I can't claim immunity to the lure of assessing popular culture through an ideological lens, but sometimes the sort of case studies that might inspire book-length exegeses by David Foster Wallace can seem dull and pointless. Consider the brouhaha over James Cameron's visually impressive but substantively void film Avatar, which, after making $1 billion internationally in three weeks, has got some U.S. conservatives grumbling as to its supposed theme of anti-Americanism. The fictionalized Mark van Doren in Quiz Show put this kind of failure of cultural proportion best when told about his son's duplicitous intellectual sportsmanship on NBC: "That's like trying to plagiarize a comic strip."
Not that science fiction can't be both wondrous and intelligent. Robert Conquest is a scholar and practitioner of the genre, and his handle on twentieth-century politics, he might insist, deeply influenced both leisurely pursuits. But as far as sci-fi parables go, Avatar is no 2001: A Space Odyssey, nor, come to that, does it contain any sophisticated or Strangelovean quotient of political commentary relevant for our time.
The film concerns 10-foot cat people inhabiting an enchanted but perilous jungle planet and the human-run private enterprise looking to mine that planet, at the expense of its indigenous population, for an expensive element with untold industrial uses. For this, Cameron is said to dilate pessimistically on the Iraq war in particular ("No Fur for Unobtainium!") and Pax Americana in general. Are those Blackwater mercenaries cutting down ancient animist plantlife before setting their helicopter gunships on the ill-equipped feline subalterns? Before one tries to locate the Saddam Hussein of the Na'vi, it is worth mentioning that phrases like "shock and awe" occasionally pop out of Cameron's CGI imaginarium, already rendered in some theatres in the third dimension, which is exactly two more than the film's dialogue. Indeed, carping about Cameron's politics is like guessing at what George Lucas had in mind about the philosophy of Leo Strauss in the last Star Wars fiasco. Conservatives would do better to discuss the merits of a relevant and important film like The Hurt Locker lest they give some earnest counter-critics, like Slate's Tom Shone, reason to await the Goldstone Report on Avatar. Here's Shone:
Cameron has an uncanny feel for asymmetrical fights: It's what gives his films such a vicelike grip on the national unconscious and makes him a useful filmmaker to have around right now. If I were on the right, I'd be celebrating the director for his keen-eyed, conservative critique of Wilsonian foreign adventurism. Yes, its regrettable that the pivot point of the final battle hinges on the incursion of a deity, no less, but I also learned some interesting stuff about how to subdue any huge flame-colored dragons I see flying around the skies: You attack from above, where he least expects it. "Tarouk is the biggest, baddest boy in the sky," Jake Sully informs us. "He never gets attacked." With yet another airplane bomber in American custody, it would seem we cannot get enough of that lesson.
This is one way to put it. Another way would be to say that middlebrow entertainment is in over its head again, as is Shone when it comes to contemporary politics. (Wilsonian foreign adventurism typically does not mean genocide at the hands of private contractors). I'm also not sure how the abortive attack of Christmas Day, coming as it did more than nine years after air travel entered a state of permanent bureaucratic siege, represents anything other a near-miss victory for Islamist nihilism.
Now the real question is this: Did the Na'vi bring it all on themselves for making a pact with the devil?
add a comment