Transformers: Dark of the Moon 3D (Saturday, July 2, 2011) (48)

First they came for the communists,
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a communist.

Then they came for the trade unionists,
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews,
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a Jew.

Then they came for me
and there was no one left to speak out for me.

-- Martin Niemöller

On a space shuttle launch pad at Cape Canaveral, Florida, Simmons (John Turturro), a government-worker-cum-freelance-Transformers-hunter-expert paraphrases this poem as he speaks to the heroic Sam Witwicky (Shia LeBeouf). He's talking about how as a gesture of weakness and conspiracy, the U.S. government agreed to the demands of the Deceptacons to send the Autobots out of the country and off into the wilds of space. Simmons is upset that the holocaust of the humans at the hands of the Decptacons will continue and, like the German pastor before him, he will have tacitly endorsed the heinous act by not fighting against it.

You might say that director Michael Bay and writer Ehren Kruger are being a bit heavy-handed, invoking the Holocaust to a sci-fi action story like Transformers: Dark of the Moon, but you would be wrong. They are presenting a deeply searing critique of modern consumerism and a deep post-structuralist analysis of the past 60 years of world history. "Was it all worth it?" is the question that they wrestle with. Taken down to it's basic parts, we see how the hope, good fortune and lessons that came out of the Second World War was all an illusion, that capitalism and the concept of "freedom" are broken systems and that there is only a bright future for us today if we embrace femininity.

The basic story of the film is much too complex to understand from a wide point of view in the context of this column (a fact which is, in itself, a comment on American consumerism, of course), so to put it simply, you have to know that the Deceptacons have come back to Earth, are more Communist than ever and are trying to get a bunch of fuel rods that were crashed on the moon in our pre-human-history. It seems these rods (read: phalluses) are the basis for re-building the Transformers' home planet of Cybertron. If they can insert the rods into our buildings, they'll be able to summon Cybertron inside of Earth's atmostphere. (Spoiler alert: When they succeed in bringing Cybertron to Earth, it looks like a big breast with a gigantic nipple.)

The role of sexuality is ever-present and central to the story. It reminds me of Pier Paolo Pasolini's film Salo: 120 Days of Sade, although here most of the sexual torture is replaced by violence and we are left only with symbolic rape. The Deceptacons are a class of super-masculine bourgeoisie, in the waning days of their own empire. They are led by a Prime (see: The President, The Bishop, etc. from Salo) whose goal is really just to dominate and subjugate. They have their own set of laws, which can be amended at a moment's notice; they appreciate youthful vigor and seem to have as much of an interest in boys as they do in girls.

Their main tool of destruction is Shockwave, a robot that can grow to infinite lengths (like an awesome erection) and burrows through the land and buildings with sharp teeth (like an awesome erection). He is, of course, a gigantic penis with teeth, a Freudian nightmare far worse than the vagina dentata. He is a clear symbol for the Deceptacon culture of over-excess, fucking the world, force feeding people excrement and acting on the most depraved thoughts and desires one could conceive.

But Bay and Kruger are not making a direct parallel to Pasolini, of course. In a very post-Roland-Barthes way they take the predicate of the Holocaust and twist it. Here the Capitalists (the Autobots and the US Government) are the Fascists and are fighting the Communists (the Deceptacons). The American freedom they are tying to defend is best symbolized in the hundreds of brilliant product placements throughout the film. One of the cars is a NASCAR stock car that is sponsored by Target. As we see our heroes fighting the bad guys, we see Target right there in the mix. The film is a polemic about American consumerism. What they are fighting to defend is a world of no choices, corporate overlords and the force-feeding of industrial crap (read: excrement). In the middle of the wreckage of post-battle Chicago, a brand new Ferrari drives down the street unscratched. Overconsumption and the post-feeling world have won and we can celebrate by dreaming of buying cars we'll never be able to afford.

The fact that Bay made this in 3D and has begged people to see it in that format, promising us more than we've ever seen, is a cynical commentary by him on the state of the movie industry and the filmic format. Like Werner Herzog did with Cave of Forgotten Dreams, Bay shows us here how everything we see is not just done well, but amazingly overdone and and we have to pay more money for the honor of beholding it. We already live in the world he's showing us in the film.

Even the human characters and locations are tied to this theme of post-choice hyper-saturation. The film is set in Washington, D.C. where Witwicky (even his name is a comment on the outsourcing of encyclopedias to the crowd-sourced Internet) is dating a bodacious blond English girl named... uh, I don't remember, but she's a Victoria's Secret model (even here, the poor woman's humanity is stripped away and she becomes a symbol of her employer in the real world; the nightmare that Marx feared has come true and we are all just drones to our corporate masters). In this post-hellish reality, there is no United States or United Kingdom. All Western governments are the same and they're all are marching in lock (goose) step to subjugate the masses with garbage (and to make us bend over so they can rate who has the best ass, so they can then kill that person).

Similarly, though the film is set in Washington, it is shot in Chicago (home of awesome tax breaks... again, a comment on the film making process) -- before the action ultimately moves to Chicago. This is a brilliant way of showing that all American cities are the same. There is no capital city and no "Midwest". There is just one big nightmarish post-Capitalist stretch of cities in American tied together by Interstate 88, the Ronald Reagan Memorial Tollway. The American government is a fascist organization, it will rape you. In the words of Pasolini's Duke, "the fascists are the only true anarchists." And, I'll add, in the words of his Bishop, "all is good if it's excessive".

Indeed.

Finally, the film shows us that the hyper-masculine nature of the Deceptacons cannot be defeated simply by complimentary warriors fighting a battle, but femininity is the key. It is only after Optimus Prime loses his trailer and rocket arm (is castrated) that he's able to beat Megatron and Sentinel Prime (a new character, a Prime who switched to the Deceptacons when he wasn't able to sell more product). And Wikipedia's girlfriend this time has even bigger lips and more amazing flowing hair than that Megan Fox chick, which means she's able to deflect danger with her feminine charms (read: her gigantic tits and super short skirts... and, by the way, she totally flashed us her crotch when getting out of the Mercedes SLS AMG Gullwing car... a car once described to me by an Italian man as a "pussy magnate"... true story). But it's really only when WikiLeaks is totally emasculated, after he's beaten by Dr. McDreamy and that dude from the Las Vegas TV show, that he's able to help out in any significant way.

This is a deeply moving comment on our world and on our lives. It is a film that I would call *important* (and at 157 minutes, you can't not understand that). It needs to be studied more for it's intricate symbols and allusions. We need to understand better why Cybertron looks like a breast when the Deceptacons are so masculine (is it an Oedipal relationship they have with their world? Is that why there are no female Autobots?) and to figure out why exactly John Malkovich is needed in the story at all. I think he's the key to something. His three-piece suits stand out as some sartorial commentary, I think. They're certainly of the same quality as the members of the cabal in Salo. Woah, it's getting even deeper as I continue to think about it....

Stars: 7 of 4