What if I told you that a major franchise released a transcendently weird movie in 2019, and no one talked about it? A movie full of amnesia, holograms, shapeshifting, hallucination, conspiracy, and optical illusions; in short, a movie that spares no effort to force both its heroes and its viewers to question reality? A movie where one man’s hubristic quest for immortality leads him to usurp the power of an angry god, and both sides of the resulting conflict resort to exploiting soul transference and the fusion of multiple consciousnesses? A movie dripping with overt symbolism almost begging for psychoanalytic or even alchemical interpretation?
In fact, that did happen. That movie was Detective Pikachu. On release, it was widely praised for visual design and technical achievement, but I observed little discussion of the actual story, and everyone else seems to have quickly forgotten it. But I can’t move on. It’s just so strange that I must share it with someone. So, take the red Pokeball, and let’s find out how deep this Diglett[1] hole goes.
The basic plot is not what makes Detective Pikachu remarkable. Indeed, it could easily be the product of one of those guides to churning out formulaic Hollywood screenplays. Our hero, Tim Goodman, grew up in an idyllic small town, and he yearned to be a Pokemon[2] trainer. Then his mother tragically died, and his father took a job as a detective in the big city.
Right after his mom died, Tim chose to stay in his hometown with his grandmother, and has since become fully estranged from his father. He blames his dad for abandoning him, even though he was always invited to live in the city with him. He’s worked a boring office job and watched all his friends move away, and rejected his past interest in Pokemon as childish folly. In truth, he’s too timid and anxious to go out and get himself a Pokemon, or a girlfriend for that matter.
His call to adventure is a literal phone call informing him that his father is missing and presumed dead after a car crash. While cleaning out his father’s apartment, he encounters his father’s Pikachu, who has amnesia and an inexplicable ability to speak intelligibly to Tim and only Tim. They decide to search for his father, and soon find evidence that his father was killed by a mad scientist to cover up all the mad science he was doing. Along the way, Tim has to find his courage and revive his childhood dream. He defeats the baddie, saves the city, trains the pokemon, gets the girl, and reconciles with his dad. You have surely seen all of this before.
I think three things make the movie memorable. First, it does have reasonable thematic and symbolic depth. Detective Pikachu explores both interpersonal and existential alienation, while reflecting on Pokemon’s legacy as a franchise and exploring how adult fans and ex-fans could or should interact with it. Second, the execution of its arcs is so on-the-nose, so perfectly telegraphed, that one must appreciate the craftsmanship. Third, and most importantly, the director’s obsession with presenting illusions and false impressions gives a surreal, off-kilter texture to many otherwise-ordinary scenes, making the moment-to-moment viewing experience delightfully discombobulating.
I’d like to illustrate this movie’s obsession with deception by walking you through a single scene, but first, I must confess that I told one lie in my introduction. There are actually no hallucinations in this movie. Instead, this movie has several sequences in which characters falsely assume real things are hallucinations because they seem too weird to believe and the characters have specific cause to doubt their senses. Please forgive the deception; there was no succinct way to explain that at the top of the essay. I hope the experience of being promised something a bit trickier and getting something much trickier still, maybe serve as a foretaste of the movie itself.
We shall walk through the scene in which Tim meets Pikachu in his father’s apartment. Please take note of the following context:
- Tim’s father, Harry, lived alone in Ryme City with his Pikachu. Both were reported missing and presumed dead after a car crash.
- Due to their long estrangement, Tim has never seen his dad’s place or met Pikachu
- Humans don’t normally understand pokemon speech, instead hearing them chirp, growl, or squeak their own name
- Tim has just collected his dad’s keys from the police station and gone to check out his apartment.
As Tim enters the door, he’s startled to hear a voice seeming to challenge him, but it turns out to be a Humphrey Bogart movie playing on TV. As Tim looks around, he finds a vial full of purple vapor sitting out on a table and accidentally opens it, releasing a huge gas cloud which envelops him. We will later learn that the vial contained a drug called R that drives Pokemon into berserk rage, but has no effect on humans. However, Tim doesn’t know this, so for the rest of the scene he believes that he’s been drugged.
