July 12, 2009
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Transformers II Non-Controversy
As always, here’s me jumping into a conflict long after pretty much everyone has forgotten about it….
Anyway, it was suggested that Transformers II was racist because of the portrayal of The Twins: Mudflap and Skids. Namely that these two characters reflect and project negative racial stereotypes of black youth culture. The most offensive line supposedly is the one where they claim to be illiterate, which combined with their other less than brilliant behavior makes the two characters seem rather dumb.
I see where the critics are coming from, I really do, but honestly I find it hard to get behind this critique. When taken by itself, sure, The Twins are a horribly non-flattering portrayal of a particular societal stereotype and if it were in another more serious movie I’d be the first to condemn them. And at first before I saw the movie I thought I would hate these characters even more than I despised Jar Jar Binks.
But then I saw the movie.
And after having seen it, I just have to laugh at this controversy. It’s so absurd. Yes the Twins are bad stereotypes. BUT SO IS EVERYONE ELSE IN THE MOVIE!
Seriously. It’s all non-flattering portrayals. From the typical white suburban family in the form of Sam’s Family, to the portrayal of a drugs infested party crazed 40K a year college scene complete with a narcissistic creepy astronomy professor. Nothing here is flattering. It’s ALL cliche. The potrayal of white America is at least as bad as black. The portrayal of women in this film is particularly worthy of scorn. Even the military is a big standard cookie cutter military cliche. The cowardly hispanic hacker kid along with his nerd allies are a cliche. The ex-CIA agent who lives with his mother and whose family owns a meat locker is a cliche. The whiny director of intelligence who arbitrarily wants to shut down the transformers program for no apparent reason and ends up pulling the wrong parachute chord is a cliche. The whole movie is like this.
And on the transformers side there’s even a reason for it built right into the plot at least if you’ve seen the first one. Each of the transformers takes their speech patterns from watching television and listening to the radio. They explain that quite clearly in the first movie. So it stands to reason that they might model their speech patterns based on predominant cliches in said same media. Hence you get sniveling starscream, and trigger happy ironhide, and you remember poor fallen hip hop oriented Jazz from the first movie? Not to mention the quintessential old man stereoype of jetfire. And let’s not even get started on Wheelie. They’re all like this. Even Optimus Prime and Megatron are even classical cliche portrayals of basic heroism and villainy. It was like this in the original cartoon too.
Really if one is to take great exception at the portrayal of skids and mudflap then they should take exception at the entire film. It’s full of sexism, racism, stereotypes, and gratuitious violence and sexual innuendo. And that’s the point. The point is to be a completely cheesy cartoon action film. It doesn’t pretend to be anything more. It’s not meant to be a work of art. It’s supposed to be funny and exciting in a silly overly exaggerated way. Nobody turns out looking particularly golden with the exception of the cheesy epitome of good Optimus Prime himself. The film even manages to make President Obama look like a moron even though he isn’t even in the film. And iirc the previous film likewise bashed Bush. No, all the major characters come off as sometimes a bad joke, sometimes a heroic figure. And yes even Mudflap and Skids have their moment of heroic triumph when they do some serious damage to the far larger and more powerful decepticon Devastator.
The illiteracy thing is really dumb. The symbols the two were referring to, *nobody* could read except for the ancient Primes and the oldest of the autobots and decepticons like jetfire. So skids and mudflap admitting they can’t read that is like admitting I can’t read ancient sumerian. That hardly makes them stupid.
I’m sure the writers are today wishing they had used a different phrase for them to express their ignorance than “We don’t do much reading”. But even that I think has been blown way out of proportion. They were referring to the text at hand in particular and even had they not been, saying you don’t do much reading is not at all the same thing as saying you can’t read or that your are stupid or ignorant.
Really if you are LOOKING for a controversy it’s often not hard to find one and then find more and more evidence to back it up. But sometimes you ust have to take a step back and look at the bigger picture. What you think you are seeing might not actually be what you are seeing.
If there is a problem with black portrayals in film and television as projecting bad negative stereotypes (and I wholeheartedly believe there is), Transformers 2 is not a particularly illustrive or even interesting example of that problem. If anything all it does is make us laugh at all kinds of silly film and movie stereotypes with equal fervor.
Honestly I thought the Jar Jar thing was a big stretch too. Sure I hated him. Sure he was a horribly uninteresting bad excuse for comic relief of a character who should never have been in StarWars to begin with. But racist? Maybe a tiny bit but hardly worth mentioning. His horribleness transcended all notions of race.
