Archive for the ‘Avatar’ tag
Avatar: Fear of Difference and the Global Network
Yesterday, I joined my wife and two of our friends at the colossal El Con theater for a matinée viewing of James Cameron’s (newest) cinematic opus: Avatar. It was quite the adventure, right down to the NASA-sleek, black, horned-rimmed 3D glasses handed out to us at the box office. We brought our own snacks, of course (microwave popcorn and seasoned almonds), and Yan got her first taste of the big-time American theatrical experience. All in all, everyone seemed to have a really good go of it, even despite the stiff $9.50 ticket price and the bladder-test of a two hour and forty-one minute runtime.
Like most big-budget holiday blockbusters, Avatar had been highly touted in the mainstream press, and it continues to garner rave reviews from a multitude of professional film critics. From the venerable Roger Ebert, to AO Scott (one of Ebert’s replacements on At the Movies) — both of whom likened their Avatar viewing experience to the first time they saw Star Wars in 1977 — to Manohla Dargis, Joe Morgenstern, David Edelstein, Michael Phillips, and many more, nearly everyone seems to dig this movie!
It’s important to note that Avatar was an incredibly expensive film to produce, coming in at just under $240 million officially. It currently ranks as the fourth most expensive film of all time, according to Wikipedia, and still some sources suggest that this exorbitant number falls way short of its true cost. The NY Times, for example, estimated Avatar’s price tag at much closer to $500 million, particularly considering Mr. Cameron’s personal financial contribution and other international marketing expenses.
And yet there is every indication that Avatar will make back all its money and then some. According to Box Office Mojo, in only one week of release Avatar has already raked-in upwards of $160 million domestically and over $255 million from foreign cinemas. With several more weeks in theaters and a slew of future sales in DVDs, books, children’s toys, video games, clothes, etc., there is no doubt that Avatar will be a monumentally commercial success.
So, after the screening, and with all this pop-cultural buzz in mind, Xu Yan returned to her reclusive comfort zone in the back corner of our rental house and I ventured out to a local bar with the rest of our group — my fellow Tucson film nerds — to drink beer and discuss the movie in greater detail. Generally speaking, like everybody else, we were all impressed with Avatar’s motion-capture animation technology and the fantastic art direction. But we also each held serious reservations about a number of the film’s nonsensical plot points and the problematic socio-political message(s) therein. Here’s a very rough overview of our more pointed criticisms:
- One friend wondered why there weren’t more portrayals of color, namely blackness, both within the fictional, blue-skinned race known as the “Na’vi” and the invading human population, and he scoffed at the utter lack of LBGT representations among both their ranks.
- Using a feminist lens, my other friend expressed concern about the long-standing Hollywood habit of perverting reality and distorting images of the female body, particularly evident in the unrealistically slender, muscled and sensuous physical features of the lead female character, “Neytiri.”
- And, finally, in keeping with my own political struggles, I lamented at what seemed to be a complete denial of economic class stratification in the filmmakers’ decision to assign antagonist credentials to a cliche military machine and NOT the greedy, callous, Earth-based corporate interests that were ultimately responsible for initiating both the imperial pursuit on the distant planet Pandora and the genocidal violence against the indigenous people. Argh!
Clearly, Mr. Cameron has much to learn about storytelling if he is to satisfy our little gang of disgruntled Tucson film-buffs. Race/ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender, class… we definitely tried to hit ‘em hard, as it were, and in the end Avatar was left somewhat wanton. The fatal flaw of this film, in my opinion, is its unwillingness to acknowledge and celebrate sentient diversity — a fear of difference.
Let’s get right to the point: the Na’vi people are an incredibly homogeneous species. As one of my friends described it that afternoon in the bar, “no one has an eating disorder,” and he’s exactly right! In some ways, what we don’t see is more telling than the great spectacle (heavily marketed in the media) that we all paid so much to experience in the first place. We don’t see any fatties, no one with a physical or cognitive disability, no one who expresses political dissent against the Na’vi leadership, no variation in skin color, no kinky fetishes, no dialects, no slang, and on and on. In essence, we don’t see any of the things that make civilization simultaneously rich with meaning and also very, very challenging.
