching splatterpunk excess. Vol. 1 is a lean-as-fuck hour and fifty-one minutes of sushied, slice-and-dice movement and sound (Vol. 2 is 26 minutes longer and much less frenetic). Kill Bill Vol. 1 dragged the audience into the mosh pit and sprayed us with blood.

I saw Kill Bill Vol. 1 on opening day: October 10, 2003. I was 18. I practically shrieked when The Bride (Uma Thurman cross-dressing as Bruce Lee) whooshed her blade through bodies that squirted, sprayed, and spouted pornographic amounts of blood. It was, for my brain-rotted millennial gamer brain, the most hilariously transgressive shit I’d ever seen that was not a video game. Blood literally erupted from the decapitated stumps of Japanese Yakuza men. It was phallic and perverse. I won’t psychoanalyze the vulgar glory of blood launching into the air through exploding Chinese condoms (a Hong Kong cinema special effect), but it caused my body to jolt. I chuckled nervously, at first, looking around to see if I was alone; faces flickered with spatters of red and yellow, but nobody was moving. The theater was in a post-9/11 “War on Terror” daze of fear and anxiety, except for a group of teenage weebs who looked like they’d spent the past 14-hours playing Grand Theft Auto purely for the lulz. The rest of the audience looked like sterile and catatonic. The weebs, my fellow Tarantino-heads, were giggling their asses off. I joined them like we were front row at a pro wrestling match in Japan watching Akira Hokuto surgically slice open her forehead with a razorblade. They didn’t see me, but we moved our bodies together. It was mimetic. It was charged. We were moshing our bodies together.

“[W]hat may especially mark these body genres as low,” writes Williams, “is the perception that the body of the spectator is caught up in an almost involuntary mimicry of the emotion or sensation of the body on the screen.” Warm blood flowed through my neck and engulfed my face. I jerked my legs forward and kicked the seat in front of me—not caring about the person sitting in it. The sheer volume of blood was honestly kind of astounding. It felt like a new genre of revenge porn, and for the record, it was. Tarantino was staging a beatdown of the critics who labeled him a “racist anti-racist” and accused him of appropriating cultures (and other directors). They said he was “dumb” and “unoriginal.” These were the same critics who’d previously dragged Tarantino for sadism, homophobia, misogyny, and for his “gratuitous” use of the N-word. Director Spike Lee noted the number of times the N-word was used in Jackie Brown (38 times). In the September 1996 issue of Premiere, writer and self-identified “snoot” David Foster Wallace described Tarantino’s violence as a commercialized, low-culture Lynch who did to Lynchian violence what Pat Boone did to the rhythm and blues: “homogenize it, churn it until it's smooth and cool and hygienic enough for mass consumption.” This was the same logic critics used to delegitimize the Ramones for “appropriating” the rhythm and blues.

This is not not true. Johnny Ramone was technically just playing sped-up Chuck Berry riffs—Chuck Berry but dumber, whiter, and angrier. Tarantino poached from Italian and Japanese genre movies and made it more American (i.e., dumber). This is punk. Why is this punk? It’s always easier to define what punk’s not versus what punk is, but punk tends to sound “revisionist” and “dumb” to the people who aren’t punk. Tarantino turned Shaw Brothers kung-fu into sped-up Chuck Berry riffs. Tarantino’s favorite mainstream film critic, Pauline Kael, described Pulp Fiction (1994), his second film, as a film with “no serious undercurrents.” I read this two ways: (1) Pulp Fiction isn’t very deep, and (2) Tarantino is punker than David Lynch. Not everyone agreed. Film critic Jan Wahl called Tarantino’s violence as “soulless,” questioning his use of “gruesome, graphic violence,” to which Tarantino responded on behalf of all his fans, “Because it’s so much fun, Jan, get it?!?!”

