It's also useful for interpreting Del Toro's other work, such as his Oscar Best Picture win for "Shape of Water." As SMG points out, all of GDT's movies are about "Nazis fighting monsters."
<<<Everything from this point on is by SuperMechaGodzilla and not by me.>>>
Imagine if the first 30-50 minutes of Speed Racer were devoted to explaining what a 'car' is, and why people were racing them. "I was fifteen when I saw the first speed race... They called them automobiles... Driving very quickly... We built them because horses were too slow..." Just interminably. That's Pacific Rim.
Del Toro fans might recall how Hellboy 2 unceremoniously ditches the bland human audience-identification character from the first film, having Hellboy and the other monsters go rogue from their government organization to have wild pagan monster adventures. Imagine if they killed off Hellboy instead. That's also this film.
The grievous sin of Pacific Rim is that both the monsters and robots have no personality. They don't. Gipsy Danger 'should be' a character, displaying a combination of traits from both pilots in its actions and mannerisms. This only occurs, however, in the actually-good sword scene. Mako presses a huge red button labelled SWORD, causing the limp blade to flop out of its sheath. She then yells "for my family!" and her rage causes the flaccid sword to literally grow erect so that she can thrust it into the kaiju. No other scene actually shows the psychological connection between pilot and machine in the same way that Mako's rage sprouts from the machine as a gleaming metallic phallus.
The next closest shot is when hero guy's brother holds a holographic boat gingerly in his hand, establishing that the blue augmented-reality interface represents the 'mind' half of some mind-body dualism. We are never provided with a Jaeger POV shot. What do they see? How do they see? The little blue boat is the closest thing, and the only. There's little other indication that the jagers are powered by psychological health. Since we don't know why they succeed, we don't know why they fail. (Was Cherno Alpha's crew just not vengeful enough?)
Consider the 'soulmate' imagery and the throwaway line about 'angering the gods' in the context of Aristophanes's speech from Plato's Symposium, in which humanity is imagined as a four-legged race of siamese twins:
Symposium posted:
Terrible was their might and strength, and the thoughts of their hearts were great, and they made an attack upon the gods; of them is told the tale of Otys and Ephialtes who, as Homer says, attempted to scale heaven, and would have laid hands upon the gods.
Doubt reigned in the celestial councils. Should they kill them and annihilate the race with thunderbolts, as they had done the giants, then there would be an end of the sacrifices and worship which men offered to them; but, on the other hand, the gods could not suffer their insolence to be unrestrained. At last, after a good deal of reflection, Zeus discovered a way.
He said: 'Methinks I have a plan which will enfeeble their strength and so extinguish their turbulence; men shall continue to exist, but I will cut them in two and then they will be diminished in strength and increased in numbers; this will have the advantage of making them more profitable to us. They shall walk upright on two legs, and if they continue insolent and will not be quiet, I will split them again and they shall hop about on a single leg.'
The resulting compulsion in humanity to reunite its halves is called 'love':
Symposium posted:
So ancient is the desire of one another which is implanted in us, reuniting our original nature, seeking to make one of two, and to heal the state of man.
Each of us when separated, having one side only, like a flat fish, is but the tally-half of a man, and he is always looking for his other half. Men who are a section of that double nature which was once called androgynous are lovers of women; adulterers are generally of this breed, and also adulterous women who lust after men. The women who are a section of the woman do not care for men, but have female attachments; the female companions are of this sort. But they who are a section of the male follow the male, and while they are young, being slices of the original man, they have affection for men and embrace them, and these are the best of boys and youths, because they have the most manly nature.
This is what the film is about, but this imagery of humanity being punished by the gods 'for a reason' is absent from the film. There is a line about global warming, but there is no imagery of global warming (outside of a quick-and-easy reference to Blade Runner in the design of the bone slums). We are told the apocalypse is coming, but there is little apocalyptic imagery because the film is already basically post-apocalyptic). The kaiju don't have the weight of a monster from Revelations - they aren't awesome in the original sense of the word. They're already commonplace - evoking malaise, not catastrophe.
Someone joked earlier about the kaiju being all female, but it's true. Being clones, the kaiju lack sexual difference - and there is an obvious theme of things squeezing in and out of yonic slits. The rift itself is a 'throat' that 'dilates' at regular intervals. A baby kaiju is birthed by Cesarian section, then Ron Perlman crawls out of a wound in its belly, covered in fluids. One kaiju gets Mako's erect sword rammed so hard down its throat that it's bisected. This is all Very Obvious.
But the kaiju, besides being gooey and female, don't do anything. There is maybe five minutes total of monsters attacking cities in the movie, and most of it takes place in a dream sequence. With a kaiju, what they destroy and how they destroy it ischaracterization. Consider how Clover decapitates the statue of liberty while screeching with wide-eyed terror in his film. I defy anyone to describe the actions of any kaiju here in even such basic terms.
What unsettles me in the film is that we open with the quick WWII montage - people used to believe in the fight (Rosie the Riveter!), but that iconography has been reduced to cliched fodder for action figures and videogames. You get the additional scene of the kid complaining about the old, crappy robot toy to cement this. But the message isn't that crass consumerism is bad. It's that we need new and better products to consume. The scene on the beach is a very obvious statement of 'this ain't your daddy's giant robot movie!' - which is definitely crass, no? It reminds of the mean-spirited scene in the Clash of the Titans remake where toy robot Bubo is thrown away, declared worthless now. Clash Of The Titans and Pacific Rim have the same screenwriter.
While I don't doubt Del Toro's genre intelligence (see the above reference to Plato), the end product seems mostly for the kind of 'fan' who says "of course I love star wars; I own all the actions figures!" and "of course I love kaiju films; I devoured that stupid shit when I was 12 years old!" You see this in the praise the film's unabashedness but not its quality. In cartoons, long scenes of characters back in base describing what's going on are a product of budgetary limitations. It's expensive to animate an expressive robot battle that conveys all the themes via punching. When Del Toro uses that 'anime style' here, it's like when deviantart people draw characters with anime side-mouths. It's an unnecessary compromise.
The fact is that Man of Steel deals with near-identical themes, but they show the ID4-hivemind terraforming laser, and they show humanity staring up in confusion as it looms over them. They show the mind-meld dream sequence where the apocalyptic plan is made visual. When Charlie Day has his encounter with the kaiju brain, he sits in a chair and tells us how cinematic it was - describing a zoetrope effect, 'like blinking your eyes really fast.' Thanks, Charlie! But why couldn't we see the kaijus battling T-Rexes on the cinema screen?
And when you really get down to it, Superman isn't a PMC.
(Now, watch as people use my demand for kaiju v. dinosaur big battels as evidence that I 'hate fun'.)
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Slate Action posted:
SuperMechagodzilla, let me first say that I really respect how much effort you put into your critiques. I don't think anyone else approaches film quite the way you do, and it really is beautiful to see a unique viewpoint about media expressed in such detail. I say this with complete sincerity.
With that in mind, what I want to know is: in your ideal scenario, how would I respond to your post?
When 140-ish pages have been devoted to calling this the best film ever, the idea is basically to get people explaining what makes it so. This is so that they can both reflect on why aspects of the film appeal to them, and to hopefully get me appreciating the film more (cause I want my money's worth).
Not long ago in the thread, people were going on about finding a canonical explanation for 'drifting'. The actual explanation is that the robots are powered by psychological health and drifting is (almost literally) the healing power of love. When Charlie Day hooks his brain up directly to the universe, he 'sees too much' and is nearly driven mad, like a Lovecraft character. He cannot weather the incomprehensible and terrifying universe alone. So, of course, he unites with his mathematical buddy to finally 'read the handwriting of God.' Mind-body duality, right? Theory and practice. The nosebleed theme is all about how your mental state is tied to your physiology - Mako needs to feel empowered in order to achieve an erection, etc.
This is all simply more accurate than the pointless theorycrafting stuff. The goal isn't to get people to stop liking the film, but for everyone to understand the film better. That includes myself.
My issue is not that the film is 'mindless entertainment' but that this stuff isn't conveyed as well as it could be. Scenes lack nuance. Mako is the only character whose journey is shown, and whose scenes really capture the surreal possibilities of operating in some kind of bizarre dreamstate, with different minds overlapping with a machine. Why is there only one dream sequence, and why is it easily one of the best scenes in the film? Do people really feel the power of love? Do they feel the lovecraftian terror? Like the scene where Day is convinced that God Himself has singled him out for death. Why does it feel like a joke?
And there's the question of who builds these things. Where does the funding come from? Shouldn't that be more clear, or are they trying to downplay it? Can downplaying the source of funding be considered a satirical point, like how nobody cares that the kaijus are caused by pollution?
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jivjov posted:
When does Charlie Day's character (Newt, by the way) ever "hook his brain up to the universe"? He drifts with a Kaiju brain, which happens to drift him with the entire kaiju 'species' (entity, maybe?). A far cry from the entire universe).
As for Jaegar funding, it's the Pan Pacific Defense Corps that's funding the whole program. A major plot point that kicks off the bulk of the movie is the PPDC pulling their funding.
The Kaiju are not caused by pollution. Their masters are adapted to an environment that is (by our standards) polluted. I'm assuming this means warmer climate and more CO2 in the atmosphere due to Newt's mention of global warming and ozone depletion.
While I appreciate the amount of effort and thought you put into your critiques, it would be appreciated if you used the facts provided by the film itself when doing so.
The alien world at the other side of the rift is a metaphor for the universe. Specifically, it's everything outside the symbolic universe of everyday reality - it's the unsymbolizable Real - represented by both by the abjection and gore of the kaiju monsters, and the purely 'abstract' scientific knowledge visualized with the blue holograms. This is why both the kaiju's innards and the computer screens glow bright blue, and why the two scientists end up as a team. They're both struggling to understand the same thing. The rift is a (literal) traumatic rupture that thrusts incomprehensible and terrifying aliens into the 'everyday' world.
The monsters are caused by pollution because the pollution terraformed the earth into an environment that attracts them. Everyday life in America is sustained by 'invisible' disavowed costs (overseas exploitation, pollution, etc.). The kaiju emerge like terrifying hurricanes because it's a 'chickens coming home to roost' thing. Climate change causes severe weather, as we know. So, the aliens themselves are the personification of what is (literally) going on 'under the surface' and erupting traumatically. By not doing something sooner, the humans unwittingly invited them.
I will admit, of course, that the film doesn't convey all this as well as it could.
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jivjov posted:
Well, your post did not present all of that as your metaphorical interpretations. You presented several of your points as if they were factual presentations from the film (No, I'm not demanding every opinion be presented with "In my opinion" in front of it, just that interpretation be labelled as such).
Everything that occurs in the film is metaphorical. It's a film - and one with blatant psychosexual imagery at that.
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Jefferoo posted:
With global warming, cowardly world leaders, and the corruption of hacker culture with massive "tech startup" corporations such as Yahoo and Skype and Facebook, Pacifc Rim is a cry to band together as individuals and innovate in the face of the monstrous destruction of humanity at massive, seemingly organic corporations. As great minds and innovators get sucked up to the Kaiju hive mind to build idiotic luxuries for the upper middle class like Instagram and Vine, we need to be building the Jaegers of our time - green energy, ways to feed the world, ways to unite and end inter-species conflict.
Pacific Rim demands that we unite and build. It damns the men like SuperMechaGodzilla who seek to sit in the corners and shout down those who build, yet rest easy in the status quo.
MANIFESTO OF FUTURISM
1. We want to sing the love of danger, the habit of energy and rashness.
2. The essential elements of our poetry will be courage, audacity and revolt.
3. Literature has up to now magnified pensive immobility, ecstasy and slumber. We want to exalt movements of aggression, feverish sleeplessness, the double march, the perilous leap, the slap and the blow with the fist.
4. We declare that the splendor of the world has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed. A racing automobile with its bonnet adorned with great tubes like serpents with explosive breath ... a roaring motor car which seems to run on machine-gun fire, is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace.
5. We want to sing the man at the wheel, the ideal axis of which crosses the earth, itself hurled along its orbit.
6. The poet must spend himself with warmth, glamour and prodigality to increase the enthusiastic fervor of the primordial elements.
7. Beauty exists only in struggle. There is no masterpiece that has not an aggressive character. Poetry must be a violent assault on the forces of the unknown, to force them to bow before man.
8. We are on the extreme promontory of the centuries! What is the use of looking behind at the moment when we must open the mysterious shutters of the impossible? Time and Space died yesterday. We are already living in the absolute, since we have already created eternal, omnipresent speed.
9. We want to glorify war — the only cure for the world — militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of the anarchists, the beautiful ideas which kill, and contempt for woman.
10. We want to demolish museums and libraries, fight morality, feminism and all opportunist and utilitarian cowardice.
11. We will sing of the great crowds agitated by work, pleasure and revolt; the multi-colored and polyphonic surf of revolutions in modern capitals: the nocturnal vibration of the arsenals and the workshops beneath their violent electric moons: the gluttonous railway stations devouring smoking serpents; factories suspended from the clouds by the thread of their smoke; bridges with the leap of gymnasts flung across the diabolic cutlery of sunny rivers: adventurous steamers sniffing the horizon; great-breasted locomotives, puffing on the rails like enormous steel horses with long tubes for bridle, and the gliding flight of aeroplanes whose propeller sounds like the flapping of a flag and the applause of enthusiastic crowds.
It is in Italy that we are issuing this manifesto of ruinous and incendiary violence, by which we today are founding Futurism, because we want to deliver Italy from its gangrene of professors, archaeologists, tourist guides and antiquaries.
***
After the snowy beach scene, I was like 'finally, the trailer is over and the real movie's starting!' Then it was like buhhhh.
7thBatallion posted:
SuperMechaGodzilla, did you at least like watching giant robots fight giant monsters?
Not really. The monsters and robots don't have any personality, and are bad at representing what they are ostensibly supposed to. Gamera: Guardian of the Universe, for example, has much better monster battel action. Gyaos is a real hateful bastard of a monster, and the whole film looks beautiful - with clear daylight cinematography and a whole model city being destroyed in the final battle. In this film we only see some fishes die at the end, and there are (comparatively) only scattered glimpses of the kaiju throughout.
I've watched nearly every Honda kaiju film, and I'd rank even the 'worst' of them higher than Pacific Rim. And this is coming from someone with high regard for Hellboy 2. Why can't I have a big awesome Jesus Moth as in Mothra? I fuckin love Mothra.
The monsters and robots do look neat as concept art and dolls. It's a shame they don't really appear in the film.
Maxwell Lord posted:
"Today we are cancelling the apocalypse!" isn't just a neat rallying cry. I think it's the film's ethos. It's saying fuck all this negativity. Fuck the doomsaying. We can get out of the hole we're in- but it takes empathy, communication, harmony.
That's what makes this film so refreshing. In the midst of a cynical age it says we can triumph.
The problem is that this is when it translates into some sort of weird unix-based(???) neo-futurism or something, as in Jeferoo's posts. A big chunk of the enthusiasm in the thread centers around anti-intellectualism and purchasing dolls. What is it that's triumphing?
In less problematic terms, what is good about harmony? What do you mean by 'harmony', ethically speaking?
Philthy posted:
I'm still not certain your post wasn't some long elaborate troll or not. But half the movie was rampaging monsters within cities. Not 5 minutes. The other half was monsters rampaging in the ocean. There was so little dialogue in this movie, that I find it hard to believe anyone could actually critique it for anything other than what it was. Robots smashing monsters for two hours straight.
I'm talking scenes of citywide destruction outside the robot combat. The robots are there to defend the cities, but we are rarely shown the threat they're trying to counter. Kaijus almost never appear alone. They are only shown reacting to the robots.
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Taffer posted:
To throw that premise out the window and then use it as ammo to attack the movie.... doesn't make any sense.
The premise of the film is that humanity is rallying together to prevent a decadent neoliberal 'end of history' situation that results in an apocalypse of biogenetic manipulation, ecological crisis, economic imbalance and 'terrorism' - basically the fate of Krypton in Man of Steel and ID4, except the aliens look different. Those four issues are all evoked by the film at one point or another, represented by the kaiju's masters.
That's not really up for debate. Rather, the discussion is currently centered around what the film presents as a solution to this problem.
In recent blockbuster cinema, we have Superman as an authentic christological figure, and World War Z's Brad Pitt as a decidedly inauthentic christological figure. Pacific Rim is not a dissimillar film, so comparison can be instructive. What are the jaegers doing to save the world? Are they more Brad Pitt or Superman?
The most disturbing scene to me is the one where Bland Hero Guy triumphantly desecrates a kaiju's corpse, smirking as its innards bubble up. It recalls nothing as much as the scenes of insect torture in Starship Troopers.
This is a sign that something's wrong because, where the ecological 'theme' is glossed over in a single throwaway line, most of the runtime is devoted to obliterating the kaijus, those vermin who disrupt our way of life and prevent us from having 'harmony' (the goal Maxwell Lord identified). The scenes of slum gangsters harvesting monster organs are reminiscent of District 9 - obviously the Kaiju are the same social abject. Slime, birth, viscera. They are 'undead' in many ways, hence the need for desecration. There are long scenes of their bodies being stripped, probed, exploited. Abjection is their keyword through and through. And the film sets it up so that they can never truly 'fit in' with society. It's impossible, right? They're not even human. Why would we give them rights? They are meteorological phenomena.
The lesson of Christ would be to love the monsters - to completely rethink everything so that this impossible goal can be achieved. Isn't the proper ending, then, for Day to connect with the kaiju and unite them against both the evil alien masters andthe corrupt politicians at home? This doesn't occur because the film is not a christian film. It's Jefferoo's film, where the young and vital crush the disruptive reptilians. It's World War Z, where Brad Pitt pretends to be a zombie, then leads them to a mass grave so that his comfortable home life won't be disrupted too much.
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Bongo Bill posted:
All the technobabble in this film is wrong, yes, and nerds' instinct is to complain about it. It's wrong even in scenes where saying something that makes real-world sense would have taken just as many lines (they call it "coolant" rather than "refrigerant," they say Gypsy is "analog" instead of "hardened"), and in some cases it's the exact opposite of reality (the globe was warmer in the cretaceous). It's so consistent and universal in its wrongness that the only acceptable way to read it is intentional. The only purpose for technobabble is for there to be a digestible line that can be understood to mean "there is a reason for this and the characters know what it is," so why not get in on the joke?
The joke is when they go out into combat for the first time, and Hero Guy says "this isn't a memory Mako, this is real" (paraphrased).
On that line, they immediately cut to a blatant CG effects shot of the football robot and frog monster posing dramatically.
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Kaiju Blue is the black goo.
What is the black goo?
[Edit: If you don't get this joke go read the Prometheus thread.]
***
Fact: Kaiju parts enhance male potency.
Fact: so does the black goo, canonically. (see: goochart.jpeg)
Kaiju Blue is the black goo.
What is the black goo?
(They include a male potency line in the film to distinguish between mere viagra use and Mako's way of hardening her sword. Sorry it's not just a floppy cigar that gets hard and thrust into a vagina-monster.)
***
Lemming posted:
You know I'm not 100% sure on this, but I think the guy might have been lying.
Doesn't matter. The entire film is lies, but the concept is the same.
Batham posted:
Christ almighty. This movie is about humans that build giant robots to beat the shit out of Godzilla's and save the world. That's it. PERIOD. If you decide to over-analyze this movie, you do not get this movie.
What is Godzilla?
What is Godzilla 'about'?
***
For the record, I'm on the side of the monsters.
***
jivjov posted:
What gets me is his penchant for blurring the line between what is the text from the movie and what is his interpretation of the subtext in his posts. If you want to go off on some unexplored tangent about how jaegars are corporations or Mako using the sword is penis envy, go for it; but don't present the speculations as if the movie is explicit about it.
Phallus =/= penis.
It's literally a phallus. It's obviously not literally a penis (pops out of an arm, is made of metal, etc.)
The robots are also not 'corporations'.
One thing Jeferoo has made clear is the link between Pacific Rim and fascism. Not all films are fascist, (Dark Knight is liberal, Iron Man libertarian, Superman a legit communist), but this one actually is. It's Starship Troopers.
Specifically, the political model it endorses (sarcastically?) is one of Third Positionism - one where ownership of the means of production is distributed among the 'productive members of society'. Third Positionists present themselves as nationalist revolutionaries who are neither capitalist nor communist for this reason. They just want all the productive members of society to unite against the ethnic other.
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Fuck This Puzzle posted:
The international community coming together is incredibly fascist.
It is interesting that the most "intellectual" of posters in this thread doesn't know the definitions of words he uses. But then again isn't the fun of deconstructionism being able to make text say whatever you want it to?
Again, I'm using the example of Starship Troopers and its message of 'war makes fascists of us all'. That film likewise presents the entire earth as united against the bugs. Racism between humans is ended once people unite against the abjectly inhuman.
However, you'd be very oblivious to miss the nationalistic aspect of the robots. Why else does the jaeger generator app thing put so much emphasis on the flags?
Third Positionists are not against alliances with other nations than their own. They will actually support national liberation movements in other nations in order to bring about a confederation of, in this case, (ethnically segregated/homogeneous) nation-states.
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Megaman's Jockstrap posted:
In this case the ethnic other really is a pan-dimensional alien killing machine bent on murdering everyone for it's extra-terrestrial masters, not a fellow human being. You cannot apply human morality to kaiju.
Kaijew...?
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Pope Mobile posted:
You're splitting hairs here. 'Phallus' literally means 'penis' in latin & greek.
It has a very different meaning in psychoanalysis, if you read a text other than the dictionary. That's the sense that I'm obviously using.
Fuck This Puzzle posted:
The other issue being the automatic assumption in his post that nationalism = fascism.
That's not an automatic assumption. Jeferoo has been posting blatantly fascist rhetoric (with the occasional "but I'm not really fascist" disclaimer) that all accurately describes the film. It's fun because so many Pacific Rim fans agree with him.
Pacific Rim and Jeferoo both promote a strong authoritarian leader who stages a militia uprising that exalts youth, virilty, masculinity (etc.) as traits that will give them the courage to pragmatically 'do what needs to be done' to regenerate the ailing nation (or nations in this case). They have both promoted a conception of the nation as an organic and mystical community that should adopt policies against groups 'outside' that are deemed inferior or dangerous to the stability of the nation. They present technocracy and solidarity as the basic principles that would allow the collaboration of productive sectors, to enhance the power of the milita regime - while preserving private property and class divisions. The throughline in all this is war, glorious war - mass mobilization of the community that believes in the above against the enemy. It's fascist.
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Megaman's Jockstrap posted:
No, this is silly. The lesson is to unite against something that threatens the survival of the species. That could be global warming, nuclear waste, the Yellowstone caldera exploding, or being stepped on by a kaiju.
There's nothing in the movie - and nothing in the kaiju - that's meant to be human. They have the wrong number of eyes and limbs. They are monsters. They are disaster made flesh (hence the category system). They are not shown, shot, or portrayed to be human in any respect. The movie specifically calls this out with "you can fight the hurricane" and yet somehow here we are, comparing them to the always-human "other".
"In his analysis of Christ’s dictum, Žižek asks ‘who is the neighbour?’, and he turns to Jacques Lacan’s answer that “the neighbour is the Real.” Yet the Real of the neighbour includes all his/her traumatic vulnerability, frailty, obscenity and fallibility. Žižek thereby concludes that the injunction to ‘love thy neighbour’ and correlative preaching about equality, tolerance and universal love “are ultimately strategies to avoid encountering the neighbour” (Conversations with Žižek, p.72, 2004). To Žižek, idealistic proclamations of love actually preclude the possibility of loving the neighbour as a Real, traumatic, inaccessible other. In his depiction of the neighbour as a ‘concretization of the Real’, Žižek argues that access to the Real is therefore not impossible – it is to be found through the neighbour – but is traumatic and threatening. Encountering the Real via the neighbour confronts us with the raw and vulnerable nature of human being, and such an encounter is often avoided in favour of more acceptable and idealistic generalisations of humanity. Jacques Derrida concurs with this when he states that “The measure is given by the act, by the capacity of loving in act… living is living with. But every time, it is only one person living with another”, concluding with the assertion that “A finite being could not possibly be present in act to too great a number. There is no belonging or friendly community that is present, and first present to itself, in act, without election and without selection” (The Politics of Friendship, p.21, 2005). That is, ‘friendly communities’ pick their members with care, to screen out the unsuitable or unlovable.
[...]
This argument is also central to the work of Julia Kristeva as explored in Strangers to Ourselves (1991), where she relates the drive to demonise the other back to an unconscious process whereby we externalise the ‘foreigner’. She says: “Strangely, the foreigner lives within us: he is the hidden face of our identity… by recognizing him within ourselves, we are spared detesting him in himself.” (Strangers to Ourselves, p.1). Kristeva also looks to psychoanalysis as an aid to transcending the projection of the foreigner/other as a monster, and she recalls that Freud did not talk about foreigners, but about the uncanny strangeness of ourselves: “The foreigner is within me, hence we are all foreigners. [Yet] If I am a foreigner, there are no foreigners. Therefore Freud does not talk about them. The ethics of psychoanalysis implies a politics: it would involve a cosmopolitanism of a new sort that, cutting across governments, economies, and markets, might work for a mankind whose solidarity is founded on the consciousness of its unconscious – desiring, destructive, fearful, empty, impossible.” (Strangers to Ourselves, p.192)."
(http://philosophynow.org/issues/77/Zizek_on_Love)
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Megaman's Jockstrap posted:
SMG, you will be forever one of my favorites for your surgical dismantling of people who liked Duke Nukem Forever, but I got to tell you I have no fucking idea what that quote has to do with anything that I said. I mean, I've read it three times now and I don't see how it addresses anything I said, Zizeck is talking about "the neighbor" as a human being and metaphorical monsters but I've already said that the kaiju monsters are real, they are literally real in the world of this movie.
I almost typed something dumb about Zizeck's reaction to kaiju in the world of Pacific Rim before I had an epiphany: I guess I'm just too fucking stupid to continue this exchange and I'm not afraid to say it; a man's gotta know his limitations. Feel free to point and laugh because buddy, you've Zizecked me right out of the conversation.
As in World War Z, the monsters represent poor people.
In the literal reality of the film, they are large, reptilian poor people. See an entire slum growing from their bodies as they're consumed. Hannibal is fundamentally the same character as the Nigerian gangsters that (literally) feed on the aliens in District 9.
Bongo Bill posted:
There are a few details in this analysis which I believe are inaccurate.
First, the value it exalts, more than youth or virility or even the very conspicuous masculinity, is trust. They need courage not to overcome the difficulty of the necessary task, but to heal from the pain of loss and open up to another person as an equal. Additionally, the most effective team of rangers is also the one that's most different from each other, showing an esteem for diversity not usually associated with fascism.
The outsiders, while dangerous, are definitely not deemed inferior; in fact, the jaegers consciously imitate kaiju througout, with Gypsy Danger being the most kaiju-like and the most glamorized of them all.
The PPDC is very pointedly not military (nobody in this film wears a uniform), nor is it a regime. The regime that does exist is the one that wishes to preserve class boundaries (helpfully identified by the geographical boundary 300 miles inland, that the rich people are hiding behind); the PPDC appears to have no ambitions regarding class at all, and while the authoritarian Stacker Pentecost is certainly portrayed as a worthier leader than his bosses, he seems content to lead his "resistance" only, and he makes several bad calls that are only rectified through acts of insubordination.
These inconsistencies might be individually trivial, mere nitpicking, but taken together they may indicate a pretty substantial deviation from the fairly strict definition of fascism that you offered.
Your first point I covered in my previous post. The film advocates a form of friendship that's exclusionary. Everyone collaborates to form an organic community, but it's based around keeping the 'unproductive' people out. As in WWZ, there is the imagery of stupid ineffective walls - but the message in both films is (satirically?) that a wall isn't enough; we need to do more to protect our Family against the unfamiliar, crushing them under our boot-heels.
The solution is the same 'postracial' fascism as in Starship Troopers. See the closeup of the alien face as we shove the final nuke into it. "It's afraid!"
The kaiju are presented as inferior in the sense that they are 'just animals' and not deserving of ethical consideration. They are also obviously presented as extremely disruptive to the organic makeup of the nation. It's the same contradiction in antisemitism, where the jews are both all-powerful and ratlike. (And see the pejorative term 'kaiju' groupie' leveled at Charlie Day and the implicit fear of 'race-mixing'.)
By 'the regime' I'm talking about the militia (not military) group that Stacker wrests control of from the decadent know-nothing/traitorous bureaucrats. See also: Leonidas in 300, Koobus in District 9.... That's the sort of figure Stacker is. That the PPCD is not really concerned about class is precisely what's wrong with them.
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I remember when they crawled into the hurricane's womb and then stabbed its baby, then hurricane's body was stripped apart and eaten.
The heroes classify the kaiju using weird labels, not unlike the alien being assigned the name Christopher in District 9. They have reasons for doing so.
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"I mean, you can't say they don't look like that, that's what they look like, right? They look like prawns."
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Characters literally punch the pregnant 'hurricane' until it miscarries & dies.
The characters in the film say a lot of bullshit.
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Bonaventure posted:
For someone who's so keen on metaphor you've got a hard time grasping how it's actually used in fiction.
There's a difference between the metaphorical implications of the film, and the metaphor employed by the blockheaded characters within the diegesis (via shit expository dialogue) to describe their enemies. Should I slow down?
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Maxwell Lord posted:
If they're immigrants, then so are King Ghidorah, Gigan, Megalon, and any other alien-invader kaiju of the past several decades. If it is a metaphor than it isn't explored at all beyond there being a "wall" at some point- we don't have any misguided advocates for kaiju rights, there aren't any hidden kaiju who have forged their documentation, they make no attempt to impose a culture or way of life on us, they just show up and knock down buildings and then go away, either because they've been nuked or Jaeger'd. Their pattern of imagery is much closer to a natural disaster than an invading culture, unlike straight-up alien invasion flicks like ID4, Earth vs. The Flying Saucers, etc. where you do have large masses of aliens not only mobilizing but occupying our territory.
But it is interesting that, for all that the kaiju are innately hostile, our only means of survival and actually winning is to "drift" with them and discover what they're all about. In ID4 the alien explaining its plans to the President is largely incidental, they have to get a basic question of motivation out of the way before we kill them all. In Pacific Rim the heroes would not win if they didn't first interface with kaiju brains and then disguise themselves in kaiju trappings. Again I'm not sure how this maps to illegal immigration unless they're saying we should all act like Mexicans and go across the border to bomb the government or something- I'm not up on my nativist rhetoric these days but I've never heard that used as a plan before.
King Ghidorah is introduced as an opponent of Mothra, the Christian moth who promotes the universal love of Jesus. Being multi-headed and covered in gold, he is easily interpreted as an antichrist figure. That's why it's important for these guys to be understood as characters.
There is a literal virgin birth in the film, for the record.
The film is not about immigration, because the right people have already been 'let in'. See, for example, Mako being adopted. See her blue hair and monstrous outbursts due to kaiju-trauma she carries inside her, and how she quickly becomes a pariah (see also the imagery of charlie day being singled out by the group in the bomb shelter because of his connection with the kaiju). In the text of the film, 'kaiju groupies' are a phenomenon that characters are under pressure to deny being.
Megaman's Jockstrap posted:
In the world of District 9 you could swap a prawn for a destitute beggar from Calcutta and it would absolutely work. You cannot - you absolutely cannot - do this with a kaiju. Nowhere in the text of Pacific Rim are kaiju treated like a person, they are treated like a threat to be neutralized and destroyed. They are shown doing literally nothing but smashing and killing.
This is an accurate observation, and you're not wrong. The difference is that I don't accept this credulously.
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jivjov posted:
Please elaborate on this?
The monsters are all female, vat-grown clones. they have no sexual difference and so can't get pregnant - but this one somehow did. It's kaiju jesus!
They jab a probe in his head.
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randombattle posted:
I think you are grossly misremembering the plot to Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster. Ghidorah was an alien equivalent to Godzilla who destroyed their planet and chased the Venus princess to Earth. He was presented as a danger to what could happen if you don't work together and misuse things like nukes. Also there was no birth in Ghidorah. Ghidorah wasn't really anyone's foe and certainly not Mothra. It's character is basically identical to Godzilla in being an analog to nuclear weapons only unlike Godzilla he destroyed his planet instead of being contained and ask to fight for peace.
In Ghidorah The Three-headed Monster, Mothra's self-sacrifice inspires Godzilla and Rodan to team up with her against Ghidorah. Ghidorah is eventually revealed to be an ally of the Xians, a group of colonizing rapists (they are literally defeated by a high-tech rape whistle).
Godzilla and Rodan must be mind-controlled into serving the Xians, but Ghidorah serves them freely. When freed from their magnetic waves, Godzilla and Rodan continue in Mothra's footsteps and kick ass.
There is a very big difference between Godzilla and Ghidorah, in other words.
Also, I apologize for unclear phrasing. The virgin birth occurs in Pacific Rim.
Edit: Mothra is a figure of radical imbalance. She will destroy an entire city, like a hurricane(!!!), in order to defend the weakest members of an exploited group.
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randombattle posted:
That's the sequel Invasion of Astro-Monster where Ghidorah was being controlled. The only alien in Ghidorah, the Three-headed Monster was the princess from Venus. In Invasion of Astro-Monster the Xilians recovered Ghidorah and tried to use their mind control noise stuff on him and Godzilla to colonize Earth.
There is a lot of continuity in Honda's kaiju films. Invasion of Astro-Monster is basically Ghidorah Part 2.
And yeah, you have that wrong. Godzilla and Rodan are mind-controlled. Ghidorah is not, and Godzilla and Rodan both force him to retreat back into space at the end.
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sean10mm posted:
The movie shows actual humans in that role - they make them work for food stamps on theleveesKaiju wallin unsafe working conditionsin unsafe working conditions and relegate them substandardhousingKaiju shelters.
This is not accidental; these are the characters who lack the class-consciousness to say "we are the monsters; we are the storm!" and rise against Stacker, the aliens, and the 1% who've moved inland. But they are at the edge of starvation, and get all their news from CNN.
Newt has the the potential to pass down the revelation from Baby Kaiju Jesus, but uses the knowledge to betray the cause, giving it to Stacker instead.
However, there is some hope: the film is cleverly edited so that the anti-wall riots are interpreted as pro-jaeger, but that's highly debatable. It's unclear if the jaegers actually have popular support.
randombattle posted:
Yeah it's a direct sequel cause you find out that Ghidorah is a weapon that aliens control to destroy planets. He's totally a nuclear analog like Godzilla. I may be blending vs. Gigan or DAM when I remember Ghidorah wrecking shit but he was being controlled all the time as he's basically a Pacific Rim style Kaiju, a big bioweapon that is controlled.
Ghidorah doesnt just destroy planets, but helps colonize/rule them. Invasion of Astro-Monster makes it clear that Godzilla and Rodan are scapegoats; the real threat is capitalism, represented by Ghidorah as a literally golden idol.
