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Horrific environments: confronting the nonhuman in Korean and Japanese Ecomedia

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Horrific environments: confronting the nonhuman in Korean and Japanese Ecomedia

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Content HORRIFIC ENVIRONMENTS: CONFRONTING THE NONHUMAN IN KOREAN AND JAPANESE ECOMEDIA By Lindsay Sutton Roberts Jolivette A Dissertation Presented to the FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (EAST ASIAN LANGUAGES AND CULTURES) August 2024 Copyright 2024 Lindsay S. R. Jolivette ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This dissertation is a cumulative project that has only been possible because of years and years of support offered to me by the faculty and staff I have worked with along the way. In recognition of the length of my journey at the University of Southern California, I want to acknowledge the associate director of the East Asian Studies Center, Grace Ryu, who first believed in my potential as graduate student and who pushed me to be my best academic self. I would also like to thank Professor Brett Sheehan who taught me how to be a good teacher when I first came to USC and who reminded me at some of my lowest times that I deserved to be here. Next, I want to acknowledge the efforts of my primary advisor, Youngmin Choe, who has slogged through horror movie after horror movie over the years in her efforts to uplift my research. I consider myself incredibly lucky to have worked with a person as ethical, brilliant, and funny as Professor Choe and at times it seems like more than I deserved and more than I could ever live up to. Professor Choe has taught me to think about words in a purposeful and probing way that has made me a better scholar and a more inquisitive person. My whole dissertation committee has been such a support to me both academically and personally that there are not enough words to express the depths of my gratitude. Professor Akira Lippit has offered me year after year of inspiration and guidance as I learned to think theoretically about cinema and the world. I am especially grateful to him for encouraging me to explore my wildest ideas. Professor David Bialock was such a fount of knowledge in the early years as I began exploring the environmental humanities that I know my project would never have gotten to where it is now without his seemingly endless supply of seminal texts and sources for me to engage with. And finally, I want to thank Professor Albert Park from Claremont McKenna College for graciously giving his time to join my dissertation committee. Professor iii Park kept me grounded both academically and personally throughout many challenging years of research and writing. I would also like to acknowledge the support of Professor Sonya Lee and Professor Panivong Norindr during my qualifying exams. They both taught me foundational knowledge in their seminars that shifted the trajectory of my research because of how much I learned from them, and I was honored to have them as examiners as I moved from one stage of my PhD journey to the next. Similarly, I would like to thank the faculty and staff of the Korean Studies Institute and the Visual Studies Research Institute for their support throughout my graduate school journey and their encouragement of my explorations of both area studies and visual studies methodologies. Lastly, I would like to thank my community. To Christine Shaw and my classmates in EALC, I quite literally could not have completed this PhD without your emotional support. To my therapists, it is because of you that I came out of this experience a happier person than when I started it. And to my spouse, family, friends, and cats, thank you for your patience and grace in staying by my side throughout this incredibly difficult but rewarding life path. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgements..........................................................................................................................ii Abstract ...........................................................................................................................................v Introduction......................................................................................................................................1 Section One: Chapters One and Two Eco-Visuality, Elemental Cameras, And Nonhuman Life in Frame………………………….….21 Chapter One: Forgotten Forests and the Arboreal Camera ...............................................22 Arboreal Horror Theory.........................................................................................26 Visualizing the Forest............................................................................................36 Caring for a Monster..............................................................................................49 Conclusions............................................................................................................63 Chapter Two: Violent Waters and the Aquatic Camera......................................................65 Water Media in East Asia.......................................................................................71 The Aquatic Camera and Commodifier’s Gaze.................................................... 76 Body Horror and Becoming Water.........................................................................88 Conclusions............................................................................................................97 Section Two: Chapters Three and Four Cinemas of Eco-Temporality and Disastrous Histories……………...……………….....……...101 Chapter Three: Nuclear Ecology and Disaster Temporality............................................102 Theories of Temporality and Ecology..................................................................107 Futurity in Pandora and Fukushima 50…...........................................................111 Filmic Doppelgängers..........................................................................................127 Conclusions..........................................................................................................134 Chapter Four: Environmental Sovereignty and Monsters of War....................................137 The Birth of Monsters..........................................................................................141 War Temporality and Environmental Sovereignty...............................................147 Narratives of Negligence and Control.................................................................157 Conclusions..........................................................................................................168 Coda.............................................................................................................................................171 Bibliography.................................................................................................................................174 v ABSTRACT Human-caused environmental damage has become increasingly difficult to ignore since The Great Acceleration and this is doubly true in post-World War II South Korea and Japan, where there have been drastic changes in cultural, economic, and sociopolitical approaches to living. This dissertation argues that contemporary genre media makes the ways these drastic changes have affected the relationship between humans and the nonhuman environment in those national contexts seeable. “Horrific Environments: Confronting the Nonhuman in Korean and Japanese Ecomedia”' engages in close readings of horror, science fiction, monster, and disaster media texts to reveal how histories of ecological connection between humans and nonhumans in Japan and Korea are being imagined in visual fields and narratological diegeses. As evidence of the enmeshment of human and nonhuman life, this dissertation innovates on new cinematographic and sociocultural frameworks for understanding Japanese and Korean genre media’s ability to capture and convey the complexities of human/nonhuman relationality within the filmic frame. It argues for a multimodal approach to both visual and cultural analysis and proposes multiple new modes for use in East Asian visual media analysis. Combining environmental history, cultural studies, and film theory, this dissertation shows that the portrayal of nonhuman beings in contemporary Korean and Japanese genre media makes visible the ways that historical clashes with the environment have altered the way humans think about their relationship with nonhuman beings and that contemporary genre media is a singularly generative space for interrogating what Japanese and Korean visual culture looks like in the Anthropocene. 1 Introduction Fall comes to the Northern hemisphere and the skies of East Asia become obscured by dense, suffocating yellow dust, as South Korea, Japan, and China each blame each other for polluting the air.1 Throughout 2018 and 2019, Japan experiences catastrophic rainfall events in succession including super-storm Hagabis, and in 2023 the government enacts a plan to begin releasing nuclear-contaminated water into the ocean causing fears lingering from the 3/11 disaster to resurface.2 In South Korea (henceforth Korea), the frequency of earthquakes significantly increases throughout the 2010s causing concern in a location once thought to only have negligible seismic danger and in 2022 the streets of Seoul flood, killing multiple people living in banjiha, the sub-basement apartments that still exist in the city.3 These specific instances are a few among the avalanche of drastic climate disasters occurring all around Asia. Events of this magnitude and frequency manifest as both visible marks on the material surface of the earth and as shifts in the cultural milieu. In the cultural milieus of Japan and Korea, for example, the fear of the potential decline of the environment has inspired popular visual media like the Godzilla franchise and has led to social trends like the contemporary zero-waste movement in Korea.4 Undeniably, the horrors of a rapidly changing environment have become increasingly difficult to ignore since The Great Acceleration, defined as the increased human impact on the 1 Kwon Pil Chon and Jung-woo Cho, “Changing winds, China blamed as thick smog blankets Korea,” Korea JoongAng Daily, 1 November 2023. 2 Se Eun Gong, “As Japan prepares to release Fukushima wastewater, anxiety grows across South Korea,” npr.com, 27 June 2023. 3 Colm Quinn, “South Korea’s Unequal Flood Disaster,” Foreign Policy, 12 August 2022 4 Zero Waste, directed by Danny Kim, 2023. I viewed this documentary in its festival run during 2023 at the Seoul International Find Eco Film Festival (SIEFF). It covers the zero-waste movement and other green living community initiatives in Korea. 2 planet since the 1940s.5 This is especially true in Korea and Japan where the years after World War II and in the postcolonial era have particularly been rife with drastic changes in sociopolitical, cultural, and environmental approaches to living. But while a sheen of shifting chemicals on a polluted body of water tells the story of the material consequences of ecological collapse and industrial developmentalism under capitalism, societal anxieties surrounding the environment make their appearance in the media people consume every day. It is this idea of “every day” media as a site of ecological significance that this dissertation is concerned with. In this dissertation, I argue that mainstream speculative genre media makes sociocultural anxieties about the human relationship with the nonhuman environment visible and thinkable by using generic conventions that allow for imagining nonhuman life as vibrantly agential and lively in its interconnectedness with humanity. The four specific genres under the speculative umbrella discussed in this dissertation are horror, science fiction (SF), disaster, and monster movies. The horror genre proper makes up only one of the genres considered, but all four of the speculative genres analyzed contain within them the ability to capture that which is horrific about the destruction of the nonhuman environment and likewise this dissertation refers to the entire scope of media genres included as “horrific.” As a result of that generic focus, this project centers on framing speculative genre media as ecomedia itself, as opposed to the perhaps assumed mediums of environmental documentaries or media with environmental messaging and educational purpose. Acknowledging that media without environmental intent can still be ecomedia allows for an exploration of how varying genres in the speculative mode contribute to understandings of how humans imagine and tell stories about nonhuman beings in an era of ever5 J. R. McNeill and Peter Engelke, The Great Acceleration: An Environmental History of the Anthropocene since 1945 (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2014): 4. 3 increasing effects of human-caused climate change. The framing of ecomedia research in this dissertation both contributes to the current body of English-language scholarship on East Asian ecomedia and specifically addresses the lack of scholarship on popular cinema and genre media as sites of ecological significance in the contemporary cultural moment in Korea and Japan. Throughout this dissertation I propose distinct ecological modes of reading East Asian speculative genre media to show the significance of convention and trope working alongside innovative visualization and narrative in the context of ecomedia. Using frameworks of cinematographic camera modes and ecopolitical narrative modes of analysis, I argue that Korean and Japanese visual media texts that employ genre conventions to capture horrific registers within their visual and plot diegesis make seeable and thinkable the often-overlooked presence of nonhuman life and the conflicts that humans have with those nonhumans.6 In a time where nothing goes unaffected by global warming and the anxiety of a rapidly changing planet is constantly stoked by every season bringing new extremes of weather phenomena, horrific media reflect how much human psyches have been affected by the awareness of an unlivable future caused by humanity’s own impact on the nonhuman environment. The modes of analysis proposed and employed in this dissertation aim to allow for a clearer vision of human fears of the nonhuman and how those fears have resulted in imaginations of the nonhuman that result in conflict rather than coexistence. But alongside my readings of fear, my analysis in this dissertation is attentive to the moments of hope for relationality between humans and nonhumans 6 In this project, “nonhuman” refers to “not only sentient animals or other biological organisms, but also impersonal agents, ranging from electricity to hurricanes, from metals to bacteria, from nuclear plants to information networks” as stated in Serenella Iovino and Serpil Oppermann eds. Material Ecocriticism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014): 3. 4 in whatever form it arrives—whether that be better policies regarding nuclear energy, the death of all humans, or the power of human care overcoming otherness. This dissertation is made up of four chapters, split into two sections, and each section engages in a different modal practice of analysis and terminology formulation. Section one is focused on frameworks of cinematographic camera modes. It is titled Eco-Visuality, Elemental Cameras, and Nonhuman Life in Frame and it includes the chapters “Forgotten Forests and the Arboreal Camera” and “Violent Waters and the Aquatic Camera.” Chapter 1 argues that there is an arboreal camera mode present in the horror films Charisma (1999), The Mimic (2017), and Suicide Forest Village (2021). The arboreal camera mode centers trees and forests in the visual field, thereby bringing them into the films as characters themselves. Most forests in media are emotional manifestations, vessels to carry a certain human affect, a reflection of the anthropopsyche that alternately fears and idolizes, and they have little to do with the ecosystem of a material forest. This is not the case for the forests and trees that make themselves known through the arboreal camera mode. I argue that the arboreal camera mode does not relegate the forests to the background as set dressing, but rather brings the forests into seeability. Once the forests are seeable, they also become consciously acknowledgeable, and in the latter part of the chapter I argue that acts of radical care for the arboreal performed by characters in the films represent a way forward for nonhuman/human relationality. Chapter two argues for a similar mode, but this time in the aquatic register of the science fiction show The Silent Sea (2021). The aquatic camera mode provides agency to water in the visual field, marking the liveliness of the element with a constant emphasis on the appearance of it in its natural state. Like with the forests in the previous chapter, the water in chapter two is just water; it is not a metaphor for human emotion, and it is not the home to something monstrous. 5 The aquatic camera mode’s focus on water itself subverts expectations of water always needing to be modified by human expectations and needs, and this way of seeing water as agential provides an innovative way to think about myriad ways water has appeared in genre media throughout time in Korea and Japan. The latter half of this chapter is the dark sister of the section on care in the previous chapter. In the aquatic camera mode, it is violence as a form of selfdefense that marks the relationality between the water and the humans. Whereas chapter one sees hope in the ability for humans to make radical leaps of care despite difference, chapter two acknowledges the dangers of exploitation mindsets in human approaches to natural resources and sees hope in a loss of anthropocentric control leading to recognition of that. Section two is focused on ecopolitical modes of narrative analysis as opposed to being focused specifically on visual analysis as the chapters in section one are. This section is titled Cinemas of Eco-Temporality and Disastrous Histories and the two chapters in it are titled “Nuclear Ecology and Disaster Temporality” and “Environmental Sovereignty and Monsters of War.” Chapter 3 focuses on two nuclear disaster films from Korea and Japan, Pandora (2016) and Fukushima 50 (2020), and how those films paint a picture of shared dread around nuclear disasters destroying the future of the humans in those nations. I argue that this cinematic imagining of a potential future disaster in Korea that mirrors the past disaster of 3/11 in Japan points to a disaster temporality that has overtaken both nations in which the nuclear ecology of Korea is portrayed in film as a doppelgänger of the Japanese nuclear ecology. But in the existence of the doppelgänger, as frightening as it is, also exists the hope of recognizing the potential for disaster before it happens because of the doubling process. And I suggest that this ability to foresee what may come can open possibilities for preventative action. 6 Finally, in chapter 4 I argue that traditional framings of the temporality of post-war and the concept of national sovereignty are not sufficient for reading East Asian monster films through an ecological lens. This chapter covers the environmentally conscious lineage of Japanese and Korea monster films, while also suggesting that certain modes of sociopolitical thought have not been sufficiently taking the nonhuman environment into consideration. I argue this by focusing on the American military presence in The Host (2006) and Shin Godzilla (2016) and how their very existence in the actual material environments of Korea and Japan have negated a temporality of post-war and have foreclosed on a non-anthropocentric sovereignty being formulated in East Asia. In recognizing the hand America’s military has had in creating ecological monsters in Korea and Japan, there is also hope that an alternative form of relationality between the nation and the nonhuman environment could exist if American influence were removed. In an attempt to capture a fraction of the multitudinal and often incomprehensible magnitude of the current moment in environmental history and its impact on humans and nonhumans alike, this dissertation employs an interdisciplinary methodology alongside its proposal of its own multimodal approach to reading genre media. I employ theories and methods from visual studies, environmental history, psychoanalysis, ecocriticism, and many offshoots of each of those fields. When thinking about all the ways in which the nonhuman manifests in human media, and how those manifestations are culturally specific, it can be difficult to hold all of that information at once or to see how it creates a whole. Whether or not the whole is ever fully grasped, this dissertation weaves as many threads from disparate fields together as possible with the goal of showing readers the significance of interconnectivity between all things. As such, relationality, enmeshment, and other forms of intertwining are constantly appearing 7 throughout the chapters of the dissertation and my analytical thrust behind each chapter circles back to showing how the interactions between humans and nonhumans have changed the way nonhuman environments and beings are imagined in human media texts. In the remainder of this introduction, I will briefly go over the theoretical, material, and cultural groundwork that supports this dissertation. Nature and Relationality The backbone of this dissertation is based on a long lineage of ecocriticism and environmental theory that has continuously questioned the ways in which humanity imagines, perceives, and constructs nonhuman life. In 1978 William Rueckert published his essay “Literature and Ecology: An Experiment in Ecocriticism” which has since been cited as the first appearance of the term “ecocriticism” as referring to the “application of ecology and ecological concepts to the study of literature.”7 Rueckert’s framing is based on contemporaneous sociopolitical and scientific concerns for the future of the environment on planet earth as they make their appearance in literary texts. Not only does Rueckert state that ecology “has the greatest relevance to the present and future of the world we all live in,” but he also emphasizes the dangers of what he calls humanity’s “self-destructive” impact on the planet—a concern that has become ever more salient with the spreading use of the term Anthropocene.8 Finally, he mentions the need for an “ecological vision” that includes legal rights and protections for ecological bodies such as trees and animals. In addition to the influence from Rueckert’s initial 7 William Rueckert, “Literature and Ecology: Experiment in Ecocriticism,” The Iowa Review 9, no. 1 (1978): 71. 8 Rueckert, “Literature and Ecology,” 71. 8 defining work, this dissertation is also informed by the foundational theoretical conversations in the field of the environmental humanities about the definition of the term “nature.” Within ecocriticism the question of “nature” as a culturally constructed term is one philosophical quandary that has been mulled over and over within the environmental humanities. In her book What is Nature?: Culture, Politics, and the non-Human, Kate Soper says that, “in the commonest and most fundamental sense, the term ‘Nature’ refers to everything which is not human and distinguished from the work of humanity.”9 This is the definition of nature that is used in everyday human language, to separate objects and systems made by humans from everything else. Soper continues saying, “I speak of this conception of nature as ‘otherness’ to humanity as fundamental because, although many would question whether we can in fact draw any such rigid divide, the conceptual distinction remains indispensable.”10 As this quote points out, the question of the “divide” is the keystone of the question of nature, as a word and as a concept. The potential the term has for negating the interconnection between humans and the nonhuman environment is one of the reasons that eco-philosopher Timothy Morton argues that the concept of “Nature” needs to be eradicated in order to recognize “properly ecological forms of culture, philosophy, politics, and art.”11 According to Morton and other similar scholars, the nature/culture or human/nonhuman divide does more harm than good in terms of ecological thinking because, as previously mentioned, it prevents human culture from developing in a way that is mindful of coexistence especially because the colloquial conception of the terminology is focused on divides. Morton capitalizes the word nature as “Nature” in an act of “revealing its 9 Kate Soper, What is Nature?: Culture, Politics, and the non-Human (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1995), 15. 10 Soper, What is Nature?, 15. 11 Timothy Morton, Ecology Without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007): 1. 9 artificial constructedness” in their work. 12 I do not feel the need to distinguish the word as such in this dissertation because my research is attentive to both the human and the nonhuman experiences as they appear in the media I analyze. In fact, the human perception of the nonhuman as Other is key to understanding horrific environments, so I let nature remain the culturally loaded word that it is. That said, I do agree with Morton and other contemporary scholars of new materialism and radical relationalities that the nature/human divide is detrimental to human/nonhuman relationships in the broad scheme of cultural frameworks and that the divide is, as Soper would say, not real. It being not real, however, does not negate the power of nature as a construct in human culture. To ignore the term’s existence would also be to ignore the power of other culturally constructed discourse such as “progress” and “civilization” which work as antithesis to nature.13 Despite Rueckert and Soper’s discussions of terminology being stated as seemingly “universal” concerns, in 1996 Cheryll Glotfelty pointed out in the edited volume The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology that “Ecocriticism has been predominantly a white movement,” and she posited that, “it will become a multi-ethnic movement when stronger connections are made between the environment and issues of social justice, and when a diversity of voices are encouraged to contribute to the discussion.”14 These concerns, and other similar ones, have contributed to the development of ecocriticism based on place—as frequently discussed in postcolonial ecocriticism and in the work of Gary Snyder and Ursula K. Heise, for example—which emphasize the importance of research and knowledge about the specific in 12 Timothy Morton, Humankind: Solidarity with Nonhuman People (Brooklyn: Verso, 2017): 3. 13 Brett L. Walker, Toxic Archipelago: A History of Industrial Disease in Japan (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2010): 9. 14 Cheryll Glodfelty and Harold From eds., The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology (London: University of Georgia Press, 1996): xxv. 10 order to truly understand the implications of cultural texts.15 As Simon Estok says in East Asian Ecocriticisms: A Critical Reader, “while the dimensions of the ‘environmental crisis’ are clearly global, responses grow out of local systems with varying cultural valencies.”16 Considering terminology within cultural context, the use of a term equivalent to Soper’s definition of “nature” is distinct to different cultures, which makes it impossible to say that a division between human/nonhuman has always been in place or is even in place now in all cultures. However, there is evidence that a similar differentiation in conceptualization and language usage existed in pre-modern East Asia which is one of the reasons I have maintained that the discussion of the term is relevant in the development of this dissertation.17 While some scholars in the environmental humanities and eco-philosophy have turned to East Asia for spiritual inspiration for relational living and for ideologies that would lead to global “harmony” with nature, other scholars of environmental history and religion scholars focused on material practice have shown that societies rarely practice what they preach (even if some individuals do).18 It is certainly true that in the contemporary moment, and in the media texts I discuss, there is no indication of a distinctly “East Asian” harmony with the nonhuman—in fact the opposite is true. That said, I acknowledge that some forms of validation of nonhuman lifeways has origins in East Asian philosophies. 19 For example, the Taoist philosopher Zhuangzi’s recognition of different ways of being in “The Sorting Which Evens Things Out” 15 Ursula K. Heise, Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global (New York: Oxford UP, 2008). 16 Simon C. Estok and Won-Chung Kim eds., East Asian Ecocriticisms: A Critical Reader (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013): 4. 17 For example, see Robert B. Marks, China: An Environmental History (Lanham: Rowan & Littlefield, 2017), 102, and, and Julia Adeney Thomas, Reconfiguring Modernity: Concepts of Nature in Japanese Political Ideology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). 18 Roetz, “Chinese ‘Unity of Man and Nature’: Reality or Myth?,” 2013, and Yumoto, “Historical Perspectives on the Relationships between Humanity and Nature in Japan,” 2011. 19 Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: making kin in the Chthulucene (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016): 132. 11 where it says: “When a human sleeps in the damp his waist hurts and he gets stiff in the joints; is that so of the loach? When he sits in a tree he shivers and shakes; is that so of the ape? Which of these three knows the right place to live?”20 Accordingly, in this dissertation I insist that every being is worth approaching as potentially possessing agential vibrancy, both as they appear in media and in their real, material formations. To describe this acknowledgement of the validity of all beings and their own lifeways, I use the terminology of “nonhuman,” “nonhuman being,” and “nonhuman environment” to differentiate entities with agential existences that are while enmeshed with humanity not contingent on humanity for their liveliness or validity. This terminology is in lieu of other terms accepted in the field such as “posthuman” or “more-thanhuman.” The non- in nonhuman is meant to draw attention to the fact that these entities are categorically not human while simultaneously not placing these entities in a valued or temporal relationship to humans. Alongside reimagining relationality as equally inclusive of human and nonhuman, this dissertation also reimagines agency, or liveliness, as a state of being possessed by both human and nonhumans. 21 In other words, this project rejects assumptions that nonhuman lifeways are less than human ones and when presented with the analytical opportunity, the analysis in this project assumes that any given nonhuman entity thinks and feels in an equivalently valid way to a human rather than assuming that they are incapable of doing so (as the legacy of Western 20 W. T. de Bary, et al., Sources of Chinese Tradition, 2nd ed. (Columbia: Columbia UP, 1999): 101. 21 According to early alchemical usages of the term, “agency” referred to any reaction between forces/objects/beings. Philosophically, a la Aristotle and popularized by Davidson, the common definition involves intentional action which results in a frequent perception of agency as “uniquely” human. I adhere to the earlier definition in which action/reaction and other-than human intention are included under the term “agency,” while also drawing on recent indigenous studies work from scholars such as Vanessa Watts who suggests that “if we think of agency as being tied to spirit, and spirit exists in all things, then all things possess agency,” 30. In Vanessa Watts’ “Indigenous Place-Thought and Agency amongst Humans and Non-humans,” DIES: Decolonization, Indigeneity, Education and Society 2, no. 1 (2013): 20–34. 12 science and philosophy has taught us to assume).22 It is because human society has rejected the equal validity of the nonhuman for so long that exploitative usage of and violent action against said nonhumans has been able to continue barely checked, further reinforcing the overall argument that human society needs a cultural change, not just a scientific or industrial one. To renegotiate these ideas of nonhuman validity and the human relationality in the now, I turn away from the materiality of environmental history and the past doing of human societies and turn to the current theorizations within the environmental humanities. As Stacy Alaimo points out in Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self, “Thinking across bodies may catalyze the recognition that the environment, which is too often imagined as inert, empty space or as a resource for human use, is, in fact, a world of fleshy beings with their own needs, claims and actions.”23 It is my belief that a condition of engaging in dialogues of relationality means acknowledging, or at least attempting to acknowledge, that the infinite multitude of kaleidoscopic nonhuman life forms that exist on earth, and perhaps beyond it, are in their own way experiencing life in ways that are of equal legitimacy to the ways that humans are alive and agential. Speculative fiction is, once again, ideal for this endeavor in the medial space. Speculative fiction gernes are capable of imagining nonhuman lifeways that capture both the horror humans feel when witnessing nonhumans simply existing—just think of the reaction so many humans have to bugs—and the potential for a divergent future for humans who do develop the capacity to accept nonhuman ways of existence. Ultimately, all four chapters of this dissertation argue that until we, as humans, begin really seeing the liveliness and agency of 22 René Descartes (1596–1650) being perhaps the most famous example for perpetuating a hierarchy of human/nonhuman by denying animals thought and his influence has marked a great deal of future science and philosophy. 23 Stacey Alaimo, Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010): 2. 13 nonhumans everywhere around us and acknowledge the relationality of their existence, we will not make progress in sustainable and equitable ways of living. Genres of Horrific Environments In this dissertation, genre plays an integral role in framing the way that ecomedia can function in the horrific mode to highlight the relationship between humans and nonhuman beings. By horrific I do not mean only “horror” as in the proper name of the literary and cinematic genre. Instead, I use the term horrific to encompass the significance of registers of fear in the four different speculative genres, as mentioned earlier in this introduction: horror, SF, disaster, and monster. Horror proper attends to the fear of otherness and the unknown, employing tropes that place the rational, moral human in conversation with those things that are perceived as the opposite of that. SF, or science fiction, considers the way that humankind survives in the future, and how many horrors there may be along the way as new places and beings interact with humanity. Disaster films combine the real-world horror of experiencing a large-scale natural disaster and combine it with the horrific prospect of being in a nation where there are not proper protocols in place to handle those disasters. And finally, monster movies make visible a wide range of sociocultural and, as this dissertation discusses, environmental horrors by embodying them in forms that communicate just how horrific they really are. Each of these genres move in and out of varying horrific registers and none of them are free from the influence of fear—especially when it comes to fear of the future. The use of the term horrific in this dissertation attends to the state of the nonhuman environment on earth, which has experienced horrific damage and which in turn creates environments that are horrific to humans. This framing of the idea of the horrific as intertwined with the future of the 14 environment follows the work of other ecomedia scholars like Stephen Rust who says that “horror films have the potential to shake us out of our comfortably numb resignation to ecological catastrophe by jarring viewers into considerations of their relationships to the world outside the theatre.”24 Making the horrific elements of the relationship between the human and the nonhuman seeable and thereby acknowledgeable is, I argue throughout this dissertation, a defining feature of horrific ecomedia. The presence of the horrific taps into the affective registers of fear, dread, guilt, and trauma in ways that other forms of ecomedia often do not. Eco-trauma and the horror associated with the destruction of the nonhuman environment is the type of concern that exists within the background of every day, every moment, and the forever future; however, it is so existential in scale that there are few ways to make it visible or even audible that are digestible for the human mind. As Sean Cubitt says in the book EcoTrauma Cinema, “The power of horror as a genre is to speak the unspeakable. What is remarkable about eco-horror is that often it voices the agony of what has no voice: animals, if indeed they have no voice, but even more so rock, earth, water and air….”25 Not only does horror “speak the unspeakable” in terms of fears we may wish to remain unacknowledged, but it also does so in the realm of giving voice to traumas, and last but not least when read from an ecocritical point of view horror offers agency to nonhuman beings which are usually denied liveness by the anthropocentric, and patriarchal, philosophies of subjectivity formation. The first two chapters of this dissertation, “Forgotten Forests and the Arboreal Camera” and “Violent Waters and the Aquatic Camera,” draw directly on Cubitt’s suggestion that horror, or genres in 24 Stephen A. Rust, “Comfortably Numb: Material Ecocriticism and the Postmodern Horror Film.” Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 21, no. 3 (2014): 551. 25 Sean Cubitt, “Toxic Media: On the Ecological Impact of Cinema,” Eco-Trauma Cinema, edited by Anil Narine (New York: Routledge, 2015): 232. 15 the horrific register in the case of my research, give often unacknowledged nonhuman entities a chance to have a “voice.” As you read the first half of this manuscript, titled “Eco-Visuality, Elemental Cameras, and Nonhuman Life in Frame,” you will see how forests and water can become recognizably agential and lively within the framing of the cinematic camera. I argue that that conventions of horror and science fiction media make this seeability possible because of the fear associated with these nonhuman entities. The fear brings them into view for human witnessing because it is fear that is evoking their existence in an agential way in the first place. Trees and water do not have to take on the form of a monster to be scary; they have a long lineage of haunting human nightmares all on their own. Overall, this project focuses on ecological manifestations of fear, trauma, and violence, and in order to do so in a place-ed way, I draw on the traditions of East Asian horror cinema scholarship to trace ways that visual media manifests culture in the horrific register. The genre of horror in East Asia was an area of critical concern for a time and saw a period of consistent consideration in edited cinema volumes. Two notable examples include Korean Horror Cinema (2013) and Japanese Horror Cinema (2005). While eco-horror per say has not made an appearance in these volumes, what does appear are culturally specific monsters.26 Although not being equated with the environment, these monsters do have agency as nonhuman beings in the films and in their cultural legacy which is consistent whether they are being read as representing gender or race or the environment. In some cases of cinematic marketing though, as shown in Horror to the Extreme: Changing Boundaries in Asian Cinema (2009), East Asian horror has been used as an indicator of “strangeness” or “otherness” in comparison to the West. This 26 For example, see Alison Peirse and James Byrne, “Creepy Liver-Eating Fox Ladies: The Thousand Year Old Fox and Korea’s Gumiho” and “Heritage of Horrors: Reclaiming the Female Ghost in Shadows in the Palace,” in Korean Horror Cinema, eds. Alison Peirse and Daniel Daniel Martin (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press Ltd., 2013). 16 framing is orientalist and narrow, and in my opinion its primacy in publishing spheres has stunted the growth of East Asian horror studies as a field. 27 My dissertation, in contrast, uses the realities of environmental history to bring a place-based reading to Korean and Japanese horrific media. Even beyond this project’s theorization of Korean and Japanese horrific eco-media, I would posit that eco-horror overall would be a significantly generative conversation for East Asian horror to interact with in comparison to the categorizations of “shock” and “extreme” that it has often been framed with in cinema studies. On top of the analytical reasons not to continue being orientalist in analyzing horrific media from Korea and Japan, there is the increased production of East Asian media on streaming platforms to be considered as it has shifted the landscape of genre media significantly from the marginalized position it used to be in. With the rise of Netflix and other streaming platforms, more and more marginalized Korean and Japanese genres like horror and science fiction are seeing renaissances of production.28 Films or shows that may not have received funding form major broadcast channels are able to shoot their speculative fiction stories with high budgets and wide reach in a way not previously seen. Take Bong Joon-ho’s Okja (2017), for example. When it was released, that film was booed at film festivals because it was being produced by Netflix.29 Now, well respected directors from around the world, including Korea and Japan, either take Netflix’s money to produce their works or at least take the money to put their works up on the site after release. Partially this shift in production and publishing was always inevitable, and partially Covid-19 27 For an analysis of this see Chi-Yun Shin, “The Art of Branding: Tartan ‘Asia extreme’ Films” in Horror to the Extreme: Changing Boundaries in Asian Cinema, eds. Jinhee Choi & Mitsuyo Wada-Marciano (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2009), 85-100 and for an example of what not to do see Patrick Galloway, Asia Shock: Horror and Dark Cinema from Japan, Korea, Hong Kong, and Thailand (Berkeley: Stone Bridge Press, 2006). 28 There are many examples, but for example the entire Kingdom series has been produced on Netflix, as has the remakes and new projects of famous J-horror directors like Takashi Shimizu. 29 Sharon Waxman and Steve Pond, “Netflix’s ‘Okja’ Booed at First Press Screening in Cannes,” The Wrap, 19 May 2017. 17 hurried the shift to online streaming being the primary form of media production and consumptions. Also, Squid Game came out and shifted the whole world’s attention towards Korea’s more horrific and less romantic media tropes. In both the Korean and Japanese cases, it is the genre media that has found the most stable home on Netflix, as mentioned above. I have no personal horse in this race, so to speak. I believe that all platforms of media are valid media, for enjoyment and for critique, but I do think it is important to offer this context to explain how and why so many of my sources in this dissertation ended up being objects one can find online. Given the rise in financial support, it seems inevitable that the speculative fiction genres would come to take center stage in this contemporary moment when the environments on earth are becoming unrecognizable to its occupants and something else, some new type of future, must be imagined. In her writings on the speculative genres, Susan Napier says, “with its ability to uniquely reflect and comment upon modern culture…science fiction serves to ‘defamiliarize and restructure our experience of our own present.’”30 Napier also suggests that there is something universalizing about speculative genres and how they create mutually intelligible representations of real disasters by placing them in obviously fictional settings.31 With our current present on the planet being one of constant environmental disasters and media platforms broadcasting those disasters to the world, this dissertation looks to speculative genres that do not negate the very real horror of the situation but rather acknowledge the horrific nature of human/nonhuman relationships while simultaneously abstracting those relationships in a way that allows for imagined restructurings of relationality. 30 Susan J. Napier, “Panic Sites: The Japanese Imagination of Disaster from Godzilla to Akira,” The Journal of Japanese Studies 19, no. 2 (1993): 330. 31 Susan Napier, “Panic Sites,” 328. 18 A Note on “Comparative” Frameworks There is a dearth of scholarship within East Asian studies that addresses Korea and Japan side by side as the modern nations they are perceived as today. It is much more common to see anthologies on East Asia, for example, or history research on the Pacific War and colonialism which discuss the relationship between the two as the primary topic. Conrad Totman discusses the reasons for this dearth in his book Pre-industrial Korea and Japan in Environmental Perspective, saying, “In short, the political and historiographical legacies of the twentieth century make it difficult to write any form of Korean and Japanese history together.”32 Despite the difficulties, Totman argues that environmental history is a realm in which it can be generative to discuss both countries simultaneously because there are significant similarities and overlaps beginning in the ancient period that do reach into contemporary agricultural practices.33 That is not to mention the literal geographical similarities which are getting more and more similar all the time as the number of large earthquakes continues to increase in Korea, for example. It is easier to make an argument for comparative scholarship when your research does not include the colonial period which is one of the major points of contention – the history in Totman’s book conveniently ends in 1870 – but as previously noted, modern studies of policy and development have also compared the environment of Korea and Japan because the similar geography and policy trajectory post-1945 do provide reason to do so. Fundamentally, I agree with Totman’s base argument that from deep history to now there are enough similarities and interconnections between the environments on the Korean peninsula and Japanese archipelago to warrant a simultaneous study of them. Building on that, I argue that 32 Totman, Pre-industrial Korea and Japan (Boston: Brill, 2004): 5. 