I finally saw the new Transformers a few days ago. I don’t have much to say about it, other than a couple quick points, and to note that it was really bad (the hetero love story was more intrusive than I had feared, and far worse). Here’s the points:
1. Did it strike anyone else as weird how often human families were portrayed or explicitly mentioned in a film purportedly about robots? The opening scene features the military hero (I don’t even care enough about the film to look up his, or the actor’s, name) talking to his wife and newborn daughter. The acquisition of Bumblebee is portrayed as a family-style coming of age story. During the communications blackout, the secretary of defense frustratedly asks, “you mean I can’t even contact my family?” If I cared more about this film I’d be arguing that the Decepticons were presented more as a threat to The Family than as a threat to humanity (except, perhaps, insofar as the film may not have actually made a distinction between the two). I’m almost surprised the Decepticons weren’t portrayed as effeminate queers obsessed with anal sex in public airport restrooms.
2. Was anyone else disturbed by the fact that the first time we meet the Decepticons (note: The big, bad, scary, evil, destructive Decepticons) it takes place in Afghanistan, as a confrontation between our wonderful military and the aforementioned big, bad, scary, evil, destructive Decepticons (who, maybe, hate freedom), that the surviving military forces were led to a promised phone by an Afganistani child, that in general our military presence there was all but cherished?
3. I was a little disturbed by the ways in which anyone slightly suggestive of politics or bureaucracy was portrayed as a bumbling, self-absorbed fool and the only worthwhile characters were either high school students or members of the US military…
Report on Probability A contains a lot of discussion of William Holman Hunt’s The Hireling Shepherd. Really, what it contains is a list of art criticism on it. And now, in an art history course, the damn painting popped up on the slideshow. Oof, its really bad.
I’m currently enrolled in a course called “comparative world history”. I have a good feel for the history part of the class, but can’t figure out what, exactly, the “comparative” part is supposed to mean, and only have the vaguest feelings about the “world” part (that, for example, we’re not focusing on a single area or a single period). I also occasionally get the odd pang of discomfort with the ways in which globalization comes up in the course without a critique of either what, precisely, the term is supposed to mean or what negative effects it may have, either as a consequence of our technology (which seems to be the focus) or as a project (which seems not to be a topic for discussion). I’m glad, though, that I’m not the only student who seems to feel this discomfort.
It is an odd thing though. When I’m wearing my Russian history student hat, I often find myself annoyed with, for example, the East/West dichotomy that frequently comes up in discussions of Russia (Is Russia a European country? An Eastern country? Both? Neither?), as if the line were real, the sort of thing given by the geography of the world, or maybe something in the water. I’m annoyed that professional historians still harp on this subject (long after they’ve given up questions like “Who is the Russian?” – as if there’s only one Russian – as if Plato was right, and the form of The Russian was just waiting to be discovered, a discovery that would finally unravel that mystery wrapped in an enigma wrapped in a vest). I’m also annoyed that I still use phrases like “the West”. It seems like this is the sort of class where students could really do some of the work of dissolving that binary, but that doesn’t seem to happen, or hasn’t yet.
I guess that the course is just frustrating because I haven’t yet figured out what’s going on, and the instructor is doing a good job of trying not to just get up in front of the class and say “this is world history”, which is usually nice, but right now blaaargh.
