The Visual Intelligence of Pacific Rim

I want to talk about Pacific Rim, and why it is not, as I've seen a frustrating number of commentators claim, a "dumb" movie, or a movie that "knows that it's dumb," or anything like that, but first I want to talk about my girlfriend, and you're going to let me because you've already clicked through and given me the pageview, so you may as well stick around. Besides, I think it will help provide a reference point for some of the ideas I'm talking about.

Alright?

Let's talk about my girlfriend.



My girlfriend Sara (who has given me the okay to talk about her case, in the name of supporting this movie that she's fallen head over heels in love with) has a learning disability. I'm honestly not sure what the clinical name for it is (if it has one), but one of the things she has trouble with is processing language on a non-literal level. In other words, metaphors, figures of speech, and some humor that depends on incongruities, sort of doesn't interface quite right with her brain.

However, there's no "metaphor" sector of the brain. There's nothing that interprets figurative information across media. There's brainmatter that deals with language... and brainmatter that deals with visuals.

So, while my girlfriend struggles with linguistic metaphor, she takes to visual metaphor like a fish takes to water. I have to admit, sometimes she gets comics or movies, for example, in ways that I don't, despite my training in media. She can look at a weird background motif in a Manga panel and immediately list off for me its significance, or pick out recurring color schemes used to signify something about a particular character, or decipher wordless sequences that I find confusing or disorienting and (embarrassingly) explain them back to me like it's no big thing and I'm kinda silly for not getting it.

This is obviously fascinating to me as a student of media and how it interfaces with the human mind. We have very different ways of reacting to media, sometimes, because I tend to struggle when it comes to remembering faces, whereas she struggles with following complex, fast-paced dialogue (or, to put it another way, I excel at analyzing spoken/written language and she excels at analyzing visual language). To some extent, then, it's tempting to look at this as a cool quirk and study it in the abstract as two equally viable ways of exploring media.

However, we do not exist within a culture that views the two ways of analyzing things as equal, and that's why I'm writing this article.

See, critical theory, from what I've observed, is highly linguistic in focus and scope. In fact, even casual critics on Tumblr tend to fall into a linguistic mode of criticism when discussing movies--they talk, in short, about the dialogue of a film or show primarily, and talk actions and plot secondarily. This is encouraged by an education system that has students read the plays of Shakespeare and Ibsen and Miller and so on, with the movie version as the reward once they're done reading. We consistently devalue the depth of visual communication in our culture--I mean, this isn't anything revolutionary to say, it's just the big dumb elephant in the room of media studies, that we have an overwhelmingly visual society that has no clue how to read images.

When confronted with a text that primarily relies on images, therefore, our response is to write that text off as dumb or lacking depth, because we're interpreting the text on a linguistic level rather than on the level that it's working. I mean, for goodness sake, look at the kind of language I'm using to describe this phenomenon! "Text." "Write off." Our mode of criticism, a century old, is wedded to the idea of communication through the typed or spoken word.

That's where Pacific Rim comes in. It's very easy, if you are confronting the movie with a linguistic bias, to see the film as "dumb," or, maybe even worse, a movie that's good because it "knows it's dumb" and doesn't aspire to be more. And yes, the dialogue isn't brilliant. Granted! You can totally watch the film and say "There's not a lot going on here as far as witty reparte is concerned, and the plot is pretty simple, so on that level, it's kind of a simplistic movie." You can take that away with you after watching Pacific Rim.

But that's not what my girlfriend took away from it.

She took away this:

"I thought it was really cool how Mako dyed her hair to match her jacket that she wore in the flashback scene. It was like she was still thinking about that day and carrying it with her."

I'm paraphrasing, of course, but that was one of the first things she said to me when the credits were rolling and we were freaking out together over how cool the movie was. She followed that up by talking about how expressive and cool the Kaidanovskys--the pilots of Cherno Alpha--were. These are, remember, two characters with effectively zero dialogue, beyond a few shouted commands during their fight scene, and yet they stood out dramatically within her mind as well rounded characters. And the conversation pretty much proceeded like that--sometimes with me echoing her thoughts, but often with her picking out details that I had missed completely.

