Flasz On Film

A lot has been said about the Transformers series, specifically in the context of their place in the landscape of blockbuster entertainment. However, the discourse surrounding these movies – such as it was – was mostly confined to breaking down the plot, exploring the accuracy regarding the source material, and fan appeal. If anything, any meta-textual conversations would typically refer to Michael Bay’s authorial idiosyncrasies, accusations of militaristic jingoism and even crass objectification of women characters. In short, I don’t think anyone ever took these movies seriously enough to look at them as anything more than products engineered to conjure base-level entertainment. Which is a real shame because at least the original trio of Michael Bay-directed entries in the franchise (Transformers, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen and Transformers: Dark of the Moon) lend themselves to a metaphorical analysis of potential cultural significance.  

And it all has to do with the character of Sam Witwicky, played by Shia LaBeouf in all three of the aforementioned movies, whose story resonates with the Millennial generation and – perhaps inadvertently and unwittingly – mirrors their strife. I should know. I’m one of those who could look at Sam’s journey into adulthood as a reflection of their own… only warped by the funhouse mirror of blockbusterist blowoutofproportionism.  

We meet Sam when he turns sixteen and he’s about to get his first car. Typical americana, am I right? Just like millions of teenagers before him, he’s about to get his first beater, learn something about responsibility and maybe set himself on a trajectory to adulthood. After all, in many ways, for us Millennial dinosaurs, like to Gen-Xers and Boomers before them (not sure where Zoomers stand on this, so I shall stop there), being able to drive and having your own car was the first step to independence. And this is important to Sam. He wants to get out of the house from under his Boomer parents’ oppressive jackboot, get out into the world and explore it on his own terms. He wants to be an adult. He’s not ensnared by any notion of staying indefinitely in his folks’ basement and becoming a professional gamer or a streamer. These options don’t exist for him.  

However, his first step into adulthood is immediately tantamount to a massive failure because he doesn’t end up getting a regular car. He gets an Autobot. He somehow establishes a supernatural connection with an old 1977 Camaro and takes it home. He falls in love with a nostalgic remnant of the American Dream symbolized by an old and rusty pony car (an affordably scaled down muscle car) that breaks down without notice and converts ungodly amounts of petrol directly into noise via its environmentally diabolical V8 engine. In short, he is scammed just as we all were back then. We looked at our boomer parents and took notice of how they worked their asses off and got somewhere as a result, bought their houses before they turned thirty and started their families while still in their twenties, and we thought we could do that too. Especially because we also looked at Gen-Xers who came of age just ahead of us and surmised that just aimlessly rebelling wouldn’t get us anywhere anyway. We wanted our independence. But more importantly, we wanted for our lives to matter. Which is what Sam Witwicky wanted. What he didn’t know (and we didn’t know it either) was that the game was about to change and just working hard wouldn’t get him anywhere, even despite the fact he was able to magically convince his beat-up alien Camaro to transform into a shiny new incarnation of itself. 

Sam had no idea that in 2007, just after he got his first car – his first evidence of impending independent adulthood – the world would turn upside down. He was completely unable to enjoy the carelessness of teenagerhood the way his parents could, because the world descended into chaos. All of a sudden, Sam became embroiled in an interplanetary conflict between Autobots and Decepticons. He couldn’t take girls out on dates, go to the movies with his friends in his beat-up Camaro, let alone concentrate on trying to figure out who he wanted to become once he hit proper adulthood, which was just around the corner. He couldn’t. Because the world went to hell in a handcart.  

For elder Millennials, like Yours Truly, the signs were there even before 2007. We came of age in the post-9/11 world of global anxiety, international tensions, wars and strife, all of which – from our perspective – came out of nowhere. And then, in 2007, the global economy went to hell so badly that it could as well have been replaced by an invasion of alien robots. It wouldn’t have made a difference. Millennials came of age at a time of crisis. A once-in-a-century crisis. Our life trajectories, mapped out carefully by choosing the right education pathways, studying hard for exams, learning skills, developing our independence… wiped out. Overnight. Just like Sam Witwicky, we couldn’t just pretend it was business as usual, so we adapted. After all, the burning desire to make sure our lives mattered was still there.  

