More Than Meets the Eye . .

I leave for Sewanee one week from today—and am excited but pleasantly nervous. My bio is now on the website, which is cool, but not nearly as cool as the fact that I can also see the bios of other attendees. Its a decorated group, with publications ranging from Southern Review to Glimmer Train to Tin House to Alaska Quarterly—so I don’t mean to prejudge based on publication records, but on paper it looks like a great crew. I also realized that most readings and lectures are open to the public, which means everything discussed therein is nice and bloggable. Hoorah.

Before that, though, I’d like to diverge from the world of literature and solipsism for a moment and enter the world of cinema. Specifically, I saw a movie last weekend I enjoyed very much. It’s a classic tale about two warring nations forced to take their fight to foreign soil, where they defy the beliefs of this new world’s inhabitants; it’s the story of an unwitting young protagonist compelled to stretch his limitations and—like Hal in Henry IV—grapple with the daunting implications of his heritage; it’s a movie that confounds our expectations not only of what defines a well-lived life, but of the nature of life itself. The movie is, of course, Transformers.

Before you get your hackles up, I’m not going to defend Transformers as triumph of modern filmmaking—unless your chief criteria for a movie is nifty special effects. I’m not even going to list it as an especially good movie, in the end. The characters are as flimsy as some of the poorer made eighties era toys, the editing is so frenetic that the action can be difficult to follow (I read somewhere that Micheal Bay’s movies have three times the number of cuts of an average Hollywood film), and as near as I can determine the story has a grand total of four plot points—and in the showing I attended one poor woman stepped out of the theater for two of them. So we are not talking about auteur cinema here. What Transformers does bring to the table, though, is fun and nostalgia . . . and plenty of both.

As you’ve probably figured out, my childhood bedroom was populated by the Hasbro toys. I had Optimus Prime, Bumblebee, Starscream, Megatron, Hound, and others, and I was well-aquainted with the franchise’s mythology, which by the end was both as complex and straightforward as the more venerated Grecian epics. Some of my first encounters with large-scale plotting came from the Transformers comic books, and my first experiences composing a narrative were had with these changeable bits of plastic spread out on the bed before me. I remember being six years old, cross-legged on the carpet too close to the screen, and listening while Optimus Prime offered up limp platitudes about how “there is still good in humanity, and they deserve another chance” all the while—for the first time, probably—thinking thoughts like this myself, but without any of those pesky complications that came later. In short, I nurtured a great fondness for the franchise, and was eager for it to be played out as an adult, finally fulfilling my childhood dreams of seeing the toys “for real”, with all of their destruction and their awe.

And while Bay leans a bit too heavily towards the “destruction” side (when the robots fight they mostly just collide with one another, sandbox style) he still has a keen enough sense of his rhetorical context to amp the kitsch full blast. Owen Glieberman of Entertainment Weekly noted that Transformers is “a movie aimed squarely at the hearts of boys everywhere, though it might be more accurate to say that it’s aimed at the boy who still lives inside a lot of men.” I couldn’t agree more. In the theatre I was giddy—positively giddy—at the recognition that Optimus’ voice was provided by the same actor from the cartoons. I was delighted to see how the unrecognizable Camaro from the opening scenes was made familiar by the “Bumblebee” shaped air freshener hanging from its rearview. I chuckled at the recylced dialogue, and probably annoyed my wife by whispering whenever I saw an old toy tucked in as an understated prop. For me, the movie’s joys are not those of discovery but those of recognition. So while it might just be a case of my taste in movies diminishing as my taste in literature evolves (or grows a bit more fussy) I still had more fun at this movie than I’ve had in quite some time. Unlike the toys, which trumpeted themselves as “more than meets the eye”, this feature is exactly what it claims to be: a fun summer Blockbuster that blows stuff up real nice, and might just help rekindle some childhood joys. If, of course, your childhood joys included marvelling at how an egg-shaped rock could twist into a dinosaur.

Posted by Alan Ackmann - Jul 10, 09:59 PM.
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