But this transformers conversey taken in context is IMO astronomically further away from being offensive than Jar Jar was. I mean it’s not for me to say what should or should not offend someone, but for myself I can say, I wasn’t offended *at all*. I thought the two characters were in fact pretty cool and if I were a kid I would have loved to get the toys of them. It would not have hurt my self-esteem at all nor would it have it made me equate “black” with fighting or ignorance.
I can understand if you just think that Michael Bay’s entire body of works is just awful. That his entire style of storytelling is offensive and terrible and just makes for horrible movies that nobody should ever watch. That’s fine. That’s a principled position that I can fully respect. I just happen to disagree because I quite enjoyed both the first and the second Transformers movies. And I enjoyed the bad boys films too which Michael Bay also directed.
However, if you think that somehow with Mudflap and Skids crossed some imperceptible line into total impropriety that nothing else in Michael Bay’s works crosses, I think you’re just being completely absurd.
Sometimes it pays not to overanalyze and take things too seriously. When I went to the theatre more than half the audience was black and nobody got upset at the potrayal of Mudflaps and Skids. Nobody walked out in a huff or a rage. This whole issue seems to be manufactured by a few commentators who seem to either have a beef with Michael Bay or just completely ran out of stuff to talk about.
Seriously there is no controversy here and there never was. Lighten up.
Comments (4)
I guess I see it both ways. It’s true that there were stereotypes all over that flick. I was watching it with my parents, and the ageism on the screen was just embarrassing. My mother is 59 years old; when Mother Witwicky didn’t know what marijuana brownies were, it just made me wince. My mother was a teenager in the sixties, for gosh sakes. To say that ANY mom born after 1945 wouldn’t know what marijuana brownies are is beyond rational thought. Seriously.
I’m used to Hollywood’s portrayal of chicks.
But when it comes to ethnic caricatures, I admit that I look for balance. Skids and Mudflap were, as you said, media cliches. On the other hand, there should have been balance. There was one African-American in a military uniform- didn’t catch his name, if the character even had one- and if memory serves he was the only serious African-American character in the whole film. That’s not balance. No doubt that’s why it’s so easy to think the worst of Skids and Mudflap.
The cowardly Hispanic… IDK what they thought they were doing when they wrote that character into the movie. For one thing, a conspiracy theorist would not react that way. Especially not a conspiracy theorist who’s trying to post scoops on his conspiracy theory website. He would have been excited as all get out, and filming absolutely everything.
The opening battle scene was fantastic. Everybody kept saying that the movie was 2 and a half hours of nonstop action and destruction. But after the opening scene the movie doesn’t blow up much else. Not what I expected. :/
@ModernBunny - yeah that marijuana brownie scene was just absurd. Both Mr. and Mrs. Witwicky were embarrassing, but the portrayal of Mrs. Witwicky was particularly ridiculous. Also, not sure wtf kind of green was in those brownies, cuz that behavior was decidedly odd…
I thought about the balance perspective too. In Transformers 1, there was another major black character who could also be seen as a twisted reflection of negative stereotypes, namely the fat kid who was also cowardly and stuffed his face with donuts during the interrogation. But there was a sort of a balance there in that he also happened to be, *the* best hacker and encryptionist in the entire world.
Balance is tough. I mean we don’t want too much forced balance or the story just starts to seem fake. If you’re doing a movie about a primarily black neighborhood and you force some major white characters in there just for balance you break verisimilitude. I think it’s better for directors and writers to worry about writing good stories and then casting the best actors to play the major roles that they can. If they happen to be black or white or hispanic or asian shouldn’t matter. I really don’t mind a movie that has no black presence whatsoever. I’ve seen tons like that. No the movies I hate is where the sole black character is a dumbass who gets himself killed. THOSE kinds of movies are problematic.
Transformers II, I guess is somewhere in between. Skids and Mudflap are kinda dumb, but more in a teenage clown kinda way, but their stupidity doesn’t really get anyone into trouble and they actually do help out in a number of scenes, even once by accident. They don’t get killed either, at least I don’t think they did. The other black character, the military guy is a serious but very minor character. He screws up with the orange smoke thing sort of, but you’d have to really be reaching to consider that an instance of deliberate racism. So all in all it doesn’t offend me. I would have liked more of a black presence, but it didn’t *need* it to make the movie work.
The hispanic character yeah that was really kinda dumb. I didn’t like his character at all. They could have made him so much more interesting. At least he should have gotten over his fear and done something cool at the end, but no he’s just really bad comic relief that the film didn’t need at all.
I agree that the open battle was amazing. I also loved the scene where Optimus was like “I’ll take you all on!” Other than that though the action scenes were somewhat disappointing. Just a lot of junk going on on the screen but not a lot really happening. It was sort of cheesy. And really I don’t see where all the decepticons went. Weren’t there like a ton of them? Did our awesome military just take them out with such ease? pffft. I guess if it weren’t for Megatron and the Fallen we didn’t really need the autobots that much after all.
