On political film criticism
In my Avatar post below, a few commenters wondered about politicized film criticism.
My basic take is this: There’s nothing wrong with a critic discussing the political perspective or messages of a film, or talking about whether they make sense. When films demand that audiences consider their politics — as Avatar does, and as most of the recent string of Iraq war movies have — it’s only reasonable for critics to discuss them. Indeed, I think critics should consider the politics of any film they review.
The problem comes when critics declare a movie good or bad (or “brave” or “courageous” or “cowardly” or whatever) because of the political stands it represents — so, say, proclaiming Lions for Lambs brilliant because it stands up to some totalitarian, Republican blah blah blah. Now, that’s complicated somewhat by films in which the political message gets in the way of the artfulness (or spectacle, or entertainment value) of a movie, which is what I think happened with Avatar. But it’s not that I dislike Avatar because I have a problem with what it’s trying to say; I absolutely adore Cameron’s Aliens, for example, which features similar, if far more subtle and narratively interesting, displays of corporate maliciousness and misconduct. It’s because Avatar‘s political points are made so obviously and so artlessly, and the story, dialog, and characters are less interesting and entertaining than an afternoon spent shoveling snow from your front yard.
The most interesting political dimension of AVATAR is how Cameron pusses out on his critique of corporate evil and falls back on the hyper-macho military for his main bad guy. Stephen Lang’s character starts out as more of a tool in the service of Giovanni Ribisi’s corporate suit, but Lang’s “kill-em-all” militarism displaces Ribisi’s capitalistic corruption as the driving force of the story’s villainy.
Mike
— MBunge · Dec 21, 06:50 PM · #
“Aliens” features subtle and narratively interesting displays of corporate misconduct? Huh? I love that movie, but it’s like all Hollywood films, written by people whose entire knowledge of business is derived from the world of writers and agents, and who therefore have no idea how giant, capital-intensive, bureaucratic entities behave.
If you want an alien smuggled through quarantine, you don’t have a mid-level corporate executive involved. That would be incredibly stupid. There’s a whole demi-monde of private brokers, consultants, etc. who deal in African diamonds, classical antiquities, or (I presume) aliens, and you hire one of them.
— y81 · Dec 21, 09:02 PM · #
Peter, you shouldn’t try to find a political angle or an axe to grind in such a sci-fi movie. Navis are blue, so does that mean that Cameron is hinting at Krishna as their progenitor? And it is clearly stated that the marines are acting as hired guns and not under any military command. So why then are you so loathe to seeing any ex-marine commit any wrong? Why can’t an ex-marine (or marine) ever play the bad guy with out getting it from self-righteous jerks like you???
Geez, why can’t Republicans just chill. And then they blame others for not being cool?!
— navi · Dec 22, 12:46 AM · #
Cameron never mentions what Unobtainium does or why Unobtainium is so valuable. Maybe it is melted into a drug and sold to misguided youths in the space black market. In which case, my guess is that you would cite moral objections and oppose its mining, and side with the Navi.
So shut the fuck up biyatch and stop talking BS politics because we know little about this fictitious world, and just enjoy this grand movie!
PS: Can you even brush your teeth with out worrying about whether the hard working top jaw or the lazy molar gets the first swipe???
— js · Dec 22, 01:06 AM · #
Y81: Sure, Burke’s plan is kind of silly in some respects, but what’s great about the character is how he’s initially presented as a friend, even a sympathizer. He’s working an angle the whole time, of course — right up to the end, when he tries, with increasing desperation, to convince Ripley that she should deal with him. Burke isn’t the greatest literary creation of all time by any standard, but in contrast with Ribisi’s smug, flat corporate weakling, he’s still an actual character, andone whose personality traits help shape the story in an interesting way.
— Peter Suderman · Dec 22, 01:50 AM · #
navi: Isn’t science fiction a genre made for thinking about things and doing political critiques? From all I’ve heard, Avatar isn’t a space opera, it’s a piece of speculative fiction.
