I. THE INFAMOUS BILLY THE KID
His name was Billy, and he would kick the shit out of me twice a week.
It would happen on Wednesdays and Fridays; the days that Billy’s Vo-Tech bus would drop him off at our neighborhood corner roughly twenty to thirty minutes before my black and yellow elementary school tube would deposit me on the very same spot. I was eleven and he was fourteen, smoking cigarettes while he sat on the big green generator box that routed power to the entirety of our quaint little suburban community*. The beatings had gone on for a few months and had become such a regular fixture in my weekly schedule that I had even established a set routine when these two dreaded days of the week arrived. Hooking my thumbs in the loops of my Jansport, I would shuffle off of the bus and get ten paces away, watching him slide off of the box in my peripheral as the vehicle’s engine growled and sent the rest of the kids off to their (hopefully) safe homes.
“Hey butt boy, you ready to fuckin’ die?”
The greeting was always the same, more than likely because Billy was too goddamn stupid to think of anything else; his brain constantly overwhelmed with the complex mechanisms of whatever trade he was studying two days a week at the “school for screws”**. I would look up and see my house in the distance, knowing that it was too far to run to. I had tried this before and had found out just how fast Billy was — his sinewy, 145 pound frame traveling like a wolf and gaining on my slightly oafish, lumbering gait. Billy had then wrestled me to the ground and given me two black eyes instead of one that fast paced Friday afternoon before removing the butterfly knife from his tattered jeans and placing its blade just below my eye, warning me that if I ever made him chase me again, I was going to be “wearing a faggot pink patch” for the rest of my life.
So I turned as I always did and faced Billy head on. And, like lightning, the first two blows hit me in the face, knocking me backward and making me see stars dotting the trees that towered over me. I would swing back, as I always did, but my meaty paws didn’t deliver the precise impact his did, and the resistance just seemed to fuel Billy’s violence as he would grab me by the collar and strike me until I found myself on the pavement, balling up into the fetal position as he kicked me again and again. This would go on until he either got tired or a passing car presented itself, causing Billy to dash off in any direction he chose while one of my neighbors peeled me off of the pavement.
In my dreams, Billy became a monster; a kind of snaggle-toothed demon that hunted me, again and again. Chasing me through the chasms of my subconsciousness, he would catch and then mercilessly pummel me and sometimes pluck out my eyes with that knife of his, until I woke up in a cold sweat, the glow in the dark X-Files poster that hung over my bed the only thing I could stare at to calm myself down.
My parents had asked me on numerous occasions where the shiners had come from, and once I told them the truth we immediately marched over to Billy’s home and our mothers sat down over tea and discussed how “this wasn’t going to happen anymore”. But the following Wednesday, Billy would be waiting for me, a fresh Camel hanging from his lip as he taunted me for “hiding behind my mom’s skirt” and then made sure I felt the extra kicks while I was on the pavement, each punctuated with a different homophobic slur and/or mucus loaded lugie.
But a savior presented itself in the form of Chris, a South Jersey Italian kid whose father was an Atlantic City casino dealer and would regale us with tales about “made guys” while teaching my father how to make “gravy”. Chris had been stopping by one afternoon when I staggered home, sporting two fresh bruises and a bloody lip. Concerned, this muscled stallion of a sixteen-year-old listened to my story and promised that he’d be there the following Friday to put an end to Billy’s seemingly endless reign of terror. And when my bus pulled to a halt at the end of that business week, Chris was waiting in his IROC. I remember this overwhelming sense of relief that came over me as I laid eyes on that fire red Camaro. My hero, my champion, my bodyguard; Billy was going to finally going to pay the price for messing with me.
“You been picking on my boy here?”
Billy didn’t even respond when faced with the towering, olive skinned athlete. He simply flicked his cigarette into the adjacent yard and rolled the sleeves of his Tool concert t-shirt up, waiting patiently for Chris to make the first move. And once Chris charged, my eyes became saucers and jaw dropped, as Billy proceeded to dismantle the bigger boy with an ease and fluidity not yet seen in the Wednesday and Friday caveman like beatings he doled out. At the end, Chris was in the same position I usually found myself in, clutching the curb and spitting blood onto the layer of wax the local skateboarders applied to allow for “grinding”.
And then the monster came for me, and all of my hope died on that sunny Friday afternoon.
II. THE SHARED PAIN OF ORPHANED JAEGER PILOTS
***Commence Spoilers for PACIFIC RIM***
PACIFIC RIM begins at “the edge of mankind’s hope”. Giant beasts known as kaiju have risen from an opening called “The Breach” in the middle of the Pacific, pounding their way onto the soil of our cities and leaving thousands dead in their wake. While conventional military defenses do work, it can take days for mere tanks and fighter jets to take down a kaiju, during which time they can level an entire metropolis. In order to defend the world, nations unite to create the “Jaeger Program”; massive, robotic monstrosities piloted by not one, but two human beings who connect minds via “The Drift”, a melding mechanism that syncs the two into mental harmony and allows them to even share memories.