For Sam, this dream for his life to have a meaning came true, if only temporarily. Despite the fact he was for the most part impotently waving his hands as massive robots battled it out and ruined the world with reckless abandon, Sam was the one to defeat Megatron. He was the one who jammed the Allspark into his chest and killed him. The little guy – an insignificant Millennial stripped of his youthful innocence – made a difference. However, his bravery went unnoticed because the whole thing got hush-hushed and forgotten. It’s almost as though Sam was an equivalent to one of the very many young adults who felt the same desire for their lives to matter and signed up to the military in the aftermath of one of the many terrorist attacks that took place in the early-to-mid-noughties all across the world. They believed their governments and went overseas to fight in wars their leaders told them were supposed to bring peace to their homelands. And for what? A medal, a lifetime of PTSD, and a horror show of flashbacks each time they would lay their heads down to sleep.  

Sam was conned, duped into thinking that his sacrifice would be noticed and appreciated. Meanwhile, he was told to get back in line and get on with his life… only for another crisis to come about almost immediately thereafter. And this is where any Millennial will be able to identify with the simple fact that Sam not being able to catch a break all throughout the trio of the films he was in, looked incredibly familiar.  

Look. It’s 2023 now. I’m in my late thirties and I have lived through a whole slew of supposedly once-a-century crises, from the world economy tanking to the rise of populism, to Trump and Brexit, to the pandemic, a cost-of-living crisis, an energy crisis, and now – most recently – the mortgage crisis that perhaps finally put to bed any Millennial dream of ever catching up to their parents or even owning a little something of their own. We’re not a “generation rent”. We are a “generation Witwicky” – a generation of people who cannot catch a break, who every time they turn the corner thinking life would get easier for a change, get pummeled by another alien invasion.  

It’s frighteningly easy to identify with Sam Witwicky’s strife because his journey mimics our own in more ways than one. In Revenge of the Fallen he literally sacrificed his life to save the world and all he got was a handshake in the end after being revived. And even then, he still felt like a walking and talking failure, a young man who entered adulthood without skills the newly reinvented world was calling for. Sorry for not being prepared for the upside-down gig economy and having to kiss backsides to even get a job interview in places that ironically enough got obscenely rich on the back of the crisis that hurt Millennials – people like Sam – the most and right at the time they were the most vulnerable.  

Therefore, it is equally infuriating as it is compelling to watch Sam struggle to catch a break in Dark of the Moon because I know so well what it feels like to still want for your life to matter after nearly two decades of pissing upwind. This is something Millennials never get any credit or appreciation for. We are the hopeful generation. We tried so hard to make ends meet and to fix the world broken by people in charge making stupid decisions and getting consumed by greed that we sacrificed our own life prospects in the process. Many of us will never own homes. We’ll never catch up to our parents. We will end up forgotten and essentially discarded like Sam Witwicky was by the franchise he was helming. Nobody even mentions his name after he leaves the picture. It’s like he never existed. And the only time Witwicky is mentioned in the cultural conversation, it is when somebody on Twitter wants to take jabs at Michael Bay for making an alleged man-child a hero and a conduit for the filmmaker’s supposed lurid optics. 

Well, sorry. Sam Witwicky was a child, a teenager, when the world went to hell. He was a young adult when it happened again. And he wasn’t much older when it happened the third time. He is a personification of an entire generation deprived of a runway into adulthood. It is the same generation whose economic productivity is what keeps the world from collapsing now. Again. It is also, sadly, the same generation that immediately gets accused of spending their disposable income on avocado toast whenever we have the audacity to express our discontent at the injustice of never getting the appreciation for having done what we could – in Sam’s case literally sacrificing himself – with what little power and expertise we had at our disposal.  

Without Sam Witwicky’s many sacrifices, there would be no “Remember Chicago” posters. The world would be a barren wasteland ruled by Decepticons. Yet, nobody cares. Sam symbolizes Millennial strife and sacrifice that to this day goes unrecognized and unappreciated. Consequently, this metaphorical mapping gives Transformers movies something nobody ever accused them of – a meaning. Weirdly enough, these are not just products peddling toys. These movies are a home for the Millennial experience. Looking at Sam’s journey into adulthood as an avatar for our own life trajectory littered with once-in-a-lifetime crises should make all Millennials stand up and be counted.

We are not the wasted generation. We are not a generation of avocado-eating slimeballs. We are a generation of hardened badasses who came of age at a time when the world crumbled to pieces, woefully unprepared for the uncertain future and we are still somehow making it work. Because just like Sam, we want our lives to mean something.  

We are Generation Witwicky.