But to be even more jaded about American cinema as a kind of religion, Americans across the low and high brow find it easier to make movies about the end of the world than to imagine a world in which Americans won't be around to save it. A lot of what passes for universal liberal human values can be thought of as also being a kind of American imperialism. The red state version of American cultural imperialism is easier to recognize because it's so literally militaristic. The blue state version of cultural imperialism has been disguised in forms like Star Trek, where the ultimately imperialist/colonialist nature of the Federation can be hand-waved away on ideological grounds by those who embrace the ideology the Federation embodies.
But the thing is ... in these lowbrow cults of media, you at least know what you're in for. You can opt in or opt out. When it gets to the level of what you have to study in film school because professors aren't giving you a choice about it ... that's something I've been mulling over over the last few years. What Adorno and others described as art religion is easier to take or leave in the lower brows than the higher brows, where whether or not you graduate from the university systems that are, whether the people there realize it or not, are part of what Frankfurt authors should recognize as the culture industry. In other words, if you're a film editor in America, you're part of that industry even if you are explicitly Marxist. I've been toying with an idea that the higher the brow of the art the less likely people are to formally recognize the art cult they are in. People who are dedicated to rewatching films by the Coens or Woody Allen have a kind of cultic devotion to film that is more respectable in some circles than having watched all of the Transformers movies but ... why is that?
Here we are in 2019 and there have been seven Transformers movies. You haven't misread that in case you've never heard of this franchise before. Seven films. There's the original animated film from the 1980s; there's the five Michael Bay directed Transformers films; and now, most recently, there's the Travis Knight directed Bumblebee.
The amount of middle-aged nostalgia for the original 1980s film surprises me. There are sincere cases that the original animated film was somehow the best of the bunch and the most daring and challenging. That an entire generation of Transformers cartoon characters got killed off in a feature-length film was considered daring and a way to show kids that death is a real thing ... that's the pitch by journalists at places even such as Slate, though sort of, kind of conceding the whole film was developed as a way to kill off the old toy lines symbolically to make room for new toy lines.
https://slate.com/culture/2007/07/transformers-why-the-original-animated-movie-is-still-the-best.html
But the new lines of characters were not as memorable or as effective as the characters and mythology Hasbro and company built around the original Japanese Microman and Diaclone toy lines. It's a relatively safe bet nobody knows who Rodimus Prime is compared to Optimus Prime even thirty odd years after the fact, and while devotees of the franchise know both names, Optimus Prime is still the focal point after all these decades, after all these shows, and most of these movies.
There have been rhetorical questions from journalists in film criticism over the years as to how and why so many of these Transformers films get made. I say the questions are rhetorical because it seems fairly evident as someone who played with the toys as a kid that the appeal of Transformers films is not, in principle, different from people who watch movies about baseball or football. The idea seems patently ridiculous that there should be movies with stories told about the objects people play with ... unless that game is somehow considered an emblem of distillation of the values and norms of a culture. People who wouldn't imagine any reason to watch Transformers might watch Field of Dreams. Neither film is necessarily more profound than the other if all we're going on is whether it can be a profound exploration of American life to make a film about people playing baseball or preparing to play the game or whether a profound experience can be had watching films about robots that turn into vehicles fighting each other on Earth over the use of Earth's natural resources as a parable of what form of contemporary American technology will decide the fate of the world.
The Michael Bay films are by now widely reviled, even if they have been widely successful. I have been developing an admittedly impudent proposal that if Walter Benjamin were alive today he'd say to forget films like mother! and look at the Hasbro-derived film franchises. The Aronofsky film may seem important to those film critics who buy the idea that it's a parable about climate change caused by humans.
But My Little Pony beat the domestic and global box office of mother! The respectable idea might be that the latter is a serious film and the former is a standard-issue toy-derived film. But in global and historical terms the Hasbro film is the third or fourth film to spin out of that toy line and its associated mythology, a toy line that has been steady since the 1980s. The Aronofsky film is the one-off blip on the radar, blink-and-you-missed it cinema. Torturing and killing off a Hollywood blonde who is supposed to represent Mother Earth can seem pretty retrograde even on paper if you compare it to, I don't know, Tara Strong's Twilight Sparkle convincing Emiiy Blunt's Tempest Shadow that choosing the path of dominance and repression is something you can cast aside. Sure, there might be film critics at The New Yorker who would rather watch the arthouse film than the Hasbro-based film but that might invite a snarky question as to why torture porn devoted to catechizing about climate change is better than a film aimed at children that hopes to instill in them tolerance and friendship. There's such a thing as what Richard Brody has called a wan and sentimental liberalism but I have a sense that a wan and sentimental liberalism might be more The New Yorker than its authors know.
