Nailing "Avatar"
By Fredric Smoler
The fallacy that great events have great causes tempts both film critics and civilian interpreters to explain mass ticket sales in pretty grandiose terms. Avatar, touted to displace Titanic as the movie with the biggest box office gross in history, has provoked this impulse with a vengeance. The film critics are the least of it: Evo Morales, populist President of Bolivia, is enthusiastic about what he takes to be a “profound show of resistance to capitalism and the struggle for the defense of nature,” while a Vatican spokesman thinks Avatar espouses a somewhat sinister pantheism, and an NYT opinion columnist had a similar thought. Some Palestinians, taking themselves for Na’Vi, painted themselves blue and created a photo-op. Enough Chinese take themselves for Na’Vi ejected from their homes – by rapacious party bureaucrats – to have caused the film to be pulled from 2D theaters after a very short run. Self-described anti-militarists not implausibly think the film anti-militarist, while some neo-cons think Avatar the first great neo-con film (Ann Marlowe, writing in Forbes, exults that the baddies are independent military contactors – in effect, high-tech Pinkertons – rather than GIs). At least one Libertarian thinks Avatar a stirring defense of private property (someone from Cato). Other critics on the Right more plausibly detect something less flattering.
Most of these interpretations are a little wishful: Avatar’s indigenes are resisting not capitalism so much as the violent and total destruction of their entire culture, and in any event, they win. In all the histories we know, the indigenes armed with bows resisting the capitalists with guns lose. Morales, called the first indigenous Bolivian President, was speaking a European language before people who would report his remarks using all the technical apparatus of modernity; had the sixteenth century indigenous peoples of the Americas possessed this and related technologies, or anything like, their fate would have been very different, and less depressing. The Chinese, who have exterminated some indigenous populations and conquered and Sinicized many others, also make for imperfectly plausible Na’Vi, who resist conquest and assimilation with such perfect success. The Palestinians, alas, do not live atop unobtanium deposits, nor even oil, and for that matter the Na’Vi do not lay claim to the whole of the dying Earth. If Avatar remains something upon which people continue to project extremely various and potent political fantasies it will deserve serious analysis, but it is still early days. If it survives as durable and universal political metaphor, we will certainly want to know why. The first interpretations have not offered absolutely convincing arguments.
Perhaps the most ambitious and parsimonious theory appeared in the New York Times, where Adam Cohen was very confident about Avatar’s wedding of form and content: “The remarkable thing about Avatar is the degree to which the technology is integral to the story. It is important to show Pandora and its Na’Vi natives in 3-D because Avatar is fundamentally about the moral necessity of seeing other beings fully…it is easiest to oppress those we cannot see. This is one reason the Nazis pushed Jews into ghettos, and one reason that the worst Soviet abuses occurred in far-off gulags.” This seems odd for many reasons, not least because unlike Jews and 1930s Russians, the Na’Vi possess but cannot use something humanity will perish for want of – the unobtanium – and also because Avatar’s humans do not initially intend the Na’Vi much if any harm, which was not true of the SS or the NKVD. The movie also implies that without unobtanium all humanity will perish: as the no-longer human Jake Sully records in his last audio-log entry “The aliens returned to their dying world.” This ought to make the Na’Vi victory partake of tragedy, for it will cost the death of billions, but Avatar’s audiences do not seem to leave theaters mourning the death of their world and all their kind. Since the unobtanium is neither the precious metals of the New World nor the rubber of the Congo, something the imperialists can, in a pinch, do without, and because Sully is no longer human, his sang-froid in the face of the coming death of the whole of what had once been his species seems more chilling than the movie’s fans find it to be – a bit more like the attitudes of the SS, in fact, than the view Cohen attributes to their principled opponents. In any case, anti-imperialism is not the same thing as lifeboat ethics, and if it was, there would be few converts to the cause among the imperialists.
Also, Avatar’s use of 3D did not allow Adam Cohen or anyone else to see indigenous peoples “fully,” because seen fully, indigenous peoples, like other peoples, are less physically and ethically flawless. If the Na’Vi were a bit more like the Comanche, or were exterminating their mega-fauna, or had conquered other indigenes, it would be a different story – an absolutely different story, and one more like our own. The Na’Vi, however, unlike most and possibly all human indigenes, are very sound on what used to be called the Woman Question, indeed on every question; they are Noble Savages on moral steroids. A friend, asked what he’d thought of it, replied that he’d have liked Avatar better if it had simply been titled “Nazis vs. Indians.”
What about the 3D? If it doesn’t work as Cohen’s brilliantly concretized metaphor, is it nonetheless the secret of Avatar’s success? A lot of the critics also pointed to the 3D, but were more inclined to praise pure visual novelty, and a far number hastened to distinguish the visual novelty from a pretty dreary script. Still, the visual novelty did provoke superlatives. Roger Ebert wrote that “Watching Avatar, I felt sort of the same as when I saw Star Wars in 1977,” a comparison also made by A.O. Scott. But nothing had ever looked quite like Star Wars – no-one had before used the then state-of-the-art Dykstraflex camera system, nor had anyone ever seen fantasized hi-tech objects looking dented and dirty – whereas anyone who has ever looked into a Victorian-age stereoscope has seen 3D as startling as anything in Avatar. Anyone who thinks that color and the big screen make the difference never saw The Stewardesses in 3D in a Montana drive-in in 1971, as did this writer, or for that matter, anywhere else.