Vol. 1 is, in its most stripped-down form, a joyfully punk distillation of Tarantino’s core gestures as a filmmaker: excess, repetition, pastiche, exploitation, and provocation, like Marcel Duchamp drawing a mustache on the Mona Lisa or Bart Simpson launching a paper plane into his teacher’s “tiny skull-sized kingdom,” to quote David Foster Wallace, who famously opined that “Quentin Tarantino is interested in watching somebody's ear getting cut off; David Lynch is interested in the ear.” DFW meant, I think, that Lynch’s severed ear in Blue Velvet (1986) was a metaphor—deeper, in his view, than the ear in Reservoir Dogs, which was just cartilage and blood. But Tarantino’s violence was commenting on itself. It was dumb, and that was the point. But Tarantino purposefully soundtracking Mr. Blonde’s ear-slicing with a Dylan-esque pop song was cartooning his violence. It was an intentional juxtaposition that was not quite “camp,” and Tarantino amplified the juxtaposition to Maxell-levels on Kill Bill Vol. 1, producing what Kenneth Turan at the LA Times described as the “most graphically violent film ever made by a mainstream American company.”

Tarantino’s riotously punk ethos flies slightly off the handles in his view that Kill Bill Vol. 1 is a movie that…children can enjoy. This is a provocation, for sure, but an earnest one—a generational one. Tarantino was 11 when he saw Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch (1969), which was, at the time, one of the most violent movies ever made. Tarantino was raised by a “swinging” single white woman who dated black athletes—a feminist, for her time. Jan Wahl was a different genre of feminist when she confronted Tarantino’s on national TV: “I’d like to see you walk down the street and get attacked by some kids who’ve just seen your movie.” Tarantino responded with a punk-rock snarl: “All the movies that I’m basing my movies on are the movies I saw as a kid, and kids go to a movie theater, and they can tell the difference. Maybe you couldn’t when you were a kid, but I could.”

One of the defining characteristics of Tarantinian punk is how he collapses the distinctions between youth, sex, violence, and gender norms (e.g., Uma Thurman as Bruce Lee, castrating the critical mass). This is why teenage boys (and weebs) worship Tarantino: he satiates their basest desires and does not apologize for it. It’s liberating. It’s what a mainstream Hollywood filmmaker should do: feed his audience and starve his critics. When I discovered Tarantino as a teenage boy, I was borderline aroused. His perversions (e.g., severed ears and bad words) made me feel something physical and grotesquely primal. I also felt like I was watching Saturday morning cartoons in my milk-stained pajamas. Tarantino and his fans, I include myself in this group, are fundamentalist about three things: 1) Violence is fun 2) Words are not violence 3) Kids can watch violent movies. Tarantino communicates this with the first instance of red blood splatter in Kill Bill Vol. 1, which appears inside Vernita Green’s suburban home as a bloody fingerpainting hung on kitchen walls where you’d normally see something cute and cozy—the portrait of a child with the family dog, for example. For Tarantino, extreme violence is not unsafe for children because children can differentiate between real violence, performative violence, and cartoon violence, e.g., a blood-stained fingerpainting.

