Thinky thoughts on Pacific Rim: Grief, loss, and the drift
Some of you know that Pacific Rim has completely eaten my fannish brain. A lot of that doesn't surprise me -- I mean, Idris Elba and Max Martini. In a movie together. Being BFFs and slashy. Plus there are giant robots piloted by hotass people punching out giant monsters. Even with all my big issues about certain aspects of the movie, I still have become a huge fan of it, and the more I think about it, the more I realize it's about relationships, first, and heroics, second; surprisingly, this is the first media creation I've ever seen that comes close to portraying what it has felt like for me to have lost my twin sister, and to try to carry on without her.
There have been a few good posts I've seen floating around about how even though he's a young white male, Charlie Hunnam's Raleigh Beckett isn't really the typical young white male lead at all -- that he listens, cares, helps other people in a way you don't usually see a lead do in this kind of movie. That relates a bit to what I want to talk about -- Raleigh's loss of his brother Yancy, and what it must be like for all the Rangers who drift together and share so much in the mental space they inhabit once neurally linked.
When we first see him, Raleigh's so excited about the chance to kick kaiju ass. They are clearly in a barracks or bunker of some kind, and we know this is life during wartime. They establish the relationship that Raleigh's the young puppy and Yancy is the older, more grounded brother. But they both disobey a direct order from Stacker Pentecost about saving the fishing boat, and that may be partly what gets Yancy killed by the kaiju and nearly kills Raleigh. The first time I saw this, I felt a really surprising sadness, but the second time I saw it, I actually cried at the scene where Raleigh brings the crippled Jaeger to the shore and collapses.
Growing up as a twin is sometimes a really weird thing -- just as I have no idea what it's like to be a single-birth person, most people don't understand what it's like to be a twin. They have a lot of media-fed ideas: that we all are mind-melded, that we can have, like, private languages or communicate with each other telepathically, that we marry partners who are exactly the same as our twin's partner, and so on. It's always kind of driven me nuts, because twins are a diverse group and not all of us are soul-bonded with our twin, you know?
However, the connection we have is undeniable, and it is usually a lot more intense than for normal siblings. You do grow up realizing that a lot of who you are is pretty much the same as who your twin is. Some of us like that, and some of us don't. But when you lose your twin, it's ... undescribably painful. It feels like you have had some of yourself ripped away. One of the most common problems twins who've lost their sibling experience is not knowing who they are anymore -- am I still a twin? Am I the person I always thought I was? When my sister died, a lot of my own character changed dramatically, and it took me many years to realize that some of those changes were because that aspect of my personality was found in my sister, and she was gone...and so was that part of me. Most of us deal with a horrible depression after we lose our twin; I met many twins afterward who thought constantly of suicide, and I admit I think about it a lot too. Our pictures of the future are changed drastically and we have a hard time integrating our new status into our expectations for the future.
All of that shows in the way Raleigh changes after he loses his brother. Because they were connected in the drift, they shared more of themselves than any normal brothers would. They know each other's feelings, thoughts, and they're bonded in a really unusual way. Having Yancy torn from him when he was in Raleigh's mind would be unspeakably cruel. It would be that way with any pilot torn from his or her co-pilot in the drift, but the fact of them being related and already loving and admiring and respecting each other would increase the horror of his loss exponentially.
The movie did this unbelievably well. I felt all the shock and pain of losing my sister in the scene where he stumbles onto land in Alaska. It was agonizing. And I really didn't expect to find that in a monster movie, not at all. So much of the criticism of the movie centers on the cardboard characters and crappy dialog; I really disagree with this, because cardboard characters do not evoke such an intense response from an audience member. Raleigh stumbles through his life afterward, working on the wall, clearly not with any focus, and he's probably had a lot of time to try to move beyond the incredible suffering having his brother ripped away from him would bring about. But he doesn't seem all that healed when Stacker asks him to come back, and the movie does a damn good job of showing why he doesn't want to have that kind of pain again.
