Drift Compatible

What you get out of ‘Pacific Rim’ may depend less on what you think is cool than on how you understand revenge

The running joke around Pacific Rim is that the trailer makes reviews superfluous. If that shot of a giant robot swinging an ocean liner at a giant reptilian monster doesn’t coax you out to the box office, then how is a review going to change your mind?

Even reviewers (who might have felt that they had some stake in asserting the relevance of their work) seem to have bought into that logic. Writing in USA Today, Claudia Puig concluded that, “For those not fascinated by two hours of unabated robot vs. alien smackdowns, the movie holds little appeal.” Had she started the review with that admission, most of us could have stopped reading right there.

Puig’s judgment is roughly consistent with most of the negative reviews, though—and not a few of the positive ones as well. The gist is that director Guillermo del Toro has exposed an already pervasive rift in American culture. “Del Toro is one of those directors,” David Edelstein of Vulture pre-emptively declared, “who brings out the fanboys, ever eager to defend him […] from the slings and arrows of critics who just don’t get it.” There are, simply put, people who go in for that kind of thing and people who don’t, with no readily available bridge between the two.

How wide is the rift? Wide enough that the don’ts aren’t even aware of much of the terrain. Thus, two points of reference have consistently emerged in the reviews that pan Pacific Rim. One is Michael Bay’s Transformers franchise. The other is a Japanese trope, kaiju (meaning, roughly, “strange creature”) and, moreover, the kaiju films produced by Toho Studios during the 1950s and 60s, starting in 1954 with Godzilla. As the detractors would have it, Pacific Rim is a straightforward mash-up of those reference points, too self-aware to trump Bay’s narrative train wreck, but too serious to recapture the old Toho magic.

It’s little wonder, really, that people who see the movie in those terms come away thinking they’ve experienced nothing but 120 minutes of bluster. With a slight shift in perspective, though, it becomes possible to see Pacific Rim as a portal into the fandom to which it caters. That, in turn, affords us a rare opportunity to bridge that rift between those who care about robots and monsters, and those who don’t.

The pivotal moment arrives about midway through the movie. The key is revenge. Mako Mori (played by Rinko Kikuchi) has spent her life training to co-pilot a Jaeger, one of the hulking, steel behemoths humans have built to fight back an invasion of kaiju. Under normal circumstances, Jaegers require two pilots linked by a neurological sympathy called the Drift. The arrival of Raleigh Becket (Charlie Hunnam), a prematurely retired pilot, presents her with her opportunity, but their commander refuses to approve her for combat. Revenge, he says, is the wrong motive to take into the cockpit.

Most reviewers have interpreted that to mean primarily revenge for the death of Mako’s family, who were killed in a kaiju attack. A Drift-enabled flashback suggests that there may be more to it than that. What we see there is not the death of Mako’s family, but rather a child, young Mako, wandering alone through the deserted streets of her home city. One of her shoes has come off; crying, she carries it before her. A kaiju appears behind her, bulldozing its way through the skyscrapers. Mako flees down an alleyway to hide.

Even some of the reviewers who have had nothing good to say about the rest of the movie have acknowledged that it’s an effective scene. They’ve mostly regarded it as a aberration: the director’s native talent shining through the mishmash of an otherwise botched film. Yet, it’s possible—and ultimately more rewarding—to see it rather as the emotional core of the story. What it suggests, though never precisely articulates, is that the death of Mako’s parents is symptomatic of a deeper loss, that of the fundamental sense that what she hopes and chooses matter. She is incapable of even putting on a shoe without help; how could she ever match wills with a kaiju?

That this is the memory that seizes her and won’t let go suggests that the trajectory of Mako’s life has been set by the inconsolable helplessness of that moment. The revenge she wants is as much for the creation of that crushing self-doubt as it is for the loss of her family. Take that as the lens through which you view the rest of the relationships in the story, and Pacific Rim begins to look like a very different movie.