33 Penelope Francks, Johanna Boestel and Choo Hyop Kim, Agriculture and Economic Development in East Asia: From growth to protectionism in Japan, Korea and Taiwan (London: Routledge, 1999): 215. 19 contemporary media is another realm in which it makes sense to study Korea and Japan together. Not only are the cinema industries in the two nations inextricable in terms of labor exchange in the colonial period,34 but there are also zainichi filmmakers in Japan,35 and not only has Japanese anime been popular among Korean youths, but Hallyu media in Japan has been a major player in the entertainment market,36 including multiple Korean webtoons being made into Japanese anime series (which are available on international streaming platforms).37 Both the environment and media disrupt the human concept of borders and in the face of matter that travels fluidly—like pollution and media over the internet—the porous quality of borders is made visible. This project is not specifically about the relationship between Korea and Japan in a political or national sense, rather it is about each independently as places that exist in an earthed space that is meshed and to reinforce a border between the two is to reinforce human, and particularly imperial, notions of a nature that can be controlled and segmented. In a counterintuitive similarity, media, like nature, is a force which nation states attempt to control but which in the age of free internet usage especially defies total segmentation or separation from Others. That being said, this work is based on environmental history as much as it is on contemporary media which means that to ignore colonialism and all of its discontents would be to erase an important element of both the earthly environment and the media environment in Korea and Japan and in between. Not only that, but the power dynamics between colonized and colonizer is an unavoidable and troubling trace on both culture and environment in Korea which 34 Brian Yecies & Ae-Gyung Shim, Korea’s Occupied Cinema, 1983-1948 (New York: Routledge, 2011). 35 Yoshiharu Tezuka, Japanese Cinema Goes Global: Filmworker’s Journey (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2012): 23. 36 Keehyeung Lee, “Mapping Out the Cultural Politics of ‘the Korean Wave’ in Contemporary South Korea,” in East Asian Pop Culture: Analysing the Korean Wave, eds. Beng Chua Huat & Koichi Iwabuchi (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2008). 37 Examples include Tower of God (신의 탑, sin-ŭi t'ap, 2020) and The God of High School (갓 오브 하이 스쿨, kat obŭ hai sŭk'ul, 2020). 20 cannot be read out of the media that comes after 1945. Although this project is not “about” postcolonialism, it is about it – like a girl about town, or a vulture circling a corpse, the postcolonial is around this project, taking up contextual space in multiple registers. I ask that the reader keep this postcolonial specter in mind as they read because even when it is not being commented on directly in the writing its existence continues to exert influence on the place-ness of this project: Korea and Japan 21 Section One: Chapters One and Two Eco-Visuality, Elemental Cameras, And Nonhuman Life in Frame 22 Chapter One: Forgotten Forests and the Arboreal Camera The human articulation of “forest” as a cultural concept struggles between two disparate emotional registers. There are the dark woods, the gnarled trees in horror stories, the maze of arboreal bodies threatening to consume you, home to shamans, witches, and ghosts. And then there are the awe-inspiring wildernesses, trees growing to touch the sky, sunshine through leaves, an abundance of natural resources and benevolent old-world spirituality. To put the comparison in media terms: there are forests like the twisted ones in the Korean horror movie Spider Forest (2004) or in The Blair Witch Project (1999), and there are forests like the one in the heartwarming, whimsical Japanese anime film My Neighbor Totoro (1988). Both types are imagined, or culturally conjured, forests that tap into the ways in which human society has formulated an anthropocentric relationship to the concept of a forest. Having little to do with the ecosystem of a material forest, the forests in media are emotional manifestations, vessels to carry a certain human affect, a reflection of the anthropo-psyche that alternately fears and idolizes. In this chapter, I will be discussing the Korean film The Mimic (2017) and placing it in a conversation with the Japanese film Suicide Forest Village (2021). I argue that they are two pieces of ecohorror that innovate on ecocritical theories of arboreal fear and human/nonhuman care via the filmic medium. Both films use forest-based urban legends as the basis for the horror in the plots, drawing on the long tradition of folklore and fairytales that have warned about the dangers of getting lost in the woods. Despite the clear association with a long lineage of folkloric interpretations of horrific forests, neither film has a significant body of scholarship discussing them as objects of critical ecological analysis. Given this gap in academic consideration, I will also be discussing the older Japanese film Charisma (1999) as a comparative source because it shares theoretical threads with these two films and because it is a film that has been written about 23 by scholars of ecocriticism because of both the director’s own admission that he thinks ecocritically and the plot’s obvious rather than veiled dealings in ecological commentary. Scholarship on Charisma is a valuable reference for considering the ways in which one can write about arboreal cinema in the East Asian context, but even more than that the film is an innovative example of arboreal cinema that is truly about trees.38 By looking at how the film Charisma and the film’s director Kurosawa Kiyoshi imagine trees, talk about trees, and visualize trees in a literal sense, I have been able to develop theoretical framings that can then be applied to films that are not literally about trees but where trees are nonetheless inextricably present and important, as they are in The Mimic and Suicide Forest Village. The plot of The Mimic follows the harrowing experience of a modern South Korean family that has returned to their ancestral home at the edge of the Jangsan (Jang Mountain) forest, with the mother Hee-yeon as the main character. Coping with layered generational trauma, created partially by the move from rural to the urban years before, the characters in the film begin hearing spectral voices of those long dead whispering in the trees which leads person after person toward a cave deep within the woods where the Jangsan Tiger resides. 39 The myth of the Jangsan Tiger speaks of a tiger-like creature covered in long, white fur that lives in the forest on the mountain behind the city of Busan’s popular Haeundae beach. When hungry, the creature 38 As a result of the Japanese context of Charisma, my references for the topic of arboreal cinema skew in that direction. I do not think this is because Korea does not have arboreal media or forest horror; I believe it to be a framework that simply has not been utilized to its fullest potential in that national and cultural context. While it has not appeared significantly in scholarship yet, Korean media of the 2000s does share a seeming fascination with the forest as a site of horror akin to the Japanese examples, and I will touch on that further in the next section about historical contexts. While I am only discussing one Korean horror film in this chapter, other horror media such as Spider Forest, The Wailing (2016), and the entire Kingdom (2009) series, for example, would all be worth considering as media objects that could be reconsidered with this framework. 39 My focus in this chapter is on the environmental imagery and themes within the film, and likewise I will not be discussing the background of this urban legend. For extensive research on the formulation and propagation of this urban legend online, see the works of scholar Lee So Yun who has documented the online rise of this urban legend in detail. 24 calls out to lure in prey, mimicking whatever noise is most likely to convince a given individual to leave the path and venture into the darkness of the densely packed trees. While real tigers may have been wiped out in Korea by hunting and development, the Jangsan Tiger brings their existence to mind and has fittingly found representation in a horror film rife with tumultuous ecological imagery.40 In the Japanese context, Suicide Forest Village, part of The Grudge (2004) director Takashi Shimizu’s most recent horror trilogy, follows a pair of sisters, Hibiki and Mei, who are helping two of their friends, a young couple, move into a new house on the edge of a forest. While setting things up, however, they discover a mysterious box that when opened calls down a curse originating from Jukai Village, located in the infamous “suicide forest.” The younger sister begins to be overtaken by the forest’s curse and the rest of the youths must enter the woods to stop it. And finally, Kurosawa’s Charisma defies a neat categorization via genre, unlike the other two films I will be discussing which are definitively horror. It has been described as “an unhinged eco-thriller in which a disgraced ex-detective battles lusty botanists, psychotic shrubhuggers, and sinister plant-bandits over the fate of a withered but potentially plant-wrecking tree.”41 This description is a bit exaggerated, but overall, it is correct in that the film does follow the journey of an ex-detective named Yabuike on his journey to understand a forest and a tree after he’s been laid off for being too slow to choose between the life of a politician and the life of the man who kidnapped him. There are two specific elements of The Mimic and Suicide Forest Village that I will be discussing that are essential to understanding them as arboreal ecohorror cinema in the current 40 Joseph Seeley and Aaron Skabelund, “Tigers—Real and Imagined—in Korea’s Physical and Cultural Landscape,” Environmental History 20 (2015): 475–503. 41 Chuck Stephens, “Another Green World,” Film Comment 37, no. 5 (Sept/Oct 2001) 64. 25 era of confronting the future of the rapidly changing environment: 1) A foregrounding of the existence of the forest in the visual field via the mode of the arboreal camera thereby bringing the forest into the film as more of a main character by making it constantly visible, and 2) A horror of and simultaneous necessity of offering care to the arboreal Other when confronted with the forest and its needs within an enmeshed relationship.42 My film and visual culture analysis will also be intertwined with references to the environmental history of urban-rural migration as a symptom of rapid development acting as a context for why the forest itself might become traumatic and horrific in the specific sociocultural contexts of Korea and Japan. In all three films the traumatic experiences the characters have had in their lives before coming to the forest become intertwined with the forest itself until the trauma becomes inextricable from the trees. In other words, their traumas morph into eco-traumas. Instead of processing their traumas in the urban space, the characters make the active choice to enmesh themselves with the forest as a trauma response. This entering into the arboreal space in a state of emotional vulnerability then results in the human characters becoming capable of caring for the nonhumans they cross paths with along the way. Alongside my close reading of the films, I use a methodological combination of genre theory that illuminates the whys of forests being prevalent in horrific media and ecotheory that prioritizes a shift to ways of thinking and living that allow for forests (and trees) to be considered as lively beings worthy of care. While each of these three films has a human plot that has its own characters and climaxes, I posit that whether the humans resist or embrace relationality and 42 I am using the term “arboreal camera” in a theoretical sense in that it is a form of camera behavior that seems constantly drawn to the arboreal subject in a way cameras in other filmic works are not. Further theorization follows in later sections. In environmental science, this term is used to describe a form of trapping in which traps are “placed above the ground to study arboreal or semi-arboreal species or systems,” see Moore et al., “The potential and practice of arboreal camera trapping,” Methods in Ecology and Evolution 12, (2021), 1769. 26 enmeshment with the arboreal Other is the ultimate decider in the fate, or future, of the human characters. As mentioned above, this theoretical analysis of care and human/nonhuman relationality is made possible by the usage of shot composition that prioritizes the forest, what I am calling an arboreal camera mode that is always working to include the forest as a vibrant being instead of relegating it to the static and lifeless background. I begin the chapter by discussing forest horror as a genre and theory, followed by a consideration of rural returns and trauma in the films’ plots, then I move on to analyzing the way the arboreal camera functions in these films, and finally I argue for the significance of caring for the arboreal Other in the face of difference and fear. Arboreal Horror Theory In fiction, the forest is rarely “just trees,” but equally rarely is the forest itself agential. Rather, it is the beings that live in the forest that carry the agency and action in most human stories about arboreal spaces. 43 There are instances in which the forest itself is somehow embodied, or pseudo-agential, but often in a way that further estranges the human characters from it, creating a larger relational gulf rather than fostering connection. To ascribe a certain amount of agency to a forest in a purposefully negative way is common in the horror genre, for example, where the only purpose of making the forest seem agential is to make it monstrous and thereby reinforce the cultural perception of forests as a space to be feared. On the rarest of occasions, a media text manages to communicate a forest’s agency in a way that both acknowledges the experiences of the forest while also sprouting compelling moments of 43 Elizabeth Parker, The Forest and the EcoGothic: the Deep Dark woods in Popular Imagination (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), 2. 27 human/nonhuman relationality that move beyond resource extraction, idyllic pastoralism, or blind fear. 44 In his book Landscapes of Fear, Yi-Fu Tuan describes the forest as frightening in its vastness, calling it “the place of abandonment—a dark, chaotic non-world in which one feels utterly lost.”45 From Korean folktales that warned of tigers in the forest, to the myriad of Japanese forest Yōkai, to the European fairytale tradition of tales like “Little Red Riding Hood,” humans have always warned their children away from the forest.46 As Elizabeth Parker points out in her book The Forest and the EcoGothic: The Deep Dark Woods in Popular Imagination, “though we may like to think ourselves beyond fairy tales, there is much evidence to suggest that we continue, indeed, to be ‘terrified by the wild wood.’”47 Unlike these folktale examples, though, now there is an element of intensification in more abstract horror media that takes into account modern developmentalism which has caused increased separation between human everyday survival and the forest. While fears of being lost, being attacked by a predator, or eating the wrong plant were daily embodied experiences for all humans at one point in time, now the fears of the forest for those living in highly industrialized areas align more and more with a fear of the “unknown” that manifests in contemporary horror media. Horror as a genre, Parker argues, is the fictional space that continues to function as mythology or fairytale. Parker attributes this to the ritualistic nature of horror because it is a genre with conventions and repetition, this means that there is an anticipatory experience and a shared understanding of the 44 One seminal example of innovation arboreal horror would be the gothic horror literature of Algernon Blackwood. See articles by Michelle Poland, “Walking with the Goat-God: Gothic Ecology in Algernon Blackwood’s Pan’s Garden: A Volume of Nature Stories” (2017), and Anthony Camara, “Nature Unbound: Cosmic Horror in Algernon Blackwood’s ‘The Willows’” (2013). 45 Yi-Fu Tuan, Landscapes of Fear (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1979), 20. 46 Tuan, Landscapes of Fear, 19. 47 Parker, The Forest and the EcoGothic, 2. 28 meanings of symbol, as with myth.48 “Indeed, it is through our depictions of ‘monstrous natures’. . . that myth and Nature are automatically viewed as very much alive,” Parker points out.49 To put it another way, the methods of human storytelling are themselves responsible for granting the forest its liveliness in culture. Viewing the forest as an alive monster and viewing it as place of horrific happenings are both narrative explanations for scary stories and cautionary folk tales. The ecological theorization of arboreal horror, moreover, goes beyond narrative analysis to consider what cultural and historical elements of human existence contribute to the fear of trees, the forest, and plants in general. Parker developed a list of “Seven Theses” that explain “why we fear the forest.” These theses span material to religious to psychological reasonings and provide useful dichotomies through which to consider the films I will be discussing in this chapter. The Seven Theses are as follows: 1. The forest is against civilization. 2. The forest is associated with the past. 3. The forest is a landscape of trial. 4. The forest is a setting in which we are lost. 5. The forest is a consuming threat. 6. The forest is a site of the human unconscious. 7. The forest is an antichristian space.50 48 Parker, The Forest and the EcoGothic, 45. 49 Parker, The Forest and the EcoGothic, 44. 50 Parker, The Forest and the EcoGothic, 47. Parker attributes the inspiration for this format of theses to Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Bernice Murphy. These theses can be seen in much Japanese media, such as Princess Mononoke (1997) where the forest is a primary threat to the human project of civilization, and it poses an all-consuming threat. The addition of a categorization that hinges on “antichristian” is apt in the Korean context as an association between the forest and religious fear plays a role in much of contemporary Korean horror. 29 The fear of “the forest” as an entity is a related variation, or perhaps a related offshoot, of the human fear of flora more broadly. Like Parker’s theses on why we fear forests, Dawn Keetley has proposed “Six Theses on Plant Horror,” or in other words, the reasons humans fear plants: 1. Plants embody an absolute alterity. 2. Plants lurk in our blind spot. 3. Plants menace with their wild, purposeless growth. 4. The human harbors an uncanny constitutive vegetal. 5. Plants will get their revenge. 6. Plant horror marks an absolute rupture of the known.51 While there is variation in cultural contextualization of forests, the genre of horror as previously mentioned relies on sets of myth-style patterns and tropes that can be seen in varying local medias. The forest in horror media is the forest that human’s fear; it is the forest that Parker is describing, and it is the home of Keetley’s plants. This is not a contemporary phenomenon—not something that can be attributed entirely to a sense of ecological disconnect caused by capitalist modernity—but rather a complicated relationship between forest and human perception that stretches back into pre-modern folk tales in certain cultures, as previously mentioned.52 The films I discuss in this chapter are evidence of not only a tradition of arboreal horror storytelling but furthermore the continued sway and power of the image of the frightening forest. This is especially true when the frightening forest is framed as “against civilization” as Parker puts it, which is a dichotomy that can be seen particularly in a related subgenre of horror: 51 Dawn Keetley and Angela Tenga, editors. Plant Horror: Approaches to the Monstrous Vegetal in Fiction and Film (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 1. Also inspired by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen. 52 It is important to note here that there are many indigenous cultures that do not have a fear of the forest or plants in the way it is being discussed here. This is noted by Tuan in Landscapes of Fear, especially regarding indigenous tribes in rain forests across the globe. I mention folktales specifically from cultures where there is a documented fear of the forest and forest creatures e.g. some European context like Germany, and Japan and Korea. 30 folk horror. The concept of the city-dweller entering a rural space and that space being scary is the foundational trope of the folk horror subgenre. This subgenre has not been widely applied to East Asian horror films as of writing this, but I believe it is another promising methodology aside from the ecocriticism angle to analyze films like The Mimic and The Wailing. As Yi-fu Tuan put it, “unlike blizzards and floods, which might be conceived as pursuing their victims, mountains and forests injured only those who encroached upon their domain,” and this characterization of the forest as a space that humans leave the safety of civilization to go to is also reflective of both concepts of folk horror and the theses of forest horror.53 Not only is this reflective of storytelling about rural spaces, it is also reflective of the actual process of rural-urban migration and vice versa that caused humans in industrializing societies to become estranged from the nonhuman environment in the first place. In Korea, for example, there was “unprecedented urbanization during the process of economic development from the 1960s.”54 However, starting in the 2000s there was a significant increase in reverse urban to rural migration which has been shown to be “related to the country’s economic condition, population characteristics and individual preference change.”55 The urban myth of the Jangsan Tiger appeared around 2010 right when “urban-rural migration became an important social issue in Korea as more than 10 thousand households have been moving from urban to rural areas since 2010.”56 Users online created, modified, and spread the urban legend of a monster in the forest that was neither fully tiger nor fully human, but which called out to the 53 Tuan, Landscapes of Fear, 7. 54 SangJin Ma, Sok An, and DaeShik Park, “Urban-rural Migration and Migrants’ Successful Settlement in Korea,” Development and Society 47, no. 2 (2018), 286. 55 Ma, et al., “Urban-rural Migration and Migrants,’” 307. 56 Ma, et al., “Urban-rural Migration and Migrants,’” 286 and continued data on 289. This quote is a bit ambiguous in wording—as is the wording throughout the article—but the authors go on to clarify that 2010 was the year the increases began becoming significantly noticeable and they continued to increase significantly through 2015 (where the study’s data goes to). 31 Korean people, enticing them to come back to nature, to enter those rural spaces again which had transformed from spaces where humans could find a sense of home into something uncanny.57 As the contradiction between increase in rural returns and simultaneous creation of a horrific rural legend creation suggests, the family in The Mimic also finds their return to Jangsan to be permeated by uncertainty, fear, and a forest that looms large. Although there is no evidence that all three directors of the films in question in this chapter were conscious of the inextricably ecological and folk horror tone of their horror films, the director of Charisma, Kurosawa Kiyoshi, has made his comprehension of the arboreal Other known in interviews. He expressed his thoughts on creating an arboreally-based film in an interview in Film Comment, saying: The principles and schemes of life in nature, in plants, are so different from human lifeforms. Plants are so very differently alive than we are, and their lives seem to be distilled over a different time frame. For many people, plant life is generally seen to be quiet and beautiful and tame. But the way that trees survive over several centuries is by decimating everything around them, in a very cruel and beautiful way. It’s the contradiction between plants being very still, and yet so voracious and devastating, that interests me. The idea that, though they operate on different principles of time than mammals, they are just as alive as we are.58 From this answer alone it is clear that he feels similar things about trees and forests as are expressed in the theses mentioned above—alterity, menace, threat, but also liveliness and a form of agency—and his words particularly reflect Keetley’s idea that “plants menace with their wild, purposeless growth.” His point about people’s perceptions of plants being that they are a tame thing, and beautiful rather than scary, is evident in the proliferation of scholarship on Japanese gardens or bonsai, for example.59 In such texts, it becomes obvious that Japanese “nature” is 57 So Yun Lee, “뉴미디어 시대에 등장한 도시괴담 장산범 연구” (Nyumidiŏ shidaee tŭngjanghan toshigoedam changsanbŏm yŏn'gu), Oral Literature Research 48, no.0 (2017) 215-261. 58 Stephens, “Another Green World,” 72. 59 For one example among many, see Kendall Brown, Living Landscapes: Japanese Garden Design in North America: The Work of Five Contemporary Masters (Tokyo: Tuttle Publishing, 2017). 32 something that must be tightly controlled. Similarly, during Japan’s colonial era in the 1900s, the idea that Japan was a nation in tune with plants and forests was a point of pride and “colonial propagandists indeed went to great lengths to highlight Japan’s supposedly timeless traditions of ‘forest love.’”60 Kurosawa’s perception of the forest captures the actual alterity that exists in perceptions of forests, especially in Japan, this dichotomy of plants as something humans love versus being something humans fear. The other side of the dichotomy, the dangerous forest, is brought to the screen to some degree in Kurosawa’s Charisma, but it is also a part of Japanese urban legend and folklore which suggests a longer lineage of considering the lives of trees starting far before Kurosawa. To further explore the reason for forests being a place of fear and danger, I would like to turn now to the case of Japan’s “suicide forest.” One of the best-known “scary” locations in Japan, Aokigahara-jukai spreads across 10 square miles below Mt. Fuji and has been a site of ritual and personal suicide since the 1300s.61 When you look up Jukai you are confronted with an oddly dissonant fork in the road of information. The two paths open to you are environmental studies on topics such as conservation and sensationalized coverage of the yearly suicides taking place in the forest. As a location, it is exactly the type of cultural symbol that breeds morbid curiosity in the outside onlooker and sparks myth and ghost story creation, as well as being a location of “dark tourism.”62 In western imagination, certainly, Jukai is a place of spectacle which is made clear by American horror movies like The Sea of Trees (2015) and The Forest (2016)—both of 60 David Fedman, Seeds of Control: Japan’s Empire of Forestry in Colonial Korea (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2020), 17. 61 Yoshitomo Takahashi, “Aokigahara-jukai: Suicide and Amnesia in Mt. Fuji's Black Forest,” Suicide and LifeThreatening Behavior 18, no.2 (1988), 165. For another approach to the topic of suicide in Jukai which is based on Japanese religious history and historical views of suicide, see Mary Picone’s “Suicide and the Afterlife: Popular Religion and the Standardisation of ‘Culture’ in Japan” (2012). 62 Victor Hernandez-Santaolalla and Paloma Sanz-Marcos, “Following Death: Suicide as Tourist Attraction through Popular Culture,” The Journal of Popular Culture 52, no. 6 (2019), 1291. 33 which have been widely panned by critics, including for their lack of cultural sensitivity. These use a Japanese place as a set-dressing for white characters to experience fear, but the horror is disconnected from context, culture, and materiality of the forest.63 This is not to say that Japan’s media industry does not use Jukai as inspiration for the horror genre, it does. In fact, that is where Suicide Forest Village is set. I am pointing out the Western fascination with the concept of this forest to establish the reach and transnational sway of the idea of a “suicide forest.” The obsession with the forest, in both a Western and Japanese context, seems to stem more from an existential attraction to a space of human death, rather than being about the trees. Explanations dark tourism to Jukai, range from capitalist readings of Derrida’s hauntology, to theories about modern “man” seeking violence in new ways in the constraints of polite society, to the potential of survival guilt compelling people to seek out areas of mass death.64 These reasonings likely have merit in specific dark tourism contexts, but the scholarship on Jukai tends to tread the same paths over and over, focusing always on the same cultural theories and the exaggeration of the horrific idea of a forest with dead bodies in it without addressing the elephant in the room that is the forest as the site of these fears. This lack of direct discussion of the forest itself is often the case in horror media that takes place in a forested or otherwise rural area, as Parker points out, “referring portentously to the so-called ‘horror’ of the woods, but without actually stating or defining what in fact this horror is, is standard practice in fiction that exploits our fears of the forest.”65 Although we 63 Even more egregious than these films was the unfortunate debacle of influencer Logan Paul’s YouTube publicization of a supposed-suicide victim’s body in the forest for internet clout in 2017. Fueled by the need for views, emblematic of capitalism at its worst in the form of dark tourism, and a result of an oversaturation of media exotifying the location, Logan Paul’s foray into Jukai and many of the Western films that reference Jukai have next to nothing to do with the forest as a nonhuman natural environment. 64 Max Hart, “The ‘suicide forest’: Aokigahara, Japan” in 50 Dark Destinations: Crime and Contemporary Tourism, edited by Adam Lynes, Craig Kelly, and James Treadwell (United Kingdom: Bristol University Press, 2023), 240. 65 Parker, The Forest and the EcoGothic, 3. 34 understand as viewers that the setting is scary or in some other way unsettling, the underlying psychological and sociocultural reasonings are rarely discussed explicitly. Analyzed from the perspective of materiality rather than impression, Japan and Korea provide contradictions to how realistic a fear of a forest as a place of death is. Why fear the dead bodies in the forest when we can compare the approximate tens of people that die in Jukai a year to the approximate 32,000 that die alone in their homes in Japanese cities a year, sometimes left undiscovered for months or even longer?66 Cities and towns are home to thousands of corpses that you walk by every day in both Japan and Korea, many caused by “lonely deaths.” 67 Of course, Japanese cinema has no shortage of films from the J-horror era that took up the fear of apartments and urban ghosts, which means the original era of technology and urbanization left its mark on the human psyche and therefore the horror genre. And while that style of horror was entangled with the new fears of that era—whose importance I am not denying—the intense fascination and constant media content associated with forests and environments like Jukai also warrants further exploration in this moment in the face of people returning to the countryside which has become a space of the unknown for the current generation and in the face of an ever-growing mainstream conversation about ecological decline. Although Korea is not known for one specific horrific forest in the way that Japan is, forests are still a site associated with a history of death, destruction, and trauma. Regardless of what may have occurred in the ancient kingdoms of the Korean peninsula in terms of national 66 Nils Dahl, “Governing through kodokushi. Japan’s lonely deaths and their impact on community selfgovernment,” Contemporary Japan 32, no. 1 (2020), 83. 67 Gi-chul Kang and Jong-yoon Sohn, “고독사 통계에 대한 한일 비교 연구” (kodoksa t'onggyee taehan hanil pigyo yŏn'gu), Japanese Culture Research, no. 61 (2017), 6. Although there is little official data on the phenomenon of lonely death in Korea compared to Japan, there have been studies done with the data from the 2010s to determine that the lonely death rate is potentially in the thousands based on statistical likeliness of an increase in such deaths over the years. 35 forestry projects, the birth of the current forests there are inextricably linked to the colonial invasion of Japan in the early 1900s, and to extrapolate even further, Japan would not have such vast forests to be afraid of if it were not for their colonial forestry projects that allowed them to get sylvan resources from elsewhere.68 For example, in his book Seeds of Control, David Fedman discusses the fraught history of the “botanical colonizer” that is the acacia tree and how older Korean people associate the trees with the forestry campaigns of the Japanese colonizers, while in reality due to the plant’s natural lifespan the trees that they look at daily and that draw their ire are almost certainly trees planted in Park Chung-hee’s New Village Movement era instead.69 These trees do not make up whole forests but rather are seen as dangerous to forests with their ability to grow rapidly and spread. As Fedman points out, there was a long history of forestry activity on the peninsula and it is not a black and white situation of colonial destruction and Korean national restoration, but as he also more aptly points out, to many Koreans “the only story of colonial forestry worth telling” is that of total devastation as a function of anti-colonial rhetoric.70 Regardless of the infinitely more nuanced and complicated history of the material reality of the Korean peninsula’s forests, the cultural understanding in South Korea, at least, is colored by this version of history. Perhaps the understanding of the current forests as a nationalist creation for the future of Korea is why the fear of forests as a mass entity has not been as prevalent in Korean media in the past, and why horror of the colonial era takes other forms.71 68 See Conrad Totman’s The Green Archipelago: Forestry in Preindustrial Japan (1989) and David Fedman’s critique of that work in Seeds of Control. 69 Fedman, Seeds of Control, 4. Karen Thornber briefly mentions Korean poet Mun Toksu and his inclusion of the imagery of an acacia tree in poems in Ecoambiguity: Environmental! Crises! and! East! Asian! Literature (2012, 92). Thornber does not discuss the tree itself, but Simon Estok in his review of the book notes his own experience first-hand with meeting a Korean individual digging up acacia trees in public because they are a symbol of the colonizers (Ecozone, 2013, 132). 70 Fedman, Seeds of Control, 6. 71 To be clear, post-colonial and colonial era horror media is prevalent even today, what with Gyeongseong Creature (which was awful, by the way) recently streaming on Netflix, but the films I am discussing in this chapter do not have explicit (or even inexplicit, seemingly) references or hints to any association with post-colonial themes. 36 Now, though, upon entering an era of unignorable climate disaster being fed to viewers on the news and in global media since the 2000s, it seems that alternate conceptions of what a forest means are coming to the fore. And forests coming to the fore—visually speaking—is exactly what the next section discusses. Visualizing the Forest To return to Keetley’s plant theses, the inability to recognize the danger of the forest, or flora in general, is due to how plants lurk in the human blind spot.72 Plants often make up the background of scenes in visual media, and likewise those plants are deprived of their liveliness because they become set-dressing. In The Mimic, Charisma, and Suicide Forest Village the plants, trees, and forest take up space in a lively, seemingly agential way that brings them out of the anthropocentric blind spot.73 The films are able to do this through the usage of a technique that I am referring to as the arboreal camera, or the arboreal camera mode. To borrow from the environmental sciences, arboreal camera trapping is a means to document the lives of arboreal species. In my usage of the term, the camera is fulfilling the role of documenter of the living going on in the trees, but the subject of documentation has shifted from a cataloging and scientific pursuit to a narrative and relational one. The arboreal camera draws the flora forward from the background until it is the plants that occupy the visual field of the viewers in a way rarely seen in films that are not nature documentaries. The modal function of the arboreal camera is to bring the arboreal to the viewer’s attention in the visual diegesis of the film and to give the forest a sense of agency within the plot by way of this emphasized visual presence. As a mode, 72 Keetley, Plant Horror, 1. 73 Agency in nonhumans is a nuanced and multifaceted issue among scholars. For an overview of the topic and an analysis of varying approaches, see Arianne Françoise Conty, “The Politics of Nature: New Materialist Responses to the Anthropocene,” Theory, Culture & Society 35, no. 7-8 (2018), 73-96. 37 the insistence on the forest as present and lively is the factor that defines the mode as differentiated from films in which there are forests or trees but in which those trees are allowed to remain in the background.74 To start with an example, in the very first scene of The Mimic, before the main family is even introduced, a man and a woman drive into the forest to dump the body of the man’s previous girlfriend. The trees and the darkness occupy most of the screen space. Rather than relying only on closeups or medium shots, the scene is framed in a wide shot allowing for the inclusion of large swaths of trees, branches, and leaves which obscure not only the characters’ vision but also at times the audiences’ view of the characters themselves. As the woman cautiously walks through the forest—the sounds of her boyfriend murdering his ex-girlfriend reverberating in the background—her form is obscured by crisscrossing branches. Rather than shooting the scene with a clear view of the character as is often done in films regardless of the reality of the sightlines and spatial configuration the location in real life, this scene purposefully includes the seemingly oppressive presence of the forest. It surrounds the woman, close on all sides, and made ominous by the darkness of the night, the sounds of screams in the distance, and the woman’s heavy breathing. The characters in this scene, and at other times in the film, are framed by the vegetation in a way that makes them appear trapped by walls of green. As the man shoves the dead body into a cave (soon to be discovered as the Tiger’s lair) the scene cuts to a shot of the tops of the trees undulating in the breeze and the previous soundscape fades and shifts to an overwhelming whooshing from the wind in the trees and the forest swaying under the 74 Who or where this mode of cinematography “originated” is impossible for me to say. Like most things, I imagine it exists at varying times and in varying national contexts all at once. That said, my analysis is very much functioning in the horrific mode, which may set this particular arboreal camera manifestation apart from other similar cinematographically arboreal modes what focus more on beauty, awe, tragedy, etc. 38 moon; the focus on the trees themselves both visually and auditorily make the sound seem more like the forest is speaking rather than just being environmental noise.75 Starting with the scene just mentioned, a continuing visual theme throughout all three films is the relationship between cars and the forest. All three films express the entrance into the forest with a car driving down a road surrounded by tree on either side. As the cars drive, the camera takes up an angle from which it can focus on the windshield and subsequently focus on the shadowing pattern of leaves and branches creeping across the glass and obscuring the view of the people within the car. In Charisma, after the main character Yabuike has been put on leave from his job, he is driven out into the forest by a coworker. The car is shot from head-on with the camera looking into the windshield, the passenger and driver slightly obscured by the shadows of tree branches moving across the glass. In the background, the rear windshield shows nothing but a strip of sky and trees leaning in from either side. This continues as the characters have a conversation and throughout there are moments when you can barely make out their faces at all because the shadows from the trees above are so dense. This same style of shot in a car occurs again later in the film when Yabuike meets Jinbo and is riding in her car and this scene is written about by Christine Marran in much the same way I describe the scene above: The superimposed shot of leaves on the window is dark but translucent. The forest is both a reflection on the windshield and an entity with its own existence as the leaves pass over the windshield, out of time with the car’s speed down the road. The passengers travel through this landscape out of sync with the time-image of the leafy-shadows. The window is not something to be seen through.76 75 Cine21, “[장산범] 문철우 사운드 이펙트 디자이너” ([changsanbŏm] munch'ŏru saundŭ ip'ekt'ŭ tijainŏ), vol.1121 (2017), 73. The sound design was clearly given a lot of thought in this film, as evidenced by a discussion with the sound designer published in Cine21. Although they do not discuss the importance of the environmental sound specifically, sound design is obviously part of the filmmaking process that was given special attention. 76 Christine Marran, “Arboreal Unicorns and Other Megaflora: On Kurosawa Kiyoshi’s Film Charisma,” in Ecocriticism in Japan (Ecocritical Theory and Practice) edited by Hisaaki Wake, Keijiro Suga, and Yuki Masami (New York: Lexington Books, 2017), 275. 39 This scene goes on for almost a full minute of constant waves of branch shadows sliding up the windshield, compromising the translucency of the glass so what the viewer sees most easily is the tree’s shadow and it takes effort to look through the shadows to find the humans. Marran refers to this style of scene composition as the way the film “creates visual agency for a visually innocuous tree named Charisma.”77 Eventually the car stops in the middle of the forest and drops Yabuike off. The shot is filmed wide, with a line of trees and shrubs in the foreground, with the car and Yabuike barely visible and off to the side, overshadowed by the darkness of the trees. When Yabuike enters the forest, it becomes even more difficult to see the human among the trees, with darkness and shadows taking up all the space between the tree trunks. This type of shot is also the first thing viewers see in Suicide Forest Village. There is a POV shot from inside the car that is framed on either side by the structure of the car leaving a square of window ahead that is filled on either side with nothing but trees reaching out over the road, and then a shot from outside of the car looking in from the front windshield, the shadows of those same trees now seeming to wrap themselves around the car, obscuring the faces of the people in the front seats. As the characters begin to talk, we realize that: 1) they are driving a hearse, and 2) they are driving through the titular suicide forest. There is nothing but trees as far as the eye can see as the camera continues to emphasize the significance of their arboreal surroundings rather than spending time focusing on the human characters’ faces. As the scene in the car ends, the camera shifts to an extended upward pan through the trees and above them, first staying close to the canopy so the entire field of vision is filled with nothing but trees, the screen turning into a moving green mass, then pulling out into a wide shot of the massive forest seeming to go on and on forever. This style of wide shot of the entire forest reoccurs multiple times in the 77 Marran, “Arboreal Unicorns and Other Megaflora,” 270. 