Transformers. More than meets the eye. Although in the case of the most recent Transformers film the reverse is true, that everything is in full view, it’s just that there’s so much of it. The camera flits from shot to shot with the agitation of a hummingbird on steroids, thereby leaving the audience no room to question or even think as images wash over them at brainwash speed. It’s like someone’s raping your mind.
Three second cuts with impossibly intricate robot disappearing acts? A bevy of beautiful women? (Every woman in the film is either super-model status or the main character’s mom.) More explosions than I care to count and characters who are always just about to burst an adrenal gland in their excitment? Two gang banging illiterate autobots with large ears and gold teeth who speak in some painfully stereotyped street slang? Welcome to the world of Michael Bay.
Michael Bay, champion of the MTV style of editing, began his career with Armageddon if that’s any indication of the sort of mastermind we are up against. In his two most recent pictures, however, he combines his signature editing style with the added bonus of his already notorious brand of transformers. These newly coined transformers change from robot to automobile and back to robot again with the nervous twitch of a drag queen on the run from the vice squad, only difference being that Bay’s drag queens are covered in so many cogs and gears that when they do transform, the viewer is confronted by the equivalent of a conceptual blur. Your eyes want to focus on each of the myriad infintessimal gears, but because you can’t, you sit back as helpless as a husband at the birth of his firstborn and about as upset.
And what about that heapload of footage lifted directly (or so it seems) from the Army of One series of advertisements? The shots of the army personnel ultra-realistic in opposition to the absurdly fantastical rest of the film?
Juxtaposed with absurdly comic civilians these military folk stand out as the true heroes of the film. For a split second, I actually wondered what my life would have been like had I chosen to enlist with all the other bloodthirsty patriots eager to risk their lives for the sake of our national security. In short, this is a piece of propaganda meant to create a similar mindset as was first made popular on the island of Sparta. I saw the first film in an airplane hangar in California on Halloween of ’07 and surrounded by wildland firefighters from across the country who cheered at the black hawks patrolling above alien desert sands. Welcome to the America of today.
But Michael Bay is not the only director on adrenal overload. He’s just the most easy to swing the stick of reason at—sort of guy just aching to get hit in the face with a heapload of critical crap. The non-stop-action film is in full swing. Even the more well-reasoned pieces of narrative candy, such as the new Star Trek for example, utilize this technique.
From the moment the cadets leave the academy they are on a state of high alert until the ending credits. It’s like the orgasm style of film-making. Humping your face with high octane cinematic sludge from first frame till final shot.
Is this the future of cinema?
Let’s step back for a second to another film from what now seems a much more innocent time. 2001, and what a world it was! Bush had just been elected, the twin towers had yet to be blasted into smithereens by some kooky terrorists, and America still considered itself the sanest place on earth.
It was in this atmosphere that Moulin Rouge was released to critical accalim. Similar to Transformers in that it jumps from narcoleptic Argentinians to dwarves with speech impediments dressed as nuns, to absynthe faeries multiplying out a quaint Parisian window; utilizing the digital film medium to manipulate the actions of characters in the same manner a puppeteer manipulates a puppet; creating unsettling loops of suggestive actions, a technique popularized by Beyonce in the video of her Pink Panther hit.
Baz Luhrman created a different sort of propaganda with Moulin Rouge, a propaganda for love. It was pure propaganda in that it had no discreet objective, like trying to equate the Iraq war with some intergalactic conflict with shape-changing robotic aliens in the minds of young men and women everywhere for example, but simply wanted to entertain the audience to death. Something I would have expected The Joker to come up with.
Another difference between what Luhrman attempted and Bay, is that he was riding this wild line between sincerity and irony, a movie that could both be a weep-fest for the weepers and a laugh-fest for the cynics. For example, when the author believes the courtesan he loves has betrayed him, that same aforementioned lisping dwarf approaches the bedside and says, Christian, you may see me only as a drunken, vice-ridden gnome whose friends are just pimps and girls from the brothels, but I know about art and love, a line that caused me to burst a gut laughing while my viewing companion turned to me with an incredulous expression. We were watching two different movies.
The thing about us cynical folk though, is that we’re just looking for some excuse to weep with the rest of you, and Moulin Rouge gives us that excuse, and more than this it re-appropriated camp for heterosexuals everywhere. (That having been said, I would like to point out that single shot of the two tattooed gents dancing during the opening scene for Moulin Rouge, probably one of the most genuinely tender in the whole film.) The film is as facile as the hooker with the heart of gold Christian falls in love with, playing into the swamp of sap lurks within every unrepentant romantic, but also teasing us with hilarious little moments that consistently undermine the film’s more hallmark tendencies.