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Bongo Bill posted:
Actually, Mako does this. Mako was orphaned in Tokyo. Stacker refuses to let her pilot a jaeger, but eventually (enabled by Raleigh, who too was working on the wall in exchange for food stamps) she stands up to him, and becomes a ranger. Jaegers are kaiju and Gypsy Danger is more of a kaiju than most, and Mako's driving it. In the third act, Stacker clearly identifies Gypsy with Mako; she has become the monster and the storm, just as you say. And she and Raleigh together end up being the ones who collapse the rift, destroying the only thing that gave any legitimacy to Stacker's title of Marshal. All the jaegers are destroyed by this time, and in the absence of kaiju, none more will be built.
The jaegers certainly were popular when Yancy was alive, and there was that cheering crowd in Hong Kong.
That does little to counter the observation that this harmony is based on exclusion (of the kaiju).
While Mako is beaten down and then stengthened by friendship-love, it's not translated into an authentically 'love they neighbour' universal love. Her victory does little to really upset the system. They're not going to disarm now that the threat is gone. They're going to find a new target. Perhaps the rioters?
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Fuck This Puzzle posted:
Also it's kinda weird that people think "people uniting to defeat a common, outside foe" is a solely fascist thing when communists and liberal democracies have done the same. Anything the slightly bit martial isn't automatically "fascist".
Where are you getting 'automatically' from?
You! I'm calling you out. Provide your ethico-political reading of the film-text or step aside.
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Fuck This Puzzle posted:
This has been your entire basis for your argument. I don't know how on Earth (or kaiju dimension) you can call me out.
The Third Positionism argument is faulty too because in such a system there is still one nation at the lead and also ignoring the fact that by the end it's a small group and not a mass action.
America is the obvious lead nation, and mass action is the ideal. This is why we see the crowds of people all working on the body of the robot.
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Xealot posted:
Gipsy Danger is the only American Jaeger we even see. And Raleigh, Newt, and Hannibal Chow are the only (presumed) Americans in the film in general. The other Jaegers are Australian, Chinese, Russian, and Japanese, and Pentecost himself is supposed to be British.
America is not the lead nation by any stretch.
You're talking about the individuals' country of origin, and not the nation they represent. (They all live in Hong Kong, but we don't call them Chinese either.)
The nations are represented not by geographical location but by the jaegers themselves. Recall the propaganda film from Children of Men, which lists the all nations that have fallen: "The World has collapsed. Only Britain soldiers on." We see the same with the Jaegers picked off one by one, until America prevails.
It's not accidental that the various members of the PPDC are all part of the Global North, high GDP, or etc.
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Bongo Bill posted:
With regard to the type of unity, you said this:
You've got a strong authoritarian leader who is frequently wrong, succumbs to insubordination, asks specifically for obedience rather than loyalty or belief, and abdicates his position before the end.
For youth, younger brother Raleigh and rookie Mako are the heroes, but Chuck, the character specifically defined by his youth, has to get humility literally beaten into him, and his heroic moment happens when he's finally accepted as his father's equal.
Virility and masculinity I'll give you. But you don't have one word about how the most important relationship a ranger has is with their co-pilot, not with their commander or community. This is an even more anti-nationalistic idea than the international composition of the team.
But regarding what type of enemy they're united against - you seem to be saying the kaiju are fought because they're the other. You can tell they're the other because... they're alive and the protagonists fight them? At any rate, there's only one type of common enemy that's not the other, and that's the kind that's nobody at all, an unpersonified force of nature, which is by far the strongest reading of the kaiju.
I'm actually enjoying the microcosmic analogy people have identified in the thread, where I am the monster and Jeferoo is the fascist robot. All this pedantry is analogous to, I guess, the picky sniping of the fighter planes.
No offense, I mean, but you're cutting out more than half the details to focus on little specifics like 'sometimes people question the charismatic authoritarian leader' (so therefore he's not an authority? The compelling speeches are retroactively cancelled out?).
The copilots don't team up to the exclusion of everyone else. They team up to become productive members of the community, good soldiers who go to war against the kaiju for the nation. They disobey Stacker only only occasionally, and only so that they can better serve the nation.
The kaiju are the other because of the imagery of slavery, abjection and exploitation. I've gone over that already too.
That's why I called out that one dude. This is a way more fun movie to read and write about than to watch, but I'd prefer if people posted full-feldged readings instead of just reacting. Like, going on saying the American movie where the American robot prevails over other countries isn't nationalistic because one of the characters was technically born in Japan before becoming a literal part of the American machine.
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Bonaventure posted:
Ok let me just load up EBSCOhost to find the article on Kristeva's "Powers of Horror" that I need to cite:
It's a shallow film notable for its enthusiastic embrace of childhood fantasy that says very little beyond its advocacy and representation of multinationalism. If we must find metaphor, then let's look at what real-world issues are addressed by the text: if we accept the kaiju are "caused" by global warming, resulting in "hurricanes" like Katrina, then the film shows the nations putting aside their differences, pooling their resources to put things right. "Stop bickering and fix the planet." --noted fascist Guillermo del Toro
I do appreciate that you suspended your usual style of posting a single vague and nonspecifically confrontational sentence, but: that's it?
Your reading of the film is that the multinationalism is good, because the director probably didn't intend to make a fascist film. That's barely a DVD synopsis. I'm certain you're capable of better than this. How are the resources pooled? How do the nations fix global warming in real-world terms? How do you incorporate the imagery of war, ultraviolence and gore into the environmentalist reading?
What political stance are you advocating?
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Bonaventure posted:
I don't have more to say than a DVD blurb because there's not more to say than a DVD blurb.
If that's all it means to you, then why do you come across as so angry in your otherwise-halfhearted defense of the film?
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Bonaventure posted:
Because reading your disingenuous criticism, and the deference it inspires (I disagree with you, but I'm probably just too dumb to get it!), makes me angry.
That's not really what 'disingenuous' means, and you seem to have confused the fact that my reading is oppositional with it being inaccurate.
I know full well that the characters put numbers and codenames on the monsters, and call them hurricanes. I am criticizing the act of categorizing, not ignoring or denying it. I don't believe the exposition because the exposition is contradicted by the text. My reading pays attention to what is unsaid, like how the rioters are only given a brief soundbite.
More to the point: when I point out fascist and anti-christological undertones in the film's narrative, with clear examples, and you say that the message is 'merely' that we should generically unite to fight global warming, then we're not actually disagreeing. However, the onus is now on you to show that you are not unwittingly advocating authoritarian fascism as the solution to global warming.
You're saying we have to 'do something' but your refusal to spell out what that 'something' is puts you in a spot. We've already pretty much established that the film isn't communist, and it's obviously not apolitical. What do you think it is?
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Xealot posted:
I mean to say, although a reading of the film as a generic pro-America screed is valid, it's also about its own (non-American) source material. Painting Mako Mori as an extension of American power because she's in an American robot is disingenuous, because she's modeled after any number of Japanese character archetypes that have their own nationalistic and cultural significance. You say she becomes American because she's inside Gipsy Danger. But other people may think Gipsy Danger becomes Japanese because Mako Mori is inside it.
I don't think it's a generic pro-America screed.
This whole sidetrack began when Fuck This Puzzle posted that the film can't be advocating a Third Position-style political system because (in his view) there is no clear 'lead nation' to this confederation. I obviously disagree on multiple levels. For starters, I am reading of Pacific Rim as a 'Starship Troopers' propaganda film. Who is the POV character? Why are these details shown, and others omitted? What nation produced the entire film? Second, I don't think multinationalism and fascism are mutually exclusive. The lack of a central 'leader' nation is an extremely arguable technicality. Some of the nations obviously hold more sway than others, but I don't think that's a big point either way.
That sort of 'but she's originally japanese' nitpicking muddies the waters and doesn't confront the fundamental question of "if it's not a type of fascist revolt, then what is it?" 'Cause it honks like a goose and steps like a goose, and no-one who disagrees has ventured to answer that question with examples from the text. That's all I'm really asking.
Assuming that the resistance is not fascist, for a moment: what is it, then?
Bonaventure posted:
What do you think the imagery of the wall breaking in Sydney was supposed to evoke? Why is the metaphor so consistent and repeated throughout the film? When is it contradicted? Because one of the monsters it turns out has a baby for a shock scare and a comedy scene?
To answer your questions, in order:
-It's not 'supposed to' evoke anything, but does combine 'levee' imagery with the security walls and fences you see in Israel, the US-Mexico border, etc. See, I don't disagree with you except for your conviction that the monsters can represent only one thing. They are also clones and 'the social abject', etc.
-Their classification system is a way of trying to categorize, objectivize and subjugate the unknown. It's a sign of the protagonists' weakness.
-It's contradicted by the baby scene, and all the scenes where the aliens are shown to be physical creatures with thoughts, bodies, etc.
-Yes, absolutely. My reading can incorporate the baby scene and your does not. My reading is stronger for not dismissing textual evidence.
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Slo-Tek posted:
A military/pseudomilitary organization that is organized along clear lines of authority?
You know what else is organized along clear lines of authority? A sandwich shop. Is thattoo?
That doesn't answer the question. (The question was: "if it's not fascist what is it?" Your answer is: "not fascist.")
With this analogy, are you saying the PPDC's private operation whose actions are designed to increase profitability? Is their resistance libertarian, in your view, or something along those lines?
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Bongo Bill posted:
I can recall one scene using some abjection and exploitation imagery surrounding kaiju [...]
That kaiju are animalistic is not propaganda, unless you think the film is lying to you.
What kind of ethnic other appears suddenly, makes no attempt at communication, has no visible culture (the protagonists have to use mind reading to learn anything about them), destroys mercilessly without even plundering, and is born ready and willing to kill? Historical precedent of any people being viewed thus, even in less exaggerated form, are rare, and no fascist state ever fought them. Fascism's fear of the other is the fear of infiltration and subversion, not the fear of extinction.
If Pacific Rim is an endorsement of fascism, then it endorses only the very peculiar kind of fascism that is minimally militaristic, works better without its charismatic leader, celebrates internal pluralism, eschews chauvinistic symbols, doesn't much care what its followers believe in, and goes away once the threat is defeated. There's probably a name for that, but I'm drawing a blank.
I'm gonna contest your saying there is 'one scene' of abjection, when the kaiju are constantly being ripped open, spilling blood and guts everywhere. Their viscera is all over the film. The film doesn't exist in a vacuum either. Kaiju are usually characters, often heroes. Godzilla is a 'personified' force of nature who became an anticapitalist hero in 1964. Mothra is intelligent and uses hurricane-force winds to fight for Jesus.
I do think the film is misleading and deceptive; there is enough said that you can tell what is unsaid. I argue that the kaiju are not canonically devoid of personality but that we are denied that level of identification. See Transformers, Man of Steel, Dawn of the Dead, and Battle: Los Angeles where the best characters identify with dogs. All we are allowed to see of the Kaiju are their 'irrational' outbursts of violence. Although the 9/11 imagery is not as strong as in Cloverfield and other recent films, the 'terrorist' aspect of the monsters should not be discounted.
Also: minimally militaristic? Really? I don't think the film is nearly as critical of Stacker as you're saying. his character is extremely similar to Michael Ironside's in Starship Troopers - the vet who instructs the new recruits then inspirationally puts on the uniform one last time. He's an overprotective father figure, but still a father figure. The nations are united by their shared hatred of the feminine kaju and even have slurs like 'kaiju groupie' to berate people and keep them in line. That belief is the essential uniting factor. There's also no sign in the film that they'll willingly disband the organization now that the war is over.
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Kannen posted:
More to the point, why don't you give us an example of an action film, in the vein of our beloved Pacific Rim, that is specifically NOT giving out a Fascist message? Are all Superhero films Fascist? Are all action films featuring an army/resistance of any kind fascist? Please, sir, educate us.
In fact, I propose a challenge, why don't you give us an outline of a film that features giant robots killing Kaiju that is NOT fascist?
Also, I've already proposed a film where the kaiju and humans team up against their mutual oppressors.
Pay attention.
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ImpAtom posted:
Eh, the best way to handle SMG is to understand that he doesn't really care to make arguments, he just wants to present a film reading intentionally against the wave of the thread's tone as a thought experiment. It only gets to be a problem when people argue with him nonstop instead instead of just having fun with the thought experiment but not taking it too seriously.
Why would I pretend not to enjoy the film?
I liked Man Of Steel and it's probably the highest-grossing film of the year.
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Jefferoo posted:
Sometimes people have to take a life to defend life. It sucks, but it's necessary.
This 'doing what's necessary' is pragmatism. Pragmatism is a power-philosophy.
"The reality of what is independent of my own will is embodied, for philosophy, in the conception of 'truth'. The truth of my beliefs, in the view of common sense, does not depend, in most cases, upon anything that I can do. It is true that if I believe I shall eat my breakfast tomorrow, my belief, if true, is so partly in virtue of my own future volitions; but if I believe that Caesar was murdered on the Ides of March, what makes my belief true lies wholly outside the power of my will. Philosophies inspired by love of power find this situation unpleasant, and therefore set to work, in various ways, to undermine the commonsense conception of facts as the sources of truth or falsehood in beliefs... This gives freedom to creative fancy, which it liberates from the shackles of the supposed 'real' world.
Pragmatism, in some of its forms, is a power-philosophy. For pragmatism, a belief is 'true' if its consequences are pleasant. Now human beings can make the consequences of a belief pleasant or unpleasant. Belief in the moral superiority of a dictator has pleasanter consequences than disbelief, if you live under his government. Wherever there is effective persecution, the official creed is 'true' in the pragmatist sense. The pragmatist philosophy, therefore, gives to those in power a metaphysical omnipotence which a more pedestrian philosophy would deny to them. I do not suggest that most pragmatists admit the consequences of their philosophy; I say only that they are consequences, and that the pragmatist's attack on the common view of truth is an outcome of love of power, though perhaps more of power over inanimate nature than of power over human beings."
-Bertrand Russell
Starship Troopers is about pragmatism as well. The Michael Ironside character promotes fascism because it simply 'works best'.
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I wonder if people would be more comfortable if we referred to the resistance as 'corporatist', the nicer way of saying fascist?
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Jefferoo posted:
Corporations exist solely to make money. Pacific Rim starts out with the PPDC losing their funding from their investors for failing to meet their goal, which is not making money. They proceed to triumph against impossible odds regardless of this fact through sheer force of people working together. In a more nonsensical world you could argue that this film is actually about Steve Jobs and it's only with Stacker Pentecost putting on his black work uniform and getting his hands dirty again that they succeed.
Corporatism =/= corporations.
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Jefferoo posted:
Yeah, I guess that's just the "nice word for fascist." Yuh-huh.
In this context, yes. Corporatism is most closely associated with fascism (specifically under Mussolini), unless you're arguing Pacific Rim is about the New Deal or something.
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What troubles me is that people are quibbling over the definition of 'fascism' when the primary issue is that a fat, grotesque, female nonperson is punched in the belly until it explodes with blood and viscera, and the hero continues punching the wound with a piston-like repetition until nothing is left but a steaming paste, while he smiles and celebrates the overkill.
This message is directed at small children, while ostensible adults exult the lack of 'moral complexity' - as if it's complex to stop and say this is WRONG.
When you break it down, people are more concerned with being called 'bad', than with honestly taking steps actually stop doing bad things. It's ok to desecrate a corpse do long as I don't do so 'fascistly'. "I desecrated this corpse as part of a technically-multinational and arguably-stateless operation, so it's ok." That's not the issue.
The yonic imagery associated with the kaiju monsters has been outlined in detail and is blatant anyways. The dilating rift, Ron Perlman crawling from a knife wound, the literal childbirth scene. Anyone seen that movie Inside? It's the same stuff.
This takes on interesting connotations when we consider that the monsters are implicitly Japanese ("kaiju", modeled primarily after characters like Guiron (i.e Knifehead)) and explicitly female - like our co-lead, right?
But even on a more basic level, who wants to see a movie where King Kong is lynched by the heroes and graphically disemboweled?
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Milky Moor posted:
I think you're referring to the 'no pulse' scene but, honestly, I'm not sure.
Are we now going to quibble over whether shooting someone with a fist-gun at close range constitutes a 'punch', and thereby continue to evade the obvious point?
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Xenomrph posted:
The "no pulse" scene works because its cathartic - [...] you can't say that the desire for some "payback" doesn't make sense.
Punching an inanimate object such as a pillow - or, in this case, a woman's corpse - to 'let the anger out' is actually shown to have no therapeutic effect, and likely just makes things worse.
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It's also important to keep in mind that this particular monster was specifically sent after the doctor performing medical experiments on her maimed but still-living sisters.
We're shown Newt disheveled and bleeding after the drift. Implicitly, the kaiju brain in the jar felt a similar pain. It's basically torture to extract information.
Yeah, the masters calling the shots are neoliberals - but that's not the monsters' fault.
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However, if you ignore the 'fleshiness' - the eyes, brains, wombs, etc. - the monsters do indeed look like mere objects to be destroyed without reflection or remorse.
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Augustin Iturbide posted:
This whole fascism debate is weird because the movie presents a simplistic, convenient narrative of good vs. evil and that is superficially similar to fascism in that fascism also attempts to simplify reality into good guy action heroes vs. unquestionably, objectively evil enemies. The problem here is that Pacific Rim is fiction, and ridiculous fiction at that. Like, you can argue it's fascist and you might even be right in the sense that they share a superficial similarity, but that misses the big issue is that actual fascist media presents itself as an actual depiction of reality while Pacific Rim depicts itself as a fantasy. Yeah, this can be problematic, if say, someone decided to base their life philosophies around what they learned from watching Pacific Rim. But if someone did that we'd all very reasonably think they're crazy.
Edited for clarity.
By this standard it is theoretically impossible for any film to mean anything, since even the most stringent documentary is not, itself, reality.
You can appeal to the film's ridiculousness, but then the same can be said of the ridiculously fascist protagonists of Starship Troopers.
The parallels between the treatment of 'kaiju' in this film and the treatment of the 'bugs' in such politically-charged fictional films as District 9, Starship Troopers, and 300 have already been outlined.
What is your precedent for reading a film of this sort as 'apolitical'? And, to repeat: if the resistance is not fascist, what is it?
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Fuck This Puzzle posted:
The problem being there is no parallel (besides being not-human). As has been pointed out to you numerous times the kaiju are akin to natural disasters or war machines and are not thinking beings as in the other films.
There are multiple scenes of characters trying to find out what the kaiju think by entering their minds and literally viewing their thoughts.
Textual evidence suggests they are intelligent enough to understand such abstract concepts as 'colonialism' - not to mention their knowledge of the gene-scanning security mechanism that blocks access to the rift.
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Fuck This Puzzle posted:
Except the thoughts are those of the alien overlords who control the kaiju with their thoughts. This is explicitly told to the viewer. It's the equivalent of remote controlling a machine.
And like I said before maybe you should start with understanding the text before delving into any subtext.
Newt obviously links minds with the kaiju, not the master aliens, and experiences such kaiju-specific memories as their painful creation/birth.
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Fuck This Puzzle posted:
Except it's shown from the outside and is thus the aliens constructing them. None of the kaiju has a specific, individual memory. The words "hive mind" are used (it is the hivemind of the colonial aliens). They're upgraded like equipment to better fight against the jaegars. They are machines.
This really is not difficult to understand.
Drifting humans also remember themselves and each-other in third person. Is Mako also nonthinking?
We are shown a kaiju's specific individual memory of being born, unless you're arguing that the specific shot of a specific creature being created is some sort of archetypal concept and not a memory (even though it is shot in the exact same way as the humans' memories)?
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Fuck This Puzzle posted:
Can you not read? The perspective is from the outside of the creature - from the perspective of the creators.
Even if we're gonna argue it's just cinematic shorthand (which it probably is) all the evidence points away from your reading and to mine. Every bit of evidence is that these are biological machines and not thinking individuals. It's getting tiring having to repeat facts to the brick wall that is you over and over again so I won't list the evidence again. It must be fairly easy to write walls of text when you can ignore the text you're writing about.
Again, we see Mako's memory of raking the sand in a zen garden 'from the outside' - via a top-down 'god's eye' perspective, even.
Did you conclude from this that Mako is the empty meat-puppet of an invisible god in the sky? Can we kill Mako without worry because she is therefore an object?
If not, why do you draw an opposite conclusion about the kaiju's intelligence from identical textual evidence?
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I find it extremely interesting that the immediate conclusion drawn from the 'hive mind' line is that the monsters are rocklike objects.
Why not conclude that they are hyperintelligent and empathetic - millions of giant interconnected brains, when one is hurt the whole group feels it, etc.?
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Augustin Iturbide posted:
Because punching one godzilla does not effect any of the other godzillas.
True point - in which case, the fact that the kaiju's individual pain is not shared with the rest of the species shows that they are not merely puppet-objects.
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Fuck This Puzzle posted:
Shit are you just missing the fact the kaiju are the aliens' Jaegers? This is real basic.
When the jaegers are damaged, the pilots feel pain and are even physically injured.
The 'pilots' of the kaiju are their twin brains, given orders over long distance (analogous to the jaegers' radio communication back to base).
The kaiju's brains feel pain. Therefore, the kaiju feel pain.
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The kaiju are slaves. The kaiju should be allied with.
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Super.Jesus posted:
How?
The way they do it in Terminator 2: free them from the system that controls them. Then, befriend them with drifting.
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Super.Jesus posted:
You see we should negotiate with the extradimensional aliens's pets who, by their own mental admission, want to genocide the entirety of humanity because
Watching John with the machine, it was suddenly so clear. The Terminator would never stop. It would never leave him. It would never hurt him, never shout at him, or get drunk and hit him, or say it was too busy to spend time with him. It would always be there. And it would die to protect him. Of all the would-be fathers who came and went over the years, this thing, this machine was the only one that measured up. In an insane world, it was the sanest choice.
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ImpAtom posted:
Wow, that's a bizarre reading.
The Terminator isn't befriended in Terminator 2. It's enslaved. John Connor enslaves a Terminator and sends it back to protect himself. He in fact forces it to participate in its own self-destruction. It's never freed. It remains bound to the rules enforced on it by others even when it actively becomes its own being. It can't even kill itself in the end. It has to plead with the young John Connor (who would otherwise grow up to enslave him) to kill him because he can't do it himself.
The terminator uses a loophole to exceed its own programming and sacrifice itself, taking down skynet and freeing everyone. It's explicitly christological imagery.
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Super.Jesus posted:
Why can't you accept that sometimes, in fictional universes, violent self-defense under the threat of death just may be the answer?
Could you list some of these other fictional universes? No joke, I'm interested.
Pacific Rim's anti-Christian message is contradicted by Terminator 2, Man Of Steel, District 9, and many others. It is also directly mocked by satirical films like Starship Troopers.
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anthraciteDragon posted:
What's the exact anti-Christian message here?
The protagonists' refusal/inability to love their neighbour and self-identify as abject, inhuman monsters too. The love that is expressed is exclusionary, failing to achieve a universal dimension that cuts across all parts of society, putting class ahead of all other considerations, championing the lowest everywhere.
A Christian film would show both the human workers and kaiju uniting against their mutual oppressors. This does not occur.
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Shadeoses posted:
The equivalent of the Kaiju is the robotic Jaeger, enslaved by the pilots, so why can't they rebel and be be free and Christlike too?
Interestingly, this is the subtext of Iron Man 3, with the AI suit.
The jaeger pilots (along with, arguably, the Glados computer system) are the brains of their robot body. The kaiju already have brains of their own.
The pilots should turn off their radios and rebel against Stacker's plan to deploy the nuke, working with Newton to free and befriend the kaiju.
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anthraciteDragon posted:
Explain to me how they'd go about doing this.
Turning off the radio? Hit a switch. Rallying the proletariat? Use their fame to broadcast a message of love for kaiju.
Freeing the kaiju is similar: search for a way to block the psychic link between them and their masters. Communicate with them via drifting.
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anthraciteDragon posted:
I'm sure the people of the world who live under the fear and threat of the Kaiju would love to hear some Jaeger pilots call for them to stop the hate and love the Kaiju. Ignore Slattern and his buddies chewing on the buildings and squashing people underfoot. They can't help themselves, they're under control of an otherwordly evil, you need to pity them and love them, right up to the point where they eat you and your family, then you can be united with them for the rest of your life!
Correct. It's people who refuse this message that are the true enemy. It's not about pity, though. It's about freedom and solidarity.
Superman doesn't pity humanity. He does what he does, and believes in humanity to make the right choice.
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7thBatallion posted:
By that logic, WWII was pointless as we could have negotiate with Hitler and forgive Pearl Harbor. See? The Holocaust wasn't that bad! He's just a good guy down at heart.
Hitler was not a member of the proletariat. He was the leader of the country.
Kill Hitler and rally the poor (not necessarily in that order).
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We should step back for a moment to look at the film's aesthetics - specifically the moment where Hero Guy stops to say this is real, in direct opposition to Mako's surreal memories which are not real.
While many would consider the 'realism' of what happens self-evident (just as it's self-evident that the kaiju are objects who deserve to be enslaved
) it's fairly clear that reality in the film (and to the characters) is a shared symbolic fiction similar to that of The Matrix. This is well before the whole drifting invention complicates who is thinking what, whose memories are whose.... See the scenes of characters credulously watching CNN, the montage of TV footage that opens the film. Is television real? Is the film, which is explicitly narrated to us, with flowery language, real?I suppose it was a mistake to take for granted that we all understood that the film is not an objective retelling of actual ("in-universe") events - that what we are seeing is no less of an exaggeration than Stacker standing haloed by sunlight in Mako's dreams, except that we've agreed to accept it.
The reason jaeger and kaiju are paralleled is that Pacific Rim follows the same logic as Terminator, The Matrix, Man Of Steel, Alien/Aliens, Battle: Los Angeles, The Thing, etc., where 'underneath' the 'everyday' symbolic reality is the Real reality of cold bio-mechanical determinism, where the steak you're eating is just a lump of carbon and what you perceive as free choice is really determined by such things as your genetic code. The jaeger caught up in the system really are the same as the kaiju -perhaps identical.
This is what makes the extreme reaction against the kaiju look like projection. "They are objects, they are puppets and drones, but I am free and I am strong." So what people are talking about with this 'fascism ' stuff is not some rhetorical game, but something that really cuts into the heart of what the film is about - whether it promotes a false freedom of the sort promoted by real people in this very thread.
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Peruser posted:
I don't think SMG is trolling, I'm pretty sure he has legit autism.
I'm still very much enjoying how the course of the thread parallels the film's narrative, where opponents are construed as inhuman, mentally ill, deceivers, etc.
I think I have switched my stance on the film a bit. Although not too fun to watch, it's neat to see it reveal people going coo-coo for cocoa puffs with such gusto.
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Jonny Angel posted:
Hey SuperMechaGodzilla, I've loved your insights in this thread but wanna ask you to unpack some of what you meant when you proposed an alternative version of this film wherein Jaegers and Kaijus work together to overthrow the systems that have placed the latter (and maybe the former, I dunno?) into subservient, abject states. It's a concept worth thinking about, but also one with some serious immediate problems that I'm interested to see how you or anyone else interested in such a film would address.
The main issue comes down to "How do you have strong action setpieces in a film like that without kneecapping its messages or otherwise bringing along problematic elements?" Since you're such a big fan of the Godzilla franchise, I trust your answer isn't just "shift the genre of the film away from an action focus", but what's gonna be the content of those big battels?
On the one hand, once you've got the Jaegers and Kaijus on the same team, it's hard to marshal a physical representation of the metaphorical forces they're fighting that poses a credible threat. You can easily have an exultant sort of climax wherein the Big Huge Fuckers are literally tearing apart a system, but that really has to be limited in scope to prevent an atmosphere of triumphalist bullying. And if we've got the larger, physically dominant underclasses beating the shit out of the comparatively small, physically weak, but hyper-intelligent and all-controlling order, does that raise issues of proximity to traditional bigoted representations of Jews and their evil Jewish media/finance control that we've gotta stop by beating up some Jews?
And if we're accepting the premises that (a) that triumphant climactic violence has to be minimized and (b) we have to have some action setpieces before the movie's climax, what do we do before then, as you see it? Do the Kaiju's masters have some other powerful physical representation of their force and neo-colonialist ideologies that they deploy to defend against the combined threat? Or do we have scenes where Jaegers are fighting the very Kaijus that they're trying to ultimately free? (Unfortunate potential implications of liberal tolerance rhetoric, "We want to include and accept this abject group, we really do, but they're just so violent and antagonistic that it can't work") I suppose you could have these scenes of combat largely occur before the realization of "We can help free the Kaijus" is relayed to the Jaeger pilots and command structure, but that might also run the risk of the audience cheering for battles we're later made to realize were pointless and needlessly destructive. Do we maybe want that?
Hopefully my references back to District 9, Terminator 2 and so-forth provide some indication.
Pacific Rim is basically a version of Aliens without a Ripley, wherein the colonial marines are lionized. In Aliens, the titular creatures are a dark mirror of the colonial marines (armored, weaponized but ultimately subservient and expendable) and the answer to their defeat lies inwards - in criticizing the society we ourselves are in, and which produces us. There's a reason the corporation in Alien and Aliens strives to capture the alien, and is Ripley's ultimate antagonist. It's because the corporation strives to become the aliens. Not intentionally, mind. It's just in that the free-market logic that drives Cyberdyne Systems produces the decidedly unfree Skynet future.
This is why I have no issue with Battle: Los Angeles. It's misread as jingoistic when it's actually harshly self-critical. The alien colonists are American too - and, on the flipside, the all-American heroes realize that they risk being mere drones, and are motivated to do better. That film has the imagery of the soldiers turning off their radios to be freer, and Pacific Rim does not.
Obviously this doesn't mean pacifism, and Ripley does need to beat some drones to get at the queen. But it's this acknowledgement that the aliens, though a threat, are not the real enemy that makes the difference. See District 9's presentation of the prawns as stupid and brutish. While the film does present them as inferior, it makes clear that they've been inferiorized by an oppressive system. It's this idea of inferiorization that's missing in the dismissal of the kaiju as mindless objects. The statement "that's just what they objectively are" can be applied to the 'prawn' aliens just the same.
As for putting the conflict onscreen, I'll refer back to Invasion of Astro-Monster, where the good monsters fight and chase away the geniunely evil Ghidorah who willingly assists in the colonization of Earth. In this specific film, do you think Stacker and others would give up their power so easily? As noted before, now that the conflict is over, these guys are just going to be looking for a new target. The defeat of the kaiju does not signal an end to all war. New conflicts are on the horizon, as the Real is only repressed, pushed back into its hole.
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Miltank posted:
Yeah Stacker was just trying to hold on to the jaeger program so he could be grand fuhrer of earth. That is why he personally went on a suicide mission and personally blew himself up in a nuclear blast. Do you think that princess Leia was just using the Rebel Alliance as puppets to gain control of the galaxy?
That is the mildly cynical kicker to Star Wars, yes. Leia is not deliberately using the rebels to become a cartoon hyperbole evil person, but is trying to get reinstated as princess. Does the world really need a princess - especially after we've seen the kingdom in Episode 1? See also the fact that Chewie and the droids do not recieve medals after being explicitly coded as minorities. The end of star wars has some nice chewy texture to it.
Stacker and the gang likewise are not power-hungry madmen but are (however unwittingly) perpetuating an oppressive system. Even though their goal is 'saving lives', their focus on attacking symptoms (terrorist kaiju) instead of the real underlying problems (capitalism) means that their efforts are misguided and futile.
Future-Romney is still president of America and, even if the resistance is a full-on rebellion, the kind of society they're creating is questionable.
It seems like this is a very big recurring issue in the thread: reading these criticisms as very personal attacks against not only fans of the film but the characters as well!
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Miltank posted:
Capitalism is not the underlying problem in the movie. That is something a crazy person would say.
The underlying problem of Pacific Rim is that titanic monsters are coming out of the pacific ocean, destroying cities and killing people. That is literally the most that Humans know about kaiju for the entire war up until the very end. The most we know for sure is that these aliens were being sent by something else and that they are coming faster and faster and soon we won't be able to stop them from killing all of humanity.
You don't really seem like you understand the difference between "saving lives" and "saving all life on the planet."
As in Terminator, Man of Steel, The Matrix, ID4, etc., the world on 'the other side of the rift' in Pacific Rim is an apocalyptic vision of the liberal capitalist 'end of history'. In Terminator and Man of Steel, it is literally the future.
Recall that at the end of Terminator 1, the defeat of the symptomatic robot does not stop the Cyberdyne corporation from creating Skynet. Terminator 3 goes further, saying that even defeating Cyberdyne will not prevent Skynet. The enemy in Terminator is capitalism as a whole, as the logic of Skynet is inherent to it.
Pacific Rim is not dissimilar. The logic of the alien masters is already present in Earth, in nascent form. The kaiju-like jaegers are built by the richest nations in service of President Romney and some other masters in the 1%.
While Stacker does eventually disregard their orders, he and the other protagonists don't really do anything about these underlying problems, doing nothing to prevent humanity from becoming like the aliens. Future conflict is inevitable.
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It was revealed that the 'Category 5' Kaiju's designated codename is "filthy slut," and that the heroes are not misogynistic at all; how could you think that.
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Steve Yun posted:
I dunno, "Slattern" isn't mentioned in the movie. I dunno what the rules are about judging a movie based on the comics/apocrypha.
The kaiju name "onibaba" means "demon hag".
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Peruser posted:
At first I thought SMG was twisting the words around, but Slattern actually means "dirty slut"
What the fuck Del Toro/people who thought that was a good name?
It's totally appropriate for a film about psychology that's presented to us from the perspective of a gynophobic character/society.
You also have Knifehead and Otachi (big sword) - reminding of the basic distinction in Lacanian psychoanalysis between having the phallus (men) and being the phallus (women).
This is fairly obvious even if you haven't listened to Del Toro talk about his deliberate use of gynecological imagery on the commentary tracks for Pan's Labyrinth, Hellboy 2, etc.
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anthraciteDragon posted:
Wait, what?
"The symbolic version of the phallus, a phallic symbol is meant to represent male generative powers. According to Sigmund Freud's theory of psychoanalysis, while males possess a penis, no one can possess the symbolic phallus. Jacques Lacan's Écrits includes an essay titled The Significance of the Phallus which articulates the difference between "being" and "having" the phallus. Men are positioned as men insofar as they are seen to have the phallus. Women, not having the phallus, are seen to "be" the phallus. The symbolic phallus is the concept of being the ultimate man, and having this is compared to having the divine gift of God.
In Gender Trouble, Judith Butler explores Freud's and Lacan's discussions of the symbolic phallus by pointing out the connection between the phallus and the penis. She writes, "The law requires conformity to its own notion of 'nature'. It gains its legitimacy through the binary and asymmetrical naturalization of bodies in which the phallus, though clearly not identical to the penis, deploys the penis as its naturalized instrument and sign". In Bodies that Matter, she further explores the possibilities for the phallus in her discussion of the lesbian phallus. If, as she notes, Freud enumerates a set of analogies and substitutions that rhetorically affirm the fundamental transferability of the phallus from the penis elsewhere, then any number of other things might come to stand in for the phallus."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lack_%...Lack_of_Phallus
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mr. stefan posted:
Not really, no, SMG is just reaching way down to the bottom of the barrel in this instance and other people are joining in for fun. He'd never trot out fascism allegory for any other movie, its the single laziest subtext to apply to an action movie there is and is usually below his efforts.
