Avatar (2009)

filmmovie

I have just seen the new billion-dollar epic by James Cameron. Avatar (2009) has now joined Titanic. They are officially the two biggest grossing films of all time (ignoring inflation). It seems Cameron has a magic touch when it comes to extracting money from paying audiences. A number of adjectives float through the mind, but the most appropriate is probably “magical” (as a reference to its visual qualities and not the additional cost of seeing it in 3D). I remember vividly going to a demonstration of 3D as one of the acts in a musical hall in Newcastle in 1952. In between the comics and singers, we all reverently joined Dr. Strabismus (Whom God Preserve) of Utrecht and balanced these somewhat incongruous cardboard spectacles on our noses. This invited us into a world of novelty, ducking and weaving as various objects were (seen to be) thrown at us from the stage. Rather like travelling down to London for the Festival of Britain, we had a sense that, despite all the bomb devastation surrounding us as a continuing reminder of the War, the future was going to be a miraculous place. Except there was constant disappointment in the offing. Living in a sleepy little town on the North East coast of England, we had a local cinema that showed a steady diet of horror and sci-fi films, some of which were filmed in 3D. But, because the technology to show them was never installed, the best we could do was to guess how much more frightening Vincent Price could be. In fact, I have no recollection of seeing anything in 3D until venturing back into the cinema to see Avatar. It seems the miracle of the future takes its own time about appearing.

I can only marvel at the extent of the progress made in fifty years. The experience of finally seeing depth of field on, and as an extension to, the screen was modestly remarkable. Some of the trompe l’oeil effects were subtle and crept up on you as a watcher involved in the narrative, pausing every now and again to note that the perspective was being enhanced through the fourth wall. If only the narrative itself could have matched the imagination of the visual effects.

Just about every possible cliché and then some have been cobbled together as the plot of this pretentious rubbish. This is every Edenic stereotype ecosystem and culture you could hope to find in a single place with an all-powerful Gaia prepared to be the deus ex machina on demand if too many of the local life forms are losing out to the military muscle of Earth’s forces. So many sources have been mined for ideas from Poul Anderson to Lloyd Biggle to Ursula K. Le Guin with the latter’s The Word for World Is Forest probably the closest match. This planet is a source of Unobtanium — every film has to have a McGuffin and there’s no reason why it should have anything other than an ironic name — and Earth’s rapacious industrial-military complex is not going to let some tree-hugging bunch of indigenous primitives stand in its way of obtaining all they want and need.

So we are suddenly pitched into the worst of the Apocalypse Now style of film where military pragmatism in the means of superior fire power becomes a symptom of insanity and immorality with death nothing more than unfortunate collateral damage in the pursuit of the end. If the plotting had stopped here, we could have relived all the best and worst of the films dealing with the use of force against a technologically inferior enemy. This encompasses everything from the Roman army’s ability to trample over the barbarian hordes through to the current asymmetrical conflict in Afghanistan where drones ignore geographical borders in the pursuit of terrorists on the ground — in this, we can note that those who fly these drones treat them like avatars and, in the spirit of shoot ‘em up video games, eradicate life through their monitor screens. But Cameron was not content with a “war is bad” film. He wanted the moral high ground to be commanded by a human “hero”. This theme always has to be handled with some care as, in this instance, the human is a turncoat. As an Army Ranger, discharged because of injury, he would be expected to side with the military on his return. Except he is seduced by the tree-huggers.

Ah, yes, we have the primitives shown how to fight back by a renegade human. The world of Pandora has to become as violent and ruthless as the human invaders — “imitation is the sincerest form of flattery” goes the idiom and, when it comes to throwing away the lives of the locals, our hero is as caring as General Sir Douglas Haig at the Battle of the Somme. All his recruits from hither and thither across the face of the planet come to fight like Red Indians on their steeds and in the spirit of the Dragonriders of Pern. Only our hero prevails because, naturally, he gets to fly the biggest predator — size really does matter when it comes to taking on helicopter gunships. But there is an even less welcome note about the film. Unless my tired old eyes deceive me, there are only Caucasians and Hispanics in the human army. So it takes a white guy to show these primitive blue creatures how to defend themselves. With the destruction of their tree home, they would all have retreated into the forest like whipped dogs, but they are rallied by our hero. For the word “racism”, I offer the tentative definition that it assumes some racial groups may be superior to others. The humans clearly believe they are superior to the indigenous blue folk. They offer them the benefits of education and, when this gift fails to persuade them of humanity’s good intentions, they immediately fall back on the gun. Yet, by the time our white guy has finished, the tall blue folk are holding guns with the same potential killing intent as the whipped white folk as they escort the survivors off the planet. In this case, Uncle Tom is a tall blue alien who is submissive to a white leader and thereby becomes as white as him.

