Subscribe to
FlickrKill Bill vs. Moby Dick
So.
I've been promising for months.
Here it is.
Why in God's name do I think it's acceptable to apply serious critical thought to Transformers?
I will be kind, and not assume indignation or objection on your part; that's a style of rhetoric I can do without. But I will be addressing the sea of sneers I saw in college, and during my work at the bookstore, and everywhere else; usually sneers associated with trendy beards and carefully unkempt haircuts. The people who will snidely embrace irony but reject Joss Whedon because "He wrote Buffy".
I will keep this simple (and possibly let people down in the process). I believe I can discuss Transformers because I agree, on precisely one, very basic, level, with the deconstructionists: I believe everything is potentially a text.
More precisely, I believe that there are no cultural labels that automatically invalidate something as a valid cultural experience, and that no genre or author or director automatically invalidates the possibility for deeper analysis. I do believe that individual works can turn out to be cultural and critical voids; but I enter every book or film with my critical eye wide and searching, and I try to find what it is people enjoy about any piece of media.
This is, of course, because I am a crusader for speculative fiction. Well, crusader is unfair; crusader implies a level of force of arms that I fail to rally. Maybe "rabble-rouser". I've read sci-fi books that had something worthy to say about the social condition; I've read mainstream fiction with limp prose and all the depth of spun sugar.
Even the most deliberately shallow experience can have depth. Take, for instance, this weekend's experience: Kill Bill. I watched both 1 and 2 this weekend, and I can see, all at once, why people loved it and hated it. I love it for its mythic level of formulaic plot, its cinematography, its contents play and juxtaposition of viewer experience. Without cinematography, the shots go on forever, the dialog is baroque and stilted, and Tarantino has an unreasonable love of surf music. But I enjoy his use of soundtrack and visual quoting and misè-en-scene, and for that, I love it. It has a lot more to say than, oh, Bride Wars.
For all that, I have to risk hypocrisy and point out that, sometimes, there is such a thing as trying to analyze something too carefully. There is a classic horror movie--you may have heard of it--called The Cat People. The final scene involves a black waitress offering a white man some gumbo, which rejects in favor of apple pie. This obvious bit of symbolism triggered a long discussion on the symbolic content of gumbo, spawning the term "gumbo territory". Likewise, there is no excusing an empty movie--I don't care how much money they spent on the CGI dragons. This is why I do not self-identify as a deconstructionist--they fail to differentiate between that that which is mainstream but fascinating and that which is artsy but vapid.
I could go on for a long while about this subject, but it would inevitably turn into one of Those Rants, where I prove just how arrogant and judgmental I can really be, and I don't think any of us need that. The bottom line is, I do not care if the subject is American Revolutionaries, or cancer patients, or clockwork assassins from Mars; if the prose/acting/dialog/cinematography is strong, and if there is metaphor to decipher, I will give it a chance.
And that, folks, is why I won't shut up about Transformers.
P.S. Thanks to the ever-lovely Liz Lacy for inspiring me to finally get off my digital keister and write this post. Read the first post, folks; it's well worth the time.
I've been promising for months.
Here it is.
Why in God's name do I think it's acceptable to apply serious critical thought to Transformers?
I will be kind, and not assume indignation or objection on your part; that's a style of rhetoric I can do without. But I will be addressing the sea of sneers I saw in college, and during my work at the bookstore, and everywhere else; usually sneers associated with trendy beards and carefully unkempt haircuts. The people who will snidely embrace irony but reject Joss Whedon because "He wrote Buffy".
I will keep this simple (and possibly let people down in the process). I believe I can discuss Transformers because I agree, on precisely one, very basic, level, with the deconstructionists: I believe everything is potentially a text.
More precisely, I believe that there are no cultural labels that automatically invalidate something as a valid cultural experience, and that no genre or author or director automatically invalidates the possibility for deeper analysis. I do believe that individual works can turn out to be cultural and critical voids; but I enter every book or film with my critical eye wide and searching, and I try to find what it is people enjoy about any piece of media.
This is, of course, because I am a crusader for speculative fiction. Well, crusader is unfair; crusader implies a level of force of arms that I fail to rally. Maybe "rabble-rouser". I've read sci-fi books that had something worthy to say about the social condition; I've read mainstream fiction with limp prose and all the depth of spun sugar.
Even the most deliberately shallow experience can have depth. Take, for instance, this weekend's experience: Kill Bill. I watched both 1 and 2 this weekend, and I can see, all at once, why people loved it and hated it. I love it for its mythic level of formulaic plot, its cinematography, its contents play and juxtaposition of viewer experience. Without cinematography, the shots go on forever, the dialog is baroque and stilted, and Tarantino has an unreasonable love of surf music. But I enjoy his use of soundtrack and visual quoting and misè-en-scene, and for that, I love it. It has a lot more to say than, oh, Bride Wars.
For all that, I have to risk hypocrisy and point out that, sometimes, there is such a thing as trying to analyze something too carefully. There is a classic horror movie--you may have heard of it--called The Cat People. The final scene involves a black waitress offering a white man some gumbo, which rejects in favor of apple pie. This obvious bit of symbolism triggered a long discussion on the symbolic content of gumbo, spawning the term "gumbo territory". Likewise, there is no excusing an empty movie--I don't care how much money they spent on the CGI dragons. This is why I do not self-identify as a deconstructionist--they fail to differentiate between that that which is mainstream but fascinating and that which is artsy but vapid.
I could go on for a long while about this subject, but it would inevitably turn into one of Those Rants, where I prove just how arrogant and judgmental I can really be, and I don't think any of us need that. The bottom line is, I do not care if the subject is American Revolutionaries, or cancer patients, or clockwork assassins from Mars; if the prose/acting/dialog/cinematography is strong, and if there is metaphor to decipher, I will give it a chance.
And that, folks, is why I won't shut up about Transformers.
P.S. Thanks to the ever-lovely Liz Lacy for inspiring me to finally get off my digital keister and write this post. Read the first post, folks; it's well worth the time.
posted by Tyler at
2:44 PM
0 Comments