But in terms of the pace of Moulin Rouge and Transformers 2, the reaction to both was that I was being forcefed cream cheese. It’s just that the former knows that it’s cream cheese, throwing in a good helping of lemon zest to give the viewer that extra little edge leaves him or her grinning like a porn star after the last gang banger’s left the room. Either way, however, both these films burrow into your brain whether you like it or not. The rapid-fire imagery leaves you no room to breathe.
But do we want to breathe? If history is any indicator, we are always searching for less and less breathing room in our narrative products, less room to think for ourselves, and instead to be handed a pre-packaged imagination, and the more the better. Because if we were given a moment to think for ourselves we just might be confronted by the vacuous selves we left behind when we started getting our dreams pre-packaged by blockbuster conglomerates down Los Angeles way. When did this begin? Was there ever an alternative?
Let’s go back a few more years and to two films that largely passed under the critical radar, specifically Stanley Kubrick’s final film, Eyes Wide Shut, and The Ninth Gate by Roman Polanski, both of which take the pamphleteering style of film-making made memorable by the likes of John Carpenter and put it on a silver platter.
I was living in New York when these films came out, and I remember the rumors concerning how Kubrick had lost his mind, hadn’t been alive to do the final soundtrack edits, or that the two of them had been in communication during production. Because both of these films appear to be a return to clumsy and obvious film-making seemed so beneath the directors who created. They both failed to capture the audience’s attention, presented their cinematic metaphors using the most bare-faced techniques, and left the viewer simply baffled. I would argue that this is precisely the point.
Just as Moulin Rouge and Transformers 2 capture the viewer’s attention in almost forceful manner, Eyes Wide Shut and The Ninth Gate purposefully stand aloof because these latter two films exist more to be interpreted and thought through than to experienced in the traditional way, i.e. as an emotional roller coaster. These are essays on film, and on that which underlies our understanding of things. The artificiality, the blatant signage, and the feeling of bafflement as the credits started rolling down the screen all begs the audience to ask themselves what we missed, and hopefully, look beyond the obvious to whatever message lies beneath.
The Ninth Gate stars a bookdealer named Corso whose most recent job is to prove the authenticity of a book called the Nine Gates. The owner is under the impression that Satan is co-author of said text and can be manifested through some ritual involving the nine engravings, but has been unsuccessful so far. As Corso gets more and more involved in his duties, he is confronted by scenes that mimic particular engravings, a bookseller friend hung upside down with one leg bent being the first. Some of the characters he comes across are also eerily similar in appearance to certain figures in the same engravings, but let’s not get too bogged down in the particulars of plot, shall we? The gyst is that Corso lives through the nine gates of the engravings, and ends by actualizing Satan, conveniently played by Polanski’s very demonic wife. The film culminates with she and Corso humping while a castle burns behind her, the flames framing her carnivore’s grin. She is of course on top. Where else would you find Satan?
The film is as much about ersatz evil as anything else.
At one point Corso’s employer, Balkan, breaks apart a cabal of sham witches to take back the book he believes to be rightfully his, but because he himself has not lived through the nine gates, his own ritual to raise the archfiend fails miserably. He’s engulfed in flames when Corso finally shoots him in the back to put him out of his misery. The final frame shows Corso walking into the same burnt-out castle, only now it’s streaming light.
This film has presented itself as a text we must unfold so as we, like Corso, can transcend this dichotomy of evil and good, heaven and hell, ritual and reality. It presents itself as a puzzle, and the characters as icons, not unlike the creatural dramas of the dark ages. The film is the book, and the book is the film, but the message is elusive. We transcend these dichotomies through struggling through hardship the film seems to be saying, but beyond that, whatever message Polanski was trying to present is lost in his own game of smoke and mirrors.
Eyes Wide Shut on the other hand is so successful at conveying its message that its almost painful. Commerce and sex are the social lubricant through which we achieve our dreams as post-industrial gadflies, but our dreams conceal the actual nightmare of reality which cannot be purchased or even seen without dire consequences. And how does it present this version of events you might ask?
Cruise is repeatedly offering tips and bribes to get what he wants. Not to mention the christmas lights are everywhere in this film, and the constant coitus interuptus. But I would argue the key to understanding this film is to compare the second secret party Dr. Harford (Cruise) attends to the earlier christmas party.
