Avatar: In defense of the semi-defensible
A few weeks ago, I set out a threat or a promise to take up the case of Avatar against some of its many critics, especially its TAS critics. Like many things, this became harder to do the longer I put it off. Also, I began by sort of casually including James Poulos’s critiques in with the others I was addressing and then realized that they don’t belong together at all. So, there’s only a little Poulos in this, for now. (Alas, as pop-cultural themes turn into philosophical ones, I have a tendency to lapse into the sort of pedantic earnestness that won me a Poseur of the Year nomination a while back. I have to work on that. In the meantime, enjoy the pedantic earnestness!)
As we know, Avatar hews to a sort of standard Hollywood romanticism in which a nagging conflict between characters we identify with and characters we like is overcome through empathy and openness. Avatar takes this a bit far, as many have pointed out, in having Jake Sully not just become one of the Na’avi but end up ruling them. My supersensitive deep reading of this move is not that it is racist or that it shows the inherent reason-imperialism of even modern humanism, or per Brooks that it shows the inherent “condescension” in the film’s liberal message, but that a movie and an audience that invests almost three hours in its hero’s progress would find it unsatisfying to see him end up a lieutenant. Still, point taken.
But I have to lay my own cards on the table here. One of the things I find so strange about the defensiveness on the Na’vi’s behalf – that they’re the victims of condescension etc. – is that the small moments in which I noted the risk of this (the inevitability that someone would make this argument) were completely swamped by admiration and jealousy and delight in the idea of sentient beings possessed of such excellence. My first comment in defense of Avatar was actually a tweet to my TAS pals, whose hostility was already rumbling through the Twitterverse, admitting that I’m a sucker for “that hyperathletic communitarian warrior shit.” In fact, the core of my enjoyment of the movie, and those of others I’ve talked to, was this. That Jake Sully should want to become a Na’avi struck me as neither traitorous nor pomo-decadent mainly because I wanted to become a Na’avi. I hate to get into the game of spot-the-condescender, but it seems like the claim that Cameron is really condescending to them (or to some earthly sufferers) with his portrait of the Na’avi’s mad skillz and enfolding the Na’avi into an evaluative scheme whose true lesson is “White liberals number 1!” itself suffers from a degree of self-enclosure. Cameron, I’m betting, took his broader and ideologically diverse audience to be capable of seeing something his learned critics either can’t or won’t: That the distinct virtues that he imparts to the N’avi really are both distinct and virtuous. They are not ours. They are theirs. Sitting in the audience, we’re not secretly thinking, Goddamn primitives. Good thing Jake Sully’s around to help them overcome their lack of technology. We’re thinking, They don’t even need cars. This whole theme reminds me of Jonah Goldberg’s sound criticism of the tendency to find racism in movie portraits like that of the Orcs in Lord of the Rings, which is basically, wait, who’s looking at the Orcs and seeing black people? In this case, if when you see blue aliens on screen you think “black people” or “Native Americans,” why is that James Cameron’s fault? Why is your itch to protect people of color from condescension via a movie portrait of aliens from an alien planet (that people of color are digging in movie theaters worldwide) not itself condescending?
