I’d like to expound later on a few topics broached by Bay in T:RotF. The first being his critique of the American Family and the dichotomy between cultural ideology and reality. Bay breaks down hoary old cliches of flyover country by suggesting that your parents are getting high and fucking while you’re not around.

Next, I think it’s interesting to note, in this Post-Yes-on-8 world, that the homosexuality is at once both toned down in the sequel and also made entirely more integral, Bay’s own method of highlighting American hypocrisies. While the first Transformers movie may have been the more phallocentric of the two (what with Shia LeBeowolf saving the day by penetrating Megatron with his “allspark”) Fallen explores the culture of robots, revealing, at last, that they are all men. Men who are capable of creating new life without the need of bisexual reproduction. The intent by Bay remains clear, couched in the safe rhetoric of robots (much in the same way Sex in the City uses women to conceal queer tropes), while also slyly suggesting to the viewer — by Sam Witwicky’s desire to leave his bendable fuck-toy girlfriend to live with Omar’s boyfriend in a dorm room — that human beings are also, here, queer and that we should get used to it.

Finally, I think it’s worth taking an Eisensteinian reading of the film and the way it manipulates the dialectic. For those of you who didn’t go to film school, Eisenstein believed in the use of montage to create new ideas by combining symbols, much in the same way that the Japanese language derives a third, new meaning from the combination of two unrelated characters. Thus, given the hyper-frantic editing style of T:RotF, often at speeds too quick for the human eye to follow, Bay appears to be aiming for a sub-rosa reading of the film. Indeed, with Eisensteinian montage, he may in fact be coding the viewer’s brain to experience new thoughts without the viewer even being aware of the process. If one were to observe only the results of this process, one may be tempted to argue that the over-riding idea being implanted in the mind of the viewer by The Bay Montage (it should be clear at this point that Bay demands a whole field of study, much like Impressionism and the French New Wave) is that of mental retardation.