The second is the shadow underbelly of the first, where the guests wear masks on their faces but expose their genitals, as opposed to the first where, conventions of western society in full swing, the reverse is true. The two parties have at least two guests in common, not counting Harford himself, and whereas the Christmas party is the birthplace of the doubts between the happily married couple (Cruise and Kidman), the secret party presents Cruise’s fantasy back to him and the repercussions of that single glimpse are total. He could lose everything, and those who helped him in and out either inexplicably vanish or definitively die.
Beyond this there is the film’s aforementioned obviousness. When Harford ducks into a coffeeshop to escape the bruiser’s been following him for several blocks, he flips open a newspaper, and the top headline reads, LUCKY TO BE ALIVE, while in the background Mozart’s Requiem is playing. It’s as if Kubrick wanted to present us with the scaffolding of the cinema rather than the usual painted backdrop.
Or perhaps a more inter-related vision of reality—that we make our reality as much as it makes us—that the distinction between the dreaming and the waking world are not as different as we would like. Polanski and Kubrick are making the same argument, a non-dichotomous epistomology, the illusory and the true as two sides of the same phenomenal soup.
Kubrick’s two parties, his dichotomy of dream and awake, of sex and money, of mundane prestige, and an alluring other, ultimately presents itself as just another perspective on the world Harford knew all along (this in a scene in which Sydney Pollack reveals the identity of the woman who saved Cruise’s life, and in this way tying the two parties together), but it is also an immensely boring film. Pretty enough, but without anything would cause us to become emotionally attached in any way.
And what about the “new disorder”, as described in the article by that name by David Denby in the March 5th, 2007 issue of the New Yorker, in which the author explores the fragmented narratives Charlie Kaufman, Quentin Tarantino, and the filmmaking team Guillermo Arriaga (writer) and Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu (director)? “The notion that one event causes another, and that the entire chain is a unified whole, with a complex, maybe ambivalent, but, in any case, coherent meaning, not only brings us to a point of resolution; it allows us to navigate through our lives,” writes Denby.
At one point in his article, Denby suggests that perhaps this narrative dexterity we are seeing in film today is a result of boredom with the conventional story arc so well loved in Hollywood. I am reminded of the Late Roman period in literature, most notable because it made nothing of note.
This is where we’re at in cinema currently, a time when our narrative arts can do nothing more than play with the tropes of yesteryear to keep this wedding of viewer and maker alive. We’re in the moonlight years of our modern storytelling.
And in the midst of all this mayhem, Kubrick and Polanski stand out as the auteurs of an earlier generation making parodies of their own films almost as a guidebook for how films “should be made”, as opposed to the narrative overloading on the one hand, and visual overloading on the other. (Michael Bay had already put out Bad Boys, The Rock, and Armageddon by this point after all.)
Now, personally, I happen to like narrative twisting and turning, but with Tarantino it does seem to be a largely superficial game, while Arriaga/Inarritu’s like anti-Tarantino, full enough with well-meaning sincerity to make this author at least sick to his stomach. As for Kaufman, he’s perhaps too ingenious for his own good, but also the perfect conclusion to the classic Hegelian equation of thesis, antithesis, synthesis. I.e. if Arriaga/Inarritu is the anti-Tarantino, then Kaufman is the synthesis of the two.
That’s to say, clever and innovative (Tarantino without the wink wink nudge nudge factor) with the humanity of Arriaga/Inarritu, but somewhat more subtle. Of course, the man is not a static entity, but has certainly lived up to this assessment with his last two films, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Synecdoche, New York, which I loved by the way. It really feels like the film version of the classic life flashing before a person’s eyes.
Time is treated strangely in this film. It will seem like the next day and turn out to be a year later, the character himself right there with us, and weird dreamlike moments, e.g. (you should know that Claire is Caden’s wife of many years, and the last line is yelled):
CADEN
She’s tattooed!
CLAIRE
(revealing massive tattoo on back)
Everyone’s tattooed!
CADEN
I’ve never seen that before.
What makes it a difficult film, however, is that it takes forever to end. The surreal moments, and the time confusion become less apparent. The hilarious and painful moments (best of which is probably the scene when Caden confronts his dying daughter) lose something of their intensity as Caden steels himself for his own encroaching demise. In a sense this film fits in all the above categories, which is one of the reasons why it’s so fascinating. It has the emotional intensity, the visual stimulation, the narrative confusion, but is also a film about a believable human being going through the ongoing crisis of their own life, which is refreshing and perhaps what’s been missing all along.