She was responding to the film as a visual learner. She was reacting not as a traditionally trained--and traditionally, we might say, constrained--theorist, but as someone that interprets media according to images, body language, design symbolism, and color cues.

She was doing it right.

The rest of us are doing it wrong.

Pacific Rim is not a dumb movie at all. It is a visually intelligent movie.

Let's talk about some specific elements of the film, though, and why they operate quite differently when you view them as primarily things to be, you know, viewed.

Mako Mori is Not A Shallow, Timid, or Weak Character

One of the arguments I've seen repeatedly from multiple feminist critics can be summed up thus:

Mako Mori is not a strong, well developed female character, because she only has a few lines.

In a way, I feel the whole basic problem with our current discourse can be boiled down to just that one phrase. The character's relative depth is entirely contingent on how many lines of dialogue she gets. That, right there, is the devaluation of nonverbal, visual communication in favor of a... well, I'm not even sure what to call this. It's certainly no critical method that I've ever seen. Counting the number of lines a character gets is... well, kind of a bizarre standard, because it utterly divorces the actual content of those lines from their quantity.

The thing about Mako Mori, though, is that while her lines may be few, they pack a punch. In fact, they have strength in part due to how quiet she typically is--when she does speak, she is direct and forceful, and you know she's not speaking trivially.

But that's not exactly what I'm here to talk about. I want to talk about the visual cues surrounding this character. Mako's character development is actually almost entirely visual in nature--no one talks through her memories or explains her motivations aloud. What's more, her personality and character arc is defined strongly by color symbolism. So, while she doesn't have a huge number of lines, that doesn't make her shallow.

Let's talk about that color symbolism my girlfriend picked up on. Mako's colors in the film are blue and dark grey. The blue is, actually, the brightest spot of color that we see on her initially, and we are drawn to the blue highlight in her hair because it contrasts in saturation with the rest of her character design.

It's a small splash of blue, but look how bold it is. It screams "Pay Attention To Me."

Now, this is a good example of how a text trains or creates its ideal reader. The film is giving us a striking cue that both makes her highly identifiable as an individual, and sets us up to recall that cue later. It's telling us that we should be thinking about Mako's colors and her character design.

This pays off once we finally see into her memories and recognize that the blue which in later life occupies her hair is the blue of the coat she wore on the day she was orphaned by Onibaba's attack on Tokyo. So, while this is never articulated, it is clear that she carries the memory of that day with her--deliberately, in fact, unless someone is actively dying her hair without her knowing, which seems improbable. This lends a certain air of truth to Stacker's claim that she is highly focused on vengeance.

Grey and blue.

One of the other interesting aspects of the flashback is the way Stacker Pentecost appears idealized. He ascends from Coyote Tango backlit, like some mythic hero or demigod. And this actually makes perfect sense when you recall that we are seeing the scene through child!Mako's eyes--Stacker is quite literally colored (colored a heroic gold) by her emotions on that day. This vision provides the context for all of her interactions with Stacker throughout the film, and, again, augments her brief speech to Raleigh about "respect." The moments where she opposes Stacker's judgment involve her standing up not only to the man who raised her, but to a man that she views as a larger than life idol.

And yet, she still is adamant in her desire to pilot, and is not shy or demur about demanding her chance to seek her revenge against the alien invaders. This is a woman who knows exactly what she wants, know exactly how to get it, and is willing even to butt heads with the person she loves more than anyone on Earth for that chance.

Wow.

There's more to Mako than just this scene and its impact on the rest of the film, of course, but I think the flashback and its visual language serves to demonstrate two things: first, Mako is a complex, wholly admirable female protagonist that probably has more depth than the male protagonist (which actually isn't all that new--holla at my fellow Hermione and Eowyn fans), and second, the film is capable of saying complex things, but it says those things through visual symbolism. (CONSCIENCE EDIT: And just in case it's not clear, I don't want to sound like I'm bashing feminist criticism--I'm a feminist critic myself--I'm just suggesting that if we're evaluating female characters, number of lines in this context is kind of a myopic way of going about it. There are other feminist criticisms of the film--like the overall number of women in the ground crew, for example--that are totally on point, I think. I just think Mako isn't given nearly the credit she really deserves as a female protagonist.)

