The Ark and The Dove

Sometimes Iceland Really is Icy

I finally got around to watching Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen.

A small glimmer of hope still stuck in the back of my mind that maybe, just maybe, the movie wasn't really as bad as everyone said it was. Perhaps it was a conspiracy of critics...

Alas, the critics were all too honest and all to right. It was one of the worst movies I have ever seen.

That being said, there was a brief moment where the movie had potential. A White House liaison in the employ of Pres. Obama has been sent to the Autobot-assisted U.S. military base to assess the effectiveness of their operations. Later in the movie, he announces that the President has decided that the Autobots are in fact causing the Decepticons to violently attack civilians. This seemed a thinly veiled allegory on the perverse arguments that the presence of the U.S. military in the middle east makes it somehow responsible for the acts by terrorists in those regions. Even more provocative, there is a scene in which the Decepticons threaten global terrorism unless the U.S. government hands over one of its citizens. The movie makes it clear that Obama wants to initiate diplomatic negotiations with the Decepticons and keep the Autobots (and the military) out of the picture. That was probably the funniest and most entertaining part of the whole movie.

Everything before and after that sequence pretty much devolved to robot fart jokes, gonad jokes, gratuitous cutaway shots to Megan Fox's rear-end, or slow-motion running shots of Megan Fox's bosoms.

Isabel asked me to explain the plot of the movie afterward, and I found myself completely incapable of doing so. Not only was I suffering from the now banal claim that the robots were all ugly and indistinguishable, I also found that the plot simply meandered. Various plot points seemed to trail off without resolution and without callback. I'm not even sure which characters survived and which ones died...and that doesn't even get me to the point where I start complaining about character inconsistencies.

Since when does Megatron report to a higher authority? He's Megatron. He's a tyrant by nature. He can't tolerate taking orders from a superior. That's one of his conflicts in the far more philosophically superior animated film from the 1980s. When Megatron becomes Unicron's slave (and is renamed Galvatron), he is driven practically mad by his compulsory servitude...

But I digress...

Visual Studies

A recent Breitbart article mentions how video is driving a current boom in Internet use.

Video overcomes barriers of language, local content and literacy, he [Robert Pepper, a vice president of Cisco] said, allowing users to interact more easily with the Internet.

My problem with this paraphrase (who knows what he actually said?) is that it lists literacy among "barriers."

Literacy is not a barrier. Illiteracy is the barrier.

Literacy is freedom. It is a pathway. A vehicle. A liberating force that gives power to its possessor.

Illiteracy is a fetter, a shackle, a limitation on human potential.

The rise of visual culture threatens to thrust us into a pre-verbal age. It poses as a pseudo-freedom of expression.

This isn't to say that the visual arts as such can't be beautiful, expressive, or informative. Plus, written text is, after all, a means of visual expression.

But there are ideas and thoughts that are too complex (or perhaps too important) to be adequately conveyed without the use of formal language.