Having immensely enjoyed the audio-visual orgy of James Cameron’s Avatar, as the kind of out-of-body experience that big movies are for, I find myself feeling sorry for the many conservatives – published critics, self-publishing bloggers, and commenters – who have blanketed, one might say wet-blanketed, the right side of the internet with their complaints and indictments.
Hollywood has given our anti-nonsense reflexes a lot of exercise in recent years, but I had still expected greater enthusiasm for this movie, or at worst neutrality, from conservatives. Regardless of how some people feel about Cameron personally, or about any statements he may have made about Avatar‘s intended messages, he remains the same director who gave us Terminator, Terminator 2, Aliens, and True Lies. By the day that the Avatar trailer played to a national NFL TV audience and on the gigantic new video screen at Cowboys Stadium, it was clear to millions that an audacious effort was under way to re-vitalize the great American movie spectacle – a $400 million gamble by one of our leading auteur-entrepreneurs, in the shape of an advertisement for democratic capitalism at its most innovative, and for the creativity and vitality of American culture during a time when American declinism and every other brand of pessimism about our future have been spreading to an extent not seen since the 1970s.
Those on the right who have been impotently and priggishly attacking the movie, their small-spirited wishes for its failure decisively dashed by a quick $1 Billion in worldwide ticket sales, have not just been embarrassing themselves and their political-cultural allies. They may even have been doing harm to the conservative movement, at least as much as the movie itself may do with its incidental Gore- and Obamaisms.
No one is obligated to like any film, of course. One blogger’s eye candy is another blogger’s eye strain, but the first reviews from the right didn’t just seek some distance from off-putting aspects of Avatar, they full-throatedly assaulted the entire effort. “Cameron’s ‘Avatar’ Is a Big, Dull, America-Hating, PC Revenge Fantasy,” was the headline over Big Hollywood‘s review, which included a bizarre attempt to charge Cameron with politically exploiting 9/11. Other rightwing bloggers seemed to compete with each other over who could write the best put-downs: “cinema for the hate America crowd,” “Production: $183,000,000. Script: $14.25,” Dances with Smurfs – drink more vodka and 3-D headache goes away,”"a suicide fantasy, the Hollywood blockbuster equivalent of a troubled teenager’s notebook sketches, scribbled by someone who hates himself only marginally less than he hates the rest of the world.” Gregg Easterbrook, not on the right but here writing from a right-ish perspective, even got espn.com in on the action, explaining at length why soldiers and I guess mining engineers, too, ought to feel deeply “insulted” by the film.
John Podhoretz’s review at The Weekly Standard bought its ticket for the put-down sweepstakes with the title “Avatarocious.” In the review itself, Podhoretz writes of astonishment, not headaches, at the film’s technical achievement, but compensates with the critic’s equivalent of a cuss-out: “blitheringly stupid… among the dumbest movies I’ve ever seen… an undigested mass of clichés… unbelievably banal and idiotic” and so forth. Unfortunately for his credibility as a reviewer, however, he repeatedly refers to the film as humorless, at one point asserting that “it doesn’t have a single joke in it.” Anyone who has actually seen the film, or merely viewed the TV ads and trailers, is left to wonder whether Podhoretz was too busy re-combining derogatory phrases in his head to be paying minimal attention to the movie – which, to be clear, offers a Cameron-typical assortment of one-liners and visual gags. As for Avatar‘s themes, Podhoretz declines to take them seriously except to argue that Cameron’s presumed marketing calculations may demonstrate how “deeply rooted… anti-American, anti-human politics” have become.
Like other reviewers, Podhoretz also indulges in the predictable and familiar charge that the movie’s narrative elements are predictable and familiar. Since Avatar stands in other ways as novelty itself – right before your eyes, in glorious 3-D – to focus overly much on derivative aspects of its storyline would seem an ungracious gesture, even if its selections from among finite narrative alternatives (boy meets female humanoid, boy loses female humanoid, etc.) were poorly justified or badly executed. I don’t concede the last, but, either way, audiences would likely have been disappointed if Cameron had denied them certain expected narrative beats – the step by step development of the love interest, the hero’s education to the ways of the alien tribe. A significant part of the pleasure of a movie like this one is seeing traditional story elements transformed in a new setting, while otherwise the narrative chiefly serves to organize, elaborate, and extend the sensual experience.
Same for the dialogue, another common attack point: Whether you respect the craft on display or decry its lack of expressive power and wit, the dialogue is not the movie’s main, secondary, or even tertiary reason for existence. Anyway, as someone who in a previous life read and critiqued thousands of screenplays, I feel professionally qualified, very likely much better qualified than any of the critics I’ve quoted, to declare Avatar‘s dialogue better than movie-competent – maybe a little broader than necessary even for an all-ages global audience, but at the same time demonstrative of Cameron’s unrivaled skill at inserting new phrases into popular discussion: “I see you!” may be a bit too peek-a-boo to achieve the same status as “I’ll be back,” but it’s already an understood punch-line on the Daily Show and RedEye.