Allow me to wax parental for a sec: juvenile delinquency is, at least I think so, a response to prepubescent trauma, e.g., seeing your parents brutally murdered in front of you by a psychotic assassin. Kill Bill Vol. 1 flashes back to O-Ren Ishii exacting revenge of the man who killed her parents in such a way, which Tarantino unleashes into bursts of animated gore and gunfire—the most belligerently juvie-punk sequence in the film. Punk, for Tarantino (and the Ramones) is coded in the primal desire to splash your high school bully’s blood across their PE locker. Vol. 1’s “mini boss,” Gogo Yubari (O-Ren’s bodyguard), is a Japanese schoolgirl who swings a chain mace and titters uncontrollably and sadistically. Gogo is a deliberate paring of kawaii culture with punk nihilism. In a flashback, we see Gogo guzzling cold sake before disemboweling a predatory Japanese pervert—a businessmen with a hard-on for teenage girls. I laughed uncontrollably as the businessman’s guts poured down Gogo’s legs, staining her white tennis shoes as a visual representation of innocence, violence, and sex. Gogo is a Japanese Sex Pistol—what UK punk impresario Malcolm McLaren described as a “sexy young assassin”—a mid-2000s collage of Japanese sadism (e.g., Takako Chigusa in Battle Royale, 2000), “Hit Me Baby One More Time”-era Britney Spears, manga, and UK punk. The weebs were obsessed. Tarantino supercharges these tendencies with Vol. 1’s Crazy 88 climax. The sequence opens with The Bride standing legs apart at the center of a glass pit. She is surrounded by masked yakuza. She draws her Hanzō sword and swings at a yakuza who cries with exaggerated agony, like a pre-recorded laugh track: “Aah! Aah! Aah!” Three yakuza swoop in from behind as The Bride leans back and draws her blade across their chests. Blood sprays across the glass like abstract expressionist paint. Another yakuza hurdles forward; The Bride pinches his eyeball and snatches it out of his skull. I winced. The teenage weebs looked like they were on a rollercoaster drop. When The Bride grabbed a yakuza and spanked him with her sword, ordering him to go home to his mother, everyone in the theater lolled. It felt like a Three Stooges bit. It was not “camp.” It was purposefully vaudeville. It was Moe poking Curly in the eye and slapping-the-shit out of him on repeat.

The juxtaposition of extreme violence and slapstick in Vol. 1 produced pain (tension) and pleasure (release). This is repeated on loop by Tarantino like the mechanics of a hack-and-slash video game. Vol. 1 was Tarantino feeding us a looping, staccato cadence of dismembered limbs, gore, and genre signifiers, e.g., Lady Snowblood (1973). But the true joy was found in Tarantino’s uninhibited violence, not his genre references. And for the record, Tarantino’s violence is never camp. It’s slapstick, exaggerated, and intentional—never in quotation marks (to “quote” Susan Sontag). Tarantino is totally earnest in his desire to puncture and release along a cathartic loop of swooshes, bangs, and aahs. Whether body genres can be camp or not is a point of debate but hear me out: camp generates aesthetic and ironic distance; body genres, on the other hand, draw the viewer closer and confront them. Body genres are in your face and relentless, like drowning in a mosh pit and trying to claw your way out (except you like the feeling). I felt like this when The Bride somersaulted into the air and swung her sword down into a yakuza’s skull—literally slicing him in half like a hot knife through butter. “I want to suggest that the success of these genres [body genres] is measured by the degree to which the audience sensation mimics what is seen on the screen,” writes Williams. Tarantino was referencing Ichi the Killer (2001)—where a yakuza gets cut in half—but I didn’t know that. I also didn’t know that Johnny Ramone was playing sped-up Chuck Berry riffs until years later. I just liked that Johnny played hard and fast with a warrior-like desire for regimentation and repetition. A one-woman killing machine cutting a man in half didn’t need to be interrogated; it needed to be felt, like Johnny’s riffs. It needed to make you cringe, scream, laugh. No film in history has brought its audience closer to gigglegasming than Kill Bill Vol. 1. Also, body genres, according to Williams, often center the female body in the spectatorial experience of pain and pleasure, inviting both a male and female gaze—blending elements of feminism and post-feminism. From Tarantino’s POV, this is partially why he referred to Vol. 1 was an empowering feminist statement—a “girl power” movie.

Stepping over puddles of blood, The Bride enters a freshly snowed Japanese garden. The tonal shift reorients us toward the elegance of O-Ren Ishii (Lucy Liu) in a white kimono, as she slowly unsheathes her katana and an ambient water fountain lulls our senses. There’s a slight pause before Tarantino plays a disco cover of The Animals’ “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood.” Moments later, a streak of blood cuts across the snow like an exclamation mark. The next sentence is a schoolyard diss: “Silly Caucasian girls like to play with samurai swords,” says O-Ren, as the two assassins clash swords and intersect cultural and generic identities in way that is quintessentially Tarantino. The action slows. Something resembling a maimed raccoon zooms across the screen. It lands on the snow. The camera pans up to reveal O-Ren’s exposed brain. I gasped as a catatonic O-Ren commented on the quality of the blade that just scalped her: “It was truly a Hanzō sword.” She’s a real-life cartoon, like Mr. Blonde conversing with a severed ear or Joey Ramone singing about teens wanting to be lobotomized.