40 film coming directly after moments of horror seemingly unrelated to the forest. Inserting these shots in this sequence returns our mind to the forest and links horrific happenings throughout the plot to the forest via this visual motif until we as viewers come to associate the forest itself with everything scary that happens. The fact that eerie dissonant music accompanies these shots further reinforces this association between forest and fear. To return to where we began with The Mimic, shortly after the murder in the forest we see the main character’s family beginning their return to the rural hometown area by car as well. The same style of arboreal framing can be seen, once again, with either side of the road dominated by greenery and the windshield acting as a host to the spectral branches being shadowed down from the trees above. The difference in this case is that the windshield shot in The Mimic allows for the most opacity out of the three. Rather than the shadows of the branches completely blocking out the face of the passenger, you can still see the person’s face with decent clarity. The passenger in this case is the mother of the family, Hee-yeon—who is arguably the main character—and she is the one initiating the return to the rural hometown. Rather than being blocked out, her face looks as if the shadowy plants are running over her skin without the darkness making her less visible. Her face changes shades as the shadows of leafy branches slide up her face, darkness interspersed with lighter moments, but it is always clearly her face just with some new arboreal touches. The appearance of the tree branches intermingling with her body is especially significant in this film where these visualizations act as foreshadowing of how much she as a character will end up enmeshing herself with the forest. Her mother sitting in the backseat is also shown looking out the window at the passing trees, but although there is a reflection, it appears green rather than shadowy and it does not come in through the window to make any impression on the grandmother’s appearance, rather it just passes by. Finally, the shot 41 pulls out from the car and transitions into a wide shot from behind the car as it drives into the distance, nothing but heavily wooded mountains visible up ahead. As opposed to the forest existing as something/somewhere scary that is separate from human life/society, these three films make the forest’s presence a primary focus. The human characters have gone to the forest, they have actively made the choice to be in an arboreal space, and the usage of an arboreal camera technique puts the appropriate emphasis on that choice by making the forest and individual plants take up visual space that would usually be reserved for human characters. Additionally, the more humans enter the forest and begin taking up space there, the more the forest begins reciprocating the behavior by intertwining with or entering spaces that would previously be categorized as distinctly human. In Charisma, this manifests as a visual emphasis on the forest integrating itself with human structures. Almost every building in the film appears to be in the process of ruination: rust, broken stone, chipped paint, broken glass. And within the spaces that are ruined the forest has begun to encroach. Tim Palmer calls this Kurosawa’s “entropy aesthetic” and notes that in Charisma Kurosawa “depict(s) both natural and urbanized Japan in a state of terminal decay.”78 For example, there is a ruined sanatorium that acts as set for many scenes in the film. The windows of the building have all become glass-less, turning into open portals to the forest that surrounds it. Every window in the background of the shots is filled with leaves and vines; without glass to stop them, the plants have become part of the formerly human space. In the process of ruination, the buildings have shifted into spaces of enmeshment where human and nonhuman life coexist. The exception to this is the home of the professor Yabuike meets, Jinbo, 78 Tim Palmer, “The Rules of The World: Japanese Ecocinema and Kiyoshi Kurosawa” in Framing the World: Explorations in Ecocriticism and Film edited by Paula Willoquet-Maricondi (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2010), 221. 42 who is bringing plants willingly into her home and studying them. Her clean, bright, airy living space is a contrast to all the dark, dirty ruins that otherwise make up the human spaces in the film. Even though she is bringing plants in her home which makes her seem like she prioritizes relationality, the plants in Jinbo’s home are controlled, contained, kept in glass pots and glass boxes. While they do visually exist in the space, they are not living their own lives and her relationship with them is one of experimentation and study, not coexistence. Jinbo’s house is also the only structure made of wood in the film whereas the sanatorium and other ruined buildings are made of stone. In other words, her home is a place of death for the arboreal. The shot composition in Charisma also foregrounds plant life in the visual field alongside buildings, leaving human happenings to take place in the background, sometimes very obscured. For example, this composition is present in the scene right after Yabuike is rescued after he has passes out in the forest at night. In the foreground of the shot is a building with a rusted window with broken glass, the chipped white paint on the outside wall, and a small tree trunk with a smattering of leafy branches. This little tree stands right at the border of the wall and window with its branches reaching out to the side, so it intersects every part of the visual field. The human story is taking place inside of the building—as that is where the people who are having a conversation audible to the viewers are—obscured by the leftover shards of broken glass and shrouded by the dark interior of the building. Rather than foregrounding human storytelling, the shot focuses on the ruins of human buildings, on the tree in the foreground, and on the trees far in the background through a second broken window. The foreground and the background are light, while the middle ground inside the building is all in shadow. This composition continues as the scene continues, with the one man eventually leaving the building to walk outside to his car where the foreground of the shot is heavily obscured by tree trunks making it difficult to even 43 see what he is loading into the car. At this point in the film, about 12 minutes in, the viewer has very little concrete information about the characters as the dialogue is sparse and the visual narrative is constantly being intervened upon by the forest. Charsima’s visualization of forest and buildings is stated primarily in a realm of realism. By comparison, the forest in Suicide Forest Village has more association with the magical nonhuman giving it the capability to make itself known in unexpected spaces. As the film progresses, the younger sister of the main character duo, Hibiki, begins to be haunted by the forest itself. In her bedroom, shadows of waving tree branches skitter across her walls despite there being no window that would allow for this to occur. Both in her nightmares and when she is awake the shadow branches lurk on her walls, black leaves contrasted on the white paint. A particularly striking scene of this type takes place later in the film once Hibiki has been put in an in-patient mental health facility. Initially, we are shown a shot of the forest from within. It is a jumble of dark trunks and scattered sticks with the moonlight shining in from one side illuminating what is otherwise a dark, ominous visual of entangled wood. Then, the shot switches to a scene of Hibiki asleep in her bed at the facility, tossing and turning as the sound of tree branches rustling in the wind is accompanied by shadows of tree branches waving across every wall of the room. Vine-like shadows begin to creep across the blankets towards Hibiki, eventually grabbing her wrist with their shadow wood tendrils, surrounding her on all sides until she suddenly awakens, causing the shadows to slink away. For a four-walled, white, sparce room located in the city with only a couple of windows on the roof, there is an awfully large amount of arboreal presence. Indeed, even while the older sister is visiting Hibiki in the mental health facility there is a plant presence. The doctor in charge has a small plant on his desk, and even that is placed in the foreground of the shot, with the shot composition situating the doctor behind 44 it. And when the two sisters are together in the visitors’ area, they sit next to the one potted tree in the room, and it lurks in the background of the shots of their conversation. Another human space that is portrayed as being taken over by the forest in Suicide Forest Village and The Mimic are the homes. Aside from the two main sisters, there is also a young couple in Suicide Forest Village who are primary characters. The home the young couple is moving into with the help of Hibiki and her sister is surrounded by densely packed trees on all sides. The noises of the forest dominate the soundscape as bugs and birds make it known that this is their home, too. When shown from the outside, the two-story house is obscured by trees in the front and the trees are crowding in from both sides; in some shots it is difficult to even see how one would enter the house because the entrance way is so obscured by branches covered in voluminous, bright green leaves. There is no sense of industrial development, no sense of human control, just a riotous arboreal landscape into which someone managed to squeeze a house. Moss and ferns cover the ground and as the characters step, you can hear them crunching through the plants. Much like the shot composition in Charisma, the shots in Suicide Forest Village of people looking in or out of the house are cut through with a branch or a leaf, making sure the existence of the forest is never ignorable. Even if there is a moment in which the fronds of a fern or the branch of a tree is not in front of a character, the plants are creeping in from the side or at the very least taking up background space; every scene is infused with green. In a way, it seems odd to have so many shots of characters seemingly obscured by a plant “getting in the way” but this is the essential mode of the arboreal camera. It is a technique in these films that communicates the importance of the forest as a character in these narratives. This style of cinematography continues throughout the films. Characters in multiple scenes who are exploring the forest experience similar obscuring treatment at the “hands” of the trees. In some scenes it is 45 akin to horror genre conventions of shooting from behind something or around a corner to make the audience feel like the character are being stalked by some sinister creature. In The Mimic what is horrific about the return to the mountain is not immediately recognizable to the characters, but it is visible to the viewers because although the characters do not know what is going to be dangerous to them, the forest takes up large amounts of the visual space in the frame. The house that the family in The Mimic move into is similarly a space of intense green as the house in Suicide Forest Village. It is right on the edge of the forest on the side of the mountain, and it is a piece of expensive looking modern architecture with wooden decks and walls of windows. In front of the house is a small grassy expanse dotted with bushes and trees, but behind the house, to its sides, and further down in front there is a seemingly endless mass of tall, dark trees. While this is said to be the grandmother’s hometown, there is little to no town left.79 The wide shots never show a village, town center, or even other houses in significant number. Instead, the visual focus is only this strangely contemporary building situated on the borderland, the liminal space between forest and field, looking like the forest behind it is looming ever closer, ready to absorb the building. Every shot of the house has this feeling, as if the building is about the be eaten up by the encroaching tree line, as if it is a building being overtaken by a flood of a green tidal wave. As the family moves in, no music plays; the soundtrack is natural noises only—cicadas, crickets, the rustling of plants. This continues as the scene shifts from day to night, the sound of the trees themselves picking up in intensity as the shot shows the house seemingly getting lost in the dark among all the tall trees closing in around 79 Dowon Lee, GoWoon Kim, Wanmo Kang, Insu Koh, and Chan-Ryul Park, “Korea’s Sacred Groves—The Maeulsoop Forest Types, Ecosystem Services, and Current Distribution,” in Sacred Forests of Asia; Spiritual Ecology and the Politics of Nature Conservation, edited by Chris Coggins and Bixia Chen (New York: Routledge, 2022), 136. A house like theirs pushed right up against the forest edge might have been part of a village right next to what would be called the “back mountain” which “according to local conceptions” would be “the ‘rear’ of the village (usually called duisan).” 46 it. And then, the shot changes again, this time to a close-up of the trees themselves, somehow ominous as they stand still against the background of a night sky. The sparse and natural sound design is opposite to the use of a musical score in Suicide Forest Village. While that film uses instrumentation typical of the horror genre to enhance the experience of fear and to draw negative association with the places and things being shown on screen, The Mimic relies more on the eerie strangeness of the noise of the trees shifting and rustling with light instrumentation in many key moments of horror. The result is additional implied agency for the forest because the sound design focuses on how trees themselves sound horrific and it is as if the trees are interjecting their own thoughts or words in the narrative of the film. Ultimately, there is nothing “homey” in the human sense about the houses in any of these three films. The ruins in Charisma and the new houses about to be swallowed by the surrounding forest in Suicide Forest Village and The Mimic do not conform to a human understanding of home, but rather are more akin to a house in the gothic genre where the living space is always the site of the greatest terror. While the concept of “home” has a distinctly anthropocentric quality— often associated with a town or a literal house which are spaces of human congregation—there is also the understanding that earth is the home of our species.80 Recognizing the way in which a “natural” and earthly space like a forest can become uncanny elucidates the depth of the disconnect between the human and the nonhuman that is being portrayed in these films. The house in the film stands in an environment that is “permeated with otherness” because of its proximity to a space that is no longer a home to humans: the forest. In their book Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics, Timothy Morton theorizes earth and the 80 I am using a Freudian reading via Morton, but Oikos theory would be another way to approach the question of Earth as “home” of humanity. For example, see chapter “Oikos” in Erle C. Ellis, Anthropocene: A Very Short Introduction, (Oxford: Oxford Academic, 2018). 47 natural environment as a home to humans and posits that “Home is the strangest place. It is strange in its very homeliness . . . Indeed, here is strange in itself”.81 Drawing on Freud’s work, Morton attempts to introduce the uncanny into the concept of the environment as a “home” of humanity by pointing out the incomprehensible strangeness of the very planet on which we live. Carrying Freud’s theories of uncanniness over into the environmental sphere, Morton quotes Freud saying, “when one is lost in a forest in high altitudes, caught, we will suppose, by the mountain mist, and when every endeavor to find the marked or familiar path ends again and again in a return to one and the same spot,” which Morton reads as representative of the traumatic kernel of encounter with the Other that is the environmental nonhuman and “Forests are iterations of trees, and so uncanny.”82 The one tree that you may return to over and over again may cease to hold any meaning as a tree if multiplication of the tree morphs it into a forest that then becomes an entity of its own that has its own uncanniness. The uncanny forest is one of the most prevalent elements of scene creation in the three films discussed in this chapter. This affect is especially strong in the scenes of the forest at night which are dispersed throughout the films. Having this space of darkness near the home, which is also part and parcel of the uncanny, ties into Morton’s discussion of environmental aesthetics in which they read Freud, saying: Freud never directly says why ‘silence, darkness and solitude’ evoke the uncanny… Perhaps beyond ‘infantile anxiety,’ silence, darkness, and solitude evoke the difference that is identity, whether or not there is someone there just round the corner, whether or not there is a sound one cannot quite hear, a form one cannot quite see…83 Not only is the constant feeling that there may be someone, or something, around every corner a staple of the horror genre, but so are silence, darkness, and solitude. In The Mimic there are many 81 Timothy Morton, Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007), 177. 82 Timothy Morton, “Ecologocentrism: Unworking Animals,” SubStance 37, no. 117 (2008), 85. 83 Sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, edited and translated by James Strachey (London: Hogarth, 1953), 178. 48 moments of typical horror ambiance with appropriately placed jump-scares in keeping with the genre, but there are also many moments of silence, darkness, and solitude that take place in the forest where there is an uncanny feeling of not being alone but no clear threat to be afraid of. Indeed, in those moments it is just the trees themselves and no monster materializes. The forest is shot repeatedly in wide angle with a single person, or two people maximum, surrounded by what seems like an endless expanse of trees and these wide shots of characters alone surrounded by trees and with no sound but the forest places the focus on the individual being isolated. Once again, a space that was previously perceived as a potential “home” becomes terrifying, the lack of other humans triggering fear rather than a sense of connection with the nonhuman. About halfway through Suicide Forest Village, the psych doctor in the mental health facility makes a speech to the characters about the nature of fear, saying that it is a result of weakness and delusion.84 His implication is that we, as humans, create fears for ourselves based on not reality but on our own perceptions of things around us; it is not that the forest is dangerous, it is that you have convinced yourself that it is dangerous because of your own fears. In this film and in The Mimic the plots do revolve around the existence of a monster or a curse that is real to the characters, or in other words, their fears are valid and not delusions. But despite having diegetic reasoning for the fears, these two films, and to some extent Charisma, present a disparate visual narrative that argues for a more abstract understanding of fear based on the primacy of arboreal visuals associated with horrific moments. 84 He later jumps off a building. 49 Caring for a Monster In Charisma, Suicide Forest Village, and The Mimic, a negotiation of who or what deserves care and which of the characters are willing to take up the work of care is an arena of constant contestation. As I mentioned in the previous section, the mode of the arboreal camera brings the arboreal to the viewer’s attention at the same time as the arboreal is becoming visibly present in the character’s lives in the diegesis. Once that making visible has occurred, the question becomes what to do with that awareness of the arboreal Other. Horror genre conventions would suggest a violent altercation with the forest as an end point to these films, but instead, I argue a lens of care is possible when reading these films. Making an arboreal Other visible to the human characters gives them the option to approach their interactions with this new awareness of the liveliness of the tree or forest in mind. What each individual character thinks care is also varies, causing a spectrum of choices to be made by the characters throughout the films, but it is the choice of radical care for the nonhuman and acts of radical care in the face of arboreal horror that stand apart from the rest and offer a rarely seen potentiality for human/nonhuman relationality. This relationality is made possible by the arboreal camera functioning to show how the forest is present in the character’s lives as something with an agential presence and therefore as something lively enough to be cared for or cared with. I begin this section with the introduction of the book Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More than Human Worlds written by feminist scholar Maria Puig de la Bellacasa. It is a long quote, but her words, thoughts, and questions encapsulate the experience of thinking about care in a way that I feel is best used as a whole. She says: Care, caring, carer. Burdened words, contested words. And yet so common in everyday life, as if care was evident, beyond particular expertise or knowledge. Most of us need care, feel care, are cared for, or encounter care, in one way or another. Care is omnipresent, even through the effects of its absence. Like a longing emanating from the 50 troubles of neglect, it passes within, across, throughout things. Its lack undoes, allows unraveling. To care can feel good; it can also feel awful. It can do good; it can oppress. Its essential character to humans and countless living beings makes it all the most susceptible to convey control. But what is care? Is it an affection? A moral obligation? Work? A burden? A joy? Something we can learn or practice? Something we just do? Care means all these things and different things to different people, in different situations. So while ways of caring can be identified, researched, and understood concretely and empirically, care remains ambivalent in significance and ontology.85 Puig de la Bellacasa identifies something about care that I think is essential: it is ultimately unquantifiable. As I discuss care throughout this next section, it is with my conceptualization of care as a lens, as is inevitable, but with an openness to all the behaviors, actions, and choices that can be considered care. Each individual experience of care is different, and it is both beautiful and horrific in turn, but in this chapter, it is specifically human care for nonhuman beings that I am interrogating. Additionally in terms of the environment, as Puig de la Bellacasa points out, caring can feel awful. To care about climate change, extinction, and pollution is to suffer every day in the face of atrocities too big for an individual to solve. Who or what is deserving of care is yet another aspect of the term and practice that is disputable when thinking ecologically. And finally, it is impossible for a human to truly know what care arboreal nonhumans want/need. Much like the definition of care is multifaceted, so too is the forest, which not only has myriad ways it intersects with human societies but is also a home to myriad creatures, plants, fungi, and others, resulting in a forest being a “kaleidoscopic” entity.86 The openness to everything care can look like or be, especially in the nonhuman sense, is what allows for thinking about caring for something like a forest that is so cornucopian in its existence. And, more importantly for the readings of Suicide Forest Village and The Mimic, an openness to perhaps unconventional forms of care is what allows for care despite radical Otherness and horror. 85 Maria Puig de la Bellacasa, Matter of Care: Speculative Ethics in More than Human Worlds (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017), 1. 86 Fedman, Seeds of Control, 10. 51 Questions like these can be considered in a hypothetical way when being discussed in an academic or otherwise non-urgent setting in which a distance is felt between the idea of relationality and the reality of it. That is not a luxury the characters in these three films have. Considering this, my analysis of these films is focused on what to do when relationality with the nonhuman is unavoidable and, in fact, may be being forced upon you. Not only is this an issue for the characters in these films, however, but it is also the state of the world in general. The choice of how to confront the situation is up to the characters and us. Truly, “an emphasis on care . . . is important in reintroducing (perhaps unfashionable) critical questions about how to respond to irreducibly entangled worlds.”87 The novel approaches to care for the nonhuman in these three films reflects an understanding of: 1) irreducible entanglement between human and arboreal nonhuman, and 2) positions care as a primary means of survival. The characters that make progress towards accepting the absolute alterity—to call back to Keetley’s words—of the vegetal nonhuman are the ones who survive until the end, which is no small feat in a horror movie. I begin with Charisma as the primary example of arboreal care, and then move on to nurturing the nonhuman in the face of fear in The Mimic and Suicide Forest Village. Out of the three, Charisma is the only film explicitly about caring for a tree and a forest. This is also likely why it is the only one that has scholarship establishing it as a piece of ecocinema. The term “charisma” being used for a specific tree also evokes the notion of “charismatic mega-flora” which is part of the environmental debates over what beings deserve care and the fact that humans are inevitably drawn to saving only those plants and animals that 87 Eva Haifa Giraud, What Comes After Entanglement? Activism, Anthropocentrism, and an Ethics of Exclusion (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019), 104. 52 they find charismatic.88 Besides the ecocritical reading, the film has also been read as an allegory for Japanese human society. Accepting the plot as more literal, however, enhances the ecological reading and asks viewers to consider the futility of human methods of care for arboreal nonhumans. As previously mentioned, Charisma’s plot follows multiple groups of humans all with their own agenda regarding the tree Charisma and the forest. The three I will be discussing at length are the main character, Yabuike, a former mental hospital patient, Kiriyama, and the biological scientist, Jinbo. There is also a forestry crew, a group trying to buy Charisma, and Jinbo’s sister. Aside from Yabuike and Kiriyama, it seems that all the humans in the film are using purely human logic in their approaches to understanding the forest, rather than attempting arboreal relationality. Kiriyama’s entire personality revolves around his obsession with caring for Charisma. In fact, his entire identity is wrapped up in care; he was influenced by the care of a mental health facility’s director, he now cares for the director’s dying widow, and he cares for Charisma the tree. He understands the importance of human-to-human care, understands how it is done and the impact it can have, but his attempts to care for Charisma seem in vain. In a conversation with Yabuike as they both stand next to Charisma, Kiryama states that the tree keeps getting weaker, despite his ministrations and asks Yabuike why he thinks that might be, but all Yabuike can say is that he, too, doesn’t know much about plant life. Kiriyama goes on to mention that trees live much longer than humans and asks one of the quintessential questions of care: who will take care of it after we’re gone? While Yabuike has no philosophical wisdom to offer, he does offer action. He begins caring for Charisma alongside Kiriyama as if to emphasize the importance of caring while one is alive, regardless of the future. This is an epistemological reversal of the common 88 Michael C. Hall, Michael James, and Tim Bairda, “Forests and trees as charismatic mega-flora: implications for heritage tourism and conservation,” Journal of Heritage Tourism 6, no. 4 (2011), 309-323. CITE MARRAN too 53 environmental logic that we need to think about the far future of the planet and humanity to find motivation to make changes now. Yabuike’s approach is much more care-focused in that he cares for the sake of caring and not because he is hoping for a specific future outcome. This would be a radical approach for current societies to take, caring because caring in and of itself is right rather than for survival or moral high ground. Jinbo, on the other hand, calls Charisma a kaibutsu, “monster.” She claims that it produces a toxin that kills other trees in the ecosystem, though this is never definitively proven in the diegesis of the film.89 She claims that before Charisma came, there was a perfect forest. Caring for Charisma is the equivalent of caring for a monster in her eyes. She believes that Charisma, who is different from all the other beings in the ecosystem, needs to die to benefit the larger whole. Her solution is to pour toxins into the water supply so the entire forest will die and in theory it can then start over. This form of violent care is just that, care, despite its seeming insanity. She cares for a specific version of the ecosystem that she sees as ideal, and her act of killing is her version of care. Neither she nor Kiriyama seem to understand how to properly care for the arboreal nonhuman, but they both make attempts to increase their relationality to the tree and the forest. Kiriyama’s retort when he hears about Jinbo’s logic from Yabuike is to call it a “human way of thinking.” He points out that the forest is just like that, with different plants living and dying in their battle for survival. He sees human intervention in the forest’s ecosystem as self-centered, a form of anthropocentrism. He is a bit of a hypocrite, of course, given that he is obsessed with caring for Charisma, but it is still an interesting concept to consider: is human care, in any form, the right care for a forest? This conversation takes place in the ruined 89 This is likely a reference to science and theorization around the concept of a Climax Forest. For one example of scholarship in the Japanese context, see Fumito Koike, “Plant traits as predictors of woody species dominance in climax forest communities,” Journal of Vegetation Science 12 (2001), 327-336. 54 sanatorium, dirt on every surface and vines spilling though a window so the ecosystem is sharing a space with Kiriyama—there is no separation of human and nature. Yabuike’s conversation with Jinbo, on the other hand, is held at a table, two people sitting in chairs, having what seems to be an academic conversation, the forest safely locked outside. While neither Kiriyama nor Jinbo truly know what to do with their relationships to the forest, Kiriyama at least has a far more lived relationship with his arboreal companions compared to the detached scientist. When the original tree named Charisma eventually gets dug up, stolen, and burned by Jinbo and her sister, Yabuike finds another tree to practice his caring ministrations on. The transference of his attention from one tree to another suggests that the need to care is more important than the specific individual to him. While Kiriyama is not convinced and is more stuck on the idea of the original Charisma as an individual, Yabuike speaks Kiriyama’s own words back at him, reminding him that this new tree could far outlive humans, just like the original Charisma. Along with continuing his practice of arboreal care, Yabuike also destroys the well where Jinbo was pouring poison to kill the forest. His desire to care for both individual trees and the forest as a whole is what makes him stand out from everyone else in the film. Yabuike decides to care for Charisma and the second tree even though they may be killing other plants, or in other words are monsters. This, as he rightly points out, is just the way things work, again in agreement with Kiriyama’s earlier words that to try to control the way forests kill and live is anthropocentric. Yabuike’s actions imply that no one tree or one forest has more of a right to live than any other, and that striving for survival is the natural way of things. He cares for the monster trees, seeing them as a natural part of the ecosystem meaning that ultimately he understands that care is not about control. 55 Charisma offers a consideration of caring for the arboreal other in a literal sense and the trees dealt with in the film while potentially deadly to other plants are not attempting to harm the humans directly. Suicide Forest Village and The Mimic ask for significantly more from their protagonists in terms of exactly how horrific and monstrous their nonhuman companions are and how great a leap caring for them is. These two films instrumentalize themes of maternal care, or generally feminine manifestations of care. Mothers as an object of horror is a well-known trope of the genre, this includes the Korean context where films like A Tale of Two Sisters (2003) and Spider Forest that have been distributed internationally perpetuate this particular convention.90 Psychoanalytic film theory, for example, has often positioned women and mothers as either the monsters themselves, or as the inevitable victims of the genre.91 Mothers are not the only ones capable of caring, but the symbol of the mother continues to be a particularly poignant element of filmic storytelling, both in horror and in other genres. In the next section the idea of motherhood is not something I will be discussing in particular, but I do want to point out the significance of choosing a mother or other female figure as the “carer.” It changes the signifier of the monstrous nonhuman from that of an ageless figure to that of a child. Perhaps this is to make it easier for the human mind to grasp the concept of care while it is being applied to something arboreal and horrible, because no matter how “other” the being, if it is a child, it can be cared for. In The Mimic, the family’s story begins with the mother, Hee-yeon visiting the grandmother in a medical facility where she is receiving treatment for a stroke and memory loss. Hee-yeon tells the doctor that she thinks her mother will recover better if she returns to her 90 Yukyung Lim, “공포와 죄의식의 이중주: <장화, 홍련>, <거미숲>, <소름>을 중심으로” (kongp'owa choeŭishigŭi ijungju: changhwa, hongnyŏn, kŏmisup, sorŭmŭl chungshimŭro), 문학과 영상 11, no.3 (2010), 754. 91 Steven Jay Schneider, Horror Film and Psychoanalysis: Freud’s Worst Nightmare (England: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 4. 56 hometown in the countryside at the base of Jangsan, despite the doctor’s suggestions for continued in-patient care. It is revealed that Hee-yeon’s ulterior motive in moving her mother back to her ancestral village is an attempt to get the woman’s memory to return. This is necessary in Hee-yeon’s mind because the family’s young son disappeared years ago and the last person to see him was the grandmother. This attempt to reverse a traumatic loss becomes the defining characteristic of Hee-yeon as a character and her behaviors throughout the film are in service of regaining this specific child to care for.92 The return to a forested, rural hometown inevitably brings along with it fear of the woods as defined in that it is not only against civilization but also associated with the past and a setting in which humans are lost.93 As mentioned in the previous section, the home the family moves into is not “homey,” but rather a space of uncanny closeness to the forest. After the family has been living in this liminal green space for a little while, a small child shows up at the family’s doorstep looking lost and dirty. For Hee-yeon, this physical presentation triggers a descent into the past trauma of losing her son and she becomes protective of the child, willingly overlooking warning signs and irregularities in the child’s behavior. Instead, she accepts the child from the woods and begins caring for them, bathing and feeding them, dressing them in her lost son’s old clothes. As previously mentioned, the Jangsan Tiger is able to mimic the voice of humans and other animals in order to trick people into coming to the woods to eat them, but in this case this little kid is the younger of the two Jangsan Tigers and has come out of the woods to pursue a care-receiving relationship with the humans. As time goes on, the young Tiger uses its ability to mimic voices 92 Hee-yeon’s obsession with finding her missing son shows the general definition offered by Freud for conditions of traumatic loss, in which there is an opposition to allowing the “loved object” to slip away and this “opposition can be so intense that a turning away from reality takes place and a clinging to the object through the medium of a hallucinatory wishful psychosis,” Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 244. 93 Parker, The Forest and the EcoGothic, 47. 57 and mannerisms to become more and more like Hee-yeon’s lost son, even wearing his old clothing, and mimicking his voice after Hee-yeon has an old home video of him playing on the TV in the house. By utilizing that specter of loss and capitalizing on Hee-yeon’s need to care, the Tiger can receive care from the human mother. Although Hee-yeon is willing to accept this child from the forest, those around her are far more skeptical and reflect the usual uncanny discomfort that the not-quite-human evokes. Arguably, one of the most horrific elements of The Mimic is the sound and appearance of the Tiger so closely resembling that of a human that the humans themselves cannot tell the difference; there is just a slight feeling somewhere deep down that perhaps this creature is not quite what it appears. However, the Tiger who appears in the form of a child does not act violently, rather it acts timid and afraid, and only mimics a human to receive safety and care. I would like to turn for a moment to the example of Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1972 film Solaris, odd though it may seem in this context of East Asian horror cinema. In Solaris there is also a nonviolent nonhuman that takes on a human form in order to interact with humans. Much like in The Mimic, the humans react with fear and violence because they cannot come to terms with the creature for what it is, and ultimately the human form taken up by a nonhuman is almost too uncanny to bear. The moment of productive relationality in Solaris comes when the main character Kris begins to relate to the human-mimic that has taken on the form of his dead exlover, much as the Jangsan Tiger models itself after Hee-yeon’s lost son. In his consideration of the film, Morton says, “Kris’s ethical dilemma is about learning to treat the replica of his exlover as a unique person who just happens to possess all the memories and characteristics of the woman from his past.”94 This is akin to the process that Hee-yeon goes through with the Tiger 94 Morton, “Ecologocentrism: Unworking Animals,” 83. 58 that has taken on the voice, mannerisms, and affect of her lost son. She knows, on some level, that this child is not her son, but it is a lost child crying out for care and that is what matters. These two films raise an important issue in the discussion of nonhuman/human relationality, that of what forms of life humans can care for. Continuing the question of both who/what deserves care and the issue raised in Charisma of humans not understanding arboreal needs, consider if nonhuman entities in these two narratives take human forms because the human brain cannot comprehend abstract care for say a forest or an alien planet. Both the people making the films and the human characters in the films are incapable of conceptualizing care without human influence—as am I, of course—but even despite the fact that these narratives make attempts at visualizing care despite otherness and fear, they do this by making an otherwise too amorphous, too unthinkable, or too horrific being into something humans can recognize and therefore accept. Thinking of the Jangsan Tiger as a being that protects and embodies the forest requires this understanding of why a film may visually humanize a nonhuman entity. If the forest could speak in a way that humans could understand, it still would not have the sway over Heeyeon that the Jangsan Tiger does because it would lack the specific replication of her son. It is the same in Solaris, Kris initially loves the Solaris manifestation because it replicates his dead ex-lover, because it is recognizable in other words. Both Hee-yeon and Kris, though, are capable of going beyond human-to-human care, which is what makes them stand out as characters in horrific narratives. In the end of The Mimic, Hee-yeon has the choice to return to human society with her now blind and maimed husband, or she can choose to become the caregiver for the young Tiger and remain in the forest. Counter to everything the horror genre final survivor trope would predict, Hee-yeon accompanies the child Tiger into the forest and stays there to care for it rather 59 than returning to the human realm with her husband. This is unlike so many horror, gothic, or otherwise creature-based narratives where the nonhuman being must die regardless of its relationship with the humans. To save the incomprehensibly nonhuman monster, to stay with it and accept it as it is, is truly a radical choice. To return to Solaris for a moment, Morton states that “Solaris shows us how to love beyond identity” and then goes on to describe Kris’s choice to stay with Solaris rather than returning to earth, stating that Kris “traverses the fantasy and commits to living in the traumatic, impossiblereal environment that is the person of Solaris.”95 Again, the story of Hee-yeon closely follows that of Kris. Both are in situations where they are forming a bond of intimacy with a nonhuman, both of them are surrounded by other people that want them to kill or in some other way get rid of the nonhuman, and ultimately both of them choose to stay with their new nonhuman companions rather than go back to living in a purely human society. Hee-yeon makes this choice despite the fact the forest is a place of alterity and otherness, despite the fact that people have been warning her away from the forest throughout the film, and despite knowing that the being she is going to care for is far from human. Considering the theme of the return to the rural that is a major part of The Mimic, it is possible to read the Tiger taking the form of the lost child as a cry for care from the forest itself asking for nurturing and consideration. The question of abandoning and then returning to the rural spaces of Korea and finding them suddenly uncannily foreign and monstrous begs this question in the context of Korea’s history of migration to the urban and then back to the rural, with generations in the mix who did not grow up in a rural space and to whom returning to that space would be extremely strange. In other words, the forest, once a part of rural life and cultural practices, has become a place of fear. As Hee-yeon’s loss of her son leaves a lasting trauma that 95 Morton, “Ecologocentrism: Unworking Animals,” 90. 60 reiterates itself, so too does the loss of the intimacy with the land and environment create a selfperpetuating eco-trauma that will not be solved simply by returning to the countryside to buy a cheaper house. To regain intimacy with the nonhuman environment requires radical acts of caring towards unfamiliar, uncomfortable, and possibly ugly elements of those rural spaces. In her book Inhospitable World, Jennifer Fay says: “When we rescue from extinction only the creatures and places we love, what becomes of the unlovely, ugly, invisible, or dangerous animal or seemingly indifferent, remote, and utterly inhospitable land?”96 The Jangsan Tiger as a representation of the forest is the remote and forgotten place as well as the creature that is dangerous and unlovely. Hee-yeon’s act of caring for the Tiger, and thereby the forest, is the act needed to prevent the forest from taking the revenge Keetley says we can expect from the realm of nonhuman flora.97 Last in my considerations of care, Suicide Forest Village is the most genre-conforming of these three films and because of that the forest is almost entirely horrific and dangerous rather than manifesting as an arboreal being seeking or accepting care. Instead of caring for a nonhuman, the arboreal care in this film manifests as humans becoming arboreal themselves to protect other humans. In the beginning of the film the sisters, Mei and Hibiki, are found stumbling out of the suicide forest as little girls. This is because their mother is assumed to have gone to commit suicide in the forest and took them with her, but they managed to find their way out eventually without their mother. As they grow up, Mei appears to function normally in her interactions with others, but Hibiki is quiet, withdrawn, and is obsessed with the occult. Her interest in the occult serves as the setup for how and why her family and their friends get 96 Jennifer Fay, Inhospitable World: Cinema in the Time of the Anthropocene (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 166. 61 involved in the curse of the suicide forest to begin with. Hibiki knows about the urban legend of a village in the forest and has visited the forest herself with her small group of online friends who are all urban legend otakus. While it would be disingenuous to imply that Hibiki cares for the forest in a positive sense, she does have a connection to it based on the loss of her mother and this is a connection she nurtures rather than rejects. As mentioned in the previous section, Hibiki is the one who ends up haunted by the forest throughout the film until all the horrific arboreal moments culminate in a final climactic sequence in the forest itself. At this point in the film, most of the introduced characters have either died or have disappeared in the forest. When Mei goes into the forest in search of a way to stop the curse and to save Hibiki from its effects, she finds herself in the titular Suicide Forest Village where she is captured by the village’s residents. The people there are a form of forest zombie that seem partially to be plants and partially to be controlled by the forest. It is difficult to tell what animates them, but they spring up from under the moss like new buds pushing up through the soil; their appearance from the earth and retreat to it imply a symbiotic relationship between their previously human bodies and the forest itself. Mei also discovers her mother in the village who has become one of the forest creatures herself, though seemingly more in control of her actions than the others. While the exact reason is not clear, the village residents want to turn Mei into a forest zombie and the ritual requires cutting off one of the person’s fingers. Mei’s endangerment in this situation is the catalyst for two radical acts of arboreal care. To save Mei from the fate of joining the forest, her mother fakes cutting off Mei’s finger and cuts off one of her own instead. This allows Mei the time to run away from the village, but in her rush to escape the forest she falls into an underground cave system. The forest zombies come after her again, but she is once again saved by the appearance of Hibiki, who also cuts off her 62 own finger to start her own transformation to distract the forest zombies. However, Hibiki does not just become a forest zombie, her experiences throughout the film of being haunted and inhabited by the spirit of the forest have inherently changed her. When she cuts off her finger in an act of sacrifice, Hibiki grows into a giant tree, absorbing the plant zombies around her, shooting up through the ground and becoming a majestic resident in the forest and preventing her sister from being captured. Both the mother and Hibiki have a primary objective of caring for Mei and to make that care actionable, they both accept their new lives as arboreal residents of the horrific forest. This acceptance of becoming the Other is another form of radical care. In other words, for the sake of care, there has to be an acceptance of complete transformation of the self. With arboreal beings falling into the category of “absolute alterity,” the choice to merge with or become arboreal is to accept absolute nonhuman existence despite the absolute difference.98 While the forest remains a place of fear because no one cares for it, Mei is able to live because others cared for her in the face of overwhelming arboreal horror. In Suicide Forest Village, the woods are a menacing landscape of trial that can only be survived by utilizing care, thereby circumventing the consuming threat coming from within.99 I want to reiterate that these films are still horror narratives regardless of my focus on the elements of care within them. Human characters are grievously injured and killed in all three films and often their death comes at the hands of the forest, or at least take place in the forest. In their attempts to control Charisma and the forest, most of the human characters die, are killed, or have full mental breakdowns in Charisma. It takes two hands to count the amount of people in Suicide Forest Village that are killed by the forest’s curse. And although the child Tiger seeks relationality, the elder Jangsan Tiger is still in search of food in The Mimic. The characters who 98 Keetley, Plant Horror, 1. 