At this point, Pikachu starts to enter the apartment through a window. Tim is not expecting Pikachu to return, so when he hears something scrabbling at the window, he thinks it’s a home invasion. It doesn’t help that perspective and lighting cause Pikachu to cast a giant, monstrous shadow on the floor. Tim tries to scare the monster off by snatching a stapler off a desk and brandishing it like a weapon, even clicking it to imitate the sound of a cocked gun.
Pikachu sees through the gun ruse, but doesn’t recognize him as Harry’s son. Now they each see the other as a home invader. Although humans don’t understand Pokemon speech, Pikachu tries to de-escalate verbally anyway. “I know you can’t understand me, but if you don’t put down the stapler, I will electrocute you.[3]”
They are both shocked to discover that Tim understood this perfectly. At first, Tim thinks he’s hallucinating, because of the drugs he just inhaled. But when he realizes Pikachu can give him verifiable information, he changes his hypothesis: the drug must have given him the power to understand pokemon. This is completely wrong. The drug has no effect on humans, and he can only understand Pikachu. Only at the very end of the movie will he learn the real reason (spoilers!). When Tim’s father was mortally injured, a friendly psychic pokemon stuffed Harry’s soul into Pikachu’s body to forestall his death.
This kind of double- and triple-reversal is common throughout the movie. Later, Tim will initially mistake a 3-D hologram recording of past events for real present activity, before learning the hologram itself was doctored. He will resort to pantomime to interrogate a mime pokemon, and forget to his detriment that this mime can make real invisible walls. He will mistake an enormous Pokemon for part of the landscape he’s crossing, then mistake its movement for a telepathic mirage. He will mis-appraise a good guy as a bad guy and then get fooled by a bad guy impersonating that good guy. And of course, he will spend the whole movie helping Pikachu look for his dad without either of them realizing Pikachu is his dad.
Some people use film reviews to inform their viewing decisions. I recommend Detective Pikachu to anyone who can tolerate a hokey fantasy adventure. It’s only 90 minutes, and I think the sheer strangeness justifies the time. It’s also very, very pretty. Go watch it now. When you get back, we can try to figure out how this deluge of illusions intersects with the story’s themes.
If_Detective Pikachu_ has one dominant theme, it seems to be overcoming alienation. Tim’s ruptured his own relationship with his father by refusing the invite to Ryme City and ignoring every subsequent letter. He’s also turned his back on the world of Pokemon. At one point, he says he resented Pokemon because he thought his father ditched him for Ryme city to spend more time with them. That may be, but he also seems to suffer a general unwillingness to engage with the world and risk humiliation or failure. In Ryme City, his lack of a Pokemon marks him as a weird and possibly dangerous loner, especially in the eyes of his love interest, a reporter named Lucy Stevens.
It becomes clear almost immediately they’re working different sides of the same case, but it takes two or three interactions for them to team up, and much longer for him to own up to his obvious interest in her. At first, they’re both too interested in playing cool and acting tough to relate authentically. At one point, Tim even boasts that he’s “really good at being alone at night,” after Lucy tells him the docks are no place to go alone after dark. For her part, Lucy wants to project the image of a hardboiled sleuth, but overdoes it to a comical extent, proclaiming that she “doesn’t fear fear,” “walks the walk and talks the talk,” and will do “anything to get the hard truth, and that’s the honest scoop.” Her sad reality is that she’s a news intern with no responsibility more weighty than drafting Pokemon listicles. Only after she inadvertently exposes the less glorious side of her condition are they able to team up.