Admittedly, I think I’m overly hard on Avatar in part because of how much Last Samurai ticked me off. But would have been possible to maybe move the ball a little bit after beyond all the past stories done in this genre. It isn’t just conservatives that have problems with narratives based around saving noble savages.
— GregSanders · Dec 22, 10:15 PM · #
Well, to be honest, it is just conservatives or conservatives disguised as neutral critics that are having problems with this narrative. When The Godfather was released, high-falutin critics like those that abound on NYT blamed it for a lot of unnecessary bang bang, stereotyping the Italian Americans blah blah blah. This time too you see cynics, not critics, deride Avatar for not having a female lead or for favoring animism (why would you want to impose your God even on a distant planet?!) or for having a white-man-savior or for showing a white man abandon his race or for having a white man as the evil-doer ad nauseum. Avatar is this generation’s Godfather (smarter critics will see this and get behind it), and its impact would be similarly significant.
— t2 · Dec 22, 10:38 PM · #
“Avatar is this generation’s Godfather”
WTF?
Mike
— MBunge · Dec 22, 10:49 PM · #
t2: From Matt Yglesias, who I personally put in the liberal camp (Note, a bit spoilery)
“The Avatar narrative starts with a form of reactionary anti-capitalism and thus ends re-inscribing the logic of colonialism inside an ostensibly anti-imperialist story. Sully defects to the alien camp, and they swiftly and unproblematically accept him as their (soon-to-be-victorious) leader precisely because of the great tactical acumen to which he (allegedly) has access precisely because he is not a noble Na’vi savage.
In Dune, by contrast, the willingness of the Fremen to accept Paul Atreides as a leader is explicitly portrayed as in part a consequence of colonialist manipulation by the Bene Gesserit missionaria protectiva.”
Some of the comments over at Yglesias’s blog dispute this characterization of Sully. I haven’t seen the film so it’s hard for me to say for sure. As I said above, I’m still overly bitter about Last Samurai and it’s confusion of the fall of a warrior caste with the plight of indigenous people and so I’m being a bit unfairly down on Avatar in ways that have nothing to do with the film.
Anyhow, my favorite Iraq war parable is still the start of season 3 of BSG. I think I’d feel a bit differently about Avatar if there was any indication in the previews that the Na’vi would fight back by doing things the audience would be inclined to reject as dirty tricks rather than just through superior connection with nature and martial prowess with traditional weaponry.
— GregSanders · Dec 22, 11:03 PM · #
yawn, yglesias follows the same uncreative line-of-attack based on race mentioned by t.
what do you know about the navi or pandora? they know the dense vortex-filled terrain (think vietnam x iraq x afghanistan). they have reinforced metallic bones. they are 18 feet tall. so please, shut up until you are better informed. you say you haven’t seen this film?! WTF WTF WTF you just went on and on and on without having seen it, simply relying on trailer trash?! come on, i mean, come on. come on.
greg sanders, you only proved you are a certified tight-ass who nobody likes talking to at cocktails because you start bitching about the labor conditions on the tortilla farms in latin america when just offered some chips.
— pandora · Dec 23, 06:03 AM · #
Man…Suderman, you’re clueless. You and Sailer got soundly mocked here for missing Blomkamps straight forward anti-apartheid message.
The message of Avatar is the same as the message of District Nine……
the other is you.
it is a message that strikes at the core of white christian conservatism.
— matoko_chan · Dec 23, 12:32 PM · #
pandora: Nailed me. I’m the type of guy that likes more intellectual stimulation from a sci-fi film than I get from a tortilla chip. Here’s hoping Matt Feeney successfully makes the case that it can support that and gives me a reason to go see it.
— GregSanders · Dec 23, 03:38 PM · #
On intellectual stimulation: The wife and I spent the hour-long ride home from the Imax theatre talking about how realistic it would be to try to combine terrestrial and alien DNA, and just what the fact that they had DNA could tell us about their biochemistry.
It may just be that you’re not smart enough to be stimulated by this movie.
— Chet · Dec 23, 05:17 PM · #
Chet: Who knows, there is some sci-fi that’s beyond me certainly.
