Robots in disguise. Misogyny, not so much.

I saw the new Transformers movie. Whether this was a good thing or not is kind of up in the air.

The good things about the movie: Lots of stuff blows up, Chicago gets pretty much destroyed. If you like to see giant robots destroying things - and you can tolerate Michael Bay's deeply chaotic style - it's not awful.

The bad things: Shia LeBeouf continues to be himself - an insipid, uninteresting whiny brat. The plot is completely incoherent - the bad guys want to...bring their planet to Earth, because...I don't even know. And then there's an entirely obnoxious subplot in which Shia LeBeouf's girlfriend exists and his parents want him to get married and blah blah blah. Which brings me to...

The ugly: Oh, Mr. Bay. Have you ever met a woman? Like, actually conversed with a real, live female?

There's this theoretical 'test' out there, the Bechdel test. What it amounts to is three questions: are there at least two female characters in a film? Do they talk to each other? About something other than men? It's not meant as an assessment of how anti-feminist/misogynistic/etc a work is, but more of something applied to track trends (a *huge* number of modern movies fail this test). For example: the new Transformers film passes. There are three female characters. Two of them talk to each other. They do not talk about men (well, they do, but they also have about ten seconds of dialogue on another topic).

Female Character A exists purely as sex appeal. She has precisely zero personality. We don't know what she likes or dislikes, we don't know anything about her history or how she ended up where she is, we don't know anything about her friends or family. The first time we see her in the movie? Literally a panty shot of her ass, barely covered, as she walks up the stairs and then goes and straddles her boyfriend in bed. Her further contributions to the plot include creating conflict by having another man interested in her, and being taken hostage and waiting helplessly for rescue.

Female Character B is a career woman in the intelligence community who comes across as a shrill harpy. She's a cold-hearted bitch. We can tell because she treats her assistant with absolute disdain, and walks into situations and attempts to take control when the (male) people who are already there are rapidly losing control and messing everything up. The first time we see her, she has her flunky carrying her multiple designer purses and an extra pair of shoes around for her.

Female Character C is the main characters mother, who makes reference to her son's being a loser and says he can't expect to get another girlfriend as hot as Female Character A unless he has a big penis.

97% of the movie is divided between the useful characters fighting the bad guys, and Shia LeBeouf whining about being unemployed while his super hot girlfriend has a job, which of course makes him feel emasculated. His girlfriend overtly says she loves having him around the house as a "boy toy"; the implication is that the fact that he's unemployed and she's not is (and should be) inherently bad. The issue isn't so much that he's unemployed and feels bad about it (understandable) but his girlfriend has a job and he doesn't (haha look at the looooser!).

The thing about movies like this is that it in and of itself isn't deeply problematic. Of course a Michael Bay movie is stupid and worthless in the moments when it's not about blowing stuff up*. The thing is it's indicative of the society that not only creates movies like this but embraces them - that not only sees nothing wrong with but downright enjoys a movie where our introduction to the first female character is literally a tracking shot of her ass as she goes up a flight of stairs. It's not a cause but a symptom of a huge problem with our culture - women are objects meant to be looked at, not people with meaningful lives.

*I also seriously question the way that Michael Bay thinks the military works, by the way.

Back from the dead for a very important birthday message

It's that time of year again - time for us to throw some dead animals on a fire, drink a juice made from fermented flowers and shoot some explosives pointlessly into the air, all in honor of the fact that around this time 235 years ago, a bunch of passionate (or crazy, or both, depending on your point of view), brilliant men wrote a document saying "Enough is enough." Sitting there in the heat and the humidity (and boy, in the past month or so have I learned about heat and humidity), fifty-six men decided that the injustices rained upon them by Great Britain were no longer tolerable - and as such, the nation of United States of America would no longer sit back and accept it. "...all men are created equal," they wrote. Britain refused to treat them as such, and so it was natural, the morally right thing, to dissolve all bonds uniting them.

Simple, really. Brilliant. Unprecedented, at the time. World-changing.

It's been a rough year, yet again. Our economy still stumbles. We've had tornados and floods, political scandals and conflicts. Our government nearly shut down. We've made significant leaps towards equality in some arenas - soon gay, lesbian and bisexuals will be allowed to serve openly in the military, and can now get married in six states. Six out of forty-four may not seem like a lot, but consider that sodomy was illegal (and such laws were selectively enforced only against same-sex couples) within the past decade, and the progress is clear.

25,000 American soldiers died during that first war. Today we still have troops on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan; more than 6,000 of them have died. This resonates more with me this year than it did last - petty, perhaps, but at the end of January I raised my right hand and swore to spend the next four years in uniform, protecting and upholding the Constitution against all enemies. And in April one of my friends, who I've known since the first day of college six years ago, deployed to Afghanistan. Many of my new friends will be heading over there in the next six months. I may be myself.

It's a funny country we have here. We began with those words: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal..." and proceeded, for 236 years, to refuse to treat all men equally. This is a nation that was born in the mud and fire and pain and heartbreak of war, a war we were thoroughly unprepared for, that we went into without an idea of what came after the war - and here we are, two and a half centuries later, doing the same thing, plunging headfirst into war after war. Some may be morally justified, truly fighting for the ideals our nation was founded upon. Some may be fought for vague and muddy, nebulous reasons. Do we always get it right? No, not by a long shot. But sometimes we do.

So here's to Jefferson and Franklin and Adams. To the fights we've fought for the right reasons - for freedom and liberty. To those who've fought in uniform, in the press, and in the streets; those who've fought against fighting and stood resolute and said that they will not raise up arms, that their fight will forever be one of words and ideas but never violence. To the flag on the moon and Francis Scott Key's flag which still hangs in our nation's capitol. To all the patches on the quilt - the colors and ideas and conflicts and contradictions that make up this country. We have been many things, and will continue to be many things, and someday maybe we'll figure out what we are.