Ars Longa.. Vita Brevis

The Problem with Avatar(s) By Andrew Shaw-Kitch

The Problem with Avatar(s)

Last night I finally convinced myself that seeing Avatar was the best way to spend nearly three hours of my life. I was horribly wrong. The movie turned out to be more reprehensible than I imagined possible, and managed to insult me personally on a variety of levels, though, most directly, an undeviating attack on my intelligence. I found myself in the movie theater trapped in a self-reflexive hell as a hyper-critical version of myself within one of the layers of movie screen that were projecting back from the three-dimensional screen, my own avatar patronizing a primitively conceived reality, that, though initially considered a ridiculous other, becomes more real than what I knew to be real before, yada yada yada.

The problem with the movie’s rendering of the avatar adventures of its characters is that there is no self-awareness or respect of the irony in being someone else while remaining who you were to begin with. The only sense of the main character’s motivation—his cinematic essence—is that he is frustrated that he cannot walk. This gives Cameron license to bypass the insane quandaries that an intelligent movie would give a serious discussion in a few of the million frames of the movie—now that he can use his legs he gets so excited he sprints out of the hospital room in his new avatar self. There is still more than two hours of the movie and the protagonist has become actualized. In the traditions of the B movie and pulp science fiction, we are now expected to take a man seriously who is occupying the body of a ten-foot blue alien from the planet Pandora as he rides in a helicopter with a gigantic machine next to an equally blue and ten-foot tall Sigourney Weaver who is basically treating the situation like it were a semester abroad trip taken with her Anthropology students to a country not inhabited by white people. Ultimately it is a movie that is more informed by the B-movie tradition of our present era: reality TV, and, more specifically, its early-90s ground-breaker The Real World, its idiot kid brother Road Rules, and, of course, Survivor.

The superficiality of Jake Sully’s self-analysis is best represented by the hackneyed device by which it receives some pathetic treatment: a video diary that the avatar project requires him to do, one that would look exactly like Real World 54: Pandora. Avatar, like the project it documents, must pretend that its characters have something interesting to say as a mere formality, even though our main character only achieves any worthwhile thought when he manages to voice a cliché that the audience has already realized James Cameron was trying to get across in his paper thin analogies. The constant challenges and the documentation of the immediate moment is what makes reality television so appealing: we can pretend that the full story—why the fuck are we here?—can be reduced to petty bickering and an incredible celebration of the short-sighted.

Not to see oneself when everyone else does is the vulnerable position of television stars, and no case is more poignant than that of the reality TV contestant/star, who seems to have no sense of how ridiculous he becomes rendered by their participation in the charade, or, worse, he delight in the I’m-not-here-to-make-friends mindset. The case with Jake Sully is that he is so happy just to be walking around that he doesn’t see how fucking weird it is to be a giant blue alien, learning the ways of the other giant blue aliens, falling in love a giant blue alien, and, ultimately, that you are in an incredibly racist, painfully obvious analogy for the history of American imperialism.

This is treatment of character is entirely antithetical to aesthetic of 1990s icons: irony, by 1994, became an essential character trait to survive the sarcasm of television: Norm Peterson and Frasier Crane kicked Sam and Diane out of the bar, or rather Frasier moved to Seattle to look after his dad; Homer Simpson destroyed the image of the father; and Kevin Costner did not realize his movies are really cheesy and that Brian Adams was a gigantic joke. It’s only appropriate that Cameron has combined Dances With Wolves (Costner at his unaware best), The Lion King (Disney movies remained a last bastion for sincerity), and Terminator (his own humorless contribution to the era).

One’s capacity to exist in a different reality is the question of both Seinfeld and Avatar, and the relationship between those two realities is essentially the same in each: Seinfeld discusses what it means to act out joke versions of people’s lives and, in the case of Seinfeld, his own life, making his persona on camera a veritable avatar in the Pandora of pop culture, who has about as much self-awareness of the silliness of being an observational comic, as Jake Sully does in his Avatar self. The difference, of course, is that there is no self-aware perspective in Avatar, neither on the part of the ego-maniacal, daft protagonist or its main character on the other side of the camera. At least in reality television the producers are acknowledged artless sleazes, whereas James Cameron thinks he has made a very important movie, and so does the Hollywood Foreign Press; and so did the Academy Awards when he spent three hours sinking a big boat with an unmanageable amount of clichés.

Cold Turkey

Best viewed within its original fetish.. and not my re-creation.. please see thebookish.net for further details..

