Giant’s Body Found And Becomes Tourist Attraction

Hi, Mystery Recapped here. Today I’m going  to explain an episode from an American adult animated anthology “Love, Death &  Robots” called “The Drowned Giant” At the beginning of the episode, three scientists  drive to a beach while one of them named Steven narrates about a naked dead giant. The day  before, a massive storm had hit the sea which washed up a dead body of a giant to the  shore. The surprised local fishermen contacted the officials who at first refused to believe such  atrocious ne

ws. But as people began to visit the beach and return back with crazy stories, the  scientists decided to go see for themselves. And so, Steven and his colleagues, who thought  that everyone was just bluffing about the dead giant, now stand before him. A crowd surrounds the  corpse, scared to touch it before being absolutely sure that it’s safe. Steven’s colleagues guess  that the man weighs anywhere around eighty tons. Steven narrates that the vast proportion of his  features makes it difficult

for them to figure out his age, but looking at the giant’s defined  nose and mouth, he believes that he had been a young man with a modest temper. The three go  around the giant's body inspecting him. Steven sees a pool of water that had been collected in  the corpse’s palm where tiny fishes swim. Steven says that beyond the size of the giant, the  simple fact that he exists surprises him the most. He compares the giant’s existence to the crowd  on the beach and concludes that they are just imp

erfect and puny copies of him. As Steven looks  at the creature mesmerized, his colleague climbs on top of the corpse’s chest and waves towards the  crowd indicating that it is safe to come near it. The people run towards him while cheering and  climb on top. Some of them comment that the body is rubbery and bouncy. Children start playing  on his chest, trashing it with their shoes. Steven, however, doesn’t touch or climb on  it. He and his colleagues stare at the giant from afar while writing o

n their notes. As time  passes by, the people get enough of playing with the dead giants, and everyone returns home. After three days, Steven visits the beach again. Because of his growing interest in the giant,  his facility assigns him the role of keeping tabs on it. Steven claims that he wasn’t morbid about  keeping an eye on a dead person because, for him, the giant was more alive than the people around  him. He watches as kids play slide on the corpse’s chest, and some workers plan to butc

her his femur  bone. The corpse has become public property. The following day, Steven deliberately postponed  his visit to the beach until late afternoon, so no one would be around. When he gets there, the  corpse looks in bad form and has started to decay. A teenage girl sits comfortably on  the giant’s ear, using it as a chair. Steven notices that the giant’s face has a much  less youthful look than it was before. He assumes it is because of prolonged immersion in seawater  and tumefaction of

tissue. As a crab crawls out of the giant’s mouth, the scientist claims that  it won’t be long until he decays fully. Steven finally gets the courage to set  foot on the corpse. Atop his chest, he sees a sandcastle someone had built. Then, his  other arm comes into view, showing us that half of it has already decayed and whatever remained  of it has been taken away by people. Meanwhile, his cornea has become hazy and cloudy, which gives  his eyes a whirlpool effect. Steven looks at them, saying

that the giants’ suffering is less  tragic than this isolation that he is facing. The next time he visits the giant, both his arms  and one of his legs have decayed and been cut. Steven walks around looking at the corpse,  which had been vandalized by teens who spray paint insults on his body. He is reluctant to  witness the end of the magnificent creature, but the insults make him feel that the creature  is more human because it seems more vulnerable to him now. When Steven comes to the beach t

he  following day, he is almost relieved to see that the corpse’s head has been removed. Birds  eat its flesh as Steven watches it from afar. Without the head, the corpse looked less  human, which reduces Steven’s relationship with the corpse that he had formed. After that day, he doesn’t visit the beach for a few weeks. On his next journey, he witnesses that  any feature indicating that the corpse was once human has vanished. The only thing that remains is  the decaying gut of the once magnifi

cent creature. By now, the interest of the crowd in the giant has  expired. Months later, after the giant’s arrival has been forgotten, various pieces of his body can  be seen around town—especially his bones, which are used as decorations. While cycling one day,  Steven notices the giant’s skull lying abandoned. He believes that if he looks around the town’s  pubs, he will find mummified noses and ears as well. According to Steven, these decorations  convey the giant’s greatness better than Ste

ven’s memory of his bloated and decaying appendages. As for the giant’s genitals, it is shown that it had been cut off and placed in the freak museum  in a circus. Steven narrates that the apparatus occupies a whole tent to itself but is sadly  mislabeled as belonging to a whale. At last, the scientist says that the people who saw the  giant remember him as only a sea monster. However, for him, the giant is still alive, and he often  dreams of his resurrection. In his dreams, the giant strides

through the town picking up his  fragments on his return journey to the sea. The episode, although short, has a deep and  metaphorical meaning in every scene. The fans of the episode have interpreted it  their own way, but many believe that the narrator Steven, is the giant himself. Steven feels the  pain of the dead giant when no one else can. So, some fans think that steven and the giant  are the same people. The giant might be trying to communicate through steven. Moreover, the way  Steven de

scribes several stages of the decaying of the corpse in such detail makes one wonder  if he is the one going through the stages. The decaying of the giant’s corpse is also seen  as a metaphor for several things. The narrator, Steven, observes the decaying of the corpse very  closely at every stage. First, he sees the process that was supposed to happen, that is his body  decaying by the passage of time, then he notices people starting to amputate the corpse treating  it as a commodity. And the w

ay humans treat him poorly showed him the extent of consumerism and  exploitation that is considered normal in today’s world. As the story progresses, Steven begins  to question what it means to be human and when do we decide that we have lost humanity. Until the corpse had a head, he thought of it as a human just like him and the others  around him. In fact, he believed that the giant was more of a human than tiny creatures  like himself. However, after Steven’s sympathy towards the giant dropp

ed when he saw him only  as a mass of flesh. Throughout the episode, we do not know who the giant is or where  he came from, rather, “The Drowned Giant” focuses more on the contrast of Steven and  other people’s feelings towards the giant. In the book itself, J.G. Ballard concludes with  the detail about the giant’s appendage being displayed in a circus. This is to emphasize how  much the giant was humiliated, although being a greater existence than them all. It also denotes  human’s superficial

and exploitative nature. Moreover, his genitals were labeled to be of a  whale’s, and his bones were mere decorations for the people. Here, it is clear that the giant has  been completely stripped of his humanity. However, Steven describes the genitals and decorated bones  as the only things that convey how magnificent of a being the giant was. Although he loves and  remembers the creature more than anyone else, he believes that his memory of his decaying  body would have never conveyed his gre

atness as his preserved body parts do. The giant was just a myth before being washed up to the shore. People  experienced his arrival for a short while, but forgot about him soon, turning his existence  into a myth again. We humans, like the giant, will someday fade away and remain only  in the memories of the people we met. But eventually, those memories will fade  as well and we simply cease to exist. Subscribe for more videos like this,  turn on notifications, and leave a like to help the cha

nnel out. Thank you for watching.