Transformers 3 as transcendental experience

Before yesterday, I had never had cause to sit and stare slack-jawed at a movie screen for twenty straight minutes. Before yesterday, I had never walked out of a movie theater feeling dazed and numbed. Before yesterday, I had never had my sensory apparatus worked to the point of literal exhaustion by external stimuli. Before yesterday, I had never seen Transformers: Dark of the Moon in 3D. But now all of that has changed, and today I awake to see the world through new eyes.

After the insane excesses of the second Transformers film, I was skeptical that Michael Bay would be able to actually follow himself. That film shattered the boundaries of good taste and discretion in spectacular ways, bombarding the audience with a toxic mix of explosions, retrograde humor (including arguably the two most racist African-American caricatures to make it into movie theaters since the 30s), and Megan Fox. The last of these has, sadly, departed completely, though the pain of her absence is alleviated somewhat by the addition of Rosie Huntington-Whiteley. More surprisingly, the film tones down the racism and misogyny of its successor to a considerable degree--don't get me wrong, the "humor" here still has both feet planted soundly and proudly in the gutter, but it fails to ever really be genuinely offensive.

And yet, despite this dialing back in key areas, the film still manages to be basically the biggest, loudest, longest, dumbest thing ever produced by mankind. If the first two films were amplifiers turned up to 11, this one is set at 11 thousand. The action here comes fast and furious, and sometimes there are stretches of 15 minutes or more in which the sounds of gunfire and explosions batter you without respite. When you combine this with the fact that all of these action scenes focus on giant robots made out of overwhelmingly detailed CGI, you end up with a film-going experience that is absolutely relentless as it hammers your synapses and feeds its loud noises and bright colors directly into the brain's pleasure center. 

This sense of total disorientation brought about by the action scenes is further compounded by the film's absolutely bonkers screenplay. The plot alone (if a narrative action this paper-thin can even be given that term) is pretty nuts in and of itself, involving as it does the moon landing, NASA cover-ups, a teleportation device elegantly referred to as a "space bridge," the destruction of roughly 1/3 of downtown Chicago, and an attempt by the evil robots to transport their dead planet into earth's atmosphere and enslave the entire human race to rebuild it. But this gives only a small glimpse into the script's total insanity. Where the film really shines is not in its ostensible main storyline, but in the truly bizarre, random, and well-nigh hallucinatory episodic sub-plots that comprise probably 75% of its run-time. Here is a short selection of the things you will see if you attend a showing of Transformers: Dark of the Moon:

*Archival footage of JFK, LBJ, Richard Nixon and Walter Cronkite
*Barack Obama played by an extra who looks nothing like him
*Seriously I think they just grabbed a black guy from catering and had him stand at the back of the shot
*Buzz Aldrin
*Shots of what is purportedly Washington DC that include skyscrapers in the background. THERE ARE NO SKYSCRAPERS IN WASHINGTON DC
*Shia Labeouf uttering the line "you look like an Asian Colonel Sanders"
*John Malkovic playing a crazy CEO guy who disappears completely 1/3 of the way through the film
*BUZZ ALDRIN
*Ken Jeong assaulting Shia Labeouf in a bathroom stall
*A pink robot having tea time with a little girl
*Patrick Dempsey as a bad guy
*a really weird Bill O'Reilly cameo
*John Turturo's ambiguously gay Dutch personal assistant who is also a trained assassin and computer hacker
*Robots blowing up a "secret nuclear site" in a location identified on-screen only as "Middle East"
*Frances McDormand as a castrating government lady who carries important documents around in Louis Vuitton and Hermes bags
*Megatron (the bad guy robot) hanging out like a wandering nomad on the African savanna
*Optimus Prime (the good guy robot) musing on the beauty of earth as he gazes lovingly at a sunset 

And so much more! Because almost all of this happens in the first hour of this 157 minute monument to bad taste.

