August 8, 2009AD
I first came across Catholic magazines such as Commonweal and America in the small library of a high school seminiary I attended for two years in the last sixties. For awhile it seemed that almost every movie review identified a "Christ figure" in one protagonist or another. In Cool Hand Luke, Paul Newman's serial recidivist is actually laid out on a wooden table, arms outstretched as in a crucifiction. Certainly the movies gave the Jesuit reviewers plenty of symbolic raw material. At the end of Omega Man, again, Charleton Heston makes the ultimate sacrifice and lays sprawled in a public fountain, arms stretched out, a man broken on the cross.
You don't read that sort of thing anymore. Catholic reviewers still strain after threads and crumbs of Christianity in the movies even as the movies are as likely to attack the faith as consciously or no retell the Story.
So, on one of those beautiful summer evenings that have blessed a troubled metropolitan Detroit the past two months, I went to the movies expecting no more than I should.
John Candy's Canadian redneck movie reviewer would not be disappointed. Things "blow up real good" loudly and often in Michael Bay's TRANSFORMERS: Revenge of the Fallen.
But there it is in the final act: the Christ Figure. Optimus Prime, father figure -- spiritual savior? -- to so many boys of the 1980s is killed. If that's the right word for an alien robot. Sam Witwicki, the Autobot Transformers' first ally in the war against the Decepticons, himself dies attempting to get an alien deviced that will ressurect Optimus. He is brought to life in time to save the greatest of the Transformer autobots. Making the imagery more narratively complex than in those old 60's movies with anti-hero messiahs.
But even as the return of the Christ figure occured to me, I realized that Optimus Prime is more than that. He and his alien 'bots are the last of the descendants of the creations of the Allspark -- something between the Creator and George Lucas' Force. Optimus is also the Father figure to Sam; and his Inspiration. An alien trinity...
Is Michael Bay a crypto-Catholic insurgent in Hollywood? That's hard to believe. His alien trinity is no more a theological stretch than Newman's Cool Hand Luke whose supernatural powers are manifest in a hard-boiled egg eating contest. Luke also dies in the end, but I was never quite sure for what?
Michael Bay has been here before in THE ISLAND. A movie that he vehemently denies is pro-life. But the imagery is just as graphic as in TRANSFORMERS. There is a long-shot lottery of life that parallels the current crap shoot many of the unborn face every day -- and 4,000 lose. Then there are the great, wet placentas in which clones are gestated. In one scene a sack is violently destroyed. And certainly the movie asks hard questions about the bio-ethics of modern medical research and technology. (The movie was one of Bay's rare failures at the box office.)
The biggest surprise -- even if Bay wants to have it both ways -- is his treatment of Sam's romance with the girl he leaves behind to go to college. There's lots of innuendo; if you can use that word in Bay's sex-soaked coed world. A good portion of the movie set up involves Sam's strenuous refusal of easy sexual availability. He is in his own words to an astonished dad, "a one-girl boy."
Bay says he now wants to take a breather from hardware movies and do a "small film." Yet long before he made that admission, the French film journal Cahiers du Cinema published a piece proposing him as something more than a hawker of popcorn and Raisonettes. The French are perverse and the "daughter of the Church" has been wayward in post-war France, yet I am sypathetic with at least one francophone writer's exasperation with American pretentiousness that has now migrated from fiction to film. Even if he's just indulging a post-modern goof to meet a deadline.
There is a reason I went to see TRANSFOMERS and not the latest drama-free, post-angst timewaster from otherwise unemployable graduates of Hollywood on Washington Square. Like B.R. Myer's in his READERS MANIFESTO -- I just can't take it anymore.
Sam Macomb
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