So this is a film that will appeal to all those people who manage to be simultaneously members of the NRA and Green Peace. For the rest of you, switch off your mind. The more you think about the film, the more painful it gets. Despite this, it does remain a quite remarkable piece of cinema. No matter how awful its politics, it is unsurpassed as a set of moving images. It is genuinely worth seeing on the biggest screen you can find with the 3D spectacles balanced on your noses. Hopefully, better writers will exploit the technology in future productions — just think how awful the The Jazz Singer (1927) is but “talkies” became the norm.

Patch for a parasite

I am provoked into writing this by a rerun of Patch Adams on TV. The name had registered as something I’d seen, but I’d forgotten how embarrassingly awful it is, displaying mawkish sentimentality on a sickening level. And I got to thinking: how is it that such films get to be made and, having been made, get to be endlessly recycled on our television screens? You would think that something so ghastly would subside into oblivion, too embarrassed by itself ever to reappear. Except there seems to be an audience for it and other films of its ilk, sadly not only as a secret pleasure on DVD. Patch Adams was nominated for a Golden Globe and had the not inconsiderable box office takings of US$202m in 1998.

I recall someone in a science fiction novel saying with a perfectly straight face that entropy is the tendency of any system to devolve to its lowest level. While Patch Adams is not quite of Razzie standard, I think it deserves honorary status. For me, it’s yet one more symptom proving the Hollywood system is in full devolution mode. Why, then, are such films made? Obviously, the studios and the producers who bankroll them must have faith their products will show a profit. In this case, Williams was a star with drawing power and the script contained the right number of clichés. Remarkably, with a production budget of US$90, their faith was rewarded with a profit. Free market capitalism is a wonderful thing. It assumes that, with all transactions voluntary, customers decide what survives to make money. If a supplier routinely offers a bad product, customers will react as Pavlovian dogs and take their business elsewhere. This will drive out the bad suppliers and favour those that offer good products. There were enough people to make a market for Patch Adams, but not all products are so fortunate. Not all customers are the same.

The point of an average or the more infamous lowest common denominator is that they are distillations from a potentially wide range of values. Famously, when dissolving their business partnership, Robert Owen said to W. Allen, “All the world is queer save thee and me, and even thou art a little queer.” So, from one person’s perspective, everyone else is different or strange. Life is something we do on our own. We accumulate experiences that shape our opinions and sensibilities. Some of these experiences may be shared but, when added together, the whole tends to be unique. How unique? The degree of strangeness between people may only by marginal in the main, but it can produce radically different responses to the same stimuli. What I like need not be what you like or we might like the same thing but for completely different reasons. You might find something serious and uplifting, the same might make me laugh, or vice versa.

Why, you might ask, was I watching Patch Adams. Boredom threatened. I had a few minutes on my own. I did not want to start a new book. There was no choice. . . Most of the time, there is no choice. You either go to the cinema to see whatever dross Hollywood has produced, or you stay at home. You switch on the TV and channel-flip until you find something vaguely watchable. In the arts, there is no guarantee that any work will be any good. The latest album, the latest book, the latest film. . . All you can do is hope. A momentum builds up. The most recent offerings from this band, this author or this director have been good. I will try the next. This may not be very rational but, once formed, habits are difficult to break. This inertia is what the marketers rely on. I should wait for the reviews before buying, except whose reviews do you trust when so many websites are involved in marketing? Reviews on major sites like Amazon are gamed.

When it comes to cultural products, there’s a group of people who appoint themselves style leaders. Think fashion and the marketers have programmed the names of the current top designers to pop into our minds. The same applies to most niches. A combination of messages aims to persuade us that this product is the best, better than all the rest. So the mass media manipulates coverage of the “facts” and shapes opinion, telling us that, to belong to the in-crowd, we must all like such-and-such or all do this special thing. No-one questions whether belonging to the in-crowd has any real value. It’s apparently a given that there’s safety in numbers — it’s better to be one of us and not one of them. Yet, curiously, the limited interest in Patch Adams lies in showing one herd’s mentality as cruel and uncaring, while only an eccentric clown can know what is best for all.

People are not the same yet the status of authority figures and the power of peer pressure are forged into a force that drives consensus. So millions are convinced that Robin Williams is entertaining. Similarly, J K Rowling is the greatest children’s author of all time and Dan Brown is the best writer of mystery stories since whoever put pen to parchment and produced the Dead Sea Scrolls with the intention of stirring up religious controversy. I suppose all this makes me a culture snob, born to sneer both at films mired in bathos and at books by authors who cannot write reasonably original content in coherent English. Fortunately, there are some films made for the small audience that thinks. Some authors do rise above the routine. But those capitalists who make the commissioning and contractual decisions prefer content that aims at the lowest common denominator. That gives the work crossover appeal and the chance for mass market success. With all the money flowing from the mass market, there can be subsidies for works that will only sell more modestly. So what all this comes down to is that I’m a parasite, pathetically grateful to the masses that like Patch Adams, J K Rowling, Dan Brown and all the other milk cows of the arts world. Without all you, the industry would never make enough money to be able to subsidise publishing the stuff I like to see, hear and read.