Whatever else one may think of the Transformers movies, it is hard not to admire the gumption and the willingness to go all in at every moment which is their ultimate and defining characteristic. An exercise in absolute and total crassness, they confront us with our own basest impulses and desires. Proving that excitement and tedium are closer together than we ever imagined, the films take the standard thrilling ingredients of a summer blockbuster and, through the force of sheer overwhelming repetition, turn them into instruments of mind-numbing torture. As you sit in the theater and stare into the bottomless abyss of the lowest common denominator, you begin to ask yourself a series of questions: "Why did I spend money on this?" "What made me want to see this?" "Why am I here?" "When will this stop?" "What is wrong with society?" "What is wrong with me?" But this questioning eventually ceases, as the last of your critical thinking capabilities are pounded into submission and you are left only to stare in mute, glassy-eyed awe at the film's terrible splendor. When you gaze for long into the dark of the moon, the dark of the moon gazes also into you.

It's not going to stop

  

Christopher Hitchens has a typically great column in this month's Vanity Fair exploring the US's truly toxic relationship with Pakistan. Hitchens, being Hitchens, doesn't fail to fire with both barrels, referring to this ostensible "ally" of ours as a "shameful" and "degraded" country, one that is "completely humorless, paranoid, insecure, eager to take offense, and suffering from self-righteousness, self-pity, and self-hatred." He goes on to write that

our blatant manipulation by Pakistan is the most diseased and rotten thing in which the United States has ever involved itself. And it is also, in the grossest way, a violation of our sovereignty. Pakistan routinely—by the dispatch of barely deniable death squads across its borders, to such locations as the Taj Hotel in Mumbai—injures the sovereignty of India as well as Afghanistan. But you might call that a traditional form of violation. In our case, Pakistan ingratiatingly and silkily invites young Americans to one of the vilest and most dangerous regions on earth, there to fight and die as its allies, all the while sharpening a blade for their backs. “The smiler with the knife under the cloak,” as Chaucer phrased it so frigidly.

These are strong words, no doubt, and would be forgiven for regarding it as yet another example of the standard Hitchensian hyperbole and overstatement. And yet, at the end of the day, I find it quite difficult to take much issue with anything he's written here. The column effectively catalogs a litany of crimes and offenses committed by Pakistan against both the global political community (giving aid and comfort to terrorists, selling nuclear arms technology to the highest bidder, maintaining a dangerously antagonistic relationship with India, disclosing the identity of the CIA's station chief in Islamabad after the bin Laden raid, etc) as well as against the basic tenets of human decency (honor killings, legally enforced rape, etc), and by the end one can't help but cringe in shame and disgust at the fact that we as a nation continue to openly and happily do business with such a politically duplicitous and morally bankrupt political entity.

And yet, for as bleak and depressing as the material contained within Hitchens's column is, it does not bring up what is perhaps the single most dispiriting thing about the situation in Pakistan, which is that there does not appear to exist even the slightest possibility that it might resolve itself peacefully. At the end of the column, Hitchens himself proposes that we simply stop pretending like Pakistan is an ally and throw our full geopolitical weight behind India, writing that:

We have been the enablers of every stage of that wretched state’s counter-evolution, to the point where it is a serious regional menace and an undisguised ally of our worst enemy, as well as the sworn enemy of some of our best allies. How could it be “worse” if we shifted our alliance and instead embraced India, our only rival in scale as a multi-ethnic and multi-religious democracy, and a nation that contains nearly as many Muslims as Pakistan? How could it be “worse” if we listened to the brave Afghans, like their former intelligence chief Amrullah Saleh, who have been telling us for years that we are fighting the war in the wrong country?

This would certainly be a less shameful course of action than the one we are currently on, though it is by no means an ideal solution. The most obvious critique, of course, would be that Pakistan has nuclear weapons and a policy shift as sweeping as this one--especially if it involved an open declaration of hostilities on the part of the US--could inflame tensions in the region to unmanageable levels and send the Pakistani military over the nuclear precipice. This certainly holds some water, but given Pakistan's well-established predilection for openly spiting the US, I do not believe that maintaining the gossamer-thin fiction that we are "allies" with them would in any real way impinge upon Pakistan's decision to use nuclear weapons or not. If they decide to flip the switch on the doomsday machine, they will almost certainly do so regardless of their nominal position with regard to the United States.

