watched the transformers the other day. the big righteous robots from my childhood return full of subtle social engineering and american propaganda. the first obvious WTF?!?!? reaction happens just after the movie begins; the transformers, the robots in disguise movie kicks off in iraq. woah../// here we go… is someone trying to make a point here? is this going to be one of those movies?

in these initial scenes in iraq and, throughout the film, we get this great sense of the power and sophistication of the US military industrial complex; this becomes quite a central theme (though perhaps meme is more on the money).

in the opening few minutes this iraqi kid (i can but suppose we are suppose to assume his nationality) runs up to the american GI (supporting actors) at their base. my first reaction: ‘ah! a suicide bomber’ then immediately ‘uh gee - that’s not cool for a family movie’. the kid is not a suicice bomber. of course not. instead the kid is all happy faced to hang with the US troops. there is some icky sense of big american brotherhood. its a scouts moment.

hang on. hasn’t the last 17 odd years seen the continuous bombing of iraq by america? if this kid was an iraqi wouldn’t he have had close members of his family and friends blown to bits by the US air force, or riddled by bullets from american ground forces. chances are he’d probably seen members of his family, or his friends, killed in front of him; probably his school, or the local hospital, or his home, or all of the above, is just rubble and body parts and the kind of memories than you can’t escape even over a whole lifetime. the happy kid really got to me. i don’t think there are many kids in iraq who would be happy to see a GI. but i’m on the other side on the world - i wouldn’t really know

there is this whole ‘bring the troops back home’ theme that runs thru the the transformers. there are great examples of a hostile government (’homeland security’ -ish) task force abducting citizens with threats and force and without explanation, this is very telling. it sends important messages, and for me is both funny and disturbing, but somehow the other scene i got stuck on is the whole morse code thing. it appears in so many movies and it might even be because of its frequency that i reckon it has some freudian baseline. its a message that is consistently reinforced.

its so generic its cliché: first all other communications are hacked, intercepted, jammed, down, whatever. someone comes up with a bright idea. morse code. that thing that everybody knows. the techie character, generally armed only with a screwdriver and acerbic dialogue, jury rigs some moorse code transmitter out of a zippo lighter and an digital watch. then (cut to scene) there is some army guy listening on the other end of a shortwave radio or, better yet, a morse code receiver. the army communications guy immediately recognises, believes (’we have some morse code blipping in - my god its from the general’), and translates the morse code on a handy notepad

do the army really still maintain these systems. what is the real message there? what secret irrational fear does is stimulate in deep within us? what is the meme it reinforces?

i’m going to have to think on that…