The charges of being anti-American and anti-military might seem more significant, but they’re harder to take seriously in relation to a film that includes exactly as many references to the United States of America as Podhoretz says it has jokes: Zero.
The movie is set in the year 2154, a multi-lightyear interstellar void away from planet Earth. We never learn whether the U.S. of A even exists 140+ years from now. The soldiers do seem American, some Australian accents notwithstanding, but, even so, our main character informs us early on that they are the tools of corporate interests, not the armed forces of a nation: “Back home, we fight for freedom. Out here, we’re hired guns.” It’s possible that corporatist liberals in the Vietnam Era LBJ mode may have come to power in the elections of 2148 or so, assuming there were elections, but we don’t really know the precise extent to which the soldiers are mercenaries, and, if not, whether they’re misused conscripts or volunteers or something wholly other and 22nd Century.
At most, the force represents a military or paramilitary force with some apparent American roots or resonances, on a mission gone wrong, its bad ends defeated by… a typically exceptional, highly sympathetic, and more than equally American, underdog-supporting Marine and his friends. To call the resultant developments “anti-military” or “anti-American” would be like calling “Dirty” Harry Callahan, Die Hard‘s John McClane, and Robocop‘s Officer Murphy anti-police figures; or calling John Rambo an anti-American and anti-war icon. Following this paranoid logic, the same logic that has led some conservatives to mis-identify Jason Bourne as anti-American, 300‘s Leonidas would become an icon of kneejerk leftwing anti-imperialism. Mr. Smith Goes to Washington becomes an attack on constitutional government. Mr. Incredible becomes an animated Ché Guevara. All of them, even Leonidas (and even Ché as fictional construct, come to think of it), are typical and very American heroes, loners whose personal characters, experiences, and moral courage lead them to fight against enemies who have corrupted and distorted whatever powerful forces or institutions they have come to control.
Such hero figures are legion in American popular art, with a lineage stretching back to America’s origins as a revolutionary and Judeo-Christian enterprise, and to our first breakaway action blockbuster, James Fenimoore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans, featuring Hawkeye, the ultimate “gone-native” American warrior. Our Hawkeyes are almost always isolated, and are frequently reviled – on the way to eventual, audience-pleasing redemptions, when “everyone” realizes how right they always were. In Avatar “everyone” is represented on screen by the defeated soldiers and corporate lackeys sent bedraggledly back to from where they came, secondarily by those who will greet them – Terrans or Americans who, we are repeatedly given to believe, would also disapprove of what the depraved Colonel Quaritch orders his soldiers to do.
Conservatives should have little difficulty envisioning Avatar‘s bad guys as futuristic neo-liberals and their lackeys, unrestrained by authentic republican democracy, indulging in ill-conceived and gradually escalated measures that inevitably lurch to overkill and self-defeat, but many of us have forgotten both our real history and our movie history – the truths of Vietnam and Somalia, for example, and also the truths underlying the final scenes of a bygone conservative fave like Rambo, a glorious rampage against military bean counters and their machines. Bad or misled American soldiers have done bad things on bad American orders, and it’s not un-American or anti-military or un-conservative to admit as much, to try to understand why, to hope for and believe in something better, or to dramatize it all for broad consumption.
The conservative Avatar-haters know this all as well as anyone, a fact that makes me think that what they’re really unhappy about has little to do with Avatar, and much more to with Hollywood’s near complete refusal to celebrate America’s contemporary military heroes. I share that disappointment: There are by now several Summers’ worth of un-made blockbusters that should have portrayed the brilliant feats of arms and moral courage of American soldiers in places that for most of us might as well be alien planets.
On the happy Wednesdays and Fridays of at least one possible future in which those movies are finally released, blowing and bloodying up theaters in vivid 3D, Avatar may indeed be revealed as a relic of an abbreviated Age of Obama. Yet most of those stories, if treated honestly and interestingly, will likely depict the dynamic tension between, on the one side, bad ideas, bad leadership, and tragic costs in blood and treasure, and, on the other side, the valiance of our real-life Rambos: Jake Sully Petraeus opposing an array of institutional forces… accused of going native… gathering a few allies… learning to fight, think, and work with insurgents… on the way to a glorious synthesis of high tech Americanism and indigenous culture.
I predict that few conservatives will be complaining at that time, if it ever comes, about predictable story beats.
