Why "Transformers" matters!

Pop culture has never been the same. These decades have seen not only the proliferation of action packed movies but also of representations of TV shows reminiscent to a generation that grew up in the 80's and 90's. The action sequences blow the mind of audiences, specially the young ones who appreciate the visual stimulation and the magic of screen time performances.

But if one asks the older crowd who flock to these cinemas they would perhaps have a bigger reason for going. Aside from the flashy onslaught of screen time and sounds that pummel the ear and shake the THX movie houses, they have another reason.

Movies like Transformers (along with other remakes that were lifted from TV series and hero-infested Marvel spin offs) strike a chord in the hearts of the young adults. I am of course speaking of my generation - young professionals (and even the unemployed) who were jumping for joy when they first saw Optimus Prime transform and hear the familiar voice of the leader of the Autobots.

I have a few students who admire the awesomeness of Transformers perhaps because of the robots and their human-like personalities. But I have to find a few who can articulate the same dynamics that make this movie so appealing to yuppies - males mostly, although I know a few yuppie girls who like it too.

Transformers simply utilizes the common themes in our day to day narratives - a struggle to make a difference in life, to make choices and jump into action that will help others, to be part of something bigger and ultimately to matter in the end. The robotic figures serve as archetypes of heroes with abilities prized by individuals who feel limited by culture, economics and geography.
In other words, Transformers does not only serve as a substitute for the primal need to be known but also as a vehicle for articualting convictions firmly held in a shared assumption that others matter, that one can make a difference and that limits do not define a person (at least not completely). The movie helps bring about that need and speaks it to a visually stimulated crowd about the convictions of a generation living in the desensitizing power of boredom and apathy.

Nearing Thirty-Five

Unoriginal like my prodigious race
celebrating copy-cat culture and enduring
relentless mutterings of my inner angsts;
Always desiring and never attempting,
With dreams held by both hands;
Clasped with the stubborness of a romantic.
Caressing the tender promises of high hopes.
Born out of studies of thick tomes that
Blister the eyes and produce the opiate
sunderings of wistful ambitions.

Trodden by the biting realities of economics
And the indolent genes of a world brought up in foolish hopes;
Tantalizing one-night stands
With vain-glorious bill-board texts and post-colonial discourses
Those that draw smiles on nutty academics
In their comfortable jargons of white light.

Unnerved and numbed at the same rhythmic
Perturbations nourished by fires in the bosom:
Ever remorseful of mediocre victories
Chanting with the dying an ode of elegiac alliterations.
Words, senseless and totalizing -
Meanings detached and yet slowly drifting into
recognizable patterns of delusions,
Begging for systematizing wholeness
crouching at the door of the phantasmagoric wisps of discarded cigarettes

Knocked bitterly bye the eternal and gnawing hunger pangs
And putting much faith in the much maligned apocaylpse
of a lost world and a matrix of reconfigured nexus
of new sensibilities and new habits.
Sustained by the image of the real and yet cavorting secretly with the longings of a new
horizon antithetical to conservative leanings lodged in the soul.

Conflicted and yet serene
Desiring and yet appeased
Revolting and pacifying the turmoil of the imposed platitudes
Meaningful and yet chaos personified in the hum-drum of postmodern epehemeras.

Oxymoronic, paradoxical and coherently brutal
At every suggestion of linearity
Morbidly divine or divinely morbid?
O! The dying values of my age!
Swallowed in the fleeting indictments of technopoly
Hyper-real and stochastic representations of the undead
May the last gasps of the cold earth sweep this industrial sewage of recycled
kaleidoscopes of what they call literary and cultural

Blistful religion of the ancients! Onomatopeic rants of a bygone age
Does faith abnegate itself at science's triumph?
Shall the spiritual be reduced to the mathematical?
Will poetry be cast aside as mere hiccups of the flatulent?
And history be nothing but the inevitable narrative that is to come?

Where is the sting of death?
Where is the liberty of light?
Where is the power of the text?

Am I then who I am supposed to be?
Or am I a singular positionality of consciousness?
A coherent ruse for the inevitable implosion of meaning's loss?

Another year of musings await, one filled with blind terror and fear
For now it is a localized pain of the abdomen, acute and undignified.
And the future is nothing but Faith in Transcendence
And whereof one cannot speak, there of one must be silent.