Michael Bay: the oxymoronic auteur who subverts the entire concept of the term
In one of its looser definitions, an auteur is a filmmaker with such an instantly-recognisable and inimitable approach to cinema that their movies couldn’t be made by anybody else, such is the precision-engineered and laser-focused individuality on display. It’s a term typically associated with the greats, but it’s also entirely applicable to Michael Bay.
Some of the medium’s foremost and indelible auteurs include François Truffaut, Alfred Hitchcock, Jean-Luc Godard, Lars von Trier, Frank Capra, and Akira Kurosawa, to name but a few, all legendary titans of the motion picture. And yet, the guy who used a pair of wrecking balls to signify that a giant alien robot in the middle of destroying the pyramids of Giza had a gigantic pair of swinging testicles also fits the bill. It’s enough to make a cinephile incandescent with rage, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t true.
Auteur theory is typically viewed as the realm of intimate features, resonant themes, semi-autobiographical subtext, and painstakingly-curated mise-en-scène. It’s a desire to either push the boundaries and conventions of the art form forward or subvert them entirely to create something bold, daring, and provocative.
On the surface, these sentiments absolutely do not apply to somebody with a penchant for excruciating product placement, woeful dialogue, characters that boast two dimensions at best, gratuitous butt shots as far as the eye can see, and blowing shit up on a colossal scale. And yet, breaking auteur theory down to its very essence, Bay ticks every single one of the boxes.
The majority of directors who made their name in the action-heavy arena don’t readily qualify as auteurs, albeit with a couple of notable exceptions, such as John Woo and peak Paul Verhoeven. In most cases, the filmmaker is there to service the story and maximize the oomph of the set pieces, but nobody is ever in any doubt that they’re watching Bay’s work.
He loves a sunset and goes out of his way to feature at least one of his signature ‘magic hour’ shots in every one of his productions. He regularly recycles the same shot compositions – and even footage in the case of The Island’s car chase being reworked into Transformers: Dark of the Moon. He lovingly referred to his preferred rapid-fire editing technique as “fucking the frame,” and his filmography is bombastic to the regular point of incomprehension.
Still, he’s very much his own man, and his reliance on practical effects in the age of CGI excess is commendable, especially when his Transformers films were so pixelated. They’re garbage for the most part, sure, but he’s always displayed a preference for getting as close to the action as possible and detonating enough pyrotechnics to level a small country.
When he went semi-serious with Pearl Harbor, the end result was thunderously dull from a storytelling perspective, but the extended set piece of the titular attack is nothing short of astonishing in its execution, and in typical Bayhem fashion, it featured the largest explosion ever captured on-camera. It’s oxymoronic to an insane degree, but while his films are regularly terrible, his camerawork is often ingenious.
His fetishistic approach to the various branches of the military and their hardware juxtaposed with the inefficiency and incompetence of high-ranking government officials is another recurring theme of his work, which once again ticks that auteur-shaped box by incorporating his widely-accepted – but never explicitly confirmed by Bay himself – socio-political inclinations into his movies.
They can be exhausting to watch and mind-numbing narratively, but nobody ever gets the sense that he’s phoning it in. He’s not really capable of doing anything else that doesn’t sit in his wheelhouse, but on the other hand, it would be similarly unreasonable to hand somebody like Wes Anderson or Todd Haynes $200million and tell them to report back with an extravagant action epic designed solely to generate as much money from its potential audience as possible.
As Ben Affleck – himself a two-time Oscar-winning filmmaker and former collaborator – told GQ: “I think Michael is actually an auteur in the true sense of the word. You may like it, you may not, but those movies are him without compromise.” That’s high praise coming from somebody who openly trashed the concept behind Armageddon on its DVD commentary track, but at the end of the day, he’s right.