Vol. 2, released about six months later with a completely unique marketing campaign, was more character-driven and significantly less bloody. Bill’s death scene in Vol. 2 is bloodless and quiet (the result of Pai Mei’s Five-Point Exploding Heart Technique). Vol. 2 has more prolonged dialogue scenes and introspection in desert landscapes—very Americana. It is composed with natural palettes and lighting that situate the viewer in the natural world. Vol. 1 is a high-contrast kinetic gore-fest that moves with the elasticity of Japanese anime and hack-and-slash, button-mashing PS2 games. Vol. 2 delves into the psychology of The Bride’s revenge arc. It’s a melodramatic body genre film that flickers with punk rebellion, like early Rolling Stones, but it’s not punk. Tarantino views Kill Bill as a single experience, The Whole Bloody Affair. I do not. These are two films with distinct visual and tonal identities. It’s Americana vs. Japanese exploitation. That is how they were first experienced by audiences in the mid-2000s, and no amount of film editing can alter history (don’t quote me on that).

Still, Vol. 1 is the personification of punk as a cinematic expression—a visual assault on the brain, but especially the body; it is generically more Japanese exploitation than Spaghettini Western—the genre anchor of the second film. For those of you who weren’t there in 2003, like those of us who weren’t there in 1974, there was nothing quite like the angry full-frontal slapstick of Kill Bill Vol. 1; it remains Tarantino’s punkest manifestation of all the things that make him problematic for his critics and so much fun for his audience. Punk, for me, is giving the people what they want and denying the critics what they want for us—what they consider “cinema” vs. “trash.” Vol. 2 is, in many ways, though not quite sonically, more of a vibe-based post-punk film that was more critically praised than the original, i.e., not as fun.

Biography

Art Tavana is an award-winning journalist and author of Goodbye, Guns N’ Roses (ECW Press). His byline has appeared in VICE, Pitchfork, Spin, Billboard, Consequence, L.A. Weekly, HelloGiggles, The Village Voice, The A.V. Club, Playboy, Penthouse, USA Today, and The Hollywood Reporter. Art’s writing has been cited in works by major literary and cultural figures, including Bret Easton Ellis’s White and Pam Houston’s Without Exception: Reclaiming Abortion, Personhood, and Freedom.

http://henryjenkins.org/blog/2026/2/21/global-genresmy-whole-bloody-affair-why-kill-bill-vol-1-is-punker-than-kill-bill-vol-2

Posted by Joy Hannah Panaligan

http://henryjenkins.org/blog/2026/2/18/global-genres-kaiju-connections-disabled-ecologies-visibility-the-posthuman-and-transnationality-in-pacific-rim

This contribution is part of a series of posts on genre and the ‘global shuffle’.

Kaiju as a genre has an established place in global cinema, tracing its origin from King Kong and Godzilla (1954), a popular Japanese franchise. Godzilla is inextricably tied to Japan’s national cinema, which reflects postwar trauma. It mirrors national and political anxieties with elements of myth and folklore. Over the years, kaiju movies have evolved beyond the realm of Japanese cinema, allowing countries to reinterpret the genre, which also mirrors their own national anxieties. Prominent Korean director Bong Joon Ho created The Host (2006), inspired by the McFarland incident and reminiscent of the 9/11 attacks, a resonance also seen in Matt Reeves’ Cloverfield (2008) (King, 2021). Jason Barr highlighted how Pacific Rim stands out from other kaiju films:

