Additionally, the cinema is, unlike any other art form, produced and controlled almost exclusively, by large businesses operating under an industrial model. This is because cinema is by far and away the most accessible as well as commercially viable art form in the developed world. It is through these avenues that we ultimately find ourselves (the cinematic consumer) bombarded with the ideology of the "ruling class." Any accessible cinematic representation of the "working class" (henceforth referred to as the "proletariat") is through the lens of the aristocracy, and as such, is inherently false (and often patronizing).
However, more often the cinema offers us the objects of our desire: fast cars, beautiful women, and adventure. The latter two distract us from our economic purgatory, while the former gives us incentive to resume uninterrupted toiling; the fast car being our reward.
Films like Transformers and those of a similar ilk are sociologically toxic, because they project onto us a series of distractions, while we simultaneously project out desires back on to the image. A sort of invisible superimposition that feeds off the capital of the proletariat while it distracts them from their reality. They are left poorer and with nothing gained.
However, I would be remis if I didn't acknowledge the importance of a distraction. It is when distractions become the norm that such a cinema becomes dangerous.
Through the lens of the bourgeois women in film are merely observed, and never outside the context of the hero's gaze. They are as Laura Mulvey stated "the reason for his movement, but never his cause." In bourgeois cinema a female audience member is forced to view a film from one of two perspectives: One is that of the objectified heroine, the other is that of the hero. When taking the latter she is choosing the more cinematically dominant perspective and in doing so is opting to strip herself of her gender, rendering her yet another proletariat consumer. In choosing the former she can become aware of her objectification. From this perspective she can then travel two more paths: one is a complacency with said objectification or perhaps even less than that, a dismissal of such. An unconscious resignation of one's self to a second tier existence, cinematically speaking. The second path is to rally against that existence by creating a counter-cinema; one in opposition to the gaze of the bourgeois.
Until the cinematic revolution,
D