As for the other criticisms of Avatar, I find it odd that anyone is significantly concerned with the conjectural practicalities of “unobtanium” mining, or the next-century economics of spinal medicine. I don’t see a conservative problem with a good-hearted red-blooded tech-enabled American guy fighting for truth, justice, and the 10-foot-tall blue humanoid he very monogamously loves. I’m not willing to give the theme of spiritual re-birth – “one life ends, another begins” – to the left or leave it for New Age hippies only, partly because I don’t see Christianity as merely a “suicide fantasy.” And it strikes me that something may have gone wrong in American conservatism if any hint of the “noble savage,” of intimate and mysterious connections to nature as God’s creation, has become off-limits according to the same people who, at a different time of the day or night, or a different blog post, will be celebrating the authentic frontier virtues, character, and elitist-mystifying spirituality of Sarah Palin.
Finally, the idea that the film (or, in theory, any film) could be “anti-human” may be the most interesting criticism, partly for its relation to extreme environmentalism, but mainly because it’s confronted directly within Avatar‘s own central themes – the parallel pscyhological, technical, and emotional challenges before the hero, the film maker, and the audience: to recognize the “Na’vi” as human; to see refusal of their humanity as wrong, primordially inhumane. It’s a dynamic similar to the one at the center of Blade Runner – Deckard and his “replicant” beloved Rachel, and us, on one side; “skin-job”-hating cops on the other (Roy Batty flying above everyone).
Cameron’s ability to exploit such “true lies” in his story concepts and on the level of form goes back to the Terminator, a character whose outward humanity was precisely the condition of his threat to humanity. Since that time, Cameron’s science fiction has crossed back and forth across the question “what is human?” – as in Aliens‘ species-traitor Burke, less human than an acid-blooded monster; as in the machine from T2 who fully attains humanity in a paradoxical final act of self-sacrifice. Along the way, in exquisitely multi-leveled film-authorial gestures, the supposed neo-Luddite Cameron has also explored the ability of special effects technology to erase the difference between “natural” and “manufactured” realities in the universe of cinema. The objective testimony of box office receipts proves he has done so with fantastic success. The lack of interest by supposedly conservative critics in such matters, and their unconsciousness of where they’re aligning themselves, will prompt a fan of the film to wonder who in the end the real skowns are.
Do American conservatives now believe that the left owns nature, spirituality, communitarian values, bold trips where no one has gone before, and all willingness to defy mealy-mouthed corporate squishes and sociopaths in or out of uniform? Of course not. But some are acting that way. Playing up and then decrying these messages, in this context, implicitly defining them as wholly owned property of the left, is to cede invaluable cultural and therefore political ground for no good reason. At a certain point, it becomes something worse than “blithering stupidity”: It becomes an unforced, hard to repair political error, reinforcing the stereotype of the conservative as aggressively defensive moralizer, living in a world of his own anger and prejudice. It’s a much less attractive and interesting place than James Cameron’s Pandora.
cross-posted from Zombie Contentions
imadds,
I was thinking of linking that! It is hilarious. But, truthfully, Pocahontas had better dialog………..
I couldn’t agree more. I read the Hot Air review and was turned off by the very thought of seeing this film. I then broke down and saw it with my family. It was fantastic and to all of my conservative brethern……Lighten up!
Every A-Team episode, most b movie westerns and a hoard of other classic films have the strong preying on the weak, and they are not typically an indictment of America. A perfect example is the Magnificent Seven… Bad guys versus the good guys…
I for one will take the “reviewers” a LOT less seriously
Of course, so caught up in the anti-war message of the film, many mainstream conservatives are missing the most blatant and dangerous propaganda it presents: anti-whiteness.
Avatar – the Latest Anti-Western Movie From Hollywood
CK – you’re an idiot. Because the movie has already grossed $1 billion, all of its conservative critics are wrong? What a sap.
The criticisms of ass-wipe Cameron and his junior-high political philosophy are spot-on, and if you don’t have an interest in motion pictures crafted above the level of Fern Gully, great. Enjoy.
I won’t be wasting my time.
Bing
Hi CK, I thought your review of Avatar was pretty good, one of the better ones I’ve read. I haven’t seen the movie yet, so I don’t have a dog in the critics’ debate. I’ve got you down in the ‘liked it’ column.
However, I think your contribution to the debate would have been better without the figurative food-flinging in the 3rd paragraph, wherein you charge that critics are “impotent” and “priggish,” “small-spirited,” “embarrassing” (to you, I guess) and, the uber-insult, “doing harm to the conservative movement.” Whew! Did you proof read this before posting, or did David Brooks sneak in a few lines when you weren’t watching? I’m guessing the latter, because the person who wrote the third paragraph surely would not also have ended the essay as you did with a zinger about the “stereotype of the conservative as aggressively defensive moralizer.”
