The Problem with Avatar(s)

Last night I finally convinced myself that seeing Avatar was the best way to spend nearly three hours of my life. I was horribly wrong. The movie turned out to be more reprehensible than I imagined possible, and managed to insult me personally on a variety of levels; though, most directly, it was an undeviating attack on my intelligence. I found myself trapped in a self-reflexive hell as a hyper-critical version of myself, lost somewhere within the layers of the movie that were projecting back from the three-dimensional screen, my own avatar patronizing a primitively conceived reality, one that, though initially considered a ridiculous other, became familiar, beautiful and ultimately more real than what I knew to be real before, yada yada yada.

The problem with the movie’s rendering of the avatar adventures of its characters is that there is no self-awareness of or respect for the irony in being someone else while remaining who you were to begin with. The only sense of the main character’s motivation for inhabiting this avatar self—his cinematic essence that drives every choice he makes—is that he is frustrated that he cannot walk. This gives Cameron license to bypass the insane quandaries that an intelligent movie would give a serious discussion in at least a few of the million moments of the movie—now that he can use his legs he gets so excited he sprints out of the hospital room in his new avatar self. There still remains more than two hours of the movie and the protagonist has become actualized. In the traditions of the B movie and pulp science fiction, we are now expected to take a man seriously who is occupying the body of a ten-foot blue alien from the planet Pandora as he rides in a helicopter with a gigantic machine gun, next to an equally blue and ten-foot tall Sigourney Weaver who is basically treating the situation as though it were a semester abroad trip taken with her Anthropology students to a country not inhabited by white people.

However, the modes of the B movie have long become acknowledged clichés and the movie instead makes itself “relevant” by appropriating the B-movie tradition of our present era: reality TV, and, more specifically, its early-90s ground-breaker The Real World, its idiot kid brother Road Rules, and, of course, Survivor. The superficiality of Jake Sully’s self-analysis is best represented by the hackneyed device by which it receives some pathetic treatment: a video diary that the avatar project requires him to do, one that would look exactly like the sidebars of Real World 54: Pandora. Avatar, like the project it documents, must pretend that its characters have something interesting to say as a mere formality, even though our main character only achieves any worthwhile thought when he manages to voice a trite oversimplification that the audience has already realized James Cameron was trying to get across in his paper thin analogies. The constant challenges and the documentation of the immediate moment is what makes reality television so appealing: we can pretend that the full story—why the fuck are we here?—can be reduced to petty bickering and an incredible celebration of the short-sighted.

Not to see oneself when everyone else does is the vulnerable position of television stars, and no case is more poignant than that of the reality TV contestant/star, who seems to have no sense of how ridiculous he becomes rendered by his participation in the charade, or, worse, the delight in the I’m-not-here-to-make-friends mindset. The case with Jake Sully is that he is so happy just to be walking around that he doesn’t see how fucking weird it is to be a giant blue alien, learning the ways of the other giant blue aliens, falling in love with a giant blue alien, and, ultimately, that he is in an incredibly racist, painfully obvious analogy for the history of American imperialism.

This treatment of character is entirely antithetical to aesthetic of 1990s iconic works of art, whether it be an album by Nirvana, Seinfeld, or Forrest Gump: irony, by 1994, became an essential character trait to survive the sarcasm of television: Norm Peterson and Frasier Crane kicked Sam and Diane out of the bar, or rather Frasier moved to Seattle to look after his dad and became the subject of his own sitcom; Homer Simpson destroyed the image of the father; and Kevin Costner did not realize that his movies were really cheesy and that Brian Adams was a gigantic joke, just as Cameron seemed to miss the message about Celine Dion. It’s only appropriate that Cameron has combined Dances With Wolves (Costner at his unaware best), The Lion King (Disney movies remained a last bastion for sincerity), and Terminator (his own humorless contribution to the era). Irony is the pretentious Manhattanite buzzkill on the genuine attempt to create real American meaning. If Jon Stewart really had the answer, after all, he would stop telling jokes, wouldn’t he?

My only consolation in this out-of-body experience was that I remained myself amid this foray into my Avatar self: I was sitting next to my friend Alexandra who shared with me shudders and giggles at the film’s bad taste. Unlike Jake Sully we had personalities at the beginning of the movie, and we fought to maintain them. We could take off our glasses and see that it was just a normal movie with blurry parts that played cheap visual tricks on us when we put the glasses on. If the movie refuses to present us with layers—that is of meaning, not animation—it instead asks its intelligent audience member to insert her own personality into the experience, not far from how the characters of the ‘90s classic attack on the B movie Myster Science Theater 3000 manage to maintain their sanity through hour after hour of cinematic kitsch. Although it was perhaps not my finest moment when I went to the bathroom and picked a one-third-eaten bag of popcorn out of the trash can, it still implicated my personality.

One’s capacity to exist in a different reality is the question of both Seinfeld and Avatar, and the relationship between those two realities is essentially the same in each: Seinfeld discusses what it means to act out joke versions of people’s lives; Seinfeld, of course, acts out a joke version of his own life, making his persona on camera a veritable avatar in the Pandora of pop culture. The difference can be found in the layers of irony in the show, its insane fabric of jokes, the ridicule of its very production and existence. There is no self-aware perspective in Avatar, neither on the part of the ego-maniacal, daft protagonist or its main character on the other side of the camera. At least in reality television the producers are acknowledged artless sleazes, whereas James Cameron thinks he has made a very important movie, and so does the Hollywood Foreign Press; and so did the Academy Awards when he spent three hours sinking a big boat with an unmanageable amount of clichés. The humility of his acceptance speech at the Golden Globes—though more restrained than “I’m the king of the world!”—shows us just how afraid Cameron is of insulting us with unoriginal ideas: “Avatar asks us to see that everything is connected, all human beings to each other, and us to the Earth. And if you have to go four and a half light years to another, made-up planet to appreciate this miracle of the world that we have right here, well, you know what, that's the wonder of cinema right there, that's the magic.” And indeed he’s right: I would even go so far as to wish that I had never gone at all.