I feel like you already had ideas about the virtue of media that does not needlessly engage in politics, and you just applied them to Pacific Rim because its politics or moments of political relevance are not obvious or important to you.
This is, as you've mentioned, a film where the day is saved by heroic soldiers and military commanders disobeying direct orders from their governments. The impotence of bureaucrats and the strength of soldiers, as depicted, is a political statement, even if the film doesn't dwell on it. Not only do you choose to dismiss it as you applaud Pacific Rim as a politics-free cultural space, but you choose to justify it as Stacker just wanting to 'stop the bad guys' and 'cancel the apocalypse'. I have seen so many police chiefs and commissioners in the past few months claim similarly in the wake of the BLM protests, portraying themselves as the thin blue line against the apocalypse and justifying any violence they deal out on protesters as what is necessary to stop the bad guys. Apolitically, of course.
It's a specific choice. The Jaeger program didn't *have* to be a rogue operation. The politicians didn't have to pursue a plan that the audience knew would never work. There are dozens of other ways they could have framed the Jaegers as cultural/political underdogs if need be. And, rather than hold Pacific Rim to the choice it made, or question why del Toro made such a choice given the strong anti-fascist thread that runs through most of his work, you dismiss it as a 'whiff'.
If you want to treat Pacific Rim as just robots fighting kaiju, then all power to you. It's not a super deep movie and enjoying it purely on an aesthetic sense is perhaps the right way to go about it. But claiming that it has nothing to say about politics because it's a 'save the world' movie is, at best, cowardice and, at worst, ignorant.
I have to thank you for this comment. It's been over a decade since I first started writing online for the student newspaper and discovered the joys of the comments section. This one took me back to my earliest days of receiving shade. I thought I had become numb to this kind of thing after spending the better part of a decade sparring on Twitter, but waking up to this comment was like Proust smelling the madeleine.
Anyway, I simply don't agree with your read here. As I say in the piece, everything is political, and there is indeed a "whiff" of militarism. But the politicians here couldn't be more cartoonish if they wore Teletubbies costumes, and all we hear from civilians is their unhappiness with the seawall project and desire to have someone bash the Kaiju. Also the only evidence of the Jaeger program hurting ordinary people is in the fact that fighting Kaiju unfortunately does a lot of damage to cities--but not as much as letting Kaiju rampage unimpeded. It's clear from this exchange that you and I are both smart enough to understand that none of this licenses authority figures to commit abuses in the real world.
Obviously there's not a one-to-one comparison between Pacific Rim and real-world politics. Nevertheless, we must question why this plot point is here in a movie otherwise more concerned with aesthetic and character studies. If it is a throwaway plot point, then we must question why this is a throwaway plot point.
Tropes don't exist in a vacuum. Yes, the military, politicians and enemy combatants in this movie are thoroughly abstracted from the realities of Western imperialism and/or abusive law enforcement. That doesn't change the fact that the movie, given several options to cast the Jaegers as underdogs, chose one that irrevocably ties it to that aforementioned whiff of fascist militarism.
And, yeah, maybe it is just a whiff. This is, after all, a movie about robots punching monsters. It's not exactly Pan's Labyrinth. And yet, even a whiff is political, and those politics are worrying. You don't dismiss a whiff of corpses or a whiff of gas.
This sort of trope, of armed men bucking orders to do what needs to be done, happens in so many, many movies and TV series and videogames. Most of them feature the military (or some paramilitary force, or law enforcement agent(s) or whatever) as protagonists. A lot of them make those protagonist heroes. It's been homogenized enough that, in the minds of many, it's been separated from its right-wing origins, to the point that it's just another action movie trope. But isn't that, in itself, political? The normalization of something with political origins, to the point that it can be dismissed as a whiff? Are the echoes of politics not politics in themselves?
I dunno, man. It seems like the sort of thing that should be considered if you're exploring stories. How they inevitably fit into a slot in the political climate in which they're created, no matter how purely focused they are on the beauty of robots punching monsters.
I've talked a good amount on my podcast about the way state violence has tended to be depicted in mass cultural stories--especially blockbusters--since 9/11. You can see this in recent bad movies like Dark Phoenix, where the state manifests as ominous, overwhelming, black-clad SWAT team-cum-special forces who seem omnipotent until Dark Phoenix whoops them. The violence of the state is ineluctable and always ready to strike, and that's just the way it is and ever shall be, etc.