I don't read other films as being about fascism because they usually aren't. In this case, it's accurate. The film is conducive to being read that way.
Pan's Labyrinth is about a girl who literally fantasizes about creatures loaded with yonic symbolism to cope with living in literally-fascist Spain. This is not Del Toro's first 'monsters versus fascism' film. Hellboy fought the nazis.
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randombattle posted:
Come on man now you're just stretching. Del Toro had one movie like that so all his movies are? That's just lazy reading and you are trying way too hard to make this work.
I don't try. I am.
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Corek posted:
Sexual psychoanalysis is not always correct. Erich Fromm misread the tale of the Little Red Riding Hood using the Brothers Grimm's flourishes that did not exist in the original folk version of the tale and diagnosing the authors based on that instead of the actual authors' tale:
"Fromm interpreted the tale as a riddle about the collective unconscious in primitive society, and he solved it "without difficulty" by decoding its "symbolic language." The story concerns an adolescent's confrontation with adult sexuality, he explained. Its hidden meaning shows through its symbolism—but the symbols he saw in his version of the text were based on details that did not exist in the versions known to peasants in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Thus he makes a great deal of the (nonexistent) red riding hood as a symbol of menstruation and of the (nonexistent) bottle carried by the girl as a symbol of virginity: hence the mother's (nonexistent) admonition not to stray from the path into wild terrain where she might break it. The wolf is the ravishing male. And the two (nonexistent) stones that are placed in the wolf's belly after the (nonexistent) hunter extricates the girl and her grandmother, stand for sterility, the punishment for breaking a sexual taboo. So, with an uncanny sensitivity to detail that did not occur in the original folk tale, the psychoanalyst takes us into a mental universe that never existed, at least not before the advent of psychoanalysis."
-Robert Darnton "Peasants Tell Tales: The Meaning of Mother Goose"
Bruno Bettelheim, another psychoanalyst that studied fairy tales, believed that autism was caused by bad mothers being frigid to their children, and claimed that he was able to cure 43% of cases. (Shades of SMG's constant denunciation of inferior "autist" contributors to Star Wars wikis). He also physically abused and beat his students for not agreeing with him.
I'm a Lacanian not a Jungian (talking about collective unconscious stuff) and I am not 'diagnosing' Del Toro because I don't care about authorial intent. I am also not concerned about 'early, primordial versions' of the text, but about the text as it exists and is read today. This has effectively nothing to do with what I've written.
Philosophy is not always correct. Since I read Zizek, I must adhere to Confucianism.
Scientists are also not always correct. Since I use a computer, I must believe in phlogiston.
This is stupid.
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That reading is fairly sound anyways. The main issue is that he misidentifies the source of the text, which has little to do with the interpreting the obviously-symbolic story of a young girl protecting a fragile treasure from a beast by 'remaining on the path'.
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Bonaventure posted:
But it makes for such clever articles in Shakespeare Quarterly.
Don't front. You haven't read Shakespeare.
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Bonaventure posted:
How could I? I'm the illiterate son of a leather-worker.
I said don't front.
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mr. stefan posted:
Reading Shakespeare is about as much of an authentic experience as enjoying a kanye album by staring intently at the vinyl record grooves. Shakespeare not performed is no Shakespeare at all.
I don't mean reading as in putting books in front of you.
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mr. stefan posted:
I'm not angry, I just want to see his A-Game. "Sword As Phallus" and "Action Narrative As Fascist Allegory" are both the kind of superficial analyses I'd expect from a video game review website.
The thing is that psychoanalysis wasn't abandoned because of inefficiency of patient treatment, it was abandoned because a significant number of its core theories were found to be in error.
Which errors in which core theories are you referring to? And found by whom?
Also, there's nothing really simplistic about fascism. That's a cheap dismissal.
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Spiritus Nox posted:
I'm not entirely sure the Jaegers actually ever kill a sentient being. The Kaiju are repeatedly and explicitly described as biological weapons, not intelligent life. Are we supposed to cry if an antidote is discovered for a weaponized bacterium?
I'd like to share a revelation that I've had during my time here. It came to me when I tried to classify your species and I realized that you're not actually reptiles. Every reptile on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment but you kaiju do not. You move to an area and you multiply and multiply until every natural resource is consumed and the only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus. Kaiju are a disease, a cancer of this planet. You're a plague and we are the cure.
Microcline posted:
SMG isn't wrong about the martial themes, but it's not the technofascism Jefferoo suggested. The movie follows a neoliberal colonial war from the perspective of the colonized. Look at our alien invaders—they strip mine resources, wallow in pollution, and abuse their soldiers to the point where they're literally disposable. They're an over-the-top parody of us right down to the point of attacking from across an ocean. Their technology is centuries ahead, having discovered interdimensional travel and mastered biological engineering, making sleek, bulletproof fighters equipped with built-in organic EMP generators and acid sprayers. Humanity's most effective weapons are knives, swords, fists, and the occasional rocket. The most advanced tech shown is the plasma cannon, which repeatedly fails to live up to expectations, and the drift, which is more of a civilian novelty than a weapon. The Jaegers have a killdozer aesthetic rather than a space-age one, they symbolically appear to have been dug up world war surplus, and it's no coincidence that the PPDC's trump card is a nuke bought on the Russian black market.
The thread is also completely wrong about the nature of the rift, as it's not a vagina. Did you see those sphincters? It's an asshole, out of which the first world shits on the third.
This is exactly right, but if the Aliens are the 'alien assholes' from ID4, the kaiju are the (workers treated like) shit. That's what makes the 'yeah fuckin kill them; they're worms, they're cancer' response so troubling. The superficial anti-capitalism of the resistance is twisted into something rather bad.
Even more insidious, though, is the dispassionate categorization of them by numbers, codenames and now such things as 'tiers of sentience' based on extremely limited/nonexistent evidence, denying them even the dignity of being hated.
It's absolutely unsurprising that the book reveals their intelligence, because it was already fairly clear in the film itself and in nearly all the prior kaiju films that provide context. Or, rather, it should be.
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It's good that people are bringing up Orson Scott Card, since this current line of argument does resemble the Ender's Game logic where everything is contrived so the hero has no choice but to mercilessly crush his enemies.
Even though kaiju are obviously (and canonically!) intelligent, the heroes have no choice but to treat them as bacteria and cleanse the earth of them accordingly.
I especially enjoy the argument from uncertainty, where we don't know enough about the enemy (maybe they like being slaves?) and should genocide them just to be safe.
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Danger posted:
To expand on this wonderful point, Zizek's overall take (and I think this is encapsulated well with the whole genre) is that the far more insidious kind of violence is the systemic, objective violence; that which creates, structures, and maintains the perception of violence is itself the greater and more evil violence.
There definitely is the logic being voiced in the thread where the solution to a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun. Maybe the Batman Begins logic where the solution to crime is to target the crime bosses (and still ignore the systemic problems that create crime bosses).
Since we're on Zizek, I'm going to point out how the 'communist' solution to the issues presented metaphorically in the film has been consistently dismissed as impossible. The trouble is that this conclusion is based entirely on the symbolic network that makes up the film's CGI 'reality' and defines what is possible. It's ideology - and specifically an ideology of 'harmony', as pointed out earlier.
"And it is here that ideology performs its supreme conjuring trick. What ideology aims at is a fantasmatic re-staging of the encounter with the Real in such a way that the impossibility of Society is translated into the theft of society by some historical Other. In Nazi ideology, for example, it is the contingent figure of the Jew who is made directly responsible for the theft/sabotage of social harmony - thereby concealing the traumatic fact that social harmony never existed and that it is an inherent impossibility. By imputing the status of the Real to a particular Other, the dream of holistic fulfillment - through the elimination, expulsion or suppression of the Other - is thereby sustained." (link)
What Zizek would ask, instead, is that we politicize the impossible and demand the impossible - not the fantasy of harmony, but the sort of impossible goals I've already outlined in the thread.
"The response of the left to global capitalism cannot be one of retreat into the nation-state or into organicist forms of "community" and popular identities that currently abound in Europe and elsewhere. For Zizek it is, rather, a question of working with the very excesses that, in a Lacanian sense, are in capitalism more than capitalism. It is a question, therefore, of transcending the provincial "universalism" of capitalism. To illustrate the point, Zizek draws attention to the category of "intellectual property" and the increasingly absurd attempts to establish restrictive dominion over technological advances - genetic codes, DNA structures, digital communications, pharmaceutical breakthroughs, computer programs and so on - that either affect us all and/or to which there is a sense of common human entitlement Indeed, the modern conjuncture of capitalism is more and more characterized by a prohibitive culture: the widespread repression of those forms of research and development that have real emancipatory potential beyond exclusive profiteering; the restriction of information that has direct consequences for the future of humanity; the fundamental denial that social equality could be sustained by the abundance generated by capitalism. Capitalism typically endeavors to constrain the very dimensions of the universal that are enabled by it and simultaneously to resist all those developments that disclose its specificity-artificiality as merely one possible mode of being."
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Guy A. Person posted:
No, that's not necessary, I understand your side of the story; wasn't aware of the mod ruling.
To continue movie discussion, I find Charlie Day's character fascinating, especially considering the various readings of the Kaiju's as being representative of the marginalized "Other".
At first he obviously loved the things and is ridiculed for it, being called a "Kaiju groupie", and of course he is the only one who even considers that they might have some form of intelligence and can be communicated with while everyone else dismisses his theories and sees them as mindless beasts. But then when he actually drifts with one and sees what they truly are he recoils in fear and disgust and betrays them. He is like the stereotypical psuedo-liberal who claims to empathize with these creatures, but only so long as he can do it from the comfort of his own worldview and lifestyle. As soon as he realizes the Kaiju are incompatible with that lifestyle, he abandons trying to understand them and uses his knowledge to help defeat them.
Absolutely right. Newt is easily the most important character in the movie. See how the kaiju's threatening tongue unfurls into a Georgia O'Keefe labial sensory 'flower'. We know the blue glow comes from their blood, while their armor is grey. It's clearly sensitive and not a weapon.
Newt is specifically comfortable with the kaiju as images, his tattoos a holdover from the time when they were toys and shoes. Actually touching them is overwhelmingly terrifying to him. Again, it goes back to gynophobia, because that's his specific reason for recoiling in terror. And it's at this exact moment of revulsion towards the feminine that Gipsy Danger steps onto the scene.
This comfort with consumerism and fear of sex puts a very interesting perspective on toychat. Del Toro clearly anticipated it.
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Let's, all of us, take a moment to contemplate the placement of the gash on this Blu-ray cover:
Yep, there it is.
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Slate Action posted:
So you're saying that the alignment of the two images on the DVD cover was intentional? If so, intentional on whose part? Is the designer of the DVD cover commenting on the film?
I actually relish slippages and coincidences.
While the rift is already obviously yonic (see the similar slits in the titles of Aliens and AV|P:R), making it an injury to the very body of the protagonist accentuates the imagery of penetration and dismemberment in the opening combat sequence.
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Shadeoses posted:
Kaiju are absolutely presented as squishy automatons. They're actually built and modded out on a giant assembly line, and stored on a giant ammo belt where they wait patiently before being fired through the portal. They're all clones of the same base material engineered to maximum killing power, and their brains aren't even built for independent thought, rather being manually directed and instructed by their masters.
Having nerves or blood isn't a factor in their primal innocence, any more than a Predator drone having oil and cables is an indication that it is actually a harmless ASIMO. Do you run out into busy traffic because you're enthralled by the sight of so many Roombas zooming about cleaning the highway?
The trouble is that this still does not confront the central problem of Jeferoo's posts, where he basically envisions a fascist revolution devoted to targeting bad weather and pollution. Literally, it's the stereotype of 'eco-fascism'. In a very fundamental way, Jeferoo (however inadvertently) says "if you take out the antisemitism, redirect that hatred towards an abstract non-living enemy like 'pollution', fascism is basically alright."
While I and others have argued that the 'non-sentience' of the kaiju is vastly exaggerated - even provably 'non-canon' - that's not at all the crux of the argument.
"Let’s say that in the 1930’s you try to answer a Nazi by claiming "Wait a minute, you are exaggerating." If you check it out the truth will of course be somewhere in the middle. Of course there were some Jews who were seducing German girls, why not? Of course there were some Jews whose influence in media was very strong. That’s not the point. We get a cue here from one of my favorite dictums of Lacan. Let’s say that you have a wife who sleeps with other men and you are pathologically jealous. Even if your jealousy is grounded in fact it’s still a pathology. Why? Because, even if what the Nazis claimed about Jews was up to a point true, anti–Semitism was formally wrong, in the same sense that in psychoanalysis a symptomatic action is wrong. It is wrong because it served to replace or repress another true trauma, as something that inherently functioning as a displacement, an act of displacement, as something to be interpreted. It’s not enough to say anti–Semitism factually wrong, it’s morally wrong, the true enigma is ,why did the Nazis need the figure of the Jew for their ideology to function? Why is it that if you take away their figure of the Jew their whole edifice disintegrates. For example, let’s say I have a paranoiac idea that you are trying to kill me. You miss the point if you try to explain to me that it’s morally wrong for me to kill you in pre–emptive self–defense. The point is, why in order to retain my balance do I need the fantasy of you trying to kill me? As Freud points out paranoia is not simply the illness, it’s a false attempt of recovery. The true zero point is where your whole universe disintegrates. Paranoia is the misdirected attempt to reconstitute your universe so that you can function again. If you take from the paranoiac his paranoiac symptom, it’s the end of the world for him. Along the same lines, we have false acts. What an authentic act is precisely what allows you to break out of this deadlock of the symptom, superego and so on. In an authentic act I do not simply express, or actualize my inner nature. I rather redefine myself, the very core of my identity. In this since I claim that an act is very close to what Kierkegaard was trying to conceptualize as the Christian rebirth." (link)
What is being debated is not the nature of the threat but the nature of the response - whether the robots serve to repress the true trauma (exploitation of the environment and of the 'third-world' by the mega-rich) with false acts (killing off all the kaiju, to make our society harmonious and whole again).
***
It's noteworthy that Cherno Alpha's pilots combine traits from the makeup and costuming of Hellboy 1's three human villains (bleached-blonde hair, mighty Russian beard, featureless steampunk mask with goggles).
The clockwork cyborg nazi assassin in that film uses twin deployable wrist-swords, and Rasputin employs an electricity-shooting mechanical glove on his right hand. You might recognize these as Gipsy Danger's main weapons.
***
Hellboy is about an alien baby birthed from a Lovecraft dimension who, despite being programmed to bring about the apocalypse, is raised as a Christian by a kindly American. Hellboy uses the lesson of Christ to defy his fate and beat down his enemies, though it means sacrificing his true love to do so.
In Pacific Rim, the infant hellboy is repeatedly shanked, and nobody really learns anything.
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meristem posted:
[I'm] not very much against films that are fun through a depiction of violence. I think that they have a valid role as antidepressants. In sperg-speak, their purpose is to give us an adrenaline-fuelled euphoria based on the activation of fight-or-flight - which is an instinct you can't really get rid of, so why not make use of it? You don't watch Pacific Rim to think, just for the sensation: 'I'm feeling down today... let's have a quick fix of endorphins by watching Star Wars/Indiana Jones/Pacific Rim' (same as you'd watch Love Actually for an oxytocin fix, i.e. the 'warm feeling inside').
Well, let's say you have a version of Star Wars that's full of dense CGI - where, after the liberals prove ineffectual at defeating the inhuman cabal of international bankers and their armies of insectile drones, we celebrate the creation of the Empire who 'do what it takes' to cleanse the earth of Chewbaccas. It's okay, kids! Chewbaccas are probably non-sentient.
And, like, you have the most gifted warrior ever recruited to the team. He's too hot-headed and obviously traumatized, but they need him anyway because these are desperate times. So:
"I killed them. I killed them all. They're dead. Every single one of them. And not just the men, but the women... And the children too. They're like animals, and I slaughtered them like animals! I hate them!"
You see what I'm getting at here. Pacific Rim is a Star Wars prequel, except without all those aspects that made nerds uncomfortable. Because it turns out the character who also hates Jar Jar and those boring debate scenes is none other than Darth Vader himself, revealed to be a petulant manbaby.
You shoulda checked what was in your burger.
***
Scyantific posted:
What in the everloving fuck happened in this thread? How did we go from HOLY CRAP ELBOW ROCKETto
about second meanings???
What's the second meaning?
I established the first meaning.
***
Bonaventure posted:
How can you stand posting on the same forum as these vermin, sire?
What are you talking about? This thread is way more entertaining than the movie.
I've already gladly forgotten half the scenes of people standing around in concrete hallways, kind-of sternly addressing eachother. That's, what, a third of the runtime?
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Maxwell Lord posted:
Part of the problem is that while approaching the film from a geopolitical perspective is valid, it is not inherently the strongest, best, or most important one. There are other perspectives, from the environmental/disaster angle (which ties into the "nature's revenge" approach of many a a kaiju eiga) to a more philosophical/psychological approach to the concepts of mental communion and trauma being a key part of the Drift, etc.
My gestalt approach incorporates all these points, while even making room to criticize toychat and the toyetic nature of the film in general.
Plus, I've addressed other things not really touched on by anyone else (like the place of the film in its genres, and in the context of Del Toro's oeuvre). My reading is bolstered by the observation that the heroes look and act like the villains in prior films. Others cannot withstand it.
If so many are so concerned about being percived as uninteresting, why not just write better? That seems like an easier solution than complaining about my 'condescension'.
(Note: that's not actually what 'condescension' means. Folks are thinking of an opposite term like 'arrogance'. In a sentence: "how dare you disrupt our toychat with your arrogance!"
If I were to debase myself by participating in toychat, that would be condescending, or patronizing.)
***
I get where that dude's coming from (see the earlier point about the kaiju being phallic rather than having phalluses), but the real interesting features are the glowing 'third eye' on her forehead, and how she's eviscerated like the turtle in Cannibal Holocaust.
***
While I'm not really down with brawleh's provocations, given the already-reactionary reaction to even straightforward analysis, it's still notable that Del Toro's response to having his 'unmarketable' R-rated dream project scuttled is this aggressively toyetic, (sarcastically?) cryptofascist, PG-13, family-friendly and ultraviolent blockbuster targeted at preteens.
Like, if you had to summarize Del Toro's career in a sentence, it would be 'loves monsters, hates fascism.' That's his whole thing. So I do find it suspect that he illustrates his ostensible love of the kaiju genre with the image of Gamera being fucked in the mouth with the blade dildol from Seven. I mean, really!
Note: the heroic Gamera is a genetically engineered weapon designed to be commanded remotely through a psychic connection. By the standards of fairweather fans in this thread, Gamera is a nonsentient object and cannot be a friend of all children - or of any children.
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ImpAtom posted:
So we've gone from Death of the Author to Reincarnation of the Author I guess. I admit that's sort of fascinating to consider.
Nobody's ever said that a director's history can't provide vital context. It's just that: another text (or a set of texts) to be read in concert with all the others. The issue is when "the author" is, credulously, treated as a sort of true and final authority whose Teen Choice Award speeches and Entertainment Weekly interviews override most or all other texts, supplanting actual literacy.
The film itself invites a reading of the marketing and toys as part of the text as well - as in Jurassic Park. When the film has a gag about the entire jaeger-kaiju conflict being reduced to a shoe commercial and toy franchise, you should be asking what makes Pacific Rim any different.
Fans love Knifehead-kun - but in the film itself, the irreverently bug-eyed kaiju mascot is a symbol of terrible decadence and impending catastrophe.
***
ImpAtom posted:
Yes, but what you're arguing is that the director's history can provide context but the director's words can't, and it seems pretty likely the only reason you're willing to go that far is that you came up with a reading that you desperately want to appeal to authority with.
I am focussing on the content of the films and Del Toro's direction because this is Cinema Discusso and not Celebrity Gossip & Marketing Discusso.
Maxwell Lord posted:
in the 90s series, the Gyaos are engineered too (though I think they're some kind of mad science accident- the big deal is that they have no junk DNA or redundant chromosomes) and they're basically remorseless monsters who can't be reasoned with and must be killed en masse. So they're much closer to the PR kaiju.
The nuance here is that the Gyaos were designed to totally eliminate pollution - the gag being that they then began to kill people too. The Gyaos represent the same logic of the Jaegers, eliminating the pollution so that society can be 'perfect'.
Gamera, on the other hand, is a 'last son of krypton' savior figure who bonds with the 'garbage' humans even though they despise him as a monster.
The Gamera figure in Pacific Rim is the baby Otachi.
***
Maxwell Lord posted:
If it's justifiable for the Gyaos to be murdered en masse by Gamera without stopping to negotiate or talk, why not the Kaiju? Why is destroying the latter without remorse fascist?
For the same reason Aliens is not actually fascist: the Gyaos are presented as an expression of the violence latent within society itself. They are not an external threat.
Remember that the Aliens aliens are a colony of soldier-drones who thoughtlessly kill and exploit those deemed inferior. They're the earlier dialogue about 'bug hunts' and 'arcturian poontang' come back to bite the colonial marines in the ass. So, the marines can't beat the aliens because they are the aliens. Ripley has emerge as an authentic freedom fighter in order to save the day.
The crucial point is that Ripley doesn't only hate the bugs. She hates everyone who stands between her and universal freedom - Burke most of all, really.
***
Maxwell Lord posted:
But doesn't that mirror the cockiness of the PR prologue? The kaiju are reduced to figures of fun and easy merchandising, they're exploited, and then they kill you.
It's only when we take them seriously that we have a chance.
The point of Aliens is not that they should've fucked the arcturians harder. The message is that the marines should self-identify as the arcturians, that they should give up everything to defend the lowest bugs.
Ripley is an arcturian, is what I'm saying.
The jaeger pilots and kaiju are the colonial marines/xenomorphs in this analogy. The PPDC and the precursors are the corporation/queen. The baby kaiju and those slum-dwelling protesters are the arcturians who get fucked. There's no Ripley.
***
Maxwell Lord posted:
Except she specifically confronts the queen and then the queen tries to backstab her, so Ripley is superior after all and is justified destroying all the alien eggs. And it's not like any tears are shed over the genocide of the arcturians.
EDIT: And I do think you're way off trying to attribute qualities to the baby kaiju that it never bothers to manifest. It slavers, it chomps, it tries to eat Newt and eats Chau, and it chokes itself to death. There's never any hint that it would do anything good if it survived. Nothing in the narrative.
I think you're misunderstanding; xenomorphs are not arcturians. They represent opposite concepts.
The arcturians are the dominated and exploited, while the xenomorphs represent the humans' logic of dominance and exploitation taken to an extreme.
The hint in the narrative that the baby can do good is when Newton communicates with it, demonstrating the potential to ally with the kaiju.
Recall that Newton was earlier presented as some sort of social pariah and outcast in the bomb-shelter scene. Instead of uniting with his fellow outcasts, he tries to ingratiate himself back into the PPDC. That's a betrayal.
***
Maxwell Lord posted:
But then aren't the invaders in PR just our environmental rapaciousness taken to an extreme?
But communicating with the kaiju baby doesn't mean they'll necessarily reform. We can talk to GOP politicians all we want, they'll still never vote for a carbon tax.
You're missing the crucial distinction between the precursors and those they enslave, as well as the point in Aliens that every drone is born from the subjugation of a person. (In a very specific way, they are 'screwed' by Burke.)
We can understand the drones as victims without also discounting the small-scale danger they pose. BUT, the important thing is to recognize the large-scale danger posed by Burke/the company/liberal capitalism.
***
In the black power super-soul musical The Wiz, the winkies are grotesque, bestial stereotypes who perform tortures and other evils at the service of wicked witch/sweatshop owner Evillene.
When Evillene and her sweatshop are destroyed by Dorothy, the winkies are torn apart from inside, and real people emerge.
This is my earlier point about inferiorization. The message is not that the winkies are 'good at heart' and that the grotesque shell is only an illusion - nor is it (obviously) that black people should be eliminated. The message is that dehumanization by an oppressive system works, stripping people of their humanity and turning them against eachother. When the winkies dismember Michael Jackson as Scarecrow, is this not the spectre of black-on-black violence and crime?
The winkies, like the kaiju here, are violent and dangerous, but only symptoms of the real systemic problems. After all, isn't the message of Scarecrow, Tin Man, and Lion that, yes, we are merely garbage, robots, and animals - yet...
***
meristem posted:
The 'destroying Evillene' analogy in Pacific Rim would be, oh, going to the alien homeworld and destroying the Kaiju masters. Tell me, honestly: if that happened, what're the chances you wouldn't cry 'fascism' and 'colonialism' then?
No.
Again, the crucial nuance: Dorothy teams up with the inhuman outcasts to destroy the sweatshop. (It's specifically the trash-golem Scarecrow who points her in the right direction.)
And, as anyone who's read any Oz media knows, they then destroy the Wiz - or rather, reveal him to be impotent.
Important detail: the Wiz lives atop the World Trade Centre. The sweatshop is located underground - almost directly underneath. Again, the villains are not some external threat but signs of the Real reality 'underneath' everyday symbolic reality. (You see the same logic in Man of Steel, when Superman saves New York by destroying the liberal machine 'on the other side of the world', in India.) There's a direct connection made between virtual capitalism and 'third-world' exploitation.
The heroes succeed because they take the Wiz's ideals of freedom more seriously than he himself does, applying them universally. The Wiz commands them to destroy Evillene, but doesn't actually believe it to be possible. You see the same issue with all the 'anticapitalist' blockbusters produced and sold by massive conglomerates. Hence, my approach to these films.
So, this brings us back to what I've said all along: unite the lowest classes everywhere, destroy both the precursors and the human rich inland. I advocate a universal freedom that cuts across all communities, in direct opposition to these organicist conceptions of harmony through exclusion.
The direct analogy here would be if Dorothy consumed Scarecrow's brain and thus empowered the glorious Wiz to send those winkies back to Africa once and for all. That's Pacific Rim!
***
Bonaventure posted:
The problem with the phallocractic-fascistoliberal pro-Winkie-slavery betrayal-of-the-Revolution reading of the film isn't that SMG and his dogsbody of the moment need to "turn their brains off" or whatever, it's that they engage with it in ways that are based on absolutely fraudulent intellectual artifice (the Kaiju are the poor! The baby-trap is Christ! etc.) and logical leaps that do not represent the actual experience of the audience or culture at large in its reception of the film. Looking for how the film reflects or comments on issues that exist in our reality is fine, but like I’ve said, the ‘meaning’ in this film is so obvious as to make its articulation feel redundant (and it is almost totally contrary to Fascist ideology which makes that particular reading so hilarious).
This is from a while back, but it's extremely telling that you define an 'absolutely fraudulent' reading as one concerning issues that fall outside the purview of the 'actual reality' experienced by 'culture at large'.
Clearly, then, there's no actual disagreement here.
I've explained all along that the film is about a symbolic/virtual reality of liberal capitalism plagued by irruptions from the Real reality of 'third-world' exploitation and whatnot. Since I have openly taken the side of the monstrous exploited and ignored, it's no surprise that my opinion does fall outside the mainstream. I'm endorsing communism. Of course it does. It's honestly rather baffling that you put that forward as a hilarious revelation.
***
Steve Yun posted:
Okay, here's an alternate reading...
The kaiju/masters represent colonialism as an abstract concept.
Everything about them is a dark mirror of humans. They have war machines, they drift, etc. And like Earth's history, the kaiju masters have a history of colonizing other worlds.
With international cooperation and the breaking of barriers between people, we are fighting against colonialism, we are fighting the sins of our own history.
That's not an alternate reading - we've established that dozens of pages ago.
The question is how colonialism is defeated. How are the barriers broken? What is the form of the cooperation?
It's insufficient to simply be against this abstract concept because, well, so was Darth Vader.
***
Bonaventure posted:
So correct me if I'm wrong here, but what you seem to be saying is that when conducting criticism, you don't care about what is actually communicated to the audience of a film?
I'm actually in the audience.
What is the actual audience?
***
ImpAtom posted:
No, because you're forgetting one of the most important parts. They didn't do anything. They are the effect. This isn't "the evil alien overlords are MAKING THE PLANET WARMER." It is "Humanity has caused this." Again, this is why I pointed to SMG's obvious lack of knowledge of the genre. This is a fairly common thing for these sorts of films to do, taking an abstract and converting it into a physical being. To analyze this you have to go to something besides "I saw Gamera" and understand the context. SMG is focusing on The Wiz and things like that instead of actually tokusatsu, robot, and kaiju works except for the most blunt and surface ones.
What on earth gives you the impression that I read the monsters as non-metaphorical?
***
ImpAtom posted:
Because you clearly don't. You have no grasp whatsoever on the monsters and in fact you break some of your own rules when discussing them. When you bring up Gamera, you bring up Gamera as a massive whole, taking each film from different eras and mishmashing them together without care, thought, or context. You do the same with Godzilla as well.
I cite specific films when not dealing in generalities that apply to most or all films. I can talk about both Man Of Steel and Superman, the character, without people being confused.
So, what's the context?
At what point do I not treat the monsters as metaphorical characters?
Use words to explain your thoughts.
***
ImpAtom posted:
You referred to "Gamera, friend to children" and "Gamera, the biologically-created warrior" as the same character as if they were in the same film, which is both not metaphorical and straight-out wrong when analyzing them. You're literal when you want to be and when it benefits your purpose.
Gamera in Guardian of the Universe is implicitly a friend to all children. It doesn't need to be explained through exposition that Gamera is fuckin rad.
He saves all children (literally every children) from being devoured by giant bird creatures. Why am I explaining this. How did you think that was a checkmate.
It seems folks are hung up on the monsters meaning one thing or another, when I made the (apparently radical) observation that they represent two or more things - much like how Hurricane Katrina was a disaster caused by both climate change and George Bush's indifference towards black people. Two things.
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Peruser posted:
The message of Godzilla is "big monsters are destructive like nuclear warfare, nuclear warfare is bad" a message is a message even if it's not an intelligent or insightful one. Our protagonists don't need to solve global warming, we do.
Godzilla is actually a 'nature spirit' awakened by the atomic bomb, and not representative of the bomb itself.
***
Acid Spit:
"While the Real, by definition, cannot be directly represented, it can nonetheless be alluded to in certain figurative embodiments of horror-excess. In Zizek's famous example, it is alluded to in the monster from Scott's film, Alien, whose blood literally dissolves the fabric of reality. And just as the unity of the protagonists in this film is constituted against the threat of the Alien, so reality itself is always constructed as an attempt to establish a basic consistency against the disintegrative effects of the Real. Just as being may be understood as being-towards-madness, reality is always reality-towards-the-Real. Every form of (symbolic-imaginary) reality exists as an impossible attempt to escape the various manifestations of the Real that threatens disintegration of one kind or another: trauma, loss, anxiety and so on."(link)
The specific image of the skyscraper being melted with acid spit, exposing the girders, is the same image of 'the city unborn' in "X": The Man With The X-Ray Eyes: "I see the city as if it were unborn … Limbs without flesh, girders without stone, signs hanging without supports, wires dipping and swaying without poles … flesh dissolved in an acid of light: a city of the dead"
Now, unless Del Toro is impossibly oblivious for a film director, he knows that the hyperreal CGI aesthetic of the film is not opposed to the imagery of monstrous abjection. These are different representations of the same Real - the 'imaginary Real' of pulsating ick, and the 'symbolic Real' of pure mathematical formula. This is obviously deliberately represented by the two competing scientists: Newton with his piles of organs and Gottlieb with his holograms. And the precursors are again a mirror: their genetic manipulations represent the endgame of these scientists' research.
"Instruments of “literal transparency” are the main components in the search to produce a ghostlike (or computer-game like) military fantasy-world of boundless fluidity, in which the space of the city becomes as navigable as an ocean." (link)
It's this fantasy-world that is seen in the tactics of Otachi, invisible from the air as she wades through skyscrapers - as in Aliens: "they're coming out of the god damn walls!" Del Toro lingers on the moment where she bursts through the mirrored surface. Far from being a uniquely monstrous quality, the jaeger-pilot-pilot amalgam also perceives the world (and its selves) as a ghostlike hologram of gamespace. Everything in the film is literally CGI. Again, the aliens (with their sensors) represent the Skynet future of humanity.
"Connor describes how the very idea of X-ray vision has historically induced anxiety and terror because ‘the problem with X-rays is that, for the most part, what they like best is to go through things, and to go on going through things unless or until they meet something, like lead, that absorbs or scatters them’. To demonstrate, he identifies X as a ‘dystopia’ in which ‘every last pocket of opacity has been seared away, leaving a vitreous desert of universal transparency’, and he aligns the film with Baudrillard’s theory of hyperreality, with its preoccupation with depthlessness and the fatal blurring of private and public realms: ‘In a world in which everything must be made visible, and in which “value radiates in all directions”, the transparency of evil is indistinguishable from the evil of transparency’.
In this account, seeing everything, a process to which we willingly succumb via commodity fetishism, is the tool of an oppressive, autonomous system that exposes us to its inner workings: the truth that is revealed may not be a truth we are ontologically equipped to handle, with its inescapable highlighting of the fact that our free will has been stripped to the bone, and that this outcome has been smuggled in via our own collusion." (link)
This is a vision of the whole totalizing system, the total objectification of a person so that you don't see a face but the mass of tissue underneath. And it's theoretically against this outcome that Stacker forms his resistance. But:
"The response of some critics on the postmodern Left to this predicament is to call for a new politics of resistance. Those who still insist on fighting state power, let alone seizing it, are accused of remaining stuck within the ‘old paradigm’: the task today, their critics say, is to resist state power by withdrawing from its terrain and creating new spaces outside its control. This is, of course, the obverse of accepting the triumph of capitalism. The politics of resistance is nothing but the moralising supplement to a Third Way Left" (link)
Again, it's the observation that Stacker merely seeks to kill Bin Laden, as it were. He is not prepared to fight the system that produces Bin Ladens. His resistance is the creation of a little island, off to the side, from which they can pretend that they are free of the 'suits' - forgetting that the powerful still control both universes.
***
If you want a picture of the future, imagine a fist punching an inhuman face - forever.
***
Yvonmukluk posted:
Yes, yes, you're so much smarter than me (and anyone else who likes the robots punching Kaijus) for overthinking this movie, whatever. I respect your opinion, but I don't think you're actually going to convince anyone by being allwith Orwell quotes.
If the movie were truly successful, shouldn't you be giddily oblivious of my concerns, instead of whiny?
Like, folks are putting a lot wordy seriousness behind their celebration of what's ostensibly lowthought stupidtime. You shouldn't be trying so hard to be happy, like I am.
