Welcome to the Shatterdome, or Why I Love Pacific Rim, POCA, and the Membership Drive

It's a good thing I get called anti-intellectual so often; I'm used to it, so I'm not too embarrassed to tell you that I've seen Pacific Rim. Twice. Yes, I know it's a ridiculously goofy movie. I love it anyway. I love it because it reminds me of POCA.

If you haven't seen it, I'll try not to spoil it for you, which should be pretty easy because it doesn't have much of a plot. Here's the Wikipedia summary:

    “The film is set in the 2020s, when Earth is at war with the Kaijus, colossal monsters which have emerged from an interdimensional portal on the floor of the Pacific Ocean. To combat the monsters, humanity unites to create the Jaegers: gigantic humanoid mecha, each controlled by two pilots whose minds are joined by a neural bridge. Focusing on the war's later days, the story follows Raleigh Becket, a washed-up Jaeger pilot called out of retirement and teamed with rookie pilot Mako Mori as part of a last-ditch effort to defeat the Kaijus.”

Or, as one fan put it in The Truth Behind Pacific Rim:

    Scene: We skip all the mysterious reveals and discovery and go straight to the White House War Room. Because a movie about giant robot suits using supertankers as baseball bats does not screw around. Or have any other kind of room.

    Colonel Kickass: Mr President, we’ve found a portal to a hostile alien world and they’re already attacking us with giant monsters.

    President Explosion: Sweet!

    Colonel: I know, right?

    President: Get me the hotline to whatever countries we’re at war with right now. We’ve got to team up to fight this.

    Colonel: Actually, every nation in the world has already declared a total truce and alliance because we finally have something worth fighting now. Every single declaration also included the word “Awesome” in their native language.

You get the idea. But if you really want to humor me, you can watch the opening sequence. Oh, come on — it's only 3 minutes, and it is, indeed, awesome. And if you do watch it, you'll see the first thing I loved about this movie: it might be about giant monsters fighting giant robots, but it's not about winning. It's about what happens when you're NOT winning, even though you've built gigantic robots that can punch monsters in the face — and you used to be winning.

The longer I practice acupuncture and the longer I work for a social business, the more I learn about not winning. And it's often not much fun to learn this in a culture that thinks the point of doing anything is to win– to win at health, to win at capitalism. Most of my patients aren't doing that and neither am I.

A lot of the movie takes place after the Jaegers, the coolest 100-foot tall robots ever, have begun to lose their effectiveness against the Kaiju, and the powers that be have given up on them. The Jaeger program has had its funding cut. Unfortunately the defenses that have replaced it aren't working out so well either. The Shatterdome is where the last remaining Jaegers are housed by the few diehards who still believe in them, for the purpose of a final, desperate effort to save humanity from becoming a Kaiju buffet. The Shatterdome is run by a bunch of damaged people; it's big and ugly; in other words, other than the presence of giant robots, it's a lot like a community acupuncture clinic.

Before POCA, I don't think I would've liked this movie this much. I would've written it off as a boy thing. I would've thought I, a girl, didn't love giant robots. But watching it now, the jaegers reminded me of POCA: an unlikely solution to an ugly problem, intricately made up of LOTS of moving parts, dependent on teamwork to function, and most of all, trying to do something big. So of course I love jaegers; I helped build one.

Apparently the director of Pacific Rim, Guillermo Del Toro, wanted to make an earnest adventure story as opposed to a dark, cynical summer blockbuster. I watched an interview with him in which he described the essence of the kaiju genre as being about love — the point of a monster movie is that you really love the monster. Pacific Rim is about love but it's also about sheer scale. It's about BIG THINGS (OK, it's about big things punching each other in the face).

Being earnest and believing in big things — let alone trying to build them, in this culture — is goofy.

But also, awesome. Because cynicism is easy. Cynicism is safe. Vowing to go big or go extinct, on the other hand, takes guts.

And not to spoil the ending or anything, but it turns out that the key to humanity not getting eaten is learning how to see the situation from the kaiju's perspective, which is in itself a risky, nerve-wracking effort. In the movie this involves fun things like kaiju brains seething in huge jars and humans having serious nosebleeds, but it seems pretty clear that it's really just about empathy.

Which brings me to our Membership Drive. You guys, it looks like we added at least 173 new patient members in October, which means we now have 147 more patient members than punks. It was not very long ago that a lot of us thought that the object of having patient members  join a cooperative THAT DOESN'T MAKE ANY MONEY, so that PEOPLE THEY DON'T EVEN KNOW can get affordable acupuncture, was a big, goofy, impossible goal. But we did it anyway.

And it's awesome.

Author: Lisa Rohleder, L.Ac.