The Avatar Phenomenon
Posted in Unfounded Speculation
on March 2nd, 2010 by
Stephen DeGrace
Topics:
Reviews,
Movies
I meant to blog about this back a month or so ago when I first saw the movie Avatar (Wikipedia entry), but never got around to it. Then today, one of my co-workers told me about this clip on Youtube. Do yourself a favour and watch it - you need to see this. These people seem to be completely serious, including the dude having sex with a flower through his braid at the end of the clip. It is truly special. Yes, the special effects were amazing, and the 3D was remarkable. But I think that while most people I've talked to tend to claim they aren't as much into the story as they are into the effects, I think the popularity of the movie was actually rooted in the story and even more in the implicit ideology. Those willing to admit it, and those who go farther into the realm of farce like the LARP people are only the tip of the iceberg - something in this movie speaks to something fundamental in the collective psyche of our culture.
First of all, I want to give props to Avatar. It truly is a fantastic piece of work. The level of detail is absolutely stunning, and not just in the amazing visuals. James Cameron even went to far as to have the Na'vi language created for his fictional aliens, an amazingly complete and detailed piece of work for just a movie, and make all the actors portraying Na'vi learn to speak it (for that reason, while having some unusual choices in structure to emphasize its alienness, it is fundamentally a possible human language in order to make it possible for human actors to speak it).
The popularity of this movie was truly amazing. Week after week, it was full house after full house. If you wanted to see this movie, for weeks you had to have tickets in advance and show up early to have a hope of getting good seats. I kept expecting it to let up so that it would be easier to go and see it, but it just never did.
A lot of people seem to want to cite the amazing 3D as the reason for the movie's popularity, but I don't buy it. The 3D is truly amazing, and was used throughout the movie. Moreover, it was exploited in a fashion an order of magnitude better than in any other 3D movie I've seen. However, I don't see it as the wave of the future, necessarily, more as a fad, even very well done. This type of virtual reality can only imperfectly duplicate the binocular parallax that gives us real 3D vision. I find that my brain is constantly trying to reconsile these two images, and the effect becomes fatiguing over time. The tried-and-true illusion of 2D is here to stay for a while yet, I think. I don't think people were going over and over to this movie just to see amazing 3D and graphics. That's part of it, but for me it doesn't make a satisfying explanation.
I think that probably the majority of the people seeing this movie multiple times have a milder case of what these LARP people have. It's the same sentiment that drives idiocy like the seal hunt protest and the near-worship of animals like dolphins and killer whales, and more serious movements like animal rights and radical environmentalism.
The urbanized culture of the Westernized world enables a population of utterly unprecedented size to survive and thrive with only a small minority experiencing any kind of true insecurity as to food, shelter or (in cold climates) warmth. It is a truly novel way of living - even urban dwellers used to have a tangible connection to things like where food comes from. It used to come from fields right by your city, and the success of local crops was vital to whether you ate or not. Often, raising of farm animals like chickens and subsistence gardening took place right in the cities. We are able to accomplish this lifestyle of unprecedented comfort for an unprecedented number of people through intensive mechanization and energy use that has made food production and distribution global. Food is a processed product conceptually divorced from its origins except as idealizations for branding purposes. We use the land more intensely than it can sustain, frankly. More and more land is coming under human use, and human use is becoming more and more technocratic and impersonal. We are doing real and serious damage to the land and water, and "real nature" is increasingly receding.
I believe this creates a profound sense of alienation and unease in many people in all cultures which have moved in this direction, being most pronounced in the most urbanized populations. Lacking any true appreciation for how dirty and harsh nature really is, the population wants to see an idealized and whitewashed version of the natural ideal, which big corporate machines like Disney are more than happy to provide for our consumption, ironically much like the sanitized, factory-farm-produced foods we consume. We don't really want to be divorced from our lifestyle, after all - we love our lifestyle, the way we want to live necessitates ordering the world in this way. We might claim we want to be closer to nature, but like children, certain realities of nature, like killing, are things we desperately do not want to address in an adult fashion.
Groups like Greenpeace and the International Fund for Animal Welfare that stage the seal hunt protest every spring are very much in the same category as Disney. The seals are a symbol for our unease about our connection with nature. Of course the seal hunt is equally humane as any slaughter operation that puts the meat on the table of the vast, non-vegetarian majority of those who profess to oppose the seal hunt. And of course the hunt is very sustainable, given the huge seal population. But the seals are cute, and the slaughter takes place in the open with dramatic visuals. So every year, Greenpeace whores out the seals to excite the Disnified, urban population and to get attention and make a pile of money. If the seal hunt were to stop tomorrow, Greenpeace and IFAW would be among the saddest people, because that gravy train would be over. I think that's why they are always careful to antagonize the Newfoundland population, to make sure that people will continue the hunt out of sheer pride and stubbornness.
Avatar cunningly strikes this same chord, but in a different way. The Na'vi are an exaggerated symbol of the severely distorted, romanticized vision people have about the aboriginal way of life. In reality, human hunter gatherers are not stewards of the environment at all. Historically, they have done the maximum damage to the environment and to animal species that their capabilities allowed within whatever was to their immediate advantage. That's where all the North American mega-fauna went... it disappeared suddenly with the appearance of First Nations people in North America, and it's not a coincidence. War was also a prominent feature of primitive life... plenty of nations were displaced or destroyed in the history of North America before the first Europeans arrived.
In this, we are like any other animal, and very much deeply connected with nature. Here is another thing we like to deny. Primitive people are closer to the truth when they impute human-recognizable personalities and motivations to animal spirits. We idealize animals and nature and imagine them as living in a kind of harmony which we humans pollute and corrupt. We imagine animals as true innocents, or as automatons devoid of our consciousness and motivations we would recognize. Of course, humans come from nature, we are fundamentally connected to nature whether we understand it or not and whether we like it or not, and truly, the apple does not fall far from the tree. The appearance of humanity would not be the first time the pattern of life on this world has been radically altered by new species arising.
But we like to imagine primitive people with deep stores of wisdom who live in harmony with nature and at peace with each other as something that really existed, and therefore exists as a potentiality in human nature that we can access and build into a better future. The Na'vi are hyper-extended embodiments of this vision. They are the visual/cultural equivalent of food loaded with salt, fat and sugar. They are an entertainment product intensively packaging memes that push our cultural pleasure buttons.
I don't mean to be completely cynical. The movie isn't completely cynical, either. For example, the connection of that Na'vi to the environment is literally non-mystical. It has a physical explanation with no parallel in earthly biology, a kind of literal neural net connecting discrete organisms. The Na'vi connection to nature is literally plug-and-play. While to me this adds a kind of honesty to the Avatar universe that keeps it from being kitsch, I think on some level it actually adds to the appeal of the Na'vi and Avatar. After all, literally wiring in to peripheral devices is something everyone in our culture of almost every generation alive can grasp fairly intuitively. Extending the metaphor to nature itself undoubtedly has an appeal. Of course, if ubiquitous wireless were a more mature technology, a more classically mystical connection could be believable to the population as sci fi.
I think James Cameron is a genius. Avatar is a beautiful piece of work, but more, Cameron has read and manipulated the Weltanschauung better than anyone ever anticipated or appreciated before Avatar was a full-blown, record-breaking success. Critics can poo-poo the story all they please, Cameron has genuinely earned his kudos and can laugh all the way to the bank, too. I suspect he will inspire many copy-cats, and of course he plans to copy himself with the announcement that he plans to make a sequel. Myself, I enjoyed the movie, but I don't think I felt it the way many did. I was certainly struck by the Avatar phenomenon, though.
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