1 Neoliberalism in Disguise: the Transformers Films As Peak Free

Neoliberalism In Disguise: The Transformers Films as Peak Free Market Globalization in Film In his book Globalization and Its Discontents, famed economist Joseph Stiglitz examines the myriad problems that largely unrestricted capitalist globalization has caused for the world economy, from “[being] run, to too large an extent, by and for large multinational corporations and large financial institutions in the large advanced countries,”1 and “[leading] to lower growth and more instability, with large fractions of the population worse off.”2 The increased liberalization of markets across the globe, which saw its early rise under Ronald Reagan, began largely at the same time as the mass deregulation of Hollywood, and in many ways, the film industry has become remarkably globalized in much of the way Stiglitz described, operating as a cultural extension of neoliberal attitudes in the global economy. Over the past two decades especially, increased globalization in the film industry, partially due to the explosion of the Chinese film market and a saturation of the domestic box office, has caused the American box office to be overtaken by the international film market, with foreign ticket sales now accounting for over sixty percent of global revenues for American studio films.3 This expansive globalization of the past few years has, without a doubt, come to impact the content of the films produced by studios so that they may be more marketable overseas, and nowhere is this more apparent than Michael Bay’s Transformers franchise. Produced by Paramount Pictures, the franchise has consistently utilized neoliberal strategies in content and marketing to ensure its economic success around the globe, and as such, serves as a[n Optimus] prime case study for how globalization and deregulation have impacted the film industry; 1 Joseph Stiglitz, Globalization and Its Discontents Revisited (New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Co., 2018), xxv. 2 Ibid., xxiv. 3 Stephen Follows, “How Important is International Box Office to Hollywood,” May 15, 2017. https://stephenfollows.com/important-international-box-office-hollywood/ 1 ultimately, the five Transformers films clearly demonstrate the effects of the free market on culture and how the globalization of what we watch changes how we watch it. As with the IMF and World Bank, which saw “[their] most dramatic change…in the 1980s, the era when Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher preached free-market deology in the United States and the United Kingdom”4 (in a period when income inequality increased by over ten percent)5, Hollywood, of which Reagan had famously been a part, underwent radical deregulation during his administration. In her paper “In Deregulation We Trust: The Synergy of Politics and Industry in Reagan-Era Hollywood,” film historian Jennifer Holt describes this transformation as a return “to a structural economy of vertical integration after almost 40 years of government-enforced divestiture,”6 recreating an industry that was virtually exclusive to five corporations. A prominent effect of Hollywood’s deregulation and its subsequent explosion of synergistic business practices was the progressive use of film and television as a means of advertising products from other corporations, birthing both product placement in existing shows and a number of intellectual properties explicitly created as commercials for products, mainly toy lines. Out of this, a number of intellectual properties, designed to sell toys to children, were born, and Reagan personally ensured their development, vetoing a measure in 1988 that “would have reimposed restrictions on television programming aimed at children, calling it ‘an unconstitutional infringement on freedom of expression.’”7 4 Stiglitz, Globalization and Its Discontents, 110-111. 5 Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, cited by Robert B. Marks, The Origins of the Modern World (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014), 193. 6 Jennifer Holt, “In Deregulation We Trust: The Synergy of Politics and Industry in Reagan-Era Hollywood,” Film Quarterly 55, vol. 2 (Winter 2001), 22. 7 Irvin Molotsky, “Reagan Vetoes Bill Putting Limits On TV Programming for Children,” The New York Times, November 7, 1988. 