Pacific Rim, however, is somewhat out of the ordinary, and it may be because of del Toro’s affinity for old kaiju films. Otherwise, kaiju films of the 2000s and 2010s seem to eschew environmentalism and environmental emphasis in favor of a new brand of realism. Pacific Rim, therefore, in a variety of ways, can be considered an outlier to the trends of 21st-century kaiju films and more of a throwback to earlier eras. Few kaiju films in the Pacific Rim era of the 2010s mention pollution or environmentalism and instead focus more on international relationships and colonialism, which is a trend almost as old as the genre itself. (2016, p. 67)

Pacific Rim (2013) by Guillermo del Toro offers a unique take by veering away from traditional kaiju narratives. The discourse from national trauma shifts to global cooperation. The invasion of kaiju emerging from an alternate dimension represents an unprecedented global crisis. It demands collective action, requiring transnational cooperation and a solution that allegorizes a more universal problem, such as an ecological disaster like climate change.  Pacific Rimpushes the nationalistic boundaries of monster films by highlighting the need for global solidarity in addressing shared threats that affect everyone. The kaiju genre maps a transnational evolution of “monsters” as a medium for expressing collective national traumas. Kaiju function as an effective metaphor that captures the devastations embodied within cultural conflicts, fears, and national traumas. In this essay, I draw on Sunaura Taylor’s (2024) concept of disabled ecologies to map out how it examines the invisible and visible “disabilities” embedded in human and non-human actors within the ecological system.

The kaiju genre is often used as a metaphor to signify destruction, but its presence also mirrors human nature. In this paper, I want to highlight how the monstrosity of kaiju can be understood as an ecological interdependence.  

Disabled Ecologies: Invisibility and Visibility

When we encounter something out of the ordinary, our first instinct is to run, hide, and battle it to maintain familiarity. In almost every kaiju movie, the first encounter with the kaiju represents chaos and destruction. It displays humans’ first instinct: scream, run, and protect. Similar to how our body reacts to pathogens, it detects and builds a response to counterattack it. But sadly, fighting is not always successful, and when it fails to protect, it can result in a form of disability. Initially, humans instinctively avoid this by taking preventive measures and relentlessly searching for a cure. However, when all hope is abandoned, we ultimately accept it. Interestingly, Pacific Rim illustrates this cycle: destruction, protection, and ultimately redemption.

Kaiju act as a foreign organism and are often portrayed as an invasive actor that incites fear and intimidation, exacerbated by their monstrous size and appearance. This sense of disruption mirrors Taylor’s (2024) concept of “disabled ecologies,” which recognize the intertwined harms affecting both human communities and the environment. This framework emphasizes that everything is interconnected, making it impossible to separate human and natural systems. The kaiju are a new organism introduced in Pacific Rim that is not originally part of the ecosystem, creating destruction. The appearance of the kaiju presents an ironic twist: while most non-native organisms that enter an ecosystem cannot survive and ultimately die, the kaiju not only endures but thrives, feeding off the damaged system and seeking to become part of it. As one of the scientists said in the film, we made the earth fertile for the kaiju to live on, laying out all the toxic waste as a product of corporate greed (refer to Fig.1).

It highlights the irony that while ordinary organisms perish in polluted or damaged environments, kaiju are drawn to and even embrace ecological harm, positioning themselves as agents or products of environmental catastrophe. The kaiju amplifies Taylor’s framework by embodying the complex and paradoxical consequences of industrial harm within disabled ecologies. It helps to shed light on the monstrous entanglements, revealing the unpredictable adaptations that result from environmental destruction. The kaiju powerfully symbolizes the monstrous byproducts of unchecked industrial and human activity, transforming invisible environmental harms into something tangible and impossible to ignore. By personifying these hidden consequences, the kaiju makes the scale and impact of environmental destruction strikingly visible.

Posthuman: Adaptive Extensions and Survival

In the world of Pacific Rim, kaiju are depicted as a new contender for colonizing the earth with their own agenda. Humans assume the role of a conservative elite with the primary goal of defending the earth against the kaiju, which are perceived as “invasive species” aiming to colonize and build a new world. In ecology, invasive species are known to cause harm whenever they are introduced into a new environment, which can threaten the “native” species and lead to extinction (National Ocean Service, 2024). In this vein, the presence of kaiju as an invasive species wreaking havoc on Earth poses a threat to the humans’ habitat, enabling humans to adapt, transform, and extend their limitations. This ultimately led to the development of Jaegers, a two-pilot drift mechanic, and an extractive labor system built around the exploitation of kaiju remains as coping mechanisms.