Pacific Rim's fascism is its most amusing quality - way funnier than any mere fist movement. Enjoy it!
Instead of complaining about Orwell references, you should just love stomping faces - unabashedly.
***
Raserys posted:
Pacific Rim - There Will Be Nazi Penis
Fascist phalluses, actually. Give Del Toro some credit; It's a fairly nuanced movie!
***
Halman posted:
I admit, I'm partial to Stanley Payne and his typological description of Fascism, but I didn't really see any of the fascist negations, 3 of the 4 items on his ideology and goals list, or an emphasis on masculinity or youth/ the necessity of generational conflict.
I think the word you mean is Authoritarian. Or maybe corpratist.
The film is totally antiliberal (the precursor aliens are unambiguously liberal mole-men) and also anticommunist (we've already outlined what a communist version of the film would entail - this is not it). So, the question is how anti-conservative it is and, well, I already identified Stacker as a (superfically) anticapitalist third-positionist.
The masculinity/youth thing is the phallic/gynophobic imagery outlined earlier - not to mention the basic design of the jaegers (as football players, brawlers) and their pilots (youthful 'rockstars').
Stacker admittedly doesn't seem imperialistic, but I'm not sure which of the other ideological points you're referring to on Payne's list.
Also, it should be noted that I deliberately reversed the meaning of that Orwell quote. Orwell lamented the trampling of humanity by the 'inhuman' boot, while I'm talking about the punching of the inhuman abject by 'humanity'.
***
Yvonmukluk posted:
Did you miss this?
Sorry if I'm taking this personally, but that's pretty much suggesting that as somebody who liked this movie, I should go and stomp on people's faces, and enjoy it. Maybe it's not strictly calling me fascist, but it is making some rather unkind assumptions about my personality.
And that's the last thing I'm going to say on this.
You misunderstand; I'm saying the vocal fans aren't fascist enough to truly enjoy the spectacle of robots punching monsters on the level they profess to. My observations have been met with halfhearted 'nooo' and denial - except in the case of Jeferoo earlier in the thread. His is the opinion I respect, because he's not shying from having an opinion (instead of merely reacting to mine).
You imply that the film endorses Authoritarian Corporatism. Ok. So where's your enthusiasm for Authoritarian Corporatism?
It's very obvious that I am not tossing the word 'fascist' about as a generic pejorative. But it doesn't seem to matter at all how accurate my language is, so long as folks such as yourself feel insulted. This is, of course the opposite of what Orwell wrote there. The urge to use the word as an insult and the urge to feel insulted by it are two sides of the same coin, equally unconcerned with meaning.
When I write that when the literal sword literally stiffens with rage and is literally thrust into the guts of the wounded enemy, folks write "hurr it's not a penis; it's just a sword" when I'm talking about imagery of agency, power and dominance - which the sword obviously is. The monster is literally being penetrated, dominated, dismembered, disempowered, etc.
So when I say that the film depicts a human fist punching an inhuman face forever, the response should be "GOOD! Crush the inhumans! Fuck them in the ass!" or an oppositional reading like mine, of we are to be at all honest here.
What I object to are the folks cheering on the punching and then sheepishly quibbling over technicalities when called on it. "Well, uh they're arguably not alive... Technically they are made of silicon..." That's lame.
***
Bongo Bill posted:
I was happy to watch the kaiju get the tar beaten out of them. I probably would have been less happy had I interpreted them as representing "the other" generally. I bought completely into the contrivance that allowed their species to be depicted as the unprecedented and likely impossible notion of an intelligent but inhuman enemy, an implacable and singleminded aggressor, a committed and irredeemable evil, which can always be denied mercy.
These images were created to resemble something that could be hated deservedly, in order to ensure that the depiction of their destruction could be unreservedly glorified. It worked quite well, I think! Several posters in this thread made comments to the effect that it was refreshing to view a morally uncomplicated story, and there was a time when practically every other post was exuberance about the combat scenes.
It's only when the (unintentional (but, of course, you are dead)) insult "fascist" entered the dialog that people became defensive - began protesting that they understand it is a fantasy, and that there are no others they know of that are sufficiently other that they wouldn't feel at least a bit uncomfortable about punching them in the face forever.
As Danger already indicated, the issue is with the choice of target. I've no problem if the kaiju unite with the wall-builders to crush the decadent hu-mans, after all. The trouble is that the exclusion doesn't happen along class lines, but along race/species lines.
It's the contrivance that bothers, because people are definitely buying into the idea that the kaiju are philosophical zombies - biological machines who simply act like they can think and experience pain. The lesson of the p-zombie thought experiment, however, is that all people are zombies by the same standard. So you have Them!, Alien, Aliens, Prometheus, Blade Runner, Battle: LA (and so-on), that all say - correctly - that the problem with a 'bug hunt' is that the hunters are bugs also. You do have to ask why Pacific Rim takes a different tact and tacitly agrees with the propaganda of Starship Troopers.
In Battle: Los Angeles specifically, you have the scene where a marine scopes out group of cyborg fungi and asks aloud "what if they are just poor grunts like me, with thoughts and feelings too? Maybe they don't want to be here either..." (paraphrased). It's played as a sort of deadpan joke, but the joke isn't that he's wrong. The joke is that he's right, as he and his fellow marines are also 'just' watery meatbags. The need to defeat the enemy simply has nothing to do with 'levels of sentience' or whatever. It's the lesson of Toy Story and Ghost in the Shell 2: being unable to empathize with puppets indicates not rationality but some sort of deficiency. At the same time, the message is that the only thing separating us from being mere dogs and puppets is commitment to an ethical ideal.
In other words, “if anyone comes to [Christ] and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be [Christ's] disciple." If you put platonic friendship with a blue-haired Asian gal above the cause of universal freedom, you're just not doing it right.
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Halman posted:
No actually fascist film (they exist, go watch one, they aren't super subtle) is going to be like 'welp, we showed that the 'liberal communist' response to the giant monsters wasnt' the best. That'll be anti-communist enough for Der Fuhrer, right?' You would have never had the Russians or the Chinese be one of the effective/still surviving teams, especially given how evocative Cherno Alpha's design is of soviet aesthetic.
Also the film is pretty explicit that the world's elite, those sneaky bourgeoisie, have some secret plan for themselves. The world's working classes are left to fend for themselves, and super importantly, are the ones who succeed, in the form of the multi-national PPDC that has seized the means of Kaiju killing(ie production), in ending the threat.
You could maybe argue that the russian and chinese robots dying like bitches while the super cool western ones kick all the ass and save the day is anti-communist, but that's pretty subtle(Fascists aren't subtle).
No-one in Starship Troopers is openly anti-communist, and the film takes place in Argentina - which is depicted as part of a multinational federation. By this standard, the fascist society in Starship Troopers is not fascist either.
Cherno Alpha obviously isn't a communist robot, since it's built by the brutal, authoritarian capitalist Russia of Putin. The Chinese robot is also not communist, but a product of "capitalism with Asian values."
It's fairly clear that their defeat by the precursor's copies represent the failure of communism. Again, the precursor universe is a dark mirror - meaning that Cherno Alpha and Crimson Typhoon always-already were slaves to the rich. The traits of the Russian and Chinese cultures were appropriated by the capitalists and turned against them.
When folks celebrate Cherno Alpha and then fistpump over Leatherback's smoldering corpse, they don't seem to realize that they are the same character.
Also, I don't see how belief in a 'sneaky elite' is incompatible with fascism.
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A Dirty Sock posted:
Pacific Rim is about how the War on Terror (Kaiju) has created a global surveillance state (the Drift) with the result being the end of personal privacy which comes from our jingoistic acceptance of the PATRIOT (PPDC) Act. The Jaegars represent the now subjugated working class, literally mind-controlled by the major economies of the world.
It is most certainly too deep for you.
Obviously your qualms are with the mere existence of political subject matter (free-associated buzzwords in parentheses as halfhearted parody) and not any of the thought behind it (writing that doesn't resemble anything by myself or others).
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Bongo Bill posted:
They weren't trying to kill all humans because they were abject; they are abject because they have committed to the decision to kill all humans.
[...] The abjection in this film is based on repeated, unrepentant attempts at the worst known crime. I don't agree with SMG that this is a problematic moral stance for a work of fiction.
It's the difference between positing humanity as a baseline from which we deviate by committing crimes or whatever, and presenting inhumanity and monstrosity as inherent to, and constituent of, being human.
You can see how the former stance already implicitly upholds a status quo - saying the existing system is ok, besides a handful of corrupt individuals (e.g. Jeff Bridges in Iron Man).
The trouble with fascists anyways is that they are 'too human'. It's easy to dismiss them as subhuman beasts, when human weaknesses are what lead them to shift the burden of freedom and responsibility onto the leader, the nation and so-on. The prime recent example is the figure of Bane in Dark Knight 3, who acts as a theatrical, over-the-top revolutionary character before revealing his 'human side' and its corresponding allegiance to the quasi-fascist league of shadows. Against the commonsense idea that "it's what's inside that counts," it's this 'human side' that smells of bullshit. The performed character is actually the true self - the ethical subject and authentic revolutionary. See also Zod in Man Of Steel, who uses his duty to his people as an excuse to avoid the terrifying burden of freedom and, therefore, is not a Superman.
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Iserlohn posted:
(the movie was really, really awesome; contrary to the insightful fascistpenisphallus chat).
I drive to work on a
A submarine is a type of vehicle.
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Halman posted:
I guess, if you ignore the parts where they glorify action, violence, youth, intolerance of *human* others(those damned pacifist Mormons), how "Service Guarantees Citizenship", everyone dressing like Nazis.
Haha just kidding, the Federation in Starship Troopers is post-fascist or neo-fascists or some other word for the subsequent lines of thought that are similar to but distinct from actual, historical, Fascism.
Women are equal, they aren't super racist, they don't deride intellectuals, people can choose to do federal service or not, etc. Picking and choosing parts of a definition so it fits your argument isn't how an academically honest argument works, but it seems kind of obvious that you want to ignore that there's actual, integral, components of a discrete concept of Fascism so that you can call people who like the movie Fascists.
Which is pretty fascist of you.
The assertion that Stacker's resistance is feminist is highly questionable, when the characters employ slurs and Mako teams up with a man to become... a big man.
Imagine an identical-opposite scenario in which Hero Guy struggles to prove himself as the subordinate, neophyte copilot of a lithe, slippery robot. After a near-catastrophic emotional breakdown where he regresses into a five years old boy, he musters up the strength to yell "for my brother!" and suck a kaiju modeled after a football player (codename: Biff Hercules) into the robot's gaping, lubricated maw trap.
(Sarcastic response: "oh right, it's not a vagina, it's a yoni.
")And then, you do have the villainous Filthy Slut, Demon Hag, and the "kaiju groupie" slur that carries implicit race-mixing stigma. Of course they're hella racist against the kaiju. Stacker's group is multicultural but, as we all know, multiculturalism is white supremacy.
I assert that, when a person is over-awed by natural disaster footage, nobody accuses them of wanting to fuck tsunamis. That, alone, destroys the 'they're just weather' argument.
But alright, let's grant that Stacker and the gang are not fascists but merely neo-fascists. How does prefixing a 'neo' rebuke anything I've written? That's way pedantic.
Bonaventure posted:
Look, I'm not saying that you're Fascist, I'm just saying that you're advocating Fascism. Totally different.
Jeferoo is pretty much the only person writing fascist rhetoric in the thread. And, if you've read the thread, you'll see that I've praised him for having the wit to voice an impassioned opinion. It's sweet of you to get worked up on his behalf, but fascism is not Voldemort. Jeferoo is mature enough to handle it.
If a person's writing extensively (unintentionally?) paraphrases Ayn Rand, I have no qualm with calling it an endorsement of libertarianism/objectivism either. Words aren't magical spells.
It's the people who reflexively shirk from 'being political', like a cat touching water, that are truly contemptible. If you want to be insulted, at least be insulted accurately. You (you, personally) are not a fascist. You are just dumb.
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OldPueblo posted:
Please deconstruct the bulldog's weight for me, I know it must mean something since they showed the dog a lot. I mean your average dog is fairly svelte, but they went with a dog that is really stocky. Does its safety "weigh" heavily on Chuck's conscience? Is the fact that it's a wide-set animal key us into the wide range of emotions that play between father and son? Was he fucking the dog and we in turn are fucking our dogs metaphorically when we don't take care of our mother earth?
The dog actually is deliberately employed as a metaphor for the jaegers and 'the drift'. Del Toro's said as much in interviews. The father and son have trouble expressing love for eachother directly, so they communicate through the dog. I don't think it's clearly conveyed in the film, but the idea is that the Jaegers are like dogs in that they are not human, but are elevated to the level of characters because of their connection to their owners. You should feel empathy for the robot even though it is just a puppet.
(See the scene where the protagonists talk about the robot's heart, obviously referring to themselves.)
That, of course, returns to my original point that Gipsy Danger doesn't have a personality and doesn't not really become its own character. When it's torn apart and then explodes at the end, I didn't really care because it's just a car with legs. (Contrast this with Toy Story 3, Ghost in the Shell films, etc.) That the robot isn't uncannily human is not necessarily a failing, but it is noteworthy.
The hirsute dog also ties into the encounter with hirsute Leatherback, and the scene where father and son bond over (in this case) their mutual reaction against the creature. This all goes back to the point about the heroes forming an organic community that unites through exclusion.
If I recall, they make a point of the dog being female as well.
You get a lot dog imagery in films about cyborgs because they explore this grey area between human and not-human.
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Tezcatlipoca posted:
They make a point of saying it is a male dog. When the dog sees Mako Hercules gives a line about his getting excited when it sees a pretty girl.
Ah, I remembered the dog's name being Rosy or something, but turns out it was Max.
That's actually a good observation there, though. When he says the dog find the girl attractive, he's very obviously using the dog as a vehicle to express his own feelings.
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PerrineClostermann posted:
Nah, this discussion's been much more interesting than continuing arguments on the facist/nazi/racist/feminist/whateverist interpretations of the movie and its "message." I've actually been paying attention for once.
This isn't a different argument. It's the same subject about empathy and how people interact with the inhuman and nonhuman. The treatment of Max by his owners can be extrapolated outwards and compared to the treatment of the kaiju by society.
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Megaman's Jockstrap posted:
A 40 pound domesticated wolf specifically bred over 10,000 years to be man's companion, whose primary behaviors consist waddling around and being cute = 2500 ton extra-dimensional killing machine designed to smash into populated areas and kill everyone. Society should be expected to treat both equally.
Of course not! Kaiju are shown to be much smarter than dogs. They should be treated better.
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Sir Kodiak posted:
"In a severe lightning storm, you wanna grab your ankles and stick your butt in the air." - Twister (1996)
That also being the movie where the entire plot is about trying to maneuver "Dorothy" into what they refer to as "The Suck Zone."
Exactly; that's the opposite of what's going on here. In Twister, characters struggle to anthropomorphze abstract weather phenomena, where here characters use meteorological language to objectify relatively anthropomorphic creatures. (The kaiju are both intelligent and were deliberately given humanlike suitmation proportions.)
The Twister characters, with their jerry-rigged tech and emphasis on understanding rather than exploiting, are way more Newton than than the other characters anywho. Compare the scene where Hunt and Paxton enter the glowing eye of an F5 tornado to the scene where the glowing tongue reaches out to Newton. In Twister, it's the climax, but in Pacific Rim, Gipsy Danger interrupts, provokes a fight, and the film keeps going for another half hour.
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Bonaventure posted:
As does SMG anyway, for whom the Kaiju are the exploited poor and the aliens are ... uh ... "liberal mole-men."
Exactly, yes.
People are not paying attention to the analogy made between the human and alien technology and social structure.
The jaegers are connected to their pilots, and the pilots are connected to the base via radio. Likewise, the kaiju's bodies are controlled by their brains, and the brains are connected to the base via psychic transmissions. These lines are blurred, but exist.
The kaiju need brains for the exact same reason the jaegers need pilots: latency. If the precursors had a perfect connection, the kaiju wouldn't need brains at all.
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Wade Wilson posted:
What about the imagery where the kaiju are basically bullets on an ammunition belt, waiting to be fired at Earth?
That's an indirect reference to Giger's 'Birth Machine' images - which feature human infants as the bullet-monsters.
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Yvonmukluk posted:
Where do people keep getting this 'Chau drifted with a Kaiju' from?. His eye's clearly fucked up because someone went for him with a knife, hence the scar that directly goes across his eye.
You're right. There is, however, an eye violence theme that connects Hannibal to Newton. People have confused this for a plot point ("maybe he drifted too?!"), when it's actually just symbolism.
As you know, Hannibal got his eye injury while stuck underground in a public shelter, forced to mingle with the (literally) lower classes. Day received his the ruptured blood vessels in his eye, meanwhile, in his attempt to communicate with the lower-class kaiju.
Anyone who's seen Valhalla Rising knows that being blind in one eye is symbolic - not of blindness but of wisdom. A one-eyed character straddles two worlds: the everyday world, and the world from Event Horizon where 'we don't need eyes to see.' The sacrifice of an eye allows a character to gaze into the void. (Similar eye violence imagery is found throughout The Avengers, along with related imagery of prosthetic eye augmentation).
Odin cut out his eye and tossed it into Mimir's well in order to drink its knowledge. The well, obviously, has similar connotations to the undersea/subterranean underworld of the aliens.
In other words, Hannibal experienced total destitution and couldn't handle it, which led to his ruthless exploitation of the kaiju so that he could create a private safehouse for himself.
Oh and hey: what happens when Leatherback curiously pokes the disabled jaeger? Yep, she gets shot in the eye with a flare.
Flare imagery is common in kaiju films, like Varan The Unbelievable and Gamera, Guardian of the Universe. In those films, there's a poetic moment where the monster is entranced by the lights and distracted long enough to be injured or killed. In Pacific Rim, the kaiju is bluntly shot in the face. The flare is almost-directly shoved into her eye.
Leatherback isn't just half-blind though, but has a symbolic, glowing 'third eye' on her forehead. We've established that the blue glow represents a tender part, usually a sensory organ. She clearly already has some kind of extravisual (spiritual?) perception.
Speaking of losing an eye and seeing into the underworld, Gipsy Danger gets half its visor ripped off when Hero Guy's brother is killed, and Hero Guy spends the rest of the film knowing how it feels to die.
This all ties back to my previous post(s) on enhanced vision, politics, and the Real.
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Maxwell Lord posted:
The problem is that the "cultural aspects of fascism" existed well before fascism itself did- it co-opted popular cultural aspects in order to sell itself. When we talk about narratives with heroic individuals and battles against unambiguously-bad evil forces as "fascist", we're permitting fascism to continue its co-option of valid story elements.
The problem is not that the badguys are unambiguously bad. The problem is the choice of badguys and the nature of the response,
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Maxwell Lord posted:
But this is why I can't sign on with political criticism- it's not about the craft of filmmaking (or other storytelling) at all, but "are the bad guys bourgeois? ()Yes ()No". It's so limiting, as much as when Randian Objectivists insist the only good story is when upstanding venture capitalists triumph against poor people and government workers.
Determining what a film means is related to, but not the same thing as, making a value judgement.
If there's a film made by Karl Marx himself called 'Communism Is Rad!' and it's incoherent for whatever reason, the result is an implicitly anti-communist film.
In other words, a Marxist film is not necessarily good, but a good film is inherently Marxist. 300 is an example of a film with a fascist aesthetic and fascist heroes, and yet has good politics just because it expresses this stuff clearly, coherently, and with nuance. It has a texture I can hold on to. It's conducive to being read as satire.
Pacific Rim is a film about empathy in which I don't care about anyone, and a film about the apocalypse where we do not actually see any apocalyptic destruction. In fact, the heroes are working to prevent the citywide/worldwide destruction we paid to see! The action scenes are dark and murky, and the bulk of it is over-edited - except for banal relationship things that aren't nearly edited enough. Bad exposition crudely paves over the gaps, as in the opening montage. It's not a very good superhero movie compared to Man Of Steel. And despite the presence of Godzillas, a superhero movie is exactly what it is.
Could Gipsy Danger beat Batman in fight? Of course not. Gipsy Danger is not a good superhero.
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Maxwell Lord posted:
Gipsy Danger is not Batman- it's the Megazord. This is sentai/tokusatsu which focuses on teamwork (and if you don't care about anyone, well, I did) and cooperation between diverse peoples. It's also a cry against the apocalyptic despair of modern genre cinema- the most quoted line is about cancelling the apocalypse. The monsters aren't immigrants, they're the personification of our pessimism and nihilism as a culture.
And it's odd that you praise Man of Steel, which is a much more dour and joyless film which gives even less reason to care about any of the characters since all they seem to do is stare distrustfully at each other.
You get this line a lot, where a film is sincere and positive - and therefore is a 'refreshing' alternative to dour, grim movies like the fucking megapopular blockbuster Superman film in which Russel Crowe flies around on a dinosaur. It's total bullshit, and I'm sure you know it.
Which despair-centric films are you even referring to? Superman was tossing nihilism back into space back in Superman Returns.
And of course the Power Rangers are superheros.
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Maxwell Lord posted:
Superman Returns actually managed a decent balance between darkness and light, but since it didn't make a lot of money Warner Bros. reflexively said the next movie should be "Darker and grittier!" because The Dark Knight was a hit, so we get the Superman movie where the focus is on Metropolitans buried under rubble. And now they're bringing Frank Miller in on the sequel.
As George Lucas teaches us, "bringing balance to the force" is not in finding harmony, but in violently restructuring society.
Superman in Man Of Steel achieves this, while the jaegers achieve only harmony. They're a candy-coloured failure - and how light is that?
***
The compassion of the jaegers is inadequate. They love only their families.
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Ugly In The Morning posted:
I mean in the sense of some very basic decisions, like filming basically the entire thing on a greenscreen, the stilted dialogue, the way the actors were directed, the whole thing just came off like there was no one to take a step back and evaluate what they were doing and most of all how they were doing it.
Like Del Toro, Lucas didn't accidentally make the film with special effects.
Mako is told that her own memories aren't real. They're achronological, abstracted. This is real - the CGI simulated robot combat is real. The aesthetic of the films is a deliberate statement about how we perceive/experience reality - what reality is.
And these are post-Jurassic Park, post-Matrix films that say (symbolic) reality is akin to a virtual reality or videogame. Lucas isn't an idiot - he wanted to depict the center of virtual capitalism in the galaxy as a pristine digital concept city. The attack on Coruscant evokes the common observation that 9/11 was 'like a movie.'
Maxwell Lord posted:
Yeah, but he also performed a lot of summary executions. I'm not sure he's on the firmest moral ground.
Guevara is talking about compassion, not pacifism.
Compassion for the poor means destroying the rich.
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Improbable Lobster posted:
I generally like reading SMG's readings but goddamn do they end up dominating threads.
Of course; I am on the side of the kaiju, and we stand for the eternal Idea of communism, where the PPDC resistance endorse only an indistinct notion of organicist solidarity.
Many kaiju sisters may be killed, but the Idea is ineradicable.
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Oligopsony posted:
SMG, you mentioned the Baby Kaiju as a virgin birth, and I'd like to discuss this a bit further.
Because the baby isn't just a virgin birth. It also dies and is "resurrected" (inasmuch as Newt and Hannibal initially suppose it dead), saves humanity, and unites its nature with that of Man. And this forces me to re-evaluate your claim that this is not a Christian film.
On a Christian reading - one which, I have to admit at the outset, is not at this moment nearly elaborated as well as your own - the Kaiju are not a human or human-equivalent other, but God and His (or, rather, Her) wrath. Their outward form (hideously gigantic undersea monsters) obviously references the divine caprice and primordial chaos as represented by Leviathan and Behemoth. (Leviathan, of course, is related to Tiamat; but whereas in a pagan reading of the film the battle between the Jaegers (Marduk) and Kaiju (Tiamat) recapitulates the male human warrior's victory over primordial female nature, under Jewish or Christian interpretation Leviathan is subordinate to God, and yet also a symbol of what (as said in Job) no human can properly defeat or fathom.)
God's wrath is able to enter the world through sin, in this case, quite literal pollution - perhaps the point would have been much better made if humanity had made at least a cursory attempt to clean up the environment before realizing it was beyond their means. But, regardless, the superficial level on which the main conflict is prosecuted - punching vagina monsters in the face - is also explicitly a failure. In fact it is only through a series of Obviously Symbolic MacGuffins that humanity is saved:
1) the above-mentioned subplot with Newt,
2) Pentecost's (!!!!!!!!!!!) painful choice to sacrifice his onlybegotten sonadopted daughter, though she emerges from her tomb, and again through merging into a composite being with Man,
3) The requirement of the alien DNA to open the rift - in order to stop the outpouring of God's wrath, something of God's own nature is needed in the sacrificial death.
Again, I have to admit some failure in the courage of my convictions here - this is tentative and doesn't explain nearly as much of the data as your own theory, perhaps not even as much as del Toro's implicit public theory. But I can't shake the feeling that it points to something (though I know not fully what yet) actually present in the text.
I'd considered that myself, but what stands out to me is that final scene of Ron Perlman crawling out of a wound, demanding his golden shoe.
We all know what the shoe represents. Is it not an obscene punchline to the whole film - most specifically Mako's coping with her trauma? The way each character forms an arm, a leg, etc. - wanting to be 'whole again', wanting society to be 'whole again'?
And of course Perlman's demand for wholeness is in direct opposition to the lesson of baby kaiju Jesus, who he must cut his way out of - leave behind as a moldering corpse. And what is Hannibal Chau if not an avatar of ruthless, amoral capitalism - disavowed by the hero's organization but sustaining its existence?
The imagery of Perlman crawling from the corpse's wound is related to that of the Deacon in Prometheus, and the scene in The Thing where Blair performs an autopsy on the Thing and pulls out a fetal dog. The message is that he is a piece of shit with illusions of grandeur - but here he is looking like none other than Mako, with a blade in one hand to make up for his missing shoe.
The final shot really undermines the whole picture - or, rather, reveals it for what it is.
***
My gimmick is victory!
T.G. Xarbala posted:
I will say the thread's habit of drawing conclusions from correlation rather than causation in media text leads to rampant intellectual dishonesty that strikes the lay reader as absurd precisely because it is so. Attributing the scientist references to a religious understanding rather than a coincidence of the writer's search for Historical Scientist Names to reference puts a lot of credit on Beacham's shoulders. And PacRim is not a movie known for intelligent writing. Visual intelligence abounds, however, but that is mostly Del Toro's domain. Quite a few of the great minds throughout the ages pondered matters both spiritual and scientific and often made no distinction between the two, and this leads to unfortunate misunderstanding when someone attempts to mine history for names to reference when the person writing the text didn't put that thought into it and someone who does know picks up on a connection that was lost to the person at the writing desk.
Beachham is irrelevant - what is relevant is that when people hear "Newton", they understand the 'clockwork universe' of Newtonian physics. Gottfried Leibinz is more obscure, but not unknown: his Monadology was illustrated recently in the film Source Code, as he's nowadays closely associated to virtual reality and cyberspace theories.
This basic dichotomy is evident in the film, as Newton deals with the slimy latex props while Gottfried gazes into glowing CGI wireframe simulations.
But what these two have in common is their belief in mechanical pre-determinism on the one hand and, on the other, pre-established harmony. Gottlieb's character outright says that math is the handwriting of God or whatever. That they are really talking about theology and a "grand design" is overt. I think also that they are both wrong.
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Clipperton posted:
He loved it. So half the posters here will have to commit seppuku.
That's not really too surprising; he praised 300 for the 'emancipatory core' under the 'historical paraphernalia' of slavery, infanticide, etc. - a point that ties into his famous claim that Gandhi is worse than Hitler, and his broader point that cultural conservatives might be stupid but make for good allies in the fight against systemic inequality.
As gone over before, Pacific Rim is an extremely similar film to 300 - thematically and aesthetically. But I'm not exactly despairing, since I've always argued that the heroes of 300 compare unfavorably to those in Battle: Los Angeles and Red Dawn.
Still, this should serve to Illustrate that when I call the film 'fascist', I don't mean it as some horrible pejorative. I find it vastly preferable to Iron Man's weak-willed vacillation between liberalism and libertarianism, even if I obviously can't wholeheartedly agree with it.
Remember that Zizek doesn't quibble over the details saying the 300 were swell guys and there's nothing wrong with slavery (worse, that the slavery isn't there - that calling it slavery is overthinking things). He's saying that the 300 were in a way a failure, but that we can still be inspired by aspects of them.
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Debunk posted:
SuperMechaGodzilla:
Please provide textual evidence/support that the kaiju, the exterminator-death-cult, are not in fact the facists.
Why prove a negative when there's no support for the assertion that they are fascist besides that people died?
You've also missed a few points. Stacker is clearly opposed to President Romney, representing an entirely different group. I've been very obviously talking about Stacker's resistance.
I'm also obviously not a pacifist.
But anyways, I've already gone over how the precursor society matches the neoliberal 'end of history' and the related 'four horsemen' - of worldwide ecological crisis, economic imbalance, biogenetic revolution, and social rupture - in a way that matches Man Of Steel and countless other films. As gone over before, the precursors are a reflection of life under president Romney, and there's the imagery of the rise of authoritarian capitalism in Russia and China with the pairing of Cherno/Leatherback and Crimson/Otachi.
It honestly doesn't seem as though you're read what I've written, as I've already addressed pretty much everything already.
***
It might seem like a bad movie, but the Pacific Rim fandom (known affectionately as 'Rimmers') have been pointing out its most fascinating details.
Like, did you know that strategic overseas marketing allowed the studio to recoup over 100m of its budget in China? Will you be able to purchase a sequel via digital download and/or Blu-Ray technology in 2016?! It's really suspenseful. Also: ironic fan-art.
***
I just remember a few years back where they showed test footage for TRON 2 aka TR2N aka TRON: LEGACY, and many real-world people were like HOLY FUCKING CHRIST IT'S TRON. And I mean breathless anticipation - people spending dozens of hours on the TRON ARG, buying hundreds or even thousands of dollars in TRON merch before the film was even out, fan-art, etc.
So I asked what I felt was a simple question: what is Tron? What is Tron about?
It wasn't rhetorical; I hadn't seen either of the films or played the videogame(s?). But no-one was willing or able to explain what Tron was. Like, not a fraction of the enthusiasm was put in that direction - and I'm talking more devotion to Tron than most people have towards God.
So I did some research, and it turns out Tron is a rather generic Disney franchise about intellectual property that got 'meta' in the second installment, with the protagonist owning Tron action figures and the composers playing the Tron 2 soundtrack 'live' in the diegesis, etc.
It was fairly underwhelming.
But it was a moot point anyways, because, once the film was out, fans quickly shifted their enthusiasm to hoping that the mediocre and underperforming film would recoup enough losses on the DVD market to prompt the development of TRON 3 aka TR3N aka HOLY FUCKING CHRIST, MORE TRON.
So, I guess, similar situation here.
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Superstring posted:
Wait, people need to be explained why some create fan art or keep track of box office in the hopes that a sequel is made? Have these people never engaged with a piece of pop culture before?
I do wonder why it's seemingly to the exclusion of all things besides 'good effects' and 'friendship', yes. I mean, the thread is like 200+ pages at this point.
I joke about the fan-art but it's comparatively, refreshingly, expressive! I could go on about how the blank killbots and protagonists are conducive to infantilization and/or sexualization. (Though obviously 'adults', people have already pointed out how they behave as twelve-year-olds, so they come across as these sort of proto-human templates that you can modify to your liking.) But it's the movie thread.
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Maxwell Lord posted:
What exclusion? We've hashed over the sociopolitical interpretations of this film for a good portion of that 200 pages, we've had thematic discussion up to the gills. We have had the heavy talk. We can also talk about the small stuff. This thread is large, it contains multitudes.
It has been played out. We have all made our points, those of us who want to and care enough to. It was rewarding, but you can't blame people or look down on them for bowing out of the heavy ideological discussion. I know to you there's no element of moral judgment or approbation to the "fascism" thing but you can at least understand how people take it that way and it makes the discussion heated.
Those of us who really liked the movie- on whatever level we happen to appreciate it- like to examine the various fun little things that have sprung up in its wake. And we would like to see more movies like it, hence box office is a matter of interest.
I just don't understand what you're trying to say with posts like that. Are you disappointed that we're not just going to talk about whether the film is fascist or not for another month?
It just strikes me as really passive aggressive. "Oh, no, it's GREAT that you're engaging with all these cardboard characters and talking about box office and not about the film's inherent xenophobia." There is room for many levels of discussion in this thread. If we don't all care to follow your line anymore that's because it's kind of exhausting.
Actually, I totally blame and look down on them! I'm scoffing hard at the Whitman misquote/paraphrase.
'Levels of discussion' is a fake idea. You're not bypassing ideology by talking about the box-office grosses, or creating an erotic and/or "chibi" image of an authoritarian-capitalist deathbot because it 'looks kinda (ironically) soviet', or endlessly complaining about my rad & accurate posting.
It's not 'just' your opinion. Don't devalue it with this nonsense.
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I am, personally, not preventing you from writing something interesting about toys, "the film's engagement with the tokusatsu and sentai genres (and the cultural outlooks reflected therein)," or anything else. I am actually interested in those things, and in seeing people reach their full potential.
So: what is Pacific Rim? What is Pacific Rim 'about'?
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meristem posted:
SMG is extremely abrasive. One doesn't get the sense that he is arguing from a position of good will and fostering discussion. He too frequently in this thread has overused statements such as 'it's obvious', mistaken basic facts about the film etc. - he isn't a good debater, and this annoys and wears out people. A debater like this isn't really worth engagement.
The only basic fact I've gotten wrong, in the entire thread, was the dog's name. You can check for yourself.
Other observations are incredibly obvious, to the point that it's half the fun of writing anything here (and make no mistake; it's hella funny).
I could quote a romance novel - "he thrust his purple-headed warrior into her quivering mound of love-pudding" - and half the thread would be like "where did this warrior come from? How did she have time to make pudding? They just were kissing just minutes ago!" And then, why don't I respect the opinion that the pudding is literal? Why am I so arrogant as to say that it's actually, obviously, a metaphor for vaginal sex?
When a literal newborn, complete with umbilical cord. plops out of a fleshy slit from its pregnant parent, the response is "you can't say it's childbirth imagery. Maybe it's like a seahorse? Maybe it's a car and the baby is luggage? Maybe it's a gun and the baby is a bullet? Maybe it's a house and the baby is a shed? Maybe it's an abstract 'badness' that doesn't mean anything? How can we really 'know' anything? Maybe Mako is a pre-op ftm transexual who only self-identifies as a woman due to societal pressures? Maybe we should be paralyzed by uncertainty forever?"
To this I reply: no.
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Oldpueblo is almost endearingly idiotic to be sure, but his example should be instructive; held to the same standard, half the defense of Pacific Rim fails to cut the mustard either.
The 'ammo belt' full of biomechanical weaponized creatures ready to be shot out a birth-hole is an obviously Gigeresque image, if not a direct reference to one of his more famous works. The rest of the psychosexual imagery, and its relation to the psychological trauma of the main characters, is likewise obvious.
