Respect the Free Speech of the Apocalypse

Pacific Rim and How to Tell a Great Story with Zero Politics

Near the beginning of Pacific Rim, a nameless father and son search for treasure on a snowy beach. A wall of fog stands between them and the gray ocean. Their metal detector goes haywire, and a vast silhouette looms into view, a tower of steel in the vague shape of a human. It topples onto the shoreline as the father and son dive out of the way. From the wreckage stumbles a badly wounded Raleigh Becket (Charlie Hunnam), decorated Jaeger pilot, lately removed from a mech-suit battle with an inter-dimensional monster. Raleigh staggers onto the ground and collapses as the father attempts to aid him, the blood of his wounds luminescent against the snow.

It’s a beautiful scene, poignant even if you don’t know the full context, which is that Raleigh’s brother and co-pilot has just been ripped from their shared Jaeger and killed. The next time we see Raleigh, he’s back in Alaska, this time building what turns out to be a pointless seawall that can’t prevent the invading Kaiju from making landfall, but can apparently get workers killed during construction. We only get a few shots of a mournful Raleigh, but we have everything we need to believe he’s broken, all done in a few weather-beaten shots.

This all happens very early in Pacific Rim. Soon we’ll be off valiantly fighting the Kaiju on land, sea, and sky, under the command of Marshal Stacker Pentecost (Idris Elba) and surrounded by top-tier art direction and an attention to detail that you could be forgiven for believing had been outlawed in blockbusters when Disney acquired Marvel.

Pacific Rim came out in 2013, or roughly a lifetime ago in the realm of blockbuster movies. I hadn’t seen it until last weekend, and when I finally did, it felt like a dispatch from an alternate future of movie-making. Why, for example, did the CGI in this movie look so, so, so much better than that in Aquaman, which came out five years later and had a similar budget and a comparably star-studded cast? Is the answer as simple as “DC and Marvel don’t give a shit”? It might be, but damn, giving a shit about your CGI is easier than, say, taking the risk of telling a story with even a sprinkling of moral complexity.

The beauty of Pacific Rim mostly lies in its beauty. Guillermo Del Toro is in that rare category of directors who can get studio blockbuster money to do genre fare his own way (Denis Villeneuve and Alex Garland being among the few others). In this case, the sense of aesthetic giving-a-shit was overwhelming, even as Hollywood plot conventions put the story on glittering rails. Costumes, architecture, the Jaegers and Kaiju themselves—all rendered with a level of meticulous care that you now rarely see in big-budget movies. When Raleigh and his new co-pilot and nascent love interest Mako Mori (Rinko Kikuchi) embrace after the final battle, green dye squirts out from Mako’s abandoned life raft, an inhuman bleeding embellishing the warmly human triumph.

The main thing I look for in big-budget studio “genre” movies—the ones I know will most religiously follow narrative convention—are touches that simply don’t have to be as good as they are. Scientist Dr. Newt (Charlie Day) doesn’t have to go into the back alleys of Hong Kong and encounter a character as richly rendered as Ron Perlman’s Hannibal Chau, with his gold-scaled shoes and hidden shop full of Kaiju parts, but it does a ton of work in telling us that there’s a world outside of mech-suit hangars and Enterprise-esque command bridges. We don’t need to have Raleigh walking around inside Mako’s traumatic childhood memories—something he can do because of the neural bond between Jaeger pilots—but it’s a canny synthesis between the geological impersonality of mechs fighting Godzilla-like monsters and the intimate vulnerability of the humans inside the machines.

All of which is to say, I thought Pacific Rim banged. Judging by my Twitter mentions when I confessed I was watching it for the first time, many of you are rolling your eyes right now. Of course it banged! You’ve been saying that for almost a decade! It’s one of the best movies ever made!

I wouldn’t necessarily go that far, but it’s a strong contender for best Hollywood blockbuster of this century. And I say that partly because Pacific Rim knows exactly how interested it is in politics. Which is not at all interested. Not even a little bit.

Here is where I give some Vulgar Marxist caveats. Any major studio product that costs well into nine figures to make and earned over $400 million at the box office is part of the dreaded Culture Industry. Its politics is thus capitalism, or something. Everything is political, yada yada. The CIA wants you to watch Pacific Rim for reasons that will become clear if you scroll my Twitter timeline.

OK, with that out of the way, this is first of all not a movie that goes out of its way to crowbar in Important Issues. (I hate that I have to clarify this, but Important Issues actually are important—it’s just that narrative art does a disservice to that importance when it merely cynically and substance-lessly points at their existence.) There is perhaps some gender tension in Marshal Pentecost’s reluctance to let Mako, his adopted daughter, become a Jaeger pilot. It doesn’t last very long or amount to very much, presumably because the film realizes it doesn’t have much to say about it.