This brings us back to Jake Sully’s troubling progress from human to Na’avi. To the extent that some latent identity makes it possible for Sully to migrate from human to Na’avi in a psychologically coherent way (unlike the Sigourney Weaver migration, which is incomplete and touristic and, yes, a little condescending), it is not that he is an imperialist-humanist-white-liberal and the Na’avi are passive colonial objects. It is that they are unfathomable badasses and he’s a Marine. As such, he’s as close as we get to them. Among the more overheated critiques of Avatar is that it is anti-military, anti-Marine. The profoundly offended John Podhoretz says that “its hatred of the military and American institutions” is so pat as represent not so much an argument as an unthought Hollywood prejudice. But, if Avatar has any subtlety in its characterization, and indeed any political sophistication, it’s precisely in the spot it puts Jake Sully in as a paralyzed Marine. The cartoonish Quaratich (a name, I now suspect, that’s probably some kind of Cameronian metaphor that’s going to undermine my defense of him) explicitly plays on Sully’s undying loyalties to the Marine Corps, and Sully is shown responding to those claims at first. He bases this reflexive loyalty on the old saying that there’s no such thing as an ex-Marine. But the bogusness of Quaratich’s claims to speak as a Marine is obvious from the start. That’s part of the tension of those scenes, something the audience senses before Sully does (dramatic irony, I think it’s called). Quaratich is not a Marine, he’s a mercenary. He’s using the Marine name, and calling on Marine loyalties, in the service of a paramilitary operation for private interests. As a critique of the Iraq War (which I suspect lingers back there somewhere), this is pretty dumb, but, as a dramatic statement of an entirely defensible general principle, it works just fine, as long as you’re not listening for dog-whistles to chase. I saw Jake Sully as confronted with a series of choices of the best way to be himself, a Marine – remain a paralyzed subject in a science experiment, fight as a mercenary, or become a Na’avi. He chooses Na’avi. Within the moral framework of Avatar, this seems like an obvious compliment to the Marines.
The best critique of Avatar I’ve read is Noah’s, in which he makes the straightforward point that the Na’avi, as characters, are are not alien enough. I think that the possibilities for plain weirdness in movie sic-fi are woefully underexplored. Cameron, or somebody writing more or less in defense of Cameron but soundingly disappointingly like me, might respond that the big emotional notes he’s straining to hit would be inaccessible in the context of a weirder anthropology. (Or the Cameron at the Golden Globes would say something about how “we’re all connected.” Sigh.) I think, still, with Noah’s critique in mind, that even with what Cameron has give us, he might have gone much deeper. You might encapsulate this by saying that Cameron fetishizes what the Na’avi can do and ignores who they are. It might have been cool to see them situated in a living political universe, in which power struggles and tense tribal relations yield that pleasing Machiavellian drama provided by the Sopranos and Deadwood. (But, thanks to their lushly providential natural environment, wouldn’t they live perpetually in uninteresting times?) Anyway, for me, in the theater, seeing what the Na’avi could do was enough. When I watch it a second time, I’ll no-doubt sense a gap where Al Swearengen should be.
This whole hullabaloo arises in the first place because some of our esteemed friends and commentators – I find myself disagreeing in this with the handful of writers I enjoy and read and respect more than about any other American commentators. Ross, for example, isolated as Avatar’s most troubling indulgence its apparent celebration of pantheism. But even if this pantheism belongs to some argument Cameron is trying to make, he chooses to do so through the language, the archetypes, of popular art. His greater commitments are clearly to them. If we want to see what cinema-as-argument looks like, there’s plenty of other examples out there, and they feel nothing like Avatar. Spend an hour being hectored by Crash, or addled by its cousin Babel, or jerked around by Million Dollar Baby, and you’ll see the difference. These anxious movies don’t risk for a second having their philosophy overtaken by their poetry. James says, forcefully, that “pantheism is not poetry,” but that is to steal the very point under contention. A poetry of pantheism is not, or not necessarily, the same thing as pantheism.
To the extent that the film exhibits a quasi-philosophical coherence that might excite certain suspicions that it’s earnestly trying to sell us a bill of pantheistic (or whatever) goods, I think this owes to two things, one novel, one familiar, neither very philosophically troubling when looked at. One is its sheer scale, the amazing comprehensiveness of its world. The other is the familiarity of its themes, which become even more potently familiar when mapped onto its massive scale. Part way through the movie I found myself laughing at the grandiosity of some scene – I think it was one of the flight scenes – and I thought, damn, Cameron. In order to create a narrative equal to his imagined world, he has no choice but to risk looking idiotic for confecting the ripest adventure-melodrama in the history of cinema. Likewise, in order to treat the well-worn romantic/pastoral theme of alienation from nature on such a scale and comprehensiveness, he has to go all out and create the most embracing natural world the world has ever seen. Anything less would be a let-down, out of scale. The fact that Cameron is probably not himself a pantheist is but one reason of many to view his portrait of Pandora in terms of genre aesthetics rather than political or moral prescription. Since the archetype for Avatar’s nature-love already exists as a virtual pillar of our popular culture, and since the schema for overcoming some curse of earthly finitude through loving something or someone a whole bunch is likewise a familiar emotional set-up, and since his world is so big and beautiful and convincing, he can get away with this. We aren’t pantheists, either, but we’ve imbibed enough nature nostalgia and romantic overcoming in our cinema that we can dig where Avatar is coming from. We know how to enjoy it, aesthetically. It’s that other stuff, only bigger and more beautiful. But the way Avatar’s super-pastoralism plugs into its own archetype so powerfully gives it, to the viewer especially attuned to argument, the whiff of a treatise or manifesto. For the rank-and-file moviegoer, the successful fusion of scale and content is even more reason to ignore the bits of sermonizing and treat the movie as a movie. For the suspicious pundit rightly tired of romanticism as a political pose, this same unlikely formal achievement is a reason to treat the movie as one of those essays on the back page of Time magazine.
