A Box of Old Love Letters: Coming Back to "Titanic"

“Are you ready to go back to Titanic?” Bill Paxton’s fortune-and-glory present-day explorer asks the elderly Gloria Stuart early on in Titanic. Paxton’s question, now, is also for us, Titanic’s audience almost 15 years after the film’s initial release. Are we ready to go back? What’s happened to this film, and to us, in the intervening years? James Cameron has assigned us the homework of watching Titanic again, this time with the unnecessary addition of 3-D. But isn’t this spectacle, tugged so long between acclaim and infamy, indeed about memories, movies, technology, and how we change, and so invites a retrospective viewing? The thesis of the film’s bookends implies that Cameron’s spectacle has much to do with the grandiosity of our memory paralleled against the pursuit of profit. That’s fairly pat and blatant, perhaps, but the curious “meta” dimension of Titanic 15 years later, and 100 years after the actual historical tragedy, intensifies the experience.

After watching the re-release trailer, I felt like blushing. Since its March 1998 Oscar sweep, where director Cameron proclaimed that he was “the king of the world” and had the gall to consider a moment of silence for the legendary ship’s dead, it’s become pretty standard to roll one’s eyes about Titanic, to rail about its plastic CGI wanderings, its spectacle at the expense of nuanced characters or good dialogue. When I wrote about Avatar a couple years ago, noting how well Cameron once again had seduced the masses with his fail-safe formula of archetypal narrative and sweep, I felt like Cameron was the great seducer, a Cupid whose arrows rendered us blind with adoration. And when the stinging arrow’s potency wallowed, we woke up and pulled our pants back up, red with shame, shaking our heads. “What was I thinking?! Idiot...idiot!”

Upon release on December 14, 1997, Titanic’s spell slew me. Though I perhaps liked other films more in 1997 (Boogie Nights, The Ice Storm, L.A. Confidential, Jackie Brown, The Sweet Hereafter, Donnie Brasco), I was quick to defend Titanic against my friends, who complained about clunky lines, Celine Dion, and Billy Zane. We grew up, after all, in a time when the flashy and clever dialogue of Tarantino was king (my love for Tarantino and Pulp Fiction was equalled by an adoration for Michael Mann’s Heat; with Tarantino I was enraptured by speech and structure, while with Mann it was an atmosphere bleeding an unquenchable longing; consequently, I credit this as making me receptive to Cameron). Films like Pulp Fiction or the Coen brothers’ Fargo taught us the melodic rhythm of written words as compared to alternative mainstream movie schlock. But I guess I saw something more to what was going on. Like a New Order song, the lyrics were stupid, but the beat and melody were great and made me want to dance.

There was a grappling for power in the Titanic argument. I think a Sight and Sound or BFI list put Titanic on its list of best 25 films of the last 20 years (along with Blade Runner, Heat, Se7en, Pulp Fiction, GoodFellas, and so on); meanwhile, an interview with Robert Altman steered the conversation in another direction (“That was a shitty picture,” the great Altman said), and I vaguely recall reading a Film Comment analysis of 1997’s year-in-film, where the writer disparaged the look of Titanic while favoring the visual style of Tarantino’s Jackie Brown (it’s apples and oranges to me, but I barely remember the bulk of the article, so forgive me). Legendary screenwriter William Goldman (Butch Cassidy & the Sundance Kid, All the President’s Men), however, wrote a lengthy piece in Premiere where he explained why James Cameron deserved to win a Best Screenplay Oscar more than anyone else that year (thesis being that Cameron is an unparalleled genius of structural script engineering). The grave possibility might have been that for a movie that was so successfully a populist venture, there was no way that it could be good. By grabbing a few of the glaring flaws (simplistic bad guys and hackneyed dialogue like, “Wasn’t I a dish?”), Titanic could be exposed. Pop categorizations, in movies, usually win.