Hey, I cried at the end of Titanic. What real man wouldn’t? I mean she took that priceless gem and just tossed it into the drink. I would’ve said “Whoa, whoa, grandma, come back here.”
What a brilliant approach! You know, some people, when trying to influence their ostensible allies, might use reason and logic to make their case.
But not you!
You instead use insults and bizarre, preening self-aggrandizement, all layered on with an odd hostility.
I’M CONVINCED!
:roll:
As a Conservative I too enjoyed the film and have recommended it to others with the caveat that, although it is a great overall experience, it does push Liberal ideas.
Since Hollywood is full of Liberals it is only normal that they would produce material that is a product of how they view the world. Since they see the world through a Liberal prism their world view is naturally going appear in the storyline in some way.
As a Conservative I largely ignore the Liberal aspects of a film that I enjoy watching. As a Conservative parent I use these Liberal undercurrents laced in Hollywood entertainment to educate the broken philosophy and logic of the Liberal perspective.
A point:
CK, in Part II, the Vietnamese chick isn’t a communist. People tend to forget that Vietnam wasn’t the U.S. against the Vietnamese. It was the South Vietnamese (non-communists) vs. the North (communists) with the U.S. allying with the South. Rambo befriends a Vietnamese woman actively fighting the communist regime. Your example actually cuts against your argument.
The bottom line is that if you have NOT seen Avatar, you can STFU until you do. Otherwise, your opinion is irrelevant.
Not really – I thought it was an interesting plot parallel just on the level of character and development – in relation to an argument a commenter made. I agree and in fact accept as obvious that the differences between the scenarios are otherwise vast. The hero with a thousand faces appears in thousands of different settings and predicaments.
Why should actually knowing what you’re talking about influence your stance? What other people think should be good enough – especially if that’s what it takes to be a member of the club. Anything else is… is… RINO stuff!
/sarc
watson007 on January 10, 2010 at 11:27 AM
Maybe. But what’s good and true in those movies you like despite their liberal messages is still good and true, and, if the messages are wrong or incomplete, will tend to rebut, undermine, or expose them.
I really liked Sherlock Holmes.
The fact that you saw fit to echo the 11:54 stfu comment is pathetic, imo.
What the director says about a movie, what critics say about a movie (like I love Ace’s reviews) or insights like Doc Zero’s should help market decision. Any smart perosn wants return on investment.
Seeing now how this is an argument that is partly emotional invested for you, I regret taking the time to have read this post at all.
I’ll use your comments, since it’s so polite and thoughtful, to stand for all of the comments that suggest my language was too strong or unkind – and say that I don’t see anything I suggested about other conservative critics as being even remotely as strong as “anti-American,” “anti-military,” “anti-human,” “blithering idiocy” etc., etc. – just to review the commentaries I directly referenced.
I call “conservative as aggressively defensive moralizer” a stereotype because in my experience that’s exactly what it is – a stereotype. The overwhelming verdict of the market doesn’t make Avatar a great or even a good film, or even a soundly conceived film, but it does suggest that a lot of people are interested in it, are seeing it more than once, are encouraging their friends to see it, etc.
I happen to think that audiences with their “A” ratings are better than half right, and that even if it’s the wrong ratio, the A-haters should consider the possibility that there’s a lot there that people find rewarding – acknowledge it, and, if possible, use it on their own behalf.
Lighten up.
I’d rather just wise up. I am not offended, was just mistaken as to the value of this discussion and the method in which I thought was being pursued. The position you have fallen back on is is chickenhawk territory and intellectually weak. And considering the criticisms of your critique are valid, especially because of Cameron’s own comments. Rebutted by – shut up, that’s why? I’m done here.
It’s not just your opinion.
It’s too bad CK didn’t lead off this stupid article with that in the first place. It would have saved a lot of time, but I guess his love of Avatar should have been a clue that getting to the point in a timely fashion wasn’t a priority.
Unless, of course, you’ve seen any of the other dozen movies made in just the past 30 years alone which even Avatar’s most vocal admirers have readily admitted that it was shamefully ripped off from. (rolls eyes)
Most of us skeptics aren’t trying to be “a member of the club”, thank you very much, Mr. MacLeod. We’ve simply seen enough other identical, by-the-numbers, cookie-cutter leftist crap over the years to know exactly where this is coming from and where it will go, and as such, we see no reason to bother with it.
If you liked it, great. More power to you. But don’t try to tell me that I’m embarrassing myself or somehow doing harm to the conservative movement by way of my decision to stay home.
I’m just not interested in being a member of that club, you see.
I didn’t accuse you of being a RINO, nor have I seen a lot of other people doing the same. I simply rejected your interpretation of the movie, and backed it up with reasons why I thought you were wrong. Seems as though rejection of your view by many of the denizens of this board has caused you to feel like a martyr.
