How Transformers Ruined my Day, or I Haven't Been This Disappointed in Mark Wahlburg Since He Left New Kids on the Block

Not Transformers? Sure?

Employees Must Wash Their Hands Before Returning to Work

Kevin does a better job deconstructing the hollywood [sic; I'm tired of capitalizing an industry because at one time its cultural center was an LA suburb with a famous ugly sign on an otherwise nice south California hill; let it be known that the industry, such as the "auto industry" and the "meth industry" will now simply be known as hollywood, no capitalization] components of the film because he has the advantage [sic] of having seen the previous Transformers films and I concur with his glowing condemnation of this fourth installment. He implies that something of the first three titles might have had some worth and that this fourth is especially disappointing. For the record, I went because my little brother chose it for the afternoon. In other words, it wasn't really my fault. But I hated it. I hated everything in this movie except for the few nice shots of Texas prairie land for a minute. If the camera had just stayed there, focused on that prairie and not on any of the characters and action, those 165 minutes of my life would have used wisely and I wouldn't feel the need to drink so much.

A few housecleaning items

Best lines of the film:

1. "Watch out, Shane!"
2. "Woah!"
3. "Ewww."

One motif I noticed immediately was the heavy reliance on iconography and cookie-cutter characters to maintain some sense of cultural relevance to the audience (of six in the theater when we were there). Unity is important in drama, no doubt, and iconography, when used creatively, builds a rhetorical environment that can build emotional bridges between rhetor and audience faster than oral or written language. I get that. But if I had to do it over again (and I don't), I would have liked to count how many times the US flag is shown throughout the film, as if this were somehow either written, produced, and released for 12 September 2001, or otherwise a mockery of everyone who wraps himself in a flag for every reason. Unfortunately, I think the thinking was more the former than the latter. There are simply US flags everywhere. I realize Texans like to fly flags, but in fact that's a fault of the film -- in Texas, the Lone Star Flag is flown as much and sometimes more than the Stars and Stripes. The open display of the flag after the 20th or 30th time made me uncomfortable, and not in the my-underwear-is-creeping-up-on-me sense, but in the sense that Michael Bay is either too careless with his symbolism or has some defensive posturing to make about how "American" this film and its characters is really supposed to be. Considering that he dredges up the old "can't trust the CIA" motif from the dusty wardrobe of some hollywood B-film, I also think that he's trying to impress the audience with how loyal he really is to America, considering that he spends 165 minutes mocking its most secret fraternity, below.

It was about an hour into the film that I asked my little brother what was the time and when he told me, I realized, "This movie has no plot to it. It's like watching Waiting for Godot with monster trucks."

The other icon is the white working class American family itself. My class this week struggled to define America and its rhetoric and spent most of their time talking past each other. One student, however, correctly noted that the stereotype of "American" is white, blond, and blue-eyed (who never sweats, btw), and Michael Bay brings this 'type out with the white painted house will rap-around porch on the Paris, Texas prairie, the mother already passed (which conveniently lets us ignore any fully-developed women in the film for 165 minutes), the father keeping his promises to her, raising the college-bound blond on his own. As Kevin mentions, there are no real people of color here -- the few blacks were hired that morning off the set; the few Latinos ... no, never mind; there were no real Latinos in the film except for stock men in black with no lines or personality or short-range target shooting ability; and a few Asians (but not Asian-Americans) who a) either kick ass; b) run screaming; or c) laugh like Jerry Lewis when shown how "transformium'' can be programmed to make anything. In other words, no people of color exist in this world who have brains or character. We see no blacks in Paris, Texas, even though blacks comprise nearly a quarter of its population. Chicago amazingly has few people of color running for cover. Even the head of the CIA is only a puppet to Kelsey Grammer's character. [Side note: this scene where the Chief of Staff was first introduced to the CIA was a too-unfortunate reminiscence of X-File 1.1 where we see Cigarette-Smoking Man for the first time, the real power behind the power. Similarly, Grammer's character reminds us that it's a white man behind all power in this universe; a black man can't really be in charge of anything].

Women in the film include an archaeologist who apparently doesn't do her own fieldwork and is dressed in the finest winter coat on REI's shelves, the blond teen whose best line is, "Watch out, Shane!" the Chinese corporate type who can kick ass just like all Chinese svelt women can surely do, and ... that's all. In this universe, women don't really do anything except extend their legs, do they? We don't see women think or create or debate or lead. For 165 minutes, they scream, they smile prettily, they take the side of good and right when told to do so, they reaffirm the man's masculinity and moral choices, but otherwise they are only props, like any commercial product placement.

Speaking of which ...

Embarrassing product placement and obsequious use -- Goodyear, the car makes, of course, etc.  

What is wrong with Wahlburg drinking Bud Lite?

1. Bud 
2. Bud Lite
3. Bud Lite in their stupid 16 oz aluminum bottle
4. Bud Lite in their stupid 16 oz aluminum bottle warm and didn't spit it out like everyone else does/would.

On the other hand, careful observers couldn't miss that huge neon sign in the barn, the logo for Angelika Cinema which once had a presence in Houston and sadly left us a few years ago. 