Ernesto Lopez

Rhetoric 189 – Fall 2009

Dr. Wintroub

Final Paper

Stones, a Theatre, and Fetish Anatomy

A way in…narrative prologue about rocks

In 1961 two Peruvian brothers, Carlos and Pablo Soldi a pair of ‘huaqueros,’ traveled down to the banks of the Ica River near their town nestled in the Ocucaje region of the coastal province centered around the city of Ica. The river had recently flooded and the waters were receding now, washing away much of the bank and leaving fresh earth exposed.

They trekked to the river on that day with the hope of finding something valuable there. They were astonished, as the story is told, to find that they happened upon a large cache of unearthed stones, bearing quixotic markings that gave them the appearance of belonging to a people and civilization now lost. The brothers gathered together as many of the stones as they could and headed back home.

For years they attempted to generate interest in the stones with collectors and archaeologists, in order to sell them, which was the nature of the brothers’ work. But they continued to be dogged by a lack of enthusiasm on their normal customers’ part. Years passed and the stones sat, isolated because of their inability to motivate their patrons.

Then some five years later in the city of Ica, far removed from the banks of the Ica River where the Soldi brothers made their discovery, Dr. Javier Cabrera, a local physician, received the gift of a bizarrely carved stone from his patient and friend Felix Llosa Romero. The stone sparked Cabrera’s interest. It had mysterious inscriptions that seemed to depict an ancient fish; which had once existed in the region but had gone extinct some millions of years before. The doctor was perplexed as to who made the engraving, and his friend Romero had no exact idea of the stones origin; he had only thought the doctor would enjoy the highly decorative gift.

Cabrera decided to go public with the stone, to see if anyone could come forward and help solve the mystery of its source. It generated a local media interest and the Soldi brothers heard of the doctor’s search. The stones that had fallen back into a dormant condition in their home were now enlivened again, having a conduit in the form of the media interest that that the doctor had stirred up. The brothers brought the stones back out into the light of day and took them to the doctor to be examined.

The stones delivered the blessing of a mutual benefit to the two parties. On the one hand Cabrera had finally found the origin of his own stone, and something worth even more …a whole set of hundreds of other similarly carved stones to continue turning his fascination. On the other hand the Soldi brothers finally found an outlet to sell their findings, the stones passed from their possession to the doctor’s, and in turn they received the money that they had hoped to collect years ago.

This was hardly the end of the stones though; rather it was their beginning. To some it was the beginning of an elaborate hoax marked with all the trappings of pseudo-science, to others it was the beginning of an elaborate resurrection of another history and a world-shaking revelation of our lost human past.

The stones, in the care of the doctor, went onto to communicate with the world, speaking a language of ancient existence. Not only ancient specimens of fish but dinosaurs as well appeared, living alongside men who hunted and dominated them. Men whose age, if accepted as true, would shatter all of our present understandings of evolution and the chronology of human development.

The stones went on, explaining that these men were not only old but also far superior in wisdom than us in our own modern age. These men had telescopes, which they used to predict astrological events. They created a system of cartography that allowed them to accurately produce world maps that rival our own. The stones tell us that they had complex understanding of human anatomy, performing open-heart surgery and extracting hormones that allowed organ transplants to take hold in bodies that received them.

The stones went on even after the doctor had passed away…communicating a history of fraud, of media manipulation and exploitative dealings. Suspect brothers and dubious claims made by doctors. The stones speak theories of ancient astronauts and claims about the proof of a Biblical creation.

The Peruvian government arrests farmers who sell them, and the farmers claim to have manufactured rather than discovered them; when asked why by the stream of journalists hailing from as far Germany and the BBC of Britain they respond: “Making these stones is easier than farming the land.”

They still call out, attracting tourists and researchers alike to their house in a Peruvian museum. There they still lead a mass of conversation, these Stones of Ica.

Another way in…the place of the body in the spaces of architecture and ceremony

Giovanna Ferrari weaves a memorable story about the anatomy theatre of Bologna. It had a long run; and in fact it’s still there. But as a sight for practical lessons and lecture it only operated for a century and a half. It was a local institution that began in the middle of the 17th century and carried on through the 18th, serving Bolognese students and the wider public as well.

But Ferrari’s tale is not about the mere didactic function of the theatre; instead it tells of the annual ceremony of a “public anatomy” held at carnival time. It was ceremonious because of its ritualistic drive, conducting a repeatable event each year that over time evolved; but still at its heart it retained an essential structure.