Oh, and while talking intention is always risky for a theorist (death of the author and all that) I think it's worth noting that reading the film this way does go along with del Toro's designs for the audience experience. Now, keep in mind that Sara picked out Mako's hair color and its symbolic significance on a first viewing, without assistance from any sort of word of god interpreting the film for her... and check out this quote from del Toro:

It’s impossible to condense because every single decision counts. And as I often say, I don’t do eye candy, I do eye protein because all of these design choices are telling the story.

I’ll give you one example. Mako is defined by the grey colour and the blue colour. As we go through the movie we find out that she’s defined by those colours because in her childhood we have a blue memory, a memory that’s all just in blue with splashes of red. I show her holding her heart, or a symbolic object that represents her heart. The memory has left a stain on her hair that is blue, and she’s carrying that memory with her. The introductory sequence of Mako is very significant.

Yeah. There it is, ladies and gentlemen, in black and white for all to see. Sara picked out the symbolism and together we sussed out its meaning without the aid of del Toro. This says to me that if you accept the film's language and read the film the way it quite openly prompts you to read it, you get results that are far more nuanced, valuable, and functional than if you read in opposition to the text. If you read with the film, you uncover the film's--and the character's--secrets.

Speaking of which:

The Kaidanovskys

Meet the Kaidanovskys:

Via

Look at Sasha creepin' there oh my god

The Kaidanovskys are basically the best.

I already kind of loved them for the fact that they pilot Cherno Alpha, a Jaeger that literally has its head transposed with a god damn cooling tower. But they're actually pretty fabulous even beyond having the hottest ride of them all.

For one thing, there's the fact that Sasha Kaidanovsky is, you know, another female pilot, which is pretty notable and cool. What's more, she's the member of her team that is constantly shouting information and orders. She seems to take the dominant role as far as interacting with the outside world, analogous to the dominant roles Raleigh and Stacker take when they pilot (although it's worth noting the complexity of that dynamic in Pacific Rim--the pilots are two parts of a whole, after all). In a way, her relationship with her husband is the mirror of Raleigh's with Mako: she is the expressive, somewhat more dynamic figure to her far more restrained husband who, like Mako, is less vocal and has an air about him of the coiled spring--force held carefully in balance.

Again, my reaction here is kind of colored by my shared experience of the movie with Sara, who is a huge Cherno Alpha fangirl. (Sidenote: this is why I always try, if possible, to watch movies with someone else. A shared experience, I find, is so much more meaningful. I love theaters for this reason.) One of the things we both noticed while watching was the way the two characters are given depth and personality through their body language. Look at the above images: Sasha's movements are lithe and determined... and more than a little lusty. She loves her husband and is quite open about expressing it. A simple gesture meant to beckon him to the place she's found in the mess hall thus becomes a sultry gesture. This is pretty cool, actually, as an affirmation, once more, of a female character's desire.

What's more, she puts an arm around her man protectively, baring her teeth at Raleigh to warn him away! I love this so, so much, because this kind of attitude is sort of stereotypically masculine, but here we've got the lithe, sexy female positioning herself as the protector of the big burly man. It's a funny moment, but it's also cool, because it writes, if not a novel, then certainly a god damn short story about these two characters and their relationship and their love and their connection as pilots, all through the power of body language.

No, Sasha does not get any lines of consequence.

But when the Kaidanovsky's finally decide to get out of the way of the plasma canon that threatens to blow up half the shatterdome, she's the second to start moving along the catwalk, and her body language oozes derision for the bullshit she's being subjected to, like she's doing the plasma fist a fucking favor by not just staring it down until it breaks down and cries.

And when Leatherback crushes the cockpit of Cherno Alpha, it's her scream--a scream not of pain or fear but of hate, pure hate, and boundless fury--that we hear.

Sasha Kaidanovsky is a badass, and she doesn't need to speak for us to know it. Every movement she makes speaks volumes. The Kaidanovskys have a voice in this film. Their voices are their bodies, their movements their words, their gestures their punctuation. If Mako speaks through color--if she speaks through pigment like a painter--the Kaidanovsky's speak through the dance they do together, a beautiful, loving, protective, forceful dance that continues even to the moment of their deaths.