The great debate had to necessarily ebb away because of Titanic’s popularity, awards, and the pop culture machine. As a cultural artifact, Titanic was equivalent to its Celine Dion theme song, “My Heart Will Go On,” something that epitomized catchy pop songs that played well on Top 40 radio. For Milan Kundera, wasn’t “kitsch” indicative of totalitarianism? Staking your ground with Titanic was embracing blind populism and shallow manipulation. And what’s up with the resolution of the love story between Rose (Kate Winslet) and Jack (Leonardo DiCaprio)? Sure, she gets to experience great “true” love, an alternative to Billy Zane’s ruthless tycoon to whom she’s pressured to be engaged, but...penniless artist Jack dies. Having sexually consummated their relationship, he gives his life for her, freezing to death in the cold Atlantic. Then Rose goes to America and marries a nice rich guy (so we gather) so she can have wealth, children, live comfortably to the ripe age of 100 or so…and then when she dies (or dreams), she’s not in the arms of her anonymous husband, but Jack, the one that got away. Poor nice-guy rich husband. He gets thrown overboard too, when you think about it.

Did you also blush when the Titanic 3-D trailers began? Did Cameron believe we’d actually be into seeing this again, as the picture’s legend has become something more akin to embarrassed memories? As Jack stands with Rose, holding her close while the Titanic soars into the sunset, our hands cover our faces. That’s what happens when some people grow older, thinking of the things they did, the gestures they made, the letters they wrote during an old love affair. And then…maybe they open up one of those old letters and begin reading.

Here’s the difference between James Cameron’s Titanic and the subsequent spectacles of Michael Bay (Transformers, Armageddon, the Bad Boys movies). We are taken in by both, and these films get our money and our time. But with Bay, we feel a little dirty, used, like we drunkenly went home with an anonymous stranger at a sleazy bar, waking up requiring a breath-mint, reality check, and an STD test (I’ve also equated the Michael Bay experience to an evening of fried gluttony, eating the entire left side of the TGI Fridays menu). But watching Titanic now, and reflecting on it the same way that elderly Rose (Gloria Stuart) looks at herself in a mirror that once belonged to her, I share the sentiment: “The reflection has changed a bit.”

Unlike a cheap one-night stand, Titanic was a brief encounter fraught with bad poems and love letters. But, silly as it may have been, the content of those letters and bad poems was real to you. And I believe it’s real for James Cameron, and his love story or interest in the fates of collateral lives in his spectacle of death is hardly cynical. Does that make it a good movie? I think that’s up to you and how you relive the experience in your head. It’s hard talking about love, just as it’s hard talking about how you guiltily like a movie so sincere and populist in a time driven by irony and shooting from the hip. Fans of Titanic may point out that the scale of the film’s destruction, the fantastic existential spectacle of that final hour as the ship goes down, is the reason for its greatness. As my friend Tommy Mischke says about the film and his admiration for it, “What love story?” I disagree. The kitschy love story ties into the symphony of true-life destruction, death, eternity, etc. It is the refrain of urgency as the chorus reminds us how close we’re coming to the end of a song. In Titanic, love and death are walking hand-in-hand.

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As an older moviegoer, first off, it’s impossible for me not to look at Paxton’s explorer and realize that he is a double for Cameron. I didn’t get that as a teenager. Like the director, Paxton has dedicated three years of his life to nothing but Titanic. And his venture, seeking out a diamond that once belonged to Louix XVI called “The Heart of the Ocean,” proposes the question of any artist with access to tens – or hundreds – of millions of dollars: Am I in this for my big payday, or is there something essential in this creation, something relating to ourselves as human beings and to the mystery of myself? Movies are dreams, so it’s been said. Are dreams born of profit or memory? When we fork over $14.50 for a Titanic re-release ticket, it’s easy to be cynical about movies, especially when it’s been reformatted into goddamned 3-D. But the feelings stirring within me while watching Cameron’s opus made me young again, helpless, in awe of life, and even something once more of a hopeless romantic. Paxton narrates doggerel poetry “to the sad ruin of the great ship” as his documentary camera films the Titanic’s wreckage. His assistant chimes up, along with Kenneth Turan and a host of eye-rolling critics and moviegoers, “You are so full of shit, boss.”

Yes. Cameron knows that this romanticism might feel like shit to a large group of people. The experiences of Rose in her stifling world of privilege plays a commentary on the dramatic scenes and characters people like Turan were so quick to criticize: “The same people…the same mindless chatter.” Cameron is as conscious of his being perceived as “out of place” in making a period film (his previous films were: Pirahna II: The Spawning, The Terminator, Aliens, The Abyss, T2: Judgment Day, and True Lies) as starving artist Jack Dawson (Leonardo DiCaprio) is, dressed in a tuxedo and assuming the manners of the ruling class. And damn, if Cameron doesn’t actually have Cupid there, in the Titanic’s aristocratic party room, his arrow pointed at Jack, who’s dressed smartly as he infiltrates the money-men, falling in love with an unattainable and engaged Rose, whom he saved from suicide the day before. The movies were his guide to performing. When he kisses Rose’s hand he says, “I saw that in a Nickelodeon once, and I always wanted to do it.”