Because he cast (casted?) only black and Native American actors to voice/mocap them?
That strikes me as significant.
— Chet · Jan 21, 05:37 PM · #
Chet…I knew Cameron would screw me on this.
— Matt Feeney · Jan 21, 05:48 PM · #
1. That was pretty good. A lot of people convieniently forgot that Avatar is popular culture with popular cultures constraints: had to make the money back so needed to appeal to large audience so had to use familiar current myths.
2. What would be wrong with being a pantheist? Why is monotheist better? If I find that the sacred is best expressed in trees, does that some how damage Ross Douthat’s belief in the eucharist? It’s jsut like gay marriage. It’s like if the gays marry then the evil of their sexual practices would radiate through thier marriage liscense onto my marriage liscese (they might be next to each other in the file cabinet at town hall) and then onto me and destroy my marriage, probably becasue I would suddnely start craving anal sex and my wife would leave me.
The sneering at pantheism is sooooo “conservative.”
— cw · Jan 21, 05:52 PM · #
Oh wait, I had more.
I just finished watching the lord of the rings and there is definitely a racial subtext radiating out through the movies (and the books, maybe) like gay sex off a marriage license.
The whole story is based on norse myths: basically the collective unconsciousness of white people. It tells the story of the men of the west and how they came to rule the world. The evil comes from the east and the south. Middle earth is an obvious stand in for europe. There are different races on the good guys side: the hobbits, dwarves and the elves, but they are just more white people in different shapes and accents. They kind of represent different norther european nationalities. The hobbit are english, the dwarves scottish and the elves french.
And then there is the imagery and poetry. Hitler would have loved this movie. It’s all white dudes in armor with heavy metal hair raising huge swords with names like Tylenol and Amoxicillin, and pale white maidens with long hair parted in the middle, and oaths and vows to fight honorably unto the death in support of your nation. It is just pure white (northern European) mythos with a strong dash of christianity.That doesn’t mean you have to see the orcs as black but they are definitely “other.” They are definitely another race. And the humans that Sauron and Sauruman recruit are all swarthy. There are Thuggee elephant drivers, arab dudes in robes with curved swords, barbary pirates. There are no blonds on Sauron’s side. They are all other and they are all bad, or at least on the wrong side.
That doesn’t mean that Token and the movie maker are racists. It just means that their story is about the white race fighting and conquering evil “eastern” races and then ruling the world—the fourth age. It’s the white mythos with all the trappings.
ps. I spell checked the crap out of this mofo.
— cw · Jan 21, 06:16 PM · #
Lol, sorry Matt. I think your analysis otherwise is pretty good, though, and I think an honest reading of the text (well, viewing of the movie, English major habits die hard) does support an inherently noble view not necessarily of militarism, but certainly of esprit de corps, and if someone like J-Pod sees the movie as “anti-military” it’s because to conservatives, the only true military is a mercenary army, obedient to and used for entirely commercial ends. To conservatives esprit de corps is for pussy hippies.
Oh, for sure. But there’s substantial evidence that audiences simply won’t accept alien characters. Solaris, which is probably the most “alien” of alien movies, has been a boring flop in every incarnation. Humans need stories to be about humans. That limits alien characters to human beings with funny ears.