Hearing more of those sorts of conversation might have gotten me a bit more excited. There do seem to be a lot of elements with some potential to be interesting. I can think of a lot that could be done with the whole hair-braid USB port thing. Glad you and your wife found it stimulating.
— GregSanders · Dec 23, 05:44 PM · #
One little thing I liked about the movie – there are a couple of scenes where, in classic space movie fashion, they lose atmospheric containment in some dramatic fashion – damage to the hull, etc. What I liked was that, as the alien atmosphere poured in, they did a shimmering effect, like you might see above a hot road or when a propane bottle leaks. It’s the shimmering caused, in other words, when two gases with different indices of refraction are mixed, and it’s exactly what you would see – not so much the fog-machine effect you see in most movies. Just a little thing, but indicative of the attention to detail present in the movie, and an attempt to make real science fiction, not fantasy with laser guns.
— Chet · Dec 23, 06:12 PM · #
Chet: Cool. Little stuff like that can really add something. Taking a similar example, I don’t harp on sound in space, ultimately sound is a big part of storytelling, but I do really appreciate when someone does it right.
Even though I’m not really excited by the story, maybe I should just see it for the world alone. I’d often heard how beautiful the world is, but I’d heard less about the sci-fi style attention to detail.
— GregSanders · Dec 23, 06:23 PM · #
See if your area is showing it in IMAX. We paid about double the regular ticket price, and had to see it in 3D, but it was well worth it just for some of the opening scenes alone. (And the 3D was nowhere near as intrusive and forced as I thought it would be, it’s easy enough to ignore if that’s not your thing.) If you have a brain keyed to little details, reward it with Avatar in IMAX.
— Chet · Dec 23, 07:22 PM · #
Chet: Thanks for the advice, will do. Might end up seeing it at one of the local museums/science centers. They run a few other of the Imax showings, I’d be surprised if they didn’t do one of the biggest films of the year.
— GregSanders · Dec 23, 10:55 PM · #
Well, according to An-l Nutwitz, I, as a Latino, have more in common with the 18 feet tall tailed blue alien Navi because of our colors than with my own white earthling. Now that’s like saying I have more in common with the colored tiger than the white man (or the white tiger). It is amazing we are so f-ing sensitive to race that no one even mentions that this privileged white protagonist is a poor, less-educated, handicapped ex-marine looking for some fast cash as a security contractor having just lost his twin brother. Way to overlook the obvious as we stretch in order to make everything about racial oppression. Typical knee-jerk bending-backwards hyper-sensitive American racism that milks White Guilt.
— t2 · Dec 23, 11:35 PM · #
I’m not so sure the politics of Avatar are artless, but they are obvious. But why muddy up a clear thesis? It goes like this: the powerful, well-armed (neo-)colonists, in search of the greatest material prize in history, use both humanitarian tactics (like missionaries or foreign aid) to soften and learn about the “natives” who are not anxious to share their resources. The military is called (in collaboration with industry) to simply annihilate them if they don’t cooperate. We, the audience, are meant to sympathize with the victims. This strikes me as perfectly normal and natural human empathy in an unambiguous political situation. Not unlike our current war for oil or past colonial wars of all kinds.
I’m not sure why people think the very simple algebra of colonialist economics needs to be muddied up or made more complex or literary. We are still practicing them today. It comes as no surpise that only conservatives have a problem with these concepts. Conservatives can’t handle the truths of the human condition. It’s really that simple.
This is why there is no conservative art to speak of since empathy and universal morality are anethema to those who speak for the powerful and would never speak truth to power.
— Ray Butlers · Dec 23, 11:40 PM · #
re: …an unambiguous political situation…not unlike our current war for oil
So the Navi are Stalinist gangsters who attack their neighbors, make billions starving their own people, employ rape rooms and mutilation centers, gas whole villages of innocents, fill mass graves, commit ecocide as punishment, and continue to fire rockets at our spaceships? And Earth was just surprised-attacked by another outer rim planet, putting all us humans into a state of maximum risk aversion?