I have serious issues with those depictions. I don't feel the same way about Pacific Rim because I think it's successfully, carefully engineered a situation where it makes perfect sense for a transnational military force to take the helm. They're the only ones capable of addressing a very urgent problem, and whether they're acting undemocratically isn't important to any of the specific movements we see in the story. I guess that flatters uniformed agents of state violence in the most general way, but so do quite a few stories with a much more complex relationship to politics. We can *imagine* a scenario where the rogue nature of the Jaeger program would be politically salient in a traditional sense--like if they had an interest in power, which they emphatically don't--but that takes us far outside what's on the screen. That which is not shown is often very important, but I don't see how it's important in this case, given the specific mechanics of this narrative universe.
Also, the "bucking orders" element here is so thin as to barely exist. One gets the feeling that those early scenes with the UN video call are meant to drive home Raleigh's failure and create a sense of down-and-out and secondary conflict in an almost rote way. All the politicians succeed in doing is reducing funding for the Jaeger program, thus giving us only a few mechs to work with--a scale that suits the narrative. It's not even clear that anyone is disobeying orders after that, because we simply don't hear from the suits. They already agreed to give Pentecost eight more months of funding, and surely it can't be against the rules to defend Hong Kong?
But here's the most important point in my analysis, for the purposes of this discussion: I'm talking about the extent to which Pacific Rim is *interested* in politics. That's a matter of degrees. I said "everything is political" in a snarky way, but since I'm broadly a Marxist, I meant it. No movie is fully apolitical. What this one happens to be, however, is simultaneously aware of its own disinterest in the kinds of things 2010s blockbusters love to gesture towards and also canny enough to create a situation in which not much emerges from even a dedicated attempt to analytically extract the politics that (yes, indeed) can't help but be present.
So yeah, I did consider how this movie fits into its political moment. The answer, for me, is that it resists the pull of cynical, commodified political statements and participates in an older blockbuster tradition. If it didn't work for you, fair enough! But there's not nearly enough here for me to indict this movie's politics the way I would Captain Marvel or Dark Phoenix.
I definitely grew up in a suburban anywhere/nowhere and romanticised the notion of striking out into the world, and "all the great things that might happen and how easy they might be" definitely describes my line of thinking before I went travelling across Asia aged 21 and had a rude awakening about poverty, pollution, ennui that follows you even if you're in another country and (most of all) the fact that you are not the main character in the story of the world and the world is not particularly concerned about your romanticised notions of adventure.
I can def relate to all of that. One nice thing about that kind of travel is it can help tamp down the egoism that led to it in the first place. Sounds like you had a close to ideal situation, in the end
I feel like you already had ideas about the virtue of media that does not needlessly engage in politics, and you just applied them to Pacific Rim because its politics or moments of political relevance are not obvious or important to you.
This is, as you've mentioned, a film where the day is saved by heroic soldiers and military commanders disobeying direct orders from their governments. The impotence of bureaucrats and the strength of soldiers, as depicted, is a political statement, even if the film doesn't dwell on it. Not only do you choose to dismiss it as you applaud Pacific Rim as a politics-free cultural space, but you choose to justify it as Stacker just wanting to 'stop the bad guys' and 'cancel the apocalypse'. I have seen so many police chiefs and commissioners in the past few months claim similarly in the wake of the BLM protests, portraying themselves as the thin blue line against the apocalypse and justifying any violence they deal out on protesters as what is necessary to stop the bad guys. Apolitically, of course.
It's a specific choice. The Jaeger program didn't *have* to be a rogue operation. The politicians didn't have to pursue a plan that the audience knew would never work. There are dozens of other ways they could have framed the Jaegers as cultural/political underdogs if need be. And, rather than hold Pacific Rim to the choice it made, or question why del Toro made such a choice given the strong anti-fascist thread that runs through most of his work, you dismiss it as a 'whiff'.
If you want to treat Pacific Rim as just robots fighting kaiju, then all power to you. It's not a super deep movie and enjoying it purely on an aesthetic sense is perhaps the right way to go about it. But claiming that it has nothing to say about politics because it's a 'save the world' movie is, at best, cowardice and, at worst, ignorant.
I have to thank you for this comment. It's been over a decade since I first started writing online for the student newspaper and discovered the joys of the comments section. This one took me back to my earliest days of receiving shade. I thought I had become numb to this kind of thing after spending the better part of a decade sparring on Twitter, but waking up to this comment was like Proust smelling the madeleine.
Anyway, I simply don't agree with your read here. As I say in the piece, everything is political, and there is indeed a "whiff" of militarism. But the politicians here couldn't be more cartoonish if they wore Teletubbies costumes, and all we hear from civilians is their unhappiness with the seawall project and desire to have someone bash the Kaiju. Also the only evidence of the Jaeger program hurting ordinary people is in the fact that fighting Kaiju unfortunately does a lot of damage to cities--but not as much as letting Kaiju rampage unimpeded. It's clear from this exchange that you and I are both smart enough to understand that none of this licenses authority figures to commit abuses in the real world.
