Pacific Rim: Reception, Readings, and Authority

Genre and auteurship are frequently seen to be incompatible. Where genre has its own “supervisory” function necessitating some adherence to convention through the repetition of significant elements, auteurship is understood to be about originality, the director marking out unique characteristics identifiable as patterns from one film to the next (Cook and Bermink, 1999, 137–38). When auteurs take on genre films, they are expected to reinvent and repackage them so that they conform to certain art-house conventions.1 When auteurs do reinvent and repackage, the use of genre becomes part of a coherent career path. Guillermo del Toro’s Pacific Rim (2013) destabilizes this approach because it is a genre film that does not seemingly reinvent genre, and, as a result, a close reading demands a reconsideration of the relationship between genre and auteurism. This chapter examines Pacific Rim as a challenge to dominant theoretical approaches to both genre studies and auteurism and proposes that del Toro should be read as a “geek auteur.”