One pair of such pilots are Raleigh and Yancy Becket (Charlie Hunnam and Diego Klattenhoff), orphan brothers who control the famed mech, Gipsy Danger. Together, they have conquered numerous kaiju and become rock stars in the public eye. But to them, fighting off ocean bound beasties isn’t about fame or fortune or glory, but protecting the innocents in the cities the demons are hell bent on massacring. During a battle with a Level Three kaiju (code named “Knife Head”), Yancy is ripped from the mech, his mind still melded with his brother’s, thus transferring every agonizing detail of his final moments onto his Raleigh’s psyche.
Raleigh is left a broken man, and the Jaeger Program is dismantled in favor of building gigantic walls around the cities in the hope of stopping the kaiju from entering. For five years, Raleigh makes a living going from job to job, helping to construct these ramparts while watching daily news footage of the monsters knocking them down with only the slightest of effort. Instead of standing up to the monsters that are at their doors, society instead thinks that they can insulate themselves from the problem and hope that eventually it’ll get better.
But it doesn’t get better. The kaiju grow in size and strength, leading to the devastation of such cities as Tokyo, where little Mako Mori (Rinko Kikuchi) watches as her mother and father are massacred and left amongst the rubble. She cowers behind a dumpster in an alley as the monster hunts for her, hoping to add to its tally of death and destruction. Out of the sky comes a mech, which proceeds to stand for little Mako and all others who have been oppressed by this monstrosity, bringing the beast to its knees. Its pilot, the leader of the Jaeger program named Stacker Pentecost (Idris Elba), emerges from the machine and takes young Mako under his wing, promising to protect her for the rest of his days.
Stacker also recruits Raleigh back into the program, hoping to make one last stand against the kaiju before the Jaegers are lost forever. The only problem is that Raleigh needs to find a co-pilot who is “Drift Compatible”; a perfect mental match-up to help dust Gipsy Danger off and have her back battling humanity’s greatest threat. During the tryouts, it turns out that Mako is Raleigh’s match, and the two bond as they discover each other’s shared loss and pain.
The loss of protector figures to marauding forces is the central crux to Mako and Raleigh’s bond. Where Raleigh lost his “big brother” (a familial bond that often times is the very representation of “protection”) Mako lost her mother and father. And while Mako is given a surrogate father in the form of Stacker Pentecost, she still feels an overt need to avenge those who have been taken from her by the kaiju. It’s the very reason Pentecost won’t allow her to audition to be Raleigh’s partner at first; taking an overwhelming need for vengeance into “The Drift” can disrupt the pilots’ control of their ship, thus leading to full-scale catastrophes.
Another one of the pilots in PACIFIC RIM faces a similar familial loss near the end. Herc and Chuck Hansen (Max Martini and Robert Kazinsky) are a father and son piloting team who, during the defense of Hong Kong, are split when Herc badly injures his right arm. When a “double event” (two kaijus rising from “The Breach” at once) presents itself, Chuck is forced to enter into the ocean with Stacker***, a man he’s not even sure that he is “Drift Compatible” with. But he is forced to link with this strange mind and carry out the Jaeger Program’s final mission, where a nuclear warhead is to be detonated inside of the “The Breach”, sealing off the opening forever and saving the world from the invading, oppressive forces.
During the course of PACIFIC RIM, Chuck is shown to be an egotistical hothead, challenging Raleigh’s re-entry into the program on the basis that he’s a “has been”; the death of his brother at the hands of the kaiju too great to overcome. In the end, without the aid of his father’s mind, Chuck is asked to essentially grow up and become the man he was always supposed to be. He has to put his petty, childish grievances away and face the evil force that took both his father and Raleigh’s brother away. And to add to that theme of “maturation”, he has to trust the “has been” and the “rookie” on not only one, but two different occasions as they do battle with the beasts from beneath.
The walls that are favored by the United Nations over the Jaegers could also be seen as an interesting critique on the “It Gets Better” mantra pushed on the oppressed by the mainstream media****. The argument often includes a warning to those being bullied that fighting back against their persecutor will “only lower you to their level”. In PACIFIC RIM, the battle against the world bullies is seen as lost, and a policy of insulation is adopted in its place. The government thinks that maybe, if they wall themselves off, the kaiju will simply stop attacking out of frustration and go away. But the news broadcasts Raleigh witnesses show that it’s not just going to “get better”, as the monsters are simply going to barrel their way through the wall and keep raining down terror on those that they want to destroy.