99 Parker, The Forest and the EcoGothic, 47. 63 do not die in these films are the ones who open themselves up to caring for the nonhuman, and even more significantly they care for the monstrous, arboreal nonhuman. While it is an encounter with an arboreal being that is being associated with the horrific in these films, all three additionally provide examples of loving the monstrous arboreal. The human characters that survive do not continue to live a normal human life, but they do live, and they live with a greater understanding of the nonhuman world. Conclusions In their article comparing fictional films with documentary horror, Kim Ji-mi argues that with fictional horror movies you can safely go experience something thrilling, but at the end of the day there is a conclusion in the film that allows for the fear to be left in the theatre, whereas documentaries of horrific events leave more uncertainty.100 Ecohorror is perhaps the exception to this rule and even more so ecohorror that is making use of the arboreal camera. By making something usually unnoticed suddenly noticeable, films that make use of the arboreal camera may be capable of breaking through some of the plant blindness that seems to have become prevalent in industrialized, capitalist nations. No matter how blind some of humanity wants to be to plants, the reality is that forests and trees are out there, and their need for care—or at least need for considerate coexistence—is one of the great challenges of dealing with the future of life on the planet earth. As Eva Haifa Giraud says in her book What Comes After Entanglement? Activism, Anthropocentrism, and an Ethics of Exclusion, “narratives of entanglement have…proven 100 Ji-mi Kim, “가짜 공포와 진짜 공포” (katcha kongp'owa chintcha kongp'o), 문화비평: 영화 (2012), 355. 64 important in implicating human activities in ecologically damaging situations and calling for more responsible relations to be forged with other species, environments, and communities.”101 Narratives and visualizations of nonhuman others, and in this case particularly arboreal entities, do not leave the viewer with nothing to think about, rather they bring nonhumans into view for human witnessing. It is also clear that the increase in arboreal horror is at least partially influenced by shifts in ways of living in Korea and Japan in the 20th and 21st centuries. In Palmer’s analysis of Charisma, for example, he notes that “rather than the once-prized purity of natural wilderness, Kurosawa’s films, like many of his contemporaries, reveal a country in environmental crisis, confronted by looming catastrophes perceived to be unstoppable and, more troubling still, largely unheeded.”102 Despite the three films discussed in this chapter framing the forest as a space of horror, they also give some actionable hope that not all returns to the forest are doomed, rather the conditions of the return may require radical care for the arboreal nonhuman. Rather than viewing these films as simply fictional horror that can be forgotten as soon as the credits roll, I suggest viewing them as reflections of the changing relationship between humans and the forests that address both the fears cultivated in individual cultures as well as the potential for learning how to care for forests in new ways. 101 Giraud, What Comes After Entanglement?, 1. 102 Palmer, “The Rules of The World,” 215. 65 Chapter Two: Violent Waters and the Aquatic Camera Melody Jue, pioneering scholar of the blue humanities and theories of blue media, notes that the ocean is discussed by humans much like how space is conceptualized and in her book Wild Blue Media: Thinking Through Seawater she says that “David Attenborough’s narration of the deep sea in Blue Planet documentaries becomes science fictional when he notes that ‘more people have been to outer space than to the bottom of the deep ocean,’ an environment that is home to ‘alien’ life forms that live there in a milieu of pressure and darkness.”103 Human discourse has a way of collapsing all nonhuman environments in this way when they are too “other” for easy comprehension. The genre of science fiction, or broadly “SF,” has long been home to those humans who desire to push against the discourses of far reaches in an attempt to speculate about what might be out there, what humans might do if they were to interact with any of it, the stuff out there.104 On the other hand, as Jue points out, the deep ocean is just as “out there” in a way as far, if not farther, than the moon. Whether discussing the moon, other planets, or the ocean, however, we can be assured that the human version of the conversation will turn to resources, expansion, and what the “out there” has to offer that humanity can take.105 Equally speculated about is if the life in these far-removed places will react violently to human presence, and of course, how the humans will triumph over opposition. 103 Melody Jue, Wild Blue Media: Thinking Through Seawater. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2020), 8. 104 I am using SF—as opposed to sci-fi or science fiction—because that has become the common parlance that includes speculative genres broadly as opposed to narrowly and my analysis is multimodal. 105 There is a cornucopia of scholarship across fields on extractivist histories of space and the ocean. For example, see “Mining for humanity in the deep sea and outer space: The role of small states and international law in the extraterritorial expansion of extraction” by Isabel Feichtner (2019), “Rare Earth Frontiers: From Terrestrial Subsoils to Lunar Landscapes” by Julie Michelle Klinger (2017) and “Extraction in Four Dimensions: Time, Space and the Emerging Geo(-)politics of Deep-Sea Mining” by John Childs (2020). 66 In this chapter, I will be discussing a piece of media that disrupts the powerful human/overpowered alien planet dichotomous trope and instead offers a speculation of what nonhuman aquatic elemental power can look like. The 2021 Korean SF series The Silent Sea visualizes an agential aquatic nonhuman that can react to humanity’s extractive practices and can resist the human urge towards resource acquisition.106 Situated in the ever-growing South Korean SF canon of the 21st century, The Silent Sea utilizes the Netflix mini-series format to transform the director’s eponymous short film of the same title into an eight-episode tale of climate change, resource shortage, lunar politics, and above all else, water.107 This chapter only discusses this one visual text in detail; this is partially because as a series it covers more ground than a film, covering a total of eight approximately 45-minute episodes, and likewise there is more to discuss. But more importantly, it is because The Silent Sea has a unique approach to personifying water visually that I believe deserves extended consideration given how singular it is. As in the previous chapter I proposed a mode of the arboreal camera, in this chapter I will argue that The Silent Sea introduces an aquatic camera mode that prevents the plot from falling into SF tropes of cosmic expansionism and prevents a framing based only on commodification of nonhuman elements. My analysis in this chapter will focus on how an aquatic camera mode in The Silent Sea emphasizes elemental agency instead of relegating water to commodity status via the show’s centering of the aquatic in the visual field and how the human body acts as a tool to enhance the water’s visibility and agency by tapping into conventions from the body horror genre. The overarching narrative premise of The Silent Sea is that a long-term global drought has depleted earth’s water almost entirely and humanity has become desperate for a solution to 106 I do not mean a creature that lives in the water. I mean a creature that is, in essence, wholly water. 107 Eun Joung Kim, “한국 영화에 나타난 포스트휴먼 소녀의 재현 양상 연구 —, 를 중심으로” (han'guk yŏnghwae nat'anan p'osŭt'ŭhyumŏn sonyŏŭi chaehyŏn yangsang yŏn'gu –, rŭl chungshimŭro),대중서사연구 27, no. 3 (2021): 110. 67 ensure continued survival on earth. As is often the case in such situations, powerful nations have turned their attention to the cosmos in a bid to find resources elsewhere. The show frames the water shortage as a global problem by showing images of fictionalized news coverage in multiple languages. Shots of reddish-brown swaths of land and wildfires are flashed on the screen as news bulletins scroll across the bottom switching from English to French to Korean. The Korean coverage shows large buildings for indoor farming—likely real footage of indoor vertical farms from Korea—and then shows people having to kill their pets because humans get priority for water usage.108 Despite the global framing, the primary plot specifically follows a team of Korean scientists and astronauts as they are sent to the moon by the government agency of Space and Aeronautics Administration (SAA) to recover research material from a now defunct space station where top-secret studies on a newly discovered resource called lunar water were being conducted. What is meant to be the savior of humanity, however, turns out to be anything but. As the characters of the show discover, lunar water is not consumable or touchable for humans and is in fact immediately deadly to humans even if only a drop comes into contact with them. In contrast to the danger it poses, lunar water is visually indistinguishable from earth water, but when a human encounters it, it alters their body in a process of aquafication that ultimately kills them. The major theories I draw on in this chapter are elemental ecocriticism and body horror, with a side of new materialism and blue humanities to bolster my treatment of water as a potentially agential being.109 A major question posed by the editors of the volume Elemental 108 Arirang News YouTube Channel, “S. Korea’s indoor farming technology helps crop production in the Middle East,” (2020). 109 Jiyong Lee, “한국 SF 에서 나타난 비인간 캐릭터들의 의미와 변화 양상 -2010 년대 이후의 SF 콘텐츠를 중심으로” (han'guk SFesŏ nat'anan piin'gan k'aerikt'ŏdŭrŭi ŭimiwa pyŏnhwa yangsang -2010nyŏndae ihuŭi SF k'ont'ench'ŭrŭl chungshimŭro), 한국언어문화 82, (2023): 208. Lee employs similar theories to a discussion of South Korea SF, particularly new materialism for the context of The Silent Sea and Okja. 68 Ecocriticism: Thinking with Earth, Air, Water, and Fire drives my own desire to think more deeply about the way in which water as an element is portrayed in visual media. Cohen and Duckert ask, “how did we forget that matter is a precarious system and dynamic entity, not a reservoir of tractable commodities? How did we cease to know that earth, air, fire, and water move, rebel, ally, crush, and desire?”110 In this chapter, I focus on the dynamic existence of the aquatic element because in The Silent Sea it is actively rebelling and crushing. While not everyone agrees on what agency looks like for the nonhuman, my analysis leaves the possibility open that an element would rebel against commodification and that visual media is capable of imagining this scenario. The idea that human media can actually see water as a material element with agency and not just a metaphor for some form of human experience, though, goes against a good deal of the scholarship on water in film and media that has been done up to this point. As Jue points out in Wild Blue Media, there is a “tendency to describe media through fluid metaphors,” as opposed to understanding water (or the ocean specifically in Jue’s work) as its own material environment, and this tendency to metaphorize the aquatic for human media “can obscure the ways that a terrestrial bias persists in our theorizations of media.”111 It is true that water in film has a long history of attempting to express the hidden depths of the human psyche as well as attempting to articulate liminality and the potential fluidity of states of being. To quote Adriano D’Aloia’s work on water’s filmic representations: Water is strategically used as a substance capable of marking the passage from one psychological condition to another, and of ‘hosting’ a crucial event...troubles pass under the bridge of cinema and, nonetheless, as water appears on the screen, something menacing always lies in ambush – a sea monster, an oppressive past, a looming catastrophe, a tsunami.112 110 Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Lowell Duckert, editors, Elemental Ecocriticism: Thinking with Earth, Air, Water, and Fire (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015), 5. 111 Jue, Wild Blue Media, 143. 112 Adriano D’Aloia, “Film in Depth: Water and Immersivity in the Contemporary Film Experience,” Film and Media Studies 5, (2012), 92. 69 While this explanation is incredibly apt for Korean and Japanese films about monsters and disasters (as will become evident in the following chapters of this dissertation), for the particular analysis I am doing in the rest of this chapter on The Silent Sea I want to pose a different approach to reading water in film in which water is water. Not a metaphor, not a home for monsters, not symbolic of the human psyche, but rather water itself being a being worth consideration. This attention to the capability of elements to possesses an agency of their own is likewise in line with theories of new materialism, in which “things are understood to exert their own kind of agentic power. The human, as a result, must be humbled, so as not to be the sole source of mastery and dominion.”113 Ideas about what exactly new materialism as a field of study includes vary, but this summative quote from Min Hyoung Song’s Climate Lyricism gets at the key facets that are relevant to this chapter; specifically, the sense that nonhumans can possess agentic power.114 The second half of this quote about “humbling the human” is a controversial framing, and while I do not personally agree with it wholesale, the idea of human hubris being humbled in the face of elemental agency is an apt description of what takes place in The Silent Sea and likewise I included it so as not to foreclose on potential discourse around eco-revenge or similar theories for analyzing this show in the future. This form of violent intent, or expectation of violence, that humans have towards nonhumans is a vital component of horror as a genre. Although it may not always be the case that nonhumans want revenge specifically, there is always the possibility that humanity gets humbled not because the nonhuman beings have that intention but rather simply because humans are prone to underestimating nonhuman power and likewise human hubris has 113 Min Hyoung Song, Climate Lyricism (Raleigh: Duke University Press, 2022), 10. 114 There are many new materialism scholars at the point I am writing this, and in fact the discipline is already out of vogue in terms of how it was originally defined, but for a foundation see scholars Jane Bennet and Rosi Braidotti. 70 its own undoing embedded in it from the start. Considering this foundation of fear, and in lieu of eco-revenge theories, I engage with theories of body horror in this chapter to address the undoing of human hubris in The Silent Sea. Often considered a sub-genre of horror, body horror is the horror of a situation in which the human body is irrevocably changed by interaction with the Other, or in which humanity is faced with a disruption of their very corporeal existence. Lunar water’s ability to enter and transform human bodies is its most horrifying trait and it is a form of power that is especially horrifying to the human astronauts and scientists who rely heavily on their perceived expertise and dominance in the setting of the science lab space station. Despite the undeniable horror that occurs in The Silent Sea regarding human bodies, I would classify the violence in the show as defensive in nature rather than malicious. Neither the human characters nor the lunar water is positioned as necessarily “evil” in the plot—despite the deaths that come from their interactions—and the nonhuman is not pigeonholed into the archetype of “enemy of humanity,” while simultaneously humanity is not vilified despite their mistakes. By taking a purposeful look at the theories mentioned above in relation to The Silent Sea’s visual motifs, I argue that by visualizing the aquatic in a way that makes it central to the plot and to the viewing experience, the show allows for a violent elemental agency that complicates post-apocalyptic and SF expansionist tropes by imagining an element that fights back against extractive attempts, disrupting the common ideas of salvation for terrestrial humanity via exploitation or colonization of other planets’ natural resources. Too often the resource itself is completely stripped of lively characteristics in the face of a narrative about human survival, but The Silent Sea offers a visually driven alternative. In the aquatic camera mode, the usage of constant water imagery that takes up space on screen and takes up space in the human body makes sure the viewer is unable to forget the presence of the elemental resource 71 that is the object of the attempted commodification. I begin my analysis with a section on water in the context of East Asian media portrayals from the early 21st century to situate the conversation within the larger context of how water can play a part in media. I set up this background of other types of water films with the primary purpose of explaining why The Silent Sea does not fit with these other examples and why I am focusing on it instead of other types of water media. Next, I move into defining the aquatic camera mode and my visual analysis of how it reinforces agency for water in the visual field of The Silent Sea. Finally, I expand on the theory of body horror as an essential component of the aquatic camera mode’s power to imagine of elemental agency. Water Media in East Asian Permeating the modern cityscape, winding in and out of the streets as the cities continue to grow and nature continues to be subsumed within the concrete jungle, the rivers and ocean fade into the background. Water is a space that predates humanity but has also been changed irreparably by the effects of humanity’s expansive growth and rapid industrialization. To limit the instability of this relationship, many human societies try to control the water in attempts to make humans feel “surer” of their primacy in the interaction. Although societies may attempt to contain and structure water by building waterways and dams and water-front condominiums, the truth is that these manufactured separations are illusions. The land constantly absorbs the water and at any time the water can reclaim the land via natural disaster, rising sea levels, or simply through the natural ebb and flow of time and tide, while conversely climate change strips the aquatic resources from areas that are not flooding, resulting in life-ending droughts. Indeed, “humanity is facing two simultaneous dangers: rising sea levels right alongside water 72 shortages.”115 The instability of the human/water relationship continues to grow as we teeter on the edge of destroying our own most needed resource and, unsurprisingly, this results in no small number of media that in some way includes narratives of relationality with watery bodies. The urge to control the water and create borders to contain it is an anthropocentric compulsion explained with narratives of progress and neglectful of the consequences for the nonhuman environment. This is particularly evident in contemporary urban spaces where the drive to modernize and industrialize over the decades has taken precedence over preservation of the environment. Horrific films in Korean and Japan in the late 90s and early 2000s showed distinct signs of discomfort with this dirtying of the water that ran through major cities like Seoul and Tokyo. Kurosawa Kiyoshi’s Retribution (2006), Nakata Hideo’s Dark Water (2002), Kim Kiduk’s Crocodile (1996) and Bong Joon-ho’s The Host (2006) are four examples of this trend of thinking about what has gone into the water.116 Retribution and Dark Water both address the landfilling that took place in Japan along the coastlines to allow for more apartments to be built, having ghosts arise from filthy water to haunt those living around these sites of erasure of the water. Crocodile and The Host both express a deep discomfort with the Han River’s pollution and paint it as a place of uncomfortable dirtiness, especially regarding bodies being in it.117 One of the best-known examples of a water-based genre movie in the East Asian context is Dark Water, mentioned above, which is a film considered to be a part of the “J-horror” canon and likewise familiar to audiences and scholars around the world.118 It and Retribution present as ghost stories on the surface with water playing a role in visually communicating that something 115 Lee, “한국 SF 에서 나타난 비인간 캐릭터들의 의미와 변화 양” (han'guk SFesŏ nat'anan piin'gan k'aerikt'ŏdŭrŭi ŭimiwa pyŏnhwa yang), 213 [my translation]. 116 A Chinese example of a similar film would be Lou Ye’s film Suzhou River (2000) which also has a liminal and unsettling cinematic diegesis that seems oddly focused on water and industrial development. 117 For further discussion of The Host, see chapter 4 of this dissertation. 118 This film is based on the 1996 short story by the same name by Koji Suzuki. The short story is much more explicit in its environmental themes and would be a viable text for comparative study of ecocriticism/ecocinema. 73 is amiss in the diegesis. The water is not a character in and of itself, however. Rather, what is in the water or where the water came from is the key to horror, with water simply being a nonagential element that is affected by human action. What is evident based on the dialogue in these two films is that the way human action is affecting water is being taken into consideration on a larger scale that what is being shown in the film’s diegesis. In both Dark Water and Retribution characters mention that the areas around where they are working or living are subject to landfill projects that have damaged the local ecosystems in Tokyo. The implication is that these development projects have been done hastily, poorly, or incompletely, thereby resulting in a final product that has compromised both the ability for humans and water to thrive rather than benefiting either. Pollution and disruption of the water ways in the city form the backdrop of much larger tales of horror and human error, but unfortunately for attempting an ecological reading, the connection between the degradation of the local environment and horrific happenings takes a backseat in the overall film plots. In Dark Water there is a fear of contaminated water within a home and in Retribution the fear of saltwater appearing places it should not be, but in both cases, it is the human bodies that are in the water that inspire horror and the bodies end up overshadowing the water itself. Two Korean films that I consider to be part of this same conversation are Kim Ki-duk’s Crocodile and Bong Joon-ho’s The Host. The Host out of the four is the most focused explicitly on water and the direct repercussions of pollution, but again diverts the focus away from the water itself towards a monster manifesting within the water. While the Japanese examples are both focused on development projects as impetuous for water becoming inexplicably present at scenes of horror, the Korean examples are focused more on pollution of a specific body of water—the Han River—and how human bodies and human toxins entering the water changes it 74 into a dirty and potentially monstrous place. Crocodile and The Host draw on the concept of suicide and society’s disenfranchised and outcast peoples being one of the major sources of damaging the water. Human bodies entering the Han River exacerbate the process of turning the river into something monstrous. Trash, waste, and bodies are all associated with the negative human impact on the river. In this case, too, the river itself or water itself is not so much a character as it is simply a place that human malpractices happen. The Han River acts as a location in which and through which human behavior is critiqued, but it itself possesses no agency and the water does not seem to have much reciprocity effect on humanity. The Host, especially, is a prime example of ecocinema readings as it is based on a real-world example of pollution and that same methodology could be applied to the other three films as well. The four films mentioned above warrant further consideration in terms of environmental history readings regarding the specifics of development and pollution around rivers and coastlines in Korean and Japan taking place in the late 90s to early 2000s. Urban pollution films, though, are not the only type of water films in East Asia and I would be remiss if I did not mention Japan’s large body of water fantasy and slice-of-life media.119 Arguably, much of this media would also be responding to concerns about pollution and environmental damage, especially if considering Hayao Miyazaki’s films. Even so, rarely is the water itself addressed in Miyazaki’s films or in scholarship about his films. What lives in the water is more of a concern—for example, think Ponyo or the river spirit in Spirited Away. 120 In addition to Miyazaki’s work, there are many anime films and series that focus on people who live by or in 119 There are many slice-of-life animes that take place in sea-side towns, at pools, or are in some other way associated with water as a primary setting. Free! (2013), Tsuritama (2012), and Squid Girl (2011), come to mind. 120 See articles: Ross’s “Miyazaki’s Little Mermaid: A Goldfish Out of Water,” Dhofarudin and Noviana’s “From Shallow to Deep Ecology in Hayao Miyazaki’s Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea,” Pan’s “Human–Nature Relationships in East Asian Animated Films,” and Mumcu and Yilmaz’s “Anime Landscapes as a Tool for Analyzing the Human– Environment Relationship: Hayao Miyazaki Films.” 75 the water in which the water is an entity of supporting rather than destroying human life. Lastly, manga and webtoons in Japan and Korea have taken up water horror, but as those are a different form of media that would require a different form of visual analysis, I must leave them to a future project.121 All these examples are media in which water is not itself agential but in which human actions transform the water into something horrific or in which something in the water is horrific. As I mentioned in the introduction of the section, this form of water media, even if it is horror, is not my focus in this chapter. The closest of these texts to my focus on horrific water itself would be Dark Water considering its inclusion of shots of dirty water entering human bodies in seemingly mundane and everyday settings, but even so the focus on ghost haunting moves the key feature of the visuals away from water and onto, once again, what is present in the water. In the next section I will begin my analysis of The Silent Sea within the framework of the aquatic camera mode. Though this analysis I will attempt to make clear how disparate seeing what is in the water is from seeing water itself. With this framing in mind, the next section of this chapter explores current innovations in aquatic visualization and water agency in Korean visual media by specifically focusing on how The Silent Sea that has taken the idea of humanity’s impact on water and speculated further to consider how water would feel about humanity’s treatment of it, how water would make itself visible as an entity, and how water could cause reciprocal damage to human bodies in response to damage done to it. 121 Two well-known examples would be Korean webtoon Leviathan (심해수) beginning in 2018 and Japanese manga Gyo (ギョ) beginning in 2001. Broadly speaking, these two are about monster fish rather than about water itself. 76 The Aquatic Camera and Commodifier’s Gaze In the history of photography, it was aquatic subjects and settings that proved both particularly challenging and particularly fascinating for human photographers, and according to nature photographer A. Radclyffe Dugmore it was one of the final frontiers, you might say, of the discipline, coming after animals, insects, and so on.122 Both nature photographers and eventually film makers found themselves hard-pressed to come up with the best ways to capture the environment, and the environment’s inhabitants, because “of all the environments on our planet, the underwater realm is the most remote.”123 The remoteness of the aquatic caused Dugmore to suggest building aquariums out of certain materials to allow for capturing and photographing aquatic subjects in a more conducive environment for clear photos and Margaret Cohen notes similarly that “aquariums are commonly acknowledged as the first media form to give general audiences access to the underwater realm.”124 In other words, the history of capturing the aquatic within the camera frame is a history of captivity, control, and commodification as much as it is a history of exploration, discovery, and otherness. As other environmental humanities scholars have noted, even the language of photography is that of human control, including the term “capture” itself.125 Cohen details the fascinating history of aquatic cinematography practices in her 2022 book The Underwater Eye: How the Movie Camera Opened the Depths and Unleashed New Realms of Fantasy, much as Dugmore details what he found fascinating about 122 A. Radclyffe Dugmore, Nature and the Camera How to Photograph Live Birds and Their Nests; Animals, Wild and Tame; Reptiles; Insects; Fish and Other Aquatic Forms; Flowers, Trees, and Fungi (New York: Doubleday Page & Co., 1903), 91. 123 Margaret Cohen, The Underwater Eye: how the movie camera opened the depths and unleashed new realms of fantasy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2022), 1. 124 Dugmore, Nature and the Camera, 93, and Cohen, The Underwater Eye, 5. 125 Siobhan Angus, Camera Geologica: An Elemental History of Photography (Durham: Duke University Press, 2024), 17. This also comes up in scholarship on nature photography and hunting, such as Brower’s “Trophy Shots: Early North American Photographs of Nonhuman Animals and the Display of Masculine Prowess” and Ronan’s “Capturing Cruelty: Camera Hunting, Water Killing, and Winslow Homer’s Adirondack Deer.” Additionally, Susan Sontag also mentions the aggression of photography in On Photography (1973). 77 photographing the aquatic in 1903, but ultimately their work and other work similar to it is interested in the human act of photographing or filming and not in understanding aquatic liveliness in the visual field. To combat the anthropocentrism of photographic and cinematic ideas of capturing the aquatic, I propose an aquatic camera mode for reading ecomedia texts.126 The aquatic camera mode as it applies to The Silent Sea is comparable to the arboreal camera mode discussed in the previous chapter in that it is a visual paradigm that prioritizes bringing the aquatic into the foreground of the visual field as opposed to allowing water to stay agencyless in the background. It imbues the nonhuman being of its focus with an agential liveliness that is usually missing from cinematic portrayals of nonhuman beings that are not commonly understood as sentient. What the camera sees thereby becomes a mode of seeing for the audience as well and the aquatic nonhuman becomes unignorable in its see-ability. In addition to bringing the nonhuman to the foreground, I posited the arboreal camera mode also visualized practices of care as part of recognizing nonhuman agency. The aquatic camera mode, on the other hand, does the opposite and mobilizes visualizations of violence as a means to make nonhuman agency seeable, which I will discuss in my later section on body horror. Both camera modes are about visualizing nonhuman liveliness, but in The Silent Sea the combination of extractive intent and assumptive commodification of the human characters means that the aquatic element must exert its validity in a way that the humans must recognize. In other words, the aquatic element in The Silent Sea uses violence as a tool of communication as if to say, “you will recognize me!” to the humans who are used to only thinking of water as a lifeless commodity.127 126 The term “aquatic camera” is not in common parlance for any group of people that I can find. The two words intersect in discussions of waterproof cameras but are not used as a combination that means a specific thing. 127 I say “lifeless” in terms of the water itself. Negate all thoughts of things in the water, from giant whales to microscopic beings, and then consider if human conceptions are lifeless. Humans think water has stuff in it that lives but I am referring to water as separated from all of that. 78 The aquatic camera mode is about the way a nonhuman being is seen—as in seeing water as only a commodity but still seeing it nonetheless—whereas the arboreal camera mode as I defined it in the last chapter is about humanity overcome a complete blindness to the liveliness of plants. In the following section, I will move into a close analysis of the visual motifs that appear in the show and I argue that the aquatic camera mode counteracts a commodification in the visual field. In a way, the show buries the lede because episode 1 begins with an undeniably conventional scene for the SF genre. The foremost moment the audience witnesses—before the intro credits, even—is an emergency with the Korean astronaut and scientist characters struggling to gain their bearings as they assess the state of their spacecraft after a crash-landing on the moon. Viewers familiar with Korean films will immediately recognize Gong Yoo from Train to Busan (2016), and Bae Doona from The Host, even as they are hanging from the ceiling or in some other way obscured by the wreckage around them. Between the star-studded cast and the suspenseful set-up for space exploration the show seems like it could be any high-budget SF series or film. This formulaic introduction to the characters and plot is why I mention an obstruction of what will be the focus of the show going forward, because as the viewers’ attention may be drawn to the human characters through the dialogue and plot setup, in the visual field there is a whole disparate story taking place. It is easy to miss the hints of the show’s emphasis on water in this opening scene because the general milieu of the crash-landing is one of emergency and adrenaline. And yet, when Bae Doona’s character unhooks herself from her seat and tumbles to the ground, the shot leaves her face to pan over to her hand which is resting in a growing puddle of water. Her hand is not hurt, she is not holding anything in it, and since this is the very first scene in which this character appears, the viewer has no reason to think her hands are significant; the thing the camera is 79 actually focusing on is the water. As she gets up, Bae Donna’s character comments on the water leaking into the ship, signaling to the viewer that it was the water that was important, not her hand. But even this comment seems odd because the viewer has not been given any plot context yet and so it is impossible to place the significance of the water leaking. The shot then zooms out from the cramped interior to show the craggy surface of the moon, further enforcing the strangeness of water being focused on in the visual field and being a focus of dialogue in the film’s diegesis. The camera focusing on this seemingly meaningless water foreshadows the centrality of the figure of water in the visual field, thereby beginning the presence of the aquatic camera mode, because amid the chaos of a dramatic crash scene the camera takes the time to see water when it could have focused only on the human characters. The credits play directly after the crash scene and leave no doubt about water being the central focus of the show. In the credit sequence, water takes over the screen, its movements lively, never static. Droplets explode in fractal patterns spraying out from the center of the black background and rivulets run down the screen in sheets. At times, the water even covers up the names of the human creators of the show, in a negation of the human that disrupts the intended purpose of a credit sequence in the first place. Finally at the end of a sequence of shots of water alone on a black background, the credits show a planet burning and then an astronaut in full spacesuit falls into an aquatic abyss, sinking into an unknown depth. These images offer a contrast to the straightforwardly themed and tension-driven disaster SF imagery in the first scene and at only three minutes into the series this opening sets the stage for a distinctly aquatic focus. This intro is an aspect of form—being a series rather than feature length film—and it serves to establish the tone for every episode of the show. These opening moments ensure that viewers are reminded of the water’s presence every time a new episode starts. These two examples of 80 focusing on the water in the crashed spaceship and the entire opening credits establishes an aquatic camera mode from the absolute outset of the show. The camera taking the time to show water is especially important because, as previously mentioned, the characters and the viewers are being set up by the dialogue and narrative framing to fall into anthropocentric patterns of thinking about water as commodity and therefore falling into patterns of not seeing the water as potentially agential. A resource-minded perception of water’s controllability is unsurprising in The Silent Sea because the characters have no experience with varying forms of water given how scarce the element is on earth outside of preportioned drinking water from machines. To them, it is nothing but a commodity which is made evident in the scenes on earth before they arrive on the moon. The scenarios in which water appears in the earth segments of The Silent Sea associate it with status and power. This occurs throughout the show whenever there is a flashback to earth as the viewer is given more pieces of the story of how lunar water was intended to be used originally. First, water is allotted to Korean citizens based on a status ranking system, with the most prestigious members of society getting almost unlimited access to water while the average citizen is allotted very little. Second, this system causes significant unrest and protesting at the sociocultural level, and envy and competition at the psychosocial level. And third, water status can be upgraded when a citizen does something particularly valuable to the government. Bae Donna’s character, name Dr. Song who is a scientist that has been recruited to go to the moon for her expertise in astrobiology, is particularly subject to government officials’ usage of water as a bargaining chip. In the process of recruiting her to the crew of the lunar water expedition, there are multiple times where the ease with which water is made available to her is emphasized in the visual field by the camera focusing in on the water in question. For example, in one scene Dr. 81 Song sits across from the government official that is the head of the mission and before they begin talking, the camera zooms in to follow the action of the official pouring clean water out a clear glass pitcher. The camera captures the water’s movement in the pitcher and its steady flow as it pours out of the pitcher’s mouth. The camera continues to focus on the water as it settles in an equally clear glass cup and still follows as the cup is pushed across the table towards Dr. Song. In a scene where two people are having a business meeting, there might be a pitcher or bottles of water in frame as part of the set, or the boss may pour a drink for their employee or a nervous employee might pour themselves a drink, but in each of those situations the emphasis would be on the person doing something with their hands or body that is dynamic while the conversation takes place or the emotions are heightened. In this scene in The Silent Sea the camera does not leave the water for the entire process of it coming into frame, being poured into two glasses, and then being moved across a surface. When the camera finally pans up from the glass of water to include the humans in the frame again, the government official tells Dr. Song to drink with the gravitas of a character in power offering someone lesser the glass of finest whiskey or a Cuban cigar. In this world, water is the ultimate status symbol, and showing that you have enough of it to casually give some to another person is the ultimate power. Examples of this abound in the earth segments of the show and include other crew members expressing their awe and envy over Dr. Song being granted the highest level of water privilege and many shots of water entering vessels, entering mouths, and in general being treated as a high-stakes commodity. And it would be only that, an objectified commodity, if it were not for the fact that the camera seems just as if not more interesting in seeing the water as it is in seeing the humans. Despite the presence of water in the opening of the show, for the first few episodes the reason for the space station going out of commission is cited as a nuclear radiation leak that 82 supposedly killed all the station’s staff. This is what the government officials in charge of the mission tell the team and likewise they are arriving on the moon unaware of what exactly they are supposed to be retrieving from the station. As a result, the characters and the viewers are unaware of the existence of lunar water until a few episodes into the show. Nuclear energy as a dangerous resource is an expected narrative device in SF and disaster media, and The Silent Sea uses that expectation to set up a disruption of perception when the human characters are faced with the need to the real reason for the empty space station.128 By disruption of perception I mean the breaking down of anthropocentric expectations of what is dangerous and what is controllable. Nuclear radiation is dangerous, but water? Well, water is easily dismissed as innocuous if you are accustomed to it only existing in commodity form. Realistically, humans do understand that water can be dangerous, but on the other hand, humans especially in what we might call “developed” nations also interact with water as if it is an innocuous and non-agential entity every day as it comes spurting out of faucets and showers and pours out of filters or bottles into clean glasses. In the context of safe drinking water in industrial capitalist nations there is hardly ever a second thought about consumptive safety, and even less so is there an understanding of water as something lively. The aquatic camera mode juxtaposes the dialogue and narrative that objectify water by focusing on it visually, but once lunar water enters the picture the human expectation of easily commodifiable water is completely disrupted in both the narrative and visual diegesis. The key to this disruption is the identical appearance of earth water and Lunar water. In her work on Japanese science fiction film, Susan Napier says, “with its ability to uniquely reflect and comment upon modern culture… science fiction serves to ‘defamiliarize and restructure our 128 The implication of the radiation leak also addresses the overarching issue that is humanity’s attempts to control powerful elements. This vein of analysis will be discussed in the next chapter of this dissertation. 83 experience of our own present and to do so in specific ways distinct from all other forms of defamiliarization.’”129 Given the expectation for water to only ever be in one form, and a form that humans control no less, the elemental mimicry between earth water and lunar water makes the threat of lunar water in and of itself a defamiliarization, or disruption, of human visual perception that is made possible by displacing the idea of water onto an extraterrestrial and therefore unpredictable version of the element. When the human crew eventually finds contained samples of lunar water, the element is visualized as a crystal-clear liquid, and it is housed in transparent containers which allow the characters to see it. This is as opposed to portraying it as kept in an opaque container which would have been wise given how dangerous the substance is to humans, but by including a transparent element to the containers the importance of the visuality of perceiving the lunar water is emphasized. The characters assume it is simply water because they perceive it that way, and they are fascinated with it. Seemingly entranced by how clean it looks after their lives spent on earth where this quality of water is associated with power and prestige, the characters hold the vials of lunar water up in front of them and gaze at it with a fixation that reads as bordering on obsession. The covetous gaze with which they regard the vials of water emphasizes how much the human perception of elemental resources is that of acquisition and usage because it is apparent that the crew on the moon wants this water not only as a savior for humanity but that they each view it as something they can benefit from personally. Not only does the camera show the water clearly, but also the action of looking done by the human characters is in its own way part of the aquatic camera mode because it is implying a commodifier’s gaze in which the human perceives water in 129 Susan J. Napier, “Panic Sites: The Japanese Imagination of Disaster from Godzilla to Akira,” The Journal of Japanese Studies 19, no. 2 (1993): 330. 