When he gets to the Hong Kong shatterdome, you can see him instantly connect to Mako -- he doesn't get annoyed when she critically assesses his character; instead he tells her that combat is different, and you can't make assumptions. You can see the pain that's still in him when he explains that, probably remembering their decision to try to save the fishing boat, but rather than being your typical man-pain-having character who acts out with macho posturing or sarcastic humor, Raleigh deals with it by getting back in the saddle, by connecting to Mako, by trying to help humanity make one last stand against the kaiju.
It's already an incredibly heroic and selfless act to be a Ranger and fight kaiju -- all of those teams in the shatterdome are badasses, and you'd have to be to do such a crazy job. But for Raleigh to take that chance and face that kind of unspeakable loss again once he's back in a Jaeger is beyond heroic. And he's nothing like any other guy we see in these kinds of things -- he talks about his pain to Stacker in Alaska, and is clearly completely besotted with Mako, not in a romantic way, but in a way that speaks to his need for connecting to someone. He sees someone who clearly is going to get it -- she's had her own losses, and Raleigh can spot that a mile away. Pain recognizes pain.
This affected me way more strongly than I expected. Especially because it's Raleigh's pain that puts Mako and everyone else in danger during their trial run -- his memories of Yancy being ripped from him are what makes the connection falter, and then Mako begins chasing the RABIT. One of the things I heard often from the partners of "twinless twins" in support groups was that they knew that as much as they mattered to their loved one, they could never have the connection that they'd had with their twin -- even some of the kids seemed to say that they knew their own parent loved them more than almost anything in the world, but that nothing would ever compare to how they felt about their twin.
Nothing's ever going to replace Yancy for Raleigh. As connected as he'll be to Mako, it's still going to be different. But what a risk he takes, anyway -- knowing just how terrible it can be, yet still willing to jump into the neural handshake with someone anyway. His support of her never wavers, even after the disaster with the trial run. He's not a silent, square-jawed, shoot 'em up kind of guy; he's caring and supportive and desperate to connect to someone.
As well, the Hansens have a unique connection because they're father and son. I've seen a lot of people write about how Chuck's so fucked up because he sees his dad boinking his mom all the time in the drift, but honestly, I don't believe that's what happens. It's really clear that the drift is fragments and feelings -- we see it more than a few times. The only long, clear memory we see in the drift is Mako's, and that's only once she chases the RABIT. Herc's been piloting Jaegers since the very beginning of the program, and has probably drifted with many different people. before pairing with his son. He's going to be controlled enough that he won't bring traumatizing things into the drift; Stacker says at the end that "he brings nothing into the drift" and we have no reason to believe that Herc isn't capable of the same thing. Herc, on the other hand, probably gets more than his fair share of Chuck's resentment for not saving his mom (this comes from the novelization, I guess), or flashes of traumatizing memories from his childhood in a world ravaged by war with genocidal alien monsters.
Losing a kid would be horrible enough, but imagine the kind of pain Herc has to endure at the end of the movie -- the son he has connected with over and over, mind-melded with, not to mention losing his best friend. I have this vision of the universe where later, Raleigh and Herc grow really close, sharing their pain, helping each other heal. One of the things that has always been hardest for me in handling my sister's death is that very few people want to hear about it, and even vanishingly fewer can even begin to grasp what I feel. It's hard to explain when you're sort of entwined with another person's soul what that feels like to lose it. The loss that Raleigh has had to endure alone, and that Herc has just had at the end of the movie, were incredibly on point for me. I had no expectation that I would see something like that in an action blockbuster summer movie.
That's what makes me so angry and disappointed about the dialog around the movie. It's got an intense emotional core, all these people dealing with loss and uncertainty and soul-crushing pain. To just dismiss it is to ignore how much Raleigh and Stacker and Herc and the others have sacrificed. I was actually glad that at least the Wei triplets went together, because I couldn't bear to think of them losing one of their siblings. And what would it be like for a married couple, like the Kaidonovskys in Cherno Alpha? Talk about an intense riff on the idea of soul mates in a marriage.
