Rushofbloodtothehead: Unedited thoughts on AVATAR

Went to see that movie with all the blue giants in it yesterday. People—my mother—were comparing it to Dances With Wolves a week and a half ago, which I thought strange because all the previews seemed to lend it more towards some kind of hybrid Lord of the Rings and amped up Pixar animation flick. These are the circumstances, because it would seem that those are always important to how a movie is understood or enjoyed: pinchy new ballet flats, Dad, Cousin, Brother, Sister, slight headache, hot theatre, wet floor, bucket of popcorn, Sour Patch kids, an orange I found in my purse. Not in 3D, as this was sold out by the time we arrived. Slightly curmudgeon-y. Munch on this, then, your grain of salt.
AVATAR was one of those movies I emerge from thinking “That was good! I didn’t like it. What’s wrong with me?” It falls in line with The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, which I also couldn’t comprehend my dislike for. These are sound, Oscar-tailored films by wide regard—they’ve got panache, political undercurrent, fabulous special-effects, scenery out the wazoo, that sort of gravitas only really perceived in epic movies that were treated, months and months before they ever arrived in theatres, as promised, hit EPIC MOVIES. They kind of froth with high expectations, and I hold (held) both of these films to just that. And oddly, the first thing I think of when puzzling out of the theatre is not the direct issue I take with AVATAR, what exactly in the film I did not like, but it made me instead refer to that which I know I do appreciate on-screen. I’m in the process of boiling it down to a formula:
I like movies with real love in them. I like movies with strange, uncultivated, angry, crude, silent, talkative, ridiculous, estranged, unlikely love. Love in the world is all of these things, but to see the truth on screen is a rarity not typically endorsed by the masses and the makers so eager to conjure escape from this, our bleak existence (dun dun DUNNNN). Love on screen I am tired of, and AVATAR shows me why—between the good-hearted, dopey Marine ingénue and the willful, passionate native princess in the movie there erupts only the worst kind of love, as the media gives it to us—expected, almost promised from the first scene of sudden altercation. Completely predictable, from that first second of lingering eye contact right down to the sweet first kiss beneath the giving tree, and uncultivated in that we don’t SEE the actual act of people falling for one another, something I always find the most exciting. Deferring to my own movie cabinet when I get home, I take note of all the harmless mediocrities in the stack and realize that there is similar flaccidness found in the romances of other movies I didn’t like, or didn’t like as much as I might have: it’s easy, it is not electric, it is seen before. And it’s not even that I’m a cynical non-fan of the escapist culture at the movies, I love to escape—but I find a hard time escaping into something I can’t inject with even a teaspoon of reality. All our daydreams, they spin off from this, our bleak existence (dun dun DUNNN)—and conveniently acting as a microcosm for this whole condition, I see in AVATAR the whole plight realized. Without the grounding of some reality in a romance, I can’t believe in it. And love is so very exciting and earthshaking at its core that it’s almost hard to believe people can make it boring onscreen, can make it predictable. I feel gypped, even amid the fabulous blue creatures in their CGI crafted world.
Another thing I thirst for in movies is the multi-dimensionality of characters; AVATAR is all archetypes. There’s an angry colonel with a scar across his face, war-mongering, inexplicably cruel. There’s the sassy, cigarette-smoking scientist who seeks only the welfare of the native people. Dopey but heroic main guy, willful natives, all in commune with nature. Perhaps it’s not only that these characters are all predictable in and of themselves as recognizable and un-complex entities, but the mere fact that I’ve seen them all before in about thirty different films (DWW among these). And here I come to the kind-of crux of why I didn’t really like AVATAR, all that much.
There is something about storytelling that begs consistent reinvention. The cyclical nature of history dictates it, the consistent charge onwards in the way of media and special effects summons it, human hearts and minds want it, will keep paying upwards of ten bucks for something that is free online to get it. People—again, meaning my mother—have been rattling the cages of the Hollywood honchos for some time, noting all the remakes and the book adaptations that pepper our theatres with some amount of disdain. They’re not original anymore, she’ll say all the time. I tend to agree: there seem to be very few original stories winning statues or critical praise these days. I don’t know if they still exist at all, at least in the same way I assume they must have when the industry was in its heyday.
