The Drowned Giant (1st Season Love, Death, and Robots)

"The Drowned Giant" is the last episode in the cartoon anthology Love, Death, Robots produced for Netflix in 2019.  The eleven-minute animated short is the most interesting thing in the omnibus show.  (The other episodes, athough skillfully animated,, are brutal and inconsequential -- the stories end abruptly as if the plug was pulled for budgetary reasons.)  "The Drowned Giant" is based on one of J. G. Ballard's visionary and surreal short stories, published as science fiction, but transcending the genre.  The short film is animated in a photo-realist style with characters almost indistinguishable from live actors -- their faces are smoother and more impassive than real people and their beards and hair less irregular, but these figures move persuasively and the landscapes are all plausible as actual places in the world.  This hyper-real animation style enhances the surrealist qualities of Ballard's tale.  A colossal corpse has washed-up in a cove on the British sea-coast.  Like Gulliver among the Lilliputians, the local people swarm the corpse and climb all over it.  The dead body is about the size of a recumbent 15 story skyscraper.  A scientist, with a small team of colleagues, inspect the huge cadaver.  The protagonist, the bearded scientist, is struck by the corpse's beauty and marmoreal splendor.  Returning after a few days, the narrator finds that people have scrawled graffiti all over the flanks of the huge naked body and, someone, has amputated an arm.  Although the cadaver deteriorates to some degree -- it's flesh becomes discolored and its eyes are great milky pools -- the corpse doesn't really decompose (or, if it does, this isn't obvious) and there seems to be be no overwhelming stench.  (The sea birds don't peck the flesh to bits either.)  After a couple weeks, the head is missing and, later, the corpse is just a vast great torso with its limbs hacked off and hauled away.  Traveling through the town, the narrator sees that the villagers have installed huge bones over several of their pubs and butcher shops and, out in the country, he sees the vast skull of the thing propped up against a ramshackle barn.  The giant's penis tours the country but as the "pizzle" of a whale.  Soon the villagers forget that the giant reposing on the beach was in human form and, simply, imagine the corpse as some kind of vast, enigmatic sea beast.  The narrator envisions the giant restored to life and striding through the village collecting the pieces of himself and, on that note, the cartoon ends with a final tableaux of the sea and the huge bones resting in the surf.

I haven't read Ballard's story for 30 years and so can't remark on how close the film cleaves to his narrative (or, rather, situation).  The narrator speaks with rather, plummy and euphemistic diction -- he's like a Victorian explorer recounting something strange that he once saw in the jungles or the African savannah.  The tone of the narration, I think, is part of Ballard's thematic strategy and this conceit is translated into the cartoon.  The story resembles Gabriel Garcia Marquez's "An Old Man with Enormous Wings" in which the allegorical figure of Father Time washes up dead on a beach near Cartagena.  The interpretative question posed by the story, of course, is the meaning of the giant corpse.  In 1947, Martin Heidegger wrote an important essay, the so-called "Letter on Humanism".  I think the tale can be viewed in that light as an exploration of the meaning of "humanism" in the shadow of World War Two.  (We know that Ballard was badly traumatized by his childhood experiences in that War; this is established by his autobiographical novel, The Empire of the Sun).  The giant corpse of the beautiful young man suggests something like the decay of the Enlightenment to me, a theme as to the collapse of the idea of man as the noble measure of all things -- that is, nothing less than the disintegration of the Renaissance ideal of humanism.  But, of course, any number of other interpretations are probably equally valid and it's an error to tie a symbol too closely to any particular thesis.

An interesting aspect of the film is that the people in the town forget that a huge human corpse has washed up on their beach.  The event is too strange to comprehended within their belief systems and so the anomalous event is simply extinguished from human memory.  I recall reading once about a British man-of-war (or possibly a Russian ship) that bombarded a Haida Indian village near Vancouver in the early 17th century.  We know this event occurred from ship logs and diaries.  Many Indians were killed in the encounter.  But within a  couple of generations, the event was simply forgotten by the native people -- this is because the attack came from a source that they simply couldn't comprehend and the incident couldn't be assimilated to the Indian's understanding of history or the structure of the world.  And, so, it was eliminated from their memory.