84 a way that is colored by an anthropocentric positionality.130 The Silent Sea acknowledges this gaze and it’s objectifying power but by employing the aquatic camera mode the show also critiques the gaze and prevents the water in the show from being relegated to commodity status. Visually mimicking earth water allows the lunar water to exploit the anthropocentric tendency to commodify, to see an already exploited object as always exploitable; this mistake in visual recognition is ultimately what leads to human downfall in the show because the preconception of what water is results in the characters missing a danger hiding in plain sight. In other words, there is no inherent sense of danger associated with the lunar water for the characters, they just see it as commodifiable resource, but as mentioned in the introduction lunar water is in fact deadly to humans. What the team discovers after some testing is that lunar water, despite being visually indistinguishable from earth water, is more akin to a virus, multiplying in the human body, seemingly responding to living blood and tissue and it stops multiplying once the human body dies. The bodies of the characters slowly fill with water, their blood converting completely into lunar water and thereby drowning them from the inside out. I will expand upon the significance of the body in the next section, but for now I want to continue focusing on the water itself and how it is visualized when it is separate from its enmeshment with the human corporeal form. Even when the crew doctor and scientist (Bae Donna’s character) are studying the lunar water in the lab under a microscope, the difference from earth water is barely, if at all, perceptible. And, indeed, despite a distinction eventually being made in episode 4 with the comment of it being “virus-like,” the visualization of the lunar water never changes to differentiate it from earth water. In terms of the aquatic camera mode, I would argue that the inclusion of a virus-like 130 This theorization is inspired by the work of Jean-Paul Sartre and Laura Mulvey on the gaze. 85 property in the plot of the show is in fact unimportant in the overall understanding of aquatic agency as a visual paradigm. The continued one-to-one mimicking of earth water allows for lunar water to stand in for all water, thereby creating the critique of commodification and objectification of water. The human crew and the government officials who sent them are only interested in humanity’s continuation on the planet earth, and the life of the water they exploit does not matter to them. By giving lunar water the ability to kill in a seemingly agential way, The Silent Sea gives the characters and the viewers a chance to reconsider how they think about water as an element in general. What sets this aquatic camera mode apart from other water-based horrific media is that, despite the danger it poses, the lunar water does not become a monster, it does not change color or move around like an anthropomorphized wave or animistic water spirit. It is simply water. Accordingly, the horror the crew goes on to experience is a horror of water. Dripping, splashing, seeping, but in no way differentiable from earth water in a visual sense. In the latter half of the show once the crew has discovered lunar water and discovered its deadly effects, there is an incident with one of the lunar water containers in which its clear glass sections gets shattered. As the water hits the ground and comes in contact with one of the crewmate’s bodies, the sound of rippling water begins to play in the background as the captain of the crew (Gong Yoo’s character) yells to the other crew members to get out. The dead crewmate has already died, his death was not caused by lunar water, and by the time the lunar water container breaks he has been dead a few moments. The horror and panic in the captain’s voice is in response to the lunar water specifically. This spill causes a chain reaction in which the ventilation system of the station fills with lunar water—in a way living up to the show’s name as this incident creates a sea’s worth of water on the moon. 86 The water filling the station does not happen out of sight and out of mind, although the characters are not aware of it taking place. The camera, however, is very much aware of the water, as always, and interspersed between the scenes of the human characters dealing with their own roles in the larger dramatic narrative are shots of bubbling, increasing water, filmed seemingly from within the water itself as all the spaces the camera enters are already completely submerged. The camera travels through the water, following its movements, documenting the once human spaces that now belong to the water. And as the water begins rushing through the vents, finding its way into every corner of the space station, the camera follows it, making the viewer feel as if they too are being pushed, pulled, and swept along with the water. Ultimately, the affect that the rushing water is conveying is horror. As the lunar water is the “monster” of the show so to speak, the fact that it is spreading throughout the station is meant to inspire dread. The freeness and force with which the water moves also makes it feel lively and not like a lifeless element, as perhaps many humans would see it. Although it is not literally chasing the members of the crew who are still alive, the shots of its rapid traversal through the vents interspersed with the shots of the human characters running around the space station give that impression. When the human crew notices that something is amiss in the station, however, it is not with a rush; it is with a drip. Dr. Song stops short in a hallway as a fat drop of water falls to the ground right in front of her. She pauses for a moment, then snaps her head up to see condensation forming on the pipe above her head. The camera slowly zooms in on the condensation as an eerie, staticky sound swells in anticipation, and then cuts off as the camera turns back to Dr. Song’s face just in time to see a drop hit her on the cheek of her upturned face. All over the station the water begins to seep through the ceiling, pipes, and walls. 87 The camera zooms in on the droplets as they begin to stream from the formerly sturdy and protective barriers that human-made walls and ceilings seem to be, but they serve as no protection from the tide of lunar water. A dramatic score with running water noises overlayed on it plays in the background as shots of water dripping from ceilings and streaming out of vents occupy the visual space. Another crew member is also exposed to lunar water in the way Dr. Song is, with the water beginning to leak through a seam in the ceiling and then gradually increasing in speed as it begins to rain down in steady streams of fat droplets. The camera shoots from above looking down at the crew member from the position of the water as the crew member falls to his knees, the look of horror on his face evident as the water begins to soak into his skin, his clothes, his hair. From his knees, he falls back, sprawling on the floor, staring up into the camera—and therefore up into the water—as if he has seen a terrifying monster coming towards him. Gong Yoo’s character watches this happen from the other side of the rain of water from where his crew mate has fallen, his vision obscured by the water. Like so many other shots in the show, the camera shoots from one side of the water through it so everything on the other side is blurry and wavey, as if there is always a human side and a nonhuman side and the divide is signaled by lines made by the water. The crew mate on the other side, who has been drenched by the waterfall from the ceiling, belongs to the water now and is no longer fully human. In the end, the pressure becomes so great that the water does begin bursting out of the vents, walls, and ceiling rather than dripping out, and then it truly does become a chase sequence in which the few remaining human crew members must attempt to outrun the water to escape the space station. As has become the standard for the aquatic camera mode, the camera documents the water’s rise to power diligently and more so than any of the other episodes, the final episode is a testament to how central water can be in the visual field if given the chance. For example, 88 almost as much screen time is given to the water filling the station as is given to the humans running from it. In other shows or films, the focus would likely be on the dramatic emotions being felt by the humans as they run for their lives, but in The Silent Sea, the camera always remains true to its focus on the water itself and the water’s experience in the station. I am going to spare readers any further descriptions of water as I have given quite a lot already, but rest assured that the water continues to drip, flow, rush, fill, and bubble in all its crystal clear, bluish glory up until the very end. As the show reaches its conclusion, the lunar water has successfully defended itself against commodification and gets to keep the station, making it uninhabitable to humans by taking up space. To quote Robert France’s book Deep Immersion, “in its march toward the future, human society has disrupted the future of water.”131 This implies the efforts to which society goes through to corral water within an easily understandable form are, above all else, carried out at the expense of the water itself. But in The Silent Sea, the water has the chance to turn the disruption back on the humans, by taking up space in the visual field, by taking up space in the station, and, finally, by taking up space in the human body as I will discuss in the next section. Body Horror and Becoming Water The Silent Sea fits into the category of eco SF what with the scenes on earth focusing closely on drought imagery and the solution to resource competition being extraction on another planet and the primary setting being a space station, but it is the specifics of the human/water relationship that push this show over the edge into something more akin to an ecohorrific 131 Robert Lawrence France, Deep Immersion: The Experience of Water (Sheffield: Green Frigate Books, 2003), 93. 89 consideration on nonhuman agency. Despite articulating the existence of the lunar water as “like a virus” in the dialogue, the imagery in the show suggests that the lunar water is much more than that. It exists in a realm entirely its own; it creates its own ecosystem, a world of water. Rather than humans being able to take control of that elemental world, the lunar water pulls them in, removing their control over their own body. Although the theme of eco-revenge is mentioned in the introduction of this chapter as a potential lens to see The Silent Sea through, I believe that another branch of horror is more germane to understanding why the water in the show is experienced as horrific. I argue that The Silent Sea employs body horror genre conventions in service of making the water’s agency visible and to emphasize the horror that humans feel about enmeshment with the nonhuman. Because lunar water is visually indistinguishable from earth water, it requires an alternative method of showing its agency and power, and I argue that the method it uses is affecting the human body in a way that is viscerally visible. I use body horror as a theory that offers a look into distinctly anthropocentric fear about loss of control to the nonhuman because understanding the threat humans perceive nonhumans to be is a step in understanding how to formulate non-violent relationality between humans and nonhumans. When considering if a piece of media is body horror or not, “the general understanding seems to be that, if a text generates fear from abnormal states of corporeality, or from an attack upon the body, we might find ourselves in front of an instance of body horror.”132 This experience of the body changing uncontrollably can be further modified by the eco as Christy Tidwell explains, “ecohorror is—and must be—concerned not only with the environment, narrowly defined, but also with human bodies (always implicated in and impacted by ecological 132 Xavier Aldana Reyes, “Body Horror” in Body gothic: corporeal transgression in contemporary literature and horror film, (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2014), 52. 90 issues).”133 In a situation of ever-increasing climate disaster, the human body will see exponential impacts in the coming years, and as Tidwell points out, many of the effects will be horrific. As Tidwell’s point suggests, body horror is an inherently ecological genre with its attention to the corporeal form of the human as it exists in and is modified by its surroundings. Tidwell is not the only one making this connection either, as Reyes states that body horror subverts Cartesian reasoning which had “previously rendered the body a ‘mere material handmaiden of an all-powerful mind.’”134 Both body horror as theory and theories across the environmental humanities take up this mission of re-centering the body in the conversation about humanness. This is in line with Gina Wisker’s opinion that in body horror, “the state of rationality and the sense of the human ability to create order is threatened by the messiness of the body,” and that this is a fear that is derived from the predominantly white European “postEnlightenment theories that emphasise mind over body.”135 In the case of The Silent Sea, the fear is ultimately about being in control of the subject self and the fear that nonhuman beings will in some way wrest control away from the rational human, thereby turning them into something irrational and therefore nonhuman. The expressions of nonhuman agency are framed in contrast to the expected human supremacy. The water takes control of the human rather than vice versa, disrupting anthropocentric narratives of human control over natural resources. Imagery of water as a lively and dangerous force permeates the show, from the opening credit sequence to the violent interactions between water and the human body, ultimately resulting in the water flipping attempts to control it back on the human thereby preventing its 133 Christy Tidwell, “Spiraling Inward and Outward: Junji Ito’s Uzumaki and the Scope of Ecohorror” in Fear and Nature: Ecohorror Studies in the Anthropocene (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2021), 74. 134 Xavier Aldana Reyes, Horror Film and Affect: Towards a Corporeal Model of Viewership (New York: Routledge, 2016), 9. 135 Gina Wisker, Horror Fiction: An Introduction (London and New York: Continuum, 2005), 178. 91 own commodification. As a result of the human characters having a commodifier’s gaze and therefore not thinking of water as a danger—as discussed in the previous section—the human body is made available as a visualizing medium for the lunar water’s agency in the show.136 Upon finally arriving at the space station in episode 2, the crew finds a dead body just inside the station doors. The body has pronounced dark blueish veins visible all over his skin where it is uncovered and there is a residue around his facial orifices. The camera slowly follows the lines of his body, moving up his hand to his face so these features are clear to the viewers, as Is the corpses partially open, glassy eyeballs. The crew doctor and Dr. Song point out that the corpse has the appearance of a drowning victim, from the state of its lungs to the dried matter around its orifices.137 Of course, the other crew members state that that diagnosis makes no sense, and of course what else could they say? The body is lying in the dry hallway of a space station on the moon, a place where there is supposedly no water. Finally, one of the other crew members makes the joke that he is envious of the dead person because at least that person got to have unlimited water. While the other crew members find this joke to be inappropriate based on their derisive facial expressions, it is the most accurate piece of foreshadowing offered by the scene because it points to both the human desire to possess the valuable commodity that is water for themselves, and it points to the unlimitedness that lunar water will in the end offer the crew in exchange for their lives. As the scene ends, the camera lingers on the dead body as the crew walks away and eerie music swells in the background. 136 Perhaps if the human characters had approached the lunar water with caution or respect this would not be the case, which is supported by Dr. Song’s ability to relate to nonhumans, but as the humans think their knowledge and power is superior to elemental resources, they open themselves up to death. 137 These two are the only women on the crew. They are both experts in their fields but also have their opinions dismissed the most often. I am not going to engage in an extended gender studies analysis, but it would be a valuable approach for a scholar to take in the future. 92 More bodies surface throughout the station as the crew gets further in and each one shows signs of drowning as the cause of death, and there is no radiation to be found despite what the crew was told before they left on the mission. As the slew of corpses indicates, the lunar water is the primary danger in the show. However, because of the aquatic camera mode it is not relegated to only the cause of death, and it does not simply serve the role of a generic danger for the plot. Rather, as a central character with transformative power, the lunar water’s ability to bring death is a key avenue through which it communicates its presence in the visual field. With the humans stuck in an isolated space once they reach the moon, the water itself functions as the monster for the narrative; it is an invisible killer that hides in plain sight. Throughout the early scenes in the station, the show implements suspenseful sound design, long camera pans, and slow pacing to build up tension and, as many horror films achieve, manages to make the viewer feel that something monstrous may be lurking around every corner. However, it is not until the first death via lunar water that the full extent of the show’s utilization of body horror becomes apparent. Near the end of episode 2, the first of the crew members is exposed to lunar water. When the crew member, named Soo-chan, accidently slips and falls on one of the seemingly drowned corpses, a fine mist of likely microscopic particles flies onto his face and enters his body through his eyeball. I say “most likely microscopic” because the camera shows the particles to the viewer, taking an ultra-close-up shot of what look like miniscule bubbles. The character, on the other hand, does not seem to see the particles even though they are right in front of his face. These particles are not recognizable as water but as the particles fly across the visual field of the scene the sound of burbling water integrates itself into the soundtrack. Much like the way the sound of trees was significant to the arboreal horror discussed in the previous chapter, the sound 93 of water in The Silent Sea also becomes something to be feared. As this scene shows, a human does not even have to go as far as drinking the lunar water for it to infiltrate the body, rather any contact at all is enough. The focus on the varying forms of corporeal stimuli that can lead to lunar water inundation reinforces the body horror of the show because it implies that anything touching, entering, or interacting with the body could lead to something horrific happening. In his book Body Genre: Anatomy of the Horror Film, Scott Diffrient discusses this breakdown of the perceived “hard” boundaries around human corporeal experiences: Seemingly banal sensorial activities that are crucial to an understanding of horror as an affective ‘body genre.’ Indeed, simple acts of seeing, hearing smelling, tasting, and touching—taken for granted as something most audiences do unconsciously during their everyday lives—become affectively intensified in narratives whenever the organs that are called upon to do that sensing (the eyes, the ears, the nose, the tongue, and the skin) are targeted by human and nonhuman monsters.138 In The Silent Sea, the water has the power to interface and thereby alter the human body through varying forms of contact. Because water is expected to hurt humans primarily through ingestion of “bad water,” the distinction in levels of permeability can elucidate just how horrific the lunar water is to the human characters. Once they realize that drinking is not necessary for the lunar water to take hold of their bodies, the awareness of skin’s permeability and all the various orifices humans possesses becomes its own site of horror. It is not until episode 3, the episode after he was exposed to lunar water, that Soo-chan begins his slow sink into the aquatic realm. Before dying, those who end up being exposed to the lunar water go through an entire process of aquafication.139 The show implements several motifs 138 David Scott Diffrient, Body Genre: Anatomy of the Horror Film (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2023) 5. 139 The term for water cremation is usually “aquamation” but on occasion this process is also called aquification. The term I am using, aquafication, is neither of those terms, and yet it evokes them and in Googling the word you will primarily get results about water cremation despite it being a different term. Aquafication is also sometimes used as a term to describe the inclusion of water on maps. Combining the association with death and the association with a literal visual paradigm of making water seeable on a human visual texts makes aquafication an ideal term for describing death in this show. 94 that repeat across all of the deaths caused by lunar water: 1. POV of the aquafying person shifting to underwater visuals, 2. Leaking and expelling water from the body as they turn into water from the inside-out, and 3. The person’s final transformation in which they are shown as sinking into an endless body of water. Each of these elements of the aquafication indicates that the human character is entering into the realm of the water. There is no control the human has over it and it is not just their bodies but also their minds that are being altered into a state in which they see only water. As stated in the body horror genre definitions, the lunar water is taking up residence in and fundamentally changing what it means to be a human body. Soo-chan’s aquafication displays all three of the motifs mentioned above. As he follows his compatriots through the halls of the space station, his movements slow as if being met with resistance and his mouth hangs slightly open as his breaths begin to come in gasps as if they too are meeting resistance. The shot switches back and forth from the camera looking at the character head-on to looking through the character’s POV, all while having sounds muffled as if everything is being heard from underwater. When in POV mode, the space station is visually transformed. The world looks like it is being seen through a blue filter and slight ripples disrupt the flatness of the screen as if the surface of the water is just above the top of the screen. Nothing is finely detailed but rather the world takes on a blur as if looking through from one side of an aquarium to the other. And finally, starfish begin to appear clinging to the ceilings and walls but when the camera switches back to a shot of the character, he is shown looking around, staring at what now appear to be nothing but blank walls. The visuals, the sound design, and especially the starfish, are further indicative that lunar water and earth water are not meant to be distinguished in the understanding of human relationships with the aquatic, as discussed in the previous section. The collapse of the two types of water supports reading this show as discussing 95 humanity’s relationship with water, in all forms, rather than lunar water being a distinctly monstrous and alien form of elemental being. The change in visual perception of the world is always the first stage of aquafication in which the human begins to see the aquatic world all around them, or in other words in which the visual mode they experience the world though changes. The next motif is the bodily transition into the aquatic which is where the body horror reaches its crescendo. To say that watching someone drown alive from the inside-out is unpleasant is perhaps an understatement, but that is exactly what happens in The Silent Sea. Gallons of water gush from Soo-chan’s mouth after he gives a few last choking gasps as he loses the ability to breathe oxygen. It is a violent and endless torrent of clear water being expelled from his mouth with visceral force as more water slowly leaks from his ears. Eventually the force with which the water is leaving his body drives him to all fours, his hands resting in the growing puddle of water created from his not-so-human body. When he can no longer hold up his body at all and the force of the expulsion has subsided, the doctor of the crew arrives and attempts to intubate him. All that is in his lungs, however, is more water. The same result comes when she attempts to draw blood from his veins and is met with more water. His other crewmates look on in horror—all of them wearing hazmat gear now as they have no idea what has caused this reaction in his body—as Soo-chan leaks and convulses on the exam table, his eyes staring into the distance, seemingly seeing nothing. This brings us to the final motif of the aquafication process, in which the human character is shown falling, or sinking, into an aquatic abyss. The camera zooms in on Soo-chan’s eyes as he lays on the exam table in the space station, then cuts to a completely different shot of him slowly falling into a body of deep blue water. It shifts again to another POV shot in which the camera through his eyes looks up from underwater to see the doctor standing over him, but she is 96 wavy and distorted, as if he has opened his eyes while swimming in a pool. The way in which water modifies or takes over the screen and takes over the human character’s visual field is akin to scholar Adriano D’Aloia’s theorization of an aquatic split screen, which he describes as when “the water surface meets the screen at right angles (i.e. the frame is split perpendicularly by the edge of the water), this offers a specific point of view…The splitting acts both at a visual level and at an ontological level, dividing the world into the human and the non-human.”140 When I describe the deaths—Soo-chan’s and the other characters who die from lunar water—as them “falling” into the water it is because it is visually framed as such. The water is portrayed as below them, as if there is an ocean under the floor of the space station and the crew members are somehow finding a way to fall through solid matter into it. There is the human world and then the aquatic world and the effect of lunar water is bringing humans into the aquatic world, whether their bodies can tolerate it or not. In the final moments before his death finalizes, the shot returns to the aquatic abyss and zooms out to show Soo-chan’s body sinking slowing into what could be the deepest ocean, the whole screen one occupied by a dark blue emptiness in which the small distant astronaut is slowly descending. This is a repetition of the end of the opening credits sequence in which an astronaut in full spacesuit is shown falling into a watery abyss, and it is a motif that repeats in the multiple lunar water-based deaths. There is an implied dark irony to the deaths as gallons of water gush from the mouths of the chocking astronauts as they drown without ever having seen a body of water in their entire lives on the arid earth and this irony is redoubled by the implication of body horror taking place in which human expectations of control and domination are subverted or disrupted. 140 D’Aloia, “Film in Depth,” 94. 97 While the death, or you could call it killing, caused by the lunar water may seem needlessly indiscriminate given that it theoretically applies to all humans, I would like to draw your attention back to the context that frames these interactions. The characters in the space station are explicitly there to retrieve the lunar water so it can be commodified and used by the Korean government in an attempt to gain an advantage on the drought-stricken earth. Behind the saturated imagery of the show is a constant narrative thread of the humans trying everything they can to get control of this resource for their own purposes. Despite media, the government, and corporations attempting to paint it as such, humans using extractive methods to colonize resources is not a necessary way of life. Certainly, the humans would not need the lunar water at all if they had taken better care of the elemental resources on earth in the first place. The celestial displacement of the themes of resource depletion and extraction makes room for a thematic focus that is less centered on earth’s material resources themselves and more on the core ideological issues behind resource exploitation, such as anthropocentrism, capitalism, and expansionism. The body horror of the deaths of the human characters acts as a critique of the human project of commodification by taking away that which the humans value most: control. Conclusions The Silent Sea joins films such as Solaris (1972) and Annihilation (2018) in showing that the intersection of the terrestrial and the cosmic can create generative spaces for considering how far into the expanses of the universe ecohorror can reach and imagining a future of elemental agency.141 As I mentioned in the introduction of this chapter, however, I do think that The Silent 141 Scholar Lee Jiyong points out that the show has scientific inconsistencies, but it is nonetheless interesting in its considerations of humanity’s future in the Anthropocene. I do not have much concern with scientific factuality, but some SF readers might. 98 Sea is somewhat singular in its successful treating of the intersections of lunar and aquatic themes because of the depth of the aquatic camera mode. Even though natural resources are often portrayed as existing solely for humanity’s benefit, including in the minds of the characters in the show, the aquatic element in The Silent Sea is visualized as agential in its ability to directly harm human bodies for its own protection from commodification. It can achieve this largely because of human assumptions about the controllable and innocuous nature of nonhuman elemental resources, resulting in a lack of caution from the human characters because the lunar water is identical to earth water in appearance. Truly, The Silent Sea is all about visual disruptions that turn into physical disruptions of anthropocentric perceptions and existence. For those readers who have watched the show, I will say here that there were many elements of the plot that went underexplored in this chapter that add dimension to the ecohorrific narrative. The show hints at ideas regarding the role scientists play in human/nonhuman relationality, the potential for nonhuman coexistence that excludes humans (lunar water does not kill plants, for example), and human cloning and posthuman forms. Although I have focused on the aquatic camera mode in my work in this chapter, the Korean scholarship has taken up the concept of the posthuman hybrid human in The Silent Sea, which is another interesting theme to explorer regarding the show because there is a young seemingly female character who is a hybrid of human and lunar water. For example, scholar Kim Eun Joung discusses forms of posthuman girls in their article “한국 영화에 나타난 포스트휴먼 소녀의 재현 양상 연구 —, 를 중심으로” (han'guk yŏnghwae nat'anan p'osŭt'ŭhyumŏn sonyŏŭi chaehyŏn yangsang yŏn'gu –, rŭl chungshimŭrot'e) and notes that the body is a site of the grotesque when it comes to scientific modification. So, while I do not discuss concepts of human hybrids, or the posthuman, in this chapter, I believe that the idea of the horrific body is a concept that is permeating scholarship 99 around The Silent Sea, as are ecological concerns in SF.142 In their article “한국 SF 에서 나타난 비인간 캐릭터들의 의미와 변화 양상 -2010 년대 이후의 SF 콘텐츠를 중심으로” (han'guk SFesŏ nat'anan piin'gan k'aerikt'ŏdŭrŭi ŭimiwa pyŏnhwa yangsang -2010nyŏndae ihuŭi SF k'ont'ench'ŭrŭl chungshimŭro) author Lee Jiyong takes an optimistic tone when discussing the nonhuman beings in Korean SF, saying that it is a good sign for the genre that it is keeping up with developments in science and that the genre has developed fairly dramatically since 2010.143 This statement alongside Lee’s usage of posthuman and Anthropocene theory also suggests to me that Korean SF media and the scholarship on it is responding along with other genres to the shifts in understanding of the environment and human’s place in it. Ultimately, The Silent Sea is an exercise in horror-fying water. This occurs through the aquatic camera mode giving the water agency in the visual motifs of the show, both on its own and as something that can impact human bodies. There is an ecohorrorific sense of irony in the concept of the show in general as it portrays humanity killing off terrestrial water only to attempt to exploit celestial water and being killed off themselves in return. As previously mentioned, I do not believe that the show imbues the lunar water with a revenge drive, or a complex understanding of human psychology that motivates violence per say, but I do believe that the possibility of nonhuman elements defending themselves against commodification is a form of ecohorror that speaks directly to anthropocentric fears of loss of control over commodified resources and loss of control over one’s subject self. The narrative of The Silent Sea taps into the very real fears of a future of climate change, human extinction, and governmental corruption in Korea, and while that would be enough to classify it as eco-SF, the show goes a step further in 142 Kim, 115. 143 Lee, 221. 100 creating an aquatic camera mode that brings attention to the aquatic element in a way that does not allow the humans to continue ignoring the agential possibility of usually commodified nonhumans. 101 Section Two: Chapters Three and Four Cinemas of Eco-Temporality and Disastrous Histories 102 Chapter Three: Nuclear Ecology and Disaster Temporality On March 11, 2011, the Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant in Fukushima in Japan suffered a series of catastrophic events. An approximately 9.0 magnitude earthquake offshore in the Pacific Ocean not only shook the island but also triggered a tsunami that hit the region with unexpected force.144 As if the earthquake and tsunami were not devastating enough, these geological and aquatic disasters also led to multiple meltdowns within the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant and the resulting outpour of radiation has been categorized as the same level of nuclear disaster as Chernobyl (level 7) according to the International Nuclear and Radiological Event Scale (INES).145 A study in Risk Analysis based on risk assessment for the costs accrued by nuclear disasters has proposed that a cascading disaster of Fukushima’s magnitude should be recategorized to an INES (International Nuclear Event Scale) score of 10 or 11, rather than the current 7, given just how much damage occurred.146 Additionally, they predict that based on current nuclear plant standards, there is a 50% chance that a disaster at the level of 3/11 will occur every 60 to 150 years, while a slightly smaller but still significant event like Three Mile Island will occur every 10 to 20 years.147 The repercussions of 3/11 in Japan alone are innumerable, and yet that is not the extent of the disasters’ impact. The reverberations of the event rippled out beyond Japan’s borders in material and emotional ways, amplifying fears of contamination in the neighboring nations and fostering a dread of the disasters yet to come throughout a region already historically plagued by earthquakes and extreme weather events. 144 Federica Ranghieri and Mikio Ishiwatari, eds., Learning from Megadisasters: Lessons from the Great East Japan Earthquake (Washington: World Bank Publications, 2014), 1. 145 Yotaro Hatamura, Seiji Abe, Masao Fuchigami, Naoto Kasahara, and Kenji Iino, The 2011 Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant Accident: How and Why It Happened (Cambridge: Elsevier Science & Technology, 2014) 2. 146 Spencer Wheatley, Benjamin Sovacool, and Didier Sornette, “Of Disasters and Dragon Kings: A Statistical Analysis of Nuclear Power Incidents and Accidents,” Risk Analysis 37, no. 1 (2017), 113. Risk Analysis is a journal affiliated with the Society for Risk Analysis; a scholar association focused on risk analysis within all relevant fields. 147 Wheatley, “Of Disasters and Dragon Kings,” 112. 103 In this chapter, I will be discussing two films that reside within a space and time of perpetual disaster. This disaster temporality is modified and mutated into a hybrid of natural/manmade events that are contingent on national government, corporate, or military control, indicating that what is often most dangerous in disaster scenarios is human action or inaction. The two films are Korea’s Pandora (2016) and Japan’s Fukushima 50 (2020). Set in Ulsan, Korea, the film Pandora tells the story of a nuclear meltdown in the power plant located in the town after a major earthquake cracks the coolant systems surrounding one of the reactors. The plot follows both the local families whose entire lives have become dependent on the existence of the nuclear power plant and the new Korean president and his cabinet as they attempt to deal with the disaster’s ramifications for the nation. Considered to be Korea’s first “nuclear power plant disaster” film, Pandora shows a potential future based on similar incidents that have occurred in other places, rather than being retrospective on an event that already took place (as much other nuclear disaster media is).148 Instead of retelling a real domestic incident as a historical remembrance, Pandora uses a mirroring of a foreign disaster—in this case 3/11—as a basis for a projected version of what could happen in Korea. As a disaster film, it explores the collective fears surrounding the “safety” of nuclear energy in Korea in a mode of anticipatory dread. Fukushima 50, in contrast, is a pseudo-factual remembrance film based on the real-life experience of the workers who stayed behind at the Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant in Fukushima and who attempted to prevent the meltdowns that did eventually occur.149 As the film notes in 148 Myung-Suk Kim, “영화 판도라-스펙터클에 가려진 내러티브” (yŏnghwa p'andora-sŭp'ekt'ŏk'ŭre karyŏjin naerŏt'ibŭ),국제언어문학 42 (2019), 297. 149 Takashi Yokota and Toshihiro Yamada, “Disposable Heroes.” Newsweek, International ed. 159, no. 11 (2012). It has since been researched and shown that the real workers who the story is based on were not receiving material care or support despite being called heroes and that many of them were showing high levels of radiation and were still being expected to keep silent about the reality of the situation. 104 the end credits, the real people who stayed behind were dubbed “the Fukushima 50” after the disaster and were seen as heroes by many. While creative liberties were not doubt taken, the film is meant to represent at least partially faithfully what happened in and around the plant on 3/11. While I am going to be arguing that Pandora closely mirrors other recent media that re-tells the stories of nuclear disaster in Fukushima and Chernobyl, like Fukushima 50 and the HBO drama Chernobyl, the major point of divergence is Pandora’s future temporality. Each one of the films discussed in this chapter tells a story that is suggestive of many more clashes to come between humans and the nonhuman energies they attempt to control, be it nuclear power or earthquake or tsunami. Furthermore, both films play a role in larger discussions about the horrifying realities of disaster, particularly of the eco/nuclear variety on a scale much larger than the plot in a genre film. Read together, the two films illustrate the ways in which one disaster iterates on another disaster until all futures become potentially disastrous. Rather than creating a monster to symbolize disaster as in the Godzilla franchise, or making up a global-scale planetary climate apocalypse as is the case in films like The Day After Tomorrow (2004), Pandora and Fukushima 50 go an alternate route of disaster cinema conventions, focusing on semi-realistic portrayals of potential or past disaster events to communicate realistic fears about controlling nuclear energy, damaging the environment, and overall national safety. The similar attention to these themes of the nuclear, the temporal, the disastrous, and the ecological in Pandora and Fukushima 50 exposes a doubling effect that is occurring in the media ecosystem of Korean and Japanese ecocinema in response to what could perhaps be called the nuclear dread of proximate existence in a time of disaster. This doubling is akin to the connection Kate Brown observes between the USA and Russia in her book Plutopia: Nuclear Families in Atomic Cities and the Great Soviet and 105 American Plutonium Disasters; a connection she describes as “two communities, united in fear, mimicry, and the furious production of plutonium.”150 Though the USA and Russia were not physically close in the way that Japan and Korea are, the articulation of the relationship as fear and mimicry based is precisely how the two films I am discussing in this chapter portray the dread of nuclear disaster in East Asia. As I will argue in the latter part of this chapter, when the conditions that allow for disaster become constant, the representations of those disasters become doppelgängers, frightening in their mirroring of one another, suggesting that if one exists so does a second (and in the case of climate change and extreme weather events, a third and a fourth, ad infinitum).151 One disaster begins to look much like another and the question becomes what possible future awaits that is not already foreclosed upon by past events. Uncertainties about the state of the nuclear in Korea and Japan have, unsurprisingly, also permeated the local visual media. In Korean and Japanese media, it has long been creature-fromthe-deep monster films that have received attention for addressing the nuclear, with the 1950s Godzilla immediately coming to mind which I will discuss at length in the next chapter. Disaster cinema as a genre more broadly, on the other hand, is generally formulaic in its focus on natural disasters and became a popular genre throughout the Asian region in the 2000s, likely as a response to the perceived uptick in catastrophic disasters throughout the area.152 Scholar KiuWai Chu, for example, suggests that this is the case for the disaster movie genre in China, Thailand, and the Philippines, and he argues that disaster films from those areas can be classified as “eco-disaster” films in light of the rise of ecological and capitalist crises.153 Starting in the 150 Kate Brown, Plutopia: Nuclear Families in Atomic Cities and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 3. 151 Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny,” 1919. 152 Kiu-Wai Chu, “The Imagination of eco-disaster: Post-disaster rebuilding in Asian Cinema,” Asian Cinema 30, no. 2 (2019): 256. 153 Chu, “The imagination of eco-disaster,” 256. 106 2010s disaster movies in the Japanese and Korean context, earthquakes and tsunamis have become associated with the nuclear, partially because those disasters are now inextricable from their role in 3/11. This linkage has been perpetuated by both the discourse around the real disasters as they are covered in the news and in scholarship, and the linkage has then been further perpetuated in the cinematic narrative spaces that allow one disaster to bleed in to the other without clear delineations between where one event ends, and another begins. This linkage is significant because while the material elements of tsunami and earthquake literally intersect with the nuclear, the way in which these disasters are classified without noting the distinctions of parts of the disasters belies a troubling process through which natural disasters becomes a manmade disaster, but that shift is not acknowledged. In the case of 3/11, for example, we can think of it as that explosive moment when a massive energetic force like a tsunami interacts with the delicate balance of management that humanity exerts over nuclear energy.154 What may have been able to be categorized as “out of human control” at one point becomes a situation of direct human culpability.155 In this chapter, I argue Pandora is a projection of the inner fears of disaster and likewise functions as an actionable warning for the Korean nation in a way that other nuclear disaster films focused on remembering, like Fukushima 50, do not. The doubling of disastrous occurrences and the human responses to them in the two films exposes patterns of catastrophic repetitions that have not yet occurred, but which are constantly on the verge of occurring, and 154 Chung-beom Ham, “핵무기의 기술 표상과 시대적 함의: 1950 년대 전반기 일본영화를 통해” (haengmugiŭi kisul p'yosanggwa shidaejŏk hamŭi: 1950nyŏndae chŏnban'gi ilbonyŏnghwarŭl t'onghae),영화연구, no.80 (2019), 123. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security classifying “nuclear explosions” as “non-natural disasters.” Ham discusses the intersection of nuclear disaster with “natural phenomena” and military usage. 