I don't usually get that teary at movies, certainly not at big action flicks. But this is probably the first time I've ever seen anyone approach just how emotionally intense it is to bond with someone far beyond our normal capabilities, and to lose them. For me, Raleigh is a true hero not because he's a young white American male, but because he has faced unspeakable loss and rebounded to save the world in spite of it all. And that he championed the one person he knew could help him do that, a character who would usually be relegated to the background girlfriend who needed to be rescued role. Mako is the one who rescues Raleigh in the end, and by drifting together, they save the world.
There have been a few good posts I've seen floating around about how even though he's a young white male, Charlie Hunnam's Raleigh Beckett isn't really the typical young white male lead at all -- that he listens, cares, helps other people in a way you don't usually see a lead do in this kind of movie. That relates a bit to what I want to talk about -- Raleigh's loss of his brother Yancy, and what it must be like for all the Rangers who drift together and share so much in the mental space they inhabit once neurally linked.
When we first see him, Raleigh's so excited about the chance to kick kaiju ass. They are clearly in a barracks or bunker of some kind, and we know this is life during wartime. They establish the relationship that Raleigh's the young puppy and Yancy is the older, more grounded brother. But they both disobey a direct order from Stacker Pentecost about saving the fishing boat, and that may be partly what gets Yancy killed by the kaiju and nearly kills Raleigh. The first time I saw this, I felt a really surprising sadness, but the second time I saw it, I actually cried at the scene where Raleigh brings the crippled Jaeger to the shore and collapses.
Growing up as a twin is sometimes a really weird thing -- just as I have no idea what it's like to be a single-birth person, most people don't understand what it's like to be a twin. They have a lot of media-fed ideas: that we all are mind-melded, that we can have, like, private languages or communicate with each other telepathically, that we marry partners who are exactly the same as our twin's partner, and so on. It's always kind of driven me nuts, because twins are a diverse group and not all of us are soul-bonded with our twin, you know?
However, the connection we have is undeniable, and it is usually a lot more intense than for normal siblings. You do grow up realizing that a lot of who you are is pretty much the same as who your twin is. Some of us like that, and some of us don't. But when you lose your twin, it's ... undescribably painful. It feels like you have had some of yourself ripped away. One of the most common problems twins who've lost their sibling experience is not knowing who they are anymore -- am I still a twin? Am I the person I always thought I was? When my sister died, a lot of my own character changed dramatically, and it took me many years to realize that some of those changes were because that aspect of my personality was found in my sister, and she was gone...and so was that part of me. Most of us deal with a horrible depression after we lose our twin; I met many twins afterward who thought constantly of suicide, and I admit I think about it a lot too. Our pictures of the future are changed drastically and we have a hard time integrating our new status into our expectations for the future.
All of that shows in the way Raleigh changes after he loses his brother. Because they were connected in the drift, they shared more of themselves than any normal brothers would. They know each other's feelings, thoughts, and they're bonded in a really unusual way. Having Yancy torn from him when he was in Raleigh's mind would be unspeakably cruel. It would be that way with any pilot torn from his or her co-pilot in the drift, but the fact of them being related and already loving and admiring and respecting each other would increase the horror of his loss exponentially.
The movie did this unbelievably well. I felt all the shock and pain of losing my sister in the scene where he stumbles onto land in Alaska. It was agonizing. And I really didn't expect to find that in a monster movie, not at all. So much of the criticism of the movie centers on the cardboard characters and crappy dialog; I really disagree with this, because cardboard characters do not evoke such an intense response from an audience member. Raleigh stumbles through his life afterward, working on the wall, clearly not with any focus, and he's probably had a lot of time to try to move beyond the incredible suffering having his brother ripped away from him would bring about. But he doesn't seem all that healed when Stacker asks him to come back, and the movie does a damn good job of showing why he doesn't want to have that kind of pain again.
When he gets to the Hong Kong shatterdome, you can see him instantly connect to Mako -- he doesn't get annoyed when she critically assesses his character; instead he tells her that combat is different, and you can't make assumptions. You can see the pain that's still in him when he explains that, probably remembering their decision to try to save the fishing boat, but rather than being your typical man-pain-having character who acts out with macho posturing or sarcastic humor, Raleigh deals with it by getting back in the saddle, by connecting to Mako, by trying to help humanity make one last stand against the kaiju.
