Find Me in the Drift: Pacific Rim, Guillermo del Toro, and Everlasting Love

 by Sienna Axe

*This article contains spoilers for Pacific Rim and Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio!*

Every so often, a piece of media comes out that completely changes the game. Something that not only fills in a gap in the English language, but that invents an entirely new concept that captures the public imagination. For example: Did you know that before The Bucket List (2007), there was no such thing as a bucket list? (Really, I promise! Look it up).

But of all the new things various pieces of media have given us, none of them, in my opinion, are quite so beautiful as Pacific Rim's (2013) drift compatibility.

Few people alive have as good a handle on love as Guillermo del Toro; it makes sense that he, out of everyone, would have handled something like drift compatibility (conceived by his co-writer Travis Beacham) with such grace. For the uninitiated, Pacific Rim is a film about humanity's fight against huge, dinosaur-esque sea monsters (Kaijus), and is best watched on the big screen (trust me on this one). In the film, humanity's weapons of choice are Jaegers, a series of monster-sized gundams that can only be controlled by a pair of pilots proven to be drift compatible—essentially, synced-up enough to undergo the mind-melding process necessary to move the Jaeger as if of one mind.

This looks different for every pair; in the film we see pairs of siblings, spouses, and mutually-annoyed coworkers, just to name a few. What they all have in common is that they flow well together: whether it's in working together or fighting with each other, they have something that makes them "click." What's more, they have an implicit level of trust in each other; in order for the drift to work, each pilot has to relax enough to allow the other to see all of their life's memories. This is why, when Pentecost (Idris Elba) dies, he tells his daughter, Mako (Rinko Kikuchi), that she can always "find [him] in the drift." Though he may be gone, she'll keep seeing him in her own memories as long as she's a pilot.

The drift ends up as this kind of esoteric connective tissue in Pacific Rim's world—a practical piece of weaponry, yes, but also a manifestation of both memory and connection. It's a physical-feeling place where copilots meet and grow to trust each other. It's a place, like memory, where life and love can continue after death. It's borderline spiritual!

Recently, I watched Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio (2022), the director's latest film, which is an absolute delight. Like Pacific Rim, it's a story about love and loss (and love and loss and love and loss over and over amen). In this version of the story, Geppetto (David Bradley) builds Pinocchio (Gregory Mann) out of grief for his late, 10-year-old son, Carlo (also Gregory Mann). The connective tissue in this film—and there very much is one—is not the drift, but wood. Carlo dies retrieving a pine cone from a church about to be bombed; Geppetto plants it near his grave and, once it grows into a tree, chops it down in a drunken haze to build Pinocchio. And wood is everywhere: In Pinocchio himself; in Alexandre Desplat's gorgeous score, performed only by wooden instruments; in the statue of a crucified Jesus Geppetto carves for the local church ("He's made of wood, too," Pinocchio says, gesturing to it, "Why do they like him and not me?"). There's a reason the film ends on a shot of a pine cone on a new tree, this one planted by the immortal Pinocchio to guard the graves of his friends and family. Life is a cycle; love is a cycle, too. Just as Geppetto building Pinocchio was his way of finding Carlo in the drift, Pinocchio can live out the rest of his endless life knowing he was loved—and knowing that, as Geppetto says: “when one life is lost, another must grow.”

I don't know if I really have a point here. If I had the words, I would get into the sweeping love of The Shape of Water, or the love that lives in the magical realism of Pan's Labyrinth. What del Toro understands about love is something few others do; something I can't even claim to. But I know that I've always loved to hear what he has to say about it, and I probably always will.