Jack’s penchant to mimic the movies serves Cameron too, as he pays homage to his idol, Stanley Kubrick, who set the bar for technological innovation in film with 2001: A Space Odyssey, and whose pictures share Titanic’s theme of contingency, where fail-safe human innovation is penetrated by chance, and death is subsequently juxtaposed, however absurdly, against nose-in-the-air custom and dignity. Strauss’ “Blue Danube” waltz (famous from 2001) plays as Rose contemplates suicide; her rebellion of blowing smoke into the face of her mother (Frances Fisher) is directly borrowed from Barry Lyndon, when Ryan O’Neal does the same to Marisa Berenson (Titanic’s openness with smoking, and identifying it with the good guys, makes it seem a film older than it really is); mass catastrophe framed against absurd protocol can’t help but recall Paths of Glory and Dr. Strangelove; and most memorably, the empty hallways of the flooding Titanic, as Rose desperately searches for a way to save hand-cuffed Jack, is clearly a nod to Kubrick’s own “Death Ship” of sorts, the Overlook Hotel in The Shining. To seal the deal, Rose’s tool for freeing Jack is, oh so appropriately, an axe. Her lumbering through the knee-deep water, axe-in-hand, almost humorously calls to our collective cinematic memory Jack Nicholson wielding his own axe.

Cameron’s Titanic thus may allude to the timeless heritage in our technologies, our cinema, and finally within our Selves. I think Titanic’s power caught such a hold of me as a teenager because Cameron’s symbols (and the way his love story gave them urgency) corresponded to the writings of C.G. Jung, in which I was beginning to immerse myself in 1997. The cold black of the Atlantic is the void containing a great soup of nothingness, insignificance, and everything – the “heart of the ocean” if you will; and though it be exteriorized in that merciless literal geography, the final moments show the dwindling heart necklace dissolving into the elderly Rose’s sleeping head. The archetypal infinity is all in all in all of us, and we individually contain multitudes. And whether in confronting death or love, human beings confront the transitory fragility of life, where permanence is lacking. The irrational heroics of a single love story, where boy saves girl and girl saves boy, work tirelessly – and absurdly – to act as a counterweight to countless absurd deaths. Yes, it’s the stuff of a million naked love letters and bad poems, but when I think about it, and allow myself to feel it (as Cameron aids me in doing so), and when I hear the complaints or dismissive reactions of critics who harshly shrug off the love story in Titanic, I now have to say, “Fuck that noise.” Whatever Jack and Rose are feeling is life, and it’s acting as a defiance of death.

When I listened to Cameron’s 1998 Oscar speech again recently, my sense of it had changed: “We’re here tonight to celebrate the magic of movies, and I’m grateful every day to get to be a part of that magic and a practitioner in it, and I love it….In the midst of all this euphoria, it’s kind of hard for us to remember that this euphoria from the success is for a film that’s based on a real event that happened, where real people died, that shocked the world in 1912. So I’d just like everybody to go with me for a second on something here. I’d like to do a few seconds of silence in remembrance of the 1,500 men, women, and children who died when the great ship died…The message of Titanic, of course, is that if the great ship can sink, the unthinkable can happen, the future’s unknowable, the only thing that we truly own is today. Life is precious, so during these few seconds I’d like you to listen to the beating of your own heart, which is the most precious thing in the world.”

First listening to that speech, live, it came across as hokey, silly, and the mark of a man who took himself much too seriously; at the time, late March 1998, Titanic had raked in nearly $600 million and was something closer to a commodity than a human story. The melodrama, romance, and existential traumas of Cameron's story had been enveloped by the masscult media barrage of pop sensationalism: DiCaprio posters, making-of books, a top ten single, and so on.