 This, then, gets at the point I was making above regarding the seemingly total hopelessness of this whole situation. Perhaps this is simply a failure of imagination on my part but, unique among contemporary global "hotspots," I cannot even begin to fathom a resolution to the Pakistan problem that is not utterly catastrophic. With nearly every other troublesome or problematic nation one can, via certain mental gymnastics, imagine relatively peaceful conclusions to the current conflicts: Reform tendencies could take hold in Iran, the Arab Spring could sweep away despots all across the Middle East, a peace treaty could be worked out in Israel, Iraq might one day rebuild itself into a working nation, the DPRK might simply implode on itself, and so on. These are of course largely fanciful, and the probability of any of them occurring in such a clean and neat fashion is quite slim, but there is at least hope there. No such potential rosy future seems to be dwelling on the horizon for Pakistan. The civilian government cannot control the military, the social order is largely dominated by a virulently regressive religious ideology, international political pressure appears to have negligible impact on the nation's decisions, they share a border with a country toward which they have an almost constitutional enmity, and they possess a full compliment of nuclear weapons. How can this not end badly?

Or am I missing something here? Because I sure hope I am.

Book Review: The Pregnant Widow

If nothing else, the last decade in literature has answered the question of what happens when former enfant terribles begin to go grey. As we move father and farther away from the Cold War heyday of radical, experimental fiction, the leading literary lights of those days have undergone a series of deeply fascinating changes. Philip Roth transformed from an angry young man obsessed with sex into an angry old man obsessed with death, Thomas Pynchon became something of an old hippie, and Christopher Hitchens turned into a neoconservative. Martin Amis--son of Kingsley, friend of Hitchens, and former London literary bad boy--has not escaped the aging process. But rather than turn him into a crotchety old Tory as it did to his father, age has simply (and perhaps somewhat boringly) made Amis fils a wiser and more subdued writer. The Pregnant Widow, his most recent novel, bears witness to this process of maturation.

 The Pregnant Widow is the third Martin Amis novel I have read in the last six months, following Money: A Suicide Note (1984) and London Fields (1989), and I believe it to be the best of the three. Now, this is not to say that the earlier novels are not genuinely wonderful books in and of themselves--they most certainly are (especially Money, which is as sharp a satire of the wretched excess of the Reaganite-Thatcherite 80s as has ever been committed to the page)--but they are also thoroughly "postmodern" in their approach, and at times tend to fall victim to some of that particular literary mode's worst impulses. As amusing, thought-provoking, and deeply rewarding as those older books could be at certain moments, they also had a tendency to be ponderous, shallow and, at times, overly self-impressed by their own formal cleverness. While not as formally explosive or linguistically daring as the books that preceded it, The Pregnant Widow is ultimately much more substantial as a novel

One of the primary reasons for this is that here Amis has all but abandoned the allegorical pretensions of his 80s novels. Money and London Fields are both clear attempts at making Grand Statements on historical conditions, and as a result end up populated with characters who are less three dimensional, fully developed individuals than they are flat stand-ins for this or that social "type" or trend or tendency. While ostensibly "about" the long-term effects and aftermath of the social and sexual revolutions of the 1960s, the social commentary in The Pregnant Widow resides mostly in the background, as Amis instead focuses primarily on crafting a fairly straight-forward (by his standards, anyway) comedy of manners. The novel is centered around the romantic (mis)adventures of one Keith Nearing, with its first two thirds being dedicated to the time he spent as a twenty year-old at an Italian castle with a handful of other colorful characters (including his on-again, off-again girlfriend Lily, a 4'10" Italian millionaire, and Gloria Beautyman, a figure who could potentially be described as the feminine version of a Cormac McCarthy antagonist) in the summer of 1970, and the last third serving as a catalog of the trials and tribulations he experiences in the 39 years following that momentous summer. While Big Questions regarding the historical import and the wide-ranging effects of the social upheavals of the 60s are ever-present, a large majority of the page-count is given over to smaller-scale affairs, as it explores the difficulties Keith encounters as he tries to navigate the increasingly tricky minefields of love and sex in the second half of the 20th century. Rather than being an allegorical stand-in for a whole generation of young men, as he may have ended up being in the hands of lesser novelist, Keith eventually stands simply as someone who experienced the revolution first hand and has lived to tell the tale.

