Epic Nonsense: Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen
The new Transformers movie is a tremendous piece of Epic Nonsense. It’s grandiose, strainingly adherent to its evanescent internal precepts, and full of enough metaphorical signifiers to choke Derrida, but holds together about as well as a birdseed snowball. I’m not sure if I enjoyed it, or was simply battered into submitting to its domination of my senses: when I exited the E-Walk 42nd Street Theater into Times Square, the environment felt reserved and coherent in contrast. After sleeping off myT.F. intoxication, I have three main takeaways as to what this movie is “about”:
1) Closet Narrative: How could one avoid this reading of the Transformers,particularly the Autobots? Save a trio of leather-clad, motorcycle-riding lesbian acrobats, their world is made up solely of bonded male characters; a key subplot concerns the end of a Boy Scout-like adolescent love affair between two dudes, one of whom just happens to be a yellow Camaro (“I love you Bee.”); and the entire premise of the AB’s continued existence on Earth revolves around masking their innate sensitivity under archetypal representations of butch masculinity.
2) GM Rescue: General Motors provided nearly all of the vehicles on which the good robots are based. (The bad guys are mostly construction equipment, foreign cars, and cheap Chinese kitchen appliances, or don’t change into anything at all, making their Transformer moniker somewhat suspect.) The movie thus inherently advocates for the continued relevance of G.M., a sentiment with which I’m pretty down. But like most everything in T:RotF, Michael Bay takes a muddled kitchen sink approach to this symbolic thread: he casts Chevrolet’s upcoming small cars—the Beat and Trax concept vehicles—in a major role, giving them some of the funniest (or at least most scatological) lines, making them scrappy and capable, and providing them with cool “urban” dialect. At the same time, the movie’s core mission revolves around the quest to revive the moribund behemoth Optimus Prime, through the application of … Magical Pixie Dust (source: Alien Rust Alloy) a clear metaphor for our current efforts to revive certain other moribund behemoths.
3) Antiquities are Irrelevant: Much of the film—seemingly three of its five hours—takes place during an immense battle in the desert, during which just about every major ancient monument—pyramids, temples, villages, the Sphinx—is atomized into sand by the overwhelming firepower of an American/British coalition Army. (Sound familiar?) At one point, my viewing partner turned to me and whispered, “Looks like a bad day for archeology.”
Brett Berk is a Detroit native, a life-long car nut, a Gay, and the author of The Gay Uncle’s Guide to Parenting. Visit him at www.brettberk.com
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