Walk a Mile in My Kaijus

What it becomes, at least in part, is an explanation of otaku culture. Roughly translated, otaku means “homebody” in Japanese slang, but it also connotes geekiness, and especially an all-consuming interest in anime (cartoons) and manga (comics). No less revered an authority than Hideo Kojima recently pronounced Pacific Rim “the ultimate otaku film that all of us had always been waiting for,” but it might be just as accurate to say that it’s a movie about otaku as that it is as a movie for otaku.

To that end, the script is threaded with acknowledgements of otaku culture. Two in particular are significant here. The first is a character, the reckless scientist Newton Geizler (Charlie Day), who is introduced early on as a “kaiju groupie.” That designation ties him back to the film’s opening sequence, an expository montage narrated by Raliegh Becket. In rapid order, Raliegh recounts the arrival of the kaiju, the development of the Jaeger program, and the turning tide of war. Once humanity begins to win, the kaiju cease to move people at the level of fear alone. They turn into a pop-culture phenomenon, their images appearing on television shows, as lines of action figures, and (this is that other significant acknowledgement) on the sides of sneakers.

Strictly speaking, that transformation of the kaiju threat into pop culture doesn’t impact the story all that much. Thematically, though, it does just what Raliegh’s narration does for the rest of the movie, introducing the major elements while glossing over significant details in order to drop us into the heat of the action. We know that there are “kaiju groupies,” the Pacific Rim equivalent of otaku, but we don’t really know what makes them tick. Which is, as it happens, closely analogous to the position of those in the audience who profess to not understand the appeal of a movie about robots fighting monsters.

When a fanboy defends Pacific Rim to those audience members by saying, “What did you expect?” the underlying issue is genre. An astute viewer will learn to expect certain things from movies that fall into certain genres. A clever filmmaker will learn how to use those expectations to advantage. A fair-minded critic will keep those expectations in mind when judging a genre film.

Things are rarely so simple. For one thing, genres carry their own history implicitly, and that often makes it difficult to understand just what’s at stake. Often, the very things that give a genre its endurance are hidden behind affectations that are, if not quite superficial, then at least secondary. It’s all too easy sometimes to mistake those affectations for the real motive force that keeps us coming back to our favorite genres. That’s as true for the otaku as it is for the neophyte.

Take, for example, what is probably the quintessential American genre, the Western. From an outside perspective, it would be easy to surmise that early Western fans were drawn to the six-shooters, the five-gallon hats, the campfire fraternity. The more glaringly artificial those affectations become, the more bewildering Western fandom seems to outsiders. The Western wear and the high-noon shoot-outs begin to stand between us and the themes that drove the genre from the beginning, rather than mediate them for us. One such theme is the question of how a society negotiates moral standards in the absence of an institutional authority. Behind the fringe and lassos lurk Nietzsche and the death of God.

Much of that gets lost in the historical process. That’s because genre functions a bit like a conversation that has drawn its audience gradually. Since very few of us were there for the initial exchange, we rely on the immediate context to help us build our sense of the topic under discussion. It’s to be expected that late arrivals will sometimes read those clues wrong, but it throws a chill on the entire conversation to say, “Look, you weren’t around for the issue that started this whole thing, so you don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.” The best you can do is help those who are interested play catch-up.

Prehistory

The traditional explanation for the kaiju genre is that it arose as an expression of the nuclear anxiety that reshaped Japanese society after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. That may well account for the monsters’ popularity and unique development in Japanese culture, but it’s also possible to see intimations of the genre decades before Godzilla, starting with classical Hollywood’s earliest forays into stop-motion animation.

You can trace that lineage through a 1953 movie called The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms. It centered on the reawakening of a fictitious dinosaur, Rhodensaurus, and the beast’s subsequent rampage through New York City. Created and animated by the widely influential visual effects artist, Ray Harryhausen, the Rhodensaurus has been cited as a direct influence on Godzilla, not least of all because a nuclear blast awakens both.

Keep going, though, and you’ll find that Beast’s producers, Jack Dietz and Hal E. Chester, had themselves been influenced by the re-release of the 1933 film, King Kong. There was even a direct link between the two productions: Harryhausen had trained under Willis O’Brien, the effects artist responsible for the original Kong. O’Brien, in turn, provides a handy through-line to the genre’s cinematic genesis, having also masterminded the stop-motion dinosaurs in what is arguably the earliest giant monster movie, a 1925 adaptation of Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World.