Optimism: A Parting Thought

There's more to say, but I'm realizing first that this article is reaching Kaijulike proportions already, and second that I really need to watch the film once more before digging into some of the ideas more easily. This is by no means a comprehensive catalog of the various visual language/metaphor components of Pacific Rim. It barely even scratches the surface, in fact. Like, we could talk about:

• The way costuming is used to portray character
• The fact that the Australians are the only pilots to mark their kills on their armor
• The crazy closing sequence in the rift
• The red shoe and the symbolism there
• Moving beyond images, the fact that Mako's freakout in the first test run happened because she was forced to experience Raleigh's brother's death both from Raleigh's perspective and his own perspective and how she would have been fine if she wasn't hit by a double dose of Raleigh's bad memories
• The images we see of Herman and Newt's memories when they drift together

And a whole lot of other stuff besides. Some of this stuff, it's worth noting, didn't come out of my own head--it's stuff I came across on Tumblr that people picked out, or, predictably, more stuff that Sara caught and I missed. There's this whole conversation going on right now, basically, about the visual language of the movie and how we can pull out the film's messages and the character arcs from sometimes very subtle cues or momentary flashes of information.

Now...

Think about that for a moment.

If this film really, truly was "dumb," or knew enough to just be dumb and not aspire to anything greater...

...Would that conversation really, earnestly be possible?

No. 

You could have a complex conversation, sure--fans do all the time. But that conversation would be built largely around the exercise of speculation and fanfiction/fan art production, not the exercise of interpretation and the evaluation of symbols within the text. It would not be the conversation we are having right now.

And really, that's what I want you to come away from this article understanding. We CAN and SHOULD delve into this work. We can do more than simply lazily write it off. For god's sake, isn't it obvious that a work that hints at character arcs is more intellectually engaging than one that spells those arcs out directly through dialogue? This film offers us an opportunity to engage a text that challenges us critically because it goes against our cultural and academic training. The proper response is to allow that text to change us, to recognize the challenge for what it is.

And really, if the film has taught us anything, this is a challenge we can overcome, in part by coming together as a community of viewers and thinkers and theorists and lovers of giant robots. There's an attitude present in a lot of "professional" reviews--usually not stated directly, but certainly present--that this sort of film, with its message of coming together as a whole planet to defeat a seemingly unstoppable opponent, and with its appeal to the flashy, the visually indulgent, and the almost aggressively upbeat, makes this film a lesser summer movie.

Fuck.

That.

Noise.

Look, I've not exactly been shy about my disaffection towards the modern grimdarkness of media. As a choice, though, I can at least understand and accept it. What bothers me more is the critical attitude that reads a film like Dark Knight Rises as nuanced or complex due to its moral ambiguity... rather than, you know, a film that contradicts itself on literally every conceivable thematic level, to the point where the film is a giant grimdark mess of growling and posturing, sound and fury saying nothing. The flip side of that, of course, is that a film like Pacific Rim is treated as somehow naive or insignificant because it dares, gasp!, to have not just a unified message, but a quite positive, affirmative message, spoken not in the language of Lifetime movies or this year's crop of Oscar-bait, but in the language of Metal, the language of force and bombast and people in giant fucking robots punching Godzilla in the face.

We have reached a point, and really let this one sink in because it gets more flooring the more you think about it, where it's more radical and unacceptable to say, "Humans can accomplish amazing things when we set aside our differences and disagreements and work together to make the world a better place," than to say something sour and bitter and cynical.

Cynicism used to be the radical thing. 

Now it's as mainstream as Greenday.

So, what I'm asking is that you give the film a second look, if you're not already one of us fanatics who loved it the first time through. Give it a chance to speak to you in its own language. Be the Raleigh in this situation--just as he surprised Mako by knowing and speaking Japanese to her, undermining her skepticism, enter a dialogue with the film that speaks in images. Open yourself to alternate ways of thinking and understanding.

There's a place by the fire here, and we've kept your second favorite chair warm for you.

