Pathways into Avatar

[in a discussion with SM the other day I ventured some points on Avatar which I have now expanded upon after seeing the film]


Avatar offers an interesting yet troubling wager for the future of entertainment. Even if the terms in which the film has been heralded are often hyperbolic, even if the ‘death of cinema’ thesis makes a ‘new frontier’ at this late date little more than a charming dream, even if to discover in this film the essence of the cinematic or some absolute triumph of ‘pure cinema’ is another kind of ‘wish’, for all this and even so this much must certainly be admitted — James Cameron seeks to enchant the medium once again and rekindle the once upon a time wondrous in it. This is a worthwhile endeavor and one he often succeeds in for his film truly conveys the experience of a world in a medium which increasingly represents the ‘worldless’.

Cameron imagines the physical co-ordinates of his planet in startlingly artistic fashion. The technological ‘magic’ here including the use of the 3-D format in unique ways is never on display purely to dazzle or overwhelm but to enchant and enrapture. We discover this new land in gradual fashion, we are completely entranced by what we see and we gradually become so naturalized to it that the world we are all familiar with seems impoverished in comparison. This arc of displacement and inversion is completely remarkably by the film much as even more impressively we are so comfortable in the presence of the Navi that the human is rendered alien to us and as the film progresses starts seeming more and more like an ‘intrusion’. Cameron’s dreamscape privileges blues and purples and all other tints work against this background. Therefore, appropriately so his world is often most seductive when it is dark with occasional luminous and really precious splashes of light when floating souls completely a brilliant choreography in these scenes (the entire construction of all this in some ways is reminiscent of elements in Fantasia). There are some other moments similar to this involving the central life-giving tree of the Navi belief system. The creatures on this planet are all the stuff of fable and legend, myth and fairy-tale. And of course the Navi themselves operate in this border region between the ‘human’ and the ‘animal’ (in another more literal and ‘physical’ sense between live action and computer generated animation).

But this does not mean that Cameron’s strengths in the film are entirely those of the painter. He is remarkably effective in the film’s more dynamic moments of flow and action. In each situation ranging from the training with the banshees to the mesmerizing climactic action sequences to the choreographed walks and glides across the branches of trees this movie suggests great fluidity.

I think it is perhaps less to the point to see the central theme of this film as one centered around romance. Even if the love story here is engaging enough that one wishes to see more of it the film offers a far more vast and considerably dark, even at times terrifying, recreation of an entire history of colonialism and imperialism. The destruction moments when these come about are painful to behold and the fate of the Navi is one that tugs at the heart. It is equally true that in his essential New Age framing of the Navi stories and beliefs Cameron repeats the classic move of late imperialism where even as the world of the other is destroyed or appropriated the notion of ‘authentic faith’ is located in the values of this same other. In Avatar one might easily detect African and Amer-Indian anthropologies, tropes of Eastern ‘values’ and Western ‘soul-sickness’. In a way the post-colonial, post-imperial nostalgia for the certitudes of what preceded it. In any case these political messages seem to pivot the film far more than the love story itself. The latter is in fact the greatest human interest story in a film that has proper polemical exercises to carry out (including rather too blunt commentary on the wars of the present). And these involve the history of ‘European man’ and the inheritor of this project in ‘American man’.

There is the danger (probably already upon us) however that with Avatar cinema is advanced along a path where it becomes an entirely virtual medium of pure effect. In other words extraordinary visuals without adequate narratives. Let us also define what the former means. Is it really stunning images artistically oriented or is it a visual grammar that overwhelms any notion of aesthetics? In other words what if we are seeing the emergence of a cinema for which ‘critique’ would be beside the point? You are so overwhelmed by the virtual reality framework (more and more 3-D sophistication, the 360 degree screen etc etc) that you can never quite have the distance from it to comment on it and even if you did it would be irrelevant since such ‘overwhelming’ would preclude more traditional narrative concerns and so forth. This to my mind is a problem. I am always suspicious of any endeavor, even if artistically inclined, that attempts to block off the ‘critical’. I shall risk a certain term here — there is something ‘terrorist’ about such a visual grammar. I also believe we need to avoid the banal strategy of characterizing every new orientation in entertainment as ‘art’. Or everything new as a newer art. Without adequately defining what that newer art means or how it relates to our older notions. It is to avoid thought to simply throw these labels around without ever understanding them properly. Similarly it is not that I am obsessed with ‘narrative’ in the arts. As a student of many currents in artistic and philosophical thought that precisely question traditional notions of narrative (and art and thought!) I would be remiss if I did not. At the same time this does not mean ‘anything goes’. And when I use the word ‘narrative’ I do not mean stories as much as ‘narrativity’. And the concern again is that with a certain sort of technology the ‘narrativity’ question becomes moribund. Why should I be so interested in this notion at all? Because I find the alternative politically problematic, artistically less grounded, and ‘intellectually’ obfuscating. There can be meaning to any art or entertainment form but with a certain kind of technological ‘crack’ at one’s disposal the ability to keep producing the former either goes into the background or becomes almost unnecessary. We are certainly left with an ‘experience’. The question becomes: what does this ‘experience’ mean and what does it entail? For those who want cinema to be an entirely pure, entirely visual medium I would suggest that this is a naive idealization. No art form is ever ‘pure’ in that sense. Does music not have narrativity? Are written art forms only about ‘poetry’? Does the experience of the stage get reduced because it also happens to be about words? Don’t phenomenal buildings also tell stories about the where and who and when? I have said in the past that cinema lost in some ways its truest potential with the loss of the silent medium. Even the use of color it seems to me is not an unqualified ‘good’ in this regard. But that earliest model was still about narrativity. again I am not arguing for discursive thought and certainly not for linear narratives. The best way I can frame it is to posit the following: the production of ‘effect’ without any reliance on ‘inherent’ meaning is a way of avoiding responsibility. Let me provide a stark example which is why I brought up the word ‘terrorist’ earlier (and not in jest) — the blowing up of the WTC buildings on all of our TV screens had the effect of a Hollywood disaster movie, the ultimate disaster movie unfolding in real time (I am hardly the first to say this). But there is also a ‘meaning’ attached to those images which is not entirely contained in the whole sequence of the buildings being attacked and eventually collapsing. However what if one wanted to consume this horrible event as pure spectacle? Why rely on contexts at all? yes there was loss of human life, yes it was a terrifying event but all of this is information not inherent to those images. What we simply see are the planes entering the buildings, the fires, the chaos, the collapse. why not enjoy it as we (later) did 2012? Because one is ‘real’ and one isn’t? But the ‘reality’ is read into the 9/11 images by way of commentary. Nothing in just the images forced us to do so. If we juxtaposed images from 2012 with those from the 9/11 TV spectacle how would be differentiate one from the other? The ‘news’ is often ‘irresponsible’ because it elides context in so many instances. But if we insist on a cinema of ‘pure effect’ we are following a path on which the perverse interpretation I have just offered of the 9/11 event should be considered fair.

Avatar does not succumb to these dangers and yet illustrates much more clearly the path of ‘virtuality’. There is great irony in the fact that the very technology that allow Avatar to become a museum of miracles, a template for the ‘new’ within the medium, is also the instrument which extinguishes this renaissance even before it has begun. Technology does not need art to work its own wonders.

It should be added in closing that what more appropriate subject or theme could there be for our own online presents where we constantly energize our ‘avatars’ every waking day in blogs and sites such as this one? This too perhaps only brings to the fore an already existing feature of human sociality, something that would not have puzzled Shakespeare very much. We are already those who have many masks..

An afterthought: what an extraordinary visual conceit those floating mountains are..