If the heroes are too attachment-avoidant, the villain represents the opposite error. Howard Clifford, founder of Ryme City, is a billionaire Pokemon researcher with a fatal degenerative condition. From his wheelchair, he searched for a path to immortality and found it in Mewtwo, the godlike psychic Pokemon. Howard builds a device which allows him to project his soul into Mewtwo’s body and thus control its power for himself. Rather than die alone, he plans to live by enmeshing himself fully with the Other. But his motivation is not purely selfish. Howard has decided that no human should suffer the intrinsic loneliness of solo existence; one empowered, he tears every human’s soul from their body to fuse them with their Pokemon companion, imposing a nightmarish collapse of boundaries. Thankfully, it gets reversed before long, but the message is clear. We must chart a course between Tim and Lucy’s self-destructive aloofness and Howard’s grotesque overinvolvement.
I think the movie is stuffed so full of false appearances because its thesis is that this is the root of alienation. Tim didn’t reconcile with his father earlier because he clung to a false idea of his father’s motives. Lucy’s tough-talking exterior initially deters Tim from engaging, while she stereotypes him as a weirdo for lacking a Pokemon, even though he’s from out of town. Early on, Tim is also invested in denying that he needs or wants Pikachu; later on, the polarity inverts. At the movie’s lowest point, Pikachu recovers partially from amnesia and retrieves memories suggesting that he had been aligned with the villains, and has done something terrible to Harry. Although Tim has faith in Pikachu’s goodness, Pikachu himself insists on separation as self-punishment. Pikachu later learns that it wasn’t as bad as it looked, and returns to save the day, but his self-imposed exile is nearly disastrous.
Not content merely to show withdrawal and defensiveness leading to failure,Detective Pikachu also makes most progress contingent on moments of empathy, curiosity, and self-expression. For instance, this movie establishes that wild Pokemon don’t understand words, but they understand the feelings behind them. When Tim is stranded in the wild with a near-death Pikachu, only voicing the depth of his love for the shock rodent enables him to summon help. Earlier, Tim obtains his first lead by playing along with Mr. Mime’s[4] mime games even though he finds this very annoying and Pikachu thinks it’s a waste of time.
Surprisingly, then, the movie's intense focus on trickery and illusion turns out to support its heartwarming message of love and reconciliation.
We’re done, right? We summarized the plot, observed a quirk of presentation, and linked it to an uplifting theme. We recommended a film as a rollicking good time for the whole family. We can zip off into the sunset like a Pikachu using Agility, yes?
I opened on a Matrix reference. The first Matrix ends with Neo becoming like a god and flying away victorious. Many people think the story should have ended there. Instead, two more movies followed, more cynical and complex than the original. The sequels revealed that some of the apparent triumphs in the first movie were orchestrated by hostile machines to sinister ends.
I called this essay a Diglett hole, and perhaps we got to the bottom. But Diglett evolves into Dugtrio. Three moles stuck together, digging three linked holes. The kabbalistic meaning is clear: we need to keep digging.
If there’s one guy we here at ACX love, it’s Scott Alexander.
If there’s a second guy, it’s The Last Psychiatrist. As he often says, “if you saw it, it was for you.” Isn’t it a little convenient that I, a child of the 90s who remember the Pokemon cartoon as one of the first shows I ever went out of my way to watch, am telling you the new Pokemon movie is actually super good? Should I question what motivates me to believe that?
If there’s a third guy, it’s Lacan.Scott tells us that Lacanian psychoanalysis is largely about how you relate to the “paternal function” or “name of the father”, which might be your actual dad and/or a symbol for the moral law and the forces of civilization generally. Weak or absent paternal functions leave people confused and mixed up, without the right internal structure.
Should we believe it’s a coincidence that_Detective Pikachu_ is about a literal quest to retrieve an absent father, who is also literally a lawman, and also literally a displaced spirit that rides on his shoulder advising like a familiar or like Pinocchio’s conscience? This is not a coincidence, because nothing is ever a coincidence.
Why is this movie about alienation? Who or what do the nice folks at The Pokemon Company think I’m alienated_from_? What would they like me to be connected to, and what would they like me not to connect to? Why am I turning to The Pokemon Company for life lessons in the first place?