If anything, Pacific Rim is substantially 'dumbed down'. When the Alien astronauts crawl into the yonic ports on the UFO, there's no expository dialogue about how the holes are dilating. And the titular creature is only metaphorically launched out a birth-hatch with a cord attached to its abdomen. In Pacific Rim, the dilation and the umbilical cord are literal.
Explorers literally crawl into a massive womb and literally encounter a massive alien god's-eye inside. The same imagery appears when Gipsy Danger plunges into the (dilated) breach: a colossal 'eye' in the background. Having this exact image occur twice, including at the very end of the film, is obviously important.
Also obvious is the depiction of the PPDC resistance as an organicist community. Even those who whinge about fascism-chat cannot deny that the film advocates some form of vague socialism. And so:
"You say socialism? Socialism is harmless. Everybody today is a socialist, you know? It just needs some vague solidarity. It doesn’t have this more radical egalitarianism. Every fascist can be said to be socialist, you know."
Though the film is most specifically about a type of fascist corporatism, those who insist that the film is 'merely' about a generic 'friendship' are obviously promoting a socialism of some sort or another, and are thus not safely 'beneath' political criticism.
But instead of just building on this obvious stuff - defending socialism, finding the nuances in all the yonic imagery, incorporating everything into a coherent reading - it's all denial and how-dare-yous. Worse, there's the deliberate ignorance of people conspicuously consuming Cherno Alpha merch without any concern for what it means - like so many Che shirts.
C'mon folks.
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meristem posted:
it's reasonable to treat the 'Otachi Jr.' scene as merely a quirk of the director's character - him wanting to put his own birth as a scare scene into the movie
A soldier robot designed to look like a football player crossed with a gunslinger is 'masculine' symbolism even though the robot obviously does not have a biological sex. Even though Mako Mori is a biological woman character, she deploys the phallic sword as a symbolic weapon.
In other words, we are basically talking about the difference between sex and gender. The biological sex of the monsters is irrelevant. They are gendered. (As their reproduction is exclusively through cloning, they are technically asexual anyway.)
If you prefer, we can substitute 'masculine' and 'feminine' with 'agency' and 'communion'. When Mako stiffens her rage-sword, this is an expression of her hard, rigid, individual agency over the soft, squishy, drone-like kaiju.
The film just happens to directly associate communion with an unending cascade of yonic slits. Slits within slits, recursively. It's the same concept as in Jurassic Park, where the idea was to make the dinosaurs asexual by eliminating males. Except life finds a way and sisters start doing it for themselves. Same thing happens here.
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Maxwell Lord posted:
So does everyone have to have a fully-formed thematic and political reading of every movie they see before they can argue if it was any good or not, or even buy a piece of merchandise?
Let's say you are a chimpanzee. If you want to play minor-league baseball, you're going to need a powerful arm and a rudimentary understanding of the game, like the ape in Ed (1996), starring Matt LeBlanc.
In this analogy, Ed represents not only a heartwarming adventure for the whole family, but the importance of communication skills (baseball skills) in everyday life (baseball).
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Neurion posted:
I'm glad you don't make the rules, SMG, because then nobody would be able to buy any merchandise ever, and people walking out of the theater would say to one another "Did you like it?" "I can't really say yet, I have to go write a fucking essay first."
Why not? It's an ideal to strive for. I believe in literacy, and if the choice is a binary between hoarding merch and being literate, then burn Hasbro to the ground.
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Paolomania posted:
I'm sorry, but if you are going to say that the mouth of a shark is scary because it represents a vagina rather than scary because it represents the mouth of a predatory animal then I am going to say that your critical framework is calibrated such that pretty much everything turns up vaginas.
The quote isn't talking about any shark but specifically the nightmarishly huge shark of Jaws that swallows men whole and must be fought by the combined forces of Law, Science and Rugged Individualism.
You can also watch the weirdly synchronous hit film Sharknado - which climaxes with a chainsaw-wielding man jumping down a shark's throat, cutting a slit in its belly and emerging reborn after thought dead.
I know you're being commonsensical, but commonsense can't account for the surprising popularity of 'vorephilia' and 'unbirthing' pornography. Google them to see!
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Clipperton posted:
why use Freud even for media criticism, if Freud's been debunked? Once you knock out the scientific support for psychoanalysis, what reason is left to use Freud's set of symbols instead of some purely arbitrary one (JAEGERS=DONUTS)?
In 2000, the 100th anniversary of the publication of Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams was accompanied by a new wave of triumphalist acclamations of how psychoanalysis is dead: with the new advances in brain sciences, it is finally put where it belonged all the time, to the lumber-room of pre-scientific obscurantist search for hidden meanings, alongside religious confessors and dream-readers. As Todd Dufresne put it, no figure in the history of human thought was more wrong about all its fundamentals - with the exception of Marx, some would add. And, effectively and predictably, in 2005, the infamous The Black Book of Communism, listing all the Communist crimes, was followed by The Black Book of Psychoanalysis, listing all the theoretical mistakes and clinical frauds of psychoanalysis. In this negative way, at least, the profound solidarity of Marxism and psychoanalysis is now displayed for all to see.
There is something to this funeral oratory. A century ago, in order to situate his discovery of the unconscious in the history of modern Europe, Freud developed the idea of three successive humiliations of man, the three “narcissistic illnesses,” as he called them. First, Copernicus demonstrated that Earth turns around the Sun and thus deprived us, humans, of the central place in the universe. Then, Darwin demonstrated our origin from blind evolution, thereby depriving us of the privileged place among living beings. Finally, when Freud himself rendered visible the predominant role of the unconscious in psychic processes, it became clear that our ego is not even a master in his own house. Today, a hundred years later, a more extreme picture is emerging: the latest scientific breakthroughs seem to add a whole series of further humiliations to the narcissistic image of man: our mind itself is merely a computing machine for data-processing, our sense of freedom and autonomy is merely the user’s illusion of this machine. Consequently, with regard to today’s brain sciences, psychoanalysis itself, far from being subversive, rather seems to belong to the traditional humanist field threatened by the latest humiliations.
Is, then, psychoanalysis today really outdated? It seems that it is, on three interconnected levels: (1) that of scientific knowledge, where the cognitivist-neurolobiologist model of the human mind appears to supersede the Freudian model; (2) that of psychiatric clinic, where psyhoanalytic treatment is rapidly losing ground against pills and behavioral therapy; (3) that of the social context, where the image of a society, of social norms, which repress the individual’s sexual drives, no longer appears valid with regard to today’s predominant hedonistic permissiveness. Nonetheless, in the case of psychoanalysis, the memorial service is perhaps a little bit too hasty, commemorating a patient who still has a long life ahead. In contrast to the “evident” truths of the critics of Freud, my aim is to demonstrate that it is only today that the time of psychoanalysis has arrived. On reading Freud through Lacan, through what Lacan called his “return to Freud.” Freud’s key insights finally become visible in their true dimension. Lacan did not understand this return as a return to what Freud said, but to the core of the Freudian revolution of which Freud himself was not fully aware.
Lacan started his “return to Freud” with the linguistic reading of the entire psychoanalytic edifice, encapsulated by what is perhaps his single best known formula: “the unconscious is structured as a language.” The predominant perception of the unconscious is that it is the domain of irrational drives, something opposed to the rational conscious self. For Lacan, this notion of the unconscious belongs to the Romantic Lebensphilosophie (philosophy of life) and has nothing to do with Freud. The Freudian unconscious caused such a scandal not because of the claim that the rational self is subordinated to the much vaster domain of blind irrational instincts, but because it demonstrated how the unconscious itself obeys its own grammar and logic – the unconscious talks and thinks. The unconscious is not the reservoir of wild drives that has to be conquered by the ego, but the site where a traumatic truth speaks. Therein resides Lacan’s version of Freud’s motto wo es war, soll ich werden (where it was, I shall become): not “the ego should conquer the id”, the site of the unconscious drives, but “I should dare to approach the site of my truth”. What awaits me “there” is not a deep Truth I have to identify with, but an unbearable truth I have to learn to live with.
How, then, do Lacan’s ideas differ from the mainstream psychoanalytical schools of thought and from Freud himself? With regard to other schools, the first thing that strikes the eye is the philosophical tenor of Lacan’s theory. For Lacan, psychoanalysis at its most fundamental is not a theory and technique of treating psychic disturbances, but a theory and practice which confronts individuals with the most radical dimension of human existence. It does not show an individual the way to accommodate him- or herself to the demands of social reality; it explains how something like “reality” constitutes itself in the first place. It does not merely enable a human being to accept the repressed truth about him- or herself; it explains how the dimension of truth emerges in human reality. In Lacan’s view, pathological formations like neuroses, psychoses and perversions, have the dignity of fundamental philosophical attitudes towards reality. When I suffer obsessional neurosis, this ‘illness’ colours my entire relationship to reality and defines the global structure of my personality. Lacan’s main critique of other psychoanalytic orientations concerns their clinical orientation: for Lacan, the goal of psychoanalytic treatment is not the patient’s well-being or successful social life or personal self-fulfilment, but to bring the patient to confront the elementary coordinates and deadlocks of his or her desire.
With regard to Freud, the first thing that strikes the eye is that the lever used by Lacan in his “return to Freud” comes from outside the field of psychoanalysis: in order to unlock the secret treasures of Freud, Lacan mobilized an eclectic series of theories, from the linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure, through Claude Lévi-Strauss’s structural anthropology, up to mathematical set theory and the philosophies of Plato, Kant, Hegel and Heidegger. No wonder most of Lacan’s key concepts do not have a counterpart in Freud’s own theory: Freud never mentions the triad of Imaginary, Symbolic and Real, he never talks about the “big Other” as the symbolic order, he speaks of “ego”, not of “subject”. Lacan uses these terms imported from other disciplines as tools to cut distinctions which are implicitly already present in Freud, even if he was not aware of them. For example, if psychoanalysis is a ‘talking cure’, if it treats pathological disturbances with words only, it has to rely on a certain notion of speech; Lacan’s thesis is that Freud was not aware of the notion of speech implied by his own theory and practice, and that we can only elaborate this notion if we refer to Saussurean linguistics, speech acts theory and the Hegelian dialectics of recognition.
Lacan’s “return to Freud” provided a new theoretical foundation of psychoanalysis with immense consequences also for analytic clinic. Controversy, crisis, scandal even, accompanied Lacan throughout his path. Not only was he, in 1953, excommunicated from the International Psycho-Analytic Association (see his Chronology) but his provocative ideas disturbed many progressive thinkers, from critical Marxists to feminists. Although, in the Western academia, Lacan is usually perceived as one of the postmodernists or deconstructionists, he clearly sticks out from the space designated by these labels. All his life, he was outgrowing labels attached to his name: phenomenologist, Hegelian, Heideggerian, structuralist, poststructuralist; no wonder, since the most outstanding feature of his teaching is permanent self-questioning.
(link)
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Clipperton posted:
Once again: where does one learn this? Whose feet do I sit at to "learn the language of film"? Please don't say "Freud".
Lacan.
Everyone in the thread has been referencing Lacan, not Freud. See my above post.
Maxwell Lord posted:
Good thing it's not a binary, then! The forum's software is clearly robust enough to handle a long thread in which people discuss themes, buy merchandise, whine about not getting merchandise, insult other posters for liking a "fascist" film, share fanart, discuss Alien, discuss whether symbolism even exists, etc.
Now let them have their fun and you can continue having yours.
No.
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Reminder:
Guillermo Del Toro has (redundantly, given the clarity of his imagery) gone on record that he deliberately and intentionally puts psychosexual imagery in his films, and that his previous two films were about relationships with mothers, anxiety over childbirth, etc.1
Y'all are incredibly, obviously wrong.
1Commentary tracks for Pan's Labyrinth and Hellboy 2.
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The film even goes out if its way to fudge scale, get technobabble wrong, etc.
You have to ask why they deliberately contorted 'reality' to have Gipsy D employ both an oil tanker and cargo containers as weapons. Why imagery of importation and exportation, goods being sold?
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Maxwell Lord posted:
Ah, but in so doing doesn't it demolish them? It's like Palpatine throwing the Senate at Yoda- it's twisting the system towards one's own ends.
(Though I would argue that a cargo container is something that would exist under any political system- whether goods are sold or distributed they would still have to be moved.)
It's not just any system though, but a specific part of the Blade Runner-styled Neo-Hong Kong. It means something that this place is exporting(?) Vespa scooters.
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T.G. Xarbala posted:
Oh, sorry then. Gender ramifications of weapons and superpowers is something that does get my sincere attention, so the question of a weapon or power that isn't masculine yet isn't predominantly defensive in concept is one part of a bevy of topics I've been thinking about for a while.
In X-Men: First Class, you have an especially pronounced gap between Magneto - whose superpower is used to launch knives at people, and (at one point) to take a whole submarine and erect it 30 degrees - and Professor X, who basically employs a gaydar and uses empathy powers. That's the whole 'agency vs. communion' thing in a nutshell.
There's an illustrative overlap between the mutant powers in First Class and those employed by Gipsy Danger.
In first class, Havok is this manly dude who lashes out with random fire, until he learns to channel it as a beam from a circular panel on his chest. They help him to aim his bright pink beam by giving him unclothed lady mannequins as practice targets. There's also Banshee, who aims his sonic powers downwards in order to suspend himself in the air (his sexual hang up is some sort of goony autism that disgusts girls, til he learns to control his voice). You get a combination of their two abilities in Gipsy Danger's otherwise-inexplicable chest turbine.
The phallic revenge-knife connection to magneto is fairly obvious.
On the other side, Otachi's skillset matches up with the bug lady who deploys acid spit and fleshy wings from within her body (Otachi is also roughly similar to Dren from the Del Toro-produced film Splice, with her prehensile tail and hidden wings). We can also talk about Storm with the obvious godlike weather-control fury thing, etc.
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I have this weird theory, that people are grossed out by genitals - but also attracted to them??
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How does anyone understand Arthurian legend, especially something like John Boorman's Excalibur, without grasping symbolism?
Like, how do you understand the magic, primordial sword called 'Excalibur' that unites all men and is spawned from the dragon?
"The Dragon. A beast of such power that if you were to see it whole and all complete in a single glance, it would burn you to cinders. It is everywhere! It is everything! Its scales glisten in the bark of trees, its roar is heard in the wind! And its forked tongue strikes like lightning!"
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The very basic point of Pacific Rim is that humanity differs from the machine-monsters in its ability to symbolize. This is why Mako's phallic sword thing that she uses to overcome her trauma is one of the only successful parts of the film.
Where the kaiju are directly connected to their universe, Mako experiences trauma, and...
""trauma" designates a shocking encounter which, precisely, DISTURBS this immersion into one's life-world, a violent intrusion of something which doesn't fit it. Of course, animals can also experience traumatic ruptures: say, is the ants' universe not thrown off the rails when a human intervention totally subverts their environs? However, the difference between animals and men is crucial here: for animals, such traumatic ruptures are the exception, they are experienced as a catastrophe which ruins their way of life; for humans, on the contrary, the traumatic encounter is a universal condition, the intrusion which sets in motion the process of "becoming human." Man is not simply overwhelmed by the impact of the traumatic encounter - as Hegel put it, s/he is able to "tarry with the negative," to counteract its destabilizing impact by spinning out intricate symbolic cobwebs. This is the lesson of both psychoanalysis and the Jewish-Christian tradition: the specific human vocation does not rely on the development of man's inherent potentials (on the awakening of the dormant spiritual forces OR of some genetic program); it is triggered by an external traumatic encounter, by the encounter of the Other's desire in its impenetrability. In other words, there is no inborn "language instinct": there are, of course, genetic conditions that have to be met if a living being is to be able to speak; however, one actually starts to speak, one enters the symbolic universe, only in reacting to a traumatic jolt - and the mode of this reacting, i.e. the fact that, in order to cope with a trauma, we symbolize, is NOT "in our genes.""
-Zizek
Saying the sword is not symbolic, but rather a mere component of the franchise universe that we immerse ourselves into, demonstrates a profound failure to understand Pacific Rim.
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Lord Krangdar posted:
Could you (or Danger) help me understand this part? Shouldn't it be the opposite: animals, having no concept of symbolic order, are constantly in an unmediated state of experience, whereas for humans trauma occurs when our lives are destabilized by experiences that don't fit into the symbolic order? So for animals there are no traumatic ruptures because there's nothing to rupture, whereas for humans intrusions are so traumatic because they are the exception.
Or is he saying that the symbolic order only exists as a constant counter-reaction to the constant potential for trauma (with the constant quality making it not the exception)?
While animals carry on instinctively, according to how they've evolved, the human ability to speak can't be accounted for in evolutionary terms. There's no language instinct. Language is like a tool, an external prosthesis.
As Marshall McLuhan pointed out, every prosthesis is also an amputation; when riding in a car, you lose the use of your legs (for example). So, when the prosthesis in question is the whole symbolic network, the flipside is the 'symbolic castration' Danger wrote about a few posts back. Humans are 'crippled animals' who have withdrawn from nature and need symbolic institutions, languages, cultures, tools, and whatnot to augment themselves.
Animals, being already 'in nature' require no such augmentation. When trauma does eventually occur, it's just an accident - but for humans, it's a universal condition. Human subjectivity is an ongoing process of 'tarrying with the negative', creating a symbolic network that will withstand the constant threat of madness, dissolution, etc.
Defiance Industries posted:
If you hate this movie so much, why do you keep talking about it?
I'm kaiju.
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Yeah, I worded that poorly but it's the covered in the last line of the original quote: "there are, of course, genetic conditions that have to be met if a living being is to be able to speak; however, one actually starts to speak, one enters the symbolic universe, only in reacting to a traumatic jolt."
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OldPueblo posted:
Let's use this thread's key examples. Phalluses, baby Kaiju's, and that Kaiju's are female.
[...]
I'm pretty sure nobody is saying there is NO subtext or imagery, just that what is there is pretty plain to see and laid out very openly. Unlike the three mentioned earlier and many other ridiculous stretches. Get some hobbies please.
The imagery of things crawling in and out of fleshy slits recurs constantly.
I just recently made a post explaining how Gipsy Danger's (symbolic) weapon loadout is directly analogous to the phallic/psychosexual imagery in X-Men 4 - a film overtly about human sexuality (esp. gay sex). Gipsy Danger obviously appears frequently in the film.
The baby kaiju is literally a baby kaiju and is a major element in the storyline. Imagery associated with it also recurs at the end of the film, when the protagonists win. Since this is not subtext, you might be referring to the christological imagery and other basic theological stuff that pervades the film ("math is the handwriting of God," etc.).
In the other hand, the things you listed (such as 'loss') are not subtext at all - demonstrating that you definitely have absolutely no idea what you are talking about.
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OldPueblo posted:
You know what else occurs constantly? Walking and clothes. And doors! So it's a quantity thing then, gotcha!
Do you mean that clothes are 'natural' and 'random', like a cloud? That would probably make the film's costume designers pretty sad.
Jesus is real.
Also, you really obviously haven't bothered to even do a cursory wikipedia google of the word 'subtext.' Why not?
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Maxwell Lord posted:
Even though authorial intent doesn't matter etc., I think the words of Del Toro on the subject of the kaiju and how villainous they are do provide some insight. This is from the same Birth. Movies. Death. issue I quoted before.
Del Toro contradicts himself here, in a telling way.
He says that a (good) kaiju film works like a wrestling match, with both the good and evil monsters displaying clear and entertaining personalities.
He then says that the monsters in Pacific Rim are neither good nor evil, being just kind of generically 'there', like nature.
Also, aesthetically, there's a clear contrast between the (dark, rainy) look of Pacific Rim and the style of lighting Barthes praised in theatrical wrestling:
"what makes the circus or the arena what they are is [...] the drenching and vertical quality of the flood of light. Even hidden in the most squalid Parisian halls, wrestling partakes of the nature of the great solar spectacles, Greek drama and bullfights: in both, a light without shadow generates an emotion without reserve."
This obviously describes more the 'daylight' (soundstage) battles at the end of Gamera: Guardian of the Universe, Legend of Dinosaurs and Monster Birds, or even Jurassic Park, than any scene in Pacific Rim. Not to mention any of Honda's later kaiju films!
And the fights themselves:
"[It is] in the body of the wrestler that we find the first key to the contest. I know from the start that all of Thauvin's actions, his treacheries, cruelties and acts of cowardice, will not fail to measure up to the first image of ignobility he gave me; I can trust him to carry out intelligently and to the last detail all the gestures of a kind of amorphous baseness, and thus fill to the brim the image of the most repugnant bastard there is: the bastard-octopus. [...]
The physique of the wrestlers therefore constitutes a basic sign, which like a seed contains the whole fight. But this seed proliferates, for it is at every turn during the fight, in each new situation, that the body of the wrestler casts to the public the magical entertainment of a temperament which finds its natural expression in a gesture. The different strata of meaning throw light on each other, and form the most intelligible of spectacles. Wrestling is like a diacritic writing: above the fundamental meaning of his body, the wrestler arranges comments which are episodic but always opportune, and constantly help the reading of the fight by means of gestures, attitudes and mimicry which make the intention utterly obvious. Sometimes the wrestler triumphs with a repulsive sneer while kneeling on the good sportsman; sometimes he gives the crowd a conceited smile which forebodes an early revenge; sometimes, pinned to the ground, he hits the floor ostentatiously to make evident to all the intolerable nature of his situation; and sometimes he erects a complicated set of signs meant to make the public understand that he legitimately personifies the ever- entertaining image of the grumbler, endlessly confabulating about his displeasure.
We are therefore dealing with a real Human Comedy, where the most socially-inspired nuances of passion (conceit, rightfulness, refined cruelty, a sense of 'paying one's debts') always felicitously find the clearest sign which can receive them, express them and triumphantly carry them to the confines of the hall." (Barthes)
Pacific Rim clearly lacks these different strata of meaning, making the battels unintelligible outside of first impressions of the bodies of the creatures (hence the toychat). There's no part where the monster sneers with disgust at the robot that vexes it, squeals with glee, or any other clear gesture of the sort. In fact, when not just attacking in a straight line, the monsters gently prod their surroundings ambiguously. Their intentions are not clear at all, despite what the expository dialogue is telling us.
As a huge, 'fat bitch' monster, shouldn't we see Leatherback lustily devouring the city (for example)? In Gamera 1, the Gyaos tears open a train car like a sardine can to feast on the occupants. It just eats messily - slurping sounds, gore dripping from its face. This is what I mean when I say Gyaos is a truly hateful bastard of a monster. We don't see a single civilian death in the entirety of Pacific Rim. It's not enough to understand the kaiju as a hurricane; we need to loathe them and enjoy loathing them. And you simply can't loathe a tornado. Loathing is intensely personal, and passionate, but rimmers dispassionately endorse the rational necessity of doing something to stop a weather thing.
The same applies to Mako: she is a 'deep character' in the sense that we look 'deeply' into her brain to see that she likes Zen and whatever. But in terms of actually displaying her characteristics, she stands around demurely before yelling once in the extremely atypical (actually good) sword scene. Hero Guy's even worse, since he doesn't really display any passionate, grandiloquent gestures after the scene on the beach. In that part, he displays exaggerated suffering and disorientation. Why never again?
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The Leper Colon V posted:
I'm gonna actually strike up the position of Devil's Advocate here, and bring up this:
What if the different kaiju being without individual personality besides their appearances and powers was completely intentional? They are mass-produced, hive-mind, biological weapons. I wouldn't expect them to have individual thoughts and personalities any more than I would expect a giant killer worker bee to have a different personality from a giant worker ant with an EMP on its back. Different methods, definitely. Different personalities? No, not really.Besides, there are much bigger holes in the movie's plot that we could be sticking our feet through.
Even in Them!, where the antagonists are literally ants (and also fairly rigid puppets), you linger on the destruction - you see homes literally torn apart, ants building a mountain of human bones... in one scene, the protagonist examines a site of destruction and is baffled that whoever did it left the money behind.
At the same time, the ants are rigorously compared to the humans - so that the darker side of the protagonists' actions serve as ant characterization in a roundabout way. The humans are at constant risk of becoming ants.
Pacific Rim kinda halfheartedly achieves the latter ("to fight monsters blah blah blah), but certainly not the former.
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A Dirty Sock posted:
Rockets are super phallic of course, in both the physical and symbolic senses.
While the above is true, the fist is actually a pre-phallic partial object, and 'punching' is an asexual, goal-oriented activity.
In yelling the name of the move, however, the emphasis is obviously not on the goal but on the gesture itself. (Does 'rocket punching' even really bother the kaiju? Does anyone care?) That move beyond the plain functionality of the gesture lends it an obscene subtext. Rocket-punching is not just the combination of fist and phallus but the fist replacing the phallus.
"And, to go even a step further, is the practice of fist-fucking not the exemplary case of what Deleuze called the "expansion of a concept?" The fist is put to a new use; the notion of penetration is expanded into the combination of the hand with sexual penetration, into the exploration of the inside of a body. No wonder Foucault, Deleuze's Other, was practicing fisting: is fist-fucking not the sexual invention of the twentieth century, a new model of eroticism and pleasure? It is no longer genitalized, but focused just on the penetration of the surface, with the role of the phallus being taken over by the hand, the autonomized partial object par excellence. And, what about the so-called Transformer or animorph toys, a car or a plane that can be transformed into a humanoid robot, an animal that can be morphed into a human or robot. Is this not Deleuzian? There are no "metaphorics" here; the point is not that the machinic or animal form is revealed as a mask containing a human shape but, rather, the existence of the becoming-machine or becoming-animal of the human, the flow of continuous morphing. What is blurred here is also the divide machine/living organism: a car transmutes into a humanoid/cyborg organism. And, is the ultimate irony not that, for Deleuze, the sport was surfing, a Californian sport par excellence if there ever was one? No longer a sport of self-control and domination directed towards some goal, it is just a practice of inserting oneself into a wave and letting oneself be carried by it. Brian Massumi formulated clearly this deadlock, which is based on the fact that today's capitalism already overcame the logic of totalizing normality and adopted the logic of the erratic excess..."
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RBX posted:
Pacific Rim - Not interesting and shallow and for manchildren but gets hundreds of pages and paragraphs anyway
Exactly, yes.
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A Steampunk Gent posted:
So as we've already established, Zizek was talking out his arse w/r/t fisting and I have no idea how it could be linked in any way specific to 20th century attitudes or consciousness, it's a sex thing people do because sex, but his description of surfing is equally nonsensical and weasely. Has Zizek ever tried surfing? It's fucking hard and requires a lot of self control and mastery of the body, it isn't a team sport and doesn't have the same agressive mentalality as traditionally macho sports like American Football or Lacrosse, but then neither does cycling or rock climbing. Does rock climbing also adopt 'the logic of erratic excess'? And what is erratic excess in this context anyway?
Zizek is talking about fisting in the specific context of hardcore pornography, just like the concept of animals morphing into humans is not at all new, but is presented in the context of the Hasbro action figures.
Although the language is florid, he's basically saying that these transgressive concepts are no longer so - rather than being a sort of 'punk' rebellion against an oppressive Power, capitalism has simply absorbed these concepts and turned them into products and marketing tactics.
Same with surfing: Zizek isn't saying that surfing is easy. He's talking about the philosophy behind the sport - what all that effort is for:
"Football’s a man-made game. You keep score with numbers. But in this, there’s no field, no rules, no opponent. Just you and the wave. [...] I’ve watched you once or twice. You surf like it’s some kind of street fight. You jerk along from moment to moment, fighting everything that comes at you. Always trying to win. [...] The only way to win out here is to surrender."
-Patrick Swayze as Bodhi in Point Break
Bodhi's a bank robber who 'doesn't care about the money' and just wants to fight the system, free the human spirit, etc. But the problem is, of course, that this doesn't work and Point Break is all about his noble failure, and how Keanu Reeves' character exceeds him (jumping out the plane without a parachute, etc.).
Bodhi: “You have to feel what the wave is doing, accept its energy, get in sync."
This synchronization is, of course, exactly what Newton accomplishes, and is similar to the neural linking with animals to form complex assemblages in Avatar (which references D&G specifically with its wasp-orchid imagery). So you have the characters reaching in, touching the source.
A key example is in Matrix 2, where 'the Merovingian' causes a woman to orgasm just by directly modifying her neurochemistry. It's related to (but distinct from) the scene where Neo reaches into Trinity and performs 'psychic surgery' on her, and a similar event in Man Of Steel. The darker side of is, of course, Mola Ram in Temple Of Doom reaching directly into the person to pull out their heart. That's the fisting scene in popular culture.
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Yeah, the ultimate fisting move is when Gipsy deploys the fist-gun 'right hand of doom' and empties the clip into Leatherback's split-open belly with an obscene repetition.
The rocket-punch is the same fist deployed just slightly differently. And is it not the same fist-gun as in Videodrome? 'New flesh,' man-machine fusion, and all that?
We know from Hellboy that Del Toro's 'right hand of doom' is specifically used to pull open the fabric of reality to contact the Lovecraftian gods 'on the other side'. Note, then, that the breakdown of Mako's symbolic universe during her trauma-induced flashback is represented by the fist-gun going haywire and threatening to tear open the literal universe.
It's basically the inverse of the speech in Patton where he tells of the horror of "putting your hand in a bunch of goo that a moment before was your best friend's face" - because, in Pacific Rim, 'putting your hand in the goo' is the objective.
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Bongo Bill posted:
This thread's been interesting and informative, but it seems like a lot of Marxist-inspired film criticism uses the film itself as little more than an example accompanying a lecture about how much capitalism sucks.
It will take more than a fistful of fascist phalluses to keep me from preferring to interpret this film as being about the power of trust for overcoming trauma, weathering hardship, and finding hope. Some sneer at such a reading for its commonality, but I'm fond of it.
Write about late-capitalist pre-phallic partial objects and folks still ain't happy. People simply don't know what they want.
But anyway, you're not at all wrong. This story about hope and friendship is simply also fascist. These qualities aren't mutually exclusive!
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Clipperton posted:
You're just not trying hard enough man. If you really knuckled down and cracked the Zizek, you could be having profound insights like
[the totalizing power of capitalism]
which is certainly not a concept that's occurred to everyone who's ever walked past a Hot Topic, ever
It doesn't seem that obvious - given that Pacific Rim is the 'Topic' in question, and you're still down with it.
If the apocalypse of the film is liberal-democratic, and the resistance talks big about hope and trust while preserving private property and class structure, then it's fair to call the acts against the kaiju false.
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A Dirty Sock posted:
The apocalypse of the film is an environmental collapse, and communism has shown itself to have no more concern for the environment, perhaps even less so, than capitalist societies. Chernobyl is the big one, but there is also the destruction of the Caspian Sea. You can point out that the USSR was not a true commumist country, but then neither is America a true capitalist one.
Del Toro's message of warning is to the whole human race and is not reserved for either system. The movie explicitly shows the cooperation of multiple independent states in the face of this danger (and the presence of narrative elements coopted by fascism doesn't mean that the film is fascist).
I am not advocating a return to the soviet union(?).
Other issues ("but it's about international friendship!") have been covered in detail already. Why quote my posts if you aren't actually responding to them?
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Maxwell Lord posted:
The thing is, the international friendship and environmental elements are much more a foregrounded element of the story than any class issues. It's impossible to really say whether the heroes represent the bourgeois or the proletariat given the information- at least one of them is very much blue collar, but he was a celebrity before that so it's a kind of reverse mobility. The main capitalist figure in the film is Chau, who survives but is basically kind of a buffoon. He knows very little about the kaiju despite dealing in them as a commodity.
'International friendship' is the kind of thing you put in scary scare quotes as a warning against vagueness. My 'international friendship' is better. What now?
And saying environmental issues are foregrounded is just straight-up wrong, when we see exactly that imagery of celebrities, blue-collar welders, black-marketeers, presidents, etc. There are straight-up shots of rioters protesting mismanagement of taxpayer dollars by the ultra-rich.
The ecological theme is present, but consists of a single line of expository dialogue and a few crowd shots that resemble Blade Runner. The kaiju terror attacks are metaphorically compared to hurricanes in the diegesis, but they're primarily terror imagery for that reason - it's what gives the Kaiju Richter Scale a weirdo 'colour-coded Terror Alert Level' vibe.
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Maxwell Lord posted:
True, but what classes are the characters? What class are the bad guys for that matter? Who are the have nots? Who controls the means of production? There's no real clear economic structure given here, be it affirming a capitalist one or rejecting it for something else- we assume they're protecting capitalism by default but there's no sign that that is what the precursors or kaiju are out to destroy.
The alien society basically illustrates Jurgen Habermas' concern that biogenetic manipulation will lead to an asymmetrical relationship between privileged 'creators' and 'creations'. There is the associated concern from Fukuyama that, since the rich in a free-market economy would obviously have better access to this stuff, they would be able to 'breed themselves better' and create a whole new form of entrenched class warfare. For a clearer examples of the same thing, see the genetically-engineered caste system in Man Of Steel, and the privatization (and thus restricted access to) the nanotech healing pods in Elysium.
While the enslavement of the kaiju shows this logic taken to an extreme, they still represent the dark flipside of the jaeger-pilots and their relationship to the unseen ultrarich in the mainland.
It's fairly clear that things are not really different from today - see the neon advertisements that choke Hong Kong, the cargo crates full of scooters, etc. Obviously, taxpayers fund the wall and jaeger programs, and these taxpayers themselves work crap jobs for their little pay. (That people will risk death on the wall for food stamps shows that unemployment is rampant.) We see riots against the irresponsible spending on the wall project (though the film uses clever/duplicitous editing to make these appear as pro-jaeger demonstrations), but somebody's paying for these scooters.
So, the jaeger-pilots are exactly that: pilots, soldiers whatever. Some have achieved fame, but they're ultimately just the military. (Some folks asserted earlier the PPDC is a civilian operation, but I'm not sure where that comes from.)
Everyone knows how poor folks are pushed into military service. So, see the association between the blue glow of kaiju blood, the drift, and the jello the troops are fed. They ultimately are just fighting for a meal - and their hunger is what connects them to those in power, allowing them to be manipulated.
There is a revolutionary kernel there, as this blue food/blue blood/blue drift imagery is only a few steps removed from being communion imagery. But, again, the protagonists fail to love their neighbor enough to form a properly Christian community. Shouldn't the heroes partake of the body and blood of Baby Kaijesus, thus finding kinship with their fellow oppressed? Seize control of the jello factory? Instead, Newt betrays them all.
As noted before, Leatherback and Cherno Alpha are the same creature, just viewed differently. So when Mako gloriously sword-fucks Otachi to death, it really is "anti-China propaganda." The 'good' Crimson Typhoon morphs into a drone animal that needs to be put down. So you get this false freedom - freedom earned through naked force against the neighbor, even though the kaiju gave us their only son....
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Kaijesus Christ does not come to bring peace, but to bring a sword.
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Carbolic posted:
Did either of them show up in any of the news clips back in the "good old days" when humanity was beating up on Category I and II kaiju? That would have been super easy.