Maybe I will see it after all. Sounds awfully complex.
— Yeshua · Dec 24, 01:29 AM · #
So the Iraqis – like, every single one – are “Stalinist gangsters who attack their neighbors, make billions starving their own people, employ rape rooms and mutilation centers, gas whole villages of innocents, fill mass graves, commit ecocide as punishment…?” As it happens, yes – making up flimsy justifications for aggression, as a pretense to gain access to valuable resources, is something the bad guys do in the movie, too.
— Chet · Dec 24, 02:15 AM · #
You reap what your leaders sow. Choose wisely.
— Yeshua · Dec 24, 07:13 PM · #
And there are easier ways to gain access to resources. Spending a trillion dollars and losing thousands of lives to have the luxury of purchasing it at market value — well, that ain’t exactly an ideal ‘war for oil’.
— Yeshua · Dec 24, 07:19 PM · #
Damn, I almost missed this!
bq….making up flimsy justifications for aggression
Those weren’t justifications for war, they were characterizations of the regime. You know, the kinds of things you establish in a script to add complexity to the actions of the protagonist.
— Yeshua · Dec 24, 07:25 PM · #
“Choose”? So, now your contention is that Saddamn Hussein was the legitimately elected president of Iraq?
That only proves that the architects of the war for Iraqi oil were incompetent. Which we already knew.
— Chet · Dec 24, 09:01 PM · #
Iraqis never had a choice until we gave it to them. And in return we got . . . lots and lots of oil fields! Oh, wait a minute.
Sad it is, but you pay for your leaders regardless; so it’s best to have a choice if you can. Hmmm…maybe spreading democracy is the moral thing to do after all. We don’t want people to pay for things for which they are not responsible. You know, like how we don’t want poor island nations to pay for our carbon intemperance.
— Yeshua · Dec 24, 10:49 PM · #
I don’t know, we’re pretty good at taking and holding things.
Nah, it’s probably best to commune with reality and conclude that we really did go into Iraq to remove the Baathist regime and set up a democracy in it’s place. (Only in pursuing the latter have we proven ourselves incompetent; we did a kick-ass job removing the regime.)
— Yeshua · Dec 24, 10:56 PM · #
yeshua…..
be honest.
we went into Iraq to make a tame little brown clone ‘Merica. that is what the bush doctrine is. 5000 american soldiers, a trillion taxpayer dollars, and 300,000 dead iraq civvies later we are slinking home like wipped curs from another islamic state with shariah in the constitution.
merry xmas.
— matoko_chan · Dec 25, 01:34 AM · #
Yeah, I’m sure it’s just a coincidence that Iraq is on top of some of the largest oil fields in the world. Oh, wait, now where did I hear that little factoid? Oh, that’s right – from Dick Cheney, whose energy task force drafted plans for exploring and exploiting Iraqi oil resources in the early days of the administration.
But I’m sure there’s no connection at all. You just go on “communing with reality” there, buddy.
— Chet · Dec 25, 06:28 AM · #
matoko_chan,
we went into Iraq to make a tame little brown clone ‘Merica. that is what the bush doctrine is. 5000 american soldiers, a trillion taxpayer dollars, and 300,000 dead iraq civvies later we are slinking home like wipped curs from another islamic state with shariah in the constitution
And worse than that, the oil still ain’t getting out.
Please America GTF out of the Muslim world and let the Chicoms deal with the muslims. They’ll get the oil out. Pinky promise.
Won’t cost USA a single dead soldier.
China will be No.1 oil consumer by 2020’s anyways.
Why are Americans dying so China can have cheap oil?
— Keid A · Dec 25, 10:42 AM · #
Gosh, you mean the Middle East is strategically important because of its oil? I thought we only cared about it because that’s where Jesus was born.
