Michael Bay and the art of not caring
Transformers isn’t a very good movie, but I don’t care; it’s got a bunch of robots fighting in it, and sometimes those robots turn into cars or planes or tanks and back again, and it looks cool when they do that. Plus, talk about the medium being the message: I saw the film on a hot Philadelphia night in the sexiest digital projection theatre I’ve ever been in. The goddamn flick nearly dripped off the screen, it was so hyper-lucid and orgasmically sharp. Fuck, that was a sweet ride. It was this experience, in fact, that convinced me to invest in Blu-Ray. Every movie should be this gorgeous. They used to talk about the frenzy of the visible, and they weren’t talking about transforming robots and muscle cars, but whatever they meant, it’s here in Transformers, too. If the frenzy of the visible was meant to refer to how an image system can be so exuberant, so clear, so unabashedly fetishized that regardless of its subject matter it enters your neurons at the exact same frequency as a soft hand rubbing your cock, then Transformers has got it.
Look at the girl in this movie. Look at Megan Fox. Is she even real? Does it matter? She is the ascending angel of these last days of our failing patriarchal empire. A hundred covers of Maxim paved the way for the birth, fully-formed, of this Athena. Does she play a character in Transformers? I guess so. Shia LaBeouf is running around in there somewhere, too, along with a fat black comic relief and the Jon Voight character from Pearl Harbor (played by Jon Voight). None of this matters though: the only thing that matters in Transformers, on the human scale, is the way sweat looks on that spot right below Megan Fox’s clavicle, and the way triple-dipping your film stock in silver and then throwing it through the digital grader will bring out every distinct particle of sensual grime that lives in that river of thick, flowing moisture. You can’t show pussy in a PG-13, but you can damn well put a hot, wet vagina on a girl’s chest. Jesus Christ, for a flick without a hint of a sex scene, this thing gives boners before the cars even show up, the kind of boners you haven’t had since you were twelve years old tearing a Penthouse apart to keep it from falling into the hands of any of the six other boys who were ready to kill you with their hands just for a shot at it.
The cars do show up, though, and that’s the gateway drug — because only a 12-year-old boy can love a Transformer. He’s the only one who can just want to stare at them… watch them fight, watch them move… Bumblebee and Starscream and even this weird substitution for Megatron. And Optimus Prime. Oh forgive me, gods of all that is right and just in the craft of filmmaking, but when the bastard Michael Bay put that big blue and red warrior king on the screen, and Peter Cullen’s voice first came forth, I felt a bell ring behind my ribcage that hasn’t made a sound since before my first ejaculation.
Only a boy can extract supreme pleasure just by seeing these creatures; these robo-deities; these walking, talking, asexual lust objects. And since the only other thing that a boy can appreciate on their purely tactile, sensual level of visual frenzy is naked women, Transformers provides a gateway to the kind of guiltless pure lust that has been dragged from us since puberty. Under Bay’s guidance we need not level anything more than blithe dispassion towards the souls that may fill those forms. A 30-year-old who gets off on uncontextualized ecstatic visual pleasure is a fiend; a kid who does so is “just growing up.” In the Transformers, visual eroticization transmutes back to the cherubically non-erotic (or the thinly veiled homoerotic, by way of the cock-car, and all those dick-swingin’ matches in the boys’ locker room). Here is your permission, here is your guiltiest pleasure. Let these shiny fighting robots be your guide back to an age when you didn’t have to give a fuck, when it was all right to be shamelessly one-dimensional in your gaze; when you really could only care about a) naked girls, b) cars that transform, and c) naked girls (in that order).
Transformers resurrects that time in your life, unabashedly, unashamedly, with stupid, gleeful passion. It doesn’t just give you permission to be naughty; it lets you love it. Michael Bay is an execrable human and a devastation upon morality, and he is perhaps even more disgusting in Transformers than he has been before, as a filmmaker and as a man. But he still hit the home run here. He has made a film where all the things that make him horrid — the inverted pyramid of disjointed misogyny where the machines are the sex objects, the women are just objects, and the rest of the people aren’t even worthy of his truculent gaze at all — don’t just work in his favour, but propel the movie into a kind of tantric ejaculatory nirvana for a hundred and forty two minutes. Every foundational element of the Transformers as a concept mainlines directly into the fervid center of Bay’s sleaze-encrusted cinematic Bacchanal. Only Michael Bay could have made this movie, because only Michael Bay can treat metal like flesh, and action cinema like porn; and only the Transformers could have given Michael Bay this movie to make, because only the Transformers are the image systems of scarcely-concealed masculine lust and insecurity who get up and walk around.
The only directorial skill that actually matters in Transformers is, how good can Bay make it look. And it looks. An erection occurs when a penis thickens and becomes congested with blood. And Transformers congests.