Theodore Roszak is primarily known, unless you're a movie geek, as the academic who wrote The Making of a Counterculture way back when. TMofaC was a Big Deal attempt to explain hippies to straights that got on public television and everything.
If you are a movie geek, you likely know him for only one thing, one of his successful efforts at popular fiction over the years: Flicker. To the uninitiated (And it's not like this is a culty-cult - the novel was quite popular twenty years ago when released, it's just not much-remembered now, as happens with popular novels, and is now back in print, I think. But my copies used to be more eBayable.): Flicker is one of those sort of Pynchon/Eco-lite novels, which is going to make you think of Da Vinci Code immediately, and I do apologize.
No, Flicker wasn't written for people who don't know how to read, like Dan Brown's books. (Nor was it written solely for people who love taking drugs, like Illuminatus!) It's not as deep or clever or mysterious as it wishes it were, maybe, but if it's not a great book, it's a smart one, anyway, and it's all about a secret history to the movies, tied to a pending religious apocalypse. And it's about being a movie geek. So, obviously, this is like the second lodge sign when you meet another one: you drop a joke about or reference to Flicker and see if they get it.
So anyway, Michael Bay has finally done it and turned completely into Simon Dunkle.
You should really read that book.
***
Roszak's kind of a crank, and I have to agree with the Ty Burr EW review quoted in the Wikipedia article: the second half of the novel, about the devolution of the movies, is shrill and totally Get Off My Lawn.
One of the most disheartening things about getting older is watching people my age start up with that Nothing's as Good as It Was When shit. No, the music wasn't better, the roads weren't safer and the candy bars didn't taste better when you were ten. And everybody thinks that. It's so common a human mental aberration as we age, the ancient Jews felt compelled to warn all members of future Earth monotheisms that the notion was foolish, five thousand years or so ago. (Really, it's in the Bible: it's stupid to believe it when people say "The old days were better." Even the one your church uses. Look it up.)
Roszak clearly doesn't like the cult/camp thing that started up around the time he made his bones as a social critic, and basically turns the acceptance of love for Ed Wood and the rise of John Waters into The End of Days, intellectually, culturally and for-really. This is, I think even my most conservative friend - aesthetically and socially - who isn't a total idiot would agree, overstating things wildly.
Roszak's kind of a dick on the subject, but it's forgivable because he knows so much about and loves the movies the same way you do, and the story's compelling and nobody's a movie geek without feeling at least a little that way about a lot of movies. If you were happy with the stuff that makes everybody else happy, you wouldn't have started looking for other movies behind the movies you liked when you were small, and pushed on and ended up the adult everybody asks when they don't have the IMDb handy.
And most popular work, in any field, isn't shit. It'd have to try harder to be shit. It's medicore, it's trite, it's the same white bread with fancier spread, over and over. You might suspect this when you've seen twenty movies or two hundred movies. You know this on a level that is physically painful, sometimes, when you've seen hundreds of times more movies already than anybody else you know ever will.
***
Michael Bay is generally the late King of Pain, the epitome of the Moron Who Got Into Movies Via Music Videos Solely To Get Laid and Succeeded, Motherfucker, and his movies are…just not. They're not bad enough to get much enjoyment out of them that way, they're not good enough at anything to latch onto, for real.
Compare Bay to his (slightly older) contemporary blockbusterer Roland Emmerich, a man with the modest goal of becoming the new Irwin Allen, at which he has largely succeeded. Emmerich makes acceptable spectacles, most of them silly, some of them outright stupid, but they're likeable enough, most of them. You can spend a Sunday afternoon with Independence Day, again, and not feel cheated even if you have seen ten thousand better movies.
Bay's screen circuses are something else. They're blanks, seemingly without a person behind them. You may have suspected something frightening behind this, real life frightening: maybe Michael Bay doesn't even have a person inside to come out in his work. At all. Well, get ready to have your worst suspicions confirmed if you ever thought Bay might be a psychopath, because Michael Bay finally made a for-real Michael Bay movie, baring his soul for all to see, and…
You know that South Park where you see what Cartman sees whenever he closes his eyes? The montage of death camps and skulls and slaughter houses and shitty eighties horror movies?
