. . . on that note, HAVE AN ESSAY
Most of these questions have exactly one answer at the root:
Traditional Japanese values are not about how individuals make themselves singular, but about how singular people learn to work with others. This means that a whole fucking lot of media are about constructing and reconstructing in-groups and out-groups. How does the movie start? By informing us that the nations of the world banded together. Then it provides us with a bunch of conflicts, between parents and children, between coworkers, between leaders and subordinates, between pilots...
So what we're supposed to understand, immediately, is that this movie is about how these people come together, again, and in coming together save the world. The Russian and Chinese groups could have worked together and taken out the double-event Kaijyu, but they don't. They're a parable. Since the Gipsy Danger crew and the secondary Striker Eureka crew come together, they manage to solve the triple-event situation without a total wipeout.
The Drift, the unification of nations, these are plot devices that clear the playing field of boring, typical conflicts and allow us to go straight to the more elemental, fundamental divisions people experience regardless of surface appearances. The Stacker Pentecost/Mako conflict is across race, gender, and nationality, but has less than nothing to do with any of the above. Diversity is necessary in order to show us precisely what we're working with.
So we have a monster movie, then, which concerns itself with the more fundamental divisions between humans, and, similarly, the division between humans-and-not-humans.
Now, where do traditional monster stories come from? Who subverts order in society? Who transgresses borders and makes things... messy? And who communicates with nature/god/the incomprehensible? Who is simultaneously respected and demeaned for encapsulating these traits?
Well, if you ask pretty much anyone up through the 1940s, in any culture, the answer to that would be the mentally and physically disabled and ill (however that particular culture constructs those notions). To underline this--WHO drifts with a Kaijyu? Who allows the enemy access to their minds, and who can predict them? Who covers themselves with their symbols? Who finds both God and monsters in incomprehensible numbers?
That's right. The disabled scientists.
From the start, they are explicitly constructed as "other." Newt has his hands elbow-deep in kaijyu viscera and Hermann has his very own incomprehensible Blackboard of Crazy. Their lab is divided with a tape line, but there's no point in it, as they're both equally alien; they're shown as beyond humanity, which is why it's so hilarious when Hermann shoves kaijyu guts back onto Newt's side of the line. Why doesn't it matter to him? To the audience's perspective, there's no real difference between them at first. Hell, the first words out of both of their mouths are subversions of social order--Newt refuses respect, deference and division that his title would symbolize, and Hermann refuses Newt the familiarity of using his first name.
And what is their subplot? Is it a plot of division? Of destruction? Of purging the monsters from their natures? Of changing their fundamental selves? No, it's a story about how they come together, odd and transgressive as they are, and aren't alone anymore, because even the monsters humanity keeps at their gates come together in this movie. Hermann must help Newt back over the line from monster to human after the first drift, and bring his plight to the attention of Stacker (the symbol of stability and civilization, remember)--he must transgress his own tightly guarded boundaries and consent to becoming a liaison, before drifting with Newt and the baby kaijyu. And before Newt can connect to Hermann, he has to meet Hannibal Chau.
Newt's experience in the Bone Slums is a "trip into the underworld" experience. He has made a deep transgression of linking to a monster without intentionally maintaining a human connection, and his punishment is a voyage into hell in order to link to another monster. Even Hannibal, however, is not the monster at the gate. He, too, is laughable, because even though he throws Newt, and everyone in the public shelter with him, to the kaijyu, he also will not be separated from humanity. For his crime of disrespecting his allies and his opponent, he is eaten by a premature baby kaijyu. We are supposed to be reminded, at every single turn, who the real monster is here. Even in it's infancy, it's enough to take care of a slum lord like Chau, who may be a hardass but whom the narrative refuses to construct as an outsider. Newt, adequately warned of both the dangers of associating himself with monsters, can now connect with Hermann and save the day.
So. We have three characters who would traditionally be placed on the fringes of humanity, doing a dance that draws them back in. They connect to each other and expel fluid--blood, vomit, sweat, tears--purge themselves of ill humors, that is, and can join the celebrants at the end of the film.
Hannibal Chau, like Mako Mori, experiences a trauma and loses a shoe. She loses her innocence; he loses some of his edge. There's a lot of symbolism in footwear.
And similarly, laughter follows the outsiders. At the same time as the narrative informs us that they are the "monstrous humans" with which we are familiar, the one too porous (too willing to bond with kaijyu), the one too restrained (too unwilling to meet humankind on its own terms), they are made laughable, adorable, safe. They are actively being declawed and demystified, despite their active connections to what most of the viewers and characters will see as horrible monstrosity.
What else is funny? The Jaegers and the Jaeger AI, of course. A movie which could have been about the disturbing relationship between humanity and technology ("we made monsters to fight monsters") emphasizes that the tools are completely comprehensible and, in themselves, safe. A kaijyu breaks through an overpass, and almost immediately afterwards a Jaeger steps over one. A Jaeger punches through a building--and then delicately, almost absurdly, makes a one of those desk doo-dads with the metal balls start going off. Because, even though it is a monster, a horrifying weapon when used for the wrong purpose (remember--all of them have to be destroyed by the end of the film. What would happen if one had survived?), every demonstration of its power is followed by a demonstration of its safe and protective nature. Yet another monster on our side. This is seen as inappropriate, because what we want to feel in that moment is the thrill of the obscured borders between machine and monster. But Guillermo del Toro insists that, in his film, he will not allow us to revel in human destruction.
So, finally, we come to the question of darkness. Light separates and divides. Darkness unifies and obscures. When the Westernization of Japan arrived, a man wrote an essay called "In praise of shadows," in which he remarks that, useful as Western technology and philosophy might be, he prefers the dark where everything comes together--the erotic, terrifying, dangerous, sublime mystery.
After all the murkiness of the film, a new humanity, a better-connected humanity, can emerge. Do you really think that it would have been the same if you could see everything clear as day? Would you have empathized with the pilots in the same way? Would you have felt suffocated and frightened? If you could see all of the Kaijyu at once, with great clarity, would you have understood it, in the same disturbing way, as a fight to the death? Would it have felt vicious?
The only birds-eye view of a Jaeger comes when the kaijyu is circling Striker Eureka after it's been shut off by the EMP. It is also the only time a Jaeger is shot without a human either in the same frame, or riding in it. If you had been shown the film with the robots being shot like machines, so that you can see all of them in a shot from a birds-eye or distant perspective, rather than being shot like humans with the same attendant closeups and camera shots, the same gritty and visceral fights, would you have felt the same way about them? Would you have connected with them? Would you have felt they were safe? Heroic, in service of humanity? If the pilots hadn't had neural force-feedback? If they hadn't been forced to act out the robots' movements? If one person had had control of the gargantuan machines?
Without the confusion between Jaeger and kaijyu, would you have felt satisfied?
The only time when a human isn't on the screen, in some form--either inside a machine, or outside of one--is when we're looking at a kaijyu, and even then, we're only given pieces. This is a deeply human film, a deeply monstrous film, about what we fear, and why--about difference, about perception, about what separates each other from horror, and from each other. The visuals are built on a Lovecraftian aesthetic.
"I've done a really great job of capturing this," says Guillermo del Toro, "but even so, some things are just too fucking big and awful for me to get on camera."
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Topic: [MILK] There were 12 eggs here what did you do with them? (Happy thread?!) (Read 16281424 times)