— Chet · Jan 21, 06:37 PM · #
Because he cast (casted?) only black and Native American actors to voice/mocap them?
Yes, but it’s very hard to tell this if you don’t already know who the actors are.
— JS Bangs · Jan 21, 06:39 PM · #
I basically agree with this. I particularly agree with your point about him being a Marine. Not only does his choice of the Na’vi flow naturally from his identity as a Marine, but so does their choice of him. They’ve never seen a sky-people warrior before, only scientists and machines. They don’t have any scientists or machines of their own. Warriors, though, they get. And they say, explicitly, that they chose him because he’s a warrior.
Regarding the requirements of genre, and Sully’s journey: I’m totally with you, but there’s one thing that bugs me. It’s not clear to me what Sully gives up to join the Na’vi. Yeah, I know, he gives up his “humanity” – but everything important to him about being human the Na’vi share; the trade is all upside, so far as I can tell. Tying into my complaint that the Na’vi aren’t alien enough: I want to know what Sully loses when he gives up his humanity that he thought he really valued – that we, as the audience, think we really value. Bud Light and blue jeans don’t quite cut it.
For Sigourney Weaver’s character, it’s clear she’s giving up something pretty big. She’s a scientist. A scientist is, by definition a tourist, someone who condescends to her subject of study. If she goes native, she’s not a scientist anymore. Of course she dies, so we don’t see her grappling with that choice – but it’s there in the background (or could be, if Cameron were interested in it, which he isn’t).
But what about Sully?
The only way to make his choice more interesting would be for the Na’vi to be alien enough to kind of weird us out – or at least to have some obvious drawbacks to their lifestyle that would make somebody pause. Easy but not-interesting choices in this regard would be to make them gross-looking as opposed to hot, or to make them have short lifespans. More interesting possible choices:
- Why do Na’vi pair-bond? Particularly, why do they pair-bond based on mutual affection? Again, other than box-office reasons. This would be a much better story if Sully were smitten with the girl Na’vi, but that pairing just makes no sense to her, for whatever reason (and the more insurmountable the reason, the better). (Speaking of pair-bonding: anybody else notice that we’re told the Na’vi bond for life with their particular Banshee, but that Sully has no trouble trading up as soon as he has the opportunity? Not just a continuity quibble – I think that’s a gaping hole in the mythology we’re originally given.)
- What’s it like having Big Mama Tree in your head? What does Sully think of the experience? All the physical badass stuff the Na’vi do is right up Sully’s alley. Communing with Big Mama Tree? I suspect not so much. Think about it: when the Na’vi bond with the animals, the Na’vi are in charge of the combined entity. Who’s in charge when they plug into the tree? It shouldn’t be the Na’vi. And just how naked are you when you’re plugged in? Is it all upload/download or is there lateral communication as well? Can his Na’vi girlfriend hear exactly what he’s thinking when they are both plugged in? If you grew up being plugged in that way on a regular basis, how would your psychology be different from ours? Lots of directions you could go with this.
- What is the deal with predator-prey relationships on Pandora? Pandora has some seriously terrifying badass predators. Why? What’s Big Mama Tree’s stake in predation? That enormous badass armored super-puma thing? It has a USB port just like everybody else. Why, if it’s never bonded with the Na’vi before? Do the various species on Pandora bond with each other when the Na’vi aren’t around? Assume Pandora was designed, not evolved – it’s still a question what the psychology is of these animals, if even the wild ones like the Banshee have this mind-meld thing going on. Whatever it is, it’s going to be really different from the psychology of Earth animals. And having a profound psychological link with the animals has got to have a psychological effect on Sully – think what it’s like when your dog dies; now imagine your dog is actually in your head, is closer to you than your child. Now imagine that dog tries to eat your child. This is the world Sully’s joining.
Obviously, exploring any of these questions would make for a vastly less-profitable movie. But I’d be more interested in it, and clearly Cameron should make the movie I want, not the one that makes the most money.
