Uh. Would you believe I’ve never seen any of the Transformers movies?

Michael Bay made this (check out some pagan SEX rituals facts!) commercial for Victoria’s Secret in 2010. TRY and tell me that’s not exactly how you pictured a Michael Bay take on “sexy”.

If you want some historical angle on things… okay. I’d say the key to understanding Michael Bay is that he’s from the first generation of directors to enter a field in which music videos were an established thing.

Like, do people even bother making jokes anymore about how MTV never plays music videos anymore? I know that was a thing in the late ‘90s/early ‘00s, and it was a thing because the abandonment was so jarring because the music video was THE art form of the 1980s and early ‘90s.

And music videos were known for bringing much quicker, more frequent, and more dynamic cuts than any other form of mass-market moving pictures up to that time, more intense and striking visuals, with extensive integration of visual and sound through-lines. And that spread out into other forms like TV (famously with 21 Jump Street and Miami Vice), commercials, and media, and Michael Bay’s the obvious type specimen.

(I actually think there’s an interesting development from early music videos, which drawing from stage shows (or even recording sessions) sold an *aesthetic*, while what narrative through-line there was was often the band literally performing the song; to mid’‘80s videos that aped short film and tried to set up stories; to the later ‘90s perfection of the form that… pitched… what, a “dynamic aesthetic”, where action sequences served the aesthetic and maybe gestured at a theme while not burdening themselves with narrative baggage like motivation or plot twists)