The exposition montage goes by so quickly that it's difficult to discern if they show up, and unimportant regardless.
It's also not a very good example of 'show, don't tell'.
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The truth hurts.
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"Whose hat represents more oppression, yours or mine?"
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Bongo Bill posted:
Every single time science-sounding jargon is used in this movie, it's exactly the opposite of how that science would work in real life. Rather than being a series of coincidental oversights, that suggests to me it was a deliberate affectation contributing to the tone, underscoring just how little it matters that everything in this movie is impossible.
In Prometheus, characters get things wrong because they're human. A person uses the phrase 'half a billion miles' metaphorically, in casual speech, to convey an impressive-sounding distance. Even though she's way off, the point is that space is so incomprehensibly vast that technical accuracy is unimportant. A trillion or a quadrillion miles - what difference does it make if you're not a navigational computer?
The opposite thing is happening in Pacific Rim. Instead of the characters using metaphor to make sense of the universe, the universe of Pacific Rim is, itself, total bullshit.
Phrases like 'no alloys' and 'analog' are employed for their obvious metaphorical connotations: purity, solidity, simplicity, tradition, etc. But it's not characters using poetic license here; the scientists and technicians are claiming that, objectively, purity makes metal stronger. And the film invents a universe where they're right.
Now, keep in mind that that the film uses the Jagers as a metaphor for corporatism. Literally, they're giant organic bodies. These bullshit phrases are directly associated with this body: they refer to Gipsy Danger's pure skin, and the contents of her heart....
How can you not read it as a Starship Troopers situation - like the scene where they blame the bugs for the asteroid strike? It's bullshit.
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Carbolic posted:
Yeah I really don't get the idea that she is supposed to be some sort of progressive or feminist character. She is essentially submissive to Stacker the entire movie. In the fight scenes, Raleigh just barks orders/encouragements at her the whole time. The only time she shows any initiative in a Jaeger is the "whoops, we forgot the sword" scene. She needs rescuing at the end (no that is not "luck," that is the way someone decided to write the script, i.e. a dude rescuing a woman the same way as every plot ever).
This is a trope-y approach to criticism that misses the forest for the trees. In a better film, it wouldn't matter if Mako herself were subservient or not, because what matters is the context.
Hero Guy ejects her from the robot body. Okay. So, what is the body?
As gone over much earlier in the thread, the film uses 'the drift' and the union in a shared body as a metaphor for love - and a specific kind of love that is about perfect unity and harmony. They're literally synchronized. And this is extrapolated out to the whole of society - gotta purge those who disrupt the harmony. The body is falling apart due to attacks by the kaiju, and the final solution is to nuke the fuck out of them. Mako is ejected so that they can re-unite in "the afterlife".
People have called the sacrifice of Gypsy Danger a Christ image, but that's misleading. It's the same false imagery as in Dark Knight 3, where Batman restores status quo and then goes on vacation. The same applies here.
Mako consistently needs to be protected from the kaiju threat that would disrupt her harmony - recall how her kaiju-trauma split the drift earlier.
So you can see the issue: even if Mako were super-confident and assertive and whatever other positive tropes, the film has already failed by presenting the threat to genuine equality as a threat from outside.
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Cherno Alpha and the red guy are shown fighting onscreen for less than two minutes each. This is weirdly like reading an extended multipage analysis of the slightly taller alien in Man Of Steel.
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Dr. Red Ranger posted:
I fully accept that I am spergin' hard about minor modifications to a minor part of the movie. It did get me to think about how tiny, seemingly unimportant details can affect my impressions though.
Don't get me wrong, there's quite a bit going on in those two minutes, but characterization is negligible. It's Russia and China fighting Capitalism. With that established, it's about the imagery.
In a better film, that image of Leatherback's massive palm fully eclipsing the field of vision as it forces Cherno's head underwater would linger for more than four seconds. That's the best and most important shot, and the rest of the 1.5 minute fight scene is pretty much just exposition leading up to it. But then, it's just glossed over for the less-interesting shot of Cherno's head going 'poof'.
When you consider what's actually going on in that scene, it's not very well-conveyed in a storytelling sense. We'd initially seen Cherno's pilots surrounded by the usual holograms in their armored cockpit. When Cherno is hit with acid, suddenly they're exposed to the elements. However, you don't see the acid actually melt away their windshield. You don't see the wind and water suddenly affecting them. You don't see a hole where the wall used to be. You even don't get an earlier POV shot that establishes what the kaiju are undermining by tearing away the wall and all shoving their hand up in there. The experience of Cherno's pilots is continually de-emphasized for some reason - we watch them drown, but the film does not evoke the feeling of drowning.
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Habibi posted:
Yes you do?
Not really. You get a CGI shot of Cherno Alpha getting spat on. Cut inside and the woman pilot says 'Cherno Alpha has been hit with acid!' and the camera pans up briefly to show some drips from somewhere vaguely above them. There's otherwise no indication of how this damage actually relates to the pilots - and that's very important. Cherno Alpha's hat melting is an abstract, unrelatable thing that needs to be made relatable. I have no idea what it means to have your 30-story mecha lose its robot hat.
The only time you see Cherno's pilots and either monster in the same shot (or a POV shot from the perspective of the pilots, or a picture of the monster on their holoscreens, or something) is the aforementionned 3-4 second shot of leatherback's palm - which appears at the tail end of the sequence.
The opening sequence is better, because you see Hero Brother get ripped out of an eye-hole, and Hero Guy does react to Gypsy's dismemberment by getting electrocuted.
If that's the logic, shouldn't being hit in the face with acid fuck up the pilots' visors?
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Habibi posted:
Uh. You get a short of Cherno getting it's chest and has covered in acid, visibly causing swaths of metal to slag off. A shot of the pilots asking for help as said acid begins to clearly eat away at their 'windshield.' And, as Leatherback jumps on top of them, s shot of the pilots being sprayed by incoming water and reeling as they yell that water is reaching the reactor. This is all before its arm is bitten through or the body and conn room ate pushed under water.
That is the only shot of the damage done to the cockpit by the acid. There's nothing that conveys that the entire front of the cockpit is missing besides that black shape. I don't think that's clear at all - especially in comparison to a theoretical interior shot where you would see the wall melt away from the inside, from the POV of the pilots, letting in starlight or whatever. Note that the cockpit is all golds and reds. Let the blue light in.
quote:
Why, because none of the other Jaegars (Gipsy, Crimson) demonstrate any neutral feedback between their and their pilots' heads/faces (probably because not having your brain 'electrocuted' anytime your Jaegars head gets damaged is a good thing)? Oh okay.
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Dr. Red Ranger posted:
You're closer than you might think. Del Toro spends a significant portion of his director commentary explaining that Pacific Rim is a sports movie that just happens to have robots/pilots instead of athletes. The disgraced former player, coach, asshole team star, scary adversary team from the rich side of town (kaiju), etc.
See: my earlier post about kaiju films and the aesthetics of pro wrestling.
quote:
To back up what SMG is talking about, I didn't get the impression that the acid even affected the cockpit. The robot takes the acid full on in the middle of his hat and the upper parts melt down, with some drip down that gets into the cockpit ceiling. When Leatherback palms the cockpit screen before crushing iit, it looks like the glass is intact.
The cockpit doesn't have a normal glass windscreen. There's a honeycomb-textured wall there instead. (The honeycombs are semi-transparent, but not enough to see through.) Leatherback's palm is visible there because, at some point, the entire front half of the cockpit was melted or ripped off, or something. It's unclear how or when that happened.
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Habibi posted:
Because there's nothing to suggest that the entire 'front of the cockpit is missing'. [...] acid is getting on it, cracking their windshield enough to let water in
The second-last shot of Cherno shows that the entire front of the cockpit was destroyed. You can see it at 1:28 in this clip. leatherback's hand is visible through a massive hole where the honeycomb wall/windshield used to be.
There is no shot of Cherno's windshield cracking.
quote:
Well, no it doesn't, since (a) nothing along those lines happen when the heads of other Jaegars get punctured, ripped apart, or otherwise damaged (which makes sense since their neural suit gizmos don't actually cover the head), and (b) you don't know where the visual sensors that link to those visors are located or what effect having much of the reactor or part of the chest melted would have on their visors (for all you know, much of what is being shown to them are internal status reports).
Basically it just sounds like a complaint based on a bunch of unwarranted (and in some cases contradicted) assumptions that you're making.
There actually is a brief (<1 second shot) of a punch causing Cherno's HUD to flicker. Is this the most effective way to convey that damage to the robot distorts the perceptions of the pilots?
Keep in mind that, with this budget, they could have literally done anything. Saying "that's just how the suits work" isn't a valid justification.
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Habibi posted:
the specific scenario you're trying to fantasize makes absolutely no sense. Why would we see massive acid damage in the conn room when it's located mostly below the area targeted and hit by the acid?
I'm talking about the imagery onscreen. You are correct that things happened offscreen, canonically, but that's unimportant.
When I say that the holograms 'should' be distorted more, I am talking about fictional events that could happen to more effectively convey ideas to the audience. The filmmakers could have had Cherno get hit in the eyes. Saying "That's impossible! Cherno's eyes are located 3.5 metres from the location of the damage!" is... weird. Cherno Alphas don't exist. The filmmakers could have created an image of him being blinded if they had wanted to.
We could have seen the wall get viscerally torn away, instead of just assuming that it happened at some point. That was an option.
I am emphatically not talking about how the robot 'actually works', because that would be dumb. It's fiction. It was constructed by artists.
When the red robot dies, a claw punctures the cockpit set. When the brown robot dies, a hand reaches into the cockpit set. Del Toro is obviously going for this thing where the puncturing of the cockpit represents death. The problem is that there is then a disconnect in prior interactions. The jaegers get punched and we cut to the usual 'Star Trek' thing where the actors flop around in a set. Outside the single death shots, we only see the pilots in a little room. They only interact with the world through the holograms. So: the filmmakers should have shown the holograms getting fucked up, to convey how the outside world affects the pilots.
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Habibi posted:
It's like seeing a chimp jump on and start assaulting a man amidst a flurry of blood and torn flesh, and then seeing the corpse with its face missing and going, "How did THAT possibly happen??"
There's a difference between what happens and how it happens. It is not presented very effectively.
Also, your analogy is off because actually we repeatedly cut inside the man's brain to see two smaller men who represent his thoughts and experiences as he is being attacked by the chimp. There is no shot of 'the corpse with its face missing'. The missing face is presented from the viewpoint of thoughts inside the dying man's brain.
The question is why this image of a man being ravaged by a mad ape is not very horrific (actually fairly shrugworthy), despite being realized with multi-million-dollar special effects and a sci-fi analogy/conceit gives us a direct link to the victim's psychology.
There's a also point where the little thought-men become terrified that the man's power hat is being melted by acidic chimp spit.
The power-hat being melted by acid spit is symbolic. Like it's literally the (nuclear) power of Putin-era Russia being dissolved. This is 'visualized' by the little thought-men yelling expository dialogue about how acid has melted the hat. The expository dialogue stands for a failure to visualize what is happening. The filmmakers could have easily shown them losing power with visual cues. (The lights dimming, a switch to a backup generator, things of that sort.)
See, the actual story is not that a monster punched a robot. It's mythic Samson-style imagery, where Cherno's symbolic hat was the source of his power, and its being knocked off left him feeling impotent. With that established, is the film effective at conveying this? Nah, not really. Contrast it with something like Darth Vader taking off his mask, or Bane getting his mask damaged in Dark Knight 3. See also Sentinel Prime getting his helmet knocked off in Transformers 3, revealing his bald head.
Note the character's posture, and how he's positioned beneath Optimus. Having his hat knocked off is a big deal that makes him look weak and pathetic.
There's barely any difference to Cherno before and after the hat gets knocked off. It's the point of the scene, and yet the presentation makes it seem fairly inconsequential - to the point that it hasn't even come up in the previous multipage analysis of the fight scene in question.
Scyantific posted:
It probably would have been better if the acid just tore through the Conn-Pod and wiped out the pilots instantly, IMO.
Yep! Extended acid death would have been rad.
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wyoak posted:
Cherno and Typhoon were fodder from the beginning and it's really weird people have spent so much time talking about their tactical abilities. I guess a shot or two of them kicking ass in the past may helped, but it was pretty clear their role in the movie was to die. Maybe learn english next time suckers.
SMG is right though, the best shot is the hand enveloping the cockpit, but it's so brief. As much as the movie tried to link the pilots and the Jaegers, they seemed to occupy spaces miles apart 99% of the time. That'd be OK if the moments where the video-game world of the kaiju and robots violently intruded into the real world of the pilots were a little more...impactful, but the few moments there were were hyperedited into a mush. The opening scene was the best about this - the tone is almost playful, they save the toy boat, easily dispatch the monster, but then hero guy's arm gets broken, hero-bro gets flung out an eyehole, and hero collapses back on shore. The link between robot and pilot seemed much more physical there than it was throughout the rest of the movie.
And people keep harping on "It's the people, not the jaegers!" but is that really the case? Our sources of that line are cocky aussie guy (gets his ass kicked in person, redeems himself in a robot) and leader (who bumbles his way through the movie until he's put back into a jaeger).
There are a lot of weird decisions in presenting how the pilots interface with the machine. There is some rudimentary match-cutting - the pilots swing their fists, cut to Cherno's punch connecting - but it's not employed very often. Otherwise, the cutaway to the cockpit are usually fairly necessary. The fight scenes are just interrupted by pictures of dudes yelling.
As noted before, the windshields are fairly opaque, so it's not really possible to see outside. There are no POV shots from the Jaegers or their pilots. Besides the one shot where Hero Brother cradles the holographic fishing boat in his hand, the HUD is pretty much a bunch of indiscernable flashing shapes. If the visual logic were consistent, shouldn't Cherno's pilots be throwing their punches at a holographic kaiju? Shouldn't we see a holographic landscape around their feet? Even basic stuff like the lighting and choice of camera angles is not always complementary to the CGI action.
It's like if all the Matrix's fight scenes were rhythmically interrupted with pictures of Neo sleeping, and pictures of the green text. You're exactly right that the shots inside the cockpits are shots of people playing a videogame. They might as well be 1000 miles away, for all its worth, and all the shaking camerawork and shouting do not compensate for it.
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Habibi posted:
Why do you think this would make for consistent visual logic? Consistent with what? I truly don't understand why holographic Kaiju in Cherno's conn room is consistent with anything else we see on the screen.
The first fight against knifeguy establishes for the audience how the robots work (making the whole expository prologue unnecessary, but whatever). If the pilot wants the robot to pick up a boat, he interacts with a little blue wireframe of a boat on the holographic AR HUD thing. This establishes how the pilots perceive and interact with the world.
This isn't consistent because... it's not consistent. The world only infrequently appears as a lil blue wireframe, and the characters are rarely shown actually touching these holograms. There is no such holographic visual when, say, they put a kaiju in a headlock. More than half the time, the screens display only abstract, raw data.
Imagine if we cut from Cherno Alpha punching lizard guy in the face to the buff russian dude delivering jabs at a holographic lizard.
Now, I would assume your response would be 'well, maybe each Jaeger canonically has a different operating system!' - but that doesn't have anything to do with the consistency of the visual presentation. If anything, it only underlines the point. It's not like there are meaningful differences between each robot OS - assuming such differences even exist. What if Cherno's cockpit had crummier low-poly graphics or something? That'd be a good gag.
Your assertion that there was one throwaway shot of their transparent windscreen only further confuses things. Do they see through the windscreen, or with the HUD wireframe? If both, how do they align? Why are through-the-window shots largely eschewed after that first shot? Why are the windscreens semi-opaque most of the time? Who is using night-vision technology in the opening prologue? Why don't the robots use night-vision? Did they use cameras to scan the boat to get the wireframe, or like sonar?
It all comes down to how the pilots - the characters we are supposed to care about, mind you - think, and feel, and see. If they see with Sonar, that's a pretty big deal. Like, check the ending of The Dark Knight. Sonar vision is not only used creatively, but it's crucial to the themes of the film.
Perhaps there is a shot of the characters looking out a clear viewscreen. I certainly don't remember it. But it's easy to imagine a better alternative: what if a film were presented as found footage from the robot's dash cam? As less of an extreme: why don't we ever see anything remotely like a 'dash cam' POV?
These are creative choices that mean things.
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Habibi posted:
At best, the only 'rule(s)' you can derive from that scene is that the HUD *can* display wireframe models, or perhaps that it only displays them for smaller objects that the Jaegar interacts with. You're basing your entire assumption on an erroneous oversimplification.
It's not an assumption; I am not talking about how the robots work. I am talking about the film's visuals.
Not the robots' OS. Not how the OS works. The film.
I am talking about the visuals of the film.
I repeat: I am not predicting how actually-existing combat robots will be operated in the future.
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The difference is between 'would' and 'should'.
The wireframe is much more effective at conveying information to the audience than the other stuff. it should be employed more frequently.
Now, it can make sense that it would be a 'high detail mode' reserved for exceptional events, both in and outside of the diegesis. However, this exceptional and very-important high-detail image is the first thing we see in the film. Narratively, this is a bad choice. First impressions matter, and if you use the most interesting and compelling image in the first scene of the film... well, there's nowhere to go.
Given that the pilots are directly connected to the computers, shouldn't the highest-resolution images appear at the end of the film, when the protagonists are really focussed and effective?
By being the first scene, the fight against Knifehead also establishes more-or-less how these things go down. It's the generic template that illustrates both the win and loss conditions of your typical Pacific Rim Brand battel. You can argue that, canonically, this is a special and atypical event - but the film has provided no other frame of reference. This is the norm.
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The way the interface is visualized is not consistent, and should be more consistent.
Your stance is that it doesn't need to be consistent so long as there is an underlying canonical plot explanation.
You're not actually disagreeing with my point (that the presentation is not consistent (because the film continually switches from the characters interacting with holograms, to using a direct neural connection, to simply reading scrolling text and pressing buttons)).
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Habibi posted:
No, man, you're fabricating inconsistencies where none exist. Just because you see it working differently in different circumstances is not a sign of inherent inconsistency, sorry dude.
I am (and have been) writing about visual consistency. As in design.
You seem to have understood that as logical consistency, which is not really related.
So: when I say the visuals could be clearer and less muddled, I am not saying the visuals are objectively impossible or 'inherently illogical' or whatever. I'm talking about how effectively information about the characters' experiences is conveyed to the audience.
It is rarely clear, exactly, how the characters do basic things like 'see'. Consequently, it's unclear what the characters are experiencing in a given scene.
For example: inside the drift, Mako has a hyperreal nightmare flashback thing where she re-enacts her childhood trauma. Hero Guy enters the dream too, and walks around inside it, like a fully immersive virtual reality.
Do the pilots - given that their brains are directly connected to the robot's sensors - experience kaiju combat as a similarly fully-immersive full-colour dream-state? Or, do they use the windscreens to see - with the AR/HUD elements only supplementing their natural vision? Or, do the interactive AR holograms take precedence over natural vision? Is it like The Matrix, where they 'see' by interpreting raw data on monochromatic screens?
This is important. Return to The Matrix's example: each way of perceiving reality has major implications. You have 'natural vision' in the real world, simulated vision inside the matrix, people watching the matrix's code on computer screens, and finally Neo learning to see the simulation's code 'from the inside', as a kind of manipulable untextured wireframe thing.
Likewise, Pacific Rim has the key scenes where Hero Guy tells Mako which of her perceptions are real. ("This isn't real!" / "This is actually happening!"). It's fairly important to know which perceptions he's referring to.
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I wrote that:
"The experience of Cherno's pilots is continually de-emphasized"
since, during their only action scene,
"the camera pans up briefly to show some drips from somewhere vaguely above them. There's otherwise no indication of how ... damage actually relates to the pilots".
This was all specifically referring to the interior cockpit shots.
Your responses have so far had little or nothing to do with the how the pilots' experience of the damage is emphasized in the interior cockpit shots. (Odd, since that's presumably the entire point of cutting to the interiors in the first place.)
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Habibi posted:
it's really more just "well I wish they showed more of this" rather than "it didn't make sense that..."
You seem to be confusing issues of clarity with alleged 'plot holes.'
When I say the visuals are unclear, this has nothing to do with plotting or 'plot holes'.
When I say that the tearing-open of Cherno's cockpit is presented in such a wide exterior shot as to essentially take place offscreen, I am not alleging that the plot makes no sense.
Rather, I am saying that the presentation de-emphasizes the experiences of the characters.
Likewise, when I say that the visual design of the man-machine interface is muddled, I am not alleging that the plot makes no sense.
Rather, I am saying that the presentation does not clearly or consistently depict the experiences of the characters.
If I were complaining about plot holes, I would refer to the plotting - and not such things as the editing, cinematography, and production design.
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Milky Moor posted:
I don't know why you're seriously arguing with someone who claimed that the scenes of Cherno's destruction didn't feature the feeling of drowning.
SMG's not really bringing his A game to this thread and it shows.
The basic plot of the Cherno fight scene is that Cherno's power-hat gets melted, which slightly weakens it. The one monster then bites it on the arm, while the other one knocks it over and squishes it. Simple stuff. The presentation is what matters.
The main thing in the fight scene is the intercutting between different locations. You have the extremely wide exterior shots intercut with three different interiors (the home base, the cockpit of the Australian robot, and Cherno's cockpit). This is in the span of less than two minutes, keep in mind. A large chunk of the fight scene consists of outside observers watching what happens to Cherno, to the point that 'watching impotently' is a bigger part of the action than 'punching'.
Now, when you have an extremely wide exterior shot of a 'building', where you then cut to the characters inside, that's are called an establishing shot. It's designed just to give just a basic impression of the setting before moving in closer for the remainder of the scene. Extremely wide shots serve pretty much that same purpose. They give you a general impression of the setting.
Imagine you're watching a version of Die Hard where half of each action scene consists of exterior shots of the Nakatomi building, shot from miles away. Like, you repeatedly cut from Bruce Willis pulling the trigger, to a little poof of breaking glass on the side of the massive building. That's what Pacific Rim does in every fight scene.
Folks object that 'Cherno Alpha is a character too!' But, by repeatedly cutting 'inside his head', exterior shots of Cherno function as establishing shots. This is true even in films like Innerspace and Osmosis Jones, that involve smaller characters moving around inside a larger human character. The large character is undermined to at least some degree - reduced to a setting. Those two films use the distance from the character as an opportunity for body humor and broad metaphors about 'the body' (society is like a body, the universe is like a body, etc.). Bill Murray is not a protagonist in Osmosis Jones. His scenes practically just serve as a frame story.
For Cherno (or any robot) to be read as his own character, you would need to remove the bulk of the interior shots. Or, do a lot more to link them visually (e.g. not having vastly different lighting schemes between exterior and interior shots, placing much more focus on the workings of the man-machine interface...) I've suggested having the wireframes be used extensively in every interior shot, for the simple reason that cutting from Cherno standing in water to the protagonists standing in 'water' would be more effective at connecting the two settings than relying almost-exclusively on similarities in posture. Make the robot read as a prosthesis rather than as a setting. There is a very big difference between being inside a character and being the same character. Pacific Rim doesn't convey the latter effectively.
But anyways, the point of the scene is that Cherno is crippled early, rendered pathetic and then swiftly executed. However, the segment of Cherno stumbling around with less power, like he's got brain damage, is edited extremely swiftly. As noted before, you're cutting between like three different settings. Editing creates motion. Why not have a longer take of Cherno slooowly stumbling around, so that you feel genuinely bad for him? Not only that, but a longer take would also do more to show why getting acid on the hat is bad. In the actual film, there is very little indication of why the hat being melted is bad, outside the basic symbolism. You do not see Cherno acting exaggeratedly weakened in a way that conveys the point clearly to the audience. There's like one shot where his arm gets bit, and that's pretty much it.
Also, Leatherback attacking Cherno is oddly prolonged. Del Toro's stated intention is for the scene to be brutal, but it actually makes Leatherback seem less effective. The 'stumbling around pathetically' segment is shot and edited in pretty much exactly the same way as the 'brutal execution' segment. If the idea is that the villains now know their weaknesses, why not have Leatherback take out the already-crippled opponent in one swift motion? The film doesn't even go in the opposite direction, and have Leatherback dish out ridiculous overkill. The scene is in some weird middle-ground where it's neither a fight scene nor a horrific execution scene.
It's just really easy to consider alternatives. What if, instead of cutting back to the base and the Australian robot, that runtime were spent on more shots of Cherno doing stuff? Nobody would really miss the shot of the Australians standing there yelling "we can't just watch them die!" That's exposition, when they could make Cherno's death seem like a really awful injustice with cinema.
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Clipperton posted:
I too thought the movie was disappointing because it "disobeyed" a bunch of "rules" I pulled out of my ass. It's okay though, I wrote a fanfiction to fix it which you all should read:
You have it backwards; the disappointment came first.
James Hardon posted:
Have you ever written a million word post about a movie with actual substance?
No.
Milky Moor posted:
You say this, but in this very thread we have people suggesting that there needed to be expository dialog to explain exactly how Cherno and Crimson were defeated.
They've rightly noted that something is missing, but 'more exposition' is not it.
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Kaiju Cage Match posted:
My favorite part was when the crocodile monster with the freaky xenomorph face got cut half while swimming.
My favorite part is when it is the year 2654 and an interstellar war is raging between the Terran Confederation and the cat-like alien Kilrathi. Christopher Blair (Freddie Prinze, Jr.) and Todd Marshall (Matthew Lillard) are cocky young pilots traveling aboard the small merchant ship Diligent, commanded by Commodore Taggart (Tchéky Karyo), to their new posting aboard the carrier Tiger Claw.
A massive Kilrathi armada attacks a remote human base and captures a navigation computer, through which it will be able to locate Earth. Admiral Tolwyn (David Warner) directs Blair, whose parents he knew, to carry orders to the Tiger Claw to fight a suicidal delaying action to let the rest of the Terran fleet reach Earth. Along with the awkwardness of joining a new unit, and continual pranks that require discipline from wing commander Deveraux (Saffron Burrows), Blair fights the distrust of his crewmates because of the drastic orders he brings from the Admiral, and because his mother was a "Pilgrim", a strain of humans who had fought against the Confederation. Pilgrims have the innate ability to navigate space by feel despite obstacles such as black holes. Marshall falls in love with Lieutenant Forbes (Ginny Holder) but she dies when the two disobey orders and engage Kilrathi fighters.
Tiger Claw personnel successfully attack and destroy the Kilrathi command ship. In the attack, they also find the stolen navigation computer and learn the space-jump the Kilrathi fleet will use to approach Earth. The Tiger Claw, however, is disabled and can do nothing more to prevent the assault, except to send Deveraux and Blair in fighters to find their way back to Earth. If alerted to the Kilrathi's plans, Earth forces can destroy each Kilrathi ship before it can get its bearings after the space-jump; if not, Earth will surely be overwhelmed.
Deveraux's fighter is disabled in combat, but she convinces Blair to abandon her and continue his mission. Blair uses his Pilgrim ability to make the jump to the vicinity of Earth. He is followed by a Kilrathi ship, but he locates a black hole he encountered at the start of the movie and induces the Kilrathi ship to venture so close as to be devoured by it. As his fighter runs out of fuel, he transmits the information Earth needs to defeat the Kilrathi assault. The Earth fleet rescues Blair, and Taggart rescues Deveraux.
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It's dumb as hell, like the kaijus wandered aimlessly around Earth for 170 million years before the smaller ones evolved into birds. Also they were asexual clones the whole time.
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The film posits that the asteroid impact that killed off the dinosaurs never happened, so it can go with the old myth of dinosaurs being stupid, sluggish and bad at adaptation.
The ambiguous phrasing of 'It was the dinosaurs!' doesn't imply 'either' their creation or their elimination - it means 'both'. The 'it' in the phrase refers to the entirety of dinosaur pop-mythology.
The distortion here is important because the film is using 'dinosaur' exclusively for its political connotations, the same way it uses 'no alloys' to mean 'purity' when it actually means weakness.
Consider the speech at the start of Inglorious Bastards, where Landa explains that although there is little actual difference between a rat and a squirrel, rats are symbolically filthy.
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Milky Moor posted:
Are you going to actually go by what's shown in the film? Sure, bring it up.
If you're not going to, or you're going to wilfully misinterpret things (like say there's no shots of the Cherno Alpha pilots drowning) then you probably shouldn't.
"In a better film, that image of Leatherback's massive palm fully eclipsing the field of vision as it forces Cherno's head underwater would linger for more than four seconds."
Do you understand the difference between this actual quote and what you wrote it out to be?
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Habibi posted:
Avoiding cherry picking the quotes that don't make you look inept, you flat out misstated that - just as a small example - there's was no evidence of water getting into the cockpit, that the cockpit was significantly damaged by acid, that the interior of the conn room didn't react to the damage to the Jaegar, on top of that jumped to incredible conclusions about how the Jaegars operate, managed to somehow miss every scene that contradicted your interpretation, and ultimately back-pedaled most of your would be critiques of inconsistency into arguments of personal preference.
I am not sure that you are in any position to demand of other posters whether they can tell the difference between reality and imagination.
You are a bad writer.
As an example, I wrote that imagery established in earlier interface scenes should recur later in the film. Your response was that, as a "universal rule", "Jaegar pilots have varied ways of representing and interacting with the world." That had nothing to do with what I'd written, because I was not writing about the 'rules of the universe'. I'd even pre-emptively explained that my point had absolutely nothing to do with canonicity.
You became extremely caught up in this, so that you would repeat even weeks later that I've 'jumped to incredible conclusions about how the Jaegars operate'. Bad interactions like this betray is that you don't know how to argument.
As another example, here is how your summarized my overall point:
"If [SuperMechagodzilla's] initial point was simply 'some things were confusing,' rather than 'these things that weren't absent from the movie were absent from the movie (even though they weren't)' I wouldn't have bothered [writing a lot]."
The trouble is that I wasn't arguing either of these things. It's a total mischaracterization. I argued that the experience of the pilots is de-emphasized so that, even though exterior shots show acid eating away at their hull, very little is reflected in the interior shots. Specifically "you don't see the wind and water suddenly affecting [the pilots]". Perhaps I should have underlined the concept of 'suddenly affecting'. You then wrote a lot of stuff about the exterior shots and other unrelated shots from the later death sequence because you straight-up ignored what I was talking about (emotions expressed during interior shots during the acid scene). Clarification was dismissed as 'backpedaling'.
And all the while you're doing this shameful thing where you write 'hahah i caught you' and 'i'm done here you're not worth my time' and generally gloating to people about how dumb SMG is and how you caught him. It's a bad look.
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Hodgepodge posted:
The PPDC's politics are further back by a few centuries- they're warrior aristocrats.
That's a good read on the characters, but how do you incorporate the sci-fi trappings like the drift and the jaegers (with their nationalism)?
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Here's my claim:
The experience of Cherno's pilots is continually de-emphasized for some reason.
When Cherno is hit with acid, the filmmakers (the director, editor, etc.) cut inside from the exterior shot, and the woman pilot says "Cherno Alpha has been hit with some type of acid!"
In this interior shot - not the exterior shot - you don't see the acid actually melt away their windshield. The camera only pans up briefly to show some drips from somewhere vaguely above and in front of the pilots. There's otherwise no indication of how the exterior damage relates to the pilots in the interior shot.
You don't see the wind and water suddenly affecting them, (in the interior shot, when Cherno is hit with acid). You don't see a hole where the wall used to be, (in the interior shot, when Cherno is hit with acid).
Besides the small drips, the pilots and the acid-damage do not appear in the same shot. The filmmakers could have used special effects to 'melt' a large chunk of the interior set, but did not. Instead - besides the small drips - the pilots and the acid damage do not appear in the same shot.
This is a problem with most of the film's fight scenes: you rarely or never see the pilots and the action in the same shot. When Cherno's arm is bitten through and explodes, what are the pilots feeling? You only see an exterior shot of the arm being bit. No animated reaction from the robot, and no cutaway to the pilot's arm being twisted or something.
At some point in the fight, the entire front of the cockpit is torn off, but this occurs in one of the exterior shots. We do not see the pilots' reaction to that specific event (which seems like a fairly big deal, considering that previously established disconnect between inside and outside - totally different lighting, etc.). The puncturing of the cockpit either happens offscreen or is shot from extremely far away. Even when we watch the pilot characters drown, the most effective part of the scene, the shot of Leatherback's palm fully eclipsing the field of vision lasts under four seconds. Even the drowning is rapidly edited.
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Tezcatlipoca posted:
The acid doesn't hit Cherno's cockpit so there wouldn't be a hole in the cockpit to allow a sudden rush of wind and water. There's a lot of sparks, the cockpit is leaking from the roof and lots of alarms and warning lights are going off which conveyed the damage pretty clearly for me.
Also, the pilots don't actually drown to death. Leatherback crushes the cockpit while it is underwater. You see an explosion under the kaiju's hand right after the brief scene of Cherno's pilots struggling underwater.
"But Cherno Alpha only got acid on his hat."
The acid should have hit the cockpit's interior, threatening the pilots, because that would be more visceral.
"But Cherno Alpha only got acid on his hat???"
and repeat ad nauseum.
I understand that there are sparks and alarms, but those are generic signifiers from Star Trek, used as a serviceable cost-saving measure. They don't convey that, say, Cherno is losing power because its reactor is damaged. Why not show the pilots moving more sluggishly, fighting unresponsive controls, etc?
You could then write that "in this universe, having your reactor damaged has no effect on the power. You don't know how a jaeger works! It could have dozens of backup generators!" e.g.:
Habibi posted:
Perhaps in this universe, the creators of the robots found it prudent to implement an interface that did not completely translate robot damage into physical pain or injury.
This is inaccurate, because I do know how the jaeger works: it's fiction. It only exists insofar as it appears onscreen. There is no objective robot for me to be scientifically inaccurate about. ("Subjective mental wankery regarding the handling of the robot/pilot interface" <- huh?) However, there are, objectively, different filmmaking techniques. There's a fairly standardized vocabulary. Extreme wide shots are different from closeups, and so-forth. It's not a 'universal rule', but seeing the character's expression typically helps to create empathy for that character.
This is why I can say with relative certainty that "the experience of Cherno's pilots is continually de-emphasized for some reason." Their faces are covered, they aren't shown closer than a medium shot, they are given only brief POV-alligned shots, they (can) barely move, their battle is portrayed mostly through wide exterior shots of the building they're in, damage to the interior is conveyed mostly through changes in the lighting (plus sparks and some water effects), and their dialogue is purely functional exposition. These are all things that de-emphasize the experiences of the characters.
You can easily imagine alternatives: their faces are uncovered, closeups are frequent, we can get a good look of the view their POV, they could move around in the massive set, exterior shots could be employed less frequently (or allowed to go on much longer, allowing the robot itself to breathe as its own character), damage to the interior could be any cool visual from walls being missing to the characters being maimed and scarred, and they they could say something neat or interesting before they die.
