First Principles

I started blogging about the sequel, which I just saw this weekend, and realized that I was writing about the first movie almost more than the second one.  So here’s a much delayed post about what might be my favorite movie of the new millennium.  Five Reagans, baby.  That’s right.  All five.

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First, I suppose a little disclosure/background is in order.  As anyone who reads this blog (or for that matter, anyone who has known me since the 3rd grade or so) knows, I’m a huge fan of the Transformers.

It wasn’t just that they were cool toys.  I loved the cartoon, and the relatively sophisticated character development and story lines that the writers attempted to insert into a kids show.  As an eight year old, you felt like it gave you a little credit for being smart.

But beyond that, the characters were heroic to me, and became role models of sorts.  The individual Autobots were usually flawed enough to be interesting, but at the end of the day rose to the occasion to do the right thing, even when that was a thankless thing to do.  They were reluctant warriors, but knew that not fighting evil was the same at the end of the day as joining the evil yourself.

Peter Cullen’s Optimus Prime was basically John Wayne reincarnated as a tractor trailer.  He was a character I looked up to and hoped to emulate and would have liked to have thought he’d be proud of me for doing good things.  And he was Conservative – his official motto  – “Freedom is the right of all sentient beings.” – was a Hasbro distillation of the core principle of Conservatism that we have an inalienable right to liberty.

The leader of the bad guys, Megatron, also had a motto.  Well, I suppose they all did, but few were so pregnant with political philosophical meaning.  His was “Peace through Tyranny”, which is a good reminder that “peace” can come in many different forms, and that not all of them are desirable.

Obviously I wasn’t thinking about my toys or my cartoons in those terms back in the day.  I knew I liked President Reagan (and was never satisfied with my mom’s attempts to explain why she didn’t), and that was about the extent of my political musings.  But those themes still resonated with me in a foundational way.  These ideas and values stuck in my head and never really left. And I clearly wasn’t alone – the success of the franchise 25 years later is proof of that.

It’s really nothing new or strange – all kids throughout history have had childhood heroes in literature, and later, in comic books and TV shows and movies.  Myth and stories are how we articulate our values and pass them on to future generations.  Why are giant transforming robots any more or less absurd of a way of doing that than river nymphs and thunder-creating god hammers in Asgaard?

And if it all helps to sell a few million toys and stimulates the economy, so much the better!

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So when I heard they were going to make a live action movie, I was worried.  This was my childhood they were intruding upon, after all!  I was even more worried that it would be a soup sandwich when I found out Michael Bay was directing it, he having missed the boat (so to speak) so spectacularly with Pearl Harbor.

Plus, all nerds have a certain loyalty to the source material, and my nerd brain would have felt viscerally betrayed with a complete reboot that didn’t respect that.  Remakes or tributes or whatever you call the movie-ization of some pop culture icon of yesteryear will fail horrifically if they just make fun of the old show (and its audience) that inspired the new version to begin with.  See Hazard, Dukes of.

It’s not that I expected High Cinema – far from it.  All I asked for was that the good guys were still good guys, that there was enough of a plot to be coherent, and that the huge fightin’ robot scenes were totally kick ass.

I was not disappointed.  I got all that and then some.

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Beyond just a fun action flick, it became immediately obvious that Transformers was an incredibly conservative movie.  Because of that, this movie (and its sequel(s?)) will be one of the most impactful weapons to get Conservatism back into the fight of the Hollywood culture wars.

There has been an attempt of late to push more conservative movies out in front of the general public.  That’s great and all, but so far most of them have been fairly lame.  I had high hopes for An American Carol, but it just tried a little too hard.  (OK, way too hard.)  Besides, beating someone over the head with an overt political ideology in a movie is usually a glaring mistake – people instantly recognize it for what it is, and sense that it’s artificially grafted onto the plot instead of part of the compelling truth of the character arcs.  If the philosophy is true, you don’t need to do that.  Let it speak for itself.  Let its truth ring through the natural reactions of the characters and the natural progression of the story.

That’s what Transformers does, and then some.

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First of all, any movie which pits Good Guys against Bad Guys – in other words, that it aknowledges that evil exists – is probably leaning conservative.  “Probably” turns into “definitely” when that evil is defined as an enemy of freedom and liberty, and Liberty’s warriors are glorified.  All of this happens in Transformers.

