Searching for Transition: A Love Letter To Whatever It Is Charlie Day Is Doing In Pacific Rim

I'm still away recovering this week, but please check out this excellent freelance piece from Kat Albiston on the non-binary genius of mad scientists. Just in time for Halloween! — Em.

I think I thought I was a trans man. Just for a moment.

It was on my seventh watch of Pacific Rim. (Y’know, the Guillermo Del Toro movie from 2013 with giant robots that punch giant aliens. It went on to have a pretty poor sequel in 2018.) There’s a scene featuring Newton ‘Newt’ Geiszler, portrayed by Charlie Day, showing off his tattoos. Newt is a little pathetic. Kind of scrawny. He squawks when he’s excited and he’s confident that he is always correct. He runs into danger assfirst.

And he’s a mad scientist. Oh, sure, if you look up “canon” lists of mad scientists, you won’t find him there. But I would argue that anyone who fuses their brain with an alien hive mind for the greater good of humanity is at least a little mad.

Anyway! Newt’s showing off his tattoos. He has the monsters he’s studying inked all over his arms and chest. He’s also wearing those dorky little leather bracelets that people thought were cool at the time of the film’s release. But… I don’t know if his physical appearance is what gave me envy.

Newt had wits. He had smarts. He could be unabashed, confident, self-serving. Masculine. He boasted six PhDs and a beat up leather jacket. The science drew me in, the masculinity of Hollywood science. Run in, do whatever you need to do to serve your discipline, regardless of consequence. Build a machine made of garbage and mindmeld with an alien hivemind. Who cares about what’s going to happen once it’s all done?

Why I identified with Newt Geiszler so poignantly is much harder to pinpoint. It could be Day. He’s short enough to feel attainable as a trans-masc, and high pitched enough to sound a bit like a trans-masc. It could be his drive, but that doesn’t explain why he felt like the ultimate end goal for me in terms of presentation, existence, presence.

I’ve flirted with being anything but myself for years. I’ve lived through men and fitted myself into heads that weren’t my own. I hated my body regardless of the identity that inhabited it, so I tried really hard to see a future where I was a boy. I browsed websites that sold binders, painted fake facial hair on with eyebrow mascara, pretending that it made me feel the same way that Newt Gesizler did.

It didn’t. Nothing did. Nothing captured the voice cracks, the strain of knowledge. Nothing captured the world weariness of a man in crisis. Newt started to feel less masculine to me, as if the character was a genderless vessel for science. That’s when I cracked him, and I fell into the character. He was autistic and non-binary and queer because I was all of those things, and he was messy and unfair and spiteful like I was all of those things. I lost a bit of my identity in Newt. My gender identity was whatever the fuck Newt had going on, and we became the same.

My journey with Newt is not uncommon. Transgender stories in science fiction (and in general) are lacking. As a community, we’ve had to make meaning in the strangest of places for a long time. In Jack Halberstam’s book In a Queer Time & Place, he mentions that transgender depiction on screen is framed in “revulsion, sympathy, or empathy’. He labels this a “transgender gaze” for mainstream audiences.

But can you feel the transgender gaze for an entire archetype?

When this article was meant to be a straightforward research piece, I went to Letterboxd in search of a masterlist of mad scientist movies I could watch in preparation. The most comprehensive list on the site is this one, which hasn’t been updated in 7 years. It had the movies I expected, Jekyll and Hyde, Frankenstein, maddened men with tight lipped smiles and evil laughs. Non-conforming beings who drove so far off of their respective cliffs that they sacrificed a certain level of sanity in the name of science.

I want to be that fucking committed to something. I spent years barely committing to the pronouns I used. Maybe that’s why I want to be a mad, lonely, spiteful scientist. For the belief of it all. For the thrill.

What I like so much about Newt is that he was wholly comfortable in how unhinged he was. I wasn’t allowed that. As a girl, as a real human, I was told no. There wasn’t a damned thing about him that he seemed to be insecure about. If people were going to think of him as crazy, he wasn’t going to give a shit. He didn’t have time to give a shit. And that’s not masculine is it? That’s not reserved for men. That’s reserved for geniuses.

I just wanted to be unshaven and manic, screaming about the stuff I love. I wasn’t interested in seeking respect, just trying to find my identity in how unhinged I felt, in how marred I am from wading through myself, searching for clues on my truest being.

Each day is different when you’re discovering yourself. You look to fiction for comfort and you look to friends for validation, but if you’re changing, you’re questioning, and if you’re questioning, you’re a scientist. Mad science is about change. It’s not always about a change that was asked for, and more often than not, the end result of said change is... uncomfortable. Like morphing slowly into a fly, or mind-melding with a scary monster, or creating a man that gains independence and feeling. These are all significant shifts in the post of someone’s life.

I recently watched the second Pacific Rim movie. Newt’s character, my character, is ruined by a lack of commitment. He’s possessed by aliens, for plot reasons, driven off of his respective cliff. The aliens in his head, they dress him up in pretty clothes, cover up his tattoos, and shave his face clean. I couldn’t relate to him. He wasn’t what I remembered, thrilling and hopelessly dedicated. I couldn’t make it through, because it hurt just a little bit too much.

I felt written out of my own story. The first entity to make me feel seen, he wasn’t there anymore. I searched for him in the acting, the costume, the slither of tattoos that you’re allowed to see, but he wasn’t looking back at me. My own reflection in the screen, yes, but not my idealized reflection beneath the pixels. I had to stop pretending to be a man.

Maybe this whole time, more than anything, I just wanted to be free to be a failure. To make catastrophic mistakes. Pushing away from being a woman would get me closer to being disgusting and rabid with scientific hunger. If I was anything but a girl, if I was a man, I could create with no boundaries and make things that went wrong.

Maybe it wasn't the masculinity I wanted, but the science. A eureka moment, a puff of smoke, and my identity comes into play. In the mind of a genius, I could be responsible for life and death. I could be wrong and gross.

Mad science is wrong. It’s gross, dirt under your fingernails, a lack of respect for your seniors. It’s dirty boots and sore throats. It’s weirdly punk for something so clinical. Not all trans people are interested in going against the grain, but my friends are. We’re gross, we’re dirt under our fingernails. We’re men who transform into flies and we’re bringing each other back to life every day. We’re fucking scientists, and we’re mad too.

I will probably be seeking a cure to my confusion for a very long time. Maybe that’s okay. Maybe I can just be non-binary. Every scientist needs an experiment, right?

Episodes is published three times per week and edited by Emily VanDerWerff. Mondays feature her thoughts on assorted topics. Wednesdays offer pop culture thoughts from freelance writers. Fridays are TV recaps written by Emily. The Wednesday and Friday editions are only available to subscribers. Suggest topics for future installments via email or on Twitter. Read more of Emily's work at Vox.