Anyone who thinks that Avatar’s 3D has the true shock of the visual new is probably too old to remember first encountering Pong in the early 1970s. People lined up for the right to pump quarters into the game in bars, and when a home version became available, adults – well, young adults – fought over the controls. Part of the pleasure was the rich, deeply pleasing and somehow persuasive sound the machine made when the bar of white light representing the paddle intersected the dot of white light representing the ball, but one was hypnotized by the fact that the virtual paddle and the virtual ball seemed to obey the same physical laws as real ones did, in 1972 an astonishingly effective illusion. The game was by modern standards remarkably crude – a black and white screen with only one effective control, which let you move the paddle up and down on a single axis – but nothing else had ever looked and behaved like it. While modern video games startle by their absolutely unconvincing representation of whatever they are representing, Pong felt eerily real, and its charm derived from the collision of that apparent reality with its manifest and unique unreality, for it was an image that seemed to behave like an object, and nothing had ever done that before.
While Avatar does not look even remotely as new as Pong did, its success with some audiences may rest on precisely that fact: Avatar may not succeed with its most important audience because it looks like something absolutely new, but because it looks like something a little old. The most interesting argument I have heard for Avatar deserving its success was offered by Jeff Lawrence, a student of comparative literature, someone young enough to have grown up playing the video games of the later 1990s, and for whom the first scenes of Sully inhabiting his new body recalled the pleasure of attempting to control another and virtual body. Those scenes are in fact thrilling, and even for someone who was never enchanted by late 1990s video games they recalled the pleasure of other stories about possessing another body, one more powerful than one’s own. Sully’s human body, however, is crippled, and the Na’Vi body he controls – and eventually exchanges for his own – is superhuman. This is a very particular kind of fantasy of a second body, and it possesses a special pathos, recalling the wheelchair-bound Locke of Lost restored to full mobility more than it does the kind of virtual body one controls in point-and-shoot games. The first scenes of the paraplegic Sully bounding through the forest in a different but recognizable corporeal form are thrilling, and recall a number of science fiction and fantasy stories. All of us, of course, possess failing bodies, but young people are not yet necessarily feelingly aware of the fragility and mayfly brevity of the bodies they possess. If Jeff Lawrence is right about this, the special pathos of Avatar’s barely-mobile hero possessing a supremely mobile body is almost incidental to its success, although perhaps all fantasies of possessing virtual bodies are energized by some kind of awareness, however subliminal, of the current and increasing limitations of the bodies to which we are so far indissolubly wedded. To say that a movie feels like a video game has never before been a compliment, but that may be because the critics who said it did not themselves recall the pleasure of first playing such games.
If that is part of the explanation, Avatar’s success will be a bit mysterious to posterity. Pong, after all, did not age well. More than a decade ago, maybe closer to two, I went out to the Museum of the Moving Image, in Queens, where a Pong set was proudly exhibited, with rather the same curatorial attitude that the British Museum might display when writing placards for an exhibit of Etruscan or Inca toys. Seen in that museum, Pong already looked old, and it was almost incredible that it had ever given people such amazed delight. My incredulity perhaps derived from the fact that I have found almost all subsequent video games barren sources of amusement. The only exceptions were a variant of Pong with a color screen, where the paddle made the ball demolish layers of colored bricks, and a truly wonderful game, again black and white, where two very simple icons representing spaceships, each possessing a limited supply of fuel, tried to shoot missiles at each other, with a variant that made the sun exert a gravitational field. Those were a lot of fun, but they did not astonish. Pong, by contrast, had been something truly unprecedented; these were merely clever tweaks of the system. If you played Pong when it first appeared, you experienced a sense of technophile wonder that was in its own small way more like the sensation felt by people who saw the first films than it was like almost any experience of a consumer product since that time. It was, I think, the first virtual reality most people had ever encountered; it was a new thing under the sun. If Avatar only recalls a comparable pleasure of first encountering a subsequent generation of games, the movie will pretty soon look like that Pong game in the Queens museum, which is not the fate of the most effective works of mass culture. For example, it is not the way any version of The Prisoner Of Zenda now looks to us – it is instead, the way Jason and The Argonauts now looks.
Watching the film a second time, in 2D, the pleasure of those first scenes of Sully inhabiting his avatar remains vivid, and probably for good reason. A philosopher memorably observed that the essence of our humanity lies in the double fact that we both are bodies and have bodies, so Avatar and the science fiction from which it derives may only dramatize and make explicit something quite elemental. Of course, imagining oneself or someone else in another body does not necessarily mean imagining that anyone controls a second and separate body. I once tried to remember which of my friends, in his boyhood a fine skater, was the one who had gone back to the pond in our home town – I could not remember whether it was the duck pond or the one near the train station – seen a new trick, and then, after a misstep, succeeded in mastering it. With some shock I suddenly realized that the friend in question was Konstantin Dmitrievich Levin, whom I know only from Tolstoy’s peculiarly effective VR entertainment, and who is as real to me, and to many others, as is anyone I know. Movies are probably at a comparative disadvantage in making characters vivid in the way that Levin is vivid – they have trouble creating a comparable interiority – but there are some very striking exceptions. Jake Sully is unlikely to be one of them, and is at an additional disadvantage, because after a while his maker more or less gives up on plot. When that happens the viewer stops supplying texture derived from the sub-genre conventions supplied by other science fiction. Simply assuming Avatar is a great fiction of some kind because of its box office receipts, or an old technical trick very briefly made new, is to lose sight of the phenomenon our grandparents called a nine day wonder – a thing that briefly took our fancy, and then faded into obscurity, as dead as nail in door. That is a phrase I recall from another very resonant VR, Henry IV pt. 2. Its sequel, by the way, very memorably urged me to eke out the performance with my mind.
From April, 2010
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