Transformers I/II (2007/2009)


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From 'if my car could talk'...
...to 'if I could talk about my car'.
By Gabriel Tupinambá

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It is a well known fact that the bigger the Blockbuster, the smaller the risk taken by the story. And this can be understood on very different levels.

First of all, it is a financial matter. If one is investing 151.000.000,00U$ in a cultural product, the margin of risk needs to be pretty small in order to compensate for the risk of simply putting the money there instead of just leaving it in a bank.

There is a common illusion that the acceptance and success of a cultural product is not partly produced by the product itself, which always offers the viewer a chance to like something that only someone better than him would like, thus not only inciting his desire, but actually telling him how to desire (on this, the Master: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JoPTbSfB-aw) - and keeping with this illusion, there is a great pressure on the film production to control the multi-million dollar project’s risk by the means of adapting it to the ‘people’s want’ (one of the most hermetic concepts every developed by mankind, a kind of inverted return of the Oracle). This drives the filmmakers and film managers to choose stories with already high acceptance rates: basically, old films/books/comics/tv series adaptations.

This also registers on the level of craft. A Hollywood film is an impeccably crafted product in all its different departments - and what we normally refer to as ‘all the films being the same’ is much more our prejudice on having encountered a contemporary, market driven product which manages to have a Form, like a poem. This means that for a story to be chosen, it needs to be ‘stretchable’ to the form of the film, otherwise the craftsman cannot work on it properly. The production design, the acting, the editing...one cannot approach a greek poet and ask him to metrify and sing of you having your morning breakfast as an epic poem (as much as we all would like to think we are that special).

There is also a third and, for us, essential level in which this little formula - ‘bigger film project = smaller narrative risk’ - shows its effects. It is the scientific level. After all it is a formula, and one that demands something very specific of the narrative, that it works the bare minimum to maximum effect. It is this aspect, which is the most silent, and still, one that can be heard as a subtle whistling in the background of the other two aspects, guiding their melody, that we need to focus on.

I

Transformers (2007) is a film very much in line with our time. We can observe in many different productions how the Film-Machine (I wanted this to sound like a terrible deleuzian machine, a very cinematic and huge monster, very hollywoodian itself) is expanding through time and space, in all directions, the naturalization of the capitalist ideology. In all eras and in all the places of this and other Universes, good people and/or aliens and/or gods always valued the well-principled individual who would stand on its own against the very corrupted system which created him, to defend the rights of having our own house and our wife and kids and the right for a mortgage and a car and of having lunch with our friends in manhattan.

The only locus the Film-Machine would not dare to touch was the commodity itself - Spaceships are either always-already ready for combat, or almost mystically fixed by a small green alien who doesn’t really sweat on it, while still giving wise advice to the hero (maybe with the exception of the Iron Man (2008), who spends 30 minutes of a film studying and working to build his armour (at the expense of an Arab doctor dying a horrible death, of course)) - well, at least until now....

Transformers, in its bare minimum, is a film about objects that speak from a very particular place. We had some glorious films in the past with prosopopeic commodities - the best being obviously those in which they killed humans, normally much more humanly than we ever could - and in that tradition, Transformers is a mixture of Herbie (2005), the talking car and Independence Day (1996). It is Independence Day with a car playing the Jeff Goldblum role (the friend who knows what is happening but doesn’t act). This is, of course, a very important change.

If there was one silence in Hollywood that could serve the purpose of keeping a small gap open within the fetish it was the silence relating to commodities. But, as the serialization continues, this silence is being substituted from within by a new speech, one spoken from a very old position. Keeping with the Independence Day comparison - where does the president’s famous speech (in the name of ALL the human race) appears here? It comes out of a car’s mouth. A huge american car, with an alien twist to it, which prompts it to speak in the name of all the humans.


President:

President Thomas Whitmore: "Good morning. In less than an hour, aircraft from here will join others from around the world. And you will be launching the largest aerial battle in the history of mankind. "Mankind." That word should have new meaning for all of us today. We can't be consumed by our petty differences anymore. We will be united in our common interests. Perhaps it's fate that today is the Fourth of July, and you will once again be fighting for our freedom... Not from tyranny, oppression, or persecution... but from annihilation. We are fighting for our right to live. To exist. And should we win the day, the Fourth of July will no longer be known as an American holiday, but as the day the world declared in one voice: "We will not go quietly into the night!" We will not vanish without a fight! We're going to live on! We're going to survive! Today we celebrate our Independence Day! "


Optimus Prime:

"Megatron: Humans don't deserve to live!
Optimus Prime: They deserve to choose for themselves!
Megatron: Then you will die with them!
[throws Prime away and primes his cannon]
Megatron: Joint them in Extinction!!"


Please permit us to quote a whole paragraph from The Capital, probably its most famous passage:

“A commodity appears, at first sight, a very trivial thing, and easily understood. Its analysis shows that it is, in reality, a very queer thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties. So far as it is a value in use, there is nothing mysterious about it whether we consider it from the point of view that by its properties it is capable of satisfying human wants, or from the point that those properties are the product of human labour. It is as clear as noon-day, that man, by his industry, changes the forms of the materials furnished by nature, in such a way as to make them useful to him. The form of wood, for instance, is altered, by making a table out of it. Yet, for all that the table continues to be that common, every-day thing, wood. But, so soon as it steps forth as a commodity, it is changed into something transcendent. It not only stands with its feet on the ground, but, in relation to all other commodities, it stands on its head, and evolves out of its Wooden brain grotesque ideas far more wonderful than "tableturning" ever was.

