What Can We Make of Michael Bay's 3D Blues?

As it turns out, Michael Bay is a 3D hater, too.

Well, at least in his Michael Bay way. In an amusingly self-serious piece in Deadline New York last week, Bay took the opportunity to lament that Paramount execs are pressuring him to convert Transformers 3 to 3D, an often prohibitively expensive process that the James Cameron school eschews in favor of actually shooting in 3D. Bay, bless his soul, thinks the cameras are too big. “Studios might be willing to sacrifice the look and use the gimmick to make $3 more a ticket, but I’m not,” Bay said, blissfully unaware of his place in the pop-culture landscape.

Bay, of course, is a chief officer in the Hollywood campaign to make movies incomprehensible if there isn’t a cut every three seconds, and his stand against sloppy 3D seems, well, a little absurd. (“People can say whatever they want about my movies, but they are technically precise, and if this isn’t going to be excellent, I don’t want to do it,” he told Deadline in his defense.) We could reasonably make the argument that his take on the blockbuster helped usher in the fledgling 3D era, where new avenues to assault the audience with visual effects are always welcome.

To his credit, though, Bay brings a serious-minded approach to the discussion of 3D, which is rapidly invading studio execs’ fearsome psyches. Clash of the Titans, one of this year’s blockbuster hopefuls, underwent a transformation to 3D at the 11th hour earlier this year. From the moment Avatar went from game-changing prophecy to astonishing phenomenon, the fate of 3D seemed irrevocably tied to Hollywood’s new business potential, an answer to the growing market for video on demand. We’ve all heard about 3D televisions, yes, but how can that really compare to the theatrical experience?

In a recent New Yorker piece, film critic Anthony Lane took up the issue, and his conclusions are humbling. Although 3D seems finally to have found the technological ability to move beyond its gimmicky roots, he argues, the desire for a third dimension has long been present in the movies we watch. He cites the floating bullets in The Matrix, among other iconic movie sequences. “These are not 3-D movies, yet the ghost of 3-D hangs over them and haunts their spatial desires,” he writes.

It’s hard to argue with that. Crocodile tears for Bay’s supposed predicament aside, it seems unlikely at this point that 3D will simply be a fad, and in any case Bay’s objection is technical—he just wants to use the best technology available. Aren’t we all essentially of the same mind? In Lane’s view, we’ve long been watching big-ticket 3D movies, they’ve just been shackled in 2D. The goofy glasses aren’t the problem; 3D could well be about what we crave as viewers, even if we don’t know it.

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