155 It should be noted that earthquakes caused by human action, such as mining, have become quite common. In the context of this chapter, however, the greater focus is on the connection between humanity and the nuclear. 107 this doppelgänger effect implies a lack of a disaster-free future for either Korea or Japan. In the follow sections, I will discuss the theoretical basis behind my analysis of these two films— namely theories of nuclear and disaster temporalities and ecologies. Then, I will move into a section of close reading of the two films based on their engagement with the concept of futurity as a nuclear and ecological temporality. And finally, I will argue for a filmic doppelgänger framing through which we can consider the implication of disastrous repetitions. Theories of Temporality and Ecology To put Pandora and Fukushima 50 in context of the larger theoretical discussion of the nuclear and the environment as they relate to disaster, I draw on theoretical frameworks discussed by Maurice Blanchot, Lou Cornum, and Kenneth Kraft regarding disaster broadly and more specifically nuclear temporalities, the irradiated international, and nuclear ecologies. These theories apply to the reality of disaster, rather than to a genre of media, but the genre itself plays a significant role in why I argue that these theories are applicable to Pandora and Fukushima 50. The genre of disaster cinema has long been classified as formulaic in an uncritical way and often the genre is perceived as undermining a potential core purpose: bringing attention to natural disasters in order to spur action.156 That said, I believe films in the disaster genre have much to offer scholars and viewers in the contemporary moment and I agree with cinema scholar Stephen Keane who says of the genre, “whether set in the past or extending to the future, disaster films carry the ideological signs of the times in which they are made.”157 It is with this attention to 156 Chu, “The imagination of eco-disaster,” 256. 157 Stephen Keane, Disaster Movies: The Cinema of Catastrophe (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006, 2nd edition). 108 temporality in mind that I employ the theorist’s mentioned above to establish a framework of disaster temporality and nuclear ecology. Blanchot’s theorization of the “imminent disaster” from his work The Writing of the Disaster provides a framing for this chapter that is informed by the legacy of WWII, and particularly the atomic bombings in Japan and the implications of the bomb itself.158 Although my analysis in this chapter is not about the bombings of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, those catastrophic events are now a constant companion of humanity and a cousin of the current existence of nuclear power plants. While historians and theorists continue to discuss the alwayspresent-ness and constant cultural pain of the atomic bombings, the same level of fear and dread is not applied to nuclear power, and it is easy to erase a sense of impending danger when nuclear energy is contained in a factory meant to be used for the good of humanity rather than being used as a weapon. After the bombings in 1945, Korean scientists and scholars across the peninsula lauded the ingenuity behind the technology behind the bomb and began what would occur all over the world, a discourse that equated the nuclear with progress.159 At the same time, both the Japanese and Korean victims of radiation were experiencing a “shared futurity that was radically different” from the glorification of the technoscientific future that scholars were proselytizing, because for those inhabiting bodies that could die at any moment due to exposure to this new poison “the future ceased to be an open vista for developmentalist projections.”160 When, years later, Blanchot posited that “the order of lived time belongs to the disaster” and that there is no 158 Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986), Translated by Ann Smock. 159 Derek J. Kramer, “An Atomic Age Unleashed: Emancipation and Erasure in Early Korean Accounts of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki Bombings,” The Journal of Asian Studies 82, no. 2 (2023), 147. 160 Kramer, “An Atomic Age Unleashed,” 146 and 154. 109 future in which the disaster is inescapable, he was speaking to a sentiment that was felt by those that had experienced nuclear power’s true uncontrollability.161 Nuclear power plants, or more generally atomic energy in its “domesticated” form, I posit are responsible, alongside the bombs, for an unavoidably disastrous future that is near impossible to remove from the temporality of nuclear futurity. It is not just across time that the nuclear continues to hold sway, but also across space—or in other words, across terrestrial environments—which results in a simultaneity of nuclear dread on a global scale. In their work titled The Irradiated International, native scholar Lou Cornum points out that nations across the globe are implicated, as they point out, in myriad ways: uranium mining, bomb or power plant part construction, testing bombs, providing land for the power plants.162 These connections across time and space are part of what Cornum calls “the irradiated international,” which includes the indigenous people forced to mine uranium, the residents of Hiroshima, and anyone “whose lives are crossed by uranium and other radioactive weapons materials.”163 And, I would argue, not just weapons but also radioactive power plant materials, which are also mined around the world, often involving indigenous peoples like the case is in Australia with the aboriginal people whose land was mined for materials that were used in Fukushima.164 We cannot undo any of these connections now and they are threads that create a nuclear ecology that is borderless. The choices made by the nation in the past are the choices we deal with in the present, from eternal radiation pollution in the environment to the haunting of both nuclear acts of war and power plant failure. 161 Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, 1986. 162 Lou Cornum, “The Irradiated International,” written for the Future Perfect Conference at Data & Society Research Institute (2018), 4. 163 Cornum, “The Irradiated International,” 1. This also again echoes Kate Brown’s work that connects the USA, Russia, and every community in either place that was heavily affected by the production of plutonium. 164 Kathy Marks, “Aborigines to block uranium mining after Japan disaster,” Independent, 14 April (2011). 110 To move into what this means for the planet as a whole, I turn to terminology developed in the context of east Asian philosophical thought. When coining the term “nuclear ecology” in Buddhism and Ecology, Kenneth Kraft said that “putting the words nuclear and ecology side by side may spur us to consider nuclear realities in a larger context that incorporates present and future effects on the biosphere—in a word, ecologically.”165 Thus, ecologically speaking, the nuclear and the potential for associated disaster are imprinted permanently on earth’s future and past. It is not a question of “if” but rather a question of “when.” What the three theories mentioned above communicate is that within the constructs of time and place there is no escape from the nuclear. Humans in a sociocultural sense are all either already a part of or will become a part of the irradiated international because the earth is already existing in disaster temporality and likewise the materiality of the earth is also a nuclear ecology. This state of living within a nuclear enmeshment reminds us that “one’s actions and nonactions continue to have wider repercussions,” both for individuals and for nations.166 To ground the idea of enmeshment in ecological reality, one simply has to consider that for those living in the rest of Asia the lack of hard borders that separate them from the water and air coming from Japan has become (as if it was not always) a path of traumatic repetitions of nuclear fears.167 In an area of the world where nuclear pollution and collective cultural trauma regarding nuclear weapons are already inescapable, a disaster like 3/11 raises questions about both the past and the future of how we think about both the nuclear and the disastrous. 165 Kenneth Kraft, “Nuclear Ecology and Engaged Buddhism,” in Buddhism and Ecology: The Interconnection of Dharma and Deeds, edited by Mary Evelyn Tucker and Duncan Ryūken Williams (Massachusetts: Harvard University Press), 270. 166 Kraft, “Nuclear Ecology and Engaged Buddhism,” 275. 167 G. H. Hong, et al., “Radioactive impact in South Korea from the damaged nuclear reactors in Fukushima: evidence of long and short range transport,” Journal of Radiological Protection 32 (2012). Hong’s study shows the carrying of radioisotopes by weather patterns after 3/11. Je-seon Han, “‘핵 없는 세상’의 시민 되기 <판도라>” (haek ŏmnŭn sesangt'ŭi shimin toegi p'andora), 새가정 697 (2017). Han addresses the psycho-emotional reaction to nuclear fear among families. 111 Futurity in Pandora and Fukushima 50 For Korea, both the proximity to Japan and the large number of domestic nuclear power plants should be difficult to overlook when discussing the future of disaster. However, Korea’s comparative dearth of large earthquakes historically had resulted in the overall threat of catastrophe being portrayed as less than that of Japan and the genre of disaster cinema had not been one of Korea’s primary cinematic focuses.168 However, the veneer of safety from natural disasters was somewhat compromised by two earthquakes over 5.0 magnitude hitting the peninsula in July and September of 2016. That following December, the film Pandora was released. In the context of East Asian environmental history, it is a nuclear disaster film of projected futurity that brings to the surface of Korean media consciousness the uncanny doppelgänger that is Japan’s nuclear cinema and the potential for a catastrophe similar to 3/11 to take place on the Korean peninsula. The mirrored situations of nuclear ecology in the two nations are highlighted in Pandora by projection—factually, cinematically, and psychoanalytically—and these projections allow the ecological monstrosity of nuclear disaster to become thinkable and confrontable through a process of visualized futurity. Rather than just stating the facts of the similar geological and nuclear plant conditions in the two nations, Pandora projects a future onto the screen that looks uncannily like the portrayals of 3/11 in Japanese cinema, thereby making the similarities seeable in a context outside of graphs and numbers and government documents. I will return to the visual similarities of the two films in the next section, but for the rest of this section I will focus my analysis on establishing the concept of futurity itself. 168 By “disaster cinema” I mean the genre as it is thought of in Western contexts: massive weather events, catastrophic seismic activity, futuristic technology solutions, a lot of high-tension action and emotion. 112 Korea, despite incredibly similar geographical and geological conditions to Japan, has not experienced a nuclear meltdown disaster—yet. Pandora is focused on this essential space of “yet” as opposed to focusing on a retelling that would cement a certain version of history. Despite being “futuristic” in a certain sense, Pandora does not posit situations that are unrealistic. Rather, it treats the disaster of an earthquake/nuclear meltdown as a plausible occurrence based on the geological, societal, and political factors. The socioeconomic usage of the term “projection” as “an estimate of future possibilities based on a current trend” works to frame the historical and cultural milieu from which this film emerged. 169 If we consider the trend that is Japan’s experience with 3/11, it is a logical assumption that their close neighbor Korea should consider projections of a similar event. The film Pandora suggests a time-space in which the disaster is inevitable, or always imminently present, and perhaps in which there is no space that we can call “future” in the sense of an assured existence of nation and the humans therein. Another meaning of the word projection is “to throw in front of,” which elucidates why it is used both to describe the apparatus of showing film as well as being used to describe predictions of the future.170 Not only is Pandora a film, and therefore a projection onto a screen, but it is also an imaging of the disaster that is being thrown in front of the event itself taking place. Succinctly, it is a projection of what may be in front of Korea if threats of nuclear disaster are not confronted. Working as a narrative example of disaster temporality, the town in Pandora is subject to an inevitable catastrophic future and from the beginning of the movie there is a sense that the lived time of every person residing there belongs to the disaster, or at least belongs to the nuclear power plant. And once the disaster does occur, the exposed inability of the human 169 Merriam-Webster, s.v. “projection,” accessed 2022. 170 Anne Hurry, Jack Novick and Kerry Kelly Novick, “Freud's Concept of Projection,” Journal of Child Psychotherapy 4, no. 2 (1976), 75. 113 government to have acted responsibly in the past or the present further forecloses on a future free from nuclear ecology and disaster temporality being a possibility in Korea, or Japan for that matter. The main character in Pandora is a young man name Jae-hyeok who works in the power plant, just as his father and older brother used to before they were killed in an accident while on duty. Jae-hyeok is the only one of his friend-group that actively longs to leave the town and the only one who shows active resentment towards the nuclear power plant. The rest of the men his age also work for the plant but, unlike Jae-hyeok, they accept that the plant is the primary reason the town still exists. With many families having given up their fishing or other local environment related livelihoods in favor of working for the plant, Jae-hyeok’s constant reiteration that the town, and himself, has no future suggests that he, at least, is aware on some level of the way the disastrous presence of the plant has robbed all of them of a disaster-free future. For the residents of the town, the power plant embodies the myth for which the film is named: an impossible to resist opportunity that is equally impossible to reject once accepted. As the original myth goes, Zeus created Pandora, whose name means “all endowed and all-giving,” as a gift for Prometheus, who was the one to give humans fire. Pandora is endowed with a jar, but this jar is not to be opened, despite accompanying her as part of the gift. Before Prometheus can accept Pandora, however, his brother steals Pandora for himself and opens her jar immediately at which point suffering, violence, and hardship pour out into the world to plague humanity.171 The comparison between the nuclear plant and Pandora’s box in the context of Pandora also relates to the larger role nuclear power plays in human societies. 171 Spyros D. Orfanos, “Mythos and Logos,” Psychoanalytic Dialogues 16, no. 4 (2006), 482. 114 The feeling that the nuclear power plant is in control of the future in the film’s diegesis begins in the very first scene, the prologue if you will, before anything about the disaster has even been addressed. Five children stand on a jetty looking across a small channel of water to the massive nuclear power plant in the background. Filtered through sepia tone, the dusty brown hues imply the setting is a flashback for context rather than the start of the film’s main plot. One of the children turns to the other four and asks them if they know what the power plant has inside. Although the first child claims it houses a robot (perhaps an allusion to the “futuristic” and “progress” related narratives around nuclear energy), a second child refutes him and says that it houses a “rice cooker.” The metaphor of the rice cooker—which he has been told by his older brother who works in the plant—hints at the developmental policies championed by the government-run nuclear power company which wanted the Korean people (especially in the towns where the plants were built) to view them as a life-sustaining necessity. 172 “Because of that rice cooker, we can enjoy life” the second boy further claims. However, both boys are refuted by the one girl in their group who states confidently that her teacher said the plant is like a box and that “if it were ever opened, evil would come out.” Upon her ominous proclamation the screen fades to black and the title of the film, Pandora, appears on the screen. Although the Greek myth of Pandora is not directly mentioned again after this scene, opening with it communicates clearly that the naming of the film was done intentionally to discuss the conflicting opinions about nuclear power and its place in human society. Is it a blessing or a curse? 172 The idea that the nuclear power plant is what will provide a secure life and future is one of the major elements of the idea of “Plutopia” as Kate Brown theorizes it. She also notes how Japan followed the model of the USA and Russia in terms of building “nuclear villages” around that plants that were supposed to provide everything the community of workers would need to have a modern life. Brown, Plutopia, 4. 115 Each child that speaks hints at the different roles nuclear energy is perceived to play in society: 1) The futuristic, advanced technology, 2) The society-sustaining energy source built for human comfort, and 3) The dangerous, volatile, uncontrollable entity that desperately needs to be contained for the safety of all. Spyros Orfanos says in his article “Mythos and Logos,” that “the myth of Prometheus has long been viewed as a metaphor for the human mastery of nature. Industrialization, individualism, the triumph of material comfort, technological prowess in every aspect of life.”173 The larger context of the myth, like the story of human society mastering fire, makes the title of Pandora even more apt for a film about the failing of human control of energy. Ultimately it is the little girl—making an additional gendered connection to the myth of Pandora—that has the right of it; the moment the nuclear “box” is opened, something monstrous spills out. Having children deliver this dire message of both narrative foreshadowing takes the trope of portraying children as the future in genre media and actively disrupts it.174 These children have no future because nuclear energy already created a futureless futurity. The sense of futureless-ness in the children of Pandora is amplified by the specter of the past of Fukushima which occurred in such a similar environment, and it reflects the reality of the dread felt in Japan after 3/11 when the issue of raising healthy children had to be addressed. Both the conversation the children have at the beginning of Pandora and Jae-hyeok’s friend’s apathetic attitudes later in the film (these are actually one and the same group of people just in different stages of their lives) indirectly address the reality of the communities in rural locations that live with nuclear power plants because they feel they have no other choice in the “development” based socioeconomic structures of their home nations. For many mothers in Japan after 3/11, for example, the choice between protecting their children from radiation and 173 Orfanos, “Mythos and Logos,” 497. 174 Susan Sontag, “The Imagination of Disaster,” Commentary 40, no. 4 (1965). 116 maintaining their family’s economic and social ties to the power plant became a site of conflict.175 Despite that reality, Fukushima 50 does not address the reliance of a community on nuclear plants as directly as Pandora. On the other hand, the portrayal of the employees who decide to stay at the plant in Fukushima 50 shows them as feeling directly responsible for the plant and for the safety of the community, which is perhaps the most heroic framing of socioeconomic reliance on a corporation. Ultimately, these Japanese plant workers do associate the future of their survival just as closely to the nuclear power plant as Jae-hyeok and his friends do, even if the tone is different. At one point in Fukushima 50, mid-disastrous meltdown of the reactors, one of the remaining engineers goes as far as saying he feels like he grew up with the reactors and he became the man he is because of the reactors. It is because of this deeply enmeshed relationship with the plant and the nuclear energy inside it that this engineer feels he should commit to dying with the plant if needed. Once again, the disaster has foreclosed on a future. The disparate tones the characters in Pandora and Fukushima 50 have when discussing reliance on nuclear power plants is another key difference in how a remembrance disaster film and futurity disaster film portray nuclear energy in general. While the Fukushima 50 engineer is portrayed as having a fondness for the reactors, practically anthropomorphizing them, and thereby taking the blame away from nuclear energy itself, Pandora’s Jae-hyeok manifests existential dread at the prospect of everyone he knows being 100% reliant on the plant for economic survival. Jae-hyuk’s position, I would argue, is the more ecological of the two stances as his recognition of a future without options is a manifestation of nuclear ecology foreclosing on a disastrous future. Jae-hyuk’s outlook is also the more realistic of the two based purely on the 175 Aleksandr Skylar, “Value conflict among voluntary evacuee mothers from Fukushima: protecting children from radiation, respecting family and society,” Japan Forum 33, no. 2 (2020): 231. 117 factual likelihood of disasters like 3/11 occurring in the future and on the reality of how certain communities will always be impacted more than others. Japan and Korea have a particular relationship built between their coastal towns and the nuclear power industry. Both the Tohoku region of Japan, where Fukushima prefecture is located, and the East coast of the Korean peninsula, where Ulsan is located, are known for their reliance on large public works projects and for being the home of heavy industry.176 In places like Futaba that experienced the worst of the 3/11 meltdown, nuclear power plants were an answer to the decline in coal mining industry in the 1960s and the new power plants offered the opportunity for mass employment of those that were losing their livelihoods.177 From an ecological perspective, if we consider the historical trajectory of humanity’s relationship with the earth, this was simply a shift from one form of extractive and polluting energy production to another. From the human point of view, however, it must have seemed a good trade for the people of Futaba who would move on from a dirtier and often more dangerous form of labor in favor of something marketed as modern and scientific. Despite the marketing of nuclear energy as inherently technologically advanced, both Pandora and Fukushima 50 expose the reality of how much human error, greed, and bureaucracy counteract that imagined ideal. To its credit, Fukushima 50 is surprisingly honest about how much bureaucratic failure in the aftermath of the earthquake contributed to it being a much larger disaster than it could have been. As the disaster is taking place in the film, the spaces in which viewers join the characters are fairly limited. There is the dark control room in which the Fukushima 50 are holed up, but most of the other tension and narrative takes place in rooms filled with computers and rows of 176 P. Pradyumna Karan and Unryu Suganuma, eds. Japan after 3/11: Global Perspectives on the Earthquake, Tsunami, and Fukushima Meltdown (Kentucky: University Press of Kentucky, 2016), 15. 177 Karan and Suganuma, Japan after 3/11, 15. 118 desks occupied by those attempting to manage the response to the disaster. Despite the bustle of activity in every one of these bureaucratic spaces, there is not actually any action being taken in terms of addressing the nuclear situation. When the power plant makes the report to Tokyo that there has been a meltdown and Article 10 is in effect, one of the emergency responders says, “what’s that?” acknowledging that he, and likely others, have no idea what the policies are.178 Similarly, The “Nuclear Safety Director” in Tokyo when asked to explain in detail what countermeasures to prevent meltdown his organization are planning, he apologizes and then replies by admitting that he “majored in business studies,” implying that he knows nothing about nuclear power plants whatsoever. At that very moment, Tokyo Electric’s representatives arrive and admit that the company’s president is on a retreat in Osaka and the chairman is in China, once again functionally stopping all plans to proceed with anti-meltdown measures because the people at the highest level of authority either have no idea what to do or are absent. The theme throughout its that everything done is done too late; too late on a response, too late to send help, and ultimately too late in planning better contingencies in the first place. In a retrospective study of the 3/11 disaster from a global perspective, author Pradyumna P. Karan states: Japan’s nuclear anguish stems more from the way the industry is run than from its technological essence. Japanese people are angry at senior bureaucrats, who move on to jobs in the industries they used to regulate, and at TEPCO (Tokyo Electric Power Company), which owns Fukushima Daiichi, for a long record of shoddy safety standards and cover-ups.179 178 Specific Incident Stipulated in Article 10, Clause 1 of the Act on Special Measures Concerning Nuclear Emergency Preparedness. The objective of the Act on Special Measures Concerning Nuclear Emergency Preparedness is to protect the welfare, physical wellbeing and property of Japan's citizens. To this end, when accidents and equipment breakdown have reached certain levels at nuclear power plants, the Act obligates us to notify the nation, prefectures, cities and towns in order for them to take necessary actions and to grasp information in a timely manner. Notifications are issued out under circumstances such as when the nuclear reactor cannot be shut down and/or when the water supply to the reactor is cut off (Press Release, 11 March 2011). Occurrence of a Specific Incident Stipulated in Article 10, Clause 1 of the Act on Special Measures Concerning Nuclear Emergency Preparedness (Fukushima Daiichi) from TEPCO, Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings. 179 Karan Suganuma, Japan after 3/11, 9. 119 It is clear from this film as well as from testimony from those living within Japan that a major concern is management, regulation, and preparedness in regard to the government and the energy companies. Scientists and theorists studying the aftermath of 3/11 often state the importance of knowledge in preventing unneeded damage, death, and loss in major disasters—how preparation is the best possible solution to the inevitable future disasters—but the implementation of knowledge dissemination that would reach all relevant parties remains somewhat murky.180 While specialists in the fields of nuclear energy, disaster management, and even environmental humanities and development policy may be able to benefit from the detailed, specialist reports on the intricacies of 3/11, the average person living in tsunami and earthquake vulnerable places would likely find this mode of information sharing inaccessible. Popular media, such as mainstream cinema, is more likely to reach the minds of people which means that what is communicated about disasters in films is significant.181 In Pandora the sentiment of government putting profit before people is a major element of the critique of bureaucracy. After the earthquake, the film cuts to the power plant control room where everyone is in a frenzy attempting to assess the situation, just like in Fukushima 50. One of the workers informs the main engineer that the earthquake has caused a crack in the cooling system in one of the reactors, directly mirroring the situation on 3/11, both in reality and as shown in Fukushima 50. The plant managers, who have little to no knowledge of the mechanical workings of the reactors themselves, try to brush off the situation as not-so-serious, however the superintendent informs them that the reactor effected is over 40 years old and has never been properly repaired due to the constant restraints of budget and time put upon them by upper 180 Karan and Suganuma, Japan after 3/1, 68. 181 The focus on the inefficiency of Japanese bureaucracy is also a major aspect of Shin Godzilla (2016). 120 management.182 As mentioned above, an almost identical situation plays out in Fukushima 50 despite the film coming out years after Pandora, indicating that both films are pulling from the accounts of happenings on 3/11 or other similar nuclear disasters. Despite this troubling knowledge that indicates an inability to physically fix the issue in a timely manner, the managers in Pandora refuse to declare a state of emergency until it has been cleared with the president’s office and the energy company. After the managers deny the superintendent’s pleas for an emergency to be declared, the scene cuts to an energy company worker reporting the issue to one of the managers of the company who is at that moment overseeing the building of a new nuclear power plant—here we also see that the energy company is named DHNP in the film, a direct jab at the actual Korean energy company KHNP. The energy company project manager also denies the right to declare an emergency, instead pointing out that they will lose profit if they shut down the plant and instead tells the worker to handle the issue quietly. This is a plausible, if distressing, outcome given that KHNP is government-run and reliant on a much larger hierarchy of action. As previously mentioned, this scene creates a projection of a nuclear plant disaster based on first, the 3/11 disaster in Japan, and second, the lack of disaster preparedness displayed by the Korean government in the past. There were actions taken in Korea to inspect its nuclear power plants after 3/11, but the results were not promising. Through this process it came to light that there were many nuclear plants in Korea that were faking equipment safety tests and that the country had almost run out of space to dispose of high-level radioactive waste.183 This is an issue Kraft brings up regarding 182 Karan and Suganuma, Japan after 3/1, 27. “Nuclear power has risks, but more recently constructed nuclear plants have cooling systems that would have prevented or limited the damage. The safety record of nuclear power is strong. Nuclear power has killed fewer people in accidents than have coal mines, yet no one is as appalled over coal mines.” 183 Sang-hun Choe, “South Korea Will Resume Reactor Work, Defying Nuclear Opponents,” The New York Times, 20 October 2017. 121 nuclear ecology, pointing out that “there are no certifiably safe ways to contain radioactive materials, yet we do not even have the sense to stop producing them. So nuclear waste appears to be a problem without a solution”.184 However, during Pak Geun-hye’s presidency, 2013-2017, the general perception of her was that she was unable to handle disasters and there were other scandals and disasters the public was focused on. The perception of her being incompetent was largely caused by her fumbling of the Sewol Ferry tragedy – a disastrous ferry accident in which over two hundred, primarily students, died.185 This theme of negligence carries over to Pandora, which came out within her presidency, shown by the character of the president being incapable of taking action in an appropriate or timely manner; in other words, being unable to think for himself. In May 2017 after Pak was impeached, Moon Jae-in became president and part of his platform that gained him support was his promise to phase out nuclear power and increase renewables in Korea to 20% by 2030.186 Despite what seemed like progress towards addressing the issues of plant density and the poor upkeep of older plants, in 2022 when Yoon Suk Yeol was elected the government approved continued construction of new power plants—including plants that President Moon had halted the construction of—in spite of the recent earthquakes and lingering shadow of 3/11.187 Having this cinematic eye turned towards national leaders is something viewers perhaps take for granted in the genre of disaster film, but it is particularly significant in the case of Fukushima 50 and Pandora because government and corporate mismanagement has been proven to be one of the major causes behind the escalation of the 3/11 184 Kraft, “Nuclear Ecology and Engaged Buddhism,” 286. 185 Jin-hai Park, “Disaster movie 'Pandora' rings true more than ever,” The Korea Times, 4 December (2016). Myung-Suk Kim, “영화 판도라-스펙터클에 가려진 내러티브” (yŏnghwa p'andora-sŭp'ekt'ŏk'ŭre karyŏjin naerŏt'ibŭ), 국제언어문학 42, (2019), 304. 186 Power Technology, “Does nuclear power have a future in South Korea?” Power Technology, 26 February 2018. 187 Jessie Yeung and Gawon Bae, “South Korea bets on nuclear power, restarting construction on two reactors,” CNN Website, 6 July 2022. 122 disaster and because in Korea the sense of what the government will do when the nation is eventually faced with a combo nuclear-natural disaster is the anxious thread that drives the critique of both the nuclear energy corporation and the president in Pandora. If nuclear power was a minor part of Korea’s overall energy infrastructure perhaps these oversights would have been less concerning. However, of countries with more than 10 plants total, Korea has the world’s highest density of nuclear power plants and these plants are primarily located on the Eastern coast of the peninsula, with the biggest concentration being at Kori Nuclear Power Plant which also has 3.4 million people living within a radius of 30 kilometers.188 This is not surprising given Korea’s history of industrial development in that area, but the geographical location is worth pointing out here because the two largest earthquakes in Korea’s history occurred in 2016 and 2017, both on the Eastern side near the power plants.189 These facts alone are enough to begin painting a monstrous picture of the situation: poorly upkept plants, over-crowded locations, and earthquakes increasing in frequency and strength. Unfortunately, these issues do not exist in a vacuum and the political situation must also be contended with. There has not yet been a disaster similar to 3/11 caused by nuclear power in Korea and likewise it is easy to imagine how the government can justify the continued plant construction because as Kraft states regarding the future of nuclear ecology, “even if we recognize that nuclear waste puts untold future generations at risk, ethical scrutiny of that legacy depends on a host of factors, including the scientific and social nature of the risks themselves.”190 When weighing energy profits/efficiency against the future of nuclear impacts on the Korean 188 Kim, “영화 판도,” 299. 189 Keun-young Lee, “South Korea has world’s highest density of nuclear power plants,” Hankyoreh, 9 August 2014. 190 Kraft, “Nuclear Ecology and Engaged Buddhism, 279. 123 peninsula, the balance has continued to weigh in favor of the nuclear industry (as is the case for most nations globally). With the governments failing to act, the responsibility for solving the issue of nuclear meltdown in these two films falls to the individual. Despite being one of the few residents to openly speak negatively about the power plant, Jae-hyeok is also the one who stays in the plant longest to attempt to save his fellow workers and townspeople when the meltdown begins, much as the Fukushima 50 chose to stay on 3/11. His self-sacrifice to save those in his community stands as a stark contrast to the slow and tepid response of the government and official emergency corps as both the power company and the presidential cabinet itself drag their feet throughout the film causing the disaster to get out of hand and more lives than necessary to be lost. In the end it is the act of Jae-hyeok literally sacrificing his own life to finish repairs that allows for a “safe” world to be re-established. This is another aspect where Pandora diverges from Fukushima 50, we do not see anyone die onscreen in the latter because the deaths of workers at 3/11 came later from the poisoning of their bodies. In both Fukushima 50 and Pandora it is individual heroism that is glorified while the practical process of disaster management, governmental action, and energy company responsibility are communicated as overall national system failures, too big for the everyday person to think they could personally intervene in. To be clear, both Fukushima 50 and Pandora are sensationalist disaster films that are typical of the genre, often exaggerating or ignoring the science of meltdowns and focusing overmuch on simplistic versions of human emotions while also succumbing to hero-worship.191 191 Kim, “영화 판도라,” 300. Kim notes this aspect of the film’s plot, and as seen in Yokota and Yamada’s journalism, is a practice that has little importance outside of the fictional space, as the “heroic” workers who stayed at Fukushima Daiichi were quickly forgotten by the system and are suffering the effects of the radiation exposure alone. 124 However, they are both also realistic portrayals of the potential for human error to play a significant role in turning natural disasters into man-made disasters. Despite these concessions to the need to sell tickets at the box office by turning everything into an anthropocentric hero story, the macro concerns of nuclear power’s safety, the likelihood of a disaster based on geological and ecological trends, and the fear of government mismanagement show in Pandora and Fukushima 50 are realistic. Additionally, the portrayal of the nuclear disaster in Pandora, despite not being a box-office landslide hit, did leave an impression on viewers in Korea and antinuclear sentiment did increase which was evident from the subsequent presidential race.192 Despite much of the film taking place within a space of disaster, Fukushima 50 focuses on overcoming and moving forward from a past event rather than encouraging viewers to think about the future in the way Pandora does. It seems as if the film meant to foreclose on discussions of disastrous futures and this willingness to look towards a future in the anthropogenic era in which disastrous environment events keep happening with increasing frequency is truly what makes it different from Pandora. Take, for example, the final scene of Fukushima 50. The song “O Danny Boy” plays in the background as the main character, Izaki, drives his car into the exclusion zone and down a road that is lined on either side with blossoming cherry trees. He gets out of the car, and he reads a letter from his late boss, Yoshi, who has died of cancer two years after the disaster. Shots of the tsunami hitting the plant play on the screen and Yoshi’s disembodied voice states that he believes humanity disregarded the power of nature and had falsely believed that they, as humans, could control nature, implying that 3/11 proved them wrong. Sentimental strings continue in the background as Izaki holds back tears thinking about Yoshi, but as he gazes up at the falling cherry blossom petals he says, as if to 192 Kim, “영화 판도라,” 320. 125 reassure Yoshi’s spirit, that the cherry blossoms are blooming this year, too. The emphasis on “too” moves viewers out of the space of disastrous futures and into a space of recalibration of the normal. The cherry blossoms are a common Japanese biotrope that have represented the constant reliability of the seasons and the idea that Japanese culture is in tune with nature, but this specific reference to them in this film is likely a nod to Murakami Haruki’s speech in July 2011 where he cited viewing the cherry blossoms every year as a sign that Japan will return to its national ability to “actively discover true beauty.”193 Despite Yoshi’s letter acknowledging the hubris of humanity as a key factor in the disaster on 3/11, both Murakami’s speech and the ending of the film Fukushima 50 do their best to circumvent issues of the material reality of the disaster and how it impacted both human and nonhuman alike for years. The prefecture of Fukushima will never not be a space of nuclear ecology and that space will never be free of disaster temporality. That is not to say that life does not go on, but to imply that the now of Fukushima is the same as the pre-disaster Fukushima is to disregard how transformative disaster is. With the recent controversy over Japan releasing the coolant water from the Fukushima Daiichi plants in the summer of 2023 signaling yet another potential disaster, further consideration into the framework of nuclear futurity and disaster temporality is apt now more than ever. The desire to wrap up disasters with a neat bow of a conclusion is, of course, an understandable tactic to maintain national moral but by not acknowledging a disaster temporality and focusing only on heroes concluding the disaster, Fukushima 50 does little to alleviate realistic anxieties about future disasters caused by similar human mismanagement. 193 Christine L. Marran, Ecology without Culture: Aesthetics for a Toxic World (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017), 7. 126 As a projection based on the recent trends in Korea and Japan, Pandora clearly predicts a future in which disaster is only a matter of time, especially if the government continues to put the energy industry’s profit above the safety of the people.194 This is a sense of futurity that is lacking in Fukushima 50. Pandora uses its namesake myth’s context to present a projection of the anxieties surrounding nuclear power plant disasters and offers a look into what will be sacrificed if the government does not take the issue seriously. Drawing on the historical and environmental context of the current situations in Japan and Korea surrounding 3/11 and nuclear power, Pandora creates a projection of a plausible future event and simultaneously engages in a visual projection of the innate fears of the Korea populace regarding the future of nuclear power and the communities that rely on it. While Pandora does suggest, a la Blanchot, that there is no future without disaster, the realistic portrayal of events in the film can be seen as a chance for the responsible parties to act now because a repetition of the situation in 3/11 does not have to be inevitable if the disastrous potential of the future can be made visible and thinkable. Blanchot says of disaster temporality: “We are on the edge of disaster without being able to situate it in the future: it is rather always already past, and yet we are on the edge or under the threat…”.195 The Korea pictured in Pandora is one existing with Fukushima as the past while being constantly on the edge of a similar disaster suggested by this past. When in the future it will occur, or if there is even a possibility of a future without it, remains unknown. 194 In “‘핵 없는 세상’의 시민 되기 <판도라>,” Han expresses a similar view regarding the film Pandora, stating on page 38 that if the film was made with the intention of preventing the disastrous future from coming then the practical actions need to follow to prevent a disastrous nuclear future. While I am not exploring the spectatorship aspect of Pandora in this chapter, it is important to note that there was a documentable impact on viewers in terms of opinions on nuclear energy. 195 Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, 1. 127 Filmic Doppelgängers The doubling of events akin to those that occurred on 3/11 in Pandora plays a significant role in shaping the way in which the film projects the greater specter of nuclear dangers. The closeness yet farness of Japan, both in location and nuclear power management similarities, makes the potential situation of nuclear power plant disaster an uncanny one because it is both known and unknown, familiar yet unfamiliar, fearful in how much simultaneity there is between the two nations, geographically and politically. The ties Pandora draws to Japan in the diegesis of the film position the 3/11 disaster as a part of the general consciousness of the Korean peninsula and as an event that has had an impact on subconscious if not conscious anxieties about Korea’s nuclear power plant situation. And yet, a similar disaster has not actually occurred in Korea, and this estrangement from a material reality makes seeing the situation of disaster reflected on the body of Korean land uncanny. The repetition of the themes, imagery, and sense of uncanny dread seen in reminiscence nuclear disaster media recalls for me the concept of the doppelgänger.196 In this section I will discuss Pandora in relation to Fukushima 50 as filmic doppelgänger s of each other in reflecting the permeation of nuclear ecology in the filmic space and how the “invention of doubling as a preservation against extinction” can elucidate the significance of futurity as a temporal setting for Korean disaster cinema.197 The concept of the evil double has infiltrated pop culture throughout the years, but the original conceptualizations of the term doppelgänger not only encompassed the uncanny 196 I believe that what registers as uncanny is subjective, and because of this element of subjectivity I cannot ensure that the reader, or viewer of these films, will also find them uncanny. I acknowledge this and agree with Freud in his perception of the uncanny: “That factor which consists in a recurrence of the same situations, things and events, will perhaps not appeal to everyone as a source of uncanny feeling. From what I have observed, this phenomenon does undoubtedly, subject to certain conditions and combined with certain circumstances, awaken an uncanny feeling, which recalls that sense of helplessness sometimes experienced in dreams,” in “The Uncanny,” 20. 197 Freud, discussing Otto Rank’s work in “The Uncanny,” 18. 