Avatar and other failures of the imagination

My wife and my wife’s family and my friend Krist and countless other people tell me I’m wrong. The critics tell me I’m wrong. I probably am wrong.

I don’t care. I didn’t like Avatar. Here’s why.

1) The ‘plot’. My friend Angeli deduced from the trailers and a little early criticism that the story of Avatar was not a new one – she cried Disney’s Pocahontas, but I’ve also heard “Fern Gully” and “Dances with Wolves” and even “Final Fantasy IX”. I’m not one to object to retelling a familiar story, or putting your own spin on an old song. It’s just that this particular old song is a particularly ugly one with a lot of bad baggage in train. This particular blend of colonialist wish fulfillment, noble-savage racism, and ham-fisted allegory is older than Kevin Costner or the Disney Corporation. It’s older than Tarzan. It’s probably older than Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, although that’s as far back as I care to go right now.

Ever since the British took their first crack at Ireland, the great dream/lust/terror of the colonizer has been the idea of going native, of becoming one with the invaded culture. Our colonizer gets to learn the ways of the native and surpass the natives in those ways. Tarzan is the baddest mofo in the Jungle; Alan Quatermain is the baddest mofo in Africa; John Carter is the baddest mofo on Mars; Paul Atreides is the baddest mofo in the desert; Davy Crockett is the baddest mofo in the woods of Tennessee, etc. Jake Sully is the greatest dragonrider on Pern – sorry, the best banshee-rider on Pandora. This mastery is always martial, and always sexual. He gets the girl, or girls (it’s almost always guys doing this sort of dreaming), usually by besting the local champion and thereby demonstrating the superiority the colonizer takes for granted.

Because that’s what’s going on here. Colonizing – at least the way it’s been played for the last half millennium – is about force, but it’s more about a certain pernicious form of empathy. Stephen Greenblatt lays out very nicely the kind of empathy I’m talking about in his great book Renaissance Self Fashioning. It’s the sort of empathy it takes to be Iago in Othello – to imagine yourself in the other’s place in order to own/destroy/control/steal/take that place. It’s Cortez in Montezuma’s court, pretending to be a god. When this sort of pretending gets pulled down to the individual, interior scale of a certain colonial type, it often takes a certain familiar form – the-going-native-and-having-a-big-adventure-and-getting-the-girl-and-saving-the-noble-savages (who can’t, of course, save themselves) story.

Our gone-native hero at some point always learns a valuable lesson, which can be applied to his society. You know, the society with the really real people in it. The society that matters. That’s why noble savages were invented, right? To teach colonizers valuable lessons? It’s just like how motherly black female roommates were invented to help white heroines through important life crises.

In Avatar, the only innovation is a rather more literal sort of going native.



2. The look. Everyone is busily praising the masterful CGI in Avatar, the wonderfully immersive world of Pandora. The CGI is pretty good. The 3D process is impressive. The floating mountains are very, very floating. It’s all also very, very stupid. Very.

Here we are, on an alien moon (orbiting a gas giant that looks like Jupiter with a dye job. I mean, it’s got a great blue spot, for chrisakes), presumably light years away, and what do we find? Trees that look just like trees. Giant frigging fiddlehead ferns.

And that’s just the plants. It gets much, much worse with the animals. We have monkeys that look like monkeys, Christmas-tree worms that look like Christmas-tree worms, wolves that look like wolves, and horses that look like horses. I mean, the blue furries ride horses. Ok, ok, they’ve got skinny faces and waggly antennae, but they look like horses. Not even everything that people ride on Earth looks like a horse – the mounts on Pandora look much more familiar than, say, a camel.

And let’s talk about those blue furries for a minute. They’re people. Ok, someone tacked on a tail and some pointy ears and scaled them up a bit, but they’re people. Two arms, two legs, one head, hair on their heads, pretty faces – people. They have bellybuttons. They have tits. You can’t tell me that billions of years of independent evolution came up with the exact same solutions for feeding babies. Most things on Earth don’t do it the way we do.

For that matter, most things on Pandora don’t have two arms and two legs. Props to someone in Cameron’s creature team for at least coming up with a consistent body plan for their vertebrates; everything from the almost-monkey to the almost-rhinoceros to the great big flying screaming predator thing has a beaky, bitey face and six limbs – two main ones in back and two paired sets in front. This is reasonable. We see such similarities when we look around Earth – whales and weasels and women and wallabies all share a basic body plan. But the blue furries don’t share that Pandoran body plan. No, they look pretty much just like us.