Personally the idea of The Fallen really pisses me off. Megatron should not have a “Boss”. My Transformer geek side is wholly offended by the idea. Galvitron had a boss and that boss was the size of a planet! Megatron shouldn’t have any or if he did it should be at least that awesome. That’s just not right. It would have been cooler if Megatron had somehow taken the Fallen’s power and fought uber upped Prime one on one.
I haven’t seen Transformers II because I am in the “Michael Bay can do special effects and… nothing else” camp. His movies are just incredibly boring. Seriously, I’d rather watch “Jesus Christ: Vampire Hunter” than Transformers, because, in my book, plot and good writing win out over a huge budget and snazzy film effects.
But I definitely agree with the idea of this post. People get really bent out of shape because the person from their particular sub-culture was portrayed poorly without noticing how bad everyone else might be portrayed as well. I’ve seen some critiques of the show, “Will and Grace” that criticized them for perpetuating negative stereotypes surrounding gays (a minority opinion, but it’s out there.) They failed to recognize that every character in the show was a cliche, and the writers were clearly aware of that. The humor on the show was based entirely in those cliches.
It’s interesting what you said in the comments about the issue of balance. I don’t know if this strictly relates, but it wasn’t until recently that I really understood all those “token black character” comments and jokes. You know how a lot of shows and movies, especially those made for kids, have just the one black character in a crowd of whites? Well, when I was growing up, that’s actually how it was. Colorado is a pretty white-washed state, especially in the areas I lived. I would have maybe one black kid in any of my classes, and, quite often, none at all. Until probably my freshman year of college I had just assumed there weren’t very many black people in the U.S. Defining what’s a “realistic balance” isn’t as objective as people would like to believe. What’s true for one person isn’t necessarily true for us all, and you can’t go getting offended every time something doesn’t perfectly portray your reality.
@elvesdoitbetter - When I grew up there were a number of classes where I was the only black person in the class. But there were other classes where there were a few. In a lot of those classes there also tended to be like one hispanic and one person of east asian background and occasionally one person of native american background. But generally it was mostly white. Things got to be a bit more diverse as I grew older as I went to bigger and bigger public schools, but at the same time as I grew older the achievement gap began to be more evident. So even by my senior year of High School still most of my classmates in my particular classes were white, and there was only two other black people I can think of in any of my high level classes. At the same time though race wasn’t very noticed or talked about when I was in school, not that I remember anyway. Then again I wasn’t particularly caught up on the High School gossip or whatnot.
So in that sense my background was sort of the quintessential “token” scenario. My classes had 1 of each category as if they were placed there to be fully representative. In retrospect when I was a little kid, I bet that was wholly intentional. I mean schools didn’t place you in classes based on achievement back then but I highly doubt it was wholly random. I have no evidence, but I bet there was an attempt to spread out various ethnic backgrounds. But by High School all classes were based on achievement.
But yeah the “token black guy” situation that I find loathworthy has very little to do with the fact that there is one black person amongst a group of whites but a great deal to do with whether that character is effectively superfluous or a very insignificant character that was obviously cast as a black person either to appease those who might proclaim the show or movie racist or worse as a vehicle to represent certain negative racial stereotypes. The second is particularly hard to spot and harder to prove. But it has to do with say, a writer writes in an aggressive belligerent male character who is abusive to women… and then decides that a black man fits that role perfectly because of course people associate “black” with those kinds of attitudes. Here I doubt it’s even intentional, rather people have certain perspectives informed by the way the media portrays black men and then unknownst to them those perspectives creep into their decisions when working on a movie or project. So in casting someone might think such and such fits this role not even realizing that they are making that decision in part because of preconceived notions and at the same time perpetuating those stereotypes.
The important thing I think is to look at media as a whole. It’s less important to say “show X is bad because it has elements A, B, and C” and much more important to say “these are the stereotypes that seem to be perpetuated in the society in general”. The later informs people so that they can be aware in the future and prevent their prejudices from influencing their casting decisions. And likewise for writing.
As for Michael Bay, yeah I know his stuff is crap. Sometimes I just greatly enjoy crappy stuff. If it has enough explosions and references I adored from my childhood I immediately regress to a ten year old version of myself and am totally satisfied. ^_^ Well ok not totally satisfied. But yeah although I love clever skilled writing as much as the next person, I also quite enjoy the mindless entertainment stuff too. It’s nice to have time periods where I can truly turn my brain off for a bit.