The Real Problem with Transformers

"Our enemy can take any shape... they could be anywhere..."
- dialogue from the forthcoming Transformers movie




Andy at Kino Slang posted some (preemptive) objections to Michael Bay's Transformers based on its complicity with the American military enterprise. While I also find this problematic, my real concerns with the film are the way in which it engages with the paradigm of contemporary warfare.

The film starts out as an allegory for 4th Generation Warfare (4GW), or perhaps even 5GW: enemies are hidden among us, yet to reveal themselves; they pose an existential threat to our society due to their capability to inflict huge damage instantaneously; these enemies emerge from the crowd of our everyday life, and have the ability to then slip back among us unnoticed, tainting all of our everyday routines and interactions with suspicion and fear. The film then renegs on this promised exploration of the enemy in our midst, in favor of a traditional (read: 3GW) military fantasy, where expertise with the tools of war provides hard-fought but ultimately inevitable victory. This military wish-fulfillment fantasy is on par with the power fantasies provided by comic-book superheros. It perpetuates the myth that the US Army can win a conflict -- any conflict -- due to its technological superiority and the grit of the soldier on the ground. The root of this power fantasy is a visible, stable 3GW enemy who need only be outthought and outmaneuvered to be defeated. This is the most ideologically dangerous component of the film: the perpetuation of an outmoded strategy -- and perhaps more importantly, an outmoded myth of warfare. I'm reminded of the experience of English soldiers in World War I (as relayed via Paul Fussell's excellent book The Great War and Modern Memory). Those men went off to war expecting the heroism of The Iliad, carrying with them ideals of personal heroism and sacrifice and expecting to return home "by Christmas." What they found was the mess and slaughter of a pointless and chaotic war, quite the opposite of the notions of heroism they had been fed. Fussell's book is predominantly about the development of a particular strand of literary irony in this generation of writers who experienced life in the trenches firsthand. If Transformers can be taken as representative of our present response to myth-disillusionment as much as Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves and Edmund Blunden were of the WWI generation, then the present response is instead one of nostalgia for the definable enemies of past days. It seems that few if any First World War veteran writers returned to the concepts of heroism expressed in Homer or the Romantic lyric. Those British soldiers experienced the disillusioning truth of war, but in 4GW [and 5GW] it is the citizenry who is made victim (with fear a main weapon of war). Thus a nostalgia arises from our desire for a defendable and secure social order, and no engagement with the realities of conflict in the modern age will do. Hollywood's machine pretends to do what no modern military apparatus can -- restore (the facade of) security to our everyday lives.

But, will the inevitable sequel-tease undercut this establishment of imagined safety?

For more on 4GW / 5GW, see:
John Robb at Global Guerrillas
Wikipedia on 4GW
5GW at ComingAnarchy
Truly Formless 5GW at ComingAnarchy
tdaxp on 5GW (in-depth)
Kung Fu Monkey on 4th Generation Media

300

One of the better posts of late from the often brilliant Coming Anarchy is entitled This is not madness…:

"what’s maddening about 300 ... is that no one involved … seems to have noticed that we’re in the middle of an actual war. With actual Persians. ... to cast 300 as a purely apolitical romp of an action film smacks of either disingenuousness or complete obliviousness. One of the few war movies I’ve seen in the past two decades that doesn’t include at least some nod in the direction of antiwar sentiment, 300 is a mythic ode to righteous bellicosity."

I have one thing to say to the over-sensitive Slate movie reviewer Dana Stevens: This is SPARTA! (*kicks her down well*)

The politics of 300 perfectly sum up the present American political moment.

Gender politics:
300's gender politics are kind of awesome (where kind of = qualifiedly, as opposed to unexpectedly). Leonidas looks to his wife before kicking the Persian emissary down a (very deep) well not for approval, but instead for decision-making. One reason the emissary is eligible for a well-kicking: insulting Spartan women, who not only give birth to Spartan warriors, but who are declared to be stronger as warriors than soldiers of other cultures.
The Queen gets some bloody vengeance on her own on a traitor to Sparta who convinces her to trade sex for politics. (And here's the 'kind of': trading sex for politics is feminism? leadership? It's supposed to be self-sacrifice for the good of the state, a sacrifice to match those of her husband and his warriors, but instead it's complicatedly problematic.)