Has anyone read the original screenplay? Rumor has it it’s more interesting than the final shooting script.
And now, back to my own . . .
— Noah Millman · Jan 21, 06:47 PM · #
My impression was that the banshees bond for life with the Na’vi, not the reverse. The banshee will never take another rider but the Na’vi can take all the mounts they want. Bonding doesn’t always mean pair-bonding.
Apoptosis?
The Na’vi bond with each other during mating. Why wouldn’t other organisms do the same thing?
— Chet · Jan 21, 07:01 PM · #
Humans need stories to be about humans. That limits alien characters to human beings with funny ears.
Agree with the first half absolutely. The second, not so much. What it does is limit you to human protagonists. Or it may absolutely limit movies because the budget for sci fi flicks is too big to profitably appeal to the minority who would be interested in real aliens.
You know what I’d like to see? Someone make a movie of The Dosadi Experiment. That would kind of be the anti-Avatar – no?
— Noah Millman · Jan 21, 07:05 PM · #
Chet:
Thanks for the clarification on the banshees. I thought the pair-bond was mutual.
Apoptosis: yeah, obviously, the reason you need predation in any ecology is that otherwise your most prolific species breed out of control. But normal ecologies aren’t sentient. Big Mama Tree has other tools at her disposal besides launching a predator-prey arms-race.
— Noah Millman · Jan 21, 07:10 PM · #
Sure they are. You, for one. Metazoan life is an ecology of single-celled organisms. For the most part, they cooperate, sometimes selflessly, but mutualism is far more common. But competition and predation also occurs within your body. Even your genes are competing with each other. Your body has cell types that exist only as predators of your other cells. Every one of your cells is prepared to commit chemical suicide at the behest of its neighbors. Indeed, cancer happens when they stop doing this.
Pandora’s understanding of her own physiology may be as limited as yours is of your own. Then again, imagine how much more you would know about your body if you could interrogate your leukocytes.
Who does a planetary intelligence talk to? That’s kind of what I left the theater wondering. If there are other Gaias out there, how do the communicate? Signals on the hydrogen band? Protein messages in cometary bottles?
Boy, get pregnant and you’ll see some serious competition as the fetus attempts to protect itself against the mother’s immune system, reacting to a drain on the body’s resources by trying to evict the invader.
Well, but then you’re not making a first contact movie, you’re making a natural disaster movie. There’s no narrative difference between The Blob and the towering inferno.
— Chet · Jan 21, 07:47 PM · #
Noah,
Here is the link to the “scriptment”:
http://www.docstoc.com/docs/14294813/Avatar-Scriptment-by—James-Cameron
And here is a link I posted before of a AINC contributor Mike Russell tearing into the film (he also thought the “scriptment” had more potential than what wound up on the screen):
http://www.aintitcool.com/node/43429
After I read Russell’s take on the film, I lost all interest. For my money, Cameron still hasn’t topped “T2” or “Aliens”.
— Arminius · Jan 21, 07:55 PM · #
Ah, but toilet paper, toothpaste and the internet are plenty enough to fill out the cost side of the ledger.
— Kristoffer V. Sargent · Jan 21, 08:33 PM · #
This is also an excellent post touching on some of the same flaws with the film mentioned by Russell:
http://blog.american.com/?p=9572
— Arminius · Jan 21, 10:02 PM · #
I wrote a defense of James Cameron for Taki’s Magazine, pointing out how much of Avatar is pre-figured in Robert Heinlein’s red-blooded American sci-fi novels. For example, Avatar’s main plot -— a human soldier teams up with a seemingly primitive but actually wise alien tribe to prevent an evil Earthling mining company from despoiling their sacred tropical homeland -— can be found in Heinlein’s 1948 “young adult” story Space Cadet.
Ultimately, I suspect that Cameron, despite his remarkable fluency as a visual storyteller, is less interested in making movies about science fiction heroes than in being a science fiction hero himself, an inventive engineer straight out of a Heinlein novel such as The Door into Summer.
http://www.takimag.com/article/in_defense_of_james_cameron/
— Steve Sailer · Jan 21, 10:20 PM · #
In order to NOT sneer at pantheism, and critique it seriously, conservatives, or whomever, must NOT attack the poetry of pantheism, or attack pantheism for being nothing but poetry. The point I tried to close on — perhaps too esoterically — is that pantheism isn’t poetry but philosophy. That raises the stakes in an important way that most conservatives will feel a need to confront.