Whatever.
And your endoresement of the aptly named uknowmorethanme’s childish view that we should all just “STFU” doesn’t speak well of you. But when your argument isn’t very good I guess that’s the kind of stuff you fall back on.
Are you on medication or something? It’s aint about the Avatar visual merits. It’s about you hallucinating that a flick about bunch of military dudes, who are nothing but a violent corporate tools, invading a peaceful place and killing indigenous peoples to take their natural resources do not constitute a pice of leftwing propaganda.
Happens all the time. The opposite, too – rightwing actors portraying leftists. Gay actors potraying “ladies men.” You may be shocked to learn that, as far as anyone has shown, Anthony Hopkins is NOT a cannibalistic serial killer. And he didn’t write all of his own lines either.
Bourne opposes authoritarian ends-justifies-the-means bureaucrats of exactly the sort that Obama-Pelosi-Reid hope to put in charge of your
death panelshealth care. Most of the Bourne movies follow the approximate plots of several other Tom Clancy novels that have never to my knowledge been seriously attacked on the right – think of CLEAR AND PRESENT DANGER, for example.Both Pam Landy – Bourne’s inside-the-CIA ally – and the pilot character who helps Jake Sully use the same lines when they decide to oppose their institutions gone wrong: “This isn’t what I signed up for.” There’s nothing un-American about refusing an unlawful and immoral order. In fact, Americans are the ones who made sure to encode that position into law. I support it. Do you?
The danger of democratic governmental and other institutions to go wrong is more American than apple pie, and a critical American conservative insight that goes back to the founding.
Spirit of 1776 on January 10, 2010 at 12:34 PM
Sheez – I took your comments seriously and respectfully, and replied to them in detail, and because I responded jokingly on the side of some commenter who replied to Avatar experts-who-never-saw-it with an “STFU,” you’ve now got a case of hurt feelings?
Then I’m going to need you to explain this to me. The commenter made this point:
Your response was this:
Yeah, a Vietnamese chick. Not a VC chick. The chick is fighting against the VC.
It seems pretty clear that this fact undermines your rebuttal. D.GOOCH
Another point:
The Bourne movies are actually excellent examples of Leftwing propaganda disguised as popcorn action flicks. Except the Bourne movies are even worse transgression, as it took a popular pro-American book series and explicitly and intentionally turned it into Leftwing agitprop.
In the books, Bourne is not fighting America. Do you recall the CIA Bureau chief in the first film? You know, the villan? He was Bourne’s best friend in the books. The villan is Carlos the Jackal, an international terrorist. Bourne is a patriot.
Look, the lefwting agitprop in the Bourne movies is obvious. But even if it weren’t, if you listen to the director’s commentary on the original movie (hint: I have), you can hear him do exactly what Cameron did: expliticly admit he took the Bourne series on with the express intention of subverting its message. He expresses hatred and disdain for Reagan and the conservative Cold War ideology and saw the Bourne books as illustrative of that viewpoint. So he changed the story to fit his own Leftwing ideas.
That you missed it in Bourne…as you’ve clearly missed it in Avatar…speaks volumes.
I can understand why some conservatives are staying away from this movie. I personally don’t have a desire to see it. What I don’t understand is why leftists are so desperate to defend it. People attacked the religious message of Passion of the Christ and Lion, Witch and the Wardrobe. It’s silly for those on the left who did so to be so offended because people don’t like the movie they are so crazy about. Some of us just don’t care about their movie. There will be others in 3D that we can enjoy at a later date. It’s not the end of the world if we miss this one.
As a Cameron fan who thinks T 1 & 2 the best movies of all time and a libertarian rather than true conservative, I wasn’t deterred by conservative criticisms of Avatar. I went to see it with my nephew, active-Navy, and he detected no anti-military bias.
Despite that, I was much disappointed in Cameron’s effort here. Cameron has the ability to play to a broad movie audience yet still weave in elements for the intelligent movie-goer. That was missing this time. Without elaborating, Avatar was simplistic, trite, wooden and comic-booky in a way that today’s crop of comic-book movies have surpassed.
Eisenhower’s bogey-man military-industrial complex as reflected in the Lang and Ribisi characters was cardboard-cutout stuff and even the lengthy probing of the soldier-vs-warrior dilemma, which I would expect to find interesting, was just a muddle.
Poor movie making on a grand scale. And there was plenty there for conservative (and other) critics to gag on.
Doctor Zero on January 10, 2010 at 2:08 AM
Seeing a film as anti-human that was made by human beings, enjoyed by millions of human beings, with sympathetic human beings in the lead and winning in the end – that’s what takes work, or, in your case, in my opinion and as I argued extensively and in detail, a misinterpretation and forced reading.