Arguably, it’s a little bit embarrassing to be a 30-year-old Pokemon fan. The Last Psychiatrist would probably say it should be more embarrassing. Or that the embarrassment is a defense against … something.
Luckily, I’ve got nothing to be embarrassed about. I’m not a Pokemon fan. I liked it the appropriate amount at the appropriate age, and then moved on. I only saw the movie at all because my partner dragged me there. I liked it despite being a Pokemon film as much as because it’s a Pokemon film. (I even meant that last bit at least 40% earnestly!)
If you’re not sure you should be wasting your time with Pokemon, Detective Pikachu will meet you where you are. “Look at this guy!”, it says. “He’s hot, he’s cool, he’s from a fashionable ethnicity, and he also thinks Pokemon is a dumb thing for kids. Look, he’s annoyed when a Lickitung[5] slimes his face!
Then the movie asks, “Doesn’t this guy actually kind of suck? Isn’t his refusal to love Pokemon a big downer?” The hot girl treats him like a weirdo for not having a Pokemon. We find out that even when Tim gave up on his Pokemon-training dream, his father still believed.
The Ryme city setting helps. It takes the silliest, most venal, least plausible parts of the old Pokemon fantasy and puts a more mature spin on them. We’re no longer hoarding Pokemon acquisitively. One monster per person; they’ll reflect your soul almost like the daemons from His Dark Materials. People joke about how pokemon battles are like dog fights, so in Ryme City they are outlawed, and relegated to underground fighting rings frequented by drug dealers and other low-lifes.
Of course, the disavowal only holds for so long. Tim still needs to train Pikachu to fight the bad guys and save the day.
I’m not the only one associating Pokemon with childhood. So does the movie. It wants you to stay invested in the franchise as an adult, but wants you to know that Pokemon is about childhood.
Tim wanted to be a trainer when he was a kid; he gave it up when losing a parent killed his innocence. When Tim investigates his dad’s apartment, finds that his dad made a replica of his childhood bedroom. All his pokemon merch is there. Even his old Pikachu bedspread.
At the end of the movie, Tim’s dad will invite Tim to live with him for a while, just as he did all those years ago. This time, Tim will say yes. In effect, he gets to go back and undo the defining mistake of his youth. Accepting the invite will mean he moves back into his childhood bedroom, snuggling up under the old Pikachu sheets. His_Pokemon_ adventure makes him a real man, but it also enables him to regress into boyhood. Tim gets to have it both ways, so why shouldn’t we?
A friend of mine told me that Freud explained nostalgia as a kind of sequel to the Oedipal complex. We are envious of the father’s power and/or access to the mother, and we yearn to kill or overthrow him. Eventually, we do this, usually symbolically. But as soon as we’ve dispatched the father, we regret it. We don’t always want to be self-reliant. Part of us always wishes we could bring the father back to life, and go under his protection again. Fascination with objects and pastimes from youth is a displaced expression of this wish to revive the father.
In this movie, Tim’s father literally dies and comes back to life, after turning into a Pokemon for a while. Resurrecting his father also grants Tim access to a recreation of his old room. This is not a coincidence, because nothing is ever a coincidence.
A novice student of The Last Psychiatrist might expect him to say that_Detective Pikachu_ employs crass emotional manipulation to rekindle your interest in the Pokemon brand, so they can profit by selling you more plushies. The seasoned TLP reader knows that what he’d actually say is that the plushies themselves aren’t the point; the plushies only exist to sell you a life of idle consumption and passivity.
I’m not sure I buy the TLP take, but I cannot bring myself to give the surface reading and stop there. There’s just too many oddly charged scenes and shots in the film. Too many things that feel significant, if not always in clear ways. Before I leave you, let me indulge in one more venerable ACX pastime. Let me attempt an alchemical reading.
Alchemical allegory is one of the formulaic stage-based mythic quest narratives from the Western tradition. It’s got something to do with a quest for the Philosophers Stone, which represents enlightenment or immortality or transcendence or apotheosis. From what I gather, Alchemical stages are defined less by concrete plot mechanics than something like Joseph Campbell’s monomyth, and more by recurring visual tropes and symbols, or specific types of activity.