So the modern world believes in special effects. Perhaps that’s our new palette, our new motion for change. While storylines and characters suffer, explosions get bigger and giant robots grow more realistic—not-so-oddly in tandem with the military. But I for one am dissatisfied with this, especially when movies come out that seem as if they teeter on the precipice of accomplishing both a thrilling world landscape and truthfulness and marvel in character and story—AVATAR does just this, you see. But in so many other ways, this story is not a reinvention—it does not really add anything remarkable to a story I have heard told before a million different ways because the minutiae of these characters cannot draw me in no matter how many fabulous weird birds they can ride. And at ITS crux, AVATAR is the same story of disgraceful human (cough AMERICAN) colonialism without any real account made for the fifteen years of turning, reinventing, that our country has done since DANCES WITH WOLVES. I demand from my cinema that everything be, at least in some way, new, fresh, challenging. I had an English teacher freshman year who would speak of reiterating direct points in an essay without adding any new thought in a new sentence as a “BOTHSAME” (inspired by some small child cousin, I think). AVATAR is a bothsame, with the fabulous new special effects of a movie moving forward but the decaying soul of a story ten years past the sell-by date. And that’s the thing about reinvention and cyclical history: even if everything is ultimately the same, if our revolutions and our patterns seem to guarantee a cycle, we’re always trying new ways to fail, and doing it somehow differently. I ask the media to follow suit—with love, with colonialism, with characters. Tell me something new, show me something wonderful—and by this I mean old things in a new way. One Brittany, One AVATAR. Stand-off.
It’s hard to put into words exactly why I want to take issue with the colonialism story itself. For some reason it bothers me that the Na’vi (blue people) are really exactly like caricatures or stereotypes or perhaps even existing Native Americans—they commune with nature, and walk about unclothed, and draw all their energy from a majestic old tree in the forest. I wonder why we even needed to leave American soil to tell this story, besides the opportunity for special effects. It too feels oddly cheap. And then there is the money-grubbing suit with an eye for the land’s natural resources, calling the Na’vi “savages” and “blue monkeys” left and right. My mother (who features prominently in this treatise…) opines that frontier worlds, even those off-planet, might involve a certain amount of regression—Oregon Trail, prairies, etc. But in this phantasmagoric 2123 I find it so unbelievable that these words are being thrown about without even a nod to the candor of a hundred years past; America’s own painful histories with oppressed people. Really? I want to ask James Cameron. Really? Can we at least get the pretended credit of a suit feigning political correctness? What is this? Then, again, maybe I’m only uncomfortable because of the sharp, unpleasant glint of recognizing something awful about yourself. Still.
In STAR TREK, the most recent comparable multi-planet epic flick, there is a suggested racism emanating from the planet Vulcan towards Terra, but it’s treated very differently. There’s an elevated kind of scoffing, which allegedly comes from the Vulcan’s inherited sense of condescending, impressive intelligence and reasonable temperament. But we are meant to understand that this is a racism about human nature, and it is not an ancient word making an untreated revival. I believe that these constructs should be expected to change in the rotating reinvention of a hundred years history, if not in intent at least in the actual vocabulary. In my mind, I rationalize that the ‘savage’ word is disdainful, this way.
Spoiler alert! The Na’vi win the last stand. This is suddenly not the same as a lot of other stories that do similar things—we’re in Braveheart country now. Riding in on fabulous creatures and by the grace of their beloved tree they utterly slam mean, scarred colonel and his drones. But once again my history book and my movie cabinet protest—everybody knows that no matter how this particular fight ends, the humans come back. With bigger guns. They prevail and wreak havoc, until hundreds of years pass, the conscience is assuaged and only a few brave souls begin to lament the story and later make movies about it. You can’t convince me that these fabulous birds will win out against nuclear fall-out. And perhaps that’s the cynical reality coming back again, but this is something else in AVATAR that I’m not willing to buy from the movies anymore—red herring happy endings. This is the cheapest blow of all—I decide at this point that James Cameron did not have a clear intention towards a message or a history when making this film, despite all not-so-subtle-Bush-digs to the contrary.
Again, this isn’t about me wanting or needing truth from the movies—just the seedling of it, the spark the imagination emanates from. And I see in AVATAR myriad reasons why that small little fleck could not possibly be underrated, ever, no matter how fantastical the setting. It does not feel truthful that the world doesn’t even try to pretend it has not changed, socially or morally, years and years from now—if humans do anything, they slap new values on each era as if to create a sense of morale in people, to let them believe or (allow them to hope!) that things have changed in response to past mistakes. Myth of progress. The Na’vi subscribe to the circle of life; why don’t the movie crews? Why can’t they give me a love story? A character I can alternately hate or chide or adore or envy? Something to think about, here, in the real world as it is related to Pandorra (blue planet homebase. My, this is unedited…). Not because I’m too jaded or unwilling to ricochet off the face of my humdrum, slightly curmudgeon-ly headached world for two and a half hours, but because at the end of the credits I have to go home. And the point of the movies, to me, is to take part of the story with you when you leave.
So, ironically, it would seem James Cameron has succeeded in an unexpected respect. It is a full twenty-four hours after I left this movie and I can’t seem to stop…considering it.