The main reason, I believe, that Avatar might not have greatly benefited from your story notes is that its main objective was making an alien environment and its aliens feel real – and in the latter case, human. It’s a science fiction representation of the statement “nothing human is alien to me.” It puts forth a synthesis of familiarly human and un-familiarly human, amidst cooperation and mutual respect, as a higher goal than selfishness and plunder. No American conservative should have any difficulty with the theme on those terms. It was essential to the plot that the hero be adequately motivated not just to fight against his former comrades, but finally accept total re-birth into a new body and new life.
The themes could certainly have been handled in a variety of different ways – and have been in cinematic and literary science fiction and fantasy. The very fact that we can have this discussion is strong evidence that, however you come down in the end on Cameron’s choices, he did a creditable job of putting them before us. With flying dragons.
And any of that is even half as strong as “anti-American,” “anti-human,” “anti-military” “adolescent” “blitheringly idiotic” “dumbest ever” “suicide fantasy”?
Perhaps, but many of those “ideas and obsessions” – respect for nature and the environment, respect for other “races” and belief systems, openness to new ideas and experiences, lawful and fair not dishonest and oppressive interaction with other nations, etc. – are all values that I suspect you want to be able to claim not just as equally, but as more the rightful property of American conservatism.
Perhaps someday we can discuss ecology and environmentalism in greater detail, and separately from Avatar. The problem in my view isn’t that kids are conscious of the environment, but that they have accepted a completely non-ecological (i.e., statist-liberal) understanding of how ecology works and what it means, and why pestering Mom & Dad about the AC is a poor, illusory substitute for doing what we need to do to build a prosperous and sustainable civilization worth living in. It should be what the left calls a “teachable moment” for conservatives, but being able to teach the lesson requires understanding its premises.
Shout away, but don’t make a bad situation worse by shouting about the wrong things, and driving listeners beyond the HotAir amen corner away.
You acknowledge that Avatar is “culturally significant.” I agree – though it will be a while before we know how much of a landmark and what kind of a landmark it is. It could be the cultural high point of Gore-Obamaism, or more a motion picture Copenhagen, with the seeds of the next cultural complex visible in the ruins of the old. Or it could depend on how we handle it. Shouting at the movie’s fans, and its makers, as though they’re teenagers who are interested in the “wrong” things is unlikely to bring them to your side any more quickly. More often than not, it makes them cling harder.
I didn’t really consider the point the other commenter was making to be significant enough to require a rebuttal vis-a-vis the main argument – that being in opposition to rotten institution or enterprise doesn’t make a military hero “anti-military.” Pandora does not equal Vietnam. Rambo does not equal Jake Sully, though as a character type in the broad sense he comes closer. The love interest does coincide with the each character’s praiseworthy and (in context) unique ability to “go native” – synthesize American and Vietnamese experiences – but, to say the least, other aspects of the scenarios are very different.
See thread above for discussion of the intentional fallacy. The only thing stupider than 90% of reviews are 95% of commentaries by artists about their own work. I tend to avoid them if I like what they’ve done, since a lot of the time it’s a turn-off to see a creative genius expose himself as a boring schlub. Often, the personal cost of doing good work is much higher than even the artist realizes. One reason that so many (not all) creative types are insufferable is that they’ve poured their humanity and vision into their works, leaving little behind.
Art works by its own rules. Lots of people fool themselves into thinking that they control the muse, and can use her for their own purposes. If it’s not in fact the other way around, then the results aren’t usually very interesting at all.
CK, post-modern “critical” analysis is nonsense. You can’t take a movie, book, play, etc. and make it whatever you want it to be. Movies have messages. The message isn’t coming from the ether. It is coming from a living, breathing human being who has something to say. That what Cameron had to say was Leftist, childish drek doesn’t change this fact. Bourne, in the books, was a patriotic CIA officer actively working to bring in a foreign international terrorist. In the movie, he is an anti-American traitor who is portrayed sympathetically relative to the evil American institution he used to work for (an institution he only worked for because of a mad-scientist chemical conditioning program which forced him to act as a CIA agent).
This is from the movie. Doctor Zero’s evidence on Avatar was derived from the movie. All Cameron’s (and the Bourne Identity Director’s) explict comments do is confirm that the message that is blazoned across the length and breadth of their films was intentional. Why you think you can ignore this is beyond me. D.GOOCH
To make this clear, let’s look at an example. Doctor Zero makes the point that the movie has plot confusion, such as the discongruence between the anti-corporatist “this is all about profit” message and the environmentalist “we have failed to follow the enviornmental true path and have destroyed the world” message. You responded:
You’re wrong (I’ve seen the movie). Both in Sully’s line where he asserts that we’ve “killed our mother” back on Earth and in the overlaid narrative at the end where the defeated humans are sent back to their “dying planet” we find the later message. You, however, assert that Doctor Zero is wrong. He isn’t wrong. He’s right. The guy who went wrong was Cameron — in trying to make both points in his movie he introduces confusion and inconsistency into the narrative. This is EXACTLY what film criticsm is about, irrespective of what you think about this message.