The quest is generally held to proceed through either three or four stages. Nigredo (blackness), albedo (whiteness), the oft-ignored citrinitas (yellowness), and the ultimate rubedo (redness).
Here’s what Scott has to say about nigredo:
“In the first stage (nigredo, “blackness”), you start with some kind of base matter. In the chemical allegory, this is usually lead. In the psychological version, this is the normal mental state, with all of its hangups and uncertainties. The seeker at this stage is symbolized by the raven, blackest of animals. He (the medieval system assumes a male seeker) must begin by confronting his unconscious mind, which takes the form of a dragon. The unconscious is full of bizarre and shameful repressed material, and the seeker’s instinct is to run away. Instead, he must slay the dragon, at which point the dragon rises again as an ally. The seeker then unites with the unconscious in the first “chemical wedding”, ending in a sudden revelation of blinding whiteness – the second stage of the Work.”
It seems we’re looking for black (or dark-colored) things, death, sickness, despair, anxiety, ravens, and dragons that die and come back to life.
When first we meet Tim, he’s still crushed by grief over his mother’s death and anger at his father’s absence. Dark-winged bird Pokemon fly overhead, though they’re not literal ravens. His last friend has cajoled him into trying to catch a Pokemon, and picked out the “perfect” one for him: Cubone. Cubone is a tiny creature that weeps constantly for its deceased relatives. It wears its mother skull as a bone mask and carries another relative’s femur to wield as a weapon. The Cubone rejects Tim, breaking out of its Pokeball and beating him with the bone. Immediately thereafter, he gets the call announcing his father’s death.
On the train to the city, the aforementioned Lickitung slimes his face.
As soon as he enters his dad’s house, he accidentally envelops himself in a cloud of purple gas (R, the rage drug). It doesn’t actually affect humans, but its effect is to suppress the conscious mind and let out primal rage.
Later, he and Pikachu trace the rage drug to an underground fighting pit. To get information, Tim has to enter Pikachu in the games. The organizers match Pikachu up with Charizard, the iconic dragon pokemon. Charizard’s handler doses him with R, while an unrelated purple-poison-gas-themed Pokemon plays music[6]. Pikachu accidentally smashes a huge stash of R, releasing so much purple vapor that a Pokemon riot destroys the whole venue.
At this point, I need to mention that there is a pathetic and helpless fish Pokemon, called Magicarp, which can sometimes evolve into an enormous sea dragon (Gyarados). Tim survives Charizard’s wrath only because he finds a stranded Magikarp, dying for lack of water to breath, and convinces it to change into its dragon form.
The first act of the movie makes a very credible nigredo phase. The only thing missing is a revelation of blinding whiteness to end the sequence. We even have such a revelation. The only trouble is that it’s tucked in the middle instead of at the end. His love interest, Lucy (nominative determinism!) Stevens, first approaches him by descending from a staircase in the lobby of his dad’s apartment building, backlit by lights so brilliant he cannot even make out her face. (Lucy’s Pokemon is a water type called Psyduck[7]; male ducks are known as drakes; one might say that the psyduck also represent the return of the sea dragon, as an ally)
Here’s Scott on albedo:
In the second stage (albedo, “whiteness”), the base matter must be cleansed of its impurities. The seeker is analogized to a child in a baptismal font, or bathing in a stream, or [any of several other water metaphors]. Eventually it begins to shine with its own inner silvery-white light. When the dross has been cleared away, the seeker encounters a second representation of his feminine principle. He unites with the feminine principle in the second “chemical wedding”, and finally see his True Self as it really is.
As mentioned above, Tim’s love interest descends from above amidst brilliant white light. She very much represents gendered virtues he needs to integrate, and he does the same for her, but this gender dynamic gets a postmodern twist. Tim starts the movie with more feminine virtues than masculine ones. It’s easier for him to be caring, perceptive, and expressive, than to be decisive, confident, or aggressive.
