Lovely little book! So interesting to see the original text, and Angles' afterword is a model of kaiju scholarship. Really good read! What were your thoughts?

Recent reading: Queer as Folklore, Postwar Japan, Other Minds, The Luminous Fairies and Mothra!

And there's no-one else like him in the whole Godzilla series!

White-collar comedy and Toho’s ‘Wholesome Color’ in Japan’s era of high economic growth Hannah Airriess To cite this article: Hannah Airriess (2023) White-collar comedy and Toho’s ‘Wholesome Color’ in Japan’s era of high economic growth, Journal of Japanese and Korean Cinema, 15:1, 1-18, DOI: 10.1080/17564905.2023.2209946 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/17564905.2023.2209946

Three characters from King Kong Vs Godzilla (1962/3). Two men in bright Hawaiian shirts standing on either side of their boss, a man in a safari suit holding a yellow umbrella.

Reading up on the salaryman genre to get my head around these three dorks!

Researching the time-honoured tradition of Kongsploitation. King Dong (2005), King Klunk (1933), Kinky Kong (2006), Queen Kong (1976)...

See also: www.atadamswriting.com/target-confi...

The cover of WAR FACES ON SCREEN - the title over a blurry pink-hued image of a man's face.

Text: "A critique of 'shoot and cry' sentimentality and anthropometric dehumanisation in drone movie Eye in the Sky (2015). ​ From the introduction: ​ This chapter focuses on two aspects of Eye in the Sky in depth, examining what it reveals both about drone discourse and about the role of the close-up of the face in the representation of war. First, Eye in the Sky is a bold example of what Israeli critic Ilan Pappe has called ‘shoot and cry’, a rhetorical strategy in which military murderers emphasize their own pain and regret to downplay the savagery of their own actions and, importantly, to exonerate themselves morally of these actions. The weeping drone operator is emphasized across a range of drone fictions: it is a figure which functions to supplant political and moral questions of the ethics of military violence with private reflections on drone operator trauma. Second, in stark contrast, the movie is a clear example of the ways in which dehumanization is built into drone visuality. This form of militarized machinic opticality synthesizes targeting, cartography, surveillance, and imperial racism, and its representation and reproduction in Eye in the Sky both reproduces its dehumanizing gaze and contributes to a technophilic fantasy in which drone visuality achieves total visual and informational transparency. The scene, that is, interleaves two visual registers, one that brings the characters’ humanity to the foreground, and another that works to eliminate it altogether."

Text: "Description How have images of the face been used to document and distort the phenomenon of war? Such is the question that drives this book, with the face forming a recurring - almost ubiquitous - motif throughout visual depictions of military conflict. At once interdisciplinary, transnational, and transhistorical, War Faces on Screen is organised into three sections. Section One examines representations of the face in war photography, illustrating how photographers have visualised the invisible violence of psychic trauma. Ethical and political concerns are at the forefront of each essay, from the advocacy work of portraiture, to AI tools capable of generating a range of aesthetically convincing yet potentially discriminatory images. Section Two focuses on the aesthetics of the cinematic close-up, drone vision, and how the selective digital colourisation of bodies and faces from archival footage works to impose a moral hierarchy. Section Three concludes the book with a focus on colonisation, decolonisation and defacement, extending earlier discussions of the imperial violence found in recent Hollywood films, where empathy is displaced from the ethnic other to the suffering Western soldier. Our final chapters chart how the face is central to articulating the meaning and sentiment of colonial and civil wars, with even seemingly progressive documentaries perpetuating unequal power dynamics and problematic notions of victimhood. Foregrounding the work of artists and practitioners, alongside theoretical frameworks, War Faces on Screen ultimately forms a radically innovative contribution to the study of image-making and war-making."

Two screenshots from Eye in the Sky: In the upper, a close-up on the targeting apparatus of a military drone in flight; in the lower, an image technician confirms the identity of a drone strike victim.

NEW PUBLICATION! My second essay this month on Eye in the Sky: "TARGET CONFIRMED: DRONE VISUALITY, DEHUMANISATION AND THE WEEPING SOLDIER IN EYE IN THE SKY" In War Faces on Screen, ed. Mani Sharpe and Katy Parry. Full info here: www.bloomsbury.com/uk/war-faces...

Cover art for Human Rights in the Age of Drones, edited by Muhammad Waqar Azeem: a schematic of a predator drone on a grey background.

Home Human Rights in the Age of Drones Chapter The Ticking Bomb Drone Strike: Drone Warfare and Emergency Ethics in Eye in the Sky Chapter First Online: 02 January 2026 pp 239–257 Cite this chapter

Abstract The ticking bomb scenario is a thought experiment that dramatizes a falsely unambiguous decision point—a bomb is ticking, and a prisoner is tortured until they reveal the information that can prevent the bomb detonating—to frame a misleadingly persuasive narrative that attempts to justify torture. This chapter examines Gavin Hood’s 2015 film Eye in the Sky, which frames a classic ticking bomb scenario with the key difference that the violent political technology that provides the solution is a drone strike. This film is explicitly staged as a debate about the morality, ethics, and legality of drone warfare, including a foregrounded consideration of collateral damage and human rights. I argue here that it also reveals the limitations of any critique or understanding of drone warfare that relies on the granular basis of emergency ethics. The framing of the story telescopes towards an inevitable use of force, which, although it has regrettable consequences, is represented as justifiable and ethically defensible. Like arguments justifying liberal interventionism that position imperial violence such as military invasions as virtuous defences of human rights, Eye in the Sky’s ticking bomb narrative positions drones as a military technology with the potential to save lives.

