Pop Culture | Scrawled in Wax

August 1, 2011

Transformers: Dark of the Moon. Rating: F

You, dear SiW readers, know this. My ambivalent affection for Michael Bay’s Transformers: Return of the Fallen has become, like, a thing. People I’ve never met know how much I like the film, despite the fact, by most accounts, I’m not ‘supposed’ to. But I do, oh how I do. I left the cinema giddy. Giddy, I tell ya’. And now I’ll talk to anyone who’ll listen about the absurd madness that is the film, even when I should really shut up.

After much wondering, I realized why I ‘liked’ it: its approach to narrative coherence was so brazen and unabashed, so obviously subservient to spectacle, that it seemed like a populist crystallization of modern problems in art. In the face of the incapacity to ever ‘accurately’ represent anything, T:RTOF responded by saying “well fuck it, then – we’ll just blow shit up and have some really incredible CG in the process”. The film made almost no sense - and none of that seemed to matter. It so clearly signaled its refusal to cohere as a story, that whether or not any one part of the film made sense when compared to another felt immaterial. It just was.

But I also had another creeping thought: if narrative coherence no longer holds, nor is meant to, then the gesture toward verisimilitude or referentiality also changes. The clearly racist, sexist elements of Transformers numero 2 didn’t particularly bother me because they were so divorced from the world to which they referred that they seemed irrelevant. Yeah the ‘black’ robots were illiterate and stupid, but none of the rest of the film made sense, so why should this? I dunno if that makes sense or holds up, but it’s what I thought.

Now that I’ve seen the third film, Transformers: Dark of the Moon, I can tell you two things: as a film, it is definitely better, marginally more coherent and logical; and that as a result, this was an infinitely more dangerous, insidious, offensive film. If I left T:ROTF feeling giddy, T:DOTM left me unsettled. I mean, it’s still fun and the effects really are spectacular, but yeah. It’s, um, weird.

Don’t mistake me, though. It’s still a film that places spectacle above plot, has non-existent characterization, sub-par acting etc. But now that it almost makes sense – now that its plot kinda’, sorta’ holds together – suddenly it felt a lot more sinister.

Here’s why:

The autobots – ‘the good robots’ – are now part of the war on terror. No, seriously. The film opens with the autobots, their intergalactic battle seemingly over, doing the only obvious thing and helping Americans kill mean brown people. It’s just sthuper.
These same autobots – bastions of morality, fairness and general human lovin’ goodness – are brutal. When they return after a false disappearance, they take glee in ripping their enemies limb by limb. “We will kill them all,” intones Optimus Prime. Uh, what? Memories of innocent Saturday mornings ruined!
That disappearance I talked about? It’s because these same autobots are banished by the UN, er, ‘government’ or whatever. They come back, in secret, and their reasoning is that they should be there whether people like it or not. Hey, remember how I said that in this film they’re part of the war on terror? Nope, no disturbing resonance with current events there!
Michael Bay has decided that an acceptable amount of time has passed that is now cool to show American skyscrapers being torn down for fun. And hey, good for him. I mean, Michael Bay has taken it on himself to heal America’s greatest psychological scar through his fucking art, man. And if he can’t, then tell me, who can? WHO CAN?
Before the, uh, ‘plot’ kicks in, Megatron, leader of the eeeeevil Decepticons can be found in Africa (where else, right?). Know what he’s, um, ‘wearing’? A ‘Middle Eastern’ looking headscarf. At this point, it seems wise to remind you that in this film, Megatron is a 50ft robot. Made out of, like, metal and shit. He’s wearing his little hoodie thing though! I know, I know, it sounds like I’m making this up. Alas, I am not.
John Malkovich in this film. Why? For no purpose whatsoever. Really. I can’t for the life of me explain to you why he was in the film other than to have his name appear on posters. It’s pretty fuckin’ weird.
Alan Tudyk is in this film. Yeah, Wash from Firefly. Except here, he’s a German dude who is very helpful, prissy, is excellent at martial arts and gun use, and has enough knowledge to hack into basically anything, including the bridge system in Chicago. I don’t know even know why I’m typing this. I guess I hoped it would make more sense by the time I got to the end of this bullet point.
Anyway, at this point, I realize this is turning into a bad copy of the Topless Robot FAQ, which is almost as funny as the last one and is better and explains the, uh, plot.

Transformers 3 was such a disappointment. In almost making sense, it became a total mess of a movie. Unlike the glorious, absurd, anti-referential pastiche of its predecessor, its pretensions of being, like, ‘a film that you would go and watch’ ruin it totally. And the one word that flashed throughout my mind as the film went started with ‘F’. No, not ‘fuck me, I can’t believe I’m watching it’. And no, not ‘fail’, either.

It was “fascist”. It really was. It was the very worst excesses of American patriotism, imperialism, violence and libertarianism writ large, and completely and utterly uncritically and presented with brazen, unthinking… loudness (the sound really was spectacular).

So, on Nav’s patented review scale, this film also gets a solid rating of ‘F’, for ‘Fuck everything about this movie’.

Still, those CG effects are really good. Like, really really good.

No I mean reeeeee-huh-eeeally good.

Seriously.