— Yeshua · Dec 26, 10:38 PM · #
Here’s some nuance for you. We attend to the Middle East because of its oil. Within that framework, we invaded Iraq to remove the regime and set up a democracy it its place: to eliminate an intractable international problem; to rescue a relatively sophisticated people from two decades of abuse; to hopefully start a democratic avalanche in the region; which would theoretically stabilize said region, by inverting the gaze of its frustrated people, by focusing their politics on the mundane; which in turn would, theoretically, keep the oil flowing and cheap while avoiding the deserved recriminations of those vengeful souls who see the West as the main guarantor of the unjust and undemocratic, nihilistic status quo.
At least, that was the theory. Still sounds good on paper, methinks, though I doubt you have the mental dexterity to appreciate it.
— Yeshua · Dec 26, 10:50 PM · #
Note: the above theory does not preclude a wide variety of personal motivations which we can attribute to various principal actors. Bush may very well have wanted to sack Iraq to avenge Saddam taking a pot shot at his daddy. Cheney may have in fact wanted to punish all Muslim brown people for Al’Qaeda’s impertinence in elevating his heart rate on 9/11/01 et seq. Rumsfeld’s motivation may very well have been limited to self-aggrandizement and seeing the bang pop whistle of all of our new post cold war toys. All these things may have been the respective motors behind the deciders.
However, it remains true that everyone else — those without personal stakes in the matter — had to be persuaded to invade Iraq when we did. Bush’s daddy issues weren’t ever going to be enough for those who ended up voting Yea. No, to get those people on board a narrative had to be sold and a case had to be made.
It’s to our eternal embarrassment that our intelligence failed us and eroded the main pillars of our case. That’s in retrospect, and important as far as it goes. But never forget: the main reason the American people polled overwhelmingly in favor of going into Iraq was not because we wanted oil, but because we thought we were doing something right and necessary. And once you understand that, never forget that these righteous expectations constrained the type of war the Administration was able to conduct, and limited the type of objectives our military was able to pursue. That’s because we’re a democracy, which means that our morality defines the Executive’s degrees of freedom, and defines the consequences should the Executive exceed and trespass against those boundaries.
We, America, went into Iraq to do good, and and we’re going to eventually exit having done our damnedest to live up to our ideals and having done our best to do right by the Iraqi people — even though we have and are going to falter along the way. That is just a fact; and more, one that we should never forget.
And yes, good intentions yada yada. A lesson for both sides, I should think.
— Yeshua · Dec 26, 11:15 PM · #
Oh, and, uh, Happy Birthday to me.
— Yeshua · Dec 26, 11:38 PM · #
What “intractable problem” are you referring to? Someone was in power that we didn’t like? Seems like that’s the case most of the time, nearly everywhere, but we hardly go about starting wars, now do we?
Funny – you did all that strenuous typing, and all I read there was “blah blah blah regime change, blah blah blah welcomed as liberators.” It sounded like bullshit when I heard it in 2003 and it still sounds exactly like bullshit now.
“Overwhelmingly in favor”? As late as 20 days before the beginning of the invasion, war in Iraq was approved of by only 54% of those polled by Gallup. More and more, Yeshua, the only one ignoring the reality – of the war in Iraq and its runup – is you. Why engage in revisionist history?
— Chet · Dec 27, 02:10 AM · #
re: all I read there was “blah blah blah regime change, blah blah blah welcomed as liberators.”
That’s why I favor better education for Americans.
— Yeshua · Dec 27, 02:35 AM · #
Chet, do you believe in me?
— Yeshua · Dec 27, 02:41 AM · #
And since I’m averaging three posts per, let me ask: so it’s your official position that we went into Iraq for the oil, and simply whiffed on the execution?
— Yeshua · Dec 27, 02:55 AM · #
WTF?
— Chet · Dec 27, 06:08 AM · #
lol@ yeshua
we invaded Iraq to remove the regime and set up a democracy it its place
let me fix that for u…we invaded iraq to make a tame little clone brown america, just like Big White Christian Bwana has been trying to do for centuries.
white judeo-xian democracy has passed its sell-by date in case you havent noticed.
Here’s another movie reference for you, Suderman…..Serenity.
All the last century’s US foreign policy has succeeded in doing is turning MENA into one giant reaver factory with an inexaustible supply of spare parts.
