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Attacking Avatar

by Alasdair Czyrnyj

Friday, 29 January 2010

Listen up, and Alasdair will tell you all a story about a little guy that lives in a blue world~

Before I begin, I would like to apologize for that joke in the subtitle. Sometimes you just can't help yourself.

At this point in time, there seems to be a certain futility in writing a response to

Avatar

. Most of the mainstream critical response has been overwhelmingly positive, while the more negative responses have extracted, elaborated, and spun out so much of the film's problems with scripting, plotting, racism, gender, politics, the environment, elementary science, and basic logic that it is hard to imagine what new ground could be covered. It might seem more rational to throw in the towel, accept

Avatar

as the renaissance in filmmaking the newspapers proclaim it to be, and let it sink out of sight and out of mind.

Of course, if I were one of those rational people, this article would not exist. Perhaps there is a certain spirit of opposition that animates this piece, an inner compulsion to take a stand against a mendacious force that so many have accepted uncritically. Maybe it's a need to strike back after having been bullied by a story that does not deserve the accolades it has received. In the end, this article may be a call by a small, imperfect man for some intellectual honesty, for filmmakers to respect their audiences and make an effort to discuss the world in all its irreducible complexity.

Or maybe I just hate mechs. Who can say?

Fundamental Flaws and the Fundamentals of Storytelling

While the objections to

Avatar

have taken a wide variety of critical approaches, there is a single source from which all the complaints spring. The fundamental problem with

Avatar

is that its ideas are deeply and patronizingly simple. While people have made unkind comparisons to

Dances With Wolves

and

Ferngully

, in actuality the film takes its cues from an unreconstructed back-to-nature idyll that's been floating around in Western culture since the heyday of Romanticism. While such stories can be entertaining and deeply satisfying if done correctly, the story of

Avatar

is constructed in such a minimalist fashion that any potential suspense is precluded. If you've ever read a book, rented a movie, or watched an after-school special where the protagonist gets away from the noise and grime of the city and learns to appreciate the beauty of the great outdoors, then you have already seen

Avatar

. There are no twists, no untelegraphed turns, no inversions or deconstructions, no attempts to play with the well-worn tropes or reassemble them into something provocative. In

Avatar

, what you see is what you get and no more.

This desire to maintain the austere "universal appeal" of the film also leads to the reduction of its characters into ciphers. As is typical in these types of stories, the entire narrative revolves around the journey of the protagonist, in this case Jake Sully, from skepticism to holistic communion with nature. Unfortunately, the dramatic potential of Jake's journey has hampered by Cameron's decision to make him a doorknob. Jake's position in the story is essentially reactive; rather than discovering and learning for himself, his job in the movie is to move from place to place on Pandora, be given wisdom by others like so much Halloween candy, and perform the occasional heroic gesture to cement his standing as a positive role model. Perhaps because the character of Jake Sully was intended to act as an "avatar" for the audience to explore the VFX paradise of Pandora, he does not really have enough of a presence as a character to stand out against the background. (I admit that I have not seen

Terminator: Salvation

, so I do not know if this is a weakness on the part of Sam Worthington or of the script.) For all that the film delves into his inner workings, he might as well have been spontaneously generated in a tank en route to Pandora.

As for the rest of the cast, most confirm to broad archetypes, with only a few enjoyable standouts. Far and away the most successful is Sigourney Weaver's portrayal of the hard-bitten xenobiologist-anthropologist in charge of the avatar project. She is genuinely delightful to watch, combining an intellectual admiration of the Na'vi with a wearied irritation at the vagarities of the colonial government. Giovanni Ribisi's corporate attaché, with his love of mini-putt and his belabored racial slurs, comes across as more of an irritant than a credible antagonist. The strangest case of all may be Colonel Quatrich, a stock hyper-militarist antagonist who, through the strange alchemy of Cameron's script and actor Stephen Lang's charisma, instead becomes the awesomest, most manliest man in all of mandom. In all honesty, it's hard not to love a character who can hold his breath for fifteen minutes, is impervious to fire, and whose mech is armed with a giant switchblade. (After watching Lang's performance, it's not hard to imagine that Quadrich's presence of Pandora is the result of a binding UN resolution on America designed to "give the other countries a fighting chance.")