2 One such franchise born from this period was Transformers, an animated TV series created by in 1984 as an American integration of the Japanese toys Microman and Diaclone, cementing the morphing robots as a globalized franchise. The series was a smashing success, as was the toy line, proving the value of corporate integration in entertainment as a means of making a profit. Though it has harbored a number of creatively engaging projects (the Bay films notwithstanding), the Transformers franchise exists purely as a product, a means to a stylish, profitable end. Its roots in neoliberal economics and globalized practices would provide a key foundation for the franchise moving forward, particularly the films – as economist Derek Johnson writes, “Transformers is not a brand that [Hasbro] made global, but a transmedia brand sustained historically by transnational processes and relationships only now publicly legible as global.”8 By 2006, the Transformers franchise was still chugging along, producing $100 million a year in global toy sales,9 but it had yet to adjust its synergistic focus to a progressively globalized cinematic landscape. That all changed in 2007 with the production and release of Transformers, the first live action film of the franchise. Executive produced by blockbuster mainstay Steven Spielberg, longtime fans of the series and its expanded lore were disappointed when Spielberg hired Michael Bay, the director behind Pearl Harbor, The Rock, and Bad Boys, to helm the film and its projected sequels. Though some fans were expecting someone different, it’s hard to imagine someone more suited to a franchise explicitly designed to sell toys to children than a man who began his career working in commercials and whose name had become synonymous with bombastic, high-octane action sequences. 8 Derek Johnson, Media Franchising: Creative License and Collaboration in the Culture Industries (New York, NY: New York University Press, 2013), 154. 9 Ibid, 153. 3 More than that, though, Bay was more prepared than almost anyone to capitalize on the developing globalization of the industry – the studios were (and remain) eager to break through cultural protectionism overseas, putting, as Stiglitz describes, “enormous pressure on the U.S. government to demand that…other countries [not] subsidize their movie industries.”10 This push for less competition for American films is a key tenet of globalization – “profits are higher and life is more comfortable without excessive competition,”11 as Stiglitz writes – but Bay had a different idea in mind to globalize his cinema: the films became, in the words of former Paramount president Adam Goldman, a mission for Bay to “make the most pop, commercially successful movie he could, because he wanted to.”12 By creating a franchise of films that at once espouses American capitalist values while offering entertainment on a basic, universal scale, Bay created a truly globalized cinema, one that “offers a sundial to assess the prospects and memories of cinema in the twenty-first century, including the unexpected transformation of avant-garde hopes into global capitalism’s most valuable currency.”13 As with fast edits, scantily clad women, and explosions, Michael Bay has a knack for threading Americanism throughout most of his filmography (including 469 American flags appearing onscreen across his first twelve films)14, and the Transformers series is no exception. Notably, Bay exhibits a strong preference for the military combined with a disdain for big government, a sentiment with ties to Reagan-era politics. Government officials are portrayed in the films “as driven by selfish agendas, at best incompetent to do their jobs, at worst thoroughly corrupt…getting in the way of much needed interventions, misjudging the perils of Decepticon 10 Stiglitz, Globalization and Its Discontents, 82. 11 Stiglitz, Globalization and Its Discontents, 390. 12 Adam Goldman, cited by Lutz Koepnick, Michael Bay (Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2018), 165. 13 Koepnick, Michael Bay, 20. 14 Frank Kemp, “Every Michael Bay American Flag,” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HoyGNJQIviA. 4 terror and the benefits of Autobot alliances, and prioritizing personal interest and vanity over common survival.”15 These depictions range from the buffoonish, as with John Turturro’s Agent Seymour Simmons, who gets peed on by a Transformer in the first film, and an obvious George W. Bush stand-in, who requests that a Secret Service agent “rustle [him] up some Ding Dongs,” to secretly devious, the perpetrators of evil conspiracies, as with Kelsey Grammer’s CIA operative Harold Attinger or John Benjamin Hickey’s National Security Advisor Theodore Galloway. Though Joshua Joyce, the Steve Jobs-like CEO played by Stanley Tucci in Transformers: Age of Extinction, is similarly portrayed as a corrupt villain, he is redeemed by the end of the film, a treatment no government characters receive, further strengthening the films’ endorsement of capitalist values and denouncement of big government. These incompetent government characters are strongly contrasted with the nobly heroic soldiers who appear throughout the franchise (and Bay’s whole filmography), most notably Josh Duhamel’s William Lennox, who fight against their superiors and government bureaucracy to help the Autobots

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