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.
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