The theatre itself became an intersection of diverse attendees; academics, masked nobles, carnival goers, and “people who were not “of good quality” (Ferrari 99).” And also something larger, a meeting place between the living and the dead; a crossing of this world into the next; but most importantly between the place of the body and the space of the theater.

Like the ceremony the theatre too evolved. During the first century of operation its space was constantly being expanded and remodeled. It had an architecture that grew and matured, changing as it interacted with the crowds inside, and conforming to the needs of the culture and community outside.

Ferrari writes of its internal shape and decorum shifting with time; its seating modified over the years, its rules of personal decorum developed to legally bind attendees, and the aesthetics of its interior flourished into dramatic forms. While its exterior façade became a source of pride for the Bolognese, a tourist destination, and eventually a historical landmark preserved and kept by the city.

Then there is the place of the body in Ferrari’s account. Not only one, not necessarily the textbook of dead flesh under the examining blade, but also the examiner’s as well. The attendees, the external public of lawyers and priests who sanctified the corpse, and the community that grieved the loss of their dead; all of these are members of the place of the body at work in the space of the theatre.

The body, in many ways, is the theatre and the ceremony; that is to say it is central to their existence. The theatre and ceremony live, grow, and evolve because of how the body comes to inhabit their space. Rules of personal decorum for the attendees and processes of law surrounding the obtaining of a corpse speak to this fact.

The body arrives, legitimating its own appearance through the space of the theatre and the ceremony that it is placed in; and likewise the theatre and ceremony legitimize their space by having the place of the body fill them. When the body becomes replaceable, in the form of the corpse being effaced by the instrumentation of improved waxwork stand-ins (See Ferrari 58), then the dynamic of the body as the localizable site for theatre and ceremony is lost.

Ferrari’s story ends in a tragic tone. With the loss of the body comes the collapse of the spectacle of ceremony and topology of the theatre. The themes shift, the focuses change, and attitudes move-on; leaving the “public anatomy” archived away in the memory of pages left by scribes. The theatre still stands, but its space is now gone; contracted into the binds of books. Without the proper placement of the body as it originally inhabited it, the theatre and ceremony forget their own origin. It becomes a place of phantoms and shades, eerie and dissonant. Cut off and eternally untranslatable into the context of where it still stands.

Argumentum: Dreaming in a biology of analogous structures, a comparative anatomy of fetishes

The Anatomy Theatre of Bologna and the Ica Stones are worlds apart; yet somehow they still inhabit similar environments. A house has converted into a museum in order to accommodate the stones, and the theatre has become a museum of its own. The occurrence of these species’ ability to effect a re-ordering of their respective locales points to a possible study of their similar phylogenies. They are clearly different organisms, the theatre and the stones. However, perhaps they share a common philosophic organon; this paper will move forward according to the premise that they do.

The organizing principle that will be used to vet the similarities of the theatre and stones will follow from the four consistent themes that “inform the idea of the fetish,” as argued by William Pietz (Pietz). These two organisms will, in their own ways, be argued to represent the occurrence of fetishism.

The stones are clearly more available for this argument, while the theatre is not as easily reconcilable with the traditional view of what constitutes a fetish. The more obvious term to appropriate to an architectural space like the theatre is heterotopia, a place that exists outside of social order while paradoxically indexed within a social order (Foucault). Still, the theatre, according to Pietz’s themes, is a fetish too, if only because through its tenuous history it has been a representative of both a “locus of religious activity [and] psychic investment” (Pietz). This quality being part of the first theme in Pietz’s schema: untranscended materiality.

Before moving forward a note on the method of comparison: this essay is in no way suggesting that the application of Pietz’s themes equates to an absolute reducibility of the fetish; rather their use is mobilized here to better inform the idea of the fetish, as it is observed in these specific occurrences. Pietz’s themes are beautifully rendered not because they provide a meaning of the fetish, but because they make the meaning of the fetish problematic. They present the opening for a descriptive critique, approaching and unfolding an object in a holistic, not reducible, manner.

First Theme: Untranscended Materiality

As stated above the theatre represents an untranscended materiality; that is a material object that becomes the locus of desire for religious and psychic commitment. That the theatre has been an object is available by its history of constant shaping; it is not viewed necessarily as a place, which is preserved in order to domicile, it can also be viewed as only a space, which is shaped in order to accommodate. At various moments in its history the theatre has moved between the categories of place and space, at times housing and at others being an object of matter. When it was the place of public anatomy lessons it served as a house for bodies, and when it served as monument of civic pride it was a material object housed within the larger city of Bologna.