The Jaeger program, known as the Pan Pacific Defense Corps (PPDC), is a transnational coalition established in the Pacific Rim in response to the invasion threat posed by the kaiju. It illustrates a semblance of the Kaiju Economy, showing how global networks function to turn a disaster into an opportunity, which can also serve as a metaphor for how industrial corporations profit from impairment. It parallels how the construction of military aircraft introduced contaminants in the aquifer of Tucson, Arizona, as part of the United States' World War II military efforts (Taylor, 2024). The Jaeger program can be linked to Haraway’s (1992) work on “the promise of monsters”:

refiguring the actors in the construction of the ethnospecific categories of nature and culture. The actors are not all “us.”...not all of them human, not all of them organic, not all of them technological. In its scientific embodiments as well as in other forms, nature is made, but not entirely by humans; it is a co-construction among humans and nonhumans. (1992, p.462)

In the film, Jaeger pilots become posthuman extensions, adapting through the neural Drift system, sharing one brain and embracing entanglement. The mecha-style costume also serves as a posthuman identity developed as an adaptive form of survival to combat the kaiju: a power-up transformation that mitigates the risks. In this context, disability is reanimated as a point of connection and not contention.

Pacific Rim expands the storyline of the kaiju genre by establishing a framework and narrative for after a kaiju is successfully eliminated. Usually, kaiju films end when the “monster” is successfully annihilated. Del Toro further broadens this by incorporating real-life issues, such as environmental consequences, through the concept of Kaiju Blue, a toxic waste left behind by the monsters (Fig.2). This concept also pays homage to previous kaiju films that addressed nuclear trauma, allowing Pacific Rim to fit into the larger global genre. Del Toro has a layered approach by featuring the exploitative practices of capitalism.

The death of a kaiju itself becomes a form of extraction. The introduction of Hannibal Chau (aka Hellboy) is a perfect fit because he can highlight the moral ambiguity of the characters he portrays, as a flamboyant black-market entrepreneur who successfully built a profitable business against these invasive species. Kaiju, in this view, are torn apart, broken into pieces that are harvested, experimented on, and become a commodity. This is reminiscent of the human experiments that blur the line between what is accepted and what is not.

Thinking on eugenics and mind melding also unpacks the dark history of non-human experimentation, linking to a Russian scientist, Vladimir Demikhov, who grafted two dogs into one body and was later recognized for transplant studies (Monasterio Astobiza, 2018). Stretching this further reminds me of a popular Japanese anime called Full Metal Alchemist: Brotherhood. In one episode, Nina Tucker fuses with her beloved dog, Alexander, to become a monstrous chimera, a transformation performed by her scientist father to maintain his State Alchemist license. These posthuman extensions can reflect two things: The Jaeger program exemplifies the good, with transnational cooperation aimed at common benefit. On the other hand, the underground business of kaiju extraction exemplifies the ambivalent nature of working with non-human actors and human’s adaptive response of survival.

Conclusion

“You have to believe in something to see it” is a saying that reflects human skepticism. Contaminants and monsters are often perceived as a product of our imaginations. The industrial age produced harmful chemicals that act as contaminants, polluting our water and air. These chemicals are often so microscopic that our naked eye cannot see them. And so we deny their very existence to hide a problem that we choose to ignore. These hidden dangers lead to invisibilities and inconveniences that create ripple effects and disabilities, which we instantly see as imperfections simply because they don’t adhere to the standard that we all know (Taylor, 2024, p.30). Kaiju are fictional representations that we make into film and cultural icons to make something intangible, tangible.