But listening to the speech again, what seemed like naivete and pretentiousness is now poignant to me. Cameron realizes that awards shows and Hollywoodland is a glossy world of pop superficiality and vapid congratulatory gestures, and he's reminding everyone, along with himself, of the spark that drove him to tell these stories in the first place. Cameron is a great showman, but his shamelessness is rooted in a sincerity that most other artists, even in the independent film world, will not dare touch. Every flaw in Titanic is quelled by the urgency, human longing, and danger that the director and his team put into the whole picture, the first two hours in addition to the universally well-regarded final one. It's hard for me to argue that his use of the Titanic as a metaphor for life's uncertainty is mishandled. The human drama is not killed by the spectacle. One of the most haunting images I've seen in any film is DiCaprio's frozen body descending into the depths of the ocean as Winslet says goodbye. And I think that Cameron has used that great archetype – the ocean, the depths, from where we come and to where we go, in dreams as in life – to his advantage here, in relation to the question of where we're going with time.

Oftentimes with romantic melodrama, the cynic in me can easily win out; but with Titanic, the cynic and the closeted romantic are allowed to duke it out, and I imagine my mood at the time determines the outcome. Titanic is not a victim of aging, but this History-as-Pop artifact has rather been more affirmed by what’s happened since its release: the acceleration of technology, 9/11, and the post-2008 economic bust where several wealthy figures have proved, in their entitlements, to be no more dimensional than Billy Zane’s “I make my own luck” villain. History is the unseen character in Titanic, as the ship’s demise anticipates the momentum of the next century, a World War looming with tools of death never before imagined put to effective use. A priest says while praying with some passengers, “The former world has passed away.” Cameron’s apocalypse obsession (so central to The Terminator films as well) is the stalking angel to his role as Futurist. And in annihilation, as the world ends, we hold onto each other, desperately in love and in death, in 1912 and 2012.

Or to quote Paxton’s assistant again, “You’re so full of shit, boss.” Yeah. Whatever. I’m sure the spell will pass on.

Auto-Erotic Asphyxiation: Michael Bay, Michele Bachmann, and the American Fantasy

Who is Michael Bay now? The Rock. Armageddon. Pearl Harbor. Bad Boys II. And finally, the Transformers trilogy, his magnum opus, perhaps not only for him but for every man-child, the long expectant Second Coming of Lost Time as once more we can all be children at play, building things and immediately blowing them up. The flirtations between Ben Affleck and Liv Tyler in Armageddon, the take on history and kitsch in Pearl Habor, and simply the erotic fetishizing of violence in...everything. Michael Bay creates movies for our worst impulses, making the idiot in his collective audience purr. Attending one of his pictures is like being caught masturbating, except everyone else in the room is masturbating also. It is fantasy as form. He's succeeded in creating a treasured aesthetic, as the sensibility of 1990s music videos have now become commonplace in action films. Films don't breathe today, so much as they glide down a runway in slow-mo, bullets firing behind the sheen of a perfect complexion. To complete the formula, Bay puts in sitcom humor, something the folks always finds very delightful. Explosions, cheeky laughs, Oscar-nominated actors, beautiful women, nice clothes, fast cars, rock anthems, more explosions…Sometimes it may resemble a 150-minute Axe Body Spray commercial, but one must admit they achieve their goals. Bay's movies are the epitome of glossy fashion, celluloid user-friendly models downloadable for fulfillment.

The critics snarl, as they do currently in regards to Transformers: Dark of the Moon, their words like darts falling like harmless feathers against Bay's Teflon chest. The previous film in the trilogy, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen was even more hated by its critics. But it made nearly $200 million in its opening week…and the audience loved it. The same fate will hold for Part 3, I predict, as the preview audience applauded at its conclusion. Bay has pointed out the numbers to his critics before, as if to suggest their meaninglessness, their lack of a useful function in this economy, their elitism. Who are they writing for anyway? 

Before digging into the bile of my own criticism of Bay or Bachmann, I wonder about the mainstream mentality that these two have so perfectly channeled and fulfilled. The executive producer of all three Transformers films is Steven Spielberg, and didn't he also make paeans to middle American life, like E.T.? 

I really have never had much problem identifying with Speilberg's heroes, like Elliot in E.T. as a child, and later as an adult, Roy Neery in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Even the myriad of dysfunctions that follow his most stoical of heroes (the spiritual and family questions that are beset on Dr. Jones, for instance) allow identification. Most of all for me, there is David in AI: Artificial Intelligence, the robot who only wants to be "a real, live boy." Spielberg's most memorable protagonists are surrounded by affluence and the normal, but have a few parts missing. Take Oskar Schindler, who's a Nazi but is also, surprising to even himself, a humanitarian, and so an outsider and eccentric in his world. 