Over the years I have been formulating a theory as to what is involved in the appeal of these Hasbro based mythologies. The appeal is pretty real since there are so many films. Marshall McLuhan is known for his axiom that the medium is the message but hes' also known for suggesting that television is a "hotter" medium than something like literature. Against proposals that TV was the "dumber" medium because it didn't require as much brain activity McLuhan claimed it was more immersive. It engaged all your senses in a go, sight, sound, and its narratives were more immersive by being episode and recurring. It demands more of you to watch fifty episodes of a show across a couple of years even if, on a strictly episode by episode basis of viewing habits, the TV show demands less of you than a feature-length film.
But at another level there's something else going on. You invest your sympathy and imagination in recurring characters in a way that you don't do and can't do in film ... unless we're talking about franchises in which the same character persists across dozens of movies like Godzilla or James Bond or pick another character you probably already know.
I've gotten to thinking that there is probably an inversely proportional relationship between how high the brow of an art cult is and how aware adherents to that cult are likely to recognize their cult participation. Kubrick fans are cultists who have a cult baptized by way of film school--it's a sacramental participation in a kind of art religion. Nobody who goes to a Pony-con or a Comic-con or an anime convention is unaware of the cultic/festival element. There might be another way to put this, that registration as a visitor or curator in the "imaginary museum" is basically the same kind of cultic social system as being a comic book fan. What's different is the extent to which that cultic devotion is sanctified by higher education.
But the higher you go in the brow the less directly you can invest yourself in the idols. You can go get an Optimus Prime toy and play with it to your heart's content. The adventures you give Optimus Prime or Megatron or Starscream in your playtime as a kid becomes a part of who you are. What's the corresponding investment of self in Shakespeare's sonnets? I'm not for a second suggesting the Bard isn't the greatest poet in the English language (even if I love John Donne's poetry quite a bit more!). I'm pointing out that a distinction between lowbrow and highbrow art is the fact that in higher brow art you can't invest yourself as directly in the work as a way to build a sense of yourself.
If you're a thespian you can play in the plays, of course, but that requires that you are part of the cult of art-makers. The theater goer who isn't a thespian has to watch Shakespeare and consume Shakespeare through reading his work or secondary literature. You can play with that Optimus Prime or Prowl or Jazz toy. the investment of imagination is more direct than it can be in consuming highbrow culture. In highbrow religions of art the opportunity to "play" is in trying to contribute to the existing canon of the arts. In lowbrow religions of the arts you can ... play with the toys while collecting the media and go on to discussion forums where you could debate whether or not Wolverine could defeat Captain America in an arena match or a scenario match.
Whether it's the sports or athletics we perform, or the culture we consume, these kinds of games help us formulate who we are as individuals and in relationship to the social groups we participate in. Those toys you played with thirty years ago helped to shape your moral compass and your sense of imagination, even if you figure you're a grown-up now and left all that kid stuff behind. To look at how people behave on social media in 2019, however, is to invite at least the possibility that a whole lot of middle-aged Americans are acting and reacting to each other as if the world is permeated with Autobots and Decepticons and total ideological warfare is still the rule of the day.
Transformers is a case study in how a couple of toy lines from Japan got marketed in the United States, to great success. There was nothing particularly new about the toys in their American presentation as objects you can buy in a store. The difference between a Japanese Diaclone and an American Transformer is that in the former case you're buying a toy, in the latter case you're buying the same toy as mediated by a sprawling mythology that allows you to inform your play time with said mythology. That's something to unpack and there's a little piece that partly attempts to unpack that over at Mbird that's part of a three-part series called "Optimus Prime and the Religion of Toys". Publishing schedule's a little uncertain for now, but part 1 is up, with parts 2 and 3 pending publication.
https://mbird.com/2019/01/optimus-prime-and-the-religion-of-toys-part-1-the-total-work-of-art-as-a-transformer-of-culture/
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