In many ways, The Lost World and King Kong fit the kaiju mold, but that complicates the nuclear explanation, since both films were released well before the Manhattan Project. Two elements remain to unite those earlier films with their post-War descendents. The obvious one is a focus on giant, rampaging monsters, but that’s the genre affectation. If you want to understand the appeal of the kaiju movie, you have to look beyond its giant apes, flying turtles, and acid spitting aliens. More often than not, what you find there is a city.

There are exceptions, of course, but the most popular kaiju films have always centered on major cities. In The Lost World, it’s London; in both King Kong and The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, New York. Godzilla himself has destroyed sections of Tokyo on no fewer than 28 occasions, and the obsessive level of detail that went into sets designed solely for onscreen destruction speaks to the city’s centrality as part of each film’s vision.

On the one hand, there’s a simple explanation for that. Cities make immanently cinematic locales for mayhem. There is, however, a more complex explanation involving a sequence of developments that converged in the early 20th century to make the kaiju genre possible. One was the rise of a new medium, cinema, and especially the advances in technique that would allow O’Brien and Harryhausen to experiment with animating three-dimensional models. That came later on, though.

Before cinema, there was a major cultural shift, the rise of the modern industrial city. In his admirably succinct historical survey The City, Joel Kotkin places its first stirrings in nineteenth century England, culminating in the ascension of London to the urban epicenter of the Western world. “By the 1850s,” he writes, “signs of the new order were evident everywhere in British cities: looming railway bridges, vast tunnel systems, sprawling factories. Gradually, some began to sense something monumental was afoot.”

What initially struck us with monumental awe soon gave way to the apprehension that we have created something monstrous. As our cities mounted around us, we sometimes found ourselves haunted by the notion that we now lived in habitats built to a more than human scale. At about the same time, paleontology was expanding our knowledge of extinct species of megafauna, and the two conspired to give primitive gigantism a claw-hold on the imaginations of science fiction writers like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Particularly as museums began to exhibit reconstructed fossil skeletons, dinosaurs suggested the sort of beast that might better fit the scale of the city.

Which brings us back to Pacific Rim. When Mako looks out from her hiding place to see her kaiju moving across the mouth of the alley, what we’re catching is a glimpse back to the primordial archetype of the genre. Nuclear anxiety would come later, likewise tied to urban life by the memory of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In the beginning, though, there was dread of the city itself, and the expression of that dread in the vision of a colossal monster moving through its streets

Fighting the Hurricane

When you take the long view, the inherent interest of a genre rests in the question of how it resolves the underlying problems that motivate it. To the extent that it is a genre, the answer must be: progressively. The Godzilla franchise, for example, presents a sequence of makeshift solutions to the problem of rampaging kaiju, but none stick in the memory quite so vividly as the destruction—which is, in its own way, a vicarious solution to monumental urbanism.

For the kaiju themselves, though, the most obvious answer is the one posited by the title of the 1968 battle royale, Destroy All Monsters. Toho intended the movie to mark the end of Godzilla’s run, but the following year he was back in All Monsters Attack, Toho’s first kaiju film produced specifically for children. The kaiju genre had clearly worked itself to exhaustion. To thrive, it needed innovation.

That came largely as the result of another genre of Japanese sci-fi. Roughly parallel to the growth of the kaiju genre, artists and writers fascinated by the concept of humanoid automatons had been producing manga about heroic robots. While kaiju ruled the theaters until the end of the 60s, the robot genres developed more gradually on the printed page. One of the early standouts, Tetsujin 28-Go, made its first appearance only two years after Godzilla, but didn’t make the jump to television until 1963.

In the early 1970s, Tetsujin creator Mitsuteru Yokoyama, shook things up with the creation of a new genre of robot story. The pattern was set by Mazinger Z, a manga about giant robot that was piloted rather than remote-controlled or (like Osamu Tezuka’s Astro Boy) semi-autonomous. The popularity of vehicular robots, called mecha, grew throughout the 70s, reaching a fever pitch with the television debut of a serialized space opera called Mobile Suit Gundam.