What is a ‘transformer’ if not an object, turned into the Commodity, that now “stands on its head, and evolves out of its Wooden brain grotesque ideas”?

But Marx writes on:

"The mystical character of commodities does not originate therefore, in their use-value. Just as little does it proceed from the nature of the determining factors of value. (...). In all states of society, the labour-time that it costs to produce the means of subsistence must necessarily be an object of interest to mankind, though not of equal interest in different stages of development. And lastly, from the moment that men in any way work for one another, their labour assumes a social form.

From where, then, arises the enigmatical character of the product of labour, so soon as it assumes the form of commodities? Clearly from this form itself”

So this is a good sign - or at least not a bad one: At the same time we witness the capital covering yet another point in the space-time spectrum (actually, an aspect of their conjunction itself, since the commodity is also the place where time is turned into space), in its failure it reminds us that the true silence of the commodity is the silence about it, a social silence, the silence of the form itself, not of its contend. (Who said that commodities know what they are? Look at the Ipad, for God’s sake!)

II

And, as for the sequel (Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (2009)), which radicalizes the same structure (in a way, we are even tempted to say that there are few places in the world where hegelian dialectics is better exemplified and intuitively applied than Hollywood...maybe it is THE HEGELIAN LOGIC what’s actually took place in all the time-space continuum, but let’s not go there now), we find the now classic passage from the first film’s in-itself to its negation (and a glimpse of where the third film will move towards).

The mystical Thing which all the robots were fighting for in the first movie - the All Spark (talk about pleonastic emphatization: how about ‘Optimus Prime’?), the thing that would would decide the end or beginning of everything - is then destroyed and a small remainder of it needs to be reintegrated into the Good so the world is saved and the boy can have sex.

The second film is really ambitious because not only it uses the ‘the second film syndrome’ (invented by George Lucas, in which the second film is the revenge of the dark side), it also uses the ‘Were the God’s Astronauts?’ premiss, showing that the robots we now see coming from outer space actually had been here before, watching us. A comparison to 2001 - Space Odyssey (1968) would probably clarify a thing or two, but let’s move on.

Another new aspect here is that it actually touches on another brilliant point repeatedly made by Zizek a propos deconstruction and cynic distance (here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HuZXplZvlVU). In Revege of the Fallen (2009), the hero of the film, now the boyfriend of the first film’s leading female character, cannot say ‘I love you’ to her, and she doesn’t want to be the first to say it.

The whole film takes place with this tension in the background. And the moment when he can finally say ‘I love you’ to her comes just after the remains of the Thing are reintegrated into the Optimus Prime robot (now Optimus Prime...Plus?): now the hero knows he is “the one he had been waiting for”, now he can say it without the chance of hearing in the echo of his own voice the strange reverberations of a word that does not coincide with itself.

Transformers - the two films combined - are a great example of how this movement of serialization occurs. How can one superimpose with such easiness the boundaries of the market and of the idea of a ‘natural’? Transformers, like a beautiful tiger, a near-perfect example of its species, shows us that somehow the answer to that question is in the staging a universal battle caused by an Unobtainable to which the answer is not the move away from the fetish, the acceptance of an elusiveness of the amorous object (the object that contemplated, could prompt the hero to declare his love, for example!), but the move deeper into it, always exchanging a bigger Thing, for a smaller one, more individual and particular, an object that would be ‘it’, that would finally mean what it means. (In Lacanese: instead of moving around the object a, it moves towards the imaginary phallus.)

And, in a way, couldn’t we grasp the same structure in the movement and choices of the film production itself?

2 Response to "Transformers I/II (2007/2009)"

  1. Martin says:

    What is a ‘transformer’ if not an object, turned into the Commodity, that now “stands on its head, and evolves out of its Wooden brain grotesque ideas”?

    As a member of this blog's nomenklatura, I think we should make a distinction here. Marxian concept of fetichism is not false reasoning, nor a wrong or imaginary conception regarding the nature of commodities.

    For Marx, ideology is constitutive ideology: A process that we enact. No matter how conscious we are about it, yet we enact it, we make it functional by relating to others. At the same time we provide human attributes to commodities, we humans relate to each other as if we were the commodities. The more we humanize commodities, the more we become interchangable objects. Material relations between persons and social relations between things.

    Fetichism begins in the moment commodities are in movement, when they are bought and sold: Commodities acquire human attributes in the social relationships of production.

    Well, transformers don't. They just come from outer space. They are virgin, pure commodities. Created not by human labor but by the Grace of God: Pure use value without exchange value.

    So transformers are the perfect commodity: The commodity that was not even created by man. Commodities that come from outer space; they just happen to take a human form, mediated by a use-value. That is to say, they had no shape when they hit the earth (they were meteorites). But they were so fascinated by human objects (made to satisfy human necessities) that asumed their form. They became cars, plans, cell phones. Once they assumed a commodity form, they were ready to "transform" into robots and finally talk.

    The fetichism of commodities reaches paroxistic levels: Not only commodities acquire human attributs, but every moving object in the entire universe!

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