The Bay 38.
While as with all right-thinking people I celebrate Charlie Jane Anders’ review of Revenge of the Fallen as some sort of critical apogee or at least the most fun I’ve had reading a movie review this summer so far—
And around hour six of ROTF, something curious happens: the two components—male enhancement and pure id—start to clash, badly. Usually, in a summer movie, the two aspects go together like tits and ass: Jason Statham plays someone who faces the same insecurities as regular dudes, but he overcomes them, and in the process he blows up everything in the world. But creating that kind of fusion requires enslaving the id to the male enhancement, and that in turn means only going way over the top instead of crazy, stratospheric over the top. Michael Bay is not willing to settle for going way over the top, like other directors.
So you have a movie that tries to reassure men that they can actually be masters of their reality—but then turns around and says that actually, reality is not real. There’s no such thing as the “real world,” and the only thing that’s left for men to dominate is a nebulous domain of blurred shapes, which occasionally blurt nonsensical swear-words and slang from ethnic groups that have never existed. If you’re drowning in an Olympic swimming pool full of hot chewing gum fondue, do you still care if Megan Fox likes you?
—Robert Humanick’s more pedestrian review from the House Next Door nonetheless proposes what I think will become the crucial metric for gaining some perspective on the era of the entertainment-industrial complex:
I mourn the volume of human life being wasted on this thing. If the film makes $100 million this weekend and tickets cost $10 a pop, that’s ten million viewers and a total of twenty-five million hours, not including previews, travel and the time spent earning the wasted money. If the average person lives to be 75, that’s 38 lives.
Remember the Bay 38, people. Never forget.
The Bay 76, as it turns out.