The
clash of giant men and monsters is a powerful image that has appeared in many religion,
mythology and folk tale throughout the ancient world, and it’s a concept that in our secular
modern world continues to live on in a somewhat different form…
Guillermo Del Toro’s Pacific Rim is one of those manifestations, and although it very
consciously embraces the silliness of the genre, it nonetheless transcends the cliché
by hinting at its very deep symbolic patterns of society and the individual, of how a world
or a center can come to both destroyed and reborn on the edge of the world.
To begin with, the story gives us a mythological version of the modern world.
Deep in the Pacific Ocean appears a rift to a dark dimension of giant monsters who erupt
out of the water as out of the primordial chaos.
The fact that the rift manifests in the Pacific Ocean is not arbitrary, because according
to how we have mapped and organized the world, even though the earth is a globe, it is nonetheless
there in the Pacific Ocean that the rim of the world is located, where east becomes west,
where time jumps from one day to another, a rift in space imaged as the gate of hades
out of which chaos and death erupts.
And so following the analogy, the edge, the rim of the world in terms of space is also
where appears the possible end of the world as cataclysmic destruction of all civilization.
The possibility of the end appears in the form of the Kaiju, who, emerging out of the
water are monsters in the fullest sense of that word.
Depicted here as undefinable hybrid creatures, mixtures of humanoid forms and diverse animal
characteristics, they remind us of the universal sea-monster that has appeared all over the
world in the form of the Leviathan, the Kraken, Charybdis or Scylla.
All of these creatures come together as a representation of Chaos and the destructive
forces of nature.
As Raleigh points out,
However, the eruption of chaos which happens on the edge is not just accidental or the
brute force of nature, but simultaneously appears as an invasion of a foreign race of
aliens, because if what lies outside the wall of the city is the danger of the natural world,
it is also the unknown stranger as possible invader, and so unlike other movie monsters
such as Godzilla who represents raw destruction, the Kaiju links several aspects of the rim
and periphery together.
Linking to cosmic symbolism, the somewhat humanoid form of the monsters, the fact that
they walk on two legs also links the more general sea-monster to the image of the clash
of Titans or the Giants which appear in almost all cultures as preceding the civilized world,
having had to be defeated in a war, or destroyed in a flood in order to make way for our current
age.
And just like the ancient ages of giants found in Myth, we are told the Dinosaurs were Kaiju
as well, linking the edge of the world where chaos erupts with an ancient forgotten time
populated by monsters.
To answer this unending emergence of chaos from the rim, humanity joins hands to bring
forth an army of giant human controlled Robots, or Jaegers.
But what makes it so intuitively right that earth’s line of defense should come in the
form of a giant man?
The strange satisfaction of the mecha robot is that it is a man at the scale of society,
a giant weapon to defend the world envisioned as the physical embodiment of the spirit which
represents a communion.
It’s the image of the St-Michael figure who brings order through defeating the great
dragon of chaos by slashing him with his sword.
It’s the vision of the Giant Man representing the communion of the Commonwealth represented
in Thomas’ Hobbes’ own version of the Leviathan.
This premise of the Jaeger as the embodiment of communion appears first of all in the name
of the Jaeger leader, Marshall Pentecost, for Pentecost is the possibility of finding
unity among diversity, when the holy spirit made it possible for people of all languages
to understand each other, and so too the jaeger program is shown as diverse peoples and cultures
joining together to fight a common enemy.
But more succinctly, the very efficiency of the Jaeger robots depends on two or more people
coming into perfect unity, communing or drifting together with all their memories, their thoughts
and with all their willpower, like any society or peoples who share a common identity, like
the two sides of a brain, like the opposites which characterize the human person, creativity
and discipline, justice and mercy, freedom and submission to societal norms: A defense
of unity can only be possible when opposites come together into focus and common purpose.
The Jaeger is not only an image of communion, but an image of the edge itself, an extension
of technology as the expansion of human capacity.