Despite these flourishes, all the characters are still bound tightly to the idyll plot, and as such do not have much opportunity to grow outside its requirements. It is a constriction that becomes all the more noticeable as the film progresses, to the point where it seems that every contrivance and inconsistency is solely designed to fulfill the master plan. Of course Jake is an "unenlightened" marine who has a twin exobiologist brother who died with a ready-to-run alien body. Of course Jake has no family, friends, wife, girlfriend, cat, coffee shop, book club, or DVD collection back on Earth to divide his loyalties. Of course the corporate observers and mercenaries are evil, shortsighted, and stupid. Of course the unobtanium is under the Na'vi tree-town.

Of course

Racism, or Attend To My Spiritual Longings, Smurfycat!

Let us make no bones about it:

Avatar

is a racist film. It is a necessary corollary of the idyll plot; whenever the wanderer encounters people who live in the idealized state of nature, it is their purpose to educate the wanderer in some deeper truth about the operation of the world. With skillful hands, this type of narrative can avoid the trap of depicting pantomime indigenous people whose sole reason for existing is to educate wayward Romantics.

Avatar

, suffice to say, fumbles early, and fumbles hard.

Despite all the time, money, effects, and research lavished upon them, the Na'vi still come across as curiously unformed, beings that embody a sort of generically photogenic Neolithic society. While they certainly have enough of a cultural style as expressed by their gear (their costume, their tools, their weapons, and so on), it is fairly hard for a viewer to interpret the world from a Na'vi viewpoint, beyond using the crudest of clichés about naturalist animism. To the untrained viewer, there is nothing to separate the Na'vi from, say, the native American cast of Disney's

Pocahontas

. Indeed, in the film's climax, where Jake travels the width and breadth of the unnamed continent to rally all the tribes of Na'vi against the humans, the various Na'vi tribes only seem to differ in costume, an idea that is blatantly laughable to any serious student of anthropology.

Of course, this mutual unintelligibility of cultures may have been part of Cameron's point. After all, the centerpiece of Na'vi culture and society, the Tree of Souls, involves a biological act that humans cannot experience, though that raises questions about the film's seeming disinterest in exploring the human-Na'vi conflict as a struggle between separate species rather than a allegorical clash of human races. However, even this generous interpretation breaks down in further dissection in the presentation of both the Na'vi and Pandora.

After the glamour of Pandora's visuals has worn off, and Jake Sully begins to take his journey to understand the mysteries of the Na'vi, it becomes clear that Pandora is, in essence, a giant amusement park. There's lizard-horses to break in, pterodactyls to bond with, trees and vines to swing around on, bows and arrows to play with, and all sorts of funny plants, floating mountains, and glowy spores to gawk at and poke. Never mind that most of this rests only dubiously with the laws of science as we understand it, and often in their complete violation. Even smaller principles are ignored; the Na'vi seem to be able to live in such harmony with nature that their town-tree can support hundreds of individuals without having them resort to stripping the forest for food and firewood to support their town. Pandora cannot be understood in and of itself because

Pandora cannot exist in our universe

, other than as a fantasy game-world for jaded materialists.

As for the Na'vi, they seem that most curious of societies: a subsistence hunter-gatherer society whose culture is entirely palatable to an early 21st century Western audience. The Na'vi do not expose unwanted children to the elements, nor do they burn people alive in wicker men to commemorate the solstice. They don't sink struggling criminals into peat bogs or have them trampled to death in sacks. Despite having a sort of mild warrior culture, the Na'vi do not even engage in brutalizing initiation rituals into adulthood or ritualized scarring or the mass sacrifice of prisoners of war. This is not to say that the Na'vi should have been portrayed as Ignoble Savages, but rather that these omissions show that, rather than illuminating the full complexity of the pre-urban culture of the Na'vi, they and their world are only intended to be Consolations, places where American heroes can go to escape the corruptions of modernity and be reborn as innocent alien children, pure and simple as nature intended. Perhaps the truth of this can be found in the basic anatomy of the Na'vi; despite living on an alien planet dominated by hexapods, the proportions of the Na'vi are a race of tall, striped blue humanoids that walk and talk like humans do and are pretty to look at to boot.

Before leaving this topic, a brief word should be given to the avatar program itself, the process by which human minds are piggybacked into purpose-grown human-Na'vi bodies for the purpose of better interacting with the local Na'vi population. While most commenting on the film as cited

The Matrix

and its sequels as inspirations for this system, there is another, more recent film that provides a closer model. In the Hollywood/war film satire

Tropic Thunder

, white actor Kirk Lazarus (Robert Downey Jr.) undergoes a complex surgical procedure designed to give him the physical features of an African-American in an effort to "get inside" the mind of his character, Sgt. Lincoln Osiris. The key difference, however, is that while Jake Sully's journey from human to Na'vi is rendered as a heroic quest back to nature, Lazarus' attempts at "understanding blackness" are mocked as the delusions of a narcissistic method actor who only succeeds in parroting the "badass black sergeant" archetype endemic to American war cinema since WWII. It may be of note that Lazarus/Osiris is also far more enjoyable character than Jake Sully.