It's already an incredibly heroic and selfless act to be a Ranger and fight kaiju -- all of those teams in the shatterdome are badasses, and you'd have to be to do such a crazy job. But for Raleigh to take that chance and face that kind of unspeakable loss again once he's back in a Jaeger is beyond heroic. And he's nothing like any other guy we see in these kinds of things -- he talks about his pain to Stacker in Alaska, and is clearly completely besotted with Mako, not in a romantic way, but in a way that speaks to his need for connecting to someone. He sees someone who clearly is going to get it -- she's had her own losses, and Raleigh can spot that a mile away. Pain recognizes pain.
This affected me way more strongly than I expected. Especially because it's Raleigh's pain that puts Mako and everyone else in danger during their trial run -- his memories of Yancy being ripped from him are what makes the connection falter, and then Mako begins chasing the RABIT. One of the things I heard often from the partners of "twinless twins" in support groups was that they knew that as much as they mattered to their loved one, they could never have the connection that they'd had with their twin -- even some of the kids seemed to say that they knew their own parent loved them more than almost anything in the world, but that nothing would ever compare to how they felt about their twin.
Nothing's ever going to replace Yancy for Raleigh. As connected as he'll be to Mako, it's still going to be different. But what a risk he takes, anyway -- knowing just how terrible it can be, yet still willing to jump into the neural handshake with someone anyway. His support of her never wavers, even after the disaster with the trial run. He's not a silent, square-jawed, shoot 'em up kind of guy; he's caring and supportive and desperate to connect to someone.
As well, the Hansens have a unique connection because they're father and son. I've seen a lot of people write about how Chuck's so fucked up because he sees his dad boinking his mom all the time in the drift, but honestly, I don't believe that's what happens. It's really clear that the drift is fragments and feelings -- we see it more than a few times. The only long, clear memory we see in the drift is Mako's, and that's only once she chases the RABIT. Herc's been piloting Jaegers since the very beginning of the program, and has probably drifted with many different people. before pairing with his son. He's going to be controlled enough that he won't bring traumatizing things into the drift; Stacker says at the end that "he brings nothing into the drift" and we have no reason to believe that Herc isn't capable of the same thing. Herc, on the other hand, probably gets more than his fair share of Chuck's resentment for not saving his mom (this comes from the novelization, I guess), or flashes of traumatizing memories from his childhood in a world ravaged by war with genocidal alien monsters.
Losing a kid would be horrible enough, but imagine the kind of pain Herc has to endure at the end of the movie -- the son he has connected with over and over, mind-melded with, not to mention losing his best friend. I have this vision of the universe where later, Raleigh and Herc grow really close, sharing their pain, helping each other heal. One of the things that has always been hardest for me in handling my sister's death is that very few people want to hear about it, and even vanishingly fewer can even begin to grasp what I feel. It's hard to explain when you're sort of entwined with another person's soul what that feels like to lose it. The loss that Raleigh has had to endure alone, and that Herc has just had at the end of the movie, were incredibly on point for me. I had no expectation that I would see something like that in an action blockbuster summer movie.
That's what makes me so angry and disappointed about the dialog around the movie. It's got an intense emotional core, all these people dealing with loss and uncertainty and soul-crushing pain. To just dismiss it is to ignore how much Raleigh and Stacker and Herc and the others have sacrificed. I was actually glad that at least the Wei triplets went together, because I couldn't bear to think of them losing one of their siblings. And what would it be like for a married couple, like the Kaidonovskys in Cherno Alpha? Talk about an intense riff on the idea of soul mates in a marriage.
I don't usually get that teary at movies, certainly not at big action flicks. But this is probably the first time I've ever seen anyone approach just how emotionally intense it is to bond with someone far beyond our normal capabilities, and to lose them. For me, Raleigh is a true hero not because he's a young white American male, but because he has faced unspeakable loss and rebounded to save the world in spite of it all. And that he championed the one person he knew could help him do that, a character who would usually be relegated to the background girlfriend who needed to be rescued role. Mako is the one who rescues Raleigh in the end, and by drifting together, they save the world.