Why Do You Have a Gun In Space: Men in Bay's Armageddon:

 I've often wondered if straight cis men were real, and apparently I'm not alone in wondering this. No one would deny trans mens' experiences, and gay men certainly seems comfortable with themselves, but so many straight cis men seem obsessed with proving their masculinity to the point of desperation. All of them either being gay men or trans women in denial seems a tidy theory. Perhaps this is unreasonable, but if you look at the veritable cytokine storm of no homo that is Michael Bay's Armageddon you do have to wonder.

I remember the film coming out in 1998 and ignoring it because of it looked awful and there was no escaping the sappy Aerosmith ballad that went along with it. I later read a description of the plot in Susan Napier's Anime book, where she contrasted it's conservative reinforcement and reassurance of the nuclear family triumphing with the "deassurance" of Akira, Ghost in the Shell, and Evangelion. However I was requested to watch it in light of the weird creepy jealousy Bruce Willis' character has about his daughter. And it's a fascinating movie that I'm glad I watched.

One never knows how much synopsis one has to give for these giant blockbusters, but Armageddon involves a giant asteroid "the size of Texas" headed to destroy earth in about two weeks. A blue collar oil drilling crew is recruited to drill into the asteroid in space and plant a nuke in a team up of American working class good folk and advanced military technology, just as American and just as Michael Bay as you'd expect, although JJ Abrams cowrote as well! Roger Ebert declared it the worst movie of 1998 and it's objectively pretty bad, but there's still enough institutional inertia in Hollywood before it became a superhero factory that it's kind of entertaining, though nowhere near as good as Con Air which had more fun with itself.

This is a movie about men, a sentimental no homo bromance between a man and the other man who wants to marry his daughter. There are about six female characters: a nagging housewife that is distracting an old retired astronomer from discovering the asteroid, a black woman doctor who wants to stick a big probe up a man's butt, a stripper, a sexy astronaut lady who wants to kick Michael Clark Duncan in the balls, a mean ex wife who wants to keep a man away from his son, and Liv Tyler, who plays Bruce Willis' daughter, who's only mildly a castrating shrew compared to everyone else. She's the prize who needs to be given from father to son in law over the course of the film, but she's also used in emotion laundering. When a character is suspected of dying, Liv Tyler will cry so no man has to. They can just see her crying and look on solemnly, masculinity intact.

The movie follows an emotional logic over a rational one, making it just the male equivalent of a weepie like Beaches. A perfect example is the opening where Willis chases Affleck across an oil rig shooting at him with a shotgun for sleeping with his daughter. This is farcical. Even if you wanted to kill Affleck, there's much too much expensive equipment around to be firing a gun, and yet the emotional jealousy of the scene is prioritized over anything sensible. The weird incest vibes here are incredible, making me think of the purity balls where evangelical girls pledge their virginity to their fathers. This is made even weirder with the Steven-Liv Tyler relationship, with dad providing the love ballad to the movie, which was horrendously overplayed in 1998. Liv also featured in Aerosmith's Crazy music video, dancing suggestively with Alicia Silverstone, so they got the casting right, I guess. After seeing the whole film, however, I think this sequence of vicious competition between the men buys space for them to share a moment of intimacy later in the film, with their masculinity already proven through their butting heads throughout the movie.

The movie is a sequence of semiotic symbols of masculinity, almost like a country music song with a checklist of all of the cultural signifiers it needs to tick off. It almost has the structure of a heist movie with all of the different guys that have to be gathered together. However, none of the men have different skills, they're just different kinds of bro that are invited to the celebration. This one eats a lot of food! This guy rides horses! This guy jokes about how he likes fucking underaged girls! This one is a gambler! This guy is black! And while it's always good to see Michael Clark Duncan, it's clear he's not here so black people can relate, but just do Bruce Willis has a seven foot, charismatic, effortlessly cool black friend who can tell him "he's da man!"

The film is also obsessed with hierarchies of men. There's the professionals of NASA, there's the military, and there's our blue collar "just folks" and it's a constant dick measuring contest between bros. Some pudgy NASA scientist will suggest a solar sail or something gay like that, as they unfurl a shiny metal sheet, and a sterner faced MIT scientist will suggest a motherfucking nuke instead, which is much more macho. But at the top of the hierarchy are the salt of the earth oil drillers, whose gut feelings are right while NASA's computers are wrong. Personal feelings of ordinary workers are much more reliable than fancy computer projections. When Duncan's character is informed during his space physical that his cholesterol and triglyceride levels are dangerously high, he flexes is giant muscles and dances. Emotionally cathartic, sure, but his health remains what it does. The ultimate example of this is near the end of the film where the sexy astronaut lady is desperate to restart the computers but is pushed out of the way by the goofy Yeltsinesque Russian who just smacks the computer with a stick and makes it work. Truly American anti-intellectual braggadocio at its finest, and from an ex commie no less.

At the end, Bruce Willis decides to stay behind to explode the nuke when it was Affleck who had drawn the short straw and was marked as a sacrifice. Due to his improbable survival and successful drilling, Affleck has proven himself in the eyes of his father in law, and the family patriline can carry on through him. After two and a half hours of ball busting, Affleck can offer an "I love you" to the old man. The movie functions as kind of an amazing system to allow men to feel emotions, necessitating Willis die so he can give Billy Bob Thornton a mission patch without it being too womanly. And in a preview of the sad dad media that would to come, the deadbeat dad gambler who it is implied has a restraining order against his ex and his son for unexplained reasons gets back with the old battle-ax as thanks for saving the world.

It's absolutely a movie for divorced dads who imagine themselves as heroes for showing up NASA scientists and their damn ex wives all in one go. At the end there's a scene where the tough NASA guy who almost betrayed Willis and crew asks Tyler for "permission to shake the hand of the daughter of the bravest man I ever knew," which is so weird. It's kind of like thanking her for her sacrifice, but in a way that she doesn't have to be acknowledged as a person apart from her father, or to acknowledge the man's own grief and survivor's guilt. The whole movie is filled with moments like this. But at least there was no comic book continuity so I did kind of enjoy it.

However, the bad moments are genuinely bad. Most famous perhaps is the animal crackers scene, which has awkward dialogue on par with Anakin's complaints about sand from the star wars prequels. It has the feeling of what should have been a sex scene in an earlier draft of the script, adapted to PG-13 sensibilities (it IS a Disney movie after all) and perhaps intended to reinforce Affleck's immaturity. Affleck's contention that earth is worth saving because people are in love, and that is what makes them worthwhile, comes off as him saying that earth is only worth saving if someone else is shoving animal crackers in his girlfriend's underwear.

It's certainly interesting to contrast with the romantic scene in Titanic, another movie that isn't particularly deep, but still manages to pull off a much better romance. Then again, the girly stuff here is in no way a priority, so it makes sense this gets overlooked to make way for space action.

In the commentary track, Affleck says he asked Michael Bay why oil drillers were trained to be astronauts instead of just having the astronauts learn to drill. He was told to shut up. Of course, this would change the ideological thrust of the movie. If highly trained experts could simply be taught to be something new there would be no place for the everyman except on the sidelines. Here the jes folk can upstage their betters, the ultimate revenge of the unambitious American psyche.