Won't you join the conversation?

Circle me on Google+ at gplus.to/SamKeeper. Follow stormingtheivory.tumblr.com for updates, random thoughts, artwork, and news about articles. As always, you can e-mail me at KeeperofManyNames@gmail.com. If you liked this piece please share it on Facebook, Google+, Twitter, Reddit, Equestria Daily, Xanga, MySpace, or whathaveyou, and leave some thoughts in the comments below.

Poetry is Dead

What if I drop one breath?

What does it mean for a medium to be dead? I mean really dead, totally stopped in place with nowhere to go, no way forward?

What does it mean to have nothing new to explore technically?

I think about this quite a bit, actually, because of my weird background with media. Although new media is very important to me, my training comes from art history and lit crit, so I'm what you would call a child of the Old School. And one of the things I've noticed is that all sorts of media have died off over the years, just sort of spun their wheels and finally stopped.

And it's not necessarily big things. Like, there's no Death of Music (despite what both Don McLean and Devin Townsend say), and I doubt there will be in my lifetime. There's just too much territory to explore. But you can kill off a single instrument. When was the last time you heard a crumhorn, for example? It's a medium of expression just as surely as the paintbrush is, but it's fallen by the wayside. And there's other little odd things that live in the space between media and genres, things like...

Well, how about Radio Dramas?

When was the last time you heard a radio drama?

I can remember the last time I heard one. It was sometime back in, oh, 1997 maybe, somewhere around there. It was a radio dramatization of Star Wars: A New Hope. And that broadcast captivated me, it went far beyond the movie ever could, for it became my personal Star Wars, the Star Wars that played out visually inside my own head.

But you don't hear too many radio dramas these days, do you? It's another dead medium. It reached the end of what it could do, new things drew the attention of the masses, and people moved on, leaving a media ghost town.

Oh, and then, of course, there's poetry.

Poetry is dead.

But wait, let me back up a bit and explain just what I mean by a medium having nothing new to explore technically. This isn't a new concept for me, actually. It's something I call the Medium Singularity. I've already talked about it in relationship to painting, but let us roll through the main points again.

A Medium Singularity is the point where we expand a medium as far as it can go, where we reach the end, essentially, of Progress. It signifies the point where our ability to predict future possibilities goes completely out the window, where there's no technique that hasn't been taken to its furthest possible point. It borrows the concept from Transhumanism, actually--the Singularity signifies the moment of push, the great thrust beyond the limits of the merely human, where all bets are off and something totally new emerges.

Another possible term for it is Art At The End Of History. What does that mean exactly? Well, I think this quote just about sums it up:

"We're the generation of 'they have already done that. They have already been there."

Youch. Heavy stuff there. That's a quote from a Belgian paper, actually, translated by a friend of mine. (He couldn't locate the original source, unfortunately--another interesting example of information lost within an information flood.) The statement encapsulates, for me, the sensation of being post-historical. It's the sensation of realizing that Progress, at least in little corner of the artistic world, is over. Our happy story of a history that moves ever forward hits a wall and we're left stranded, with all the achievements of the masters of the past gathered up behind us.

And that can be insanely frustrating for artists! I don't deny that it can be the hardest part of playing in these fields today. Hell, it's a cornerstone of modernist philosophy, where instead of making new material you just endlessly disembowel the great works of the past in search of some elusive meaning among the cast out guts of consonants and vowels. From J Alfred Prufrock all the way down to Howl, there's dross left for us after the last masters plucked out their gold, and standing on the shoulders of giants, as the song goes, leaves us cold.

Poetry is the latest victim of the End of History. Think about it, when's the last time you bought a book of poetry? When's the last time you saw someone stand and recite aloud, or heard the sound on the radio?

And you know, people have been releasing new poetry. But they're the vinyl freaks of the lit world, the people who still buy their albums pressed onto those big beautiful discs, the dying crowd with their dying tech, playing out their songs till their needle jumps and another one bites the dust.