Cameron and company have pretty much edited out the complexities of life in a naked attempt to force an emotional bond between the movie-going public and the super-human (by definition) Na’vi people. Avatar’s version of “noble savagery,” as portrayed through the main protagonist’s intimacy with this idyllic, peaceful, and spiritually-connected little nation of stretchy smurfs, might make for compelling (even romantic) fodder for the big screen but it is ultimately a kind of bad anthropology. This film can in no way serve as a poetic allegory — much less a visionary model — for anything we might make manifest in contemporary society, for this day or tomorrow. Though they have been carefully and painstakingly crafted by a contingency of talented artists, writers, and computer technicians, the Na’vi are little more than giant blue puppets, hollow signs for a director that doesn’t want to get his hands dirty trying to flesh-out something “real,” something we can all recognize within ourselves, a common humanity; Cameron ignores all those tedious little differences that distinguish sentient beings from inanimate objects.
This failure to appreciate the importance of diversity is certainly disappointing. However, to Cameron’s credit, Avatar is not merely a character study in interpersonal dynamics. Regardless of any imperfections three dudes in a bar might find to beef on, Avatar still stands-out as a coherent, beautiful, entertaining, and sometimes even awe-inspiring cinematic achievement precisely because the filmmaker has bigger goals in mind. Beyond the sexy bells-and-whistles of how it was produced, not to mention two surprisingly effective performances from young actors Zoe Saldana (“Neytiri”) and Sam Worthington (“Jake Sully”), Avatar ultimately serves as a vehicle from which to advocate for a grander and more complex understanding of our global network systems, be they ecological, cultural or even technological. In other words, we are not-so-subtly asked to remember that everything is connected.
There is one scene in particular that fully articulates the praise-worthy underlying ethic of Avatar. During the final third of the film, Sigourney Weaver’s “Grace,” the rugged and passionate botanist in charge of the Avatar science program, implores Giovanni Ribisi’s “Parker,” a sarcastic, upper-level corporate lackey and the top-dog behind the mining effort on Pandora, to reconsider his insistence on removing the Na’vi and destroying the land. The dialogue proceeds in rapid-fire [SPOILER ALERT]:
JAKE: You say you want to keep your people alive? You start by listening to her.
GRACE: Those trees were sacred to the Omaticaya in a way that you can’t imagine.
PARKER: You know what?! You throw a stick in the air around here and it’s gonna land on some sacred fern, for Christ’s sake!!
GRACE: I’m not talking about some kind of pagan voodoo here. I’m talking about something real, something measurable in the biology of the forest.
PARKER: Which is what exactly?
GRACE: What we think we know is that there is some kind of electro-chemical communication between the roots of the trees, like the synapses between neurons. And each tree has ten to the fourth connections to the trees around it, and there are ten to the twelfth trees on Pandora.
PARKER: Which is a lot, I’m guessing.
GRACE: It’s more connections than the human brain. Get it?! It’s a network. It’s a global network and the Na’vi can access it! They can upload and download data — memories at sites like the one you just destroyed. Yes!
PARKER: (beat) What the hell have you people been smoking out there? They’re just goddamn trees!
GRACE: You need to wake up, Parker.
PARKER: No, you need to wake up!
GRACE: The wealth of this world isn’t in the ground, it’s all around us! The Na’vi know that and they are fighting to defend it…
In this dark era of slash-and-burn disaster capitalism, environmental degradation, and a plague of massive disinformation campaigns from a handful of elite economic entities hell-bent on maintaining their power and turning a profit at the expense of the natural world, Avatar offers a timely, grand, and much-appreciated word to the wise. I sincerely hope the audience is paying attention.
