Extraterrestrial Irish Pub Type

What’s the story of Avatar? In the news, it’s a different one each week. This week it’s simply that of the most successful movie ever, soon to cross US$2 billion, James Cameron surpassing his own Titanic. Last week, the story was that Avatar had been bumped from 2-D screens in China, despite continuing strong attendance, to make space for the epic Confucius featuring Chow Yun Fat in the title role. (Funny that a pioneering hero of Hong Kong gangster drama, with its twisted Mafia-Confucianism of family ties and honour, would eventually be the impersonation for the comeback of Confucianism as semi-official doctrine in China; even more funny after Chow Yun Fat had been edited out of Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End in 2007, as the character he played was supposedly ‘vilifying and humiliating the Chinese.’)

Even though it’s not uncommon to limit the run of foreign films in China to support local productions, the speculation was that authorities had started to feel uncomfortable about Cameron’s sci-fi fantasy apparently having struck a chord with many Chinese who, confronted with images of a native populace driven from their soil by bulldozers, couldn’t help but think of ruthless development projects in China of recent years, and said so in many blog entries. And in fact, the image of the huge solitary tree in the film had a slight similarity to the famous image of a ‘nail house’ from a few years ago – developers in Chongqing had excavated a ten-meter-deep pit around a house that been the home of a family for three generations, the owners of which had refused to leave it for two years.

But that very same image of the tree as big as a skyscraper, with people running for their lives as it falls down in flames, is also eerily reminiscent of 9/11 (an association that is reinforced in the film with a redneck commander instructing his soldiers with pep talk about fighting terror with terror, an obvious allusion to the Bush years of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo).

In more general terms, Avatar is an amalgam, as if in a strange dream, of many of these kinds of allusions and associations, and you can look at it being very clever calculated to capture the widest possible audience globally, playing many cards at once; but by way of the very same strategy, it also could be seen as capturing the widest possible 3-D panorama shot of collective anxieties about the future (ecology, war, loss of social love and security etc.). And in the same contradictory way, it is this all-encompassing ambition that is interesting about it, but also what is off-putting.

I saw Avatar late, after my wife Sarah had texted me during the intermission of the screening she had gone to: ‘I’m already bored to death, don’t bother seeing it, Pocahontas meets the Smurfs’. Though she’s right about Pocahontas and the Smurfs, there’s more to chew on. And not just Dances With Wolves and other popular myths of ‘civilization’ versus ‘native’ that get recycled on a regular basis as in this case. I went with my friend Jons who is a graphic designer and he couldn’t help but point out that it is strangely ironic that the language of the natives, Na’Vi, is subtitled with a Celtic type reminiscent of the ones used in corporate Irish Pubs. In the same vein, the music that comes on when they are around is a tooth-ache mix of tribal drums, saccharine strings and Enya-type ethereal solo and choir voices.

Compare for yourself:

The effect of all of it is that this starts to make what is otherwise an in parts quite mindblowing 3-D vision of what an alien bio system could look like – mutations of earthly forms abound, hovering mountains etc. – feel interrupted by the audio equivalents of aerial shots of a Scottish distillery and a Maori tourist performance for a corny commercial. But is that important, is that significant, or am I just whining about high-brow aesthetic sensibilities? Point is, Avatar is not just its plot and its role models. Cameron deserves respect for having changed the way women are portrayed in mainstream action cinema, and Sigourney Weaver in this movie is not least a self-quote re. Aliens in that respect (and, as a kind of inversion of the old Romantic myth of the dead woman in the water, he is arguably also the first to have portrayed a romantic dead male that way, with DiCaprio in Titanic).

But do we really only follow the role models offered, when it’s possible for the audience to pick and mix and relate the story to whatever seems appropriate to them? There are obvious ‘messages’ implied in this film such as: don’t go and destroy nature for the sake of industrialization and greed; don’t justify your war by saying the opponents are just beasts etc. etc. But these are not exactly what is new and interesting about that film. Not in the least. What is new and interesting about it is not the mere use of technology either; some of the more sophisticated computer games have had similar effects, the 3-D glasses replaced so to speak by the player’s ability to navigate the environments. What is new in some way is the powerful strategy to amalgam all these different things – myths, plots, ethnic aesthetics, game environments etc. – into one big, big whole. It’s like Steve Jobs presenting the iPhone – with all its features and surprising capabilities – but with a tacky Microsoft design. In the computer world that might be a minus – the great hybrid product that combines well-known features into a new smoothly-running whole with a great interface, but then bad design… But in cinema, this seems to be precisely the winning formula.