“Politics” in the sense that most people use the word is present in Pacific Rim only insofar as a coalition of UN representatives from around the world are shown telling Marshal Pentecost that the Jaeger program is being shut down in favor of the seawall. The seawall doesn’t work, and everyone should have known it wouldn’t work. Politicians are thus stupid and malignant, unlike the dedicated warriors manning the Jaegers. Our heroes retreat away from all this bullshit to a final redoubt in Hong Kong, where they still have enough money to operate their giant mechs and we don’t ever hear from those pesky politicians. I guess you could say there’s a whiff of fascist militarism here, but Pentecost and his comrades have zero interest in power. They just want to fight the monsters.

And that’s what they do. Once Raleigh’s past traumas are established and he’s done some Top Gun-esque tussling with his compatriots, we spend most of our time fighting the Kaiju. These battles are gorgeous and carefully choreographed. They make up the meat of the movie, as they should. There’s no pearl-clutching over the fact that defeating Kaiju lays waste to entire cities. Maybe there should be, but again: This is a politics-free zone. Politics gets in the way of, as Pentecost puts it in a memorably corny speech, “cancelling the apocalypse.”

Making the stakes of your story “we need to save humanity and earth from total destruction” opens a path that can easily swing wide of the real issues afflicting our real lives. It’s not the most original path, since it’s one patterned with the footprints of so many mass cultural epics, but it can get you where you want to go. Del Toro’s Kaiju story gets there. Pacific Rim doesn’t pretend it can save our world; it just tells a fun story about some cool people trying to save theirs.

Taking this path can be a dodge, and maybe it is even in the case of a movie this good. You may be tempted to roll your eyes when Hunnam’s voiceover asserts that the Jaeger program was a transnational effort that overcame “old rivalries,” thus wiping away basically all of history. But it’s easy enough to believe this was the case in the universe of the movie—these monsters, after all, are very big.

I wish more stories that don’t really have anything to say about politics or issues or whatever would avoid trying to do so. Leave that heavy and (when done well) worthy lifting to more complicated art. Let Pacific Rim be your lodestar if you just want to make something beautiful and badass. Follow its light and let yourself battle some very big monsters, without having to remind us that Orange Man Bad.

Calvin and Hobbes Corner

We’re headed to The Yukon, if only we can figure out where that is:

I have a confession: I’m very restless. Depending on how you define “moving,” I’ve done so six or seven times since college, which I left less than a decade ago. Two of those moves were to different countries. So I can relate to Calvin’s impulse to get the heck out of dodge, and the way doing so causes you to lose yourself in hectic fantasies. Of course we need the space helmet. Why are we even doing this if we don’t have the space helmet?

Based on flora, fauna, seasons, and default probability, I tend to assume Calvin is from Watterson’s native Ohio. Watterson grew up in Chagrin Falls, Ohio, and he allegedly now lives in Shaker Heights, a leafy prewar suburb outside Cleveland. Calvin seems to live in a place like this, perhaps more exurban than suburban—but not truly rural, since his dad has to commute to an office that appears to be in a city.

If you grow up in that kind of place, a cozy Middle American nowhere-everywhere, I suspect your sense of what lies beyond the horizon takes on a particular imaginative intensity. Here we get Calvin in perhaps the sweetest spot of adventuring: Imagining all the great things that might happen, and how easy they might be. The space helmet will be nothing more than a fun bauble on a quick but noble journey. There’s no chance you’ll really get bonked on the head.

Other fun things

This week, I’m giving this section over to a new collective I’ve joined, called Discontents. It’s an exciting project, and I’ll let member Luke O’Neill of Welcome to Hellworld do the honors:

I have joined a collective of lefty writers and podcasters for a weekly newsletter called Discontents — including Discourse Blog which is the newish project of the also-shuttered Splinter — where we are each taking turns writing a digest of our work from the week. The first edition went out on Monday. It includes Cruel and Usual by Shane Fero, no love in fear by André Carlisle, BORDER/LINES by Gaby Del Valle and Felipe De La Hoz, A Lonely Impulse of Delight by Connor Wroe Southard [Ed.: That’s me!], Perspectives: Past, Present, and Future by Patrick Wyman, Be the Spark by Kim Kelly, Wars of Future Past by Kelsey D. Atherton, Air Gordon pt. 2 by Jeremy Gordon, The Insurgents by Jordan Uhl, Rob Rousseau and (occasionally) Ken Klippenstein, Foreign Exchanges by Derek Davidson, and Hell World by me.

I recommend subscribing to the Discontents mothership letter so you can keep tabs on all of us. I also recommend subscribing to as many of these worthy projects as you can. This is all experimental and in the early stages, and who knows where it’s going, but we’d love to have you along for the ride.

A poem

Sagawa Chika on things that are like clouds