Posts tagged: symbolism
A surprising number of commentators seem to think Pacific Rim is a dumb movie. Tonight, I explain why it’s not dumb at all. It just uses a different type of intelligence than we’re used to analyzing: a visual intelligence.
I want to talk about Pacific Rim, and why it is not, as I’ve seen a frustrating number of commentators claim, a “dumb” movie, or a movie that “knows that it’s dumb,” or anything like that, but first I want to talk about my girlfriend, and you’re going to let me because you’ve already clicked through and given me the pageview, so you may as well stick around. Besides, I think it will help provide a reference point for some of the ideas I’m talking about.
Alright?
Let’s talk about my girlfriend.
My girlfriend Sara (who has given me the okay to talk about her case, in the name of supporting this movie that she’s fallen head over heels in love with) has a learning disability. I’m honestly not sure what the clinical name for it is (if it has one), but one of the things she has trouble with is processing language on a non-literal level. In other words, metaphors, figures of speech, and some humor that depends on incongruities, sort of doesn’t interface quite right with her brain.
However, there’s no “metaphor” sector of the brain. There’s nothing that interprets figurative information across media. There’s brainmatter that deals with language… and brainmatter that deals with visuals.
So, while my girlfriend struggles with linguistic metaphor, she takes to visual metaphor like a fish takes to water. I have to admit, sometimes she gets comics or movies, for example, in ways that I don’t, despite my training in media. She can look at a weird background motif in a Manga panel and immediately list off for me its significance, or pick out recurring color schemes used to signify something about a particular character, or decipher wordless sequences that I find confusing or disorienting and (embarrassingly) explain them back to me like it’s no big thing and I’m kinda silly for not getting it.
This is obviously fascinating to me as a student of media and how it interfaces with the human mind. We have very different ways of reacting to media, sometimes, because I tend to struggle when it comes to remembering faces, whereas she struggles with following complex, fast-paced dialogue (or, to put it another way, I excel at analyzing spoken/written language and she excels at analyzing visual language). To some extent, then, it’s tempting to look at this as a cool quirk and study it in the abstract as two equally viable ways of exploring media.