Colonialism, or It Takes Two To Despoil

The "corruptions of modernity" illuminates another great weakness of

Avatar

: its depiction of a colonial relationship. Most of the reviews of

Avatar

have made much of its ties to the broader story to the American expansion to the West in the 19th century, so much so that

Dances with Smurfs

has become the accepted alternate title online. However, there are fundamental differences between that mode of colonization and the one presented in

Avatar

: on Pandora, there are no human settlers. Beyond the avatar program, neither the humans nor the Na'vi show any interest in each other, and mostly seem to avoid one another whenever possible. The human colonists stay within the boundaries of their own small settlement, relying on imported technology, building materials, and food as much as possible, while focusing all their energies on mining unobtanium and mapping Pandora.

This model, then, is not the model of the American frontier; it is the model of the final wave of European resource-extraction-based colonization in Africa at the end of the 19th century, and of contemporary practices by American corporations throughout Latin America. While this is an exceeding vicious colonial system that certainly should be criticized, it is also something of a cop-out on the part of Cameron. By reducing the human expansion on Pandora to this (exceedingly simplified interpretation of) this mode of colonization, it neatly sidesteps all manner of issues regarding the relationships between colonizer and colonized, the multiple worldviews each group develops as it interacts with an outside culture, and the way the two groups react and adapt to one another.

Avatar

deals with these issues in the classical Gordian fashion. The mode of colonization the humans use, as mentioned above, is useful in precluding dicussions of the sort of tangled issues of cohabitation that would arise in a North-American-style colonization by expanding immigrant settlements or a British-India-type colonization by a foreign trading company that becomes a freelance government as local authority decays. There is no trade relationship on Pandora to speak of: the humans make some half-hearted attempts to entice the natives with an English-language school and roads, while the Na'vi are seemingly "uninterested in anything humanity could give them," or so Jake Sully exposits in a video log. It appears that the Na'vi are even uninterested in the most basic products of Earth's industry, including such staples as grain, woven cloth, refined metals, or cheap flintlock guns, the goods that served as the bread-and-butter of European traders in Africa and beyond for centuries. As for the social dimensions of colonization, they are never mentioned. Pandora is so utopian, it seems, that there are no socially disadvantaged Na'vi that would see the arrival of humans as an opportunity to achieve a kind of success Na'vi society denied them. Nor are there any Na'vi leaders who are genuinely impressed by human achievement and who seek to uncover its secrets so that they may be combined with Na'vi ideas to improve their own societies. The Na'vi, it would seem, view all outsiders as fundamentally worthless, as an opportunistic pathogen to be avoided or driven off. In a telling detail, the Na'vi formally refer to themselves as "the People," a phrase with many unfortunate implications to modern minds; if the Na'vi are "the People," then there must be a group of "Not People" who can be safely attacked/mutilated/eaten without undue comment.

The Root of the Problem, or Talk to Me Like an Adult Dammit!

While the above points could be elaborated

ad infinitum

by themselves they give a fairly clear explanation as to why

Avatar

is so deeply unsatisfying. Every time the film has a chance to explore an issue in depth, it is ignored in favor of undemanding analogies and monochrome morality plays of soulless industrialists against free-spirited space furries, all in the interests of maintaining a clichéd plot that has been deconstructed, critiqued, and found wanting in a hundred different monographs and a hundred different books. Perhaps the most galling thing is that all this was something Cameron

should have been aware of

, leaving one of two possibilities. Either he simply was not aware of the flaws in his plot, or he was aware but chose to ignore the problems and press on anyway. Given how

Avatar

has been praised for its "messages" by the mainstream press, choosing the second scenario would make Cameron guilty of serious intellectual dishonesty.

It is dishonest because, at the end of the day,

Avatar

is just a fantasy. The natural idyll was only ever a creation of the mind, never fluorescing into being outside of a pair of covers or a canvas. People chose to industrialize because they wanted lots of cheap goods and the distant possibility of a job where you don't have to break your back farming for fifty years, but can get an education and spend your time writing or making movies. We've been doing this for about two centuries now, and most of us would rather it was made less wasteful, dirty, and dangerous than give it up entirely. You can't stab modernity in the chest with a spear, and to claim otherwise is to indulge in a fantasy that helps no one, and distracts people from trying to find a way through the recursive puzzle-box that is our planet. We cannot fight, so we must adopt, adapt, and improve.

