film, eyeballs, brain

Avatar is probably the most beautiful film I’ve seen in the last 12 months. James Cameron’s fantastically detailed vision of the planet Pandora is a sumptuous visual feast: entire villages in lush trees, floating crags of rock, the way ships explode into constellations of steel and showers of dust, flowers that shrink shyly upon touch, the way tendrils of hair curl sensuously around tails – one forgets very quickly that it’s all the product of technicians hunched over computers. The real world around you, and the “real world” on screen, falls away once you enter Pandora, and I imagine that, had I seen it only in 2D, I would have still been extremely impressed. The richness of its visuals alone explains its ecstatic reception by the moviegoing public. Avatar is exceedingly beautiful, without a doubt – so why, then, did I find it also exceedingly, almost fatally dull?

Much of my disappointment can be blamed on the irritatingly trite screenplay. While I understand that Cameron’s project is explicitly foregrounded as a retelling of the romantic “first contact” story – and hey, maybe we can start invoking Joseph Campbell as well to raise the comparison on an even more macro level – it’s done so in a terribly predictable fashion, with events proceeding in automatic lockstep. Surely myths, with their corresponding narrative elements, don’t have to be retold in such a banal manner? Sure, no one believes for a minute that Jake Sully, played by a lifeless Sam Worthington, would actually carry out his military orders, but his effortless decision to go native happens almost as if… it’s what the motif demanded.

There’s precious little attempt in deepening the cast of characters in ways other than cardboard types: the headstrong scientist, the shrill company man, the psychotic colonel, the unusually generous native woman, yet another tough soldier who has a change of heart, etc., and they remain more or less as such from beginning to end. The Na’vi embody every (positive) stereotypical trait ascribed to all natives everywhere: they’re especially attuned with the earth, they’re proud and fierce warriors, they hold hands and chant as one people to heal the sick, and they live in a blissful Edenic state, free from disease, war, strife, and, indeed, any human complexity whatsoever.*

One might very well ask: Well, what did you expect from the guy who made The Terminator and Titanic? To which my answer would be: A lot, actually. Its similarities to Harlan Ellison and Philip K. Dick notwithstanding (and I thank my buddy Oscar for this observation), The Terminator (1984) still stands as Cameron’s finest moment, and one of the defining films of the ‘80s.

There’s a lot more narrative complexity in The Terminator, for starters; the film may begin with Michael Biehn, but half an hour in, the audience-identification shifts completely to Linda Hamilton. We’re as bewildered as Sarah Connor, and we never actually get a fuller understanding of the bigger picture until we come close to the last act. Not in Avatar, though, for we know exactly where it’s going, each clichéd plot point – the big battles, the taming-of-the-wild-horses scene, the jealous betrothed, the warrior initiation – all announced in bright neon letters half an hour before.

The Terminator was, for its time, as groundbreaking in its effects as Avatar, but the technology is harnessed for far more than just window dressing in the former. For instance, one of my favorite special effects in The Terminator (other than the melted cyborg rising like a phoenix from the flames), is when the red night-vision HUD overlay appears on the screen as we see through Arnold Schwarzenegger’s eyes for the first time. The audience realizes, in shock, that Schwarzenegger’s character isn’t just incredibly strong; he isn’t even human. It’s not just a cool special effect; it’s a moment that suddenly opens up different narrative possibilities for the viewer.

Titanic (1997), despite its similarly flaccid screenplay, at least had two genuinely good actors. Even the hokey “king of the world” scene was, at its core, the fulfillment of an acutely observed class-based desire. You know, something human.

In contrast, there’s little sense of wonder or internal struggle with Sully’s character. The audience is permitted to exult, however briefly, with the paraplegic marine regaining the use of his legs. But we don’t feel that disappointment along with him when he returns back from avatar form. The most potentially interesting part of the narrative – namely, the psychological effects of slipping in and out of an avatar that is no less real – is unexplored. Neither is Sully particularly reflective about his change of heart; it just happens, almost because the audience expects it to.

I happened to stumble on this rather appropriate quotation from another Golden Globe-winning director, Michael Haneke – and no, I’m not about to make a ridiculous Avatar vs. The White Ribbon** argument here – who says, in a conversation with Alexander Horwath in Film Comment:

I always look for the places in a story where leaving things open can become really productive for the viewer. I often compare filmmaking with building a ski jump; the actual jumping should be done by the audience. For the filmmaker, this is pretty hard – it’s much easier to do the jump yourself, to do it for the viewer. Because there’s always the fear of frustrating them. What do I have to indicate? What do I leave out? How much can I not spell out when constructing a film and still not frustrate the audience?

For such a fully imagined visual world, Avatar paradoxically doesn’t leave very much room for the imagination. The function of allegory, particularly in science fiction and fantasy, is to allow readers and viewers to imagine different worlds and realities, to point towards external meanings and references that lie outside the cinematic narrative. This act of imagination on the part of the viewer is obviated, however, when the director plots a one-to-one correspondence, and then proceeds to poke us repeatedly in the eye with it.

This, it seems to me, is Cameron’s greatest failure in Avatar; it’s as if he simply doesn’t trust the audience to make those connections. We are therefore barraged with references to the war on Iraq and the genocide of Native Americans – and while Cameron is at least on the good side of things here – did the colonel really have to exclaim, “We will fight terror with terror?” Did someone actually have to refer to the military’s attack on the Na’vi as “shock and awe”, just in case we still didn’t get it? It’s not that Avatar is dumbed down (indeed, its scope and ambition is proof that it isn’t); it’s that Avatar seems to think the audience is dumb.

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*Much has been said, apparently, about how Avatar is problematic for yet another exhausted iteration of the White-man-saves-the-natives narrative. This, to me, seems fairly obvious and not worth commenting on; if anything, there’s a deeper racism to be seen in the fact that the colonized – Iraqis, or Vietnamese, or the whole range of Native Americans flattened into a generalized whole – are infinitely substitutable for each other in Avatar’s symbolic matrix.

**Ridiculous, like the one that David Thomson makes in his Ozu vs. Avatar essay in The Guardian, for there will always be room for different kinds of movies (you know, just like this blog), but I can’t help but admire the pugilism in his argument: good movies are worth fighting for. Plus I wanted to write something more than just “Avatar sucked ass.”

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