Like that, only I'm pretty sure it goes on for six hours instead of fifteen seconds. Plus hot chicks. Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (and I'm well aware I'm not the first guy to say anything like this) is not a movie. It's put together like a movie, technically, but it manages to avoid all of the standard conventions of editing movies, of film narrative, of using actors, and…does not accomplish what a dramatic film sets out to do, and often seems to be accomplishing the opposite. Intentionally.
You know how you'd feel about that if anybody but Bay had done it, if they'd hired, say, Gaspar Noé out of the blue to do the Transformers sequel, the way Godard got hired to do a Lemmy Caution movie, once. And he shit all over the movie, everything it was supposed to be about, and turned it into a crawling, visceral depiction of hell with no plot, no characters, no anything going on for two and a half hours but pure hideously expensive mental rape. If he'd gotten hired to make Transformers 2, or hell, Cronenberg, or the two of them together, and they'd produced a wretched, dripping sort of satire of summer movies that was primarily useful for a real world Ludovico Treatment.
You would be so into that. You would be there on opening night, right next to me, and I didn't even bother going to the theater for the first Transformers movie. Like I care about some cartoon kids ten years younger watched, back in the day.
Well, lucky you and lucky me, because that's what Michael Bay delivered as Transformers 2, as it turns out, exactly that movie. This is a great movie, if you have any heart for appreciating the wrongest ways movies ever go wrong. It is a demonstration of utter contempt for its audience on a scale that I think I can legitimately compare to de Sade, and speaking of de Sade, like Salo, I'm pretty sure I don't ever want to see the fucking thing ever again, singular and brilliant as it may be.
Michael Bay will surely go back to his soulless formulas next and never top this: he has made a perfect anti-movie. If we lived in a universe like Flicker's, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen would be the First Trumpet. Or the Seventh. Or all of them, and the seals and bowls, at once.
This is Henry Miller's gob of spit, except Michael Bay got into a position where he could hock a loog in the whole world's face. You have to respect, at least, the Satanic levels of dedication evident in that kind of hate.
If I did shit like giving movies starred rankings, I'd give Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen all the stars, and then some.
***
In Flicker, "the movies" predate the invention of cinema, magical methods precede and infuse the modern and technological, and the entire history of twentieth-century film has been a series of rituals leading to Gnostic apocalypse. There is an antichrist, of sorts, an autistic savant director named Simon Dunkle who makes the world's last popular movies.
As these things can tend to go, when you finally do get to "see" Dunkle's work through the novel's narrator, Jonathan Gates, it's a bit of a letdown. If you're going to write a King In Yellow story, it's usually best if you leave the book in shadows. You may be able to write a good story about the Work of Art That Ends Worlds, but you are mad if you think you can actually write that book.
Dunkle's work, in the novel, comes across as sort of a long-form eighties Sonic Youth video directed by Larry Clark, mixed with The Road Warrior. Roszak apparently finds just about every aspect of emerging youth counterculture since the one he pinned to a board in the sixties confusing and reprehensible. In his world, the most popular movies are simply two hour-long punk music videos full of half-naked teenagers driving around in the desert and fighting and fucking and repeating the same memey nonsense, "Sub sub." (This is almost all anybody says in the movies, "Sub sub," sort of this "Where's the beef?" cultural virus thing, anyway, people pack theaters to watch this crap.)
In the real world, of course, you and your friends might go see that movie and argue about it online after, and maybe Autechre would do the soundtrack and it wouldn't matter to ninety-nine percent of the world at all. This is not only not very apocalyptic, it's not very good satire. Richard Kern's movies really do exist. Everybody did not pack theaters during the eighties to see them.
Michael Bay actually managed to do a Simon Dunkle, though. Jesus God, I don't know where, exactly, to start describing this thing.
