Michael Bay (dir), Transformers 4: Age of Extinction (2014)

My review of this wearyingly long, loud, empty movie is over at Strange Horizons now. I won't lie: the review started out as snark. And continues as snark for quite a long time. But then, mirabile, it turns into something a little more substantial in terms of argument. In fact the more I think about the final point I make, the more I wonder whether I'm not onto something quite important.

I was tempted to dilate upon it whilst writing the review, but I'd already blown thousands of words on The Snark and accordingly, we can be honest, gone on more than long enough. But I can treat this blog as an annex to the original piece (especially since the comments facility is down over there) and think through a little more about what I was trying to say.

The germ of the idea was thinking about how oddly miscast Wahlberg is in his eccentric-inventor-father role. This is not a dig at Wahlberg as such; more star than actor and a player with a very limited range, but someone who's proved able to bring real charm and charisma to some of his previous roles. Not to this one, though. And actually my point isn't about that. It's about Wahlberg's pumped-up musculature, and the film's unexamined assumption that a reclusive parochial inventor guy who works in a barn would also be an 'if-the-bar-ain't-bendin-you're-just-pretendin' style bodybuilder.

So, there's an entire cultural history to be written about the way ideals of masculine beauty have morphed from slender-elegant-aristo to bulging-toned-musclebound. This isn't just about bulk: Sean Connery was a bulky, strong-looking individual. It is about muscle definition: that's the look, nowadays. Why spend all the time and money to acquire such a body? For it is both extremely time-consuming and expensive. Worse, it is fleeting: without continual injections of time and money it melts away, or turns to flab. Of course, one way of 'reading' it is to see it in terms of Late Capitalism. Gym membership is a perfect commodity: something expensive and vacuous that must be repeatedly paid for over and over, like a sort-of healthy version of a cigarette habit.

But for the moment I'm thinking about it from the other side. Why acquire such a body? What do you get out of it?  'Well,' you could reply: 'I do it because it makes me strong; because it makes me fit; and because it makes me attractive to sexual partners.' The strength is, surely, almost an irrelevance (that's almost its point -- the possession of such superfluous strength in a society where machinery do all the heavy lifting is like a peacock's-tail thing). Fitness can be acquired much more cheaply and easily by cycling to work or jogging. The third is salient, though. I spent several years attending a gym, before my present marriage; and it was in large part to make myself 'look good'. I'd guess that the same motive brought most of the other attendees to that vanity factory too: floor-to-ceiling mirrors on every wall, and both men and women narcissising into them throughout their workouts.  But in what way does having a six-pack, huge muscular arms and plumped up pectorals make you more sexually attractive? You're at liberty to say 'they don't, I don't fancy such types'. That's as may be. My point is that what Schwarzenegger, Stallone or (now) 'The Rock', Hugh Jackman or Wahlberg physiques do is take elements of the male body other people may find attractive and make them more obvious. That's why definition, rather than just bulk, is key. There's a equivalent process in female 'beauty': boob jobs, liposuction and botox-lips all renders female secondary sexual characteristics more obvious.

Now, of course, where sexual allure is concerned these are not the only games in town. Human sexuality being both as protean and as diverse as it is, it would be surprising if they were. But they are indices of a broader cultural logic. It relates to film, I think, because film has become the prime medium of obviousness. It needn't be (there's nothing obvious about late Tarkovsky); but it has. This feeds, I think, off the fact that cinema and TV is, formally as it were, less well suited to interiority than the novel; but cinema as a discourse, and cinema-goers by feeding the beast, have resulted in a sort of aesthetics of gigantic obviousness coming to dominance. Bigger, brasher, more colourful, noisier, longer (oh my God longer: what purpose does the bloat of running times serve, except to inflate production costs and make cinema-goers buttocks go numb? Nobody likes it. It's the filmic equivalent of Hugh Jackman's prodigious pecs). Lest verisimilitude slip past the viewers' ken, the dominant has opted for more obvious tropes and symbols: cartoon heroes, jaw-dropping special effects, everything on a gigantic scale, shock and awe.

I need to be clear: I'm not grumping. I love many of the movies that this logic has produced; and I can see the appeal of the Obvious. I just wonder why it has taken contemporary culture by storm. It's not that people are dumb: broadly speaking, people are not dumb. Nor is it a process of infantilisation: children are often not obvious, and are in fact more often in love with secrets, hiding-away, games that grown-ups don't understand and so on.

Indeed, I wonder (this is early-stage speculation, and necessarily spit-balling) if there's not something larger going on. Once upon a time, and not that long ago either, 'knowledge' was an esoteric matter, and many things were hidden away from the profane. But the extraordinary explosion in internet coverage, the range of online content and the breathtaking ingenuity of search engines means that Everything -- all the accumulated wisdom and learning of humanity over the last five thousand years -- is Obvious. It's all right there; all stacked on the infinitely-long front shelf, a few finger strokes away. I'm not sure it's yet sunk in how profound a change this represents. One consequence is that we may start to regard stuff previously rendered valuable by its scarcity (the Mona Lisa; the hermetic corpus; the notebooks of Leonardo) as mere trash, simply because we can so easily access them. But that would be a rather depressing development. I wonder if the reverse isn't starting to happen: and the very obviousness of culture, art and science don't revert a kind of glamour back upon obviousness itself.