In addition to toning down the portentous and apocalyptic allegoricism of its predecessors, The Pregnant Widow also goes much easier on the sort of meta-fictional, "po-mo" formal tricks that mark the work of the Young Amis. Other than a few self-reflexive moments, which hit that much harder for being so rare, the book is formally quite conservative indeed. A seemingly minor plot point in the novel concerns Keith's attempt while in Italy to familiarize himself with the English Novel by speeding through the entire canon from Richardson to DH Lawrence, and for long stretches The Pregnant Widow itself, with its romantic intrigues and comedic set-pieces, reads like nothing so much as an updated, more self-aware, slightly pornographic take on the classic, canonical English comic novel as practiced by the likes of Fielding, Austen and Thackeray. In fact, beyond everything else, the book can also be seen as a mediation on the novel's status as a dying but still-vitally necessary generic form. This comes through most forcefully in a passage near the very end of the book in which the story pauses briefly and the narrative voice that has been speaking for the last 360 pages steps forward to identify itself for the first time. It is a remarkable passage for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that it stands as an excellent argument for the continued preservation of the classic, literary novel in these seemingly post-novelistic (and possibly even post-literary) times:

...I? Well, I'm the voice of conscience (which made such a dramatic comeback between his first and second marriage), and I preform other duties compatible with the superego. No, I am not the poet he never was. Keith could have been a poet. But not a novelist. His provenance was too peculiar for that. He couldn't hear what others hear--the reverberation, the echo of humanity. Confined by truth, by Life, I'm nonetheless the part of him that always tried to listen out for that.

It is those reverberations, those echos of humanity, of other people, that the truly great novels capture more perfectly than any other literary or artistic form. In the midst of his senescence, Martin Amis has written a truly great novel.

  

Michelle Goldberg has a pretty great piece on Michele Bachmann over at The Daily Beast. Among other things, the article provides a nice potted history of Bachmann's political and ideological development, exploring in detail the "intellectual" foundation of the radical Christian worldview that she picked up while studying law at Oral Roberts, and includes a few juicy anecdotal nuggets such as this one:

A few dozen people showed up at the town hall for the April 9 event, and Bachmann greeted them warmly. But when, during the question and answer session, the topic turned to gay marriage, Bachmann ended the meeting 20 minutes early and rushed to the bathroom. Hoping to speak to her, Arnold and another middle-aged woman, a former nun, followed her. As Bachmann washed her hands and Arnold looked on, the ex-nun tried to talk to her about theology. Suddenly, after less than a minute, Bachmann let out a shriek. "Help!" she screamed. "Help! I'm being held against my will!"

 More importantly, though, the piece serves as a useful corrective to a lot of the reporting on Bachmann that's come out since her supposed "break-out" performance at Monday's Republican Presidential "debate" in New Hampshire. Nearly every report, response, scorecard, and take-away published by a mainstream, inside-the-beltway news organ in the aftermath of that farcical dog and pony show has pimped the same basic narrative: "Romney looked good because no one went after him, Tim Pawlenty fell on his face because he refused to go after Romney, and Michele Bachmann emerged as a surprisingly serious contender." The line of thinking here seems to be that because Pawlenty disappointed, and because Bachmann didn't go all crazy eyes and start shrieking about a radical gay Muslim conspiracy or whatever, she has now effectively made the transition from "quack running a hopeless vanity campaign" to "real candidate," effectively positioning herself as a "serious" right-wing, Evangelical alternative to milquetoast, moderate, Mormon Mitt.

