Transformers: America in Disguise

An essay on Transformers (2007)

Michael Bay’s Transformers is a genre pastiche, combining elements of action films, science fiction, high school dramas, general comedy and even moments of direct satire. Most interesting, though, are the ways in which Bay’s film ties into the genre of war cinema and the modes and conventions it borrows – particularly from Lewis Seiler’s Guadalcanal Diary, George P. Cosmatos’ Rambo: First Blood Part II, Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket and David O. Russell’s Three Kings – to create a surprisingly multi-layered depiction of the wartime Other. The Other of Transformers – a race of giant robots – is both alien and familiar, both overtly evil and uncompromisingly noble; and most importantly, it provides a mirror for American society that allows the film to promote its own consumerist ideology.

Alienation and the Other

Before any film can present its Other, though, it must first introduce the Same – the protagonist or protagonists with whom the audience is meant to identify – from which the Other is excluded. Therefore, the openings of war films often serve to acquaint the audience with a group of American soldiers. Guadalcanal Diary begins with shots of its star soldiers lazing on the deck of a ship, reflecting on their lives back home. Three Kings starts with a party and on-screen text – such as “New Father” or “On a … paid vacation from Detroit” – that describes the characters outside their current military context.

Similarly, Transformers opens with the film’s military heroes on a plane discussing what they miss about home. These scenes establish the characters as more than just soldiers; they make them into normal, identifiable people. Such depictions overshadow the moral complexity of the soldiers’ situations, ignoring the fact that they have, oftentimes forcibly, been removed from their lives and turned into killers for some abstract cause. For one brief scene, the soldiers are removed from the war.

This early scene in Transformers functions according to that mode. In it, the audience sees American soldiers returning from an unspecified mission in Qatar. They never discuss what they were doing or, for that matter, are doing in Qatar. They just talk about missing their mother’s cooking, “a cold hotdog and a flat beer,” baseball and their newborn daughters. For this one scene, they are not soldiers, just normal guys in military uniforms talking about things anyone can relate to.

This could just as easily be the opening to any war movie.

The fact that American soldiers receive this moment for reflection is part of what allows for a differentiation from the Other, as the Other is conferred no such development. The first appearance of the “tricky Jap” of Guadalcanal Diary depicts him lurking menacingly in the shadows as the music hits a dramatic pitch. The North and South Vietnamese of Full Metal Jacket are merged into a single group of “gooks” who “don’t appreciate” that the Americans are “getting killed” for them. The Other of Rambo is epitomized in Colonel Podovsky, whose sadistic enjoyment of torture and thick Russian accent serve to simultaneously estrange him from the hero and present him as cartoonishly evil. Each of these instances depicts characters who are not only oppositional to the American soldiers, but are also devoid of a rationale for being so. They lack the backstory to make them other than soldiers and to give them moral grounding to excuse their killing.

Decepticons Forever!

This is a trend that Transformers initially follows in the same manner as those three films, as shortly after the scene that introduces the military heroes, they are attacked by the first transformer robot to appear on screen. Much like the Guadalcanal Jap, this tricky enemy sneaks in – in this case in the guise of a military helicopter – and attacks without warning. It offers no reason, nor is it yet given a name. It just comes on screen and starts destroying things. This establishes the Other as oppositional to America, especially since the military base it attacks is in Qatar, but instead of assaulting a native military instillation, it specifically chooses an American one. As the audience then watches the military protagonists “ambushed, betrayed, slaughtered” (Seiler) by the only transformer yet seen, the transformer Other becomes as simplistic, ruthless and violent as the “Jap”, the “Gook” and the Podovsky of the previous films.

The Trickiest of the tricky Others

It is clear to the audience, though, from the outset of the film that this initial impression is not meant to last. Before any of the characters are introduced and even before the movie’s title appears on screen, a voice-over narration describes the underlying conflict of the film as centering on the so-called Allspark, which “some wanted … for good” and “others for evil.” Immediately, then, the Other is presented as being more than just a threat to the American heroes. Even before those heroes are introduced, the audience knows the Other will be dichotomous, a narrative mode borrowed from Three Kings.

In his film, Russell divided the Other into two groups: enemy and ally, both initially distinct from the American protagonists and both eventually made to be relatable in their own way and on their own level. In Three Kings, the Iraqi Other is divided along lines of refugee and soldier. In Transformers, it is separated into Autobot and Decepticon. In contrast to Three Kings, however – where the moment when an American soldier relates to and identifies with an Iraqi soldier, the enemy Other, is probably the movie’s most profound scene – the enemy Other of Transformers never escapes that prima facie simplicity, save for a few isolated instances. Yet rather than provide the means for the spectators to recognize themselves within the Other, these instances just provide an outlet to emphasize certain differences and, ultimately, the Decepticons’ hostility toward the Same.

One such example is language. While the Decepticon from the first attack never speaks, others do. In fact, Decepticons are the first transformers to speak on screen, both in English and in their native alien language. This latter language is especially interesting because the Autobots never use it, only the Decepticons, and so it creates an obvious disparity between the enemy Other and the ally Other and further separates the audience from the enemy Other via a language barrier. This barrier, however, is not a substantial one, as the alien dialogue is always subtitled. In fact, the subtitles actually begin in alien text and then transition into English, thus visibly overcoming the language barrier.