Transformers · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

The camera swings around a man who is standing still. Behind him the sky is doing the thing Bay's skies always do, going gold and enormous at the one hour of the day when nothing else looks like that. The angle is low. Everything in the frame is moving except the figure at its center. He isn't doing anything. He is being monumentalized, from below, at speed.

Hold that shot. It is the entire film folded into one gesture, and it happens to be the fastest way into what Gilles Deleuze was actually talking about.

Deleuze opens his cinema books with a claim he takes from Bergson about what film changed. Before cinema, images of action chased what he calls privileged instants: the posed climax, the moment a sculptor freezes because it stands in for the whole movement. Cinema broke that. It samples motion at any-instant-whatever, two dozen ordinary slices a second, not one of them the important one, and it gets real movement precisely by refusing to privilege any slice. That refusal is the medium's founding trick.

Bay's orbit puts the pose back in. This is his specific invention and it is stranger than it looks. He has more motion available to him than almost anyone working, and he spends an enormous amount of it manufacturing statues. The camera does the moving so the figure doesn't have to. Tableau and kinetics in the same shot, no compromise. He codified it in The Rock, with the canted patriotic framing that comes with it, and he inherited the ancestry from Top Gun, whose sun-flared low-angle worship of military hardware taught a generation how to shoot a jet like a body. Transformers applies that grammar to robots, to a used-car lot, and to a teenager.

Structurally the film is the movement-image in full mechanical health, which by 2007 was supposed to be a period style. Deleuze's map of classical cinema runs situation, action, transformed situation. An encompassing world presses on a character until he acts decisively and remakes it. Deleuze calls that encompassing world the synsign, and here it is doubled, with half of it real: an ancient alien war on one side, the United States military on the other, the second supplied by actual Department of Defense cooperation that put real fighters, transports and armor into the film's back half. The opposing forces arrive pre-installed from the toy box. Autobots heroic, Decepticons malevolent, force against force. Deleuze's binomial, printed on the packaging before a frame was shot. The hinge is a boy who has unwittingly inherited a link to the artifact everyone wants.

Reading this with Deleuze is not a stunt. Most of the films that make his action-image legible are seventy years old and come loaded with other reasons to admire them. This one has the back off the watch.

Then the mechanism does something Deleuze did not anticipate. The action-image runs on a sensory-motor circuit: someone perceives a situation, acts on it, and the cutting keeps the space coherent enough that we can follow the link from one to the other. Bay's action editing does not keep the space coherent. The cut rate in the set pieces is extreme, and inside each short shot he stacks three separate motions at once, the camera moving, the subject moving, and the robot reconfiguring its own body. Put two similarly colored chrome giants into contact under those conditions and you cannot say who is where. This has been the standing objection for two decades and the objection is factually right: the editing prioritizes momentum and sensation over legible cause and effect.

Deleuze has a name for the circuit failing. He calls it the crisis of the action-image, and his version looks like Antonioni: slack causality, characters wandering through situations they cannot act on, trips that transform nothing. Bay's failure is the mirror image. Not too little connective tissue. Too much motion for any tissue to survive. Sensation arrives whole and geography never arrives at all. Later critics gave this a name, post-continuity, which is not Deleuze's term and shouldn't be smuggled in as one. But it names something real, and this is one of the films where it went industrial. You can be genuinely thrilled by a fight here while understanding nothing about it. That is a new capacity, and the decade that followed learned it, largely from this template, largely badly.

Which is why the film's still shots carry more than its loud ones. The one thing Bay holds motionless is a face: Sam looking up, at something the frame hasn't shown us yet. That is an Amblin move, the magic-hour reveal blocking and the awe-struck reaction shot lifted from E.T., whose director executive-produced this and, by the production's own account, supplied the premise of a boy and his first car. Deleuze would call it the affection-image, the close-up as the gap where perception has arrived and action has not yet started, a face reflecting a single quality back at us. Wonder. A qualisign. It is the only place in the film where time is felt rather than spent, and nearly everything the movie manages to make you feel is banked in those few seconds.

The other still point is a sound. That cascading ratchet of parts folding and locking descends straight from the designed metallic vocabulary ILM built for the T-1000's morph in Terminator 2, and its function here is load-bearing. Nothing that dense could actually fold that way; the animators were reverse-engineering an impossible mechanism into something convincing at speed. The eye can't verify the machine, so the ear certifies it. Sound supplies the causality the image withholds. Peter Cullen's voice does the same job at the level of character, carrying twenty years of accumulated authority into a body made of polygons. The transformations satisfy in a film whose fights blur, and this is why.

Notice, too, what the robots are made of. Many thousands of separately articulated components, a production statistic that doubles as the film's metaphysics. Everything desirable in this world is made of parts that come off and go back on. The camera brings the same sectioned, caressing attention to a car hood, a gun barrel, and Mikaela Banes's body, which is why the objectification the film has been fairly criticized for doesn't read as a lapse in an otherwise different style. Deleuze's word for the part-object charged with more force than any whole is fetish. The toy line came all the way through into the aesthetic.

What it did to the art is measurable. ILM under Scott Farrar took the pipeline built for Jurassic Park, which had proved photoreal CG creatures could share a plate with actors, and scaled it to characters of thousands of moving parts with chromed surfaces that betray any lighting mismatch. It held. Fully synthetic, mechanically intricate characters could now carry a blockbuster's entire action load, and the Best Visual Effects nomination confirmed the industry had noticed. The second consequence reshaped a decade: this is the film that proved a toy line could become a tentpole.

So here is the question worth carrying back in. Cinema's founding break, on Deleuze's account, was trading the pose for the ordinary instant, and the reward was real movement. Bay found a way to keep both, and the price was that we stopped being able to see where anyone was standing. Watch it again and count the orbits. Then notice how often the loudest film of 2007 stops dead, holds a face, and waits.