Neoliberalism In Disguise: The 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 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

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 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 and save the day. As with the everyman heroes of the franchise, especially

Mark Wahlberg’s impossibly Boston-accented Texan inventor Cade Yeager, the soldiers in the

Transformers movies, as described by film critic Lutz Koepnick, do “embody traditional soldierly virtues, [but] their sense of discipline and self-reliance, of working on their own…very much echoes what neoliberal capitalism over the past two decades has come to expect from anyone trying to define himself as a successful economic agent.”16 By providing this

commentary as background to the large action scenes that make the movies marketable overseas,

Bay and his writers have created an effective means of promoting both American militarism and

15 Koepnick, Michael Bay, 124. 16 Koepnick, Michael Bay, 126. 5

neoliberalism in an easily digestible globalized package. Though its effects are hard to gauge, the

attitudes presented by the franchise about the military and economics

This portrayal is compounded by the fact that the U.S. Department of Defense, in exchange for a fee ($600,000 for the first film)17 and script approval, has provided military

advisors and supplied soldiers, vehicles, and weaponry to each film in the series, the second of

which was called by Lt. Col. Gregory Bishop as “one of the largest joint films made with the

military…[it’s] a lot of people watching a film that positively depicts the Army.”18 As film

historians Matthew Alford and Tom Secker uncovered, the Pentagon asserted a great deal of

creative control over a number of films they advised on, including Transformers. For example, in

the first film, after a Decepticon attack on an Army Ranger station, “Pentagon Hollywood liaison

Phil Strub inserted the line ‘Bring em home’, granting the military a protective, paternalistic

quality, when in reality the DOD does quite the opposite.”19 This championship of the U.S.

military, particularly when analyzed in the context of the negative portrayal of American

government, serves as a tacit endorsement of neoliberal attitudes. By providing a narrative of

American idealism as consistently countered by governmental management, the films advocate

for deregulation, both of the military and, as its marketing of commercial brands evidence,

economic markets.

If Michael Bay’s goal with the Transformers films was to create a series as commercially

popular as possible, this mission became a resounding success, with the first three films grossing

over four billion dollars and the fourth, Age of Extinction, “exceeding the GDP of at least

17 Matthew Alford and Tom Secker, “Documents expose how Hollywood promotes war on behalf of the Pentagon, CIA and NSA,” Medium, July 4, 2017. https://medium.com/insurge-intelligence/exclusive-documents-expose- direct-us-military-intelligence-influence-on-1-800-movies-and-tv-shows-36433107c307. 18 Grafton Pritchartt, “Soldiers Support Filming of Transformers Sequel,” U.S. Army, July 14, 2009. https://www.army.mil/article/24358/soldiers_support_filming_of_transformers_sequel. 19 Matthew Alford and Tom Secker, “Documents expose how Hollywood promotes war.” 6

seventeen nations worldwide.”20 The films have also fulfilled their role as commercials for the

Transformers toys, with toy sales jumping from $100 million in 2006 to $484 million in 2007

after the release of the first movie,21 and spin-off film driving sales of the toys

enough to lift Hasbro to a significant profit in the first quarter of 2019.22 However, the films have served as more than marketing for their own products – the corporate synergy that birthed the franchise in the first place paved the pathway for a virtual peak in product placement throughout the films. As a series designed for international success built upon a globalized brand

(and one helmed by a director known for inserting products into his films), the prospect of marketing their products through Transformers became an attractive proposition for a number of multinational corporations, “which are larger than many countries and which often have marked market power.”23 By serving as an advertisement for its own product as well as hundreds of

multinational brands, the Transformers films represent a distinct feat in the use of cinema as a

means of furthering globalization and neoliberal economics.

A criticism often lobbed at the Transformers franchise is its particular use of “world-

making” - “a key word of contemporary criticism for understanding how the architecture of

individual works of art echo the developments of contemporary convergence culture and

economic globalization.” Much of this criticism is born of the various brands put on prominent

display throughout the films, even at the expense of narrative cohesion. The first film in the

franchise features sixty-five brands, among them Citi Bank, Visa, and a fleet of car companies

(the robots do disguise themselves as cars, after all).24 Things mainly remained the same

20 Koepnick, Michael Bay, 10. 21 Johnson, Media Franchising, 153. 22 Reuters, “Bumblebee movie boost transforms Hasbro first quarter; shares surge,” CNBC, April 23, 2019. 23 Stiglitz, Globalization and Its Discontents, 11. 24 Transformers: Product Placement Infographic, Hollywood Branded, February 20, 2016. https://blog.hollywoodbranded.com/transformers-product-placement-history-infographic 7

throughout the first three films (even with the Dark of the Moon, the third film, reaching sixty-

eight brands).25

However, this trend underwent a major shift with Transformers: Age of Extinction, which

not only prominently featured dozens of American and European products (including a widely

derided scene that essentially acts as an extended Bud Light commercial), but took full

advantage of the growing Chinese film market by showcasing products from fourteen Chinese

brands, including NutriLife, Lenovo, and Lukfook Jewelry.26 In addition to these product

placements, Bay set a significant portion of the film in Hong Kong and utilized a number of

popular Chinese actors (a trend continued in the film’s sequel, which includes a bizarre cameo by

Chinese singer-songwriter Han Geng). The cultural messaging in Age of Extinction and The Last

Knight (to a lesser extent) mirrors the American-centric attitudes of the first three films, but on a global scale, promoting Chinese values (notably and semi-ironically, individualism over government) and celebrating everyday citizens around the world as potential heroes. Ultimately, this effort paid off – the film “cashed in around $1.1 billion and…[became] the first American film [to earn] more money in China than in America or anywhere else.”27 By shifting its overall

messaging and increasingly globalizing its content while maintaining a similar construction of

neoliberal principles, Bay and his collaborators reached a peak of globalized neoliberal cinema,

one that set a massive precedent for blockbuster filmmaking moving forward.

In The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith characterizes a foundational economic principle

in explicit terms: “consumption is the sole end and purpose of all production.”28 Had he lived

long enough to see the blossoming of the film industry into a global capitalist force, he would

25 Ibid. 26 Ibid. 27 Koepnick, Michael Bay, 10. 28 Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, Book II, Chapter II, 329. 8 most likely have very positive things to say about Michael Bay’s creative ambitions. The

Transformers films are but one of the cinematic brands that have embraced globalization; blockbuster mainstays like Star Wars, the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and Jurassic Park, the former two of which are distributed by the Disney corporation, one of the biggest and most vertically integrated multinationals in existence, depend on the international markets to break records and turn enormous profits. However, none of these franchises have embraced the neoliberal economic ideology behind this globalization quite like Michael Bay and the robots in disguise.

Other series have begun to utilize the techniques behind the Transformers’ success -

James Cameron’s Avatar sequels will feature a number of Chinese actors, and the Marvel films market themselves as global events, strategically manipulating release dates to encourage turnout around the globe - and as such, the international box office has become more important than ever. Ultimately, however, by embracing free market idealism and globalist practices, the

Transformers franchise and its blockbuster brethren, much like the globalism perpetuated by the

Washington Coalition, are progressively eliminating competition in an industry far more volatile than those it modeled itself on. While some films succeed on a massive scale, like this year’s

Avengers: Endgame (which is on pace to shatter Avatar’s record for highest-grossing film of all time, unadjusted for inflation), these films are accounting for more and more of annual total box office gross. If audiences grew tired of the lack of options, and one of these tentpole films were to fail, the tent would collapse. Ultimately, the question that faces the film industry is one seemingly faced by the Autobots in each Transformers film: should the humans of Earth decide their own fate, or be saved from their own indecision?

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