In closing, I would recommend that everyone watch

Princess Mononoke

. After reading this, you'll be glad you did.

Links to the Opinions of Wiser Men

Given the high profile and structural flaws of

Avatar

, it has prompted a few intellectually stimulating and gleefully vidictive essays online. The following sample represents my favorites of the bunch.

Over at Locus magazine

, Gary Westfahl gives a brief review that discusses some of

Avatar's

SFnal ancestors.

At CHUD.com, there's a

piece

comparing

Avatar

to its progeniter, a treatment Cameron wrote back in the '90s entitled

Project 880

, which lends some credence to the "intellectual dishonesty" theory.

The upper-middle-brow literary blog

The Valve

comes at

Avatar

from several directions at once, with articles dicussing how the film

shifts genres

about halfway through and inadvertantly shoots its political message in the foot, how Jake Sully embodies

the worst aspects of the American psyche

, and a piece that

says what I managed to say

in less than a thousand words. (One of

The Valve's

main contributors also gets in a good point on his own blog about

the seemier side

of the Pandoran

genocidal omnimind

memory trees.

Finally, Adam Roberts

gives you the business

in one sentence.Themes:

TV & Movies

Sci-fi / Fantasy

Minority Warrior

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~Comments (

go to latest

)

Arthur B

at 12:26 on 2010-01-29

Pandora cannot be understood in and of itself because Pandora cannot exist in our universe, other than as a fantasy game-world for jaded materialists.

This speaks to an issue I was having with Avatar that I was having trouble enunciating. Avatar and its ilk don't just say "industrialised life is stinky, living naturally is much better". It doesn't just compare a cynical view with industrialised life with a horribly sanitised version of a still vaguely recognisable "natural" lifestyle. It tries to compare industrialised society with a "natural" lifestyle which not only doesn't exist, but

couldn't possibly exist

. Of

course

modern, urbanised living isn't going to hold up well to that. It doesn't hold up well to Toytown or Narnia or Heaven either. But making the comparison between industrialised society and Pandora is just as stupid as complaining that the taps in your bathtub don't dispense champagne and chocolate ice cream.

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Viorica

at 17:36 on 2010-01-29Personally, my favourite summing-up of the movie is

this

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Melissa G.

at 18:17 on 2010-01-29

In closing, I would recommend that everyone watch Princess Mononoke.

Yes, exactly! As I was reading about Avatar, all I could think was, "Wow, Princess Mononoke pwns your ass, Avatar." Mononoke handles the progression vs. nature predicament in a far more complex and satisfying way and remains my favorite Miyazaki movie to this day.

Secondly, is it seriously called "unobtanium"? To my ears, it sounds extremely close to "unobtainable", which I find stupid rather than clever. I kind of giggled and then shook my head disapprovingly.

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Rami

at 18:35 on 2010-01-29

Secondly, is it seriously called "unobtanium"

I think it's a completedly straight-faced attempt at lampshading

this

and

this

. Not done very well, IMO.

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Arthur B

at 18:58 on 2010-01-29The unobtanium thing keeps making me scratch my head. What were they thinking? It's almost as though the thing was originally written as a comedy, and they forgot to take that out in the script revisions.

(Actually, that sounds awfully plausible to me. I kind of suspect that for James Cameron

Avatar

is basically an excuse to do some technological dick-waving, and he just got some hacks to cobble together a story which could make the best use of the technology involved. Maybe the "technology is evil" undercurrent is a backlash from the scriptwriters against Cameron phoning them up at 3AM and saying "oh, we've developed this new bit of CGI which will do X, Y, and Z, could you do a rewrite to give us a chance to show it off?")

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Dan H

at 13:55 on 2010-01-30Perhaps I'm just slow, but I've only just realised how staggeringly ironic it is that this film about how awesome it would be to cast off our technological shackles and get back to nature was made with the most advanced computer technology available to mankind.

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Arthur B

at 14:00 on 2010-01-30Moreover, the film is about this wonder-tech that lets a human being look exactly like a Na'vi... and it's filmed using this wonder-tech that lets a human being look exactly like a Na'vi.

It's navel-gazing with a multimillion dollar budget. It's almost as though it's not meant to be a commercial film at all, just an advert for the tech, only it's turned out to be so expensive to make they need to release it to cinemas to make their money back.