***
Nothing happens in Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. There is no plot. There are some actors left over from the first movie, but they're no longer even trying to play the same characters or any characters at all, really. These actors run and drive and sit and talk and this all sort of happens in a story order correctly, but…this is too obvious a comparison, maybe, but Stan Brakhage comes to mind. And he and Cindy Sherman had a baby. And then that baby grew up and had a baby with another baby produced by the union of Francis Bacon and Steven Spielberg. Or something.
Anyway, nobody ever actually seems to be in the same room talking to each other in this movie, or know exactly what they’re supposed to do next.
There are all these robots everywhere, and I guess some of them express unpleasant ethnic stereotypes, but mostly I was just trying to figure out which side they were on, at any given moment, never mind which car they were and what they hell they were doing.
I'm getting to an age where I'm having some trouble reading up close, that kind of thing, so I wondered about halfway through this movie if I was just getting old. I really could not tell what the fuck was going on at any given moment for like half the movie. All I know is that the screen was filled with shifting fields of metal within metal and that this metal sometimes seemed to form individuals who hurt and talked to each other. And then sometimes turned into cars.
(That shit is just baffling, BTW - I mean, I get the cartoon was about some toys and that's what they did, but…come on. These things can literally jump off the earth into space. But they prefer, when the chips are downest, to travel as cars, on highways, topping out at a hundred or so, stopping every two-three hundred miles for gas. And a sody and a pee for the kids. When they parachute from airplanes, they turn into cars first to do it, god only knows why.)
***
Anyway, it' s not my old eyes, and I know this because even the humans on screen had to check VINs to keep those robots straight. There’s actually a whole thing that resembles a subplot, were it human, about how nobody including the robots can tell who’s who and what they’re doing. It’s cool, the text is telling you, this is part of the show.
No, it's the absurd degree to which the FX folks were unleashed to follow the first film's redesign of the cartoon robots, who, you know, just turned from cars into robots. And back. Pretty basic, but life was just simpler in 1985, you know? And the candy bars were way better.
No way that was enough, not in today's CGI Loudness Wars, so the robots in the first movie were little micro-universes of transformation, always something shifting and sliding around on them, in them, whatever. It was dealable. You could watch a robot talk and not get carsick in your soul.
Nobody seems to have restrained the computer modelers on this movie whatsoever - in fact, you can imagine Bay with a whip, banks of nerds in chains at workstations, urging them on to greater and greater heights of agonizing ecstasy. The second movie's Autobots and Decepticons are Cronenbergiger masterpieces of biomechanical disgust. They are constantly at a whirl, everywhere, demonstrating this Lovecraftian robot physiology, in the first place. Second, they fucking weep and sneeze and piss and shit and bleed transforming metal crap all over the place at every opportunity, creating other pools of transformation from which unpleasant new voices may emerge at any moment and never go away.
***
In a sense, this is all hyperbole, yeah: this movie isn't really a work of art. It's even predictable, how this happened: this is a Sequel Nobody Gave a Shit About. Nobody cared , not Bay, not anybody in it, everybody working on it was just into doing their own neat shit and moving on to a better project ASAP.
The thing about those kinds of sequels, though, is that they're generally cheaper than the originals. If you're going the blockbuster route, you usually try to make a whole second movie, even if it ends up sucking. People sort of expect that.
So there's the first of Revenge of the Fallen's reversals on the way to becoming Bay's masterwork, I guess: it's a much more elaborate and expensive sequel, and still, nobody gave a shit about it.
It's magical, even: the worst of what "Hollywood" represents when anybody says it with a sneer, bottled up, preserved forever. A movie that can actually hurt you, a la Infinite Jest and Ringu.
Again, hyperbole. Obviously.
***
Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen looks very much like I might expect Hell to look. It is baffling and terrifying and will make you question yourself and all your assumptions about humanity. It is an evil piece of work, in its stupid way, like a two-hour-plus film of a starving baby screaming. It is hard to take, I don't blame anybody who doesn't even want to try, but…this is the only Michael Bay movie I’m ever going to say this about, most likely. You have to see it. It's completely fucking nuts. Even if it makes you throw up a little or a lot in your heart, stick it out.
And then scour your eyes, for serious, and move on.
Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen
USA, 2009
Dir: Michael Bay
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