Obviously there's not a one-to-one comparison between Pacific Rim and real-world politics. Nevertheless, we must question why this plot point is here in a movie otherwise more concerned with aesthetic and character studies. If it is a throwaway plot point, then we must question why this is a throwaway plot point.
Tropes don't exist in a vacuum. Yes, the military, politicians and enemy combatants in this movie are thoroughly abstracted from the realities of Western imperialism and/or abusive law enforcement. That doesn't change the fact that the movie, given several options to cast the Jaegers as underdogs, chose one that irrevocably ties it to that aforementioned whiff of fascist militarism.
And, yeah, maybe it is just a whiff. This is, after all, a movie about robots punching monsters. It's not exactly Pan's Labyrinth. And yet, even a whiff is political, and those politics are worrying. You don't dismiss a whiff of corpses or a whiff of gas.
This sort of trope, of armed men bucking orders to do what needs to be done, happens in so many, many movies and TV series and videogames. Most of them feature the military (or some paramilitary force, or law enforcement agent(s) or whatever) as protagonists. A lot of them make those protagonist heroes. It's been homogenized enough that, in the minds of many, it's been separated from its right-wing origins, to the point that it's just another action movie trope. But isn't that, in itself, political? The normalization of something with political origins, to the point that it can be dismissed as a whiff? Are the echoes of politics not politics in themselves?
I dunno, man. It seems like the sort of thing that should be considered if you're exploring stories. How they inevitably fit into a slot in the political climate in which they're created, no matter how purely focused they are on the beauty of robots punching monsters.
I've talked a good amount on my podcast about the way state violence has tended to be depicted in mass cultural stories--especially blockbusters--since 9/11. You can see this in recent bad movies like Dark Phoenix, where the state manifests as ominous, overwhelming, black-clad SWAT team-cum-special forces who seem omnipotent until Dark Phoenix whoops them. The violence of the state is ineluctable and always ready to strike, and that's just the way it is and ever shall be, etc.
I have serious issues with those depictions. I don't feel the same way about Pacific Rim because I think it's successfully, carefully engineered a situation where it makes perfect sense for a transnational military force to take the helm. They're the only ones capable of addressing a very urgent problem, and whether they're acting undemocratically isn't important to any of the specific movements we see in the story. I guess that flatters uniformed agents of state violence in the most general way, but so do quite a few stories with a much more complex relationship to politics. We can *imagine* a scenario where the rogue nature of the Jaeger program would be politically salient in a traditional sense--like if they had an interest in power, which they emphatically don't--but that takes us far outside what's on the screen. That which is not shown is often very important, but I don't see how it's important in this case, given the specific mechanics of this narrative universe.
Also, the "bucking orders" element here is so thin as to barely exist. One gets the feeling that those early scenes with the UN video call are meant to drive home Raleigh's failure and create a sense of down-and-out and secondary conflict in an almost rote way. All the politicians succeed in doing is reducing funding for the Jaeger program, thus giving us only a few mechs to work with--a scale that suits the narrative. It's not even clear that anyone is disobeying orders after that, because we simply don't hear from the suits. They already agreed to give Pentecost eight more months of funding, and surely it can't be against the rules to defend Hong Kong?
But here's the most important point in my analysis, for the purposes of this discussion: I'm talking about the extent to which Pacific Rim is *interested* in politics. That's a matter of degrees. I said "everything is political" in a snarky way, but since I'm broadly a Marxist, I meant it. No movie is fully apolitical. What this one happens to be, however, is simultaneously aware of its own disinterest in the kinds of things 2010s blockbusters love to gesture towards and also canny enough to create a situation in which not much emerges from even a dedicated attempt to analytically extract the politics that (yes, indeed) can't help but be present.
So yeah, I did consider how this movie fits into its political moment. The answer, for me, is that it resists the pull of cynical, commodified political statements and participates in an older blockbuster tradition. If it didn't work for you, fair enough! But there's not nearly enough here for me to indict this movie's politics the way I would Captain Marvel or Dark Phoenix.
I definitely grew up in a suburban anywhere/nowhere and romanticised the notion of striking out into the world, and "all the great things that might happen and how easy they might be" definitely describes my line of thinking before I went travelling across Asia aged 21 and had a rude awakening about poverty, pollution, ennui that follows you even if you're in another country and (most of all) the fact that you are not the main character in the story of the world and the world is not particularly concerned about your romanticised notions of adventure.
Still fun to dream, though.
I can def relate to all of that. One nice thing about that kind of travel is it can help tamp down the egoism that led to it in the first place. Sounds like you had a close to ideal situation, in the end