Recognizing environmental harm requires confronting inconvenient truths. Al Gore’s climate change documentary An Inconvenient Truth (2006) reminds us of facts and truths about how toxic mass waste alters the only planet we inhabit, yet a lot of corporations today still practice greenwashing and are motivated by corporate profits despite knowing the facts (Lyons, 2019). Disabled ecologies also pose inconvenient truths, such as the reality of polluted contaminants in Tucson's aquifers, which is an enduring consequence of postwar efforts in the 1940s. It illustrates a grim history of denial and corporations hiding behind myths such as “they didn’t know better back then” and “lack of experience” against the mounting evidence. This is just one case of many. Beyond the kaiju’s known metaphor, it also serves as a reminder of how humans choose to set aside facts and inconvenient truths for temporal benefits, which later evolve into a monstrous disaster we can no longer contain. The idea that humans, known as custodians and protectors of the earth, become prey is a reversed take on the return of the repressed, as they become victims of their own actions.

Do we need to fear the “monsters,” the kaiju? Or do we need to rethink how we perceive their presence because they make inconveniences and harsh realities visible? Do we wait for problems that require evangelical technological advancement? Or should we embrace the unknown by doing the hard work now rather than later? We must recognize things that are disabled and in the periphery, and we must be reminded that meritocracy and standards are socially constructed, despite how much value we put on them. It’s about expanding our understanding and resisting conforming to norms, by being comfortable with logic, and ultimately challenging and questioning how things are. Social norms offer only a compelling facade by presenting themselves as the right choice, seeking comfort in the approval of others as a form of self-preservation. Kaiju is a form of disabled ecologies that welcome and acknowledge differences, embrace discomfort, and have their own timeline. It is a connection that paves a path to recognize the uncanny and peculiar, going beyond the awareness that it exists to embrace it fully. It represents the subconscious urge to ignore visible threats, even as it loudly reminds us not to repeat past mistakes and become a cautionary tale. Understanding disability in all its forms (non-human and human) expands our tolerance and acceptance, allowing us to welcome differences and challenge our own conception of fear.

References

Arakawa, H. (Writer), & Satō, Y. (Director). (2009). The older brother (Season 1, Episode 4) [TV series episode]. In H. Suzuki (Producer), Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood. Bones.

Barr, J. (2016). The kaiju film : a critical study of cinema’s biggest monsters. McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers.

Bong, J. H. (Director). (2006). The Host [Film]. Showbox Entertainment; Chungeorahm Film.

Del Toro, G. (Director). (2013). Pacific Rim [Film]. Warner Bros. Pictures; Legendary Pictures.

Haraway, D. (1992). The promise of monsters: A regenerative politics for inappropriate/d others. In L. Grossberg, C. Nelson, & P. Treichler (Eds.), Cultural studies (pp. 295–337). Routledge.

King, H. (2021). The Host versus Cloverfield. In S. J. Miller & A. Briefel (Eds.), Horror after 9/11 (pp. 124–141). University of Texas Press. https://doi.org/10.7560/726628-008.

Lyons, J. (2019). “Gore is the world”: embodying environmental risk in An Inconvenient Truth. Journal of Risk Research, 22(9), 1156–1170. https://doi.org/10.1080/13669877.2019.1569103

Monasterio Astobiza, A. (2018). The Morality of Head Transplant: Frankenstein’s Allegory. Ramon LLull journal of applied ethics, 9(9), 117–136.

National Ocean Service. (2024, June 16). What is an invasive species? NOAA. https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/invasive.html.

Reeves, M. (Director). (2008). Cloverfield [Film]. Paramount Pictures; Bad Robot Productions.

Taylor, S., & EBSCOhost. (2024). Disabled ecologies : lessons from a wounded desert. University of California Press.

Biography

Joy Hannah Panaligan is a doctoral student at USC Annenberg. Her research interests broadly concern platform labor and labor in emerging digital technologies. Her scholarly interests also include casual video games, films, and science fiction. 

http://henryjenkins.org/blog/2026/2/18/global-genres-kaiju-connections-disabled-ecologies-visibility-the-posthuman-and-transnationality-in-pacific-rim