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http://fintinobrien.livejournal.com/

at 12:04 on 2010-01-31RedLetterMedia, the guy who did the 70-minute Phantom Menace review, has done a two-part

Avatar review

And I hear there's talk about a sequel? D:

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Andy G

at 14:27 on 2010-01-31

RedLetterMedia, the guy who did the 70-minute Phantom Menace review, has done a two-part Avatar review.

Even more exciting is that he's apparently working on an Attack of the Clones review :D

I'm not sure I entirely agree with his criticism of Avatar's portrayal of the military though - I don't think Iraq or Afghanistan really show that the military have learned a great deal of cultural sensitivity or the like ...

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http://nykinora.livejournal.com/

at 04:26 on 2010-02-01Hmmm. I liked that this article pointed out that what occurs on Pandora is closer to extraction-based mercantilism rather than colonisation and the messy relationships that the latter entails. Yet the film attempts to naively comment on imperialism and colonialism, often confusing the two. It also stands to reason that the Na'vi would have no interest in trade or goods seeing that they're living an edenic existence where nature provides all, they apparently have absolutely no impact on their environment and aren't even in competition with other species, other groups of Na'vi or even each other for resources. Also agree that one of the necessary conditions of colonialism is that there are existing factions and fissures in a society (class, gender, tribal afiliation, conflict with other groups, politics and power-play etc.) that can be exploited. But we get none of that in "Avatar".

I've already watched "Princess Mononoke" and it goes without saying that it is a far superior, more thoughtful film, even though it elicited hostile reactions in the U.S. for being overly earnest, preachy, pro-environmentalist etc. Go figure.

Some of the links were very useful. (The Acephalous link, and the Valve links are generally good. Joseph Kugelmann is on the money, and I completely agreed with Aaron Bady that Jake Sully is just another macho James T. Kirk in Star Trek '09, or another lamentable Harry Potter type - innately 'heroic', deeply solipsistic, childish and utterly entitled as the universe bends, warps and shifts in order to confirm the overwhelming importance of their existence and their unimpeachable rightness in all that they do - no matter how self-absorbed, damaging or downright stupid. But I digress...) Also agree that the film repeats some of Le Guin's mistakes in "A Word for World is Forest" without the more positive things from that novel.

But I actually couldn't stand the Westfahl article and or the RedletterMedia video link (the latter of which was provided by a poster in the comments thread to be fair.)

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Frank

at 06:27 on 2010-02-01

I completely agreed with Aaron Bady that Jake Sully is just another macho James T. Kirk in Star Trek '09

To be fair, Kirk's macho is full of awesome while Sully's is full of douchebaggery.

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http://nykinora.livejournal.com/

at 07:35 on 2010-02-01Awesome? Different strokes etc. A douche is douche by any other name. (I drew the Kirk/Potter comparison to Sully, but Bady describes an irritating heroic archetype that all these and many other heroes fit into. Kirk is only marginally more tolerable than Sully because he spends most of the movie being beaten - heck, even Spock smacks him down - so that the audience doesn't spend its time secretly wanting to punch him in the face themselves - not when the narrative is doing it for them.)

It's worn, it's tired and it's played out. I'm just sick of watching movies or reading books where white guys who have nothing more to recommend them than a ridiculous dose of insular self-rightousness, brainlessness and of course a 'heroic' allergy to thinking or planning somehow manage to get people to actually listen to them, and worse even obey them. How does this work and more importantly why? It's not loveable, or charming or 'awesome' -it's perplexing when it isn't downright predictable and boring.

The only conclusion that I can draw is that they're leaders because the authorial voice says so, and the narrative logic is then forced into improbable contortions to accomodate this. If these stories had any genuine narrative logic at all nobody would even follow these characters across the room.

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Liam King

at 12:40 on 2010-02-02Being new I feel somewhat apprehensive about displaying an opinion so directly opposed to the general consensus. However, I am not ashamed to admit that I really liked Avatar.

I am aware that the themes it deals with are juvenile, unoriginal and misguided, that the story is naive, idealistic and patronising. And as the dude from RedLetterMedia explained, it's skilfully crafted to manipulate audiences.

I personally don't think that's such a bad thing. I mean, sure, people don't like to feel that they're being manipulated. But isn't that the point of fictional entertainment? To manipulate you into feeling for characters who are complete fabrications?

I for one did not go to see Avatar for a lecture on colonialism or natural spiritualism (or whatever). I'm not sure who exactly did. I went to see a good show. It may seem incredibly shallow of me, but occasionally I have other motives to see a film than moral pondering.

And a good show it is. It has great acting, a great score, a decent script (say what you will), and brilliant visuals. It restored my faith in 3D.