Gundam set the format for nearly everything that followed, not only by establishing certain genre affectations but also by demonstrating that the genre could approach its stories with a measure of adult seriousness. Somewhere between medieval armor and ultra-modern tank, mecha lent themselves to stories about war, and many of the canonical examples of the genre blended pure action and anti-war meditation into a contentious, sometimes self-defeating mix. Others hybridized the genre by casting about for non-human antagonists built to the same scale. Many settled, naturally enough, on the waning kaiju genre.

Which brings us back to the question of what makes the combination so appealing, so enduring. On a very visceral level, it’s that the mecha provides a coeval challenge to the urban dread embodied by the kaiju. We live in a monumental—not to mention, monumentally indifferent—habitat better suited to monsters, but the mecha allows us to respond in kind. Pacific Rim’s Raliegh Becket sums it up at the end of his opening narration: mecha like the Jaegers let you fight the hurricane. They let you win.

So much for the appeal. The nagging question that remains is this: do mecha correspond to anything in our experience? If, after all, kaiju embody an undercurrent of dread we feel about our very real cities, it would be nice if our answer to that dread had some substance to it as well.

Maybe—but that ambiguity may also be a major reason the genre endures well into the 21st century. It allows creators the latitude to explore a broad range of possibilities in the mecha conceit, from the historical and political clash of civilizations in Escaflowne, to a Kabbalistic meditation on embodiment in Neon Genesis Evangelion. The permutations may not always be dignified or even terribly coherent, but they do allow creative thinkers to push the genre into previously unexplored territory.

Plus, they look cool.

Otaku Cool

Hasn’t that always been the first and last line of defense? Kaiju are cool. Mechas are cool. Kaiju fighting mechas? The math is simple.

If that sounds like I’m doubling back, let me put it into context. Cool is not merely a matter of taste; it’s a matter of attitude. Cool is the heat index of your response to situations that might drive someone else to extremity. Cool is the Man With No Name remaining unflappable in the face of torture. It’s Han Solo refusing to go soft when Leia confesses her love. It’s Cool Hand Luke accepting challenges he’s almost bound to lose because the alternative is oblivion.

Which is to say that cool is also a subterfuge, a matter of hiding what any normal person would feel. The early strides made by the Jaeger program in the opening moments of Pacific Rim allow the battered population to re-imagine the kaiju as cool, but that’s an elaborate display of bravado. The fear remains, submerged just below a veneer of geeky enthusiasm. Otherwise, we’d be hard-pressed to call anything as resolutely nerdy as kaiju-branded sneakers cool.

The implicit message is that monsters are fashion, and who fears fashion? Certainly not Hannibal Chau, the black market dealer in harvested kaiju parts, played by del Toro stalwart Ron Perlman. The first clear shot we get of Chau begins with his shoes, a pair of black leather brogues decked with overlapping gold bands, like the back of some armored reptile. Cool—or, at least, an otaku notion of cool—is Hannibal Chau.

Later on, Chau will lose one of those shoes, making him an unlikely counterpart to young Mako Mori. It marks him as one possible version of what she wants to become. Chau gets his revenge after the fact, dismantling the corpses of his monsters, so bolstered by his gaudy display of cool that he can afford to think of them as commodities. He is, at the same time, a completely manufactured personality, thoroughly severed from the main trunk of humanity. Even his name is an affectation, a cultural mishmash cribbed from his favorite historical figure and his second favorite Chinese restaurant in the Bronx.

That’s the nature of otaku. They build an aura of cool around genre affectations like the mecha and kaiju, and sometimes they take it too far, but you shouldn’t let that fool you. Behind those fascinations lurk the shadows of the modern age, even when the otaku has occasionally managed to push them out of mind. From time to time, we need to reconnect to those shadows, to remember what it’s like to face the monsters, as Mako does in her flashback, lest we lose our bearings.