You, however, criticize the critic…rather than the movie maker:
Yes, it is contradictory. That doesn’t mean that Doctor Zero has misinterpreted a message in the film. It means that one message in the film contradicts another message in the film. Which is a mistake/error by *Cameron*…not Doctor Zero. The problem is the inconsistency in Cameron’s ideology (the ideology he is promoting through this medium)…not in Doctor Zero’s accurate criticism of it.
Note to all:
Since I’ve explicitly taken on a near-consensus among conservative critics on this film, I decided that I would attempt to reply to all thoughtful and reasonably open-minded comments, to the best of my ability. I apologize to anyone I’ve left out so far, and will try to get to everyone sooner or later – perhaps later today.
I don’t, however, accept any obligation to respond to people who drop by to offer personal attacks – whether those attacks are based on forced and prejudicial readings (either of the movie, often without having seen it, or of my critique) or just on bad manners.
One note before I leave for the moment: it is actually more characteristic of post-modernist criticism to include, and often to politicize, “everything.” The treatment of the work as an end in itself is now more a feature of conservative critical schools, attacked by Marxists and fascists as “bourgeois aestheticism,” and by neo-Marxists in more contemporary terms. The privileging of political and social “messages,” and the definition of artist as primarily a social-political message-sender, is the stuff of statist art and grant proposals sent to the National Endowment for the Arts.
CK, I’m not sure why you posted a note to “all” when it is clearly directed at some. In so doing, you’re unlikely to influence the individuals your comment is aimed at and you’re going to leave the innocent (of which, I assume, I am a part) wondering if that comment was directed at them.
I agree with your sentiment, however, and endorse it. Personal attacks are inappropriate and you have no obligation to respond to them. Besides, having a bad taste in movies doesn’t make you a RINO, anyway. I’d have reccomended you just ignore them…rather than posting a general, non-specific note to “everyone.” Your behavior would tell the tale and discourage further transgressions. I fear your note may prove more inducement than deterrent.
That said, three cheers for respectful debate.
D.GOOCH
Creating “political” messages in works that lack them is indeed poor criticism. Equal to, I believe, the error in ignoring clear political messages in works that have them and are intended to have them. It isn’t post-modern to note that Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged” is a critique of socialism and a tribute to market capitalism.
def, DGOOCH, however flawed my note may have been, part of my intention was not to leave any people like yourself with the impression that I was ignoring them. As for you yourself, I look forward to addressing your comments in detail later on, and I hope you check back – whether it’s for another round or just to let me have my (umpteenth counter-)say is up to you.
Another example that Avatar’s plot is not so original…
A point that just occurred to me: there are two distinct POV’s in the criticism of Avatar – there is the conservative critique of Avatar and there is the film criticism of Avatar. The conservative critique is obviously aimed at the political messages in the film. However, the criticism of the narrative, plot, dialogue, etc. isn’t particularly conservative, despite the fact that many conservative critics have echoed those criticisms in their own reviews.
My point is that it isn’t just conservatives who think this is a dumb movie with a simplistic, derivative and cartoonish plot, bad dialogue, and ridiculous narrative transitions. And it isn’t just conservatives taking note of the overt political messages in the film. For example:
“Look, I have no problem with big, vacuous entertainment. If it looks good, and the principals make it fun, then I don’t really care how stupid it is. The worst thing about Cameron’s latest epic is that he wants—practically demands—for you to take it seriously, with its environmental message and “war on terror” parallels. It’s a nearly three-hour message movie that could’ve been written by an eighth grader. No, make that a fifth grader.”
http://www.newsreview.com/reno/content?oid=1342868
“OK, so I’m not the first, nor the highest paid, nor the smartest critic to notice the incredibly strong similarity between Dances with Wolves and James Cameron’s 15-years-in-the-making follow-up to the biggest film of all time, 1997′s Titanic.
…
But everything about the story, the setting, the dialog, and the parts that aren’t purely visual is awful. It’s actually worse than Dances with Wolves in terms of cultural imperialism.
…
He attempts to make the film topical by bringing in some War on Terror references, some Bush quotes (“Make no mistake!”), some Iraq blunders (“shock and awe”), and a whole lot of simpering ecological idealism (which I ordinarily support, but still), but the words are wood in his actors’ mouths.”
http://goatdog.com/moviePage.php?movieID=994
CK’s argument in his review seems to suggests that conservatives are seeing something that isn’t in the Avatar movie itself…lead astray by our own ideology. My question for CK is, if that is so, why is it all these liberal / no-apparent-ideology reviewers saying the same thing?