The Enemy of My Enemy is My Friend

Grammer's character says this early in the movie, intending to explain his motives in killing off who the audience knows are the good guys. He even tries to give it rhetorical context, "We have a saying here on earth ..." as if the weightiness of its origin gives him some kind of authority. The dusty motif that Michael Bay pulls up is that oldy, but a goodie, the universal mistrust of the CIA. Some films portray cops as corrupt, the FBI as misguided with the occasional rogue special agent, but the CIA is universally distrusted and seen as the heart of darkness of anything that might be good about America; even "the police and FBI" have to turn over suspects to Grammer; all other law institutions are pawns to the CIA [which, remember, has no official operations within the borders of the USA [read carefully and note the responsibilities of The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency]].

The OSS, Precursor to the CIA

Here's where all this is going. The bad guys in this film are Americans. They are very American. They are uber-American in every sense of the word, right? The love their country, they serve their country, they shoot their countrymen, they shoot wildly off target at their countrymen, they wear cool sunglasses and drive black SUVs and fly black helicopters like real Americans do. But these are really bad Americans because they put a gun to a beautiful blond girl's head and tighten the trigger. So now we're confused, right? How can the real Americans possibly be good Americans when they're standing in front of the white wooden house on the Paris, Texas prairie with a US flag flying above its nice porch with a gun to the beautiful blond girl's head? And here we have perhaps the most important discourse within these 165 minutes: dulcis amor patriae.

In 1952, a widow sued the US government for information about her serviceman husband's death on duty. The US government claimed that he was on a secret mission and therefore the widow nor the court could be privileged to know the details of the mission; in other words, if the government claims national security, then citizens have no right to learn about the government's doings, including budgets, personnel, hardware, geography, history, texts, authorities, technology, etc. [See United States v Reynolds ]. The burden of proof is on the plaintiff -- not the government -- and the government can holds its cards as close to its empty-hearted chest as long as it wants by referring to Reynolds.

This power to control the discourse and deny its citizens access to information on the government's doings, permits the government to do pretty much whatever they want with minimal oversight. Though Congress has the responsibility to oversee every agency of the FedGov, their history in oversight is dismal, and it is invariably the Fourth Estate -- the press -- that uncovers some program or misdeed of the FedGov. Only when the press reveals this to a larger public does Congress get out of the Capitol pool and show up to their subcommittee hearings. "Fast and Furious" [no, not the film, the ATF's bright idea to give thousands of working firearms to Mexican drug cartels for free] was not unearthed -- at least publicly -- by a congressional oversight committee, but by rumors on a public Web site which was then picked up by a reporter, etc. But the program was enacted, beginning in 2006, under the argument of "national security" and so the public would have never have learned about the program except for Brian Terry's murder.

The first argument is that the federal government must protect its citizens from its secret plans for the sake of "national security." That's the god-term here -- "National security." For example, POTUS could not have told the country (or anyone in Congress) that he was about to violate plenty of international laws by crossing into Pakistan to kidnap ObN because if ObN had known this, he would have had the Pakistani Inter-Service Intelligence move him to another safe house, perhaps down the street where they had given him residence for the previous decade with a nicer garden view. Besides the fact that ObN was no longer a threat to the US at that point, the claim of "national security" preemptively prevents any discourse from happening because our "security" is at stake. Thus, secret programs such as Kelsey Grammer's alliance with ... whoever, it doesn't matter ... can go by unnoticed because "national security" mandates it. Grammer's character at one time screams something about "aliens" and "protecting the country" from "aliens" and

... for ten minutes I zoned out and thought about 57,000 "aliens" who have crossed the border in the past year and heard Grammer's words over the faces of all those flag-flying haters in Murrieta and Phoenix and League City yelling and pounding their chests and in the name of "public health" and "jobs" ...

he does so within the discourse of "national security." But we know, really, that his association with Tucci's Joshua Joyce is really about making money, lots of it, and changing the world for their own advantage. That's what "national security" as a god-term does to us -- it makes us feel that the "national government" is watching over us, protecting us, preserving our way of life (though, if we compare our standard of living with that of our grandparents, we need to re-examine exactly what quality of life really means), ensuring the "real" bad guys won't hurt us.

And so we were told in 2001, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2007, etc. etc. that because of "national security" we needed Halliburton and Blackwater and dozens of other corporations who made hundreds of billions of dollars to start two wars in the past two decades. But when we think about the outcomes of these corporate-sponsored wars, we come to this uncomfortable realization that "national security" apparently doesn't mean what we think it means. It doesn't mean "my" security or even my "neighborhood's" security or even my "community's" security. "Nation" and "national" have been redefined in the 20th century to mean "corporate interests" so that "national security" means "corporate security and profit-making."

Seriously. Name one advantage the invasion and occupation of Iraq since 2003 has brought to you and your family. Name one. So, how is your security improved by this trillion-dollar escapade? Yet those corporations made billions from war-making. The Treasury was emptied. The middle class lost a quarter of its overall long-term savings in the Great Recession and not one banker or FedGov official went to jail. Over 3500 service members have been killed in combat, with over 100,000 casualties who have to deal with a non-functioning Veterans Administration. I can go on, but it should be clear that when FedGov uses the term "national security," they don't mean our security. They mean the security of the corporate state -- a corporate state of rich white men making money hand over fist every day.

Which might, for all the otherwise embarrassing erasure of people of color and thinking women in this film, explain why everyone with power here ... is a white male. And though we might be comfortable with Grammer's killing at the end, even Optimus Prime reminds us that nothing really changes and that the real danger doesn't come in the form of form-shifting cars, but discourse-controlling men-with-suits.

Update -- 12 July

See Juan Cole's assessment of the National Security Agency spying on American citizens, again, in the name of "national security."

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