128 experience of seeing a copy of the self and feeling fear, but also included Freud’s interpretation of the works of Hoffmann and Otto Rank in which he saw myriad purposes for the double in the human psyche. Expanding on Hoffmann, Freud noted that the double goes beyond simply looking identical, but rather “there is the constant recurrence of similar situations, a same face, or character-trait, or twist of fortune, or a same crime, or even a same name recurring throughout several consecutive generations.”198 In the case of Pandora and Fukushima 50, the filmic doppelgänger effect takes place in the handling of the theme of political incompetence in the narrative and the visual design of the settings of disaster response. To return to a previously mentioned scene, the control room of the power plant in Pandora and the uniforms of the workers will both ring a bell for viewers familiar with Japanese disaster media. Grey consoles, oversized switches and buttons, and outdated looking computers, evoke similar scenes from Japanese nuclear-related films making it difficult to determine if this is, in fact, what the inside of a Korean nuclear power plant looks like or if this is an archetypal creation that draws on Japan’s filmic examples. The two-tone over-jackets with button-up shirts underneath made of a horribly stiff looking fabric are another signifier that makes an appearance in both Pandora. In addition, the color-coded over-vests worn by disaster workers in Japan and Korea result in an incredible similar color palette and overall visual experience when viewing Pandora and Fukushima 50. The presence of these garments creates an uncanny doubling of the two nation’s situations, placing even the bodies of the workers on a similar plane of existence in which disasters happen. After the scene at the plant and with the project manager in Pandora, the narrative switches to Seoul where the president and his cabinet are also coming to grips with the situation 198 Freud, “The Uncanny,” 18. 129 at the plant. Again, the incompetency portrayed by the president character is eerily similar to the officials and prime minister in Fukushima 50 with both groups of characters standing at the head of a table in multiple shots in a place that should indicate authority, but instead they are surrounded by other officials yelling, bickering, making demands and proposals, all while the president—or prime minister—sits there in dumbfounded limbo, unable to make a decision. Another example of this doubling between Pandora and Fukushima 50 are the conference rooms in which major decisions are being discussed. The tables are circled by men in suits or uniforms and a screen occupies the wall at the far end. This is a stylistic choice on the Pandora crews’ part because they have no real event to reflect on and no real interlocutors to question about what it was like in those rooms where the disaster was discussed. Pandora evokes the specters of Japanese nuclear disaster films and the specter of 3/11 in these visuals alone which do not only look akin to Fukushima 50, but also look incredibly alike to scenes in other nuclear-focused films such as Shin Godzilla (2016). In these rooms of disaster that appear in both films, the focus is specifically on commenting on the systemic inability to respond to disasters that both Japan has suffered from, and Korea imagines itself in Pandora of possibly suffering from. As with the workers looking one-and-the-same in their designated disaster vests in front of screen after screen, the officials become generalizable between Fukushima 50 and Pandora via their complete inability to respond in a timely manner to the nuclear disaster. This doubling which makes groups of individuals share a common archetype suggests a plausible narrative of “if it can happen to them, it can happen to us” between Japan’s disaster preparedness and Korea’s. The idea of something that is hidden becoming “visible,” or perhaps “thinkable,” is one key element of projection as Freud discussed the concept in his work. There are things that are “inaccessible to consciousness except via projection” which must be processed by throwing them 130 in front of oneself, literally or figuratively speaking, which are otherwise unable to be acknowledged.199 Both the future temporality of Pandora’s narrative and the act of throwing an image of nuclear disaster in front of oneself onto a cinematic screen are functions of projection that make the idea of Korea having a nuclear power plant disaster come into the realm of the conscious. Freud’s discussion of projection took many forms over the many years of his writing, but I want focus on the ways in which it is used to highlight the process of making the unacknowledged acknowledgeable. The human reaction to “instinctual danger,” which in this case I posit is the fear of nuclear disaster, is repression, or in other words “avoidance.”200 It is unthinkable that many people live within close proximity to a source of something so monstrous that it can make entire swaths of land unsustainable, and in some cases unlivable. Likewise, those working in the plants or living right next to them repress even greater levels of instinctual danger because they must see the plant itself every day. According to Freuds work, it is projection that allows these fears to be seen; what gets projected outward, or in front, is the “cause or source of the anxiety,” which in the case of Pandora is a nuclear meltdown and the very real possibility of it occurring.201 After 3/11, especially, it would be surprising if the subconscious fear of a similar disaster happening in Korea did not increase and the uptick in antinuclear sentiment after Pandora’s release suggests that it did just that.202 In his article "Freud and the Sandman," Neil Hertz states that repetition becomes visible when something specific is shown being repeated.203 This can be the case for Pandora and Korea’s situation. The repetition of situations of nuclear disaster across the globe begs for 199 Hurry, Novick, & Novick, “Freud's Concept of Projection,” 76. 200 Sigmund Freud, Psychopathology of Everyday Life (London: The MacMillan Company, 1914), 184. 201 Hurry, Novick, & Novick, “Freud's Concept of Projection,” 82. 202 Kim, “영화 판도라,” 320. 203 Neil Hertz, "Freud and the Sandman," in End of The Line: Essays in Psychoanalysis and the Sublime, (New York, Columbia University Press, 1985), 117. 131 attention and by showing repeated themes and visualizations of Japanese nuclear disaster in a Korean film the specific elements that are being repeated become visible. With the direct criticism of the governmental reaction to nuclear disaster, it is not hard to imagine that the director of Pandora created a film meant to be seen and thought about in its own specific historical moment. While the film may not be aggressively anti-nuclear in its overall message, it is aggressively critical of the human mismanagement of nuclear power, especially in the face of the changes in the environment of the Korean peninsula (specifically the increasing earthquakes), which are outside of human control. To return to Blanchot’s discussion of disaster, he says that “The thought of the disaster, if it does not extinguish thought, makes us insouciant with regard to the results this thought itself can have in our life.”204 The disaster according to Blanchot is that which nullifies thought. It cannot be thought. It is beyond thinking, but if one tries to think it and, in some way, succeeds even then it is impossible to overcome indifference. To give an example, in Pandora there is a scene in which the plant workers are being driven to work in a company bus and their trip is delayed by anti-nuclear protestors blocking the road. When one of the workers exits the bus to confront the protestors the two are unable to see eye-to-eye on the dangers, real or imagined, that the plant presents. The lead protestor insists that if the plant isn’t closed soon “we’re all going to die!” (a handy bit of foreshadowing), but the worker just exasperatedly responds, “You’ve been saying that for years.” Freud’s conceptualization of the idea of a double was multifaceted and included that there was a type of double “with the function of observing and criticizing the self.”205 The worker clearly either does not think about the possibility of disaster, or more likely when it crosses his mind, he reacts with repressive indifference that allows him to continue his job without losing his mind. Indifference 204 Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, 12. 205 Freud, “The Uncanny,” 19. 132 does not mean a disaster will not happen, it simply means the thought of it can be put off, pushed into the future, to worry about later. However, the projection of the disaster in this film exemplifies Blanchot’s theorized impossibility of a disaster-less future because this plant, and all the real nuclear power plants in Korea, exists in a world where Fukushima exists. The likelihood of that disaster being repeated in the significantly similar conditions of Korea points to a timeline of when, not if. Given this, the protestor is correct about the trajectory of the films plot: if nuclear plants are not closed, many will die. The question becomes what is this doppelgänger effect offering in a context of nuclear futurity and nuclear ecology? In his article “The Return of Negation: The Doppelgänger in Freud's "The 'Uncanny,'" Dimitri Vardoulakis also suggests a less “negative” approach to the theory of doppelgänger, one of relationality.206 The existence of the doppelgänger forces an acknowledgement of a doubling of the self and makes visible otherwise unthinkable concepts via seeing the self repeated. As Vardoulakis puts it, “the reversal enacted by the doppelgänger is all about a type of subjective relationality…It is about the how, not the what.”207 In the context of Pandora, the subjective relationality that becomes visible is that between the future nuclear situation in Korea and the nuclear past and present of Japan. However, as Vardoulakis points out, the acknowledgement of the what is not as significant as the how, which is where a turn to the filmic can be productive in interrogating what this doppelgänger’s existence is communicating considering that one of Freud’s definitions of the term is “return of the repressed.”208 Pandora unboxes the repressed relationality between Korea and Japan by existing as a Korean nuclear film that doubles Japanese nuclear films. The reading of a doppelgänger as offering an 206 Dimitris Vardoulakis, “The Return of Negation: The Doppelgänger in Freud's "The 'Uncanny,'" SubStance 35, no. 2 (2006), 100. 207 Vardoulakis, “The Return of Negation,” 104. 208 Vardoulakis, “The Return of Negation,” 102. 133 opportunity to prevent extinction, as mentioned above, is also particularly apt in this sense because disaster must be made thinkable—and in the case of cinema seeable—before it can be prevented or mitigated. All this mirroring exists in Pandora, but minimal explicit mention of Japan makes its way into the film. This, I would argue, returns to Vardoulakis’ point about the importance of how a doppelgänger appears, rather than just focusing on what it is. In his article, Vardoulakis says, “The reversal performed by the Doppelgänger counteracts absolutism by making ‘excessive’ what seeks to become absolute. Excess undoes occlusion.”209 There is an absolutism to the perceptions of one’s own national border existing in a space-time that is not only unique, but also safe because of that uniqueness; when a nation is perceived as being only beholden to its own history it is difficult to surmount the wall of denial. Korea, as previously mentioned, has had very few earthquakes historically speaking, especially compared to Japan, so when considered without context that would suggest Korea will not have issues with them in the future. Pandora subverts these perceptions by emphasizing the uncanny similarity of nuclear plant meltdown in Fukushima. The excess of signifiers of Japanese nuclear disasters, especially 3/11, within Pandora has the potential to undo the blocking regarding the precarious nuclear future of Korea as a nation with similar conditions to Japan. The conditions that led to that disaster exist in Korea as well and Pandora may force Korean viewers to confront that doppelgänger, which is a projection of their hidden, but already present, fears. 209 Vardoulakis 105. 134 Conclusions In a study after 3/11, funded by Korea’s Ministry of Education, Science, and Technology, scientists attempted to determine if the radiation exposure levels for humans and non-human animals was significant, ultimately concluding that the doses they measured were negligible, saying that “this is a natural result, considering that the activities deposited on the ground are very low compared to weapons fallout.”210 To which my response is, how will any radiation pollution looks significant if the bar is always the tools of war, which are specifically built to be fully destructive? Slowly and stealthily increasing the rate of cancer for each subsequent generation via contamination in the soil and watershed is still damage, but the inescapability of nuclear horror and the inescapability of the state of war colors perceptions of what “damage” is. With serious seismic, aquatic, and nuclear disasters striking Japan, an outward facing approach from Korea has developed that takes the proximity of the nations and the connecting ocean into account. Korea’s approach to disaster preparedness has reflected this reality of borderless interconnection in the recent decades, as has its disaster-related cinema, both of which have focused on nuclear policy as well as new precautions for ports in case of tsunamis. At Samcheok Port on the East Coast of Korea, for example, a floodgate has been constructed that is meant to protect the port and surrounding area from tsunami surges, especially ones caused by earthquakes occurring off the West coast of Japan. Samcheok has already experienced two major tsunamis attributed to seismic activity in Japan in 1983 and 1993, but with the magnitude of the 3/11 disaster barely 10 years ago, it seems that Korean ports are being pushed towards further preventative action.211Nuclear trauma, the history of natural disasters on coastlines, and the 210 Dong-kwon Keum, et al., “Radiation dose to Human and Non-human biota in the Republic of Korea resulting from the Fukushima Nuclear Accident,” Nuclear Engineering and Technology 45, no. 1 (2013), 11. 211 News about these building projects can be seen on Arirang News YouTube, and on Hankyoreh.com. 135 constant sense of anxiety that permeates human consciousness skirting around the fact that we cannot, really, control energies that in a cosmic horror sense outpace our comprehension; these are all elements at play in the films discussed in this chapter.212 My analysis of these films similarly presents as a cyclical consideration of the varying iterations of ecological anxiety associated with the nuclear. In the 1960s, Susan Sontag wrote that “one gets the feeling, particularly in the Japanese films, but not only there, that mass trauma exists over the use of nuclear weapons and the possibility of future nuclear wars. Most of the science fiction films bear witness to this trauma, and in a way, attempt to exorcise it.”213 Decades later, the continuation of the nuclear signifier in Japanese cinema proves that the exorcisms have been ineffective, and the expansion of the theme into the Korean context suggests that Sontag’s analysis can be expanded to the whole region affected by the nuclear legacy, both of bombs and of power plants. In many ways the disaster movie genre is a facade that hides an immeasurable depth of ecological terror and existential dread behind the idea that if a nation is politically strong enough disasters can be avoided, but that in the end no nation is ever in truth ready for a disaster to occur. To put it in terms Kraft uses to describe a Buddhist approach to nuclear ecology: humans are responsible for their eco-karma and likewise in the famous words of Einstein, “humanity will get the fate it deserves.”214 Ignoring concerns about the safety of nuclear power plants for both humans and the environment alike has led us to a point in which disaster temporality and nuclear ecology are something that has to be lived with, rather than prevented. When considering what can be done in the face of 212 Ham, “핵무기의 기술,” 123. 213 Sontag, “The Imagination of Disaster,” 46. Some of Sontag’s statements about science fiction are not relevant to these contemporary examples of disaster cinema, but she does draw overlap between sci-fi, disaster genre, and horror genre, which I believe allows for extrapolation on her points in this current context. 214 Kraft, “Nuclear Ecology and Engaged Buddhism,” 277. 136 these realizations, Lou Cornum acknowledges that being a part of the irradiated international involves no easy answers, but they do offer a set of goals for living in a nuclear ecology: “The work to do: Making visible, Making felt, Making it stop.”215 I have no answers for making it stop, but I endeavor to make a contribution to the first two goals through this chapter’s interrogation of how disaster cinema makes the nuclear seen and felt. 215 Cornum, “The Irradiated International,” 4. 137 Chapter Four: Environmental Sovereignty and Monsters of War In the previous chapter, I discussed the nuclear as a key aspect of what makes the contemporary environment in East Asia take on a horrific quality, and in this chapter the nuclear will continue to have resonance. However, my analysis in this chapter shifts away from the nuclear exclusively to focus instead on another major actor in East Asian history that leads to horrific environments and disrupted temporalities: The United States of America. This chapter moves the conversations of horrific temporality and ecology towards a conceptual paradigm that considers these concepts as redefinable into critiques of American imperialism. By reading American military presence through the lens of the East Asian monster movie genre, this chapter adds to the ideas of war temporality and environmental sovereignty in conversations about what form of horrific ecology and horrific temporality Korea and Japan reside in. Shin Godzilla (2016) and The Host (2006) are two 21st century monster films, from Japan and Korea respectively, that continue the long tradition of the genre’s ecologically and politically dense narratives. Both “creature-from-the-deep” films, they expose the patterns of endangered environmental sovereignty that have occurred in each nation at the hands of America while the narratives simultaneously shift the focus away from the violence caused by the monsters and towards the violence carried out by an occupying military.216 I engage in a reconsideration of the terms of post-war and sovereignty by arguing that these two concepts, and their lived realities, can be viewed through the framework of the ecological in the context of these East Asian monster films.217 Delving into the material environmental realities of American occupation brings to the foreground the deeply ecological origin of the monsters that appear in Japanese and 216 In their book Movie Migrations, Hye Seung Chung and David Scott Diffrient discuss the development of the relationship between monster movies in Japan and Korea, saying, “Godzilla, like The Host fifty years after it, falls under the “creature-from-the-deep” umbrella” (151). 217 The definition of environmental sovereignty will be discussed in the third section of this chapter. 138 Korean films and how both their origins and their futures are resultant of and reliant on the American military’s understanding—or lack thereof—of sovereignty as encompassing both the nonhuman environment and human societies. Additionally, unlike my analysis of forests or water which took place primarily in the visual field, the dialogue and plots in The Host and Shin Godzilla are the filmic space in which the critique of American military pollution is taking place. The foregrounding of ecological and political critiques in the verbal and narrative elements of the diegesis of The Host and Shin Godzilla result in these themes being easily comprehendible by human viewers, thereby reinforcing the past tradition of the genre’s usage for deliberate and conscious critique of ecological damage perpetuated against Korean and Japanese nonhuman environments since 1945.218 Released in 2016, Shin Godzilla follows the current Japanese government as it copes with the appearance of a giant aquatic monster coming ashore to ravage Tokyo, eventually referred to as “Godzilla.” Japanese scientists work to figure out what the creature is and how to stop it, but ultimately discover that it was born from dumping nuclear waste in the ocean and that America knew about this happening. Despite that, the American government gets involved when Japan cannot kill the monster and threatens to drop a nuclear bomb on Tokyo if the monster is not contained. While many critics and scholars have noted the similarity to the 3/11 disaster, Shin Godzilla also continues the traditional theme of the Godzilla franchise of critiquing America’s usage of nuclear weapons near and in Japan. Released ten years earlier in 2006, The Host tells the story of a monster that is born from the Han River in Seoul after American military personal dump embalming chemicals into the water. A lower-class Korean family ends up taking on the 218America has long had an ecological impact on the East Asian area, and it is not contained to post-1945. In this chapter, I am specifically focusing on the monster movie era starting with the original Godzilla in the 1950s and likewise my statements engage with that time period and how America acted in that time. 139 task of tracking the monster after it takes the family’s young daughter, despite constant opposition from the Korean government and American military who are determined to handle the monster in their own way. Once again, because the American military knows what really happened, they create a false narrative of a contagious disease to keep the Korean people controlled and to give themselves more power to take drastic action. Similarly to Shin Godzilla, the conflict comes to a head when the American military is determined to deploy a toxic gas in the city of Seoul to stop the monster, regardless of human and nonhuman safety. The monsters in these films act as fictional manifestations of real ecological violences that have not been fully repressed in the public consciousness because of the detrimental effect those violences have had on the material world as well as on the political landscapes of Korea and Japan. Although the monsters in these films are akin in some ways to the disastrous power of a tsunami or an earthquake, neither monster would exist if it were not for negligence towards the responsibilities of human entanglement with the nonhuman, making the creatures more manmade disaster than natural disaster. Each film tells a story that revolves around human/nonhuman conflicts that are exacerbated by American military involvement and both films are suggestive of a lack of environmental sovereignty resulting in the birth of monsters that embody fears of uncontrollable contamination and endangered livability. Even though the monsters are given giant bodies in these films, and likewise take up most of the visual space in any scene where they appear, it is the imperial history behind their birth that makes these films inherently ecological. Because of that history, this chapter interrogates the concept of nation directly as a key factor in the creation of temporalities and ecologies that are reliant on the negative effects of occupation. In The Irradiated International, native scholar Lou Cornum writes, “The weapon of mass destruction is the nation. The United States of America for one. But also, the very notion of 140 nation itself.”219 America’s influence is the catalyst for the birth of the monsters, but the monsters are not an allegory for America the nation per say as much as they are an embodiment of environmental violences that occur because of the continuation of America’s ideas of national sovereignty. To vilify a nation is easy and there are enough war movies that vilify or de-vilify a variety of nations to prove this point; to specifically vilify a nation’s impact on another country’s environment, on the other hand, is a more specific undertaking. As discussed in the previous chapter, the implication of nation as the primary wielder of power and control in the disaster genre is that the nation should be able to prevent the creation of environmental monsters or prevent natural disasters from getting out of control. In The Host and Shin Godzilla, the option for control is foreclosed upon by American military interventions and likewise Korea and Japan are not able to prevent monsters from being created nor are they able to take actions that might bring the human and nonhuman environment back into balance with each other. Nuclear trauma, the history of American involvement in East Asia, environmental monsters real and imaged, and the constant sense of anxiety that permeates a nation when it feels like it lacks control are all elements at play in the films discussed in this chapter.220 I begin by briefly discussing the history of ecological monster movies in Japan and Korea, focusing on their long-standing traditions of critique of environmental damage inflicted by the American military. Then, I move onto a section of theoretical and historical considerations of war temporality and environmental sovereignty as concepts that are not only valuable for discussing The Host and Shin Godzilla but are also valuable for reorienting anthropocentric modes of thought towards a goal of a more ecological consciousness of war politics. And finally, I engage in close readings of the portrayal of the American military in these two films to 219 Lou Cornum, “The Irradiated International,” 4. 220 Chung-beom Ham, “핵무기의 기술,”123. 141 evidentiate the significance of breakdowns of environmental sovereignty that perpetuate systems of violence. Overarchingly, this chapter argues for the importance of continuing the tradition of reading East Asian monster films through an ecocinema lens with the goal of furthering critiques of human structures that damage the nonhuman world. The Birth of Monsters As I have been emphasizing in all previous chapters, genre is a significant factor in how seeable or thinkable the human/nonhuman relationships are in visual media, and monster films in the context of East Asia are an outstanding example of this. Starting from the original Japanese Godzilla film in the 1950s and then Korea’s version Yongary in the 1960s, the two nations’ monster films have echoed each other’s concerns about environmental pollutions and have created traceable influences back and forth. 221 Analogously, the two contemporary monster films I am analyzing in this chapter amplify the echoes of American’s occupation since World War II and the Korean War and they reverberate with further echoes of the environmental damage caused by American military presence even now. Despite being 10 years apart and originating in different countries with individual histories and experiences, The Host and Shin Godzilla overlap in ways that suggest certain patterns of thinking ecologically in East Asia’s monster movie genre even within the seemingly-nature-devoid space of military politics.222 In their book Movie Migrations: Transnational Genre Flows and South Korean Cinema, Hye Seung Chung and David Scott Diffrient discuss the many similarities between Godzilla, Yongary Monster from the Deep, and The Host, classifying them as creature-from-the-deep 221 Kim Ki-Duk, Yongary, Monster from the Deep, 1967. 222 The war ecology and military environmental history are ever growing as more and more scholars acknowledge the violence that the nonhuman environment undergoes in human wars. In the Korean context, for example, see the work of Eleana Kim’s book Making Peace with Nature: Ecological Encounters Along the Korean DMZ (2022). 142 movies, as mentioned in the introduction, as well as arguing that they all fit into the Kaijū Eiga genre.223 That book was written before Shin Godzilla was released and consequently it compares The Host retrospectively to the original Godzilla rather than comparing it to the more recent iterations (as I aim to do in this chapter).224 In this long tradition of monster movies in Korea and Japan, America has played a vast role as a visible/invisible entity from the very beginning, being almost inextricable from the nuclear in early films.225 In Chon Noriega’s work on the original Godzilla film in relation to America he writes that “the films transfer onto Godzilla the role of the United States in order to symbolically re-enact a problematic United States-Japan relationship that includes atomic war, occupation, and thermo-nuclear tests.”226 The original Godzilla was based on nuclear fears in general stemming from World War II, but also had the contemporaneous context of the death of a sailor who was exposed to American H-bomb testing the Bikini Atoll in 1954, the year the film was released.227 Given that America, as Japan’s occupiers, had been censoring media that implied anything about the nuclear bombs for many years prior to this, Godzilla as an agential being was able to act as a representation of the repressed memories of the victims and survivors of the atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki and “reveal a self-conscious attempt to deal with nuclear history and its effects on Japanese society,” especially in regards to America’s involvement.228 223 It is up for debate if the monster in The Host is really a Kaijū per say, but I am not going to enter into that debate in this chapter. Whether it is or not, the themes in The Host are akin to the Godzilla franchise. 224 Hye Seung Chung and David Scott Diffrient, Movie Migrations: Transnational Genre Flows and South Korean Cinema (New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2015). 225 Chon A. Noriega, “Godzilla and the Japanese Nightmare: When Them! Is U.S.” in Hibakusha Cinema: Hiroshima, Nagasaki and the Nuclear Image in Japanese Film edited by Mick Broderick (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 54-74. 226 Noriega, “Godzilla and the Japanese Nightmare,” 61. 227 Chung and Diffrient, Movie Migrations, 152, and Chung-beom Ham, “핵무기의 기술,” 146. 228 Noriega, “Godzilla and the Japanese Nightmare,” 54. 143 This central issue of nuclear waste was central to the plot many of the films following Godzilla, including the Korean monster movie Yongary in which a nuclear test triggers an earthquake, revealing a monster in the earth. 229 Bong Joon-ho’s The Host is not explicitly nuclear like Yongary or the Godzilla franchise, but it is just as concerned with military pollution as a phenomenon of war and occupation. The Host broke box-office records at release by selling 13 million tickets in Korea and it is filled with references to the U.S. military forces housed in the country.230 Like the original Godzilla, the monster in The Host is also born from water contamination caused by America. In this case, based on the true story of Albert McFarland, an American civilian who ran the morgue at the U.S. military base in Seoul and ordered Korean employees to dump embalming waste down a drain.231 Shin Godzilla, released over 60 years after the original Godzilla and 10 years after The Host, has continued the genre’s discourse about American military influence and nuclear contamination while also responding to recent disasters. The changes to Godzilla’s body movements and relationship to movements of water, for example, made many viewers think of the 3/11 disaster and this association accounts partially for why Shin Godzilla was very well received in Japan, selling approximately 5 million tickets in Japanese theatres.232 Anna Fifield says in her article: Now, in the wake of the 2011 triple meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, the theme takes on a different meaning. It is impossible to watch the flummoxed bureaucrats, the scenes of the boats being washed ashore and the fears of radiation without thinking of the tsunami that devastated the northeast coast of Japan five years ago.233 229 Yongary info, similar plot minus the monster has been seen in Korean disaster movies such as the 2019 Ashfall (백두산) which focuses on a similarly entanglement of nuclear and earthquake, but with a reunification political agenda. 230 Jinhee Choi, The South Korean Film Renaissance: Local Hitmakers, Global Provocateurs (Connecticut : Wesleyan University Press, 2010) : 32. 231 Choi, The South Korean Film Renaissance, 36. 232 Anna Fifield, "New Godzilla film imagines a strong Japan pushing back against the US," Washington Post, 23 September (2016): 1. 233 Fifield, “New Godzilla Film,” 1. 144 This new imagery does not negate the concerns of nuclear contamination coming from the American military, as is traditional in the Godzilla franchise. Rather, it builds the new fear on top of the old. Godzilla is still born from nuclear waste dumped in the ocean with America’s knowledge, and with concerns to 3/11, America is still deeply entrenched in the spread of nuclear energy plants in Japan in the first place. Returning to the question of being post-disaster, the layer of references in Shin Godzilla is evidentiary of the enduring presence of disaster and how even if the event itself is technically “past” it will continue to resurface. A new disaster does not negate a past disaster, they exist on the same temporal plane that does not experience a breakage in continuity. Bae Kwan-mun has even posited in their work on Shin Godzilla that the very body of Godzilla itself mimics the 3/11 disaster: Godzilla unmovable on the coastline is like a nuclear power plant and in the film they pump coolant into Godzilla just like cooling agents are pumped into reactors.234 That means that in the DNA of Shin Godzilla are the traces of the original nuclear critique from the 1950s Godzilla and of the discourse surrounding 3/11, making the 2016 iteration not an unwriting of the ecological, national, and sovereignty concerns, but an updated imagining of them.235 Although one cannot say that one disaster is equivalent with another, what we can see in these films is shared disastrous outcomes stemming from America’s presence in Japan and Korea. As Shin Godzilla’s more recent release shows, these are not only disasters of the distance past, either. Although America’s entrenchment with the nuclear is the most well-known influence in such films, I would like to offer a further consideration of the disasters of the American 234 Kwan-mun Bae, “재난 이후의 일본문화론 - 『신고질라』의 새로운 상상력에 관하여” (chaenan ihuŭi ilbonmunhwaron - shin'gojillaŭi saeroun sangsangnyŏge kwanhayŏ), 일본학 56, (2022): 193. 235 Yun-jong Lee, “바이러스의 살육성: 〈괴물〉과 〈감기〉의 기생체” (pairŏsŭŭi saryuksŏng: koemulgwa kamgiŭi kisaengch'e), 영화연구 87, (2021): 189. 145 military’s continued occupation in both countries as a shared experience of significant magnitude that has for many years and continues now to make the environment in Korea and Japan horrific. Bong Joon-ho stated that one thing the ending of The Host was meant to show was “the distance between the United States and ordinary Koreans,” but if one considers the physical presence rather than an ideological or cultural one this supposed distance collapses.236 Everything around them, the air and water and land, has been impacted by the American presence. Both the original Godzilla and The Host monster are products of the negligence America shows towards others’ land and water. Despite the exact pollutant being different, the actor being the American military and the outcome being a monster are the same. Regarding the early entries in the Godzilla franchise, Noriega says, “In Godzilla films, it is the United States that exists as Other.”237 This is one way to interpret America’s intervention in Shin Godzilla and The Host as well, allowing for a readjustment from focusing on the monster as Other, which would be standard in a monster movie discourse, to focusing on the occupying nation as Other. Indeed, hardly any readjustment of focus is necessary when viewing these two films. America’s position as the cause of the monsters and as a thorn in the side of Korea and Japan is explicit in the narratives in Shin Godzilla and The Host in a way that was not possible in the 1950s, for instance, when America had strict control over the content in films.238 What the portrayed behaviors of America and its government showcases in these films is an inherently selfish attitude suggesting that in Korea and Japan there is an understanding of the fact that America always puts America first and that this self-serving behavior continues to create monstrous situations other nations. 236 Chung and Diffrient, Movie Migrations, 176. 237 Noriega, “Godzilla and the Japanese Nightmare,” 56. 238 Ham, “핵무기의 기술,” 146. 146 Much as they are not the first to comment on America’s issues with military pollution, Shin Godzilla and The Host are not the first films within the creature-from-the-deep genre to emphasize America’s willingness to damage land that is not their own. The 1980s version of Godzilla included a storyline in which the United States and Russia propose nuclear bomb dropping on Japan to stop Godzilla, just like Shin Godzilla. 239 Even in America’s own The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms—another story in which nuclear energy creates a monster and is also proposed as a way to get rid of it—the consequences of nuclear action are displaced onto other land as the bomb is not tested on the continent.240 As Noriega points out within that film, “The message is clear: nuclear weapons can solve the problems and anxieties they create. But in order to provide such a resolution, the real site of United States nuclear testing is displaced onto the more politically distant and isolated Arctic.”241 By enacting this displacement America is able to send the message to audiences that their concern is for the safety of their own land, a reassurance to American audiences, but when seen from the alternate perspective of nations where it is their land that has been made a dumping ground, such as Japan and Korea, America’s attitude takes on a more sinister tone. There is a sense that America’s military can leave occupied nations to return to their own for safe water and safe land; they can go somewhere else, return home, whereas the people who will suffer are the people who must stay. Whether or not America is the monster itself, certainly there can be no doubt that through America’s actions other human and nonhuman environments are being made monstrous. 239 Noriega, “Godzilla and the Japanese Nightmare,” 68. 240 Ham, “핵무기의 기술,” 145. Film directed by Eugène Lourié, 1953. 241 Noriega, “Godzilla and the Japanese Nightmare,” 59. 147 War Temporality and Environmental Sovereignty My refusal to use the term post-war to describe Korea and Japan’s environment in my analysis of The Host and Shin Godzilla is twofold: 1. A refusal based on how the monster movie tradition in the cultures of Korea and Japan characterizes American military presence, and 2. A refusal based on the impact of American military action and American military bases in Korea and Japan on the nonhuman environment. In this section I will expand upon the second of these refusals focused on environmental history and environmental sovereignty, and I will return to the first refusal in the next section of close readings of the two films. As with the previous chapter’s discussion of a disaster temporality and the impossibility of being truly post-disaster, the idea of being post-war seems untenable when considered from an ecological standpoint. When reflecting on the intertwining of historical experiences between Korea and Japan, something they both share is the experience of “hosting” the American army during World War II, and in the Korean War, and currently doing so still. In their article “American Imperial Sovereignty and Militarised Land Dispossession During the Korean War,” scholar Bridget Martin details the many ways in which American presence in Korea has been an affront to Korean sovereignty, and how especially during the Korea War the American Military’s role in Korean transformed into much more than a collaborative alliance. In said article, she draws on multiple frameworks to posit that: Within the frameworks on sovereignty and bases provided by scholars such as David Lake and Alexander Cooley, it might be argued that American territorial practice in Korea after 1950 slid from a condition of ‘informal empire’ to ‘empire’, or more specifically, that an ‘agreement’ on operational control slid into an ‘occupation’ through a series of American transgressions. It might also be argued that the transfer of operational control itself marked ‘a major withering away of Korean sovereignty’, as suggested by historian Steven Lee. In a study of militarised American civil assistance during the war, Lee (2010) argues that the war was a ‘second occupation’ of Korea by the United States. The term ‘occupation’ effectively communicates the violently overwhelming power the US military 148 held over much of the Korean population during the war that had strong resonances with the earlier occupation period.242 Although Martin is discussing primarily the Korean War period in this quote, in terms of defining America’s presence as an occupation I would argue that the resonances of that period continues far past then and into now, which is evident from how fraught the imagined relationship between East Asia and America is in the films The Host and Shin Godzilla. While there was a theoretical moment in time in which East Asia could have become post-war, the American military is very concerned with the temporality of its own existence— and more importantly, the temporality of its success.243 “The West,” whatever amorphous blob of perceived racial/cultural authority it thinks itself to be, is constantly concerned with its own downfall and therefore concerned with holding onto control that is perceived as needed to prevent said downfall. However, what a downfall is, or what progress is, or what peace is, is all specific to cultural temporalities in which systems of worthiness to win wars is calculated.244 There is a cultural specificity to perceptions of temporality that can result in America feeling one way about a war while Korea and Japan may feel another way about the very same war in terms of what temporality that war is existing in. Truly, war can be fought across varying temporalities, whether each group reaches the conclusion at the same point in time is unsure, and in the case of Western versus East Asian traditions of warfare temporality there is a definitive difference in understanding what victory means, and what an end means.245 242 Bridget Martin, “American Imperial Sovereignty and Militarised Land Dispossession During the Korean War,” Geopolitics 28, no. 5 (2022): 2113. 243 Sten Rynning, Oliver Schmitt, and Amelie Theussen, War Time: Temporality and the Decline of Western Military Power (Washington: Brookings Institution Press, 2021). 244 Rynning, Schmitt, Theussen, War Time, introduction. 245 Rynning, Schmitt, Theussen, War Time, 9. 149 On the other hand, these understandings of war temporality, even if culturally specific, are anthropocentric; the nonhuman environment and nonhuman beings would also have their own way of experiencing the time frame of war and violence, or even peace. In her book Making Peace with Nature: Ecological Encounters Along the Korean DMZ, Eleana Kim makes the point that “the framework of paradox is conceptually limited, for its rhetorical force depends on an ahistorical logic that holds two ostensible, yet incommensurable, truths in tension: ecology and war or, put another way, nature and culture.”246 The DMZ’s existence is, of course, a predominant example of why Korea is not post-war, however my consideration of forgoing that term hinges on America’s presence rather than North Korea’s refusal to accept global capitalist norms. As Kim’s writing points out, the instability of temporalities of war and peace regarding the nonhuman environment are ultimately immeasurable in the terms that most humans would use to think them, because ecology is not absent when war exists, as nature is never absent even when human culture imagines it to be so. While war exists, the nonhuman environment continues to exist, and its existence is shaped and altered by human war but is never negated by it. In terms of material presence, the continuation of American military bases and military personnel occupying both nations’ spaces alone indicates that these two nations cannot be categorized as fully post-war because the buildings and people of war remain. 247 And in the ecological material sense, there is also the ongoing ways that American military's presence in the nations of Japan and Korea have allowed for a continuation of ecological disasters to seep into 246 Kim E., Making Peace with Nature, 4. 247 Martin, “American Imperial Sovereignty,” 2123. Martin notes that while many bases have closed in Korea, which could be read as increased sovereignty for Korea, that is not actually the case because of the agreements made in the 1970s with America that means that even if Korea closes an American base, they are required to build an “equivalent facility” which results in Korea’s land still being constantly mediated in its usage by association with the American military. Additionally, according to the GAO report, as of 2020 there were still 55,000 military personnel in Japan and 28,500 in Korea, 4. 150 the nonhuman environment.248 America itself has become a disaster for Japan and Korea, and the occupation a form of slow violence that never ends.249 Militaries produce refuse, people and areas get damaged by the bases’ construction and land usage, noise and environmental pollution radiate out from the spaces the bases occupy, and compounding all of that are clashes in which some civilians do die. There are myriad examples and case studies that could be used to evidentiate this point, but for the sake of space I shall just offer one: the case of Agent Orange contamination. Agent Orange contamination illustrates environmental permeability and the impossibility of being post-war in an environmental sense because the impact of war cannot be fully cleaned up or erased. Agent Orange, an extremely potent herbicide that contains the longlasting and highly toxic substance dioxin, was used during the Vietnam War to deforest land, and kill agricultural crops (especially rice fields).250 Though not the enemy of America in this particular conflict, land in Japan and Korea was used as storage or disposal grounds for the leftover Agent Orange and soldiers from those nations working for America were exposed in Vietnam.251 Due to its potency, Agent Orange is not only responsible for ecological terror but also has been recorded as causing severe damage to human health, including everything from immediate rashes when handling it to long-term developments of cancer and chronic pain due to exposure.252 248 For another consideration of materiality as part of sovereignty, see Andy Hanlun Li’s article “Volumising territorial sovereignty: Atmospheric sciences, climate, and the vertical dimension in 20th century China.” 