Michael Bay makes movies for the kids who made fun of Elliot and David, the well-adjusted ones with the affluent parents, the steady stream of lunch table friends, who had their lives figured out for them, from the right kind of clothes to wear to college. Again, I'm not disparaging the normal – it's what I envied, and I need to be careful here, because at the bottom of all this is, admittedly, my own resentment. And so let it be written – Michael Bay makes films for and about those people who wouldn't let me be a part of their club, and the guys who got laid before me. 

Yet so many freaks and geeks I know love Transformers, just as many who hate it. They love the way every moment is eroticized, the explosions, the loud noises, the glass hurling everywhere even though human bodies seem to stay intact (or they just kind of disappear). I wonder about history, and if Michael Bay could have been who he is now 40 years ago, when Spielberg was just beginning. The short, and possibly unexamined answer, is 'no.' Michael Bay was created by videogames, just as his film aesthetic perhaps worked to influence the course of where videogames would go in the decade following The Rock. For Transformers: Dark of the Moon, the theaters would do well to hand out videogame controllers just as they hand out 3D glasses, allowing the audience to be more immersed in the action as their fingers hit buttons and maneuver a joystick as guns blaze, swords slice, and metal crumbles. The perspective is unstoppable, allowed all access, traveling through windows and walls. This is what Bay's image does: it is unrestricted. Not in the service of story or theme (the unrestricted camera is employed in more respected films from Citizen Kane to The Tree of Life), but just for the effect.  It works well with our lazy eyes by giving us everything, outlaying so much information, titles on the screen joined with the noise of a computer farting, and even if the story doesn't make any coherent sense, we accept it. Special effects, in their persistence, are story for Bay, a point satirized pointedly by South Park ("That's not a plot – those are special effects!" "I don't know the difference.")

The unrestricted film image, where the camera eye reformatted by the graphic designer is allowed to go anywhere, gives us limitless space, as the spatial is no longer necessary. The first Transformers film from 2007 was an awful spectacle showcasing the worst of blockbuster special effects, because of how relentless it was to not be boring. But the special effects aspect of filmmaking, geared to satisfying the popcorn-fisted instincts of viewers, was less exciting than tiresome. The pursuit of not being boring proved  boring because the noise – aural and visual – worked to create numbness: too much sensation, too little reflection. 

There is no lull in videogames. It is all stimulation, all the time. Your eyes and fingers work away on the controller as your mind works itself into the screen, becoming one with the digital embodiment therein, killing other virtual bodies, collecting virtual money, and saving virtual women. If you die, you always get another life. When the game's over, there is fulfillment, accomplishment, rest, and a happy ending as order is restored – until the sequel comes out, and the villains also miraculously resurrect. This is how Bay's films operate--without the benefit of using your own hand-eye coordination with a controller--and it is why they are so successful with their intended audience (I want to note how prescient Bay was with the Transformers villain, Megatron, who is dropped in the ocean: the enemy to freedom anticipating the fate of Osama Bin Laden). His genius is being able to densely put so much into his images, knowing precisely what that audience will respond to – just as Michele Bachmann knows what her political base responds to. If you insult it, you are an elitist. Both Bachmann and Bay, as far as ideology goes, thrive purely in the realm of abstraction: Freedom vs. Tyranny in Transformers being the simple theme, where the Good take on the Bad – and the Bad have no motivations beyond simply being, well, bad.

The characters here are not human, but rather waxwork versions of humans. This is particularly applicable to women, and it is Bay's portrayal of women that I find most troublesome, even more than the militarism that makes his pictures look like recruitment films. Megan Fox, the female lead from the first two Transformers, was a "tough" mechanic chick, but functions as a fulfillment of male fantasy. It is Bay's intention that she should be a one-note character, because it's that channeling of the collective teenage fantasy that he's after – and he succeeds. Fox's replacement in Dark of the Moon, Victoria's Secret model Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, is even more "perfect," and so empty. (And in real life, apparently does not talk back; Fox was fired for her negative comments about Bay – specifically, comparing him to Hitler).