Sexual politics:
This movie is unabashedly and dramatically homophobic. Xerxes looks, sounds, and acts like RuPaul, only with more makeup, more jewelry, and more effeminacy. I won't even get into the 'all I ask is that you kneel before me' component of his characterization.
Outside of the overpowering enemy-as-gay-icon themes, the Spartans themselves make comment contrasting their culture with Athenian "boy-lovers." This is noteable not just for its factual falsehood - if anything Spartan culture was more prone to homosexual/homosocial relationships within the confines of military authority (boys at the age of 7 taken from their mothers and becoming wards of the all-male military culture for, essentially, the rest of their path to adulthood) - but also for its establishment of masculine virtues as heterosexual ones.

War on Terror politics:
Here's where it starts to get interesting. The film's political stance on the War on Terror is appropriately muddled, given the present American relationship to our neverending conflict with radical Islamism. 300 confidently asserts the values that we can all agree upon ("Freedom isn't free" is spoken more than once in the film). Sparta's need to defend herself is unquestioned by the film's point of view, just as the need to use violence to defend America against radical Islamism is nearly unquestioned in our society. But there is no strict allegorical correlation between the War on Terror and the battle of Thermopylae. Dana Stevens claims in her article that "we're in the middle of an actual war. With actual Persians (or at least denizens of that vast swath of land once occupied by the Persian empire)." Only, we're not. Not exactly, anyway. We're at war with religiously-inspired zealots who hail from these lands but who are a definite minority. The enslaved fighters who fight for Xerxes fail for lack of motivation; they need to be whipped to be spurred to battle. The zealots in 300 are the 300 Spartans, fighting for ideology and the liberation of their land from foreign occupation. With the right directorial hand, this battle of East vs. West could have taken a turn towards Battlestar Galactica and carried inverse political implications. Yes, the enemies fight for Persia, but they hail from all of the lands conquored by Xerxes. They are the previous victim's of Xerxes' expansionist imperialism.

Displacement:
"All that was once directly lived has become mere representation." - Guy Debord

Bloody carnage. Under the attack of great numbers, from all sides. An impossible defense. The capability for heroism in spite of certain death. The muddled politics of a divisive and eternal war. A willingness to engage the enemy from the safety of an theater seat. An entertainment mechanism for dealing with uncertainty, victimhood, terrorism, and continuous global conflict?


Forget the politics; is it effective? Is 300 moving? Short answer: uh, not really. Pretty boring, in fact, to say nothing of overwrought. Whichever critic cut through the movie with its own dialogue ("This will not be over quickly. You will not enjoy this.") had it nailed. But most people go to the movies to be entertained for 2 hours, not to be haunted or spurred to thought. It serves well enough as spectacle to erase the outside world, and for most moviegoers that's all you can ask for.

Hell in the Pacific

In this film from 1969, Lee Marvin and Toshiro Mifune star as WWII soldiers stranded on the same island. Mifune speaks Japanese, Marvin speaks English, and there are no subtitles. Dialog is minimal and the film's story is a slow development of their relationship from adversaries to comrades. Performances are excellent - Mifune and Marvin are bitter rivals with such enemy anger for each other, and their the audience shares their frustrations with communication. Mifune is expressive enough that even without understanding his words, he projects his emotional state; Marvin's performance matches Mifune note for note. Marvin served in the Pacific, and was one of the 2 survivors when his [squad?] was attacked by enemy machine gun fire during the battle of Saipan (Marvin, for his part, took gunfire in his buttocks and crawled to safety, later receiving a Purple Heart). John Boorman's direction is effective but not flawless, and some elements have not aged well - the occassional zoom for emphasis seems especially unelegant. The movie doesn't effectively transmit mood, in part because music is heavily foregrounded to provide emotional cues. I would have prefered that this film build tension through silence, which would have augmented the 'real experience' transmitted by the decision not to subtitle Mifune's dialogue for English-speaking audiences. [WARNING --SPOILERS AHEAD.] The version I saw was NOT the original cut of the film, which ended with Marvin and Mifune dropping their truce and return to fighting a pointless battle. Instead, in a touch that both outdoes and predates Buñuel's That Obscure Object of Desire, they are blown up by a bomb (or are they?) in a final shot added by executive producer Henry Saperstein after the movie's first few weeks of release were underwhelming. The original cut sounds more poignant by far but as a fan of Obscure Object I could appreciate the narrative insanity of such a stunt - one that gets to the heart of war in the way that Buñuel gets at the heart of the modern world and our inescapable fear of irrational (read: terrorist) destruction. DVD Savant has a good review of the film and available DVD edition [I saw this on Turner Classic Movies]. In either version this film is recommended viewing.