Uncomfortably Close Encounters of the Third Kind (Thoughts on Avatar)

There is at least one SPOILER below

One of my very favorite films of the last ten or fifteen years (certainly my favorite American film of this decade) is about a white colonist-soldier who drifts into an uncharted world, gets captured by its native people, is saved by a native princess from execution, infiltrates the natives’ world, learns their culture and language, explores their gorgeous, pristine natural world, falls in love with that strong, independent princess, only to ultimately be faced with the choice between the world he’s come from, and the new, truer self he’s discovered in the splendor of the forest. Loyalties are tested, a love blossoms, blood is spilled between naturalist natives facing a technologically superior invader, and all of this is captured by jaw-dropping visuals married to a thoughtful and complex narrative. I’m speaking here of Terrence Malick’s The New World—a film that is referenced at almost every turn and twist of plot by James Cameron’s new three-dimensional epic spectacle, Avatar.

More precisely, Cameron has his eye on the same historical narrative Malick explored in his film, which dealt with the mythicized history of the English mercenary John Smith and the Powhatan tribal princess Pocahontas. Cameron reconfigures and subverts the foundational myth by making the “Americans” in Avatar the new colonists, and he sets the stage for another telling of a timeless and tragically cyclical story. The stage itself is Cameron’s most masterful creation. This director has always had an eye for startling sci-fi imagery and he’s a veteran visionary when it comes to choreographing rousing and engaging action sequences. Avatar retains all of these typical Cameron strengths but it also carries a newfound sensualist’s eye for detail. Maybe spurred by the cutting-edge camera technology at his disposal, as well as the flights of his own imagination, or maybe still the methods of the cinematic tradition he himself is “infiltrating,” Cameron is much more of an explorer of this wondrously realized world than even the characters he creates. This was for me, the most appealing thing about this film, and what made it an ideal (imperative) IMAX 3D watch. The camera soars across and lingers on the beautiful alien flora and fauna, the many different sights and sounds of an undiscovered world full of danger at one turn and breathtaking radiance at the next.

The spectacle, even as mesmerizing as it is, doesn’t overtake the narrative, but the narrative is rarely as interesting or as new as what Cameron devises visually. Malick had, in one way, the more formidable task in The New World of making a very earthly, very familiar landscape seem new, untouched, and ravishing. This is not to diminish the force of Cameron’s vision or cast his achievement under the grand shadow of a previous history. But his film would not exist, or would not carry the same meaning without The New World (or other, lesser cinematic myths like The Last Samurai or Dances With Wolves or, hell, even another great one in Dead Man) all of which places Avatar within a tradition. The difference here is that the act of “infiltration” on the part of Cameron’s “John Smith” character is one that involves an absolute physical metamorphosis, (or at least complete physical masquerade) which only occurred transitionally in the other works I’ve referenced. In those previous works, the spiritual change within the “infiltrator” character was mirrored by a profound physical one that occurred over time, but in Avatar, we begin with an almost complete physical infiltration, and the spiritual journey becomes that much more prominent. The spirit is in the foreground, the body always secondary, which is paradoxical for a film whose formal “body” is always more easily accessible than its philosophical relevance—its “spirit”.

Avatar is hardly the first film to wed the American foundational myth with a visual approach that itself comments on a foundational myth for cinema. One of the less comfortable parallels to this kind of historical and philosophical template is the aforementioned Jim Jarmusch masterpiece Dead Man. That neglected film, with its black-and-white, often silent formal approach (always taking on new visual strategies while embracing traditions) shares with Avatar not only the Native American-meets-New-Agey spirituality but also an interest in the Hindu process of reincarnation—an otherworldly forward step for both its characters and for the experience of cinema. In Avatar, (a film with a good amount of Hindu iconography, not least the blue-skinned warrior “gods” on earth) major moments of death are often connected to a new movement in life. Dead Man, too, is about an outsider’s journey towards, or through, an inevitable death, leading to another kind of life. Both films carry their lead characters through a world and landscape that is entirely foreign to them, steeped in a culture of great spiritual richness, and ends with their being “ferried” (in Dead Man this is literal) over to a new beginning, which importantly involves a very certain end. And in both instances, there is a physical transformation that is key to the process of reincarnation. By the end of Dead Man, Johnny Depp’s character is draped in all the customary garb and “makeup” required for a journey to the next world, for assimilation within a greater spiritual being. In Avatar’s closing scene, the lead’s human physique is annihilated for a “godly” form.

The link between the physical and spiritual is important for a film like Avatar, and it’s significant to note that it’s because of the way these aspects are braided that I don’t believe the film will be at all successful in a 2D incarnation. I honestly don’t know what kind of life this film will have in the world of home entertainment. It really dies with the big screen, because Cameron does not use 3D and the vast IMAX canvas simply as tools in service of pure spectacle. Avatar is the first “myth of the infiltrator” where the audience itself becomes a kind of infiltrator. The ones who see this film as it is meant to be seen are “reincarnated” or transported to another time, another place. So the act of infiltration is multiple. There’s Cameron, wide-eyed, entering a world of his creation, there is the lead character entering the culture and landscape of this alien planet and there is the audience placed in the middle of it all. This is where all the “birth of cinema” hyperbole and nonsense comes from. Cameron’s work is not really the film to end all films. What it does represent is a big step in the journey we’ve always taken towards our movies. Literally, towards our movies. Movie audiences, to some extent, have always wanted to pierce the invisible skin that separates us from the fascinating worlds of the movies we see and we experience. Avatar, at least visually, comes closest to allowing such a breach to occur. It places us in a new avatar as an audience who were never before as assimilated “physically” into the world of a motion picture. This reincarnation either represents a major violation or a major breakthrough. Like the effectiveness of sitting in a theater and watching the 3D illusion unfold, it depends on where, in the audience, you’re coming at it from.