— James · Jan 21, 11:00 PM · #
Confront pantheism AS a philosphy? Confront meaning judge?
— cw · Jan 22, 01:02 AM · #
Panentheistic feelings are an important part of Western Civilization — e.g., Wordsworth’s poetry.
— Steve Sailer · Jan 22, 02:13 AM · #
“…pantheism isn’t poetry but philosophy. That raises the stakes in an important way that most conservatives will feel a need to confront.”
Do you think that there are a lot of conservatives out there worrying that our kids are going pantheistic? That treeworship is fraying the fabic of the american experiment?
This is what I am talking about. If pantheists start kidnapping virgins for submersion in a bog then it is a public health issue, and I can see talking the time to critique the philosophy behind the actions. But who cares is some people feel a connection to nature that is stronger than their connection to a biblical story, or meditation, or whatever. Or are you guys actually worried that satan is gaining a toehold (he has long pointy blue-black toenails) through pantheistic thoughts? That pantheisim is an allegorical Veitnam in a manachian game of dominos?
Basically I am saying that to stoop to criticize something so harmelss as pantheism, which at this point in history is nothing more than vauge feelings that people have about nature, is typical of a certain kind of conservative. It’s anal, paranoid, authoritarian, rigid, compulsive, silly….
— cw · Jan 22, 04:49 AM · #
Jackson could have derailed all the “racist subtext” criticism of Lord of the Rings with one bold but simple step: cast black actors — preferably seven foot tall East Africans — as elves.
— Matt Frost · Jan 22, 05:24 AM · #
cw:
Pantheism only scares me when it stays awake for days doing meth in the garage with Science and the two of them start looking for fun.
— Matt Frost · Jan 22, 05:28 AM · #
“Sitting in the audience, we’re not secretly thinking, Goddamn primitives. Good thing Jake Sully’s around to help them overcome their lack of technology.”
I was think that very thing! Well, maybe not the first sentence, but definitely the second — especially in the last act, after (SPOILER)the tree gets blown up. If it weren’t for him, they wouldn’t have had a chance in hell.
In fact, the technological asymmetry was what most impaired my ability to suspend disbelief. Even with Jake and the big red dragon, the Na’vi wouldn’t have a chance against even present day weapons, let alone future tech.
All you’d have to do is nuke the surface from orbit, then go down and gather up your minerals to your heart’s content.
Actually, the more I think about it, the more I realize that it was only the company’s attempts to be humane and ecologically friendly that gave the Na’vi a chance. So the real lesson here is, if you’re after Unobtanium, don’t hold back.
— Ethan C. · Jan 22, 10:40 PM · #
No need for nukes.
Herbicide, Agent Orange. Find whatever kills the trees around your mine.
The smart vegetation is the only thing that really matters.
— Keid A · Jan 23, 03:33 AM · #
@matt: Equating, even loosely, Pantheism with Crystal Meth, only reveals your prejudices. Oh wait, did I miss a lame attempt at being funny? Goodbye!
— pandora · Jan 24, 08:37 PM · #
Matt,
It’s ok to equate crystal meth and science, though. I do it all the time in my head when I’m using crystal meth. In fact, I have recently developed something I call the scientific crystal method. I can’t tell you how it works here, but if you want to come over I will show you. Bring money and some sort of beverage and maybe some wings.
— cw · Jan 25, 02:43 AM · #
Everyone seems to have forgotten about Cameron’s earlier classic ‘Aliens’ with which viewers may find many similarities [I am not critising for repeatation, just mentioning] such as opening shot of crew coming out of deep sleep, the second-last battle bet the ‘fighting machine’ and the beast, the chopper pilot and Sigourny Weaver herself!
— sdhc card · Jan 26, 06:36 AM · #