The movie starts off showing a military unit coming back to base, and it shows them as regular guys.  Good guys.  Guys with families who’d rather be home with those wives and kids and parents.  When a Decepticon lands and starts tearing up the place, the good guys try to fight it.  When it becomes obvious that it’s trying to steal classified information, they risk their lives to protect those secrets.

Too few movies these days show the US military in such an unabashedly positive light as this one does.  The Army isn’t corrupt or stupid or reveling in torture or preying on poor people for recruits – they’re a bunch of regular people rising to their own occasions and being heroes.  They are shown protecting innocent lives (of foreigners!) when they can.  (Say what you want about Michael Bay, but that’s one of his trademarks, and you have to love him for it.)

What’s more, officials at the highest levels of the government of the United States are not shown as incompetent buffoons, except for one agent in a secret bureaucracy which is totally unknown to the President (or any other elected official, it seems), and so is completely unaccountable to the people.  And really, even he is more socially inept than professionally incompetent.  The Secretary of Defense, played by Jon Voight, is quite obviously, I think, a Rumsfeld homage, and Voight plays him as a good, tough, smart, and flexible guy who is adapting to an unexpected threat in the best way he knows how.  Even when the government was making terrible mistakes and unwittingly helping the Decepticons, it wasn’t because they were evil or corrupt – they were making imperfect decisions with imperfect information, decisions which seemed the best option at the time.  When they got new information, they adjusted their plans and actions accordingly.

And Bay made it quite clear that the head of this government was George W. Bush.  Well, a slightly sexist, ho-ho eatin’ version of him, anyway…

This overtly political thematic element is more blatant after seeing the sequel, which (by chance or design I don’t know – the script was surely writen before the election) takes pains to make clear that the sniveling bureaucrat on a self-righteous power trip which very nearly leads to the destruction of his planet is an Obama appointee.  But more on that in the next post.

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The theme of protecting innocent life, and of risking your own life so that others might be free, is central.  Bumblebee does it on several occasions with Sam Witwicky.  Sam risks his life to save his Autobot friends (and all of humanity, which includes his super hot new girlfriend) from the growing power of evil.  But it gets better and more obvious than that.

How many blockbuster movies are there where a major character – set up as the paragon of all that is good and noble and badass to boot – is speaking openly and philosophically about the right to liberty?  Not since William Wallace asked his clansmen, “What will you do without freedom?”  But that’s exactly what happens here.

In one of the most Conservative scenes in all of filmdom, Ironhide asks his boss Optimus Prime why they bother protecting the humans, and Prime responds with an exhortation of Lockean Natural Rights theory, saying without reservation that “Freedom is the right of all sentient beings.”  And then he goes on to explain his plan to end his war that’s endangering innocents – not by surrendering or ignoring the evil enemy, but by defeating them (or at least their plans for world domination).

Even in that big final battle, Prime still gets in a little time for philosophy:

Megatron: “Humans don’t deserve to live.”
Prime: “They deserve to choose for themselves!”

Which the humans (represented by the main human character in the movie) then do by finishing off Megatron for good until the sequel comes out.

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When I first saw this movie, I told a friend of mine (with whom I’ve had many discussions about the hidden conservatism in some of our favorite movies) that I thought it was a tremendously conservative movie.  He said he wasn’t surprised, since the foundation was a popular kids’ cartoon and toy line.  That there is good and evil and an inherent right to be free within us all is something that children all know in their guts, and ignoring that leads to a disinterested after-school audience.  It certainly won’t keep a franchise together for 25 years.

That’s why, despite the bad reviews of the snobby and the liberal (our local paper’s reviewer weirdly called it “mean spirited), this movie will resonate on for decades.  (Well, that and the hottest of hot chicks and awesome special effects.  Oh, and hot chicks.  I mean, lets be honest.)

Transformers has already helped spawn an entirely new generation of kids who will look up to Optimus Prime and think that fighting for freedom is something incredibly worthwhile – in fact, that it’s worth risking your life for.  When judging a movie on its Conservatism, it’s hard to ask much more of it than that.