Poetry killed itself, hung itself in the attic on a tetragrammaton string that read PoMo. Some of its acolytes killed it with sound, broke it to pure noise like speaking in tongues, like gifts from the mad god of the 20th Century. Some made it a grocery list, gathered their affairs in order like Pink arranging guitar splinters in a hotel room, then passed away into the West taking the magic of the Elves with them. And some, knowing the time was at hand, hearing the tune of the jazz band, took their books and ran, their pages fanned out in a flickering street lamp in the wasteland.

Poetry hit a wall. It beat up language for its lunch money, and the funny thing was, when it was through it found nothing more to do with the change it had effected. The beat was rejected: each meter was reduced to a kind of tired pattern of use, and the modernists refused its tired truths.

And what could they do? All the clear visions of the Chinese masters were used up faster than you could conceive, they had received all the alliterating letters from the Nordic breed, and the call and answer patterns from across the Mediterranean Sea. Even long and short vowel beats, those pounding feet, had been retreaded from the Greeks by Edgar Allen Poe.

So where was there to go
but down?

But let's rein it in, I'm losing breath.

It came to the point that every technique you can imagine was played out, and, like the modernist painters, the modernist poets pushed every possibility as far as they could: repetition, the abandonment of meter and rhyme, the collapse of grammar and punctuation, the abandonment of meaning in favor of pure sound... every way you could mutilate a poem, the modernists did it. Sometimes their work was staggeringly beautiful. Sometimes it was dead. But I think that explosion of panicked experimentation can be seen as the death throes--it was the final moments of poetry's life, the rush claim the last innovatable territory.

But if you've been paying attention, you know that death isn't the end.

It's just the beginning stage of the metamorphosis.

See, just because you can't do something new technically with a medium doesn't mean you're out of things to say with that medium. In fact, I would argue that it becomes far easier to say what you want after a medium is dead, because you've got all of the tools imaginable, and you can pick and choose the tool for the message you want to convey. You're cut free from the stupid demand of the critics to be avant-garde--which isn't to say the avant-garde is bad, but the constant push in the art world for the next shock is absolutely a hard limitation that you don't have when your medium is dead. How on earth can you respond to a demand for the fury of artistic progress with anything but laughter when your medium's already been buried?

And after that laughter you can really get them worried, 'cause once the tools are all laid out before you, all the ones that are played out can start to be questioned. And this may cause some tension, but I just have to wonder:

Is poetry dead, or has it found a way to live under a new name? A name that to old poets is profane, but that has gushing through its veins the methods of Homer and the rushing presentation of a great Orator's proclamations? I speak of "SLAM," a poetry that positions its hand upon the shoulder of the oral tradition, that is bolder than the gentle bleating lamb beats that the ivory tower demands.

Tell me, when is the last time you heard a man raise a crowd's voice and hands with rhymed out lines out of his very soul? When a whole gathering of people stood at attention to hear their lives and feelings captured in a poem's mention?

But don't listen to all my nonsense, listen to Saul present this:



You can see how I might get irate when I hear someone pontificate about the youth today and how they don't appreciate art. Let me do my part as a lit crit theorist and say the nearest I've ever come to Dead Poet Society is when I'm listening to a playlist of hip hop. Hear this! The Modernists let the beat drop! And this genre caught the ball and slammed it, sample loops and all, through the hoop.

You could call it a SLAM dunk.

And you don't have to punk out
your lines, or rap to these jams,
This just shows with no doubt
that poetry died and came back
like Adonis. And I'll be honest,
I can't tell you what all this means
because once you've crossed the singularity
you're in the land of the Absolutely Free--no limits.
So give it a shot, don't let poetry
rot in a grave of its own making.

Because we're making art
at the end of history.
And poetry's only as dead
As we let it be.

Give my regards to Brooklyn.



This article really took on a life of its own--I wasn't going to write it this way, but the rhymes just started coming, and the rest, as it were, is history. No idea if it actually worked or not. You can follow me on Google+ at gplus.to/SamKeeper or on Twitter @SamFateKeeper. As always, you can e-mail me at KeeperofManyNames@gmail.com. If you liked this piece please share it on Facebook, Google+, Twitter, Reddit, Equestria Daily, Xanga, MySpace, or whathaveyou, and leave some thoughts in the comments below.