Sure it manipulates us into caring about rather bland, stereotypical characters, but 1.9 billion dollars testifies that it did it pretty well.

Plus I love the ekrans. I so want one.

Actually, this reminds me of a conversation I had with a friend of mine, about how the movie should have ended after 105 minutes. I reckoned that after the tree is destroyed, and he's pulled out of his little matrix booth, and he repeats his line from the start and it all goes black, the film should have finished. It would have tied off a three act story, with an ending in which the protagonist gets what he wanted at the beginning but utterly fails at everything he has come to want, yadda yadda, plus the big corporation wins and gets to destroy the pathetic resistance, which mirrors real life. And it would have been a more manageable length.

My friend disagreed, reminding me that the disgusting public want endings that are happy, not thought provoking, and that Avatar was made to flash and dazzle, not to enlighten. He's right. 1.9 billion dollars have gone towards proving his point.

But then, James Cameron in his interviews goes on about the themes and issues of Avatar like it's some philosophical thesis, so maybe we're both giving him too much credit... I don't know. But I'm determined to maintain my enjoyment of the film, whatever its arrogant director might think.

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Arthur B

at 13:12 on 2010-02-02I don't think there's anything wrong with wanting to enjoy something as pure entertainment. But at the same time, I think it's difficult to actually do that if you find the story being presented directly offensive. It is going to be far easier for some viewers to overlook the more dubious elements of

Avatar

than others.

The example I like to bring out in these discussions is Robert E Howard. At their best, the

Conan

stories are absolutely wonderful. But at the same time it would be dishonest of me not to acknowledge that Howard was, by any measure, an enormous racist, and that his philosophy of racial conflict rears its head time and time again in his stories.

I can just about deal with it if I stick to the better stories and skip over the nastier ones. But it would be impolite of me to expect everyone else to do the same, and to pretend that the problems with the texts

just aren't there

for the sake of just sitting back and enjoying the ride doesn't seem right to me.

Avatar

is pure entertainment, then I shouldn't

have

to deliberately turn my analytical mind off in order to enjoy it; I should be able to sit through the thing without cringing, wincing, or getting seriously pissed off at points. We should

all

be able to do that. And if there are elements to

Avatar

which are genuinely problematic I don't think it's wise to simply overlook them for the sake of enjoyment. I used to want to be able to do that, but various discussions in the past on FB have convinced me that that's not an admirable attitude.

It's not that I criticise every frame of every movie I see these days. But my inner critic has become a light sleeper. If there's nothing to wake the little fellow up, all's good. But once he's roused, he doesn't hit "snooze" and go back to bed.

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Rami

at 13:13 on 2010-02-02

But then, James Cameron in his interviews goes on about the themes and issues of Avatar like it's some philosophical thesis, so maybe we're both giving him too much credit

I think anyone who gives Cameron (and not his special-effects supervisor) credit for Avatar and its success is completely missing the point ;-)

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Frank

at 05:52 on 2010-02-03

It's worn, it's tired and it's played out.

Yes, having white males save the day are all those things, but when done right (Star Trek 09) it's fun! But like Avatar it's not Oscar worthy (wtgdf, Academy!) While ST09 was fun, I recognize its suck with regards to the female characters. But the Macho of Kirk worked, probably because of being beaten which of course makes him more human.

Then why do you watch/read them?

@Liam: I agree with Arthur. And would like to add that I think it's socially valuable for partakers of entertainment, particularly for those who are of the dominant culture (white-male in the US), to recognize how non white-males (men of color and women of any color) are portrayed within that entertainment especially when the protagonist is a white-male. Doing so, I naively hope, will bring cultures/races/genders/orientations/abilities closer together by dialoging with 'the other' and questioning ourselves.

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Arthur B

at 08:22 on 2010-02-03

Yes, having white males save the day are all those things, but when done right (Star Trek 09) it's fun!

But would it really be less fun if the protagonist were not white, or not male?

FWIW, I think Star Trek '09 is a special case. Given that it was a direct homage to the original series it was pretty much bound by the structure of said series. If Kirk

hadn't

taken the lead and saved the day but left it up to someone else we'd all be complaining that the film radically departed from the formula it was trying to recapture.

Avatar

has no prior canon that it's bound by, so I don't think you can point to casting decisions made in ST09 to justify Cameron's decisions.

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Liam King

at 10:55 on 2010-02-03I think anyone who gives Cameron (and not his special-effects supervisor) credit for Avatar and its success is completely missing the point

Absolutely. I think that Cameron made a half arsed story, and because he was so rich and famous, thousands of people came to work for him and did the best job in the history of Hollywood. The only problem was, it was a half arsed story to begin with. The actors, the score writer/(s?), the conceptual designers, and, as you say, the special effects team, all combined to make a fantastic film, that I guess couldn't carry Cameron's story.