Clothing is the most primordial image of technology, the most immediate.
Clothing is protection of weakness and increase in the power to master the hostilities of
the outside.
So like a giant knight of cosmic proportions, the jaeger is both an armor and a weapon which
can move into the periphery to meet the challenge which appears on the edge.
In their status and in the expression of the characters, the Jaeger team itself is represented
as representatives of the margin.
They are the exceptions, they are a ragtag group of drift compatible couples.
And they are pushed out of the center and discarded with when in their overconfidence
things start to go downhill, and the societies now opt to hide from chaos behind a giant
seawall instead.
Visually the move towards the edge is represented as a descent, an image repeated over and over.
The head of the Jaeger with its human agents descends onto the body, then the Jaeger is
dropped into the waters, and ultimately the Jaeger moves to the bottom of the ocean floor
in order to descend even into the pit, into the chaos of the underworld where the monsters
come from.
Where the Jaegers were at first part of the military hierarchy of the center, they now
adopt an identity more closely aligned with the hybrid heroes of the frontier…
They are the resistance, the few and the underdog fighting against immense odds.
Instead of dealing with governments they are now forced to do business with those that
dwell in the shadows in between worlds.
This in between-ness is also noticeable in the resemblance of the Jaeger and the Kaiju,
firstly in their name which are permutations of each other, and also in their mirrored
appearance as giant extensions of their societies engineered by either side: “To fight monsters,
we had to create monsters”.
The Jaegers are emissaries and guardians of order on the one hand, but as giant weapons
of nuclear proportions they also, like the hive mind controlled Kaiju, embody the potential
for mass destruction.
And herein lies the necessity and the danger of the descent.
In order to effectively overcome the unending destruction caused by the rift, the Jaeger
crews are forced to both voluntarily and involuntarily be touched by chaos.
Rayleigh loses his brother and is left with a print of the Kaiju’s making on his body,
causing him to resign to a rather meaningless life behind the wall.
His partner Mako on the other hand is touched by the chaos of the Kaiju in a more mental
way, which takes the form of a severe childhood trauma which has controlled her life in a
quest for vengeance that almost leads her to point the gun at her own kind.
The crazed scientist Newton on the other hand holds an unhealthy desire to be connected
with the Kaiju, which consequently leads him to learn the secret of their origin, but it
paradoxically also gives them the information they need to figure out the intentions of
the Jaegers as well as his own present location.
It’s in fighting chaos on the edge, in this descent in which we can both obtain the power
and the knowledge to emerge victorious, but in which there’s also the danger of becoming
consumed by it, perishing or reemerging as the very same thing we had wanted to overcome.
In the end the men and women of the Jaeger program have to consciously find a balance
on this slippery rope in between order and chaos.
It’s not only in the balance that’s found in this relationship or this harmony of opposites,
but it’s the individual as the place where unity and resolution find their most immediate
form.
All of these characters have to re assess their opinions and their compulsions in order
to together take up the sword one last time…
(Pentecost speech).
In this final clash they learn that it is not only in opposition that the Kaiju are
to be defeated.
It’s through merging with them in a strange manner that unlocks the gate for a Jaeger
to make its final descent into the underworld.
This descent into the underworld can be seen as the embracing of chaos without being defeated
by it, Rayleigh riding the Kaiju into the rift is like Gandalf riding the Balrog through
the abyss, and ultimately it is an image of Christ’s descent into hades and ultimate
resurrection, his “trampling down death by death”.
It’s this voluntary acceptance of the existence of chaos both without and within, in coming
together in communion despite that, that the last act of courage and sacrifice culminates
into a single act of the human person in a moment of solitude, destroying the power of
the underworld and closing the rift.
The return to the surface is therefore shown as a rebirth, as the emergence of a new world
free from the menace of destruction, but also the rebirth into a world where the two opposites
of Raleigh and Mako find themselves united, floating on an island in the vast ocean as
the final image of
a
new beginning.