In Dark of the Moon's excess, there is a kind of momentous absurdity that I found appealing, along with special effects set-ups that I admired, such as the human protagonists trapped in a wavering Trump Tower. Even so, it left me with a "not so fresh feeling" later on, and I couldn't help but feel a little used the next day. To his credit, Bay has almost altered his abominable aesthetic in many cases, at times seeming to emulate Christopher Nolan's recent summer films (Inception, The Dark Knight) more than his own work. The film's prologue juggles history, revealing how the Kennedy Administration started its race for the moon because of an alien Autobot spacecraft that crashed there. I was surprised by the amount of restraint Bay was employing during this prologue, and I took notice to how he was thinking of those cameras filming Apollo 11 while it was happening. Michael Bay was being self-reflexive about his own technological spectacles.

And then – well…immediately following the prologue, we see Rosie Huntington-Whiteley's ass in close-up, the commissioned Top 40 rock score singing along. This is Sam's (LeBeouf) girlfriend, prancing around in his apartment, getting ready for work. One of his transformer pets chimes in, "What a gorgeous box." The prologue gives way to latent porno. Dark of the moon indeed. Bay's film launches into its admittedly interesting commentary on men's desire for women, something that began in the first picture, where Sam's first car, the Autobot Bumblebee, seems to compete with Megan Fox for his erotic fixation. At the conclusion, the Autobots, statesmen of progressive and immortal technology, preside benevolently over the planet as Sam and his hot girlfriend lay on top of Bumblebee's hood – a perfect amalgamation of sex and technology, women and cars, the two things men love to talk about most.

The friction between Sam's new girlfriend and his car is now much more pronounced, and it will climax with a wedding proposal where a Decepticon scrap functions as an engagement ring. The erotic attachment to technology makes a lot of sense for Michael Bay. His aesthetic reminds me of a man flexing, then photographing and tweeting such images of himself. He gets off on technology and its possibilities. The "gorgeous box" of which the comic-relief Transformers spoke could refer to a mechanical invention or an organic vagina. The catch is that in Bay's films, the women are far from organic, and if they are nuanced women, they are bitter shrews contemptible of their femaleness. Sam's nemesis is his girlfriend's rich boss, Dylan Gould (Patrick Dempsey), who collects classic cars – and has a female staff of seemingly cloned ladytrons. He points to one car and mentions how it's "built to echo the body of the ideal woman." Bay's women are as mechanically constructed as his Transformer robots are, or as the $200,000 automobiles flashing through the frame.

And yet on the other side, you have CIA Director Charlotte Mearing, played by the great Frances McDormand, who seems to be modeled on Hillary Clinton. She wears pants, talks straight, does not smile in a comely fashion, and, well, looks like a real person. More than twice in the film she accosts her male underlings: "Don't call me ma'am." "You're a woman, aren't you?" one of them asks. With this statement, we are assured that Bay's depiction of women here is not a subliminal or unconscious thing. The woman in his film who is powerful by virtue of her intelligence – and not at all by her looks – is herself a machine, as Mearing talks about protocol and paperwork, which "separates us from the animals." Strangely, while Bay's unreal and beautiful model women – who seem to be everywhere – are all too eager to issue romantic and sexual gestures, Mearing is a cold heartbreaker, having broken-up with the film series' special forces nut, Simmons (John Turturro). Even at the end of the film, when the world has been saved and Simmons grabs her for a big end-all smooch, her smile drops quickly and she commands her men to arrest him. Michele Bachmann and Sarah Palin, the attractive Christian Conservative female crusader, find their most enthusiastic audience among - if not other Christian Conservative women - older white men. They embody that attractive good-wife fantasy, headstrong and active but fully in support of an older set of mainly patriarchal values, and feminism does not apply to them. They too are virtually male fantasy constructs.

Transformers: Dark of the Moon's endearing misogyny is rampant. Though we do not see much trace of female robots, the villainous Decepticon Shockwave terrorizes our heroes with a shape-shifting cross between a snake-phallus given a toothy-vagina mouth (work with me here), ripping through civilization and the best things men have created for us (Mearing is meanwhile responsible for much of the bureaucratic stupidity that will put characters in danger). And then there is a teleportation portal to the Transformers' home of Cybertron, that will give passage to the villainous Decepticons as they land on earth and take over, which, in a Gigerean or Cronenbergian sense, resembles a huge, robotic clitoris.

Transformers: Dark of the Moon has a good message for us young men: work hard and harness your tools, so that you can take care of your beautiful women and keep them securely in your grasp. Sam's problem is that he's out of college and can't get a job, while his underwear model girlfriend is paying the bills. This puts him in a realm of uncertainty – most pronounced when he meets the flirtatious Gould with his car collection and infinite wealth. Sam's parents remind him of his responsibilities as a man, mom offering him a self-help book, She Comes First, and dad adding, "Happy wife, happy life."