Likewise, the Ica stones share in this condition of materiality. When they are encountered they serve as objects available for reflection. They are both objects housed within museums. Still, the theatre as object is paradoxically housed within itself as museum, giving it the added dimension of possibly transgressing into a heterotopic frame as well.

Both objects are sites of religious and psychic investment, and both become a localizable site of this investment. The stones are scrutinized at the local level of their surface, examined by the trained eye of professionals and under the technical eye of instruments. The theatre was the site of the occurrence of ceremony in its past, and now serves as a site of research and tourism in the present. In each case they come to have sets of beliefs and facts attached to them; which give rise to larger stories and practices that individuals commit in relation to them.

Second Theme: Radical Historicality

Each object has a persistent origin, creating instances of radical historicality. Pietz describe radical historicalities as emerging from extraordinary moments; which in turn gather together a discrete array of elements and actors. These historical moments of gathering become radical in that they present an “enduring capacity to repeat this singular process of fixation, along with the resultant effect” (Pietz).

The Ica Stones bring a radical historicality, in that their appearance always arrests an observer and presents a rupture of scientific logic, which the observer is forced to reconcile; sometimes in their favor, and at others against. The theatre functions in the same way. In its classical mode it served as a repeatable entrance into a localized ceremony, which developed its own history. In its modern mode it has become a site that functions like the Ica Stones, confronting researchers and tourists with the contingent conditions of their own existence, among other concerns.

Third Theme: The Contextualized Contextualizer

Pietz writes, “the dependence of the fetish for its meaning and value [rests] on a particular order of social relations, which it in turn reinforces” (Pietz). The Ica Stones were without meaning or value until a doctor brought media speculation onto them. This awakened a possibility of meaning for the stones, taken up by a public that became fascinated with them. In turn they have now continued to ascribe a meaning and value unto themselves through the fostering of a media industry around them. To name a few: they are a tourist destination, a stimulus to the local economy of Ica, and serve as proof for fringe theories.

The theatre too, has a meaning which has always been reliant on the social order that locates it. Ferrari’s article speaks of how its lifespan is a peculiar feat, since other anatomy theaters hardly survived as long. This is part and parcel with the theatre’s ability to reinforce its relationship to its community, adapting when necessary to changes in public opinion and mood. This is still true of it today, having now found another life as a museum.

Fourth Theme: The External Organ

This final theme is described as “the active relation of the fetish object to the living body of the individual: a kind of external controlling organ directed by powers outside the affected person’s will” (Pietz). The Ica Stones are a force in the lives of people who seek to reconcile themselves to them. For the believer they are devices of communication, which literally speak of a distant past world. For the tourist the stones present a site of curious attraction, drawing the tourist to their museum. And for the skeptic they represent the stakes in an argument about authentic and inauthentic appropriations of scientific understanding.

The theatre, in its past, held a literal control over the bodies that came to it, both living and dead. As a contemporary museum it has many of the same attractive and intellectually seductive qualities as the Ica Stones. They are a site compelling to seekers of attractions, as well as an enticing location of historical value which creates an impetus for scholarly work.

Concluding Remarks

These two organisms, stones and theatre, are arguably of similar phylogenies, belonging to a category of fetishism. Seen as fetish object they can be approached anew, and perhaps read with fresh vision. That they have been organized as such presents no solutions to the mystery of their occurrences; but it does offer a way of allowing their unique problems to resonate in a novel manner, giving a possible beginning of encountering them once again as if for the first time.

Bibliography

Ica Stones Resources:

Coppens, Filip. "Jurassic library - The Ica Stones." 2001. Fortean Times. 2009 http://www.forteantimes.com/features/articles/259/jurassic_library_the_ica_stones.html

The Mysteries of the Gods; online video recording; accessible at: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6113175402315678182&ei=gC4rS47iDYfYqAOU-In8BA

The Theatre of Bologna Resources:

Ferrari, Giovanna. "Public Anatomy Lessons and the Carnival: The Anatomy Theatre of Bologna." Past and Present No. 117 (1987). http://thebookish.net/files/ferrari.pdf

Fetish Resources:

Foucault, Michel. "Of Other Spaces (1967), Heterotopias." foucault.info. 2009 http://foucault.info/documents/heteroTopia/foucault.heteroTopia.en.html

Pietz, William. "The Problem of the Fetish II." Res Spring (1987): 23-45. http://www.jstor.org/pss/20166762