***
Anywho:
Vermain posted:
This sequence is effective because it repeatedly emphasizes the effect that the battle outside has on the people inside the vehicle. We don't really care about the Evangelion except as an extension of the pilot, Shinji. Shinji's experience inside the Evangelion is repeatedly emphasized through his connection with the events that are occurring outside. Imagine if this sequence was instead shot with images of the Evangelion being beaten up by Sachiel, cutting back to Control (where they exposit things like, "The left arm is damaged!" or whatever). The experience of Shinji thus becomes de-emphasized, because we're only really seeing the experience of the Evangelion, and not what he is feeling as he pilots it.
What I think SMG is getting at is that it feels more like the pilots are remote drone operators piloting the robots rather than as "bodily" elements of the robot itself. In modern culture, we don't really think of drone pilots as "warriors" or "soldiers," but we certainly think of aircraft pilots as being such, despite them fulfilling functionally similar roles. It's not just what they do that matters, but also the physical space which they occupy. You need to emphasize this in a film like this one in order to properly express the stakes to the audience. The stakes in Evangelion are completely unambiguous from the second we see Shinji grasping at his arm.
That's exactly it.
In fairness to Del Toro, I think that the total disconnect between the cockpit and outside world is deliberate. The pilots occupy different universes until the wall finally breaks open in that 4-second shot. The puncturing of their little sealed cocoon equals trauma and death.
It goes back to the scene where Mako first pilots the robot, and hero Guy announces "this isn't a dream! This is reality!" or whatever. The film immediately cuts to an extremely wide tableau of the CG combatants posing. This weirdly implies that the extreme wide exterior shots are the POV shots - that the pilots 'normally' perceive themselves in a disconnected way, as spectators of their own battle. They only feel embodied, connected to the machine, when something is drastically wrong.
Of course, this has implications. The goal of the heroes is to cut themselves off from the physical world and enter the 'virtual reality' of kaiju combat, to experience battle as an out-of-body experience. The film presents this as entirely positive - so it's not 'just' an aesthetic problem, but one that cuts right into the philosophical heart of the film.
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Carbolic posted:
When Knifehead tears Gipsy Danger's left arm off, Raleigh (the left-side pilot) screams in agony and clutches his left arm.
Perhaps in this universe, characters only 'feel things' under extremely rare circumstances.
You don't know how a Jaeger works. Ergo, the film is well-made.
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CelticPredator posted:
I guess I found Gipsy to have a ton of character. But the character only exists through the combination of the two pilots. They meld together and create Gipsy Danger. One badass mother fucker.
What are some character traits that Gipsy displays?
quote:
As for the whole acid thing...I thought the acid melted right through the hull to the cockpit. But there not being wind or anything didn't bother me, because well....it wasn't important. The hull was breached, and that caused them to kinda drown, until they were crushed to death. The point of the scene is Cherno isn't the best compared to these new Kaiju.
This is all accurate. But, looking at it from a storytelling perspective, it gets weird. Why have drowning imagery when the pilots die by being crushed/exploding? Why have the acid imagery when the real damage is caused by smashing?
The acid imagery and the drowning imagery are totally redundant on the level of sheer plotting. They don't need to be in the film for the plot to 'make sense.' So, they're only in the film to provide expressive metaphorical flourishes.
'Cherno Alpha is overpowered and explodes' is something that can be conveyed in a single shot. So again, the dozens of different 'extra' shots are also there to expand on that, providing little flourishes, telling a story:
"Being punched by a kaiju is like drowning."
But then, it's not as exactly as simple as that - the smashing is shot from extreme wide angle, and basically looks like a monkey jumping on top of a car, or King Kong climbing the empire state. It's violence against a ship, or building. It's all CGI, particle effects, etc. The drowning part, on the other hand, is shot relatively close. The camera goes underwater with the pilots, then shows their POV of a massive hand reaching down to them. Cut back to the wide exterior shot, and everything that was just shown disappears in a sad little poof.
The effect is that the pilots are pulled out of the 'real world' - the CGI VR landscape of towering structures - and forced underwater, into the domain of the monsters. They were floating above the action, forgetting their bodies in a safe bubble - but now forced to feel the cold metal of their restraints, and the water around them. They lose a distance from the action - and when the finally see the enemy with their biological eyes, it's at the moment of death.
"Being punched by a kaiju knocks you out of VR, makes you aware of your body again, makes you see in first-person. The physical world rushes in, overwhelming you, drowning you."
The cut back to the exterior shot confirms this. In the VR, nothing really dramatic has happened. It was just a little poof of fire. An embodied human is nothing more than an ant.
The overall narrative is of the characters trying not to feel, losing their identities - Mako and Hero Guy become Gipsy Danger, who has no real personality outside its 'football player' iconography. Hero Guy tells her this, the VR, is reality. The film is against bodily existence.
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enraged_camel posted:
Because pushing someone underwater and crushing their skull while they are struggling is a lot more brutal than pushing someone underwater and simply holding them there until they drown.
Maybe you didn't get the idea, but the entire Leatherback vs. Cherno scene was supposed to be about brutality. Did you miss the part where Leatherback slams on Cherno's head and then rips huge chunks out while Otachi is biting its arm off? That is what happens when a weakened Mark I jaeger is being gangbanged by two Cat 4 kaijus. It's not about "if the pilots were drowning why did Leatherback need to crush them." It's about conveying that Cherno had literally zero chance and was ripped apart and murdered in the most brutal way possible.
The acid was absolutely necessary for the plot to make sense. Cherno could not have been overwhelmed and killed in the manner shown if it was not weakened by acid first.
Even if Cherno were canonically invulnerable, the filmmakers could easily say that the monsters are more invulnerable times infinity and have anti-invulnerability claws. This is because the whole thing is make-believe.
You don't 'need' an explanation for how a fantasy monster can kill a robot. The explanation given (the melting of Cherno's reactor-hat implicitly weakening him) is pure metaphor. So is the cutting between the various settings, viewpoints and levels of reality.
Anyways, I know the 'supposed-to-bes' very well. The scene is supposed to be brutal, so, why does it pale in comparison to the violence in other films?
For example, there's a scene in Elysium where a dude in a robot exoskeleton has his power cut. He crumples to the ground and can barely move. When a similar thing happens to Cherno, the next scene/shot shows him with Otachi in a headlock, delivering a 'piston punch'. It looks like a struggle, but Cherno does not look significantly crippled. I mean, you can compare it the common scene in superhero films where the hero loses his powers and gets the shit beat out of them. Hancock is an especially good example of the kind of techniques you can deploy to make the violence more brutal, even though it's much smaller in scale. In fact, the intimacy of the violence in Hancock is what makes it brutal, and it's an intimacy that's lacking for reasons gone over already.
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enraged_camel posted:
I think it's silly to compare it to other movies, since context matters. In a movie that features giant robots, the brutality was as effective as it could be. The way the pilots go from feeling overly confident and secure (due to the massive armor plating around them) to first surprised ("we're disabled!") and then panicked ("water's reaching the reactor!") and finally screaming in fear (drowning) was very, very well done. And of course, what made it stand out was that they weren't even given the chance to drown, as they were crushed.
That's more a description of the content than the form. The violence in the exterior shots is better described as 'awesome' and 'spectacular'. Leatherback leaps out of the water and flings chunks of the robot into the air. Water sprays everywhere, and there are little fireball explosions throughout. The cutting to the interiors underline that that the pilots are basically spectators. They sit there, immobile, and watch this stuff, offering commentary. The shot with the sparks is a Star Trek bridge shot, and what is that if not people watching a giant television?
Brutal violence is what happens to Leatherback: Gipsy just mechanically fires its cannon into the dead/debilitated monster - not stopping even as its guts bubble up, not stopping until the clip runs out. The piston-like repetition of the act is what makes it brutal. The goal isn't just to win but to desecrate, to grind the thing into dust. It's very literally a crippled animal being fed into a machine. This is the sort of violence employed by Michael Myers in the Halloween remake, and Rorschach in Watchmen. Just a mechanical stabbing motion.
Leatherback's attack on Cherno is a different sort of excessive. Instead of repeating a single act beyond the point of necessity, Leatherback goes through a variety of stategies. He tears parts off, crushes other parts, tries to push them underwater... It's the sensory overload. No single action is very excessive; it's the overwhelming number of things happening at once.
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CelticPredator posted:
Being really, really cool.
What are some really cool character traits that Gipsy displays?
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People always worry whether I 'actually believe' what I write, instead whether it's true of not.
Truth should be your main concern.
Example: the characters in the film believe themselves to be the saviors of humanity, but are - in truth - just fascists.
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Wizchine posted:
What if they're both? You know, after millions of people died...
By focussing on merely exterminating/containing the 'inhuman' invaders, the protagonists ensure that nothing is actually solved on Earth. The (very superficial) unity against the kaiju was only a temporary truce. With the kaiju gone, new crises will inevitably emerge - if they haven't already. More Jaegers will be built, and they will be turned against the still-impoverished population, those countries that don't have Jagers....
Recall the key point that Kaiju World is Earth, the rift being a looking-glass that shows Earth's future. The end of the film involves merely breaking this mirror to prevent any self-reflection. It's not a good ending.
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RBA Starblade posted:
I think stopping the extermination of humanity counts as solving a problem.
If you hold "The other world is our future" as true doesn't that also include the end result of humanity after Pacific Rim being a united collective hive-mind, regardless of the crises that occur in the interim?
I never said fascism doesn't work - trains running on time, and all that. The central point of Heinlein's Starship Troopers, after all, is that fascism simply works adequately.
In a proper film, however, characters would be fighting to prevent the future. Kaiju World is the same as Skynet, Krypton, and - more to the point - the advanced prehistoric civilizations in Gamera: Guardian of the Universe and Godzilla. Both Godzilla and Gamera are fighting to prevent the apocalypse from happening 'again': prevent history from repeating itself.
You'll note that, in all these stories, the monster rises to become the hero. It's because these are all variations on the Christ myth. Pacific Rim is no different, except that it sides against Christ. The gag with the baby Kaiju is as if, upon landing, Kal-El had a probe rammed into his baby skull.
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RBA Starblade posted:
I've never watched Gamera and have only seen Godzilla 2000 and US Godzilla, but I thought the second was an allegory about nukes, not that Godzilla was Christ.
Every Honda-directed Godzilla film is better than Pacific Rim, so watch them already. Godzilla slowly transitions from being an apocalyptic menace to being a follower of Christ. Like he literally teams up with Christ, aka Mothra, to fight the Dragon of Revelation.
Gamera: Guardian of the Universe is also probably the best kaiju film ever made.
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Crows Turn Off posted:
Wait, what's the evidence that Kaiju World is Earth? I don't remember anything in the movie implying that.
It's metaphorically Future Earth, in the same way that Krypton is.
What the films I've listed share is a blurring of the lines between past and future. Krypton was a futuristic planet that blew up decades ago, and the Terminator films use time-travel fuckery to make the past and future literally the same. Consequently, characters like Kyle Reese are doomsday prophets, receiving messages (memories) from a future that 'already happened'.
Another thing these films have in common is imagery of terraformation. You can note how the battle in Aliens centers around the Atmospheric Processor, while the aliens modify their own environment. Terraformation is linked to pragmatist philosophers like G.H. Mead, who wrote about how species can/should reshape the world in accordance with their 'determining power'. Since animals are less complex/organized, their determining power - and, consequently, their values - are totally different.
"I do not know what it is like to be God, nor do I know what it is like to be a bat. The concept of intrinsic/inherent value is thus either meaningless, or else it reduces to the value of something that enters into ecological relations that do not immediately affect any human agent. All that is, however, does eventually, mediately, affect some human agent. Its value can thus be cognized by humans, and its moral considerability can be acknowledged and respected. The lesson here, that we are connected at all points to our environments, and they to us, is the Alpha and the Omega of pragmatic thought about the environment."
-Kelly Parker
What you see in films like Starship Troopers and Pacific Rim is where this logic breaks down - where the bugs are seen as only part of OUR environment, and therefore we must exert power over them. And, of course, the bugs have their own conflicting values....
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Maxwell Lord posted:
Except the very immediate problem of kaiju killing everyone.
The idea that you can't solve anything unless you solve EVERYTHING THAT'S WRONG is odd to say the least.
The characters' stated goal is to prevent the apocalypse, and they don't do that.
If the film were about the moral compromises that 'needed to be made' in order to simply preserve status quo, that's a whole other kettle of fish - and still highly questionable besides (since they don't prevent the apocalypse, and 'what needs to be done' is the extermination of the rat-lizard invaders).
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Stackman: Today, we are briefly postponing the apocalypse!!
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kraftwerk singles posted:
Is this movie good?
If you like fascism and the vague idea of giant robots, but have no respect for giant monster cinema whatsoever, you should go see this movie.
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It's weird that I mostly/only get this reaction from the Pacific Rim thread. I do not receive similar complaints about Her or Star Wars, despite using exactly the same approach in those threads.
The only real difference is that, while I liked Star Wars and thought Her was OK, I disliked Pacific Rim.
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CelticPredator posted:
I think it's because you're going after a goofy campy monster movie instead of something with actual substance. I love this movie dearly, but it is what it is, and not much more.
What is the actual substance?
It sounds like phlogiston.
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RBA Starblade posted:
I seem to recall similar results after Battle: LA, Skyline, and Prometheus, among others. Though I don't think you implied anyone was a fascist in those.
I didn't imply anyone was fascist in this thread either. (Well, besides Jefferoo.)
I said the character in the film were fascist, which is accurate. If forums poster goku420 is a fascist, or admires fascism... who cares?
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Maxwell Lord posted:
Well that's the thing. When you spend this much time and energy trying to convince people that this thing they like is bad and wrong, even if you've got a valid argument, it gets tiresome after six months.
What if the thing you like is Christ, the arguments against are not valid at all, and the period of time is way more than a few months?
I kid, but you're kinda assuming that people actually like this movie. I'd say that they don't. The most common response to the criticism is that 'it's just a stupid movie, undeserving of attention.' There's a lack of respect and confidence there, and it's not coming from me.
This is related to the steadfast refusal to celebrate the film. With the notable exception of Jefferoo, who took the fascism and went wild, few take the film seriously.
Statements like "it knows what it is," if you think about them for even a second, are totally nonsensical. If the film could know what it was, it would know that it's loaded with psychological imagery - including multiple scenes set inside people's minds. Even on a most rudimentary level, the film is about a war. I'm not the one who brought this up. Rosie the Riveter shows up. US President Barack Obama shows up. C'mon now.
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Barry White posted:
Have you ever heard the phrase "If you haven't got anything nice to say then don't say anything at all"? If you take this phrase into your heart you'll save yourself a lot of time and your keyboard a lot of wear and tear.
I actually open up avenues for authentic praise.
For example, a reader might find that the film is conducive to being read as a Starship Troopers satire. I've placed the film in context with many similar films (Man Of Steel, Aliens, etc.), which can help identify its strengths.
I think folks are mixing up analysis with evaluation. I don't make that many value judgements; it's more just description. If I say that kaiju blue is the same Lacanian imagery as the black goo in Prometheus... what is cruel about that? If I say that Ras Al Ghul is a fascist character in Batman Begins, nobody bats an eye - because that's not a value judgement.
I've dissed those who stan for illiteracy, but rightfully so. The only recourse, then, is to attack me for my imagined inner feelings.
So the thread does mirror the film in that it can only sustain itself by rallying against an external intruder in the hopes of purifying the discussion - when the actual illness is, of course, capitalism. Killing me won't bring back your precious honey.
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Tommy 2.0 posted:
I am pretty sure that the reason you are getting so much flak is that people are going to love the ever living shit out of this movie regardless of its merits as an actual film. FFS it has giant robots beating giant monsters. Seriously, that is all some people want.
I am one of these people.
There's not exactly a shortage on great recent giant robot/giant monster films. War Of The Worlds, Cloverfield, Skyline, Transformers: Dark Of The Moon, King Kong, Crank: High Voltage, District 9, Hellboy 2... And these are obviously closely associated with alien invasion pictures like Battle: Los Angeles, Man Of Steel and so-on.
You can branch out further from there, even. Cop drama End Of Watch is extremely similar to District 9, despite having no sci-fi elements and taking place in the present day.
And that's just in the last five years or so.
But if you legitimately don't care about the quality of the film, outside the base fact that there's large things onscreen, why protest? You could just post stuff on Deviantart.
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Pacific Rim is not actually simple at all. For a simple good versus evil narrative, watch Only God Forgives.
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That's an odd way of looking at it. Really, Pacific Rim itself is making you feel bad by not being a better film.
If I were wrong about the film, it would be very easy to correct me - as when I misremembered the dog's name.
The basic reason you see these volumes of weird complaints is because I write truthfully. Those opposed to truth can only resort to... whatever it is that they're doing.
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A Steampunk Gent posted:
Whilst you're addressing criticisms directed towards you, could you please explain to me your reasoning behind your 'baby kaiju = baby jesus' reading again? I'd previously disagreed because the film never portrays the baby kaiju as anything but a mindless belligerent and found that hard to reconcile that with a reading where the protagonists have squandered opportunities to form an alliance or understanding with the kaiju. Aside from expectations of the genre, where do you get the idea that the baby kaiju is actually meant to be revolutionary figure meant to bring change? Because I'm just not seeing it in the film.
Baby Kaiju Jesus is the product of a literal virgin birth in exactly the same way Darth Vader is. They fill the same role in each story, so the comparison is instructive.
Vader is the Force made incarnate. When he sacrifices himself, the Force dies with him. The Force that dies is the Force of the prequels, which is basically defined as the raw power of God, aka The Dark Side. It's associated with liberal capitalism, genetic engineering, westernized Buddhism, transhumanist rhetoric and whatnot.
In Pacific Rim, the imagery is the same. The master aliens wield the dark side as their weapon. Baby Kaiju Jesus is the incarnation of their kaiju hive-mind and their genetic engineering program - but he is also an accidental, excremental byproduct. He appears disgusting, belligerent, abject, filthy and so-on because the film is told from the perspective of the 'Romans'.
By drifting with the kaiju, Newt essentially receives prophecy of 'the future'. So, when Baby Jesus dies, he gives up his teachings to Newt. Newt now has an opportunity to be a Pauline figure, spreading the Light Side, aka the Holy Spirit - preaching alliance with the Kaiju, dictatorship of the proletariat and whatnot.
And he fails. Instead of allying with the kaiju, the heroes simply strive to eliminate them. The prophecy is ignored, and they remain destined to become the enemy they hate.
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RBA Starblade posted:
Why do you think it was accidental? And also akin to shit when it came out of a birthing canal in a movie where you keep discussing a metaphorical birth canal?
As in Jurassic Park and Man of Steel, this is 'life finding a way' imagery. Recall that Kal El is the first natural birth in centuries, and carries the blueprints of Krypton in his DNA. He's the same character as the Baby Kaiju.
He's also the same character as John Connor (born of a time paradox), Arnold in T2 (who carries Skynet inside himself, and destroys himself), and Marcus in T:Salvation (ditto).
The point in every case is that, regardless of how they were intended, they are examples of the system turning against itself and 'committing suicide'. In that sense, they are errors.
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RBA Starblade posted:
I have no idea what "It's the dissolving of boundaries into disavowwed zones of exclusion; a shift in perspective where the "alternate" dimensions are revealed as a degeneration of the solid State and a possibility of radical transformation by redifining the surfaces through the burrowing of worm holes." is supposed to mean but I guess the idea is that babies are shit because they're born of women which are shit in our society?
Leaving aside Marcus because I don't remember much of Terminator: Salvation, Arnold and the baby Kaiju were subverted by outside forces to humanity's benefit, unlike Superman and John Connor. Superman rejects his species in favor of humanity, unlike the baby kaiju who, like all other kaiju as they are one, tries to kill humans until it is dead. In addition, the Terminator did not commit suicide because it was incapable of it; the baby didn't commit suicide, it died because it was unviable outside the womb (it chokes on it's umbilical cord then gets back up and eats Ron Perlman then dies). They might share some passing similarities but it ends there. I'm not really sure if it counts as a virgin birth if you're your own father though.
Danger is talking about abjection, which refers to things like gore and shit that cause revulsion. This is linked to social abjection; refugees, the homeless, etc. For one of the best recent examples of this in popular culture, see the aliens in District 9, who are violent and unruly, pissing and vomiting everywhere. Although we supposedly live in a 'multicultural', 'postracial' society that promises human rights for all, plenty of people are excluded and implicitly inhuman. That exclusion is disavowed. See, for example, those held without trial in various 'black sites.' Although physically alive, they are 'legally dead,' denied human rights.
Abject imagery triggers revulsion because it's about dissolving boundaries, like when something stops being a part of your body. So the imagery of the disgusting, dead fetus-monster carries some revolutionary potential, depending on how it's interpreted. It allows you to see to the other side.
"There is a nice Hitchcockian detail in Finding Nemo: when the monstrous daughter of the dentist enters her father's office in which there is the aquarium with fishes, the music is that of the murder scene from Psycho. The link is more refined than the idea that the girl is a horror to small helpless animals: at the scene's end, Nemo escapes by being thrown into the wash basin hole. This is his passage from the world of the humans to his own life world (he ends up in the sea close to the building, where he rejoins his father), and we all know the key role of the motif of the hole in which water disappears in Psycho (the fade out of the water disappearing in this hole to Marion's dead eye, etc.). The hole in the wash basin thus functions as a secret passage way between the two totally disparate universes, the human one and the one of the fishes. This is true multiculturalism, this acknowledgement that the only way to pass to the Other's world is through what, in our world, appears as the shit exit, as the hole into the dark domain, excluded from our everyday reality, into which excrements disappear. The radical disparity of the two worlds is noted in a series of details-say, when the father dentist catches the small Nemo into his net, he thinks he saved Nemo, from certain death, failing to perceive that what made Nemo so terrified that he appeared on the brink of death was his own presence... However, the wager of the notion of Truth is that this obscene-unnameable link, secret channel, between worlds is not enough: there is a genuine "universal" Truth that cuts across the multitude of worlds." (Zizek, my bolding)
The baby kaiju died for our sins, offering up the Drift and the potential for communication. This potential is squandered because Newt does not follow Christ and unite the poor of both worlds.
Jesus did not commit suicide himself - he had to be crucified. This is why the Terminator must use a loophole in his programming and kill himself, by asking John to. Baby Kaiju Jesus is likewise 'crucified' by the three men there.
Magnus Condomus posted:
Speaking of which, what is the symbolism of the post credits scene?
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RBA Starblade posted:
I see the basic idea, but I don't quite get how that links birth to shit (or at least, that as a unique thing then if all kaiju are "birthed" from the breach).
You're right that it's not an entirely unique thing. All the kaiju are horrific drone-creatures - just like all those other Terminators before Arnold, Zod's team of Kryptonian warriors, and so-on.
That's why it's crucial that Baby Kaiju Jesus was a totally disgusting accident. It's what makes him unique - human. It separates him from the drones.
Your fear that Baby Jesus wants to destroy all humanity is not very well-founded. He attempts to kill Ron Perlman, but Ron totally deserved it. And, remember that the Kaiju are a hive-mind. Otachi tried to communicate with Newt before being brutally killed. Baby KJ has those same thoughts.
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RBA Starblade posted:
Yes, the kaiju are a hive-mind, and the baby kaiju is a kaiju. The kaiju are trying to exterminate humanity. You've said it's an accident before, backed up and said it's an error in the system (because it was subverted), and are back to saying it was accidentally created again. Why do you think that, given in the same paragraph you mentioned the genetic engineering of the mother? Plus if it's a Christ analogue, to complete it it would have to have been intentionally sent in order to redeem. That'd make either the masters God in this context, or God actually did it.
The alien masters are trying to exterminate humanity. The kaiju are just drones.
This is getting nitpicky, and I'm consequently starting to have difficulty understanding your post.
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RBA Starblade posted:
Which part of my post got too nitpicky for you? I said the baby was a kaiju, kaiju being the race which is destroying humanity on behalf of their masters, and then I asked you why you thought the baby's birth was an accident, because the last time I did you instead talked about how it was instead the system being subverted and turned on itself, and also asked you what you thought the rest of the kaiju, which area part of the same hive-mind as the baby kaiju, are in this analogy, along with the masters themselves if the birth was not an accident.
I'm still having difficulty parsing this, but to reiterate:
The masters employ a race of drones. The entire drone collective somehow birthed a single pathetic creature, which died and passed its 'spirit' to humanity. This is directly analogous to the Trinity.
The individual kaijus are angelic figures, albeit corrupted ones. Had the film resolved its conflict properly, they would be free to become the Heavenly Host - the army of God. (See the police robots in Elysium, and Ghost Rider 2's "angel who went crazy.")
The masters did not deliberately give up their key weakness. They had been exploiting the 'power of God' with their Frankenstein genetic engineering. Had the heroes allied with the kaiju against their masters, it would bring about The Kingdom Of God, which had been selfishly supressed.
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Hodgepodge posted:
I saw the baby Kaiju as the Kaiju's one chance at rebellion, providing a brain for the humans to drift with even if it's mother fails. I definitely see how it is Kaiju Jesus- it's whole purpose was to die to pass on a message to humanity, which it does. This allows the humans to save their world, while killing the Kaiju's masters and presumably freeing the Kaiju as well. The symbolism of the ending doesn't work out to SMG's liking, I guess, but as I read it, the result of the baby Kaiju is the co-operation of humans and Kaiju to achieve their mutual goal. The Kaiju simply have extremely limited agency, being mind controlled clones and all.
I think the difference is in a satirical film like Robocop. As everyone knows, Robocop is not the real Jesus but an 'American Jesus'. The joke at the end of his film is that, however well-intentioned he may be, he simply eliminates the old 'mean' CEO and inaugurates a new 'nice' CEO.
Another trickier example would be Matrix 3, where Neo uses his Jesus-powers to simply eliminate Agent Smith. See also The Phantom Menace - which, as a sequel to Return Of The Jedi, shows the terrible consequences of Luke's failure. What if he simply restores the (inherently corrupt) Republic, instead of creating a truly "universal" democratic society? Well, then you end up just repeating yourself.
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Snak posted:
I think I've finally put my finger on what makes SMG so grating. He doesn't deconstruct and analyze films so much as he deconstructs and criticized film viewers.
This is semi-accurate, because a film and its viewers cannot be separated. Reading a film is intensely personal, cutting to the core of what you are and what you believe. By presenting a reading of the film, I am automatically and implicitly attacking yours.
However, you reach a bad conclusion; instead of accepting this unavoidable fact, I'm accused of 'making personal' - even though I (personally) am fairly indifferent towards your deep, inner feelings and intentions.
I just post truthfully. It's really not so outrageous.
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Skeesix posted:
While the baby kaiju may not have killed him, he just needed to be restrained and to have his wealth and power taken away. He's now just a poor white guy in hong kong looking for his shoe. If you want jesus imagery, this was not jesus on the cross but jesus knocking down the temple vendors.
The shoe symbol is the same as Mako's missing shoe. Mako's whole thing is of course that she is trying all her life to 'get the shoe back' - overcome her trauma, avenge her family, and 'become whole again'
The equivalent image would be one of the cannibalistic gangsters crawling from the wreckage in District 9 and vowing to restore his criminal empire.
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Shadeoses posted:
I don't think the baby Kaiju was an act of rebellion to save humanity because the Kaiju are manually constructed on assembly lines as weapons. That implies a disgruntled alien factory floor worker somehow hiding a viable truck-sized fetus inside Otachi, or perhaps a conspiracy reaching deep into the upper echelons of the alien leadership to smuggle information to their enemies.
What's unfathomable is that the Baby Kaiju's birth was a miracle.
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Simplex posted:
I think you have things completely backwards. The parts of the movie that aren't lifted wholesale from Independence Day come straight from Revelations starring Raleigh as Jesus.
The Kaiju are literal horned demons from the sea and the war is won when Robo-Jesus pitches the big one back into the lake of fire. The miracle birth of the baby Kaiju should only be viewed as another trick of the devil to try to fool people that his anti-christ is the real deal. When he two scientists drift with the dead baby they are finally able to see the true nature of the creatures and the mistake of their own heretical beliefs.
That's a valid interpretation if you think the real jesus is the celebrity warrior-god, while the antichrist is the homeless slave-baby.
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Panfilo posted:
Even though it would never happen, I'd like to see an alternate movie that is the aliens side of the story.
This is Elysium - with Matt Damon in the role of the Baby Otachi, and Sharlto Copley in the role of Gipsy Danger.
Shadeoses posted:
I guess since Will Smith and Jeff Goldblum didn't unite with the suits in a Christlike, communistic revolution against both the alien and Earth forces, the movie is fascist.
What makes you think they didn't? What is your actual opinion?
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DeathChicken posted:
"Debate my gibberish! You don't want to? I win!"
ID4 has very similar imagery to Pacific Rim. Although not a character, the captured ship fills the same role as Megatron in Transformers and the Terminator whose parts are stolen and researched by Cyberdyne. The ship is being researched by the military so that they, obviously, can use the tech to become like the aliens. That's implicit even without the cut scene where they say this outright.
Pacific Rim is the same, with its countless scenes of alien autopsy and experimentation. This is the true meaning of "to fight monsters, we created monsters." The kaiju are a byproduct of the attempt to fight the kaiju. It's a spiral. The monster-inspired robots are just part of the process of Earth becoming the kaiju homeworld.
ID4 is far more Transformers than it is T2, though. Note the key detail that the ship survives, where Arnold had to sacrifice himself.
ID4 is not very fascist though; it's straightforwardly liberal. Recall how, in Pacific Rim, President Romney is told to fuck off. That obviously doesn't happen in ID4; there's no resistance movement. Issues like poverty aren't really acknowledged at all, except with Randy Quaid's tolerably eccentric Jar Jar character. ID4's big concerns are standard feel-good environmentalism and multiculturalism. Quaid is not taken seriously, even in his death scene. These are the politics satirized in The Phantom Menace.
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RBA Starblade posted:
It's been a while since I've watched it, but the movie ends with a resistance movement fighting the aliens off from what I remember.
To clarify, I mean that the dudes in ID4 don't splinter off from the existing power structure to form a new resistance group. Stacker very specifically condemns the 'suits' who've moved away from the coast. Will Smith in ID4 works with them.
Piedmon Sama posted:
Are you suggesting TPM was directly impugning the multicultural zeitgeist of the 90's and maybe that it (and the other Prequels) kicked off the current spate of "grimdark" ur-fascism in the Dark Knight films, Pacific Rim, Optimus Prime, the horrible death of that captured alien in Battlefield LA, etc?
Definitely yes to the first part, but it gets tricky after that.
Darth Vader in the prequels is an enormously flawed good guy more akin to Megatron in the first two Transformers than to Optimus. Meanwhile, The Dark Knight Rises quotes Darth Vader directly, with the character Bane. These characters are 'totalitarian', but not necessarily in a bad way. They are all highly ethical characters, leaving behind their human selves to identify with their revolutionary masks.
Bane is a key character, as his failure is most closely associated with the breaking of his mask. As I like to point out, Bane's revolutionary mask is his true self - not his pathetically fascist 'human side'. When he takes off his mask, the film brushes him aside as worthless. The Star Wars prequels likewise 'retcon' the original trilogy by saying Vader, the mask, is the true hero, while Anakin the human was a whiny loser. Vader, not Anakin, should be considered Luke's true father.
This is what Battle: Los Angeles is about as well. The film is kind of a special case, because the characters are conservative leftists. The film goes as controversial as possible by saying that even torture may be justified as a part of a radical emancipatory movement. Like Bane and the kids in Red Dawn, B:LA's marines stand for revolutionary terror. They are modeled after Lt. Ripley in Aliens, not Sgt. Apone.
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Clipperton posted:
I'm guessing they named them Jaegers because PR is partly an homage to anime, and anime uses a ton of German words (eg these), just because they sound cool.
lol
So if I put a bunch of kanji and anime babes in my sig, that doesn't mean anything?
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sassassin posted:
Your refusal to engage with a text is not evidence of an absence of meaning.
If anything, it's the opposite.
But fer crying out loud, there is obvious meaning to Russia, China, the US and the British commonwealth uniting with Germany and Japan. In a film full of WWII imagery (Rosie the Riveter!).
Gottlieb, in his long black coat, was not named that because Gottlieb is a cool name.
They literally have the definitions of words pop up in the screen in order to explain to people that the meaning of words is important. The text explains that 'Jaeger' is a German word. Why do they explain it?
Earlier in the thread, you goofballs were marveling at how the colour blue in the costumes and hairstyles was used to symbolize vulnerability. But now the words that someone wrote (formatted, chose a font for...) mean nothing. Come on.
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penismightier posted:
Go look yourself. But it's a damn good reason for Germany not to be present.
...but it is, nonetheless, present - along with Britain. Gottlieb and Stacker represent those nations.
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DressCodeBlue posted:
Pretty sure both Hermann and Newt were supposed to be German
It gets fun when you remember that they're involved in vivisection experiments.
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OldPueblo posted:
I just watched this again today and realized that the boat that is saved in the beginning absolutely represents a love of the TV show Gilligan's Island. Discuss.
Write multiple sentences while trying not to sound idiotic, and I'll allow you be my rival.
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Hbomberguy posted:
I agree. It's a very common theme in films nowadays that the bad guys can be our friends if we all come to a compromise of some kind, or agree to tolerate one another a little more - Avatar comes to mind as a good example.
What Pacific Rim seems to be doing is saying 'yes, but sometimes you actually do have to kill monsters trying to destroy your way of life'. This is a point missing from a lot of progressive agendas. Yeah, we need more solidarity with the Middle East and to come to mutual agreements instead of demonising one another, but there are actually people who want to see the entire West burn to the ground, and won't compromise or change their minds. It might be a good idea to kill those people. Yeah maybe they're reacting to a deeper cultural problem and they're just a symptom, but they are trying to kill us!
This is true - political action requires a concrete opponent. However, Pacific Rim is not as good of an answer to this as Battle: Los Angeles, AV|P:R, Cloverfield, or War of the Worlds remake.
These films are about America attacking itself. Cloverfield seamlessly transitions from being a 9/11 film to an Iraq War film. The monster knocks down a skyscraper, but then it sticks around and occupies the city, in a lengthy battle against local 'insurgents.'
Battle: LA is the US military fighting its own drones. The alien tech is modeled after that terrifying BigDog robot, and so-forth.
What sets them apart from Pacific Rim is the point that this shouldn't happen anywhere. The people bent on destroying the west are us as well. That is, the west is bent on destroying itself. Battle: LA is the best recent example of this, where it is specifically about what makes a man different from a drone or a dog. There's jokes about dogs with human names, the danger of getting your face blown off, and a scene where they search for a comrade's body and find a mangled alien where he fell. The answer is in the commitment to the revolutionary ideal. The film is about rigid self-improvement and self-discipline, with the villains largely irrelevant because they are just a consequence.
This is also the point of Elysium. Although people often mistake it for a straightforward screed, Sharlto Copely's character appears as not only an evil version of the main character, Max, but an evil version of Wikus from District 9. He represents the traps a revolutionary movement can easily fall into - pathological attachments, focus on eliminating individuals to the detriment of systemic change....