Michael Bay, who has that aforementioned erotic attachment to filmmaking, and so to technology as his pictures are technological monuments, has then accomplished the male's dream of amalgamating a man's ideal woman with his ideal tools. He's a garage logician able to keep his women satisfied and eternally beautiful in the comfort of narcissistic prosperity – and to criticize his films for their reactionary arcs is then to criticize prosperity (or to "punish it," such as we hear a lot today). To be subservient to the woman is like being trapped in a job – the "life sucking abyss" described by Sam's effeminate boss (John Malkovich), and then echoed in Shockwave's vulva dentata. Transformers: Dark of the Moon is perfect for the new social Ayn Rand enthrallment, where pity is decried. To act with sacrificing charity only results in the pitiful lemmings below your sinking boat, pulling you into their den of doom.

It is puzzling to have the famous words of Spock from Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan given a completely different context here – especially considering that Leonard Nimoy does the voice! The turn-coat Sentinel Prime has made a deal with Megatron and the Decepticons because, "The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few." You'd think that Sentinel had made a deal to tax the richest 2% of earners in order to help balance the budget – which is an affront to freedom. The "milk of human kindness," that feminine attribute, is done away with in Transformers in favor of pure will, strength, and prosperity. A funny example is Simmons, now wealthy, who is interviewed on The O'Reilly Factor (and is a self-described "big fan"). Simmons says of Gould (who has made his own deal with the Decepticons), "Rich bastards. I used to hate'em. Now it's…." and he shakes his head, as now he's one of them. Freedom, as Optimus Prime makes clear, "is everyone's right!" The Decepticons (who were linked with the Obama Administration in the second film) are so the bringers of socialist, feminist tyranny, who will make slaves out of all 6 million of us, destroying the landmarks of capitalist glory (such as the Trump Tower) and our nation's heritage (the Lincoln Memorial).

What becomes a little frightening in Transformers, from my "milk of human kindness" effeminate male progressive liberal humanist perspective, is how sadistic the Transformers become in their heroism. Optimus Prime has done away with pity or the will to identify with his enemies. Where is the logic in that, after all? Pity makes no sense. Kill them. Stomp them out. Take the battle to them! And rip their heads off. Even when the beaten Sentinel Prime, Optimus' former leader and mentor, comes to understand defeat, Optimus does not hesitate for a moment in blowing the older Autobot's head off. Twice. It's great that Michael Bay can once again show us what being a man is all about.

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This is the kind of stuff that gave me that "not so fresh feeling" of feeling used. I reiterate that the female imagery in Transformers makes me think that it is not accidentally featured here, and Bay truly does have some personal statements he wants to make in response to his critics. He knows that the audience will criticize him, but he's like Simmons grabbing Mearing, smooching her and willingly going to jail for it. He smiles and winks, knowing that we all like it. And most of us, evidently, do like it, even against our better judgment. This film will be a huge success, as most of Bay's films are. It's about prosperity and prosperity will always win – certainly as human beings become more mechanically inclined and concrete-thinking. Transformers: Dark of the Moon is a Dark Age Black Mass, reflective – even with a degree of antagonism to art – of the current mindset as the most deeply felt independent film. And this is frightening. 

Michael Bay and Michele Bachmann give the crowd what they want: fantasies and agelessness, along with cruel death to enemies of freedom, though no one can really define "freedom." The sadism of Optimus Prime disturbs me, but he's not too different from a post-modern, Cyborg Age representation of John Wayne, a symbol of a bygone age that so many people believe is lost. Conveniently, Wayne was just hilariously paid homage to by Citizen Bachmann on her campaign trail, as she spoke of Wayne's place in Waterloo, Iowa, when in reality it was the serial killer John Wayne Gacy who was that town's brief celebrity citizen. This is the nihilism of the ghost years in our Information Dark Age: In the films of Bay's opposite, Michael Mann, the filmmaker has deep concerns about the cloudiness of human identity where the cop and criminal collapse into one frame and the hyperreal impact of the brave new world steals away our spirits. In Bay and Bachmann, Freedom, Sadism, and Tyranny are all similarly confused, but we dwell blissfully in the illusory ether bits of the videogame fantasy.