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Excellent work on this thread Terry. My favorite part was rethinking the opening of Transformer 3 as being a negative statement on the modern generation of youth. I dislike youth myself, even though I am one, and your analysis drives home a lot of my frustrations dealing with other young people. We are being unjustly screwed over by a bad system...but there's no unity in that, just anger that I, the special snowflake, am not getting ahead. I really like the way you illustrate Witwicky's character in terms of this same ambiguity. It's hard to get much actual discussion of this outside a context of "dumb kids not doing it right like in the good old days" and "old people are always assholes talking poo poo about the younger generation". I think I do have the answer to a question you posed in the last thread that I don't think anyone else was able to figure out, and which you kind of sort of allude to here- Terry van Feleday posted:- why are women dogs The question you posed in the last thread was, generally speaking, "what exactly does Carly see in Sam". Your analysis of the climatic scene Carly has in this movie is close, but not quite there. My take on Carly is that she is attracted to Sam Witwicky because he is Sam Witwicky. Specifically, because he is the cause celebre of this whole Transformer movement. Consider, for a moment, how an ambitious young woman is supposed to reconcile the fact that she wants to be an Eleanor Roosevelt style statesman figure, yet also has to buy into our culture's nonsense about oversexualized women. A man can get his kicks from any willing girl he can find- we're animals and our sexuality isn't meant to be indicative of us as a person. But for women it's unmistakable. Carly doesn't want her Wikipedia page one day to read that she was in a romantic relationship with some random normal person. What will make the gossip rags sing, what will fully establish her value as a sexual object and as a famous object worthy of continued coverage in the future, will be the hotlink that leaves her two steps away from Optimus Prime, mankind's modern Messiah. Sam Witwicky is that connection. So logically, of course, he is a worthy romantic partner and a valuable human being. Because in American rhetoric, a person can only be famous or well-treated by the world if he or she has clearly done something to deserve it. It's obvious to us that Sam is a terrible love interest and a terrible partner all around, but Carly can't believe this. She won't believe this, because Sam Witwicky has a place in her plan as one of the beautiful popular people. Even if the relationship eventually breaks up or ends in divorce, by having sex with this man Carly will have proved she has worth to the collective consciousness of humanity. There will be bad political cartoons about her. In short, people will pay attention to Carly, even if indirectly, and in the modern world of self-promotion and immortality through gossip, this earns her a permanent foothold. The longer the relationship lasts, the more interesting a person she must be. This reasoning is obviously incredibly dumb, but since Carly has also been conditioned to believe that relationships are just about "having fun", she never thinks about the actual state of the relationship. In a world where, (as movies such as Kick-rear end 2 deftly demonstrate), the most horrible thing a woman can do is act girly, Carly will never allow herself the "girly" act of talking about feelings in a relationship. It's the very same machismo attitude she uses to talk down to Megatron at the end of Revenge of the Fallen. Carly wants to be the go-to-it icon for women, but wants no help from feminism to do so. Carly will either raise herself by her bootstraps in this society on her own terms (using sexuality as necessary) or she won't do it at all. She has denied her own agency as a woman in the belief that the "neutral" value she seeks is an objective one, completely oblivious to the fact that she herself is being manipulated.
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Oct 22, 2013 10:07
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As much as I enjoy Terry's takedown of the Transformers franchise, it's important to keep in perspective that even if this is the intentional reading of the film, it's still not the reading the clear majority of audiences get out of it. Most people see Transformers as unironically being a big dumb robot movie. Contextual excuses for the Twins being racist caricatures are pretty weak when most people watched those scenes and thought "lol look at those robots acting like dumb niggas". I seem to remember at one point Terry mentioned that in the DVD commentary Bay for the second movie often says "that was the writers' idea" and that this clearly isn't meant as a compliment. Whatever he was trying to do with the Twins, if he was trying to do anything at all, just isn't as clearly presented as the whole "Optimus Prime is a psycho" storyline, which as we can see is constantly reenforced. Granted, normal viewers unironically see him as a hero, but...again, fans who've never heard of the critique will admit Optimus Prime acts kind of psycho. They'll just straight up pretend the racist implications of the Twins don't exist.
