The Third Layer

Rating: Null/10 (26 December 2007)

I know of only three periods in Americam history when it can be said that the people as a whole, as Americans, were truly noble. Where being was more about ideas, ideals and intents than tribal exclusionism.
One of these was the late sixties. If you were there in the midst of it, you would have experienced something that simply cannot be described today  a sort of group mind that was so shared and shared with better futures that is was often mistaken for spiritual.
Much of that reflected and was fed by the music of the time. Folk. Rock, and that quantum edge between that often seemed perfect. So you, dear reader, may have to simply accept on trust that the music of the times, and times themselves, mattered. That's even though the artifacts have been since re-incarnated as ordinary things.
Much of that ordinariness has been because of how we have reinvented the story to allow ourselves to handle the disappointment of the futures we ended up with. And a large part of that reinvention has been through movies that retell and reshape.
Much of that can be laid at the feet of the slick marketeers behind what has become known as "country" music, where the story is in the surrounding wrapper of a metastory: honesty, forthrightness, god and country, guns. (This package comes with the standard negatives: anti-gay, woman, minority, etc.)
The unwitting patron saint of this particular reinvention was Johnny Cash, a poor soul swept up in his and our addictions until even after death. That's when we got a particularly revolting biography. We seemed to want it. It has true love, a successful struggle with demons, performances of music to fill in for the thin story. Grimaces and joy.
It also trivialized what the music of the era was. It turned a whole social movement into a mere plot device, no different than say a Denzel Washington-coached football championship. The music didn't matter at all. It was the fame that turned lives.
(Something similar happened with "A Beautiful Mind" where the mathematics was incidental instead of what made the man mad, and along the way changes imagination in and of us all. But few people believe in math, and nearly everyone considers power in music as heavy.)
Oddly, our reaction to this trivialization is not to look deeper at the real thing, but to add a third layer of abstraction that further trivializes. I must admit to laughing here and there, especially at the Dylan spoof. But I left the theater wondering if this is all we end up with from this era. Is it merely a joke now? Is this yearning and work already the same level as the fodder for "Austin Powers?"
Kids used to play with toy cars. They weren't real cars, but the play was generally along the lines of what real cars do, sometimes flying, but not as planes  only cars on air-roads. Then at some point, the cars could transform into robots and the robots themselves conveyed a simple cosmology of good and evil. Play became disembodied, and the connection with reality was lost.
This is a transformer movie: three layers removed, transforming what celebrated complexity, subtlety and ambiguity into something manufactured by promoters as a battle of good and evil, and then transformed into a joke.
Tom Paine dies again. I'm sure Apatow thinks it is just simple fun, like goofing on Nascar.
It seems important that it is not.
Ted's Evaluation -- 1 of 3: You can find something better to do with this part of your life.