Lucy, by contrast, is brash, direct, and adventurous. Through the first two acts of the movie, Lucy leads whenever the team needs to break rules or physical objects or otherwise spring into action, and Tim leads when negotiation or insight is called for. But by the end of the film, each has adopted the other’s methods. Tim awakens his valor, and Lucy her capacity for caring and teamwork.
Tim gets baptized at least twice, too. The first act ends with Gyarados (the sea-dragon) destroying the fighting pit with a cleansing flood, while the second ends with Tim and Pikachu falling into into a river.
Scott didn’t covercitrinitas, so I have to rely on Wikipedia here.
“Citrinitas, or sometimes xanthosis,[1] is a term given by alchemists to "yellowness." It is one of the four major stages of the alchemical magnum opus. In alchemical philosophy, citrinitas stood for the dawning of the "solar light" inherent in one's being, and that the reflective "lunar or soul light" was no longer necessary.”
Pikachu is a yellow rat who can generate massive blasts of yellow electricity. At the beginning of the movie, his amnesia renders him incapable of actually using his lightning. After his near-fatal fall in the river, he receives supernatural healing and his memory is restored, making him able to wield lightning for the first time. His returning memory also trigger an argument between him and Tim, leading to a temporary parting of ways. Having spent the film up until now learning how to collaborate with Pikachu, Tim is now forced to learn how to stand on his own, even going into battle against Pokemon using only his own strength.
We return to Scott for rubedo, the final stage
In the third stage (rubedo, “redness”), the seeker has already discovered his True Self as a sort of distant guiding star, but has yet to relate it to the rest of his life or the everyday world. The otherworldy True Self must be united with the seeker’s worldly personality in the final and greatest alchemical wedding, often called the Marriage of the Sun and Moon, or the Marriage of the King and Queen, or [several other flowery metaphors], which joins all opposites into a final cataclysmic union – the Philosopher’s Stone. When this stage ends, the seeker is once again an ordinary person interacting with the ordinary earthly world, but now in a way fully integrated with his true Self. In some traditions, the work is cyclic, and the seeker begins again at the nigredo stage.
There is plenty of rubedo imagery in the last act, but strangely, it belongs to the antagonists more than the heroes. It is Howard who tries to bring about a “final cataclysmic union” by forcibly merging all the human souls with Pokemon bodies. It is Howard who constructs a physical object that bestows ultimate power (in his case, a crown that allows him to mentally dominate Mewtwo). They do this by filling parade floats with the rage gas and popping the balloons to disperse it on the citizens below. I know I already counted purple gas as black for nigredo, but I’m tempted to also count it as red for rubedo.
It may be that Detective Pikachu is an anti-alchemical piece rejecting the traditional alchemist’s ambition as dangerous hubris.
Still, some rubedo themes do apply to the heroes. Lucy does get magically merged with her Psyduck. Tim and Pikachu are not merged, but attain an unprecedented degree of coordination. After Tim frees Mewtwo from Howard’s control, it repays the favor by restoring his father to human form. And he does get a date in the end, which may stand in for the magical marriage.
I’ve watched_Detective Pikachu_ at least five times now, and I still lack the power to sum up or synthesize what it means to me. Every time I go back, I see something new in it.
(I haven’t even mentioned how the villain’s evil lab looks kind of like a Pokeball, but when imprisoned Pokemon burst out of that lab it’s treated as a_good_ thing; nor how the lab and the Pokeball might correspond to a womb or an egg; nor the special feature where they promise audio commentary from Mr. Mime on his scenes, then play them with no changes and apologize for forgetting that mimes don’t talk)
My first viewing actually gave me a life-changing ecstatic experience beyond expression in ordinary language. For more on this, see my forthcoming memoir,That Time Detective Pikachu Convinced Me To Drop Acid And Become A Conservative.
Until then:Detective Pikachu is a weird but fun movie. 8/10.