Michael Bay. Tyler Perry. Hearing those names will make you cringe or gush. These two “prolific” directors consistently elicit nothing less than extreme responses from audiences and critics. Depending on your taste, education, location, and a glut of other circumstances, you will believe that Mr. Bay and Mr. Perry are either brilliant auteurs with their fingers on the pulse of contemporary audiences or manipulative, unimaginative hacks.
The record-breaking success of Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (ROTF) this past weekend has brought the well-known-but-rarely-discussed enmity between the average moviegoer, the discerning moviegoer, and the critics and their opinions of Bay and Perry’s movies into the spotlight. While no one expected ROTF to be a masterpiece of storytelling, the amount of vitriol it has received from critics and more discerning moviegoers is staggering. This film is currently at 20% on Rotten Tomatoes with many professional and amateur critics slamming it for its scant plotting, poor characterization, weak dialogue, gratuitous sexuality, racism, and general stupidity. At the end of the weekend, the preaching of the film world’s “intelligentsia” had little effect on average/casual moviegoers who made ROTF one of the fastest and highest grossing films in history, and had mostly positive comments for Bay’s metal grinding epic.
In many ways the wildly different responses from casual moviegoers and critics are reminiscent of the divergent responses to controversial “filmmaker” Tyler Perry. Critics and savvy moviegoers repeatedly bemoan the nonsensical plotting, stereotypical characterizations, and overwrought theatrical melodrama of Perry’s films, yet his target audiences never fail to push his films to the #1 box office spot. This phenomenon once baffled critics and savvy moviegoers but now only seems to enrage them. It leads them to label audiences as easily manipulated, unrefined, and stupid. They decry these audiences for turning away from intelligent fare for formulaic fluff. But, as a any math major will tell you, formulas are effective because of the potential for mass application.
Michael Bay and Tyler Perry have crafted films built on strict adherence to a simplistic formula, which manipulates audiences into having specific emotional responses that allow for catharsis and wish fulfillment. Simply put, they use a simple formula to make films that make audiences feel good. Their films are candy for the soul of the malnourished. Yes, they appeal to lowest common denominator. But, the thing about the lowest common denominator is that it’s common. Most moviegoers would prefer a movie experience with safe yet cathartic fantasy and wish fulfillment than one with profound, challenging, thought-provoking and, likely, painful content. This is nothing new. The troubling revelation is that today’s casual audiences do not actively engage in balanced viewing habits. Casual audiences are content to be entertained and are not bothered in the slightest to pursue material that might expand their mind or break their hearts. This is the phenomenon that disturbs critics and discerning moviegoers most.
Generally, it’s fine to enjoy guilty pleasures and popcorn entertainment. But, without balance, those forms of entertainment become the so popular and profitable that they threaten to dominate the cultural landscape. Consequently, intelligent, challenging work begins to fade away because it is no longer marketable. The growing possibility of a dumbed-down culture causes many critics and certain audiences to go at filmmakers like Bay and Perry full bore because they don’t want good culture to disappear. And, really, who can blame them?
While critics and moviegoers of particular taste are not the vanguards of culture they are still voices that represent culture and it is their right—and at times their responsibility—to defend culture that will show the future that we weren’t idiots. When watching ROTF, or any of Bay or Perry’s work in general, I think to myself, “this is ridiculous.” But, beyond that thought, I hope that other members of the audience know it’s ridiculous too. In all honesty, that’s a real roll of the dice. Much of the audience for these films is too young and unbalanced in their cultural exposure to accurately interpret these movies as fluff. Conduct an exit poll on audiences from any of Bay’s or Perry’s films and see if that audience isn’t dominated by people who believe movies like ROTF or Madea Goes to Jail aren’t masterworks of cinematic storytelling. This is particularly demoralizing to African-American audiences, who make up such a small segment of the population--with so few films to represent their experience, positive, negative, or indifferent--and whose tastes are doomed to be defined solely by the Tyler Perry standard. Even worse, an entire generation of moviegoers may grow up disregarding intelligent entertainment in favor of youth-skewed fluff that never dares to evolve beyond wish fulfillment and consider the human dimension of facing extraordinary circumstances and the subsequent triumphs and consequences.
As our culture becomes more youth-oriented, high tech, and generally hyperactive, we can only hope that audiences will grow out of the phase where they only enjoy the work of Bays and Perrys. We hope they realize there’s more to life than explosions, pissing robots, hot babes, pot-smoking-fist-fighting-drag-queen grandmas, chubby bigots, and happy endings, and will in turn demand more from their entertainment. But with ROTF breaking box-office records daily and Tyler Perry’s movies consistently reaching top spots on the box office, all we can do is hold on to a hope that is vague and fleeting at best.
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