Eye in the Sky (2015) - a closeup shot of the surveillance camera mounted on the front of a military drone.

NEW PUBLICATION: "The Ticking Bomb Drone Strike: Drone Warfare and Emergency Ethics in Eye in the Sky", in a new book called Human Rights in the Age of Drones. I've written a lot on this film, and I'm proud to publish this concise version of my thoughts on it here:

link.springer.com/chapter/10.1...

A book on a table: Exterminate All the Brutes by Sven Lindqvist

Researching for King Kong 1933...

So glad you like it Derek!!

If you enjoyed Skreeonk's remarks about bisexual lighting in Godzilla Vs Kong, you may enjoy my essay that I wrote on exactly that! Here's a long read about colour, 'seriousness', and queer-coded lighting in the MonsterVerse: popmec.hypotheses.org/5186

I mean it's the dream

The Mighty Kong (1998)

An image of the DVD package for The War at Sea from Hawaii to Malaya. A screaming pilot and a fighter plane next to the text: "American Occupation Authorities confiscated all prints convinced the realistic special effects were real Pearl Harbor footage!"

Doing some background on Eiji Tsuburaya by watching The War at Sea from Hawaii to Malaya. Really interesting historical piece!

Bargain alert! In the Routledge end of year sale, my book POLITICAL TORTURE IN POPULAR CULTURE is reduced to a mere £120 hardback and £33.59 paperback! www.routledge.com/Political-To...

Looking for Christmas presents? Allow me to recommend Kill Box, my book on cultural representations of drone warfare, now only £85! www.bloomsbury.com/us/kill-box-...

BANANA OIL by Vaughn De Leath 1925 YouTube video by cdbpdx

Writing about Gigantis again: youtu.be/Qj4dZpqec5E?...

More Mothra plz

if youre trans and youre struggling to justify why you as a person should be allowed to take up space in the universe just consider that by your sheer existence you make a lot of the worst people on earth mad enough that they will die early deaths from stress. so thats a p good reason

Love songs from the swamp: Support indie publishing by grabbing your copy of DEVASTATION SONGS from @brokensleepbooks.bsky.social: www.brokensleepbooks.com/product-page...

Luminous Fairies and Mothra shipped!!

I know how you feel - whenever I finish a book, all I can see are the bits I want to change. From a reader's perspective, though, I think you've done a terrific job!

Very useful! Really helpful for understanding a lot of aspects of the movie. I'll be citing it a lot 🙂

If you want a model of how to do Kaiju scholarship, look no further than @chrisstewardson.bsky.social's great book on Ghidorah, the Three-headed Monster! Snappy & accessible, but wide-ranging and informed by deep knowledge of relevant historical, political and genre contexts. Highly recommended!!

Trying to find the article that Honda wrote about his time working in a comfort women camp - "Reflections of an Officer in Charge of Comfort Women", in Movie Art Magazine (perhaps Eiga geijetsu in Japanese). Does anybody have any insight into finding this article, or better, a copy of it?

About to watch Predator: Badlands & trying not to get too caught up in the hype. Here's my We Are The Mutants essay on the original, in case you missed it: wearethemutants.com/2020/12/03/i... #predator #predatorbadlands #demonology #monstermovie

Quick reminder that my episode of KAIJU COMICCAST discussing GODZILLA IN HELL is live now: open.spotify.com/episode/5nCQ...

Quote from Rachel Falconer, Hell in Contemporary Literature: Western Descent Narratives Since 1945 (2005), p.3: In classical katabasis, the descent to Dis or Hades is about coming to know the self, regaining something or someone lost, or acquiring superhuman powers or knowledge. The descent requires the hero to undergo a series of tests and degradations, culminating in the collapse or dissolution of the hero's sense of selfhood. In the midst of this dissolution comes the infernal revelation, or the sought after power, or the spectre of the beloved. The hero then returns to the overworld, in some cases succeeding, in other cases failing to bring back this buried wisdom, love or power from the underworld...

One of the things we talked about was katabasis, a template for stories about Hell which emphasizes the trials endured during the journey through Hell. Godzilla in Hell is a katabasis story! 3/

Screenshot from Altered States (1980). A grainy red and black image of multiple damned souls hanging from crucifixes.

Screenshot from Godzilla Vs Destoroyah (1995). A huge horned and winged monster rises from flames.

Screenshot from Ebirah, Horror of the Deep (1966). Teenagers party at a dance competition.

Screenshot from Tokyo SOS (2003). As Mothra flies into the sunset, her fairies make a cruciform sillhouette.

We had a really wide-ranging conversation about comics, kaiju, late night discovery of oddball movies, and the iconography of hell! 2/