Pacific Rim Goes Big

It really seems like Hollywood has something against the Golden Gate Bridge. Maybe it’s the classic NorCal/SoCal thing, or maybe Angelenos have an instinctive hatred of transit infrastructure. Whatever it is, at the time of writing this, two meteors, several assorted leviathans, and one sharknado have all taken a crack at the poor old GGB. Admittedly, the lanes are a little narrow, and the tolls a little steep, but surely a three-hundred-foot-tall alien would have more pressing concerns than FasTrak bills.

Nevertheless, in Guillermo del Toro’s 2013 film Pacific Rim, the San Francisco landmark is the very first casualty of a kaiju — a massive monster from the depths of the Pacific Ocean. It takes six days and three tactical nuclear missiles to bring down the offender. Its name — a truly inspired stroke of understatement — is Trespasser. Unfortunately, it’s only the first in a procession of increasingly fearsome monsters who proceed to torpedo beachfront property values around the globe. Humanity’s answer to the new threat? Mecha warriors called jaegers who can fend off the interlopers with a combination of martial arts and assorted weaponry including swords and plasma cannons.

If it sounds like a geekfest of epic proportions, it is — not just figuratively, but literally. The mecha and kaiju are both gigantic, towering hundreds of feet tall; one of the poster taglines used to advertise the movie was “Go big or go extinct.” In fact, because the jaegers are so large, the neural load of operating one is too great for a single pilot. Instead, two people, unified by a mental connection known as the drift,¹ pilot the jaeger together from a cockpit inside its head.

Mech pilots are a familiar science fiction conceit. But in Pacific Rim, they’re also part of a visual motif: fractal recursion. Like the Sierpinski triangle, or onions, the human pilots are nested within the humanoid jaegers, replicating their geometric form on a smaller scale. It’s like if matryoshka dolls were awesome.

The jaegers are the most obvious example of this phenomenon, but Yale professor Wai Chee Dimock also highlights del Toro’s self-identified preoccupation with a more everyday fractal — shoes.

Shoes are a familiar instance of [fractal recursion]: a slightly enlarged re-expression of us, copying both the physical anatomy of the feet encased in them and the emotional contours of the person walking on those feet.

Just as Ron Perlman’s Hannibal Chau sports ostentatious, glittering winklepickers and the young Mako Mori clutches a grimy Mary Jane, so too do the jaegers mirror their pilots’ personalities: the three-armed Crimson Typhoon is piloted by triplets, while former prison guards Sasha and Aleksis Kaidnovosky operate the appropriately brutalist Cherno Alpha. Meanwhile, the American jaeger is named after an ethnic slur, a subtle nod to the fact that Americans love ethnic slurs.² Cool!

For the film’s first fractal, though, one need look no further than the opening shot. As we float past points of light in a vast darkness, protagonist Raleigh Becket muses, “When I was a kid, whenever I’d feel small or lonely, I’d look up at the stars.” But those “stars” are revealed to be underwater particulate matter as Raleigh continues, “Turns out I was looking in the wrong direction. When alien life entered our world it was from deep beneath the Pacific Ocean.” Here’s a big fractal indeed — one alien world (outer space) visually contained within another (the ocean), which is in turn literally contained within the first; both alike in form (dark, difficult for me to breathe, etc.).

That misdirect is more than a visual gimmick. These repeated nesting-doll resemblances point at something deeper: an obsession with the relationship between inside and outside. And the slippage in the opening prefigures how Pacific Rim will continue to trouble the boundary between the two.

In Barbara Creed’s 1995 essay “Horror and the Monstrous-Feminine: An Imaginary Abjection,” she identifies the theory of abjection as fundamental in horror cinema. Creed writes that “the concept of a border is central to the construction of the monstrous in the horror film; that which crosses or threatens to cross the ‘border’ is abject.” For example, it’s horrific when the borders of the human body are violated by the emission of substances like feces, guts, and kaiju acid spit.³ The same goes for birth and death, both of which feature — to varying degrees — blood and holes.

Pacific Rim is not precisely a horror film in the same way as del Toro’s other works, in many of which other writers have noted the importance of abject bodies, but the film is still full of broken fractals. After Raleigh and Mako kill the kaiju Otachi in extremely epic slow motion, organ harvesters enter the corpse and realize that Otachi is pregnant. The infant kaiju then emerges, alive, and swallows Hannibal Chau whole. But in the postcredits scene, Chau cuts his way out from within, born again, like a super-stylish xenomorph.

Meanwhile, in the opening action sequence, Raleigh and his brother Yancy pilot Gipsy Danger off the coast of Anchorage, where the kaiju Knifehead (seriously, who’s coming up with these names?) tears open Gipsy’s cockpit and kills Yancy. Raleigh pilots the damaged jaeger back to shore, where it collapses, but when Raleigh drags himself out of the smashed cockpit, we instead witness a (re)birth.

This fractal nesting of birth and death — or rather, the repeatedly ruptured boundary between them — is crucial to Pacific Rim. When we look at it this way, is it really surprising that the kaiju don’t come from outer space, but are instead birthed from within our own planet via the “dilation” of an interdimensional breach?

“Trespasser,” it turns out, isn’t a stupid name at all. It’s actually kind of profound.

The ultimate example of boundary-crossing comes in the form of the drift — the futuristic neural bridging technology that allows two pilots to operate a jaeger in perfect unison. To do so, they must completely immerse themselves in each others’ memories and emotions. It’s a central plot point of the story, and a radical surrender of individual consciousness — as del Toro says, “they should be in love to drive one of these things.”⁴ Thus unified, our two leads Raleigh and Mako defy both race and gender boundaries to become a transnational hybrid hero.