It is at this point that not only three of the central characters, but the world has lost a “guardian” to the “bullies” that are forcing their will upon it. The loss of the Jaegers now define how society functions. But Stacker Pentecost and the pilots he inducts into the Jaeger Program know that they have to face the monsters head on to get any kind of closure. In the world of PACIFIC RIM, you cannot hide from the “monsters that are at your door”. You have to face them, or they’re going to keep coming, threating to bring an apocalypse to you and everyone you love. Through sheer bravery and teamwork, the members of the Jaeger program say “no more” to the kaiju, and ensure that the big bad beasts no longer bring pain and suffering to their world.
In short, by standing up to bullies, they become heroes.
III. THE UNITY OF THE OPPRESSED
It turned out I wasn’t alone.
That summer, Billy went away to…somewhere, leaving me to enjoy the season in peace. One day, while skateboarding on that very same curb Chris had spat blood onto, I met Adam, another eleven-year-old who lived across the street and whose existence was totally unknown to me until that moment. We bonded fast and spent the rest of that summer listening to Sonic Youth records, swimming in his pool and stealing Marlboros from his big brother Jason’s car. It was one of those insta-friendships that you only experience as a child, and whose simplicity is yearned for as an adult.
One night, Adam told me that Billy had been terrorizing him in damn near the same exact fashion he had been me. It had gotten so bad that Adam’s mom didn’t even let him ride the bus anymore, and instead drove him to school an hour early, as she had to be at work just around the time the bus would’ve been dropping him off. Adam told me that there had been nights, when his mom and dad were gone, that Billy had dropped by the house and tried to get him outside and fight, threatening to even break his windows with rocks and come barging inside. Adam had been terrified and even threatened to call the cops before Billy finally disappeared into the night.
It wasn’t until Adam was walking home one night alone after a sweaty skate session that Billy hit him with a lacrosse stick. He had broken his nose and bruised both of his cheeks so deep that Adam had to suck Shamrock Shakes through a straw for two weeks straight. When I told him about Chris and the Wendsday and Friday ritual, he seemed to be just as relieved as I was to finally have found someone to share this pain with.
And then the training began. We saved our money and bought boxing gloves, the cheap plastic kind that you find on the shelves at Modell’s and hurt your hands after two or three sessions of punching the wall. We asked Jason to show us a “thing or two” when it came to fighting, and he happily obliged, sitting in the corner of Adam’s unfinished basement, puffing on a joint while we took turns beating on sand bags he brought home from his job at the local nursery. We jumped rope and ran around the neighborhood, both shedding weight and comparing muscles after rounds of push-ups; suburban Rocky Balboas with LA Lights on our feet.
We knew we’d have to wait for the school year to test out our newfound fighting skills, when Billy would be waiting for me to get off of that bus. It took some serious convincing, but Adam’s mom finally gave in, not knowing the vigilance we had planned for that first Wednesday after school. And when the bus pulled to a halt, Billy was indeed waiting for us, grinning with a cigarette between his lips and a fresh Cannibal Corpse tee.
“Faggot one and faggot two. Must be my lucky day.”
Adam and I kept walking as if the bully weren’t even there. I heard his footsteps pound the pavement and then his hand grab my bag, whipping me around so that he could deliver the first blow of the new school year to my chin. But Adam cut him short, delivering three blows to Billy’s face in quick succession, bloodying his lip and nose. I’ll never forget the look on his face, either; one of sheer surprise. There was no way that this could be happening to him, and certainly not at the hands of these two little shits.
But our punches didn’t stop. Adam and I both took turns wailing on Billy until he sniveled and cried and ran off for the woods that bordered our development. And after that day, we never saw him sitting on that green generator box ever again. The walk home became filled with talks about the latest Pearl Jam album or whether or not HALLOWEEN THREE actually counted as a HALLOWEEN movie, not just senseless, fear mongering violence.
We didn’t have a mech, or swords or plasma cannons, just a belief in each other and that we were stronger as a team than we were as individuals. When we were together, no monster could take us down, no matter how big or ugly or horrible they were. And in discovering this shared strength, we recognized that we were worthy of respect not only from others, but from ourselves as well. Because you can’t run from evil, and you can’t hide either, hoping that it won’t break down the walls you’ve built to keep it out.
You have to stand up and punch it square in the fucking face.
*That’s the kicker to me, even now at thirty years old. This kid would FUCKING WAIT for me. He took serious pleasure in the act.
**A colorful moniker me and my other nerdy, music and movie obsessed friends gave to Vo-Tech that, for the life of me, I can’t remember the genesis of.
***You could also argue that Stacker himself has been indirectly effected by “bullying”, as his health has been put in jeopardy due to the earliest days of the Jaeger Program, where he was exposed to radiation while fighting the kaiju.
****A term I generally hate but think rather applicable here.