One Shall Stand; One Shall Fall

[talentedmrraber]

I saw the new Transformers movie, and it predictably failed to live up to the 80s version. Sure, the effects were great, but the script was written by one of those folded-paper things that elementary school kids use to tell fortunes. The poverty of the script led me to rethink some of the things that made the original movie so classic:

Comments

[talentedmrraber]

It's true that we don't see any examples of good meditative characters, but we also don't see bad meditative characters. "Meditativeness" is not one of the axes along which the movie's themes travel. How would "meditativeness" manifest itself in the movie, if it were to do so?

What you describe the movie as lacking, I think, is some notion of Romantic subjectivity, of an oppositional identity in which the individual tries to strip away or step behind established social forms and meanings, in the hopes of recuperating some potential insight into the conditions of life, which he expects to emerge outside of any existing social context. This kind of subjectivity proceeds from a quasi-Cartesian fantasy of the individual before society, evaluating his world as if he stood, or should try to stand, on some Archimedean point from which the rest of the world other than himself would be visible, and he would merely decide how to insert himself into the world after this appraisal. Needless to say, this is an imbalanced worldview---also needless to say, it is a worldview with which we can never dispense without risking the blind conformity which you fear.

The flipside to this Romantic subjectivity, proceeding from an idea of the individual abstracted from social context, is a view in which social context is everything and the aspects of the individual on which social context does not bear are nothing. This is the view of many legal documents: in the US Constitution, for example, citizens have a right of habeas corpus, not by virtue of anything interior to themselves, but because of their social position as citizens. It should be obvious that no legal system can function on a Romantic basis, but that it must primarily, or perhaps exclusively, attend to what you call "external action" and "external" qualities. This view is just as imbalanced as the former, in the opposite direction.

The Transformers, insofar as they are an animated treatment of political philosophy, attend only to this latter perspective, just as many great works of art attend only to the former. This is the nature of its artistic enterprise, and interpreted as such I think it is a great success.