I hear two objections to my objections to Pandoran biology, and I shall demolish them thusly:

First, you might ask this: why should they be so different from us? It’s an earthlike world (well, moon), isn’t it?
This is dumb because even Earth isn’t as similar to Earth as Pandora is. We have lots of variation right now, and we’ve had much, much more over geological time. Met any trilobites lately? Mushroom forests? Thylacoleo carnifexes? Everything on Pandora is just as it would be if it were imagined by someone who was looking out their window in LA or Paris (but not, say, Sydney) and not trying very hard to think of anything different.

And the Pandorans are unlike us in important (but stupid) ways. They have little telepathic tail tendrils; conveniently, everything even approximately the right size for them to ride on has compatible little telepathic tail tendrils - even though they’ve apparently evolved from a completely different, six-legged, bitey-faced biology.

Second, you might ask this: why does it matter? Who cares? Star Trek is surely stupider, with everyone looking like a normal-sized human with stuff on their face.
And you’d be right. Star Trek is stupider. But Star Trek has its dumbth grandfathered in from a simpler, lower-budget era – an era of blinky lights and Fabian Socialism: an era, in short, of pervasive crappiness. Star Trek’s crappiness is, by now, somewhat quaint. Almost charming. You’re just glad to see them stretch a little. Avatar is supposed to be new. Avatar has all this glorious CGI and a bulging budget that means they had the chance to make a truly new world. And they blew it. Hardcore.



3) "Unobtainium"? Really?


4) Floating mountains? Seriously?


Avatar is pretty, I suppose. It’s rousing. It’s topical-ish. But it’s not good, and the reason it’s not good is a pervasive failure of the imagination. All that budget, all that delicious, yummy CGI, went into making an unimaginative world to be the setting for an unimaginative, hackneyed, ugly, bad story. Fie on James Cameron and his furries, say I. Fie and faugh. You can keep it. Go see Sherlock Holmes instead.

Dream diary #5

My boss took my wife and I to the swimming pool she used in the city, which she referred to as ‘Sea World’. I asked if that was her nickname for the place, but she said that was what it was called – that it had been calling itself Sea World long before the Florida or California places. When we got there, I was surprised to see the pool was inhabited by one huge green sea turtle. Becky said his name was Olive. We could swim if we wanted, but the trick was not to get too close to Olive, who was prone to biting.

Wound Talking

Wound won’t heal if you pick and pick won’t heal if you itch and scratch
Wound likes lonely, likes clean, likes dry. Wound likes hidden, likes patch.
You come early, stay late, don’t leave. You talk talk, find fault.
Fault don’t matter to wound, not now. Talk ain’t nothin’ but salt.

Dream diary #4

Dreamed of winning the lottery. Woke up four times thinking it might be true.

Dream diary #3

Caught a wasp in a jar. Added a large chunk of bread dough and sealed it. Watched the wasp dig its way into the pale mass of dough, scrabbling frantically with it’s pincers and front legs.

Remembered the wasp would need to breathe, poked some holes in the lid. Waited for it to come out. Got worried, pulled apart the dough – saw the wasp and it’s new larva. Awww.

Wasp turned an angry laquer red and flew out – larva metamorphosing before my eyes into more red wasps.

I knew I had to find a way to stop them before they killed my Dad.

Dream diary #2

Footrace versus coworkers, to be held in the produce section of a downtown supermarket. Riding the train, stretching and warming up on the way. We’re late – the race has already started, but we’re encouraged to join in.

The course runs in a rough oval around the aisles of the produce section, and I’m doing my best, really pushing it. I cut past a couple of runners by the broccoli and the race comes to an abrupt halt.

“OK, OK,” loudly intones the referee, an authoritative older black woman in a red striped shirt; “I guess we’ve got someone here who’s not familiar with the rules.”

It is explained to me, as the other runners resume their course, that it is not permitted to cut past two side-by-side runners – running faster than other people is actually discouraged.

I continue running. The course is getting less crowded, and I am able to pick up the pace a bit, but now there are people sorting fruit and unpacking boxes. It becomes necessary to hurdle a pile of variegated eggplant by one of the turns. I’m running faster now, and it seems I’m the only one running. My boss appears by the side of the course, tells me the race has been over for hours.

She’s got a letter she needs me to edit.

Written thing #1

Postman Cheval

Stones imply other stones.
Implied stones are pregnant with temples, columns, trees –
cacophonies of form and flux and dream and exultant, involute shadow.
Shadows imply shadows.