Summer movies suck. I still go see them. Whatever. However, two contrasting movie-going experiences from this most recent shit-fest served to cement in my mind what exactly it is that bothers me so much about the Hollywood blockbusters that are served up to the apathetic and aesthetically crippled audience that is the summer movie crowd. I’ll begin with the negative example.
I went to see “Transformers.” I hate (director) Michael Bay so much, it is hard to articulate. This was not a film, it was a series of shifting metal things exploding and crashing, interrupted by formulaic acting from that Disney Channel kid and the requisite eye-candy (who, admittedly, managed to be much more badass than the usual hot-girl-in-action-movie). John Turturro was funny as a neurotic government agent, but that’s about it.
That’s not to say that I don’t understand the appeal, I really do. However, this movie made over $600M overseas. It made $150M in its first weekend in the U.S/Canada. This is bad. This is not “Snakes on a Plane,” one of those times when pop culture gets really excited about something purely for its tongue-in-cheek absurdity, only to realize that such films are usually funny for about … 20 minutes. This is something more insidious, more revealing of the perverse track that our society is following. Whoa! What a surprise. That leads me right into
Movie Experience #2.
Two weeks after the above incident, I got to see “2001: A Space Odyssey” as part of the Northwest Film Center’s Stanley Kubrick tribute series, held at their theater in the Portland Art Museum. The screen size and surround sound quickly made me recall the brilliant, beautiful simplicity of this movie.
Rumor has it that Kubrick wanted Pink Floyd to do the soundtrack, but they turned him down. No offense to Roger Waters and company, but I am glad that he did so. The pairing of a completely classical score (save a creepy/sad version of “Daisy” sung by the computer) with long, slow shots of spaceships moving about gives the feeling of a sort of space-dance, as if the machines themselves were engaging in an epic waltz. Floyd, I think, would have ruined the effect of this ironic yet powerful combination.
It amazes me how Kubrick can convey so much with nothing but image and music, and all of that with the technology of 1968. The oft-discussed time-warp sequence, in which astronaut Dave Bowman is hurtled through a tunnel of flashing, shifting light, is still awe-inspiring today. The attention to the meaning of image, rather than the image itself, jumps out at you. This movie forces you to pay attention to the entirety of the image it presents, but only by depriving (liberating?) you of the constant barrage of light and sound that we come to expect from many films.
In doing so, Kubrick allows you to engage with the subjects of the film as he creates and exposes them. Take the respective lead-machines in the two movies: Optimus Prime on the one hand, the HAL 9000 supercomputer on the other. Optimus Prime is all that is the ideal liberal/American subject: strong yet kind, possessed of an unerring moral compass (albeit one that points in only two directions) and totally ass-kicking in every sense. Also, he is really huge. While pleasing, this is merely a robotic version of the standard action hero that we have been seeing since the beginning of film.
HAL, on the other hand, has no physical form (huh?). He is a supercomputer, supposedly infallible in every respect. In a sense, he is God, all knowing, all seeing (the only visual image of HAL is his red “eye” that is seen throughout the ship, monitoring everything). Yet He fails, and eventually conspires to kill the crew. God fails, and man has to kill Him before He destroys that which has become dependant upon Him. In doing so, man frees himself from God and continues his journey into the unknown. Truly great stuff, yet only because Kubrick took the time and thought to create a set of images that allow the viewer time to extract meaning from them.
This, I think, is at the heart of why movies like “Transformers” bother me so much, and I started to realize it shortly after “2001” was over. The way that the two directors approach their subjects is fundamentally different. Both movies are ostensibly “science fiction.” Both deal, in some way, with machines. That, however, is where the similarity ends. For Bay, his subjects are merely base visual tools. Consider the plot of the movie: There are giant war-robots. Some are good, some are evil. They fight. A lot. In the end, the good robots win. That’s it. Thank you, Michael. That was enlightening. The entire time, you are bombarded by sound and flashing images, gunfire and explosions, the works. The Transformers themselves appear to be constantly in flux, never static. Continual motion drives this movie, and keeps the audience in their seats.
In “2001,” perhaps the most notable visual feature is the lack of motion, at least on the surface. However, this leaves the audience free to contemplate the totality of the image being presented, i.e., the spaceship arriving at the monolith as a symbol for the act of conception (something Kubrick comes to a lot). Without the simplicity and subtlety of the images presented, layers of meaning such as this are simply washed away in the white noise.
