Rinko Kikuchi in space: transnational Mexican directors' global gaze

Alejandro González Iñárritu and Guillermo del Toro are contemporaries and compatriots who have charted different paths in their careers as makers of major international releases. Between Babel's realist network narrative and the science fiction spectacle of Pacific Rim, the actor Rinko Kikuchi offers one connecting thread which can provide us insight into different transnational visions of the global. Pacific Rim establishes the typical global stakes now a cliché in expensive blockbusters, which increasingly depend on international markets for profitability and cannot incorporate too much locally specific experience incomprehensible to non-U.S. audiences, however del Toro's particular vision suggests a more complex reading of subjectivity in transnational space than the humanity vs. aliens plot may initially suggest. In this context, the figure of Kikuchi's Mako Mori is arguably the central character in terms of the narrative despite the film apparently being framed around Charlie Hunnam's Raleigh Becket. On the other hand, Kikuchi's performance as Chieko Wataya in González Iñárritu's Babel is at the centre of one story in the geographically dispersed but intersecting meditation on the relationship between the locally specific and global systems, with the Tokyo setting emphasising the alienation experienced by the character. Ultimately, Babel reproduces a sense of isolation whereas del Toro's global aesthetic and speculative world-building underpin transgressive intersubjective, intercultural, human-machine and human-monster communions.