CK,
“Conservatives” like yourself make me glad cool effects weren’t around when Hitler was writing Mein Kampf. On the other hand they say Stone is doing a movie which would put Hitler and Stalin “into context”, so you have a chance to set us straight on this one as well.
If you’d stuck to reviewing the movie, you’d have less heat than what your article actually did do, which was to a) defend Avatar as a great flick; b) challenge conservative critics of Avatar as failing some objective measure of film criticism; and c) arguing that our failure as film critics was injuring our political message.
Some people disagree with all three, some with two of the three, and some with just one of those three premises. But yeah, you’re taking flak from three sides.
My late applause to Doctor Zero’s comments arund 2am this morning. Zero put in the effort to more fully explain the basis of my disdain for this tripe.
And one last tidbit that makes the arrogance / hubris of Macleod’s nonsense abundantly clear – look no further than the URL of this topic -
/its-the-humanity-stupid-a-conservative-dissent-on-avatar/
what pray tell is the ‘humanity’ in an alien species butchering humans? Zero is right. Avatar is a liberals wet dream / suicide fantasy of ‘nasty humans getting their just desserts’. Nihilism, at its foul dark heart, just like every other liberal expression / meme.
And Wareagle probably think ‘Triumph of the Will’ was ‘just a movie’ too.
Why would I give money to someone who seeks to cast my efforts in Iraq in a negative light, as well as make me out to be a war criminal? That goes for all of Hollywood. If I don’t agree with their politics, I don’t spend a penny on their movie. I’m not missing anything. They’re missing out on my $$$$. Get it right.
The “humanity” of the “other race” – the central point of the film, which you apparently haven’t seen, yet feel qualified to characterize – as discussed in detail in my review beginning in the 3rd to last paragraph, and in several comments above responding to Doctor Zero in particular, explaining why his assertions on the subject, which you appear to accept unquestioningly, are ill-founded.
Maybe the good doctor is saving a reply or busily researching one – anything’s possible – but he neglected even to acknowledge my detailed responses on the core of his “anti-human” argument, nor did he respond directly to the other arguments I offered. He instead withdrew to a generalized assertion and re-statement of his preferred theme, which is based on nothing but his personal impressions and several illogical assertions.
As far as I recall, neither the hero nor the Na’vis harm a single homo sapiens until the homo sapiens have already killed one of their own – the Sigourney Weave scientist character – in addition to large numbers of Na’vi. Referring to the action climax as “butchering” is again something you would say if you either hadn’t seen the film or were looking at it through ideological blinders in addition to your 3D glasses.
D GOOCH – on the Doctor Zero reading of the “dying planet” dialogue, I refer you again to the above link, and I ask you, again: 1) how could the failure of this expedition kill the Earth if the Earth is already dying? 2) How could the Na’vi tribe control the entirety of the supply of Unobtanium, supposedly crucial to interstellar travel – especially considering that a sizeable contingent of human beings has already traveled their via interstellar space? 3) If the supply was survival-necessary for the entire human race, why doesn’t anyone say so to Sully, the scientists, or the soldiers, but instead refer exclusively to other motivations? 4) If the Na’vi are anti-human, why do they send the surviving soldiers home, and let several other human beings remain with them?
The Na’vi satisfy every meaningful definition of being human – to the extent that it’s even possible for a mature human being to transfer his mind into a Na’vi body without loss or remainder. They are human within the universe of the story.
Being against the destruction of a human society for profit is not anti-human.
Logboy on January 10, 2010 at 8:58 PM
Following the above, Logboy, unless you believe that that’s what we’ve been doing in Iraq – wiping people out for the sake of profit – this has nothing to do with Iraq. I have yet to see anyone quote Cameron’s specific words in this regard in this discussion. I’m not doubting he made critical comments, perhaps even excessive and odious ones, but, for reasons I’ve gone into above, I don’t particularly care about them in relation to the movie, and in the meantime I’ll refrain from indicting anyone without seeing the actual evidence.
If Cameron did say that his movie was supposed to be an indictment of our actions in Iraq, then Cameron has been too busy making movies and hanging out with Hollywood idiots to have informed himself adequately, and his own movie can and should be used against him.
Chris_Balsz on January 10, 2010 at 6:16 PM
You think I care about taking flack from the three sides you describe? I explained who I was paying attention to, and why. I’ve made an exception for certain people who, though they’re uninformed and rude, are persistent, and make useful arguments more or less despite themselves. I’m sure you’ll agree that’s entirely my prerogative. You’re welcome.