https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=elfZprmMMIc
Thank you to Skillshare for sponsoring this video. The clash of giant men and monsters is a powerful image that has appeared in many religion, mythology and folktale throughout the ancient world. And it’s a concept that in our secular modern world continues to live on in a somewhat different form. Guillermo del Toro’s Pacific Rim is one of those manifestations, and although it very consciously embraces the silliness of the genre, it nonetheless manages to transcend the cliché by hinting at its very deep symbolic patterns of society and the individual. Of how a world or a center can come both to be destroyed and reborn on the edge or the rim of the world. To begin with, the story gives us a mythological version of the modern world. Deep in the Pacific Ocean appears a rift to a dark dimension of giant monsters who erupt out of the water as out of primordial chaos. The fact that the rift manifests in the Pacific Ocean is not arbitrary, because according to how we have mapped and organized the world, even though the world is a globe, it is nonetheless there, in the Pacific Ocean, that the rim of the world is located, where east becomes west, where time jumps from one day to another, a rift in space imaged as the gate of Hades, out of which chaos and death erupts. And so following the analogy, the edge, the rim of the world in terms of space, is also where appears the possible end of the world as cataclysmic destruction of all civilization. That was a preview of this month’s movie interpretation, Pacific Rim, which I did in collaboration with Thomas from the Storytellers channel. It’s worth going to check out their channel to see the full video, but also to see their other videos. They have a lot of interesting movie interpretations, many of them using some pretty powerful symbolic structures as well, based on on Jordan Peterson’s interpretations and my interpretation, so it’s worth checking that out. For those of you near South Carolina, this week on Thursday, March 15th at 7 p.m., I will be at Furman University in Greenville, South Carolina, and I’ll be giving a talk there called Zombies vs. Icons, Art, Monsters, and the Apocalypse. I did not choose this title, but it’ll be an expanded version of the zombies talk that I gave last year, and so if you’re near there, it would be great to meet you. So hopefully you’ll see you there, and enjoy the Pacific Rim video of this month. Next month will probably be The Matrix.