Film still from Avatar
In his book Nobrow: The Culture of Marketing, The Marketing of Culture, John Seabrook charts the collapse of the old high-low/art-kitsch hierarchical system in the age of late capitalism. The days of easily distinguishing a cultural product that is ‘good’ for you from one that is ‘bad’ for you are long over. Whilst visiting an exhibition at the Guggenheim New York, Seabrook recognised that ‘the old (categories) aren’t really useful here… art (has) been made out of the discourse of advertising.’ Fine, but it feels a far easier journey down than up. Whether it is by adopting its contexts or vernaculars, high art may enjoy an ambiguous yet superior position in the murky pool of mass culture. It no longer has the distinction of being traditionally ‘high’, but it remains foreign, and special. The reverse, it should be noted, has not yet happened.
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An inevitable maelstrom of buzz has surrounded the release of James Cameron’s Avatar, the behemoth that has thus far made over $1.8 billion worldwide and is the second highest grossest film of all time, beaten only by the director’s previous film Titanic. Aside from prophetic claims of ‘groundbreaking effects’, ‘revolutionary cinema,’ and similarly frenzied superlatives flying round in the media, I picked up on one interesting curiosity.
Popular legend now has it that Cameron originally conceived of Avatar’s story fourteen years ago, but quickly realised that Hollywood could not supply him with the adequate resources to film it. His vision exceeded the limits of the technology. The technology eventually did catch up, and Cameron pumped countless sums of money into refining and perfecting it during Avatar’s four-year production. The notoriously megalomaniacal filmmaker has overseen production to the last letter: he created a large quantity of the preliminary designs and concept drawings. The point, then, is that Avatar is the product of an auteur: a labour of love from a visionary who accepted no compromise or downscale in ambition in its realisation. By some old romantic definition, then, this might well be Art.
Avatar is set on the fantastical jungle world of Pandora, an unspoilt paradise teeming with all manner of exotic flora and fauna. The space-faring humans of the future have discovered a highly lucrative mineral on the planet, one that will solve the energy crisis on their dying Earth. Unfortunately, their path to prosperity is blocked by the sentient race on Pandora: the 10-foot, blue-skinned Na’vi, whose settlement sits upon the chief deposit of this mineral. One solution to the issue is diplomacy in the form of the human scientists’ avatar program, which allows humans to enter the host bodies of genetically engineered Na’vi and breathe the planet’s air. The other solution is the guns and missiles of the military. Ex-marine Jake Sully and Na’vi maiden Neytiri become the star-crossed lovers who draw the two species into full-blown confrontation.
The Na’vi were always to be the audience’s chief object of scrutiny in Avatar. These willowy creatures were to be a show of Cameron’s home-grown technology, a milestone in motion-capture wizardry, and proof that dramatic integrity and digital effects are not mutually exclusive. In this respect, they are a success. As protagonists in the film, their behaviour is naturalistic and human.
Unfortunately, the Na’vi are in fact extremely human. Indeed, they are depressingly so. Like those unspecific world-music albums available in the café in Borders, these creatures are a hollow mish-mash of various ethnic/spiritual stereotypes and tropes. Whatever aspirational values they possess as a race are undermined by the inescapable fact that they are as convincingly ‘indigenous’ as the cartoon Amerindians of Disney’s Pocahontas. They exist in an ultra-idealised, hyper-stylized, quasi-religious symbiosis with every other living thing on Pandora. This is an admirable trait but one horrendously literalised, for example, in the way that they connect a tendril hidden in the braids of their hair with the antennae of fellow creatures like some convenient USB cable. Similarly, their revered Tree of Souls, whose glowing branches hang like fibre-optic cables, acts as some kind of organic hard-drive for the planet, where information can be conveniently uploaded and downloaded. Whether it is all rendered perfectly becomes a moot point; there are various levels at which an audience must be convinced.
Pandora, as crass and saccharine as it is, would be far more sellable a creation were it not for Cameron’s insistence on making them very much part of a real world, albeit one of the future. The 22nd-century humans of Avatar are believable and intentionally so; the grubby-industrial aesthetic of their vehicles and technology is familiar, rather than utopian. With the exception of a few well-meaning but (naturally) powerless scientists, our future selves are cynical and greedy, having left a ruined Earth in search of a new world to pillage. There is the heartless corporate executive, indifferent to the fate of the ‘blue monkeys’ whose settlement sits between him and revenue. There is also the cigar-chomping colonel, looking as though as he has just wandered off a U.S. military base in the Middle East, who favours the tear gas-and-napalm approach over diplomacy. These are amoral, everyday individuals; the Na’vi are little more than dreamish cartoon phantoms by comparison. They cannot co-exist.
Therein lies the film’s central fault: its self-appointed mission to sermonise at every available moment. Subtlety of expression is hardly a high expectation in the domain of the blockbuster, and yet the allegorical tendencies of Avatar are so explicit as to be impossible to ignore. Whether it be the age-old tension between the colonial and native, the West’s rapacious hunt for oil in the Middle East, the tangled situations in Iraq and Afghanistan, or our species-wide complacency about the earth’s deteriorating state, the filmmakers clearly have points they wish to put across. Indeed, the fact that the phrases ‘fighting terror with terror’ and ‘shock and awe’ are actually used gives some idea to the contemporaneity that the film is grasping to build a position around.
This tendency to pontificate, in itself, is not a problem: the moralistic agenda of the typical blockbuster, if hard to stomach, can be generally ignored when one recognises its real content, that being its entertainment agenda. Whether it is to politically pander to its main demographic, or to help redeem its wicked money-spinning existence, the ‘message’ of the average box office movie is arbitrary, ornamental, easy to identify and usually just as easy to discard.
But here in Avatar, no such separation can take place. The problem is not the typical hypocrisy of Hollywood (this being a film that bemoans the marginalisation of weaker societies yet boasts a budget probably equal to the GDP of the average Third World nation). No, the fact is we cannot reconcile the virtue of Avatar’s content with the artifice of its form. We may visually accept every meticulously rendered eye, leaf, hoof, tendril and cloud that Cameron’s computers have to offer. Certainly, in its virtuosic blending of CGI, motion-capture and live action, Avatar has benchmarked a new level of cinematic experience. But for all the ‘realism’ of the digital effects, there is also the fundamental insincerity of the production design, delivering an aesthetic that is derivative, hollow and at its worst, prejudiced. This insincerity is mirrored in a storyline so generic and perfunctorily recounted one genuinely wonders if it was thought of as an important aspect of the film. And so believing in Avatar – by my definition, accepting it as a worthy representation/abstraction of reality – is another matter entirely. The eco-parable that Cameron drops into his digitally constructed theme park evaporates into irrelevance upon impact. The troubles of Baghdad and the G8 have no place on Pandora.
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Avatar is something of a self-destructive beast, greedy for both populist success and artistic excellence. James Cameron, the auteur-creator as we understand him to be, obsessed far too greatly over both the ‘realism’ of his spectacle and the piety of his story. Was the struggle for the latter a desire to make something ‘good’ for audiences – good, righteous Art? Or a disclaimer-style attempt at validating the most expensive piece of entertainment audiences have ever seen? Either way, his failure was to not realise that spectacle and piety only negate one another in Avatar.
Avatar’s shortcomings may be interpreted as a warning against any repeated attempt by entertainment to transcend to art. Conversely, they may be interpreted as a Nobrow-ish reassertion that blockbuster entertainment is at its best when it is complex, amoral, and sincere. $1.8 billion could have been a lot more.
Matthew Breen