As for the offensive undertones, I don't pretend to be a minority warrior but I must admit I was rather annoyed at the ridiculous stereotypes bandied about, especially after hearing James Cameron wanking about its provocative themes and values.

As for the more subtle colonial issues (which nykinora explained), they didn't really bother me as much. The film isn't an allegory, just a rip-off of a dozen other movies with references to history that give audiences the impression that it is deeper than it is.

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Guy

at 12:15 on 2010-02-03

I'm just sick of watching movies or reading books where white guys who have nothing more to recommend them than a ridiculous dose of insular self-rightousness, brainlessness and of course a 'heroic' allergy to thinking or planning somehow manage to get people to actually listen to them, and worse even obey them. How does this work and more importantly why? It's not loveable, or charming or 'awesome' -it's perplexing when it isn't downright predictable and boring.

I think it might have something to do with wish-fulfillment fantasies and audience identification. A lot of people have fantasies in which they shout their indignant bit of self-righteousness over the top of the people around them, and then (unlike in real life) everyone acknowledges that they're awesome and right and falls in behind them. As for the heroic allergy to planning... I think it's an adolescent power-fantasy, to be able to just leap in and, with a bit of quick and clean violence, solve the problems that everyone else wastes time trying to solve with analysis.

I remember seeing some kind of "making of" thing about the film LA Confidential, and some dude was explaining that they were worried that audiences wouldn't be able to relate to the Guy Pearce character. Naturally there'd be no such problem with the Russell Crowe character, but they would have to really work hard to bring the audience around to Guy Pearce. And I was thinking, OK, does everyone really naturally gravitate toward the violent, amoral thug? And what makes Pearce so hard to identify with? Maybe I've got a bit a lower boundary for identification with someone named Guy than most people do, but it struck me as bizarre that they were so worried that Pearce wouldn't be as identifiable as Crowe, despite the fact that... to me at least he came across as seriously unpleasant and unlikeable. But he fits the right mold, I suppose.

Anyway, yeah, I think partly it's to do with the fact that so many films are revenge fantasies or omnipotence fantasies, and our avatar is typically a white dude with poor impulse control, and it sort of lays down tracks in our brains to just assume that that makes them "the goodies".

In a sense, I don't have a problem with that. I mean, people can fantasize about whatever they want. I'd much rather have people live out there fantasies of omnipotence in the cinema than in the workplace. But... the problem is... trying to overlay another kind of story onto those fantasies, and making those fantasies a vehicle for carrying a contrary kind of message to your audience. Cameron does something similar in Terminator 2, but I think it works there because he's doing a kind of inversion and examination of the way violence in films typically solves problems. But... hmm, yeah, here, not so much.

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Melissa G.

at 14:48 on 2010-02-03

to pretend that the problems with the texts just aren't there for the sake of just sitting back and enjoying the ride doesn't seem right to me.

I just want to say thank you for saying this, Arthur! This is what I try to get people to understand ALL THE TIME when I'm having feminist arguments with comics/game fans. It's okay to like/enjoy something despite its problems, but just acknowledge that the problems exist and that they are in fact problems. (/mini rant)

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http://webcomcon.blogspot.com/

at 15:11 on 2010-02-03One thing I sometimes do to enhance my enjoyment of films is to try to deliberately ignore their messages. Like, all messages, not just the ostensible and overt ones. I mostly experienced it with District 9: I refused to view it as actually saying anything in particular ABOUT apartheid, because at this point there's not much a film can say about it other than "it was pretty bad." So, rather, I viewed it as using apartheid as more-or-less scene-setting, an instantly recognizable historical framework to contextualize the events of the film itself.

The film isn't an allegory, just a rip-off of a dozen other movies with references to history that give audiences the impression that it is deeper than it is.

Similarly!

Of course, this doesn't take into account the fact that films have much more to say than just the overt messages of the director, and it's perverse to deliberately ignore the messages of any communication in favor of some preferential reading that you like. I could waffle about and say that I'm not denying that they exist, but I'm choosing to temporarily bracket for my enjoyment of the movie...bah. Nonsense.

Personally, I thought that Pandora was entertaining enough that the complete blandness of the plot and character arcs didn't ruin the movie for me. It probably makes me a special effects junkie, or a colossal James Cameron fanboy, or something like that. (I am a colossal James Cameron fanboy, although I couldn't honestly say that Avatar is one of my five or so favorite films of his, which places I think only Piranha II and Titanic beneath it.)