— matoko_chan · Dec 27, 04:03 PM · #
and chet…..yeshua is the aramaic for jesus…. alas, the clueless neocon revanchist imperialist poseur we see here has nothing in common with the real Issa.
— matoko_chan · Dec 27, 04:08 PM · #
No matoko_chan. You confuse strategy with tactics.
The goal of GulfWar2 was always to remove Saddam from power and free up Iraq from the sanctions regimes, NoFlyZones, etc, imposed after GW1.
France, Russia and China were no longer willing to support sanctions in the UN Security Council.
Without sanctions, Saddam would have been free to rearm without restraint. This the US/UK were not willing to accept. The possibility of WMDs were only part of it. The threat to Kuwait and maybe even Saudi Arabia were also a part.
The deadlock in the Security Council was at the heart of the crisis. It was the UNSC deadlock that led us to war.
Removing Saddam by force was supposed to be the solution. Democratization was merely a tactic for creating a new, legitimate, post-Saddam regime.
With the threat of Saddam removed, oil-rich Iraq would be free to export its vast oil reserves.
The great powers figured: Get rid of Saddam, there’d be no need for sanctions, and the oil could flow.
They did not understand how unstable Iraq was as the focal point of the Sunni-Shi’ia split.
They did not understand democracy would overturn Sunni rule and precipitate a catastrophic civil war that would paralyze Iraq for years.
The miscalculation of the US/UK was nearly total.
— Keid A · Dec 27, 05:24 PM · #
Chet: I ended up seeing it (in Imax 3D) and liked it a hell of a lot more than Last Samurai, so it did turn out I was being overly biased. For me, the big sci-fi angle (spoiler alert) was that creating a world where pantheism had a scientific basis and then played out an admittedly fairly cliche story within that world.
The plot struck me as about average American film quality, which is disappointing from Cameron but doesn’t really deserve some of the piling on its gotten. However, with both the world and aesthetics being fantastic I’m definitely recommending this more widely. Thanks for taking the time to defend its virtues some.
— Greg Sanders · Dec 30, 04:25 AM · #
Glad you liked it.
— Chet · Dec 30, 08:19 AM · #
When you are calling religious extremists Stalinists, you’ve just giving up on words have definitions.
— Freddie · Jan 1, 03:12 PM · #
It is interestin’ that both Suderman and Sullivan “like” District 9, but diss Avatar.
It is the SAME message, complete with human/alien DNA hybridization.
the Other is you.
the only difference is that Avatar is rendered in PG-13 and overt gamertech culture.
which we all know is wholly opaque to Suderman.
Suderman should just give up…
You simply cant get to cooltown on the conservative express.
;)
— matoko_chan · Jan 2, 03:09 AM · #
It’s hilarious how hard conservatives are straining to critique this movie (not that it is above criticism; for example, there are enough plot holes to drive a truck through).
Obviousness of message is not exacly uncommon in movie making and hardly disqualifies a movie from being successfull artistically.
I think that at least part of what some people are missing here, though, is understanding of the difference between science fiction and historical fiction. Dances with Wolves was something of a failure artisticly because it’s message simplified an HISTORICAL reality (well, that and the fact that Costner can’t act his way out of a paper bag). But science fiction allows what ifs – in this case, “what if ‘the web of life’ and ‘mother earth’ were more than just a imperfect metaphors, but actually represented literal reality?”
The basic coperate greed/colonialism/militaristic nature of the humans was, of course, a stereotype, but one with sadly plenty of historical examples. Reality is usually more complex, but often not. Conservatives are upset that the protagonists are recongnizably “American,” and thus get their panties in a twist.
Though I will say that in the contemporary U.S. military you probably wouldn’t find too many savages like the Colonel. Plenty of them among the political class, though.
— LarryM · Jan 3, 06:08 AM · #
Avatar breaks billion dollar barrier.
Avatar is now the 4th-highest grossing movie of all time. It has broken $1 billion. Already.
lol.
— matoko_chan · Jan 4, 03:03 PM · #