249 Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013). 250 Jon Mitchell, “FOIA Documents Reveal Agent Orange Dioxin, Toxic Dumps, Fish Kills on Okinawa Base. Two Veterans Win Compensation, Many More Denied,” The Asia-Pacific Journal 13, no. 1 (2015): 1. 251 Jae-Hyeon Yun, “고엽제에 노출된 월남전 참전군인의 삶의 재편성” (koyŏpchee noch'ultoen wŏllamjŏn ch'amjŏn'guninŭi salmŭi chaep'yŏnsŏng), 한국산학기술학회논문 23, no. 7 (2022). 252 Yun, “고엽제에 노출된 월남전,” 127, and Christine Ahn and Gwyn Kirk, “Agent Orange in Korea: Whistleblowers have unearthed the widespread use of Agent Orange by the U.S. military in Korea,” Foreign Policy in Focus, 7 July (2011): 1. 151 Although America likes to deny various elements of the existence and usage of Agent Orange, in Korea for example evidence continues to be brought forward by American soldiers that in the time period after the ceasefire of the Korean War and continuing on through the 1970s, the U.S. military was testing and using Agent Orange in the DMZ to supposedly “clean” the land.253 In a later incident of dumping at Camp Carroll in Korea, an American soldier said, “we basically buried our garbage in their backyards.”254 This dumping site has since been tested multiple times over the decades for contamination and Chung In-cheol of Green Korea United is quoted as saying, “if Agent Orange was dumped in 1978, the drums may have already eroded. And the toxic substance could have contaminated the soil and underground water near the area. The U.S. camp is situated just 630 meters away from the Nakdong River, which is the water source for major cities like Daegu and Busan.”255 Despite these concerns, military bases have continued to be built, such as the one on Jeju Island which has been in use since 2016. Quoting that same article, “the ROK-U.S. naval base now under construction on Jeju Island will have a devastating impact on the island’s marine ecology, affecting fishermen and women sea divers who depend on the clean sea for their livelihood, and the Korean people who rely on the ocean for seafood.”256 Similarly, in Okinawa, Japan, there have been multiple cases of Agent Orange dumping which has come to light later. For example, barrels that were labeled as having contained Agent Orange were dug up during the construction of a soccer field.257 This raised many concerns about what other contaminants may have been buried only slightly below surface level on the island in 253 Carol Comegno, “Bill would cover more Korean DMZ vets for Agent Orange exposure,” Courier Post Online, 16 August (2017): 1. 254 Ahn and Kirk, “Agent Orange in Korea,” 1. 255 Ahn and Kirk, “Agent Orange in Korea,” 2. 256 Ahn and Kirk, “Agent Orange in Korea,” 3. 257 Jon Mitchell, Poisoning the Pacific: The US Military’s Secret Dumping of Plutonium, Chemical Weapons, and Agent Orange (Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield Publishing, 2020), 97. 152 the years since America had set up bases there. The American government initially denied any such dumping has occurred, but later documents were released that showed “three areas of large scale contamination and four dumpsites” at least and there was additional documentation of seepage into the water resulting in marine life death.258 Along with animals tested in the area showing high levels of contamination, after a typhoon in the summer of 2015 some previously partially unearthed barrels were submerged in water and “the standing water near the barrels contained levels of dioxin thousands of times higher than environmental standards.”259 That water was then largely diverted into the nearby river without any cleansing or decontaminating treatment and as we know, all rivers eventually flow into the ocean. Despite being categorized as something only used during the Vietnam War, Agent Orange continues to effect Korea and Japan even today, which certainly does not make it seem like the war is so post- after all. In both the Korean and Japanese cases of Agent Orange pollution, America initially denied the situations completely or downplayed the severity and while this is not unexpected, whether the American military takes responsibility for Agent Orange contamination or not does not change the ecological damage done by the improper disposal of chemicals. This theme of improper disposal—along with being the reality of the Agent Orange situation—is the basis for the narratives of both Shin Godzilla and The Host. In these films, pollution originating from human action is what leads to the monsters being born and subsequently attacking each nation. Although Korea and Japan are not able to stop the root pollution events, they are then given another chance to address the issue in the form of the monster. An impending disaster offers the semblance of a sense that something could be done to stop it, and that is what the monster movies offer, whereas the reality of the situation of military pollution has been out of Korea and 258 Mitchell, Poisoning the Pacific, 2. 259 Mitchell, Poisoning the Pacific, 7. 153 Japan’s control from the inception of American military intervention and occupation. The American military plays the role of perpetrator and self-styled savior in The Host and Shin Godzilla, thereby instating a doubled infringement on Korea and Japan’s environmental sovereignty; these two nations have not been in control of the pollution taking place in their lands and they are not trusted to control the monsters in their nations either.260 Likewise, for my reading of these films, sovereignty, like war temporality, is another concept that must be reconsidered through an ecological framing. Sovereignty is, to put it as pedantically as possible, a complicated concept. As a term it implies both the power to control and simultaneously the freedom to decide. A sovereign may have power over their kingdom, and a nation may be free to exercise their sovereign control in their own land. The Host and Shin Godzilla emphasize the latter concept of national freedom of choice and the importance of the handling internal affairs without foreign influence because in both films, as in reality, the situation of national control is the exact opposite. Within the diegesis of the film, the nations of Korea and Japan are permeated by foreign influence from start to finish with a distinct lack of internal agency. The origin of the monsters, the choices of how to handle the monster situation, and the plan for a final solution are all predicated on American influence. Especially in the case of a solution both films portray the sovereign nations where the monsters have been born as completely lacking control, with America making a choice in both cases to do irreparable damage the land of Korea or Japan in the process of their so-called solutions. 260 I would like to point out here that I am collapsing Okinawa and mainland Japan in my references to military pollution by saying “Japan.” This is not particularly accurate because Okinawa has certainly felt the effects of American occupation much more in recent years than other areas and because Okinawa is not the same as mainland Japan in terms of power as well as culture. Still, the history I am discussing does go back to the original Godzilla film and other nuclear narratives of pollution, which are not Okinawa specific, so I am painting with a broad brush. 154 For this reason, I am interested in the importance of the distinction between one’s own land and land on which one is merely a visitor, because visitors are not subject to the needs of long-term livability. Militaries have always been harbingers of destruction, hence the old adage of rape, pillage, and burn. Reflecting on the words of Japanese scholar Yoshiro Hoshino, it may be true that “there is nothing worse than war for bringing about the destruction of nature” because “when environmental destruction is understood in its broadest and most fundamental sense, the original culprit is war.”261 In the fundamental sense, if the originator of damage is war, then the environment, or nature as Hoshino calls it, is at its core altered by war and in a new state of existence that is predicated on war’s continued power over the nonhuman environment. And in a situation where the military that never leaves, the destruction may take on a less obvious form, but it is not as if the violence to the environment ends. In Japan and Korea, the building and maintenance of American military bases has caused countless types of damage including the destruction of land, noise and environmental pollution, and of course cultural and societal conflicts. The wanton nature of America’s military decisions in The Host and Shin Godzilla films is made possible by the fact that it is not the land on which they must live. Theoretically, the American troops could leave at any time and return to their own in-tact lands, while for the Koreans and the Japanese it is their lives, land, and water that are being but at stake for what is considered the “greater good.” The nations are in flux temporally and are performing a constant mediating of a semi-war reality, additionally creating a liminal space of sovereignty negotiation. A concept that is integral to ideas of sovereignty as they are understood by some indigenous groups is “natural law.” One definition of the concept is as follows: “Natural law means the idea that nature itself is suffused with a moral order that in some way transcends 261 Jun Ui, ed., Industrial pollution in Japan (Tokyo: United Nations University Press, 1992), copy of document used was scanned to the web and did not include page numbers. 155 historical particularities and is (at least to some degree) accessible to humans. Natural rights means the idea that this natural law indicates that specific (usually human) subjects have certain capacities and obligations.”262 As a result of definitions similar to this, indigenous ideas of sovereignty, even within the structure of the idea of a nation, are based on “relationship with land” as opposed to being about control over the land and the nonhuman.263 And as the second part of the quoted definition points out, part of sovereignty based on natural law is a responsibility to the nonhuman inhabitants of the land being considered, which in the case of indigenous native Americans is founded on cultural understandings of what living with nonhuman beings means.264 However, the desire or necessity to live a sovereignty that incorporates needs of and has responsibility towards the nonhuman environment is always in opposition to the standard Western understandings of nation and national sovereignty.265 If the American military is willing to bury Agent Orange in shallow holes that will inevitably lead to leakage into the land and water of Korea and Japan, it is clear that the American military does not operate with a conception of natural right or law in mind and likewise does not view Korea and Japan as possessing these forms of sovereignty that would protect the nonhuman environment as part of its participation in the sovereignty of the nations that exist on that specific land. I am not arguing that Korea or Japan necessarily functions under a similar concept of sovereignty as native American or other indigenous peoples do because I do not believe that is evidence by the films I am analyzing in this chapter and because I do not have the extensive knowledge of legal code that would be needed to understand those laws, but I am 262 Samuel Piccolo, “Indigenous Sovereignty, Common Law, and Natural Law,” American Journal of Political Science 00, no. 0 (2023), 2. 263 Piccolo, “Indigenous Sovereignty,” 2. 264 Piccolo, “Indigenous Sovereignty,” 3. 265 Piccolo, “Indigenous Sovereignty,” 7. 156 arguing that the American military’s complete dismissal of Korea and Japan’s right to have a livable environment is an affront to some form of ecological sovereignty. Whether or not Korea or Japan’s governments enact policy to protect the nonhuman environment is a different matter, but the ability to consider such legislation relies on living humans and an environment that can sustain that life, and in The Host and Shin Godzilla the American military is directly in violation of continuation of life because they propose to use pollutants that would cause mass environment uninhabitability—for humans and nonhumans alike. While the ultimate definition of sovereignty may be complicated, there is one aspect of it as a functional concept that many theorists have agreed on: the inextricability of it from violence.266 Deciding on who gets to make the final choice of a solution in response to the monsters is deciding on who gets to enact violence, whether it be the American military or domestic forces. And in deciding on who gets to employ violence, it necessary to think about what rights the concept of sovereignty grants in terms of a livable environment as a result of specific violences. In their own desire to kill the monsters in The Host and Shin Godzilla, it is also true that Korea and Japan are not exempt from this violent sovereignty. The monsters infringe on human sovereignty and therefore must be killed. But while the monsters would have made livability for humans difficult, the American military solution to those monsters would make the environment unlivable for all, human and nonhuman alike. And, of course, the monsters would not exist if it were not for America’s dismissal of Korea and Japan’s environmental sovereignty in the first place. In the remainder of this chapter, I will discuss the significance of the monster movie genre as a tool that has been used in East Asia to critique 266 Violence in sovereignty is clearly addressed in Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life by Giorgio Agamben, but this idea is also drawn from the works of Deleuze and Guattari and Lyotard on the topic of sovereignty. 157 American military’s disregard of a livable environment for those in the region, and I will specifically discuss how portrayals of the American military in The Host and Shin Godzilla are critiques of disrespected environmental sovereignty. Narratives of Negligence and Control In The Host and Shin Godzilla, the nations of Korea and Japan are permeated by foreign influence from start to finish with a distinct lack of internal agency able to be exercised over protections of environmental sovereignty. The origin of the monsters, the choices of how to handle the monster situations, and the plan for a final solution are all predicated on American influence. While non-military Americans do exist in Korea and Japan, they are few in these films and ultimately it is the American military that occupies the visual filmic space most dominantly, becoming the signifier for America as nation.267 The choices made by the American military in both films suggest that: 1. America does not care about destroying the livability of the environment in Japan and Korea for those who must stay there, and 2. America sees the governments in Korea and Japan as weak in comparison to themselves and thusly unable to be trusted to handle disasters, which is another subversion of sovereignty. In this section of my chapter, instead of focusing on the failures of the domestic government as I did in the last chapter on disaster cinema genre, I will be focusing on the stripping of sovereignty from Korea and Japan, especially regarding the possibility of maintaining a relationship with the nonhuman environment. Despite the incompetence of 267 Lee, “바이러스의 살육성,” 194. While emphasizing the legacy of 3/11 in their work, Lee also notes the important theme of the American military. Some questions can be considered to unravel the intricacies of America’s role in these two films as well as America’s role in history that led to that filmic portrayal: How explicit or ambiguous is the judgement placed on America’s actions in these two films? Are they evil or good, neither or both? What would these films look like if America (expressed as a looming nation and as individuals) was absent? How is absence versus presence significant? 158 domestic governments being a major factor in the plots of Shin Godzilla and The Host, the solutions America offers as a response to the monster attacks are not endangering governmental structures of power or responding to incompetence with solutions that would better equip the nations to handle monsters in the future. America’s solutions, rather, endanger the livability of the nations’ environments, threatening complete contamination, and thereby undermining the natural rights of environmental sovereignty that should consider the long-term flourishing of humans and nonhumans alike in Korea and Japan. In the following section I analyze moments from The Host and Shin Godzilla chronologically as they happen in the film to highlight the progression from the birth of the monsters caused by America’s pollutions to the violence that America posits as ultimate solution. The Host begins with a reimagining of the real event in which chemicals from an American military morgue were illegally disposed of down standard drains and eventually ended up flowing into the Han River.268 In the film version of the event, the scene starts with the American mortician surveying a slew of glass bottles arrayed on the metal counters of the morgue and saying that he “hates dust more than anything,” suggesting a cleanliness standard that is high, but also specific to his own proclivities. He is also implying that the Korean employee he is addressing has somehow failed in living up to this specific standard of cleanliness. He then goes on to tell the Korean employee to dump the chemicals in the bottles down the sink drain, which is of course a request met with resistance from the Korean employee. They have an entire conversation in which both acknowledge that the formaldehyde will go into the Han River, but the morgue director insists on the dumping regardless. After this conversation, the American obsession with the dust on the bottles seems misplaced, and a bit ludicrous, since 268 Wallace, “Who’s the Monster?” 2006. 159 he is fine with polluting the river, however this contradictory behavior shows the significant perception of America as a people concerned with their own proclivities will simultaneously being negligent of negative effect on others. In other words, the morgue director is offended by the dust on the outside of sealed bottles because he can see it, but he is not offended by the idea of making Korea’s water less livable because he is not Korean, and he will not see the pollution in the river. As the scene ends with the Korean employee dumping bottle after bottle into the sink, the camera pans across a view of the table filled with empty bottles, seemingly going on forever until the shot begins to fade and merge with a shot of the Han River coming into focus, with the last traces of the bottles visible overlayed on the rippling water. By beginning with this event, the film situates America’s role clearly as one of negligence and self-interest that views themselves as the authority over the Korean nation while simultaneously engaging in actions that are counter to what is best for the nonhuman environment. Shin Godzilla does not start with America embodied and actively polluting in the way The Host does, but from the beginning the influence of America’s occupation of Japan is an underlying current that effects the choices made about dealing with the monster that has appeared. When the Japanese ministers and government officials meet to discuss what to do about the monster (once they accept that it is a creature and not some innocuous water vent), the option of extermination is the most supported—rather than live capture or simply driving it away. However, the issue of being able to achieve extermination is a snag in the plan. The availability of weapons strong enough, and of individuals trained to use them, in Japan is a significant problem in the eyes of the characters in the film and this difficulty is contingent on the history of America’s military agreements with Japan in and after 1945.269 Not only are the 269 For an extended analysis of the events during this time period when Japan and America were establishing treaties about war, see Nick Kapur’s 2018 book Japan at the Crossroads: Conflict and Compromise after Anpo. 160 government officials in Shin Godzilla unsure if they have strong enough weapons to combat the monster, but they are also unsure if they are even allowed to attack the monster at all due to the US-Japan Security Treaty. The question becomes who has the legal right to use lethal force on Japanese land and what, if any, permission is needed from the American military. Though Japan legally does not have an army, or at least nothing classified by that term, they do have a Self Defense Force and in Shin Godzilla it becomes an ongoing dialogue about if they can use it and to what degree, even though the target is not human. In other words, Japan’s ability to exercise a sovereignty that would take into consideration nonhuman residents is contingent on America’s approval. While the treaty with America and the Self Defense Force has changed a good deal since 1945 in reality, Shin Godzilla imagines the run-in with a giant monster in the film’s diegesis as the first time the Japanese prime minister has had to use the military in an act of force since WWII. Even without an American body in the meeting room with the Japanese officials having these conversations, the influence of America is felt in every action, or lack of action. Once the monsters in both The Host and Shin Godzilla make landfall, as opposed to just staying in the water, the interference of America’s military intensifies. The monster’s first attack on land in The Host is on civilians relaxing along the Han Riverbank. An area known for its social leisure offerings and almost always crowded on the weekends, the areas along the Han River are an environment that people living in Korea go to experience a livable, and enjoyable, time with the natural world where there is sun and water and grass. In The Host, in contrast, the bank of the Han River becomes a place of violence and fear because of the American military’s polluting actions. As the monster lopes ashore, all the humans flee the scene, screaming, attempting to run as far away as possible from the aquatic creator. But while others make their escape, a white American man runs towards the creator instead, yelling that someone needs to 161 help. Seemingly a heroic sentiment, the context of the scene makes his actions seem contradictory, much like the morgue director. This lone man’s desire to rush in is clearly foolhardy and dangerous, and it implies that America’s heroism is out of touch with the reality of the situation—that is not even to mention the fact that America caused the monster’s birth in the first place. As viewers find out via a newscast later in the film, the American man loses an arm when he ultimately gets pinned down by the monster, but his story does not end there because it turns out that he is a member of the American military. This small detail of his employment is another factor in the film that illustrates the pervasiveness of America’s occupation of Korea’s environments. Military personnel being casually present The Host also reinforces the idea that Korea is not post-war because an official member of the military can be found so casually existing in leisure spaces. In the early 2000s many of the Americans in Seoul would likely be military, as this character is, and his presence as a wannabe hero (who ultimately does nothing to help anyone) is an example of America attempting to control situations in nations they see themselves as having power over while really being the cause of breakdowns of environmental sovereignty that allow for monsters to be born. To go back to our titular American hero, he appears in the news not only to be recognized for his heroism, but also to be an example for the American military to broadcast the existence of a viral infection supposedly caused by coming in contact with the monster. The virus is used by the American military to take control of the area around the Han River for “decontamination” and to take control of the population by detaining those who had been at the Han River when the monster came ashore. When asked to provide further details, however, Korean officials, medical staff, and reports say that “without the approval of the United States” they are unable to share information. As the film plot progresses, the Korean news begins to report that there is doubt 162 from the US that Korea is capable of properly quarantining the potential victims and keeping the virus in check. When the above mentioned individual American hero is reported to have died from the virus, the American military uses his death to claim they have the right to engage direct intervention in the face of Korea’s incompetence and take over all further efforts at extermination. In truth, there is no virus. This is revealed by a white American doctor who frankly looks like a pasty skinned villain as it is, but he also delivers this news with seeming amusement despite the fact that people have been killed by the monster or have been injured by being experimented on by Korean doctors under the belief that there is a virus. Much like the initial dumping of embalming chemicals, the management of the virus control is another case of Korean people feeling forced to do bad things to their own people and environment at America’s behest. And, again, America’s actions seem to be almost maliciously negligent in terms of consider the long-term ramifications of their actions, focused more on keeping their own control over the nation of Korea rather than thinking about the sovereignty of Korea’s living beings. Similarly, in Shin Godzilla once the monster comes on land in Japan the US meddling begins immediately. As mentioned above, it is true that the Japanese government expects this to some degree, as they themselves are unsure of where their power ends and America’s begins in terms of violence, but America’s involvement quickly extends beyond simple questions of military might. Although the viewer is not privy to the conversation directly, the prime minster of Japan indicates when talking to his cabinet members that the American government is making many demands about the handling of the monster situation, which the prime minister implies is typical of America. We get some sense of what types of demands these may be because the Japanese scientists also have a conversation where they say that most of their samples of bodily fluids from the monster have been taken by the American military, leaving the Japanese experts 163 little to work off in terms of determining what type of creature the monster even is. Once again, the sovereignty over relationships between human and nonhuman beings that Japan would in theory have under natural law if they chose is negated by America’s insistence on taking control away from the nation in which the monster has appeared. This control over scientific information as a means of denying Japan environmental sovereignty goes even deeper, though, because as the film progresses it is revealed that America knew all along about the nuclear waste that gave birth to the monster and about the scientific possibility of its birth. It comes to light later in the film that 60 years ago, non-regulation disposal of nuclear waste went into the water off Japan’s coast. Shots of the barrels are shown with them gathered on the ocean floor, some whole but some broken in half or cracked and leaking their contents out, and some, seemingly bitten into. Again, the USA already knew about this before the monster appeared, but when they finally let the Japanese government in on the situation is also when they inform the Japanese government that they named the creature “Godzilla”; in this timeline, Japan is not even in control of naming their own monsters. America having come up with a name and profile for the monster infers that America already knew far in advance about a potential monster before it happened in Japan and the fact that they neglected to inform Japan shows a complete lack of concern for Japan’s ecological balance and environmental livability because even aside from the monster itself there is also the issue of fishing waters being heavily polluted, for example. In the narrative diegesis of the film, the Department of Energy in America had hired multiple scientists to research the dumped waste and the phenomenon of a monster being birthed from it. Of most note is Goro Maki, the main scientist who predicated Godzilla’s appearance, a biologist who worked for US nuclear companies and blamed both America and Japan for allowing pollution from nuclear materials to lead to the death of his wife. Because of Goro’s 164 perception that neither nation had good practices of environmental sovereignty in mind that would have protected human and nonhuman alike, he hid his data about Godzilla for a long time so neither nation could make further irresponsible nuclear choices. Despite being the cause behind the birth of these monsters in the first place due to their environmental negligence, the American military concludes in both The Host and Shin Godzilla that the nations of Korea and Japan are incapable of handling the monster in a way that the US approves of. As a result, America asserts their military influence and tells—rather than asks— Japan and Korea that they will personally be taking care of the monsters’ annihilation. In Japan, this will take the form of dropping an atomic bomb on Tokyo, and in Korea the spraying of a deadly chemical called Agent Yellow throughout the streets of Seoul because it supposedly kills viruses. Both situations are traumatic repetitions of the disasters of war that continue to reverberate in the contemporary moment. The real slow violence of historical radiation and Agent Orange pollution poisoning the land, animals, water, and people in Japan and Korea becomes actively attributed to America via the military’s choices to repeat their past transgressions against environmental sovereignty in the narrative diegesis.270 Further, both of these films portray America’s approach to subduing the monsters as responses that would cause, arguably, even greater amounts of damage than the monsters themselves. America’s idea of “salvation” does not actually take into consideration the permanent damage to the environment in Tokyo and Seoul, and when the monsters were gone so too would the breathable air, the drinkable water, and the walkable city be gone. That is not even to mention the direct health effects radiation and military chemicals have on human bodies immediately and in the long run (and let us not forget, humans are a part of the environment, irreparably). 270 Nixon, Slow Violence, 2013. 165 The catalyst to America’s choice to drop a nuclear bomb—though perhaps they always planned to—is the discovery by Japan’s scientists that Godzilla’s DNA rapidly evolves to make the creature more powerful, and that it is also capable of self-replication reproduction. Upon hearing this, the American representatives that have been sitting in on the meetings with the Japanese researchers get up and leave the room together saying in English, “before that happens, using our nuclear wisdom is the only road to salvation for mankind.” While this may seem a logical statement in terms of threat negation, the implicit meanings within this sentence are indicative of a continued dismissal of Japanese sovereignty. Firstly, the Americans leave the room without addressing the Japanese science and military experts. This signals that America does not feel they need help from or approval of the Japanese officials (despite the monster being in Japan) to take care of the situation. Secondly, they only make statements in English. This language choice effectively shuts out many listeners in the room and there are no attempts made to start a discussion, even if a translator would be needed. Third and finally, invoking the good of “mankind” flies in the face of America’s actions ignoring what may be best for the nonhuman environment of the nation in question in terms of future livability. And of course, “salvation for mankind” does not mean salvation for Japan’s land or water or even monsters; in fact, the plan of dropping a nuclear bomb on Japan’s capital would clearly doom the entire nation to some extent, economically and environmentally. Shortly after this, following the conversation in which we as viewers learn that the American government is in fact planning on dropping a nuclear bomb on Tokyo, pictures of the destruction at Hiroshima briefly linger on the screen reminding everyone watching what that would really mean in terms of not only consequences but also in terms of repeated histories and traumas. 166 In response to this plan, the new prime minister (the previous one having died in a Godzilla-related explosion) says something to the effect of, “that country foists some crazy stuff on us.” This is a seemingly mild response, but it is not that he, or his fellow officials, lack outrage. Their outrage is overshadowed by resignation born from repetitions of violence and continued occupation. This line of dialogue alludes to the long history of America’s influence over Japan and the fact that the Japanese perception of the relationship is not always glowing positive. Indeed, America is just as likely to bury their unneeded chemicals on a nation's land as they are to offer military assistance when it is truly needed. In a similar vein, shortly after that dire conference call, one of the government officials suggests that contemporary Japan is akin to a subsidiary state to America, and his colleague answers with the statement, “the war seems to last forever.” As I posited in a previous section, applying the term post-war to Japan (and Korea) is worth reconsidering given the influence America continues to have over the nation, especially in the face of an emergency where military action is potential necessary. As is evident in Shin Godzilla, by remaining in occupation of Japan, or even just remaining involved closely with their politics, America extends the period of a semi-war state indefinitely to keep themselves advantageously placed to interfere with their own interest in mind. As previously mentioned, in The Host America’s excuse for taking drastic action is the inability for Korea to reliably contain a virus spread by the monster. Even though the virus is not real, the American military still uses it as an excuse to employ a noxious chemical substance called Agent Yellow to prevents viral spread. They claim that Agent Yellow is a biowarfare and virus counter measure, but it is also acknowledged by the announcements on the news that once deployed Agent Yellow will kill all living matter in the area. Even though it is not nuclear destruction as it is in Shin Godzilla or in the lineage of East Asian monster movies, the use of 167 Agent Yellow is still a war coded action, with the name obviously inspired by Agent Orange thereby bringing about the similar form of war repetition as is the case with America threatening to bomb Japan in Shin Godzilla. When it becomes evident that America will use a form of violence that will negate livability in Seoul, the Korean government is conspicuously absent, but the people of the city begin protesting in the streets. In the climactic conclusion of the film, the monster comes ashore and rampages into the mass of protesters who are attempting to block the vehicle that is going to emit Agent Yellow. Between the air filling with a thick yellow smoke and the monster loping hither and thither attacking anyone in sight, there is death and destruction everywhere. But amid the protesters rushing to escape and the monster coughing up dead bodies, there are American officials there to supervise the release of Agent Yellow. Amidst the chaos, the camera pans to two upright figures off to the side in black suits—both seemingly white men. Standing alone and apart, like two agents of death in their gas masks, one writes down notes furiously while the other records with a small camera. They remain professional and aloof as the Korean protestors begin coughing up blood and bleeding from their ears due to their exposure to Agent Yellow, observing these symptoms with a dispassionate eye for detail. This scene recalls when the usage of Agent Yellow is first announced and how unclear it is what the primary goal of the American military really is in this situation since they know that the virus is a fabrication. Yet, as these two figures stand apart as impersonal catalogers of doom, it becomes clear that Agent Yellow, much like Agent Orange, is experimental and America needed living bodies on which to test their tools of death. Seeing what the chemical does to the human body, it is only natural to assume that the effects on the air, water, land, and fauna will be equally dire. 168 As the American military’s so-called solutions make clear, the perception of them in these East Asian monster movies is that they have little to no concern for life. The monsters, by comparison, are hardly villainized in comparison. Although they pose a threat to human livability, they are also products of an environment heavily damaged by American military negligence which ultimately brings their monstrous form of rampaging violence right back around to being attributable once again to America. Conclusions How do the people in Japan and Korea go about their lives if the situations are so dire in terms of endangered sovereignty and environmental damage? A large part of it, as previously mentioned, has to do with the nature of slow violence. After a period of living with pollution and occupation, and the dangers those situations pose, people stop experiencing the violence of it in everyday life because it becomes a background noise. These nations are living with violence. In writing about the early Godzilla films and nuclear fear, Peter Brothers says they are “... a somber testimony of those experiences, continually reinforcing the feeling that nothing can be settled by armed conflicts and that potential destruction stills looms over a Japanese populace helpless to prevent it.”271 Despite being written in regard to films starting in the 1950s, this is also true for Shin Godzilla and The Host. In these two films, the creation of a disaster narrative and a monster narrative hinge on outside influence. Instead of it being exclusively about the people in the country where the film takes place, the imminence of outside influence is constantly looming. This sort of reality reflects the deeper insecurities about control and sovereignty that can be read 271 Peter H. Brothers, “Japan’s Nuclear Nightmare: How the Bomb Became a Beast Called Godzilla.” CINEASTE XXXVI, no. 3 (2011), 36. 169 into the history of Japan and Korea when dealing with America. Yes, the desire for military control over a discrete area and the people in it is undeniably the general understanding of sovereignty, but again I want to point out the material reality that lurks below that surface understanding: sovereignty hinges on environmental preservation because without livable land and usable water, a nation will eventually cease to exist. Land and water are essential for the continuation of a nation state primarily because of the literal need for a human population to exist to continue feeding into national projects such as capitalism and military, and likewise the endangerment of that sovereignty goes beyond national pride into survival instinct and the deep connection to natural resources.272 Without the control over those essentials, it can be theorized that a sense that all control is in danger may follow. This chapter, I must be clear, is not arguing that Korea or Japan legally recognizes their responsibility to the nonhuman environment and nonhuman beings in the form of natural law or natural rights, or any other form of sovereignty that is indigenous or even animistic. What I am arguing is that in the portrayals of these nations in The Host and Shin Godzilla, those concepts are not even given the chance to be applied in law or action because America’s interventions in Korea and Japan have negated the choice to observe a form of environmental sovereignty that respects nonhuman life or that prioritizes ecologies that are livable for humans long-term. As in these fictions, the real world environmental and political impact of America’s occupation reflects similar conflicts of interest that may not have allowed for a more environmentally inclusive version of sovereignty to form in today’s Korea and Japan. Realities of environmental law notwithstanding, the narratives of The Host and Shin Godzilla communicate a resonant 272 Inspired by Foucault’s concept of biopower as discussed in his work “The Will to Knowledge,” 1976. 170 discomfort with America’s willingness pollute other nation’s nonhuman environments. As the one female scientist in Shin Godzilla observes, “mankind is scarier than Godzilla.” 171 Coda Genres are fascinating in their inherent humanness because they originate from the fears of humans and reflect the varying emotions that are so common to humans that they become tropes and conventions. The genres I cover in this dissertation—horror, science fiction, disaster cinema, and monster movies—are built on a foundation of fear, deep rooted and dripping with anthropocentrism. Fear of what the future holds for humanity, fear of what has happened in the past on human societies, fear of the other in all its forms that are not human. There is nothing wrong with the anthropocentric nature of these genres because who else is ecomedia for if it is not for humans? But despite being for humans, that does not mean these genres cannot also be in service of helping humanity understand nonhumans better. I have argued throughout this dissertation that even genre media made for and by humans is capable of foregrounding nonhumans and foregrounding understandings of relationality in ways that disrupt paradigms of hierarchical ways of seeing and thinking. Whether it be on an individual level or a national level, the human element is responsible for the trauma that the nonhuman environment and nonhuman beings have experienced, and the pieces of ecomedia I discuss in this dissertation are examples of how genre media made by and for humans can take responsibility for that by witnessing nonhuman agency as it communicates itself through various modes of being embodied, being destructive, and being in need of care. As this is a project that engages with Korean and Japanese genres that have not been extensively studied through ecological frameworks, many of the points of analysis, connections to historical context, and interpretations of cinematic meaning are preliminary. There is still much more that needs to be done in terms of recognizing nonhuman agency and liveliness in mainstream genre ecomedia, and much more that needs to be done to develop the modes for 172 reading ecomedia texts that I proposed in this dissertation: the arboreal camera mode, the aquatic camera mode, and ecological readings of national temporalities and political landscapes as modes. The speculative genres have often been on the margins of East Asian cinema and visual media scholarship (as well as popular spectatorship), much like the nonhuman environment is often marginalized in our human consideration of what is worth paying attention to. Now, however, is a moment of time and material existence when speculation about the future has no choice but to consider the nonhuman environment. The genre of East Asian horror proper, especially, has struggled to escape the pigeonholing of simply being “extreme” and therefore not very culturally relevant, but this dissertation has shown that horror and other genres of the horrific are inextricable from the significance of the place and culture of their contemporaneous moment. As human society continues to cope with ecological decline, the genres of fear will be ever more relevant to the goal of understanding how the human psyche reacts to anthropocentric negligence and an endangered livability for the future. In her book Bonds of Love, Jessica Benjamin makes the statement that “knowing can be felt as communion, not conquest,” and this powerful yet so often ignored revelation puts into words the struggle of the nonhuman beings in a world that humans think is theirs.273 Research, too, is a form of knowing, and in the research in this dissertation the emphasis has been placed on knowing the difference between connection and conquest in human narratives about the nonhuman. Indeed, the goal of this dissertation was to bring attention to the connections between humans and nonhumans and the ways of knowing that genre media has provided in the Korean and Japanese contexts specifically. With this goal in mind, the creation of a multimodal 273 Jessica Benjamin, The Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and the Problem of Domination (New York: Pantheon Books, 1988): 192. 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Creator Jolivette, Lindsay Sutton Roberts (author)

Core Title Horrific environments: confronting the nonhuman in Korean and Japanese Ecomedia

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program East Asian Languages and Cultures

Degree Conferral Date 2024-08

Publication Date 07/11/2024

Defense Date 06/14/2024

Publisher Los Angeles, California (original), University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag east Asian cinema,Ecomedia,ecotheory,environmental history,genre media,horror cinema,Japan,Japanese cinema,Korea,Korean cinema,nonhuman agency,OAI-PMH Harvest,speculative fiction,visual culture

Format theses (aat)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Choe, Youngmin (committee chair), Bialock, David (committee member), Lippit, Akira (committee member), Park, Albert (committee member)

Creator Email giltathar@gmail.com,lsrobert@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-oUC113997L8T

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Legacy Identifier etd-JolivetteL-13190

Document Type Dissertation

Format theses (aat)

Rights Jolivette, Lindsay Sutton Roberts

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