It makes me wonder if a movie is going to come out that I can actually appreciate, even after I subject it to careful analysis for its social content. My suspicion is: Probably not for a while, considering the problems in society that will necessarily be expressed (even if not overtly) in any film produced in that society. Mitigating factors include foreign films and deliberately socially progressive films, but since I'm incredibly parochial and lazy I'm just going to wring my hands about Hollywood blockbusters and not consider actual alternatives.

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Arthur B

at 15:24 on 2010-02-03@Melissa: It's probably something that you (or perhaps other FB commenters) have in fact got me to understand through discussions on here.

Part of the reason that I wrote that response to Liam is that I do, in fact, recognise that sort of response in myself. It

frustrating when your ability to enjoy something on a purely innocent level is disrupted by someone pointing out the unsavoury aspects of it. The trick is to understand that the blame lies with the emperor, not the person pointing out his nudity.

Of course, sometimes there'll be criticisms of a film which have no effect on the way I approach it one way or the other - normally because the criticisms are based on ideals that I just don't share. The

CAPAlert

guy marks down films if they don't present a religious viewpoint that he agrees with. For him, this is a great moral evil. I just couldn't give a crap one way or another. Likewise, I could see someone with radically different political views from my own not agreeing with my take on

300

because they just don't agree that the things I'm pointing out

are

problems - to them, they'd be

features

. I can't analyse a film or a book or a game from the point of view of absolutely everyone who might encounter the thing, and I can't expect anyone else to. But I

can

try my best not to blind myself to things which, based on the principles I claim to adhere to, are in fact deeply wrong.

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Sister Magpie

at 15:55 on 2010-02-03A word about Kirk. I've seen the original series but don't feel like I know it well enough to argue it, but isn't he originally a captain who is actually good at his job? I mean, he still has the arrogance and swagger, but I thought his backstory was that he was a good student who rose up through the ranks the same way anyone would. Is he associated with not planning? A daring attitude with a willingness to take risks, yes, but I don't remember him being presented as being admirably ignorant as the article described Jake Sully.

Maybe I've got a bit a lower boundary for identification with someone named Guy than most people do, but it struck me as bizarre that they were so worried that Pearce wouldn't be as identifiable as Crowe, despite the fact that... to me at least he came across as seriously unpleasant and unlikeable. But he fits the right mold, I suppose.

Wow, that's interesting. That's one of my favorite movies and I know they've talked about how really none of the characters are very likable, but that is an interesting comparison. I suspect for the same reasons that Pearce's character is far more disliked in the movie than Crowe's or Spacey's is. He's uptight and openly ambitious--and "book smart" as people keep reminding him. At some points he's put down for doing the right thing (knowing the difference between silence and integrity), at other times he sees the right thing as a way to leverage his own career. I'm not surprised they'd expect people to relate more to Crowe's character's simple black and white view of the world. Pearce's "smarts" is actually a liability. (Spacey's characters is also smart but doesn't seem to value it.)

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Melissa G.

at 17:50 on 2010-02-03

I do, in fact, recognise that sort of response in myself. It is frustrating when your ability to enjoy something on a purely innocent level is disrupted by someone pointing out the unsavoury aspects of it.

I think there's a little of this response in everybody. :-) I certainly do it too. I read and love the Ultimate X-Men comic line even though the female costume choices have me rolling my eyes much of the time. But I just kind of tell myself that the strengths outweigh the flaws, and that no one ever gets it totally right. The important distinction to make I think is that a critic should not fault someone for liking something they don't like but rather be trying to explain why it was offensive or unlikable for them in particular. Which opens a dialogue and helps to promote understanding and all those good things.

I also understand your point of how what is a problem for some people might not be a problem to others. I would just point out that "I don't think it's a problem because we have different religious views" is more defensible than "I don't think it's a problem because women are hot so who cares if they're objectified. It's all in good fun". Which seems to be what I come across....

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Viorica

at 17:51 on 2010-02-03I think the difference between Kirk (the '09 version, not the TOS one) and Sully is that Kirk is actually allowed to grow over the course of the film. He fails, he fights, and he changes as a result of his experiences. But Sully never does. Aside from deciding that the Na'vi way of life is awesome, he's never allowed to fail. To have him do so would destroy the self-insertion wish-fulfillment that the movie's going for.

#Ferretbrain #Alasdair Czyrnyj #Avatar #James Cameron #Minority Warrior

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