Um, yeah.

1 comment

August 6, 2010

“Like Walking Through Cobwebs”

Today on Twitter, a couple of people I follow had a brief conversation about polyamory. It was intriguing, in part because it was tinged with the ambivalence that can often characterize some aspects of modern feminism. Like the relationship towards traditional ideals of femininity, it’s hard to both disavow the structures that produced something – whether sun dresses or monogamy – when those same structures were part of the cultural milieu in which one was raised. To wit, you can be a feminist woman and yet still ‘not feel like yourself’ wearing men’s clothing; you can believe in polyamory and still get wigged out by it.

Polyamory represents an alternative to the social and material practice of monogamy. But rather than only being a different lifestyle, it is also part of a historical moment. The effects and causes of feminism – which is to say the combination of activism and socio-economic change like, for example, women working during World War II – have opened up space for a change in the social organization of sexual relationships. It’s not so much that the notion of polyamory never existed before as much as the social and material conditions for its practice were never very, um, favourable. That we exist in an era of ‘sexual liberation’, feminism, secularism, female economic independence etc. has made the option of polyamory a reality.

At the same time, what was clear during this conversation was the conflictedness that polyamory can introduce. We still live in an age when sexual fidelity and morality are linked. Additionally, there is, I’ve heard, some small amount of discourse committed to celebrating the notion of the lifelong love, ‘the one’ and monogamous marriage as the ultimate goal. What’s more, there are still the psychological impacts of polyamory: of not only the possibility of external, social censure, but a kind of internal punishment too, one that stems from directly contravening one of the core principles around which goodness, the good life and morality is centered.

So, naturally, you can see why I thought of the hijab.

This is an argument I’ve had floating in my mind for some time. In much the same way that polyamory is a sorta’ ‘edgy’ rejection of established social norms that carries with it both external social consequences and also psychological ones that come from flaunting standards, so too is the choice of a Muslim woman to uncover her hair.

I say this because, so often, the hijab vs. no-hijab debate is constructed in terms of freedom and personal liberty vs. repression and misogyny, as if all someone wearing a hijab must do is simply see the light, peel off her headdress and step into the future. But it so often misses that, like choosing to be polyamorous, it is a decision that removes one from – and places one against – an entire network of socio-cultural beliefs. It is not a single act or a solitary moment, but an ongoing reconfiguration of your relationship to a set of structures and practices that have not simply ‘governed your behaviour’, but constituted your identity. It is not about throwing off shackles, but instead, choosing to let your skin be chafed by a new pair.

But making matters even more complicated is the inextricability of rejecting of what are often called ‘traditional beliefs, and the accusation of becoming westernized. In the contemporary moment, articulating something like ‘Eastern’ (or, more specifically, Iraqi or Pakistani) feminism is essentially impossible to do outside of some kind of discourse in which change is a movement from East to West. As Fanon notes, history has been constructed such that the East is the past of a timeline on which the West is forever the present and the future. Or, to put it in slightly more contemporary terms, Microsoft Word recognizes the word ‘westernized’ but not ‘easternized’. That is not a viable option. It does not ‘exist’.

To take off the hijab, then, is always read as the inevitable movement toward the telos of western, individual liberty. But if one is concerned with a kind of ‘fidelity’ to an identity that is not simply about enabling or submitting to a neat East/West dichotomy – that one either participates in ‘traditional beliefs’* or assimilates to a set of western values – this presents a problem. Suddenly, your lack of faithfulness hurts not only those around you, but you yourself hurt too. You have betrayed something by becoming someone who cannot stick to one thing and one system. You have become a floating mark in a system that cannot locate you adequately because you are no longer recognizable by its most treasured precepts, ideas that form the very structural basis of social relations. You have sidestepped the control of female sexuality. You no longer makes sense within the ways of speaking about the individual or the woman or faithfulness because your actions contravene accepted truths.

What you do know though, is that with each step forward, the ‘fine meshes of power’ tug at you ever so slightly. They drag. They weigh. So that, as if walking through a stream of cobwebs, you are constantly reminded of your choice: to exist just on the edges of the world that made you as it keeps trying to pull you in.

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April 14, 2010

Box Office Madness Redux

Why redux? Because ‘Box Office Madness’ was the title of the first ever non-travelogue Scrawled in Wax post. It went up in August 2006. Which, I’ll be honest, makes me feel a little old. Well, that and my prodigious amount of grey chest hair.

Anyway.

At the time, I railed against what I saw to be the strange madness that saw people become obsessed over box office numbers. Tim and others have disagreed with me about this, but I still stick to the argument that it’s weird. And now, strangely, Techdirt – that bastion of free-market futurism run by Mike Masnick*, who loves to claim that the world has fundamentally changed and the solution is to intensify capitalism – backs me up.

Not in a deep way, mind you. They simply argue that box-office receipts are only a tiny fraction of how films make money, which means that the weekly breathless reporting is just misleading and misinformed.

But I guess I just liked the circularity of it all. Well, that and I like the word redux.

*I saw Masnick give a presentation at Mesh ’08, and it was really good. He’s smart and nice. I just disagree with his faith in free-market capitalism.

Scrawled in Wax

Category: Pop Culture