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Dec 9, 2013 03:15
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Lord Krangdar posted:To me the joke is that they have misunderstood human culture by mistaking media depictions of race for reality, becoming blatant stereotypes that stand out in the name of fitting in. I found that pretty funny when I watched the film, and that's not some subjective thing up for debate even if your experiences differ. I'm kind of curious at this point whether you think it's possible for any film to be racist at all. Could you give us an example of unambiguous racism in a movie that can't be explained away as the film actually making an ironic statement about perceptions? Just to throw the obvious one out of the way here- if you look at Birth of a Nation in the context of D.W. Griffith's career, and especially in context of the fact that he later made Intolerance, it's easy to interpret the so-called lazy blacks of the film as actually being the victims of naive Northern oppression, being forced into positions of power before they were ready. Even more problematic parts, like the attempted rape of a white woman by a black man, can much more easily be seen as being the inevitable outcropping of poor governance. Heck, I'd be willing to bet a decent amount that this was in fact exactly D.W. Griffith's original intention. At the same time, I think it would be pretty horribly naive to say that Birth of a Nation isn't a racist film at all just because this is a reading of the film that can be easily supported on textual and exculpatory evidence. quote:Oh but I forgot I'm only allowed to judge the film by how those other people interpreted it. And they, all of them, think "jive-talking and flapping jaws and monkey ears are funny". You seem to think this is hyperbole. You must not be very familiar with the world where people unironically argue that it's not racist to say nigga because it's a completely different word from friend of the family.
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Dec 9, 2013 09:36
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Arquinsiel posted:I see where Lord Krangdar is going with this, and in the context of the movies as a criticism of hyper-capitalist libertarian utopia America it sort of works. The Transformers are a hyperbolic microcosm of the state as a whole, so it makes sense that they'll have hyperbolic negative stereotypes with the lampshade of "they learned it from watching YOU dad!". I agree. The main problem with it is that the movie just doesn't execute the idea that well. The reason Terry gave (which for the most part I'm willing to accept) is that the culprit for this was a rushed production schedule and shoddy screenwriting as a result of the strike. What I like about Terry's argument is that you can share it with a random person and they may well actually believe it, because Optimus Prime constantly acts like a psychopath. With the Twins, first you'd have to get someone to admit they were racist at all for the alternate reading to work. And that's really an uphill battle. Incidentally, I saw a random Transformers scene at a mall yesterday, and it really is striking how impossible it is to tell the difference between the good robots and the bad robots in fight scenes, They're both equally brutal. About the only thing that could be reasonably be called an out-of-context clue is that the Autobots tend to be more colorful.
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Dec 10, 2013 01:10
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I'm kind of tempted to start a thread about the conflict between abstract film discussion and the potential harm commonly misread films can have in corrupting the population. It seems like this exact same argument seeps into random threads all the time and the only real difference is the specific movie being discussed. But that would probably be a poo poo thread anyway, even if it would be convenient to just have all that conversation going on in the same place. Oh well.
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Jan 25, 2014 06:20
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Terry van Feleday posted:Please do this. Even poo poo threads can hold the occasional great post, and I'd like to read more on this topic. Well, if Terry asks I have to do it, since I owe her for making these threads in the first place. Here you go. The rest of you can pay off that debt by not shitposting there.
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Jan 28, 2014 02:14
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Whoa, wait, hold on- the new Transformer movie has Mark Wahlberg? The guy in his forties who was supposed to be a Hollywood whiz kid fifteen years ago then the Planet of the Apes remake bombed, but luckily he was able to piece together a career making well-known critically acclaimed but not super popular movies? The guy who produced a TV show about the skeevier parts of Hollywood culture but managed to avoid getting addicted to drugs and destroying his life personally? He's gotta be pretty high on the list of people whose lives would have gotten a lot worse if they met Optimus Prime right after facing a major setback. Here's to hoping the movie does something with that. Wahlberg's not the kind of actor who signs up for random big projects just because he wants money.
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Mar 4, 2014 09:57
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