What's most dispiriting about these pieces is the fact that none of them go to any great lengths to call bullshit on Bachmann's new act, choosing instead to simply praise her "reasonable, measured" performance and exalt her savviness. But the Michele Bachmann who appeared on stage at St. Anselm College on Monday is, in fact, the same Michele Bachmann who once hid behind some bushes to spy on a gay rights rally in DC, the same Michele Bachmann who once called for the media to conduct an investigation into the "anti-American" activities of Congressional Democrats, and the same Michele Bachmann who once said, "Literally, if we took away the minimum wage — if conceivably it was gone — we could potentially virtually wipe out unemployment completely because we would be able to offer jobs at whatever level.” The only difference between the "sane and reasonable" Michele Bachmann who burst onto the scene this week and the lunatic who was (rightfully) pegged as being laughably unelectable when she first started making noises about running for President is that Bachmann Mk II has a seasoned team of crack political advisers who have no doubt told her that if she wants to have a shot she'll have to tone down the wild-eyed nuttiness just a tad. 

Unfortunately, the narrative that has emerged in the last week has not been "Crazy lady pretends to be level-headed, reasonable, serious Presidential candidate," but rather "Michele Bachmann is now a serious Presidential candidate." This, sadly, is the sort of thing that happens when you have a press corps that tends to be more interested in the construction of over-arching campaign narratives (and meta-narratives, and meta-meta-narratives) than it is in actually looking at candidates critically. Bachmann and her team seem to have caught on to this tendency and are currently exploiting it for all it's worth. I still kind of doubt that she actually has what it takes to topple the Romney juggernaut, but the odds have now swung ever so slightly in her favor. She may still be a million miles away, but Michele Bachmann is closer to the White House today than she was a week ago, and that alone is sort of terrifying.

This song’s got the internet going nuts, prompting Deep Discussions of race and gender and the politics of authenticity at places like The Root and NPR.com, and inspiring people to write things like this:

    Elvis Presley was not the originator of rock ‘n’ roll. That would be Chuck Berry. Vanilla Ice’s “Ice Ice Baby” is said to be the first hip-hop song to top the Billboard charts (others argue it was “Rapture” by Blondie). Justin Timberlake went from the pop sensation group ‘N Sync to the soulful singing White boy with swag. My point? America has always capitalized off of Black culture. Kreayshawn, the new White girl rapper, is only the latest byproduct

Now, maybe it’s because I’ve spent the last two years in the sometimes-wearying war zone of identity politics that is a contemporary university English department, but I just can’t get super agitated about this sort of stuff these days. Like, if I was writing about this even two years ago I’d probably be here talking about what a gross and horrible example of racist cultural appropriation this was and about how truly awful white people are, but I can no longer manage to muster up that sort of (faux-)outrage anymore, since getting salty about white people “stealing” rap in 2011 just seems kinda pointless and weirdly anachronistic. It’s like, who really cares if some white girl from Oakland is “acting black”? Like what does that even mean anymore?  And is the phenomena of privileged academic blogger-types styling themselves as the gatekeepers of Real Rap Authenticity really any less of a pose than what Kreayshawn is doing? If some 22 year old girl from East Oakland wants to make rap songs about shooting haters with a pearl-handled gun and pumping swag out of her ovaries, and happens to make a whole lot of money doing so, who are we to begrudge her?

I mean, it’s not that I think that the racial and gender dynamics at work in contemporary pop music aren’t worth examining critically (they are), or that our culture isn’t still shot through with all sorts of ugly and troubling problems relating to these issues (it is), it’s just that I find it somewhat tiresome when every discussion about these things defaults to the same set of shopworn questions and concerns. Music doesn’t exist in a vacuum, and to act as though Kreayshawn’s relationship with so-called “black music” is in any way comparable to Vanilla Ice’s or (more absurdly) Elvis Presley’s is to operate under the premise that the cultural climate of 2011 is somehow comparable to that of 1991 or 1953, which is simply ludicrous. Times change, cultural dynamics change, and, if it wants to stay relevant and important, cultural criticism needs to change along with them.

As for the song itself, and this might just be a byproduct of the complete and total deterioration of my critical faculties w/r/t new music, but I sorta really dig it. On the merits, it’s no great shakes—her flow is somewhat stilted at times, the lyrics outside of a few choice moments (eg, the aforementioned line about swag and ovaries) are unremarkable, the beat is merely serviceable, etc—but so what? It’s summertime, which means the only real criteria for judging a song are “Will this sound good coming out of car windows?” and “Will this work on a BBQ playlist?” This clears both those bars with room to spare.