International cooperation is a continual (and conscious) emphasis of Pacific Rim, whether it be the Pan Pacific Defense Corps or the Hong Kong-based Shatterdome. Early in the film, the United Nations takes a defensive stance and erects the colossal, supposedly impenetrable Wall of Life.⁵ The Wall is intended to replace the embattled Jaeger Program and protect coastal cities from unwanted tourists, but it takes less than two hours for a kaiju called Mutavore to smash through into Sydney.

The thematic resonance of this image is about as subtle as the wall-smashing. “Perhaps it is with glee,” suggest Jamie Uy and William Brown, “that a Mexican director pictures kaiju breaking with ease through the human-constructed wall designed to keep them out.”⁶ (They should have tried painting it black.)

In the same vein, Pacific Rim’s influences are decidedly multinational, ranging from the Japanese mecha and kaiju traditions to Anton Chekhov and Mexican wrestling.⁷ Upon release, the film was a financial disappointment in the States, but a smash hit in China, which became its largest market. Meanwhile, it initially received lukewarm critical response, dismissed as a shallow, crowd-pleasing entry in del Toro’s English-language oeuvre, as opposed to his more artful Spanish-language films. But later critical readings (including this one) challenge that division by elevating Pacific Rim as an object of artistic discussion. In this way, the film itself becomes a hybridized entity (a trespasser!) within the landscape of global media.⁸

There are more abstract boundaries, too. For example, the ever-topical divide between analog and digital, embodied most overtly by the resident action movie eggheads Newton Geiszler — a tattooed, kaiju-loving Charlie Day — and Herman Gottlieb, for whom “numbers are as close as we get to the handwriting of God.” When an attacking kaiju emits an electromagnetic pulse that completely disables state-of-the-art (digital) Striker Eureka, Gipsy Danger is the only jaeger left functioning, thanks to its Mark-3 (analog) core.⁹ Meanwhile, Gottlieb must abandon his precious numbers and place his trust in Geiszler’s hands-on approach — namely, drifting with a chunk of kaiju brain — which ultimately saves the day.¹⁰

Furthermore, from the audience’s perspective, the film viewing experience is its own kind of drift, merging our mushy animal brains with technological spectacle. As Uy and Brown put it:

Pacific Rim’s digital form anchors the film as an example of posthumanist cinema, thus furthering the idea that digital technology is itself a kind of kaiju-hyperobject that has arrived from another dimension, with which we might drift into new, posthuman becomings. . . . That is, cinema is Cthulhu come from another dimension to herald the end of humanity.

I know, right? Get these guys in the blunt rotation.

But whether drifting with a BluRay or a kaiju brain, there’s been an important leap here: the unsettling of a final division between human and extra-human. Idris Elba’s Stacker Pentecost suggests as much in his climactic (and, dare I say, certifiably electric) locker room hype speech: “at the edge of our hope, at the end of our time.” Our time — humanity’s time — is over. Instead, we’ve entered a new era of vast and alien forces. William Brown and David Fleming call this chthulucinema, derived from Donna Haraway’s idea of the chthulucene:¹¹ cinema that envisions a posthuman world.

Haraway argues that humans, if we are to have any hope of existing sustainably, must leave behind our time (the Anthropocene) and embrace “multispecies ecojustice.” That includes embracing “the more-than-human, other-than-human, inhuman, and human-as-humus” — drifting with the kaiju, as it were, towards what she calls “making kin.”

We need to make-with — become-with, compose-with — the earth-bound. . . . All earthlings are kin in the deepest sense.

In other words, we need to build bridges. And this movie does a lot of that, even if it also breaks a couple in the process.

Haraway’s ecological framework is particularly appropriate given the kaiju’s true origins. As it turns out, these guys didn’t hop on any old interdimensional exit ramp. They previously visited Earth during the Cretaceous Period, and they’ve been waiting for anthropogenic climate change to render the planet’s atmosphere conducive to invasion. So Pacific Rim’s apocalypse is not only coming from inside the house, it’s also slower and subtler than it initially appears, extending across geologic timescales beyond our grasp.

In this sense, global warming is just like the kaiju and the jaegers. They exceed comprehension, they baffle our puny senses; that is, aside from their most essential quality: they are all very big.¹² The catastrophic impact of humans on our fellow earthlings is staggering. Conceptualizing it requires us to reconsider not only our sense of scale, both spatial and temporal, but also our perceived separation between self and other.

No easy task. But therein lies the great, desperate hope of Pacific Rim: that we mere humans, in our profound togetherness, could magnify ourselves in fractal towers, multiplying into something more — titans that can suplex the end of the world.

There are things you can’t fight. Acts of God. You see a hurricane coming, you have to get out of the way. But when you’re in a jaeger, suddenly, you can fight the hurricane. You can win.

Pacific Rim ultimately ends (spoiler alert) like any good summer blockbuster: with the breach sealed and the kaiju nuked to oblivion. But, as we’ve established, this film is hardly content to abide by such neat arrangements. When Raleigh finally emerges from the ocean after the final battle (a kaiju in his own right), reborn from his escape pod, and takes his first breath, are we really to believe that this death/birth is any more final than the others? Chthulucinema, after all, harbors no such illusions:

In understanding that in some senses we are dead already, we learn to appreciate life; in refusing to die, we never truly live.

Or, as Haraway puts it:

We are all compost.

Scary, maybe — but so is the drift. When they attempt their first mind meld, Raleigh warns Mako not to get lost in her own memories. “Don’t chase the rabbit,” he says. “Stay with me.”

That just might be the whole point.

Big ideas for a movie about robots punching aliens. But then, Pacific Rim is all about going big.