The trick is that Copley's character is the one that more resembles the heroes in Pacific Rim. Check his Hanzo Steel, lust for revenge, focus on just attacking bad people, elevation of familial bonds above true egalitarianism, etc.
There's also an aesthetic difference. Cloverfield and B:LA employ handheld camerawork to show the characters' struggle to stay focussed and orient themselves. Again, the idea is to first fix yourself, psychologically - and that's something Mako, I'd argue, doesn't really accomplish. Compare her to Shaw in Prometheus, whose dreams we also enter.
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Rhymenoserous posted:
I'm pretty sure this movie is about robots punching monsters, which is honestly a huge step up considering it is a sequel of the acclaimed hit Robot Jox which was about robots punching robots.
What kind of robot are you?
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All the dudes freaking over the word 'phallus' earlier must have shut off their brains during the RJ scene where the robot unzips his mechanical fly and a chainsaw erection pops out.
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Voltron - AKA GoLion - represents a return to pre-scientific holistic wisdom. GoLion is a sentient robot that predates Christ and was split apart by a nature goddess in order that he can only reach his full power through humble co-operation. Each lion is associated with a different classical element: Earth, Wind, Air, Fire and Lightning/Aether.
If this sounds familiar, it's because it's the same plot as Captain Planet And The Planeteers. Ted Turner created the series to broadcast this liberal philosophy to the kids.
The multicultural team works together to eliminate bad characters like Verminous Skumm, a literal rat-person who represents 'crime'. Their ultimate enemy is Zarm - a god who is not 'balanced' like Mother Earth.
Christ is, notably, totally alien to this new-age pagan ideology.
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"What I like is to see the emancipatory potential in institutionalized Christianity. Of course, I don’t mean state religion, but I mean the moment of St. Paul. I find a couple of things in it. The idea of the Gospel, or good news, was a totally different logic of emancipation, of justice, of freedom. For example, within a pagan attitude, injustice means a disturbance of the natural order. In ancient Hinduism, or even with Plato, justice was defined in what today we would call almost fascistic terms, each in his or her place in a just order. Man is the benevolent father of the family, women do their job taking care of the family, worker does his work and so on. Each at his post; then injustice means this hubris when one of the elements wants to be born, i.e. instead of in a paternal way, taking care of his population, the king just thinks about his power and how to exploit it. And then in a violent way, balance should be reestablished, or to put it in more abstract cosmological terms, you have cosmic principles like yin and yang. Again, it is the imbalance that needs to establish organic unities. Connected with this is the idea of justice as paying the price as the preexisting established order is balanced.
But the message that the Gospel sends is precisely the radical abandonment of this idea of some kind of natural balance; the idea of Gospels and the part of sins is that freedom is zero. We begin from the zero point, which is at least originally the point of radical equality. Look at what St. Paul is writing and the metaphors he used. It is messianic, the end of time, differences are suspended. It’s a totally different world whose formal structure is that of radical revolution. Even in ancient Greece, you don’t find that—this idea that the world can be turned on its head, that we are not irreducibly bound by the chains of our past. The past can be erased; we can start from the zero point and establish radical justice, so this logic is basically the logic of emancipation. Which is again why I find any flirting with so-called new-age spiritualities extremely dangerous. It is good to know the other side of the story, at least, when you speak about Buddhism and all of these spiritualities. I am sorry, but Nazis did it all. For Hitler, the Bhagavad Gita was a sacred book; he carried it in his pocket all the time. In Nazi Germany there were three institutes for Tibetan studies and five for the study of different sects of Buddhism."
(link)
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The lion that forms the hand - turning against the body, rending it apart.
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Uncle Wemus posted:
So is this saying multiculturalism/neoliberalism/new age stuff leads to fascism?
Not so much that it leads to it, but that it's bad for similar reasons. Ted Turner isn't a nazi, and Captain Planet actually fights Hitler at one point.
Nonetheless, his Gaia-worship cartoon literally blames 'crime' on rat-people who worship the wrong god.
This is not far removed from the classic example of Starship Troopers, where you have an international, multicultural fascism. The Earth is united, but it's united against the 'Bug Menace.' As we all know, the point there was that "war makes fascists of us all." Ted Turner is, of course, against this sort of outright, deliberate bigotry. He's against war in general - a total peacenik. This is what allows Captain Planet to be against Hitler: he was born of the Earth goddess, and the enemy god who sows imbalance, disease and discord is a god of war. The result is roughly the same though: Ted Turner just exports violence to the invisible 'third world' so that the multiculture can live in harmony. He merely does unintentionally what the Starship Troopers do intentionally.
Notably, the war-god Zarm has, as his symbol, a map of the earth divided in half. It can't help but recall that Christ does not bring peace - but a sword. The meaning of that statement is that true unity does not come from a 'natural balance', but from a radical imbalance that cuts across all societal boundaries and privileges the weakest.
In the example of Starship Troopers: why don't the lowest humans and the lowest bugs unite against their mutual oppressors? The point of the film is that it's propaganda: the narrative is set up to make any sort of alliance with the bugs appear impossible - even though N.P. Harris has the ability to communicate with them psychically.
The same thing occurs in Pacific Rim. The battle is presented as our side of the rift against theirs, when it should be split along the perpendicular axis, cutting both worlds in half.
***
Everyone's still fixated on cocks and Hitler, even though I'd been writing about relatively unrelated subjects like 'corporatism' and 'the phallus'.
Now I'm writing about Gaia worship and Ted Turner. You gotta keep up to stay relevant!
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Uncle Wemus posted:
Are there any movies like Pacific Rim (heroes rise up to defeat enemy) that don't frame the enemy as unreasonable monsters who must be eliminated? Or rather have movies like this ever properly targeted the correct definition of enemy? Can't quite figure out how to say it but who does it right?
Elysium is my go-to example, but there are quite a few. Battle: Los Angeles, Captain America, AV|P:R...
***
Flocks of antifa birds* descend on the Jaeger pilots and peck at them relentlessly.
*descendants of the dinosaurs. -ed.
***
Hbomberguy posted:
I totally can't wait for this. Pacific Rim's big problem was that it was trying too hard to justify itself and its action. It felt the whole time like it wasn't sure I was sold on giant robots. Now that's out of the way, I am sure Del Toro can deliver.
It's going to be pretty funny when they pull the inevitable Winter Soldier deal and confirm what I've been writing, but I'm not on board without a drastic change in aesthetic.
Godzilla 2014 has the kaiju film on lock, from the cinematography to the editing - Heisei style applied to Showa thematics. Pacific Rim, on the other hand, looks worse than the average-quality 1999 Gamera sequel False God Awakening, where everything is murky-dark with overdone colored lighting. I mean, look at this shit:
This doesn't look bright and anime. It looks scuzzy and awful - like Punisher: War Zone or Hobo With A Shotgun.
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Neowyrm posted:
I mean I guess I could see that if you're extrapolating the whole movie's feel from just that one set...
It's very consistent. the same combination of dark blue and lemon-yellow lighting is used on the protagonists' faces in the Gispsy Danger cockpit, giving them a lovely greenish complexion.
Note that, just like in the previous image, the characters' bodies - their silhouettes - are borderline illegible against the same-coloured background. The hydraulic robot chair, however, is perfectly visible in light blue. In this image, the two protagonists are looking at their hands. Can you see the hands clearly?
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dreffen posted:
Punisher: War Zone was a pretty good movie so I'm okay with that!
This shot has a similar colour scheme to the ones above, but you can see how the character's silhouette is very clear. The yellow highlights further separate him from the background, associating him not with the building but with the trees and the staircase leading downwards. This imagery is clear and forthright.
In terms of cinematography, the lines of the bannisters and the curve of the arch point straight to the cross. The Punisher is standing in the exact opposite location of the purple lighting, unbalancing the symmetrical composition and pulling you eyes down from the cross. The whole movie is very clear like this, even in his deliberately cluttered and shadowy workshop.
In a more general way, it looks garish and gross in a way that suits a movie about vigilantism and depravity. Pacific Rim is ostensibly a love-letter to kaiju films and animes.
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Habibi posted:
You could have saved yourself some time and properly parsed my 'yes' response to mean, 'yes, I can see the hands clearly.' They're not stark against the background and they're not bright garish yellow, but they're pretty clear (especially when they're, you know, moving). And because they're not important to you, the viewer, why is it even relevant whether they're clear or not?
Where I come from, matte black on a black background with dark blue highlights is not 'clear'.
It's pretty impressive that the response was simultaneously 'yes I can **technically** see the hands' and 'you're **not supposed to** see the hands'. I'm writing about cinematography, which means more than being merely onscreen, and has absolutely nothing to do with 'supposed-to-bes'.
Here's an animated GIF:
You can see perhaps more clearly how the blue chair thing is the sole focus of the shot. Hero guy raises his arm from the control panel in a way that perfectly alligns with the spinning dohickey in the background. You can also note that Mako's reaction is delayed by a second, and that the blue chair thing lines up with her head. Cinematography is clearly going on, so it's not 'oh you're not supposed to see things'. Guillermo Navarro is not inept. The focus of the shot is (eventually) the blue chair-arm's upwards curling motion, the way it pops out from behind Mako, and then pulls her with it. The yellow lights, meanwhile, form a V that points straight at Hero Guy's face.
In context, this shot immediately cuts to robot's massive fist. So yeah, the entire purpose of the shot is to show how the character's hands and forearms have been augmented. If you squint even slightly, the hands and forearms disappear against the background.
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Even if you can spot Waldo on the beach, the purpose of the Waldo book is to be as busy and noisy as possible.
Waldo is not 'clearly visible'.
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Maxwell Lord posted:
Honestly I liked the aesthetic. Busy shots with lots of color contrast appeal to me in ways that stark minimalism doesn't. I like picking out details and such, and I didn't have trouble following the fight scenes, any more than, say, the races in Speed Racer.
I'll grant that other viewers DID have a problem following the action, and I think this may be a difference in the way people see things. Like, to me the contrasts in lighting helped define the shapes of monsters and kaiju well enough that I could register the action, whereas some movies with brightly lit scenes with a flat color palette can be harder to "read", whereas for other people that's plain as day.
I posted this as an example of bad action in the Godzilla thread.
What's going on here?
NOTE: I did not cherry-pick the worst possible image. This is actually the clearest image I could get, going frame-by-frame, of Cherno Alpha getting pounced on by Leatherback.
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The bright blue line of the chair-arm leads away from Mako's head. It is not literally attached to her head - I am talking about the lines of motion.
Maxwell Lord posted:
Jaeger in the center, two kaiju dog-piling him.
You're starting to stray into RLM "How can anyone like this? Here's my test that proves it's horrible" territory.
That's not what's going on. Again, I'm talking about cinematography - not the mere fact that there is something onscreen.
If that's your standard, then literally any shot is good.
***
One of these images was taken from Pacific Rim, and the other is from a press photo of George W. Bush holding a pumpkin.
In which image are the pair of hands (their position, gesture, etc.) more clearly visible?
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Neowyrm posted:
it is only as simple as watching the movie to figure out what is going on, i.e. Leatherback pouncing onto cherno's shit.
Again, I am not talking about the mere fact that something is onscreen.
***
Here's an image of Godzilla being attacked by Mothra.
Compared to the previous image of Cherno Alpha being attacked by Leatherback, which is more clear?
Here is an image of two shapes: a circle, and a square with rounded corners.
Which of these two shapes is more round? Which of the two shapes is more yellowy?
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Habibi posted:
I can't tell what's going on here at all. Is that a giant bat? Why does it just look suspended in the air?
It looks suspended in the air because it is suspended in the air.
The composition is such that Mothra's body is clearly separate from the ground, clearly overshadowing the hunched-over Godzilla. Godzilla looks, for the moment, like he is being pushed down and to the left - away from the rubble and towards the ocean in the background. It's clear visual storytelling.
***
Here's a shot from later in the same film. You can note that the composition is very similar.
Godzilla is again pushed down and to the left. The darker hill(s) in the foreground slope in that direction. In motion, you can clearly see the clouds of dust blowing to the left. Although they are no longer near the ocean, Godzilla is still being pushed back 'underground', into the hills in the background. He is already partially obscured by the hills in the foreground and the clouds of dust.
This is clear visual storytelling.
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Habibi posted:
Nope, because you're using an image capped from a GIF that's already suffered color loss and in which your little block comes out to be about 1mm square. We're not even talking about the same ballpark, here, because, by contrast, when I boot up the movie on my laptop, the hands are not only significantly lighter than in that screencap, they're actually blue (from the lights), slightly darker than the wall behind them, and only begin to approach the same color as he is closing them, at the very tail end of the scene.
I used the example of the circle and rounded square to explain the concept of 'more'.
The image could be 'more' clear. The silhouette could be 'more' defined. There could be 'more' contrast.
It's okay to admit that 'extremely dark blue' and 'black' are nearly the same colour. The movie's honour will not be hurt.
***
Habibi posted:
Yes, I had noticed that you had moved the goalposts from "clear" to "relative degrees of clear," but wasn't going to point it out.
Concepts like clarity are always already implicitly relative you goofball.*
Neowyrm posted:
(right click, "view image")
Here's a quick paint-over explanation of the composition. All the light-blue lines have been traced in red. As you can see, they all point towards Hero Guy's elbow (which I've marked with a green dot). The elbow then travels up along the dotted line. The elbow is the focus because that's the point where the arm is hooked to the chair. The lines are not pointing towards his hand or body at all.
Secondary elements in the composition are marked in blue. They do kinda hint towards the arms and face, but central element of the composition is that red vortex of arrows.
These compositional elements do not change if you up the resolution. I am talking about cinematography, not resolution.
*goofball relative to a normal person
***
You're highlighting things that have no contrast in the actual shot. We consciously 'know' that there are arms there, but they are not a major part of the composition at all. They are extremely de-emphasized. Returning to the GIF:
The main thing that moves is the huge, brightly lit chair-arm. It extends along that green, dotted line I marked earlier.
The characters are looking at the palms of their hands, but only their faces are lit. in other words, the only important part of the shot is how their thoughts are transmitted to the chair.
Neowyrm posted:
I should say that I am a little confused about what is even being argued at this point, though. Not just on your end.
Random tangential nitpicking is a good obfuscatory tactic.
***
Xealot posted:
Ok?
I don't see why people are going through hoops to say the way this shot is staged is perfectly clear. It isn't; SMG is right about that. But what I don't understand is, how is this lack of visual clarity a flaw in the filmmaking? The pilots are *supposed* to appear to be part of this interwoven lattice of robot-innards. They're part of the machine. Their bodies are purposefully being abstracted as one component of the machinery. There's a lack of visual clarity for the same reason Giger's designs are a jumble of biomechanical shapes.
Complaining that the actors' eyes are looking at their hands is pedantic, though, because that's a single frame and their gaze shifts forward across the shot. The relevant action of the shot is the mechanical "ka-chunk" movement of their arms, connected to the giant metallic wings behind them. The shot is doing exactly what it's supposed to, which is demonstrating how the pilots are part of this mesh of metal-sinew and wire/tube/vein crap inside the robot's head.
It's similar to the metallic spine-insert thing with its tiny grasping claws in the prologue scene in Alaska. There's this invasive, cyberpunk aspect to the technology, where jaegers are these giant assemblages of weird and arcane parts, to set them against the slimy, cthuloid viscera inside the kaiju.
As noted earlier, the insides of the robot cockpits are actually these huge cavernous spaces. If the idea is that the characters get absorbed into a machine, it doesn't really happen.
There are wires and complex devices behind the characters, but there is nothing in front of them except a big empty space full of holograms. Also, the huge mess of machinery that they are actually connected to is colored bright blue. If the idea is to have the characters merge with the machine, they should be a bright blue as well, right? Or at least, in that shot, their forearms should be.
***
Instead of whining about how I think you're wrong but everything's relative - it's just your opinion, I can't judge you, blah blah blah - just write something substantive.
Maxwell Lord posted:
It goes both ways though- it was SMG who posted the screencap that "proved" how shitty the movie looks. And specifically saying that a film's action sequences are incomprehensible means that it's fair for people to argue that they understood what was going on.
People are going to weird extremes. When I say something is unclear, someone actually got mad that I was literally calling it invisible. When I explain that unclear and invisible mean different things, I'm accused being intolerant of other people's opinions.
I can post an image that is essentially a huge blue cloud with an arm sticking out of it, saying it's not very easy to comprehend, the reply is "it's not 100% incomprehensible! I comprehend that it's a cloud with an arm!"
C'mon now.
***
Here's a shot of 'dirty slut' from the end of the film.
Here's the 'alien queen' from Aliens.
Which shot is more clear?
Maxwell Lord posted:
I tried writing substantive things in this thread many times, they were apparently not substantive enough, but you can't say I never tried.
And I think the specific kind of subjectivity I'm talking about here is more than just "that's just, like, your opinion man." Just as we all learn better in a number of ways, I think there are differences in how we process visual information such that for some, Pacific Rim's action sequences make sense but those in Transformers don't, or vice versa. There's definitely bad cinematography and bad editing but there is a level on which the observer matters.
It is not, and has not been, a question of 'does it make sense y/n?'
I am not claiming the film is utterly 100% incomprehensible, so 'I understood the plot' is not a real response. And, so far, that has been your only response.
***
These are relatively minor issues that are exacerbated by the editing.
Immediately after that shot of Hero Guy clenching his fist, there's a match cut to the exterior of the robot, with lens flares all over, the camera is suddenly circling the action to the right, and there's a a totally different lighting and color scheme. Then they cut back inside the cockpit, and it's pretty much the opposite angle, with Hero Guy facing the opposite direction. As noted earlier on the thread, this is like cutting from a baseball being thrown, to an establishing shot of the house the ball is in, to the ball actually flying through the air.
What you might see instead, on Speed Racer or something, would be a split-screen effect of some sort, allowing for clear simultaneous action. It'd be cheesy, but look at the movie we're talking about here. Conveying the man-machine interface with a brief match-cut is both overly flashy and kinda rudimentary.
Same with the 'drift' being a bunch of flashing, rapidly-edited, monochrome footage with a glow effect slathered overtop. I'd argue that's not a good way to do what's effectively a dream sequence. Like, just imagine a direct neural interface with another person. What would that be like? How would you convey that to someone who's never done it (I.e. an audience)?
Obviously the technology doesn't actually exist, but we've seen it in countless films. How many resorted to the rapid-fire montage?
I don't see what people have against the film being better.
***
There is such a thing as a stupid question. Here is your question:
"So, could you see anything in the shot clearly SMG?"
This is the post you were responding to:
"The hydraulic robot chair ... is perfectly visible in light blue."
You asked a question when you were already provided an unambiguous answer.
This is a good example of how what I write is truthful, while others engage in obfuscation and deception.
***
Vermain posted:
The match cuts here work well to express the mood of Shinji, though they generally abstain from actually showing him performing an action matched by Unit 01, aside from when it's intimate (e.g., as he's brutally stabbing Shamshel at the end).
Not to dis your good post, but I was referring to that latter sort of graphic match cut, where compositional elements in both shots align almost perfectly.
You can see how the bright line on both arms is located on pretty much the exact same spot on the screen. The video you posted actually doesn't really much of this sort of match-cutting, being more conventionally edited. What would normally be close-ups of the robot's face are simply replaced with close-ups of the protagonist's face.
When showing the cut in the above gif, you can see how the sudden introduction of camera movement is distracting. The camera dollies to the right, causing the lights in the background to zip around. The arm is mostly, again, an extremely dark shape on a dark background with just a little band of light on top, so the background actually gets more of the focus. The arm itself is practically negative space.
In any case, it's obvious that the predominant color is black. That little gif screen is essentially a black rectangle with spots.
***
But then you have a film that's literally about killer tornados, and it looks like this:
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Chronojam posted:
All the coolest scenes of Twister were dark and overcast.
If you can find a shot that looks like a typical Pacific Rim shot, post it. Here's one I dug up:
Notice the reds, greys and greens. It's dark, but there's very little black. Also note the lack of little super-bright lights everywhere, clouds of fog, etc. This scene depicts a hailstorm, but everything's pretty well visible.
Another example from Jurassic Park, where the T-Rex is directly related to the tropical storm going on (chaos and whatnot):
It may be foggy, but the fog is used to make the rex stand out against the background. It passes the squint test.
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Neowyrm posted:
hahahahahahahahaha holy shit dude
I replaced the darkest parts of the image (colors that are black or near-black) with pink in MS paint. It's quick and dirty, but you get the idea.
It's a really dark image.
***
This is actually really funny. People are literally denying that black is the absence of light in order to 'defend' the movie from... what?
No wonder the basic observation that it's fascist caused such a panic.
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thatbastardken posted:
SMG maybe you should get your eyes checked? None of the shit you are saying about clarity or colour makes any sense to me.
Basic colour theory: 'blue' and 'orange' are complementary colors.
'Dark blue' and 'black' are not complementary colors
White text on yellow is hard to read, because there is very little contrast. Dark blue shapes on a black background are hard to read, because there is very little contrast.
Contrasts make things easier to read.
Contrast means that something is different from another thing, rather than similar. There is a game on Sesame Street called 'one of these things is not like the others'. We can play this game as well. Dark blue and black are very similar colors, and orange is very different. One of these colours is not like the others. Orange is not like dark blue or black.
Visual clarity refers to the legibility of the image. I am writing about cinematography, the way the image is composed to convey visual information. A cinematographer is a man who 'writes' images for you to 'read'. He uses things like basic color theory to make images easier to read. An image may only be onscreen for a second or two, so it needs to be easy to read. An image that is less clear is more difficult to read.
'Difficult' means that something is hard, but not impossible. It is 'possible' to read yellow text on a white background, but it is 'difficult' to do so. It is 'easier' to read text that is black. This is why books typically use black ink instead of yellow ink.
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Maxwell Lord posted:
Except the ideological angle has also been a line of attack, so it's heads-I-win-tails-you-lose. Either it's horrific fascism or just plain incompetence, we aren't allowed any other answers.
Two plus two equals four.
I am, personally, not allowing you to write a different answer to the above math equation.
Even if you try, your answer will not be true.
***
The punchline is that no-one has yet tried the obvious solution: not one person has actually praised the cinematography and suchoutside the vaguest terms (e.g. "it didn't bother me," "I could tell what was going on,").
You have to become monsters to fight monsters. Otherwise, you're the planes that I'm swatting down.
***
Ferrinus posted:
It would have been cool to see Cherno whatever stepping on fake Mitt Romney, but that's not the movie we got. It'd feel like kind of a cheat for the robots vs. monsters movie to turn halfway through into a robots vs. oligarchs movie, though. I'd rather see a better-executed version of PR's existing story than a completely different story.
A transition from the Jaegers being fascist anime mechs to acting like revolutionary/terrorist kaiju (swatting down planes, attacking the rich) would actually work rather well. Simply shift to the real target.
For a successful example, see 28 Days Later - where Jim emerges from a mass grave to become a zombie, fighting alongside the very monsters he earlier wished to exterminate.
The black zombie chained up and experimented upon makes the meaning there fairly clear. He is the same as the kaiju that get vivisected in this film.
Tezcatlipoca posted:
They are not trying to fix society, they are trying to prevent extinction. The invading aliens are not scapegoats.
Their intentions are not important. The simple fact of the upcoming sequel shows that the plan to prevent extinction was - as I've said all along - doomed to failure.
The nuke was, like the kaiju wall, a false solution. It delayed the inevitable in a way that served only to let the PPDC retain a brief moment of power.
***
Tezcatlipoca posted:
The PPDC has only as much power as the people give them. Remember that everyone working there is a volunteer. Since the sequel doesn't actually exist yet I won't use it to make any judgments about Pacific Rim and in any case it would be too similar to people who say things like "the sequel ruined the first one for me."
The sequel was already implicit the minute Pacific Rim was released incomplete. The failure to address the radical antagonism at the heart of the conflict put a huge question mark on "The End".
It's a structural thing. In Captain America's many sequels (essentially the entire Marvel EU), Cap just keeps fighting Hydra - over and over, endlessly. He cannot ever defeat Hydra because he is a capitalist, and Hydra is capitalism. Marvel's constant sequel teasers, franchise tie-ins and whatnot serve to obfuscate the real conflict with an endless parade of spectacle. The characters work extremely hard so that nothing is actually accomplished. Consequently, Marvel can keep raking in the money with the illusion that the story is 'going somewhere.'
It's a Red Queen's race: "here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place."
Elysium, as a direct contrast, ends with the successful implementation of true universal democracy - and thus cannot be sequelized. There is no post-credits teaser for Elysium 2, and there will not be an Elysium 2.
(28 Days Later comes close to Elysium - but the weird ending, with the formation of an ersatz nuclear family and the arrival of an ambiguous fighter jet, naturally leads into the sequel. 28 Weeks Later attacks the ideological assumptions behind its predecessor's happy ending.)
Why did Del Toro, famous for his antifascism, make a fascist movie? The explanation is that Pacific Rim was planned out as a multi-film franchise from the beginning. It sets up the antifascist sequel, just as Hellboy 2 completely attacks everything about Hellboy 1.
Hodgepodge posted:
Both Batman and Stacker know exactly what they're doing. The PPDC internally refers to itself as 'the resistance,' as I recall. They are resisting not only the Kaiju, but also the people who ordered them to stand down.
Resistance is surrender.
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S-Alpha posted:
I love the fact that it's completely unfeasible to SMG, at any point, that the fact that Del Toro is making these movies is his love of an idea, a love of the tropes associated with it, and a genuine heartfelt enjoyment from making a film of the stuff he loves.
Del Toro's a smart guy. Don't sell him short.
***
Godzilla and Mothra are the good guys.
***
I expect them to not be fascists. Also, 'fascist revolution' is an oxymoron.
***
Vermain posted:
"You said it yourself, Kain. There are only two sides to your coin."
[Zizek's] own dream project is a version of Antigone with three different endings. In the third version, neither Antigone nor her opponent King Creon wins: "The chorus steps in and says, 'These are your bourgeois feudal struggles,' and arrests them both."
***
sean10mm posted:
Maybe the working class not magically making the capitalist system disappear at the end of the film with their giant robots isn't a flaw, but an observation of how things actually work. The rich create the problems the working class have to live with, and the working class are so wrapped up in survival and dealing with the acute problems the moneyed classes caused that they can't deal with the big picture of how the system dooms them.
The film itself shows Stacker watching widespread rioting on TV. He presumes, falsely, that the rioters are rioting in favor of the PPDC.
***
At the end of the film, Hero Guy and Mako step out before the masses. The sky clears above them. The people stop their rioting, and look up at the sun.
"Thank you," says Mako. "For supporting the PPDC in its campaign to cleanse the Earth of the kaiju plague. My father would be grateful that he did not die in vain. His spirit lives on inside you all."
A tomato explodes against her black torso plating, and Hero Guy is splattered with juice. "Give us Charlie Day!" Cabbages are thrown, along with smaller bell peppers and the occasional radish. "No more walls! Bring them back!" Event Security steps in to escort Mako off the stage, as Hero Guy yells at the crowd. "How dare you! I gave up my Gipsy for you, and this is the thanks that I get? Show some gratitude!"
Eventually he, too, is forced to retreat.
***
Tezcatlipoca posted:
There is nothing in the movie to support this.
Yes there is. I just described it. Stacker watches the anti-wall riots on TV, and then dies to build a bigger, stronger wall between the two worlds.
***
Actually, it does happen. There is a scene in the movie where Stacker watches anti-wall riots on TV.
***
Tezcatlipoca posted:
Beckett is the one watching the wall riots. Stacker is in the scene right before it. The only screens Stacker watches are in the command center.
If that is the case, and it was his subordinate, it does not contradict my point at all.
RBA Starblade posted:
He speaks only Truth, after all. The st-uh, SMG, is infallible.
Truthfulness does not mean 'infallibility'.
Attacking does not mean 'going on a genocidal rampage'.
Unclear does not mean 'totally invisible'.
You are not skilled with reading comprehension, and it is causing you undue vexation.
***
Xealot posted:
Liberating them would be like "liberating" a Predator drone from its operator.
Why not liberate a Predator drone from its operator?
***
Xealot posted:
I once touched a hot piece of metal and burned my finger. Why not liberate my hand from my brain? When the Hand's Army rises up against the Motor Cortices of the world, they will finally end the cycle of neuro-manual class conflict and form a Hand Utopia.
With your analogy, we are back to (fascist) corporatism - the community as an organic body with a head, and hands.
Liberal corporatism is the moral of Fritz Lang's Metropolis. The hero is a rich dude who travels through a subterranean rift to see the 'third world' workers enslaved. He slums it for a bit, becomes a christian, etc. he decides to become an advocate for the poor while also endeavoring to 'civilize' them. Metropolis is a very good film with a very dumb ending.
"In today's predominant ideological perception, I'm tempted to claim work itself — that is to say manual labor as opposed to so-called symbolic activity — work, not sex is more and more becoming the site of obscene indecency to be concealed from the public eye. The tradition which goes back to Wagner's opera, Rhinegold, or to Fritz Lang's film, Metropolis, the tradition in which the working process takes place underground, in dark caves, today culminates in the millions of anonymous workers sweating in the Third World factories, from Chinese gulags to Indonesian assembly lines. In their invisibility the West can afford itself to babble about the so-called disappearing working class. Of course, it's disappearing from here.
But what is crucial in this tradition is the equation of labor with crime, the idea that labor, hard work, is originally an indecent criminal activity to be hidden from the public eye. Significantly, we ask ourselves a simple question: Where in Hollywood films do we see still today the production process in all its intensity? I claim, as far as I remember, and you can correct me if I'm wrong, only at one place: in James Bond or similar films when the good guy, James Bond the agent, penetrates the fortress of the master criminal. And then you see it's either the drug processing or putting together of some lethal weapon. That's the only place where you see the production process. Of course, the function of the agent is then to explode, to destroy, to repress again this sight of production." (link).
I am not a corporatist.
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SHISHKABOB posted:
What is the opposite of corporatism?
Corporatists are generally against both radical egalitarian movements, and liberalism (individualism, the unfettered free market, etc.).
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Mu Zeta posted:
I hope that happens then the only things left to fight are other Jaegers. Humans are the real monsters, right?
As noted earlier in the thread, Jaeger technology would simply be employed against the increasingly-despondent civilian population.
Militarization of various police forces is inevitable. Riot suppression.
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Raku posted:
Somehow I think Metropolis wouldn't have been quite as good if it ended with "The intermediary between the hand and the brain is the labor relations board!" so I'm alright with the ending.
The mediator between head and hands must be destroyed.
***
At a most basic level, the heart is a temporary class-truce, where rich and poor 'unite' to eliminate the outsider who sows dissent. This 'unity' takes the form of humanitarian aid and other forms of charity, passed down to the workers so that they don't get all uppity.
(Despite the liberal style, this focus on the devious outsider led to the film being easily co-opted by the Nazi party.)
The symptom of the film is the splitting of Maria into good and evil halves, with the 'good' one meekly preaching Christan love and the 'evil' Satanic one promoting actual revolt. The idea of a radicalized Christianity is beyond the confines of the film - the 'evil' Maria is casually destroyed.
The proper messenger from hands to head would be both Marias working in concert. Freder is a distraction.
***
Captain Invictus posted:
I'm gonna cut you in half with mydickphallic imagery
It is still fashionable today to mock the Freudian notion of phallus by ironically discerning everywhere "phallic symbols" - for example, when a story mentions a strong, forward-thrusting movement, this is supposed to stand for "phallic penetration"; or, when the building is a high tower, it is obviously "phallic," etc. One cannot but notice how those who make such comments never fully identify with them - they either impute such a belief into "phallic symbols everywhere" to some mythical orthodox Freudian, or they themselves endorse the phallic meaning, but as something to be criticized, to be overcome. The irony of the situation is that the naïve orthodox Freudian who sees "phallic symbols everywhere" does not exist, that he is a fiction of the critic himself, his "subject supposed to believe." The only believer in the phallic symbols is in both cases the critic himself, who believes through the other, i.e., who "projects" (or, rather, transposes) his belief onto the fictive other.
-Slavoj Zizek, With Or Without Passion
Filling food for thought as always. A couple of thoughts I had while reading this:
ReplyDelete1. What's the Zizek/SMG/Blue thinking about communism (your kind) being just another ideology, e.g. capitalism being your Other and The Revolution being your means of recovering your jouissance?
2. SMG, and you too (and I'd guess Zizek as well) mean something very different than most people understand by 'communism'. I'm sympathetic; I'm probably guilty of the same with respect to 'capitalism'. On the other hand, it's pretty hard to maintain much of a justification in doing this *without being very clear about what we're doing*, particularly when we're arguing or debating or discussing those very ideas.
3. Is there an SMG thread about 300? I'd love to read that.
4. *Obviously* no actual proletariat would allow SMG to live once they had any real power. He might survive the first few dozen "It's obvious!" outbursts.
5. Would SMG consider eyes (similar to those humans have) to be inherently "yonic" due to them 'dilating'?
6. The 'psychoanalysis isn't that thing Freud developed (you rube)! It's "the core of the Freudian revolution of which Freud himself was not fully aware". How could you not know this (you rube)?' act is really really terrible and SA should justifiably band SMG just for that alone. It's also pretty shitty behavior generally.
7. I love this: "We see riots against the irresponsible spending on the wall project (though the film uses clever/duplicitous editing to make these appear as pro-jaeger demonstrations)" – pointing out 'propaganda' in a work of fiction aiming to hide 'the truth' about said work of fiction's fictional universe!
8. Fuck that was long; whew!
Thanks for posting this.
1. The difference between "just another ideology" and "communism" is the difference between trying to find a DIFFERENT scapegoat to blame for all the problems in society, and committing to love everyone regardless of their identity.
Delete3. I can't find one specifically about 300, just he talks about Snyder's movies on many threads, and often references the satirical reading of 300.
"One thing that really threatens people is that Snyder's vocal fascination with the terrifying, amoral power of art. That's why people get upset at the commentary tracks and interviews, where he gets enthusiastic about cool violence. However, every single one of his films is about how the awesome power of cinema is very easily abused.
The Spartans in 300 use these powerful images to justify infanticide, but the nuance is that they are also promoting anti-imperialism. The very form of 300 is this is all-pervasive ideological fiction, so the viewer is tossed into this bathwater and forced to search for the baby. It's all about ideological critique."
Sucker Punch might be a good place to start. http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3332329&userid=118075
5. SMG would say to stop wondering what he thinks (he doesn't exist) but to answer what is true or not. Are eyes a yonic symbol, or can you identify differentiation there?
Have you seen Pacific Rim: Uprising? I just watched it and it has juicy ideological content. I couldn't resist opening up my notes app and noting my many thoughts and observations (I was also taking screenshots throughout) during the credits. I would love to hear your and/or SuperMechaGodzilla's takes on it if you or them have seen it. It's a very interesting film and follows on from a lot of the themes talked about here
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