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Avatar (2009)
Directed by James Cameron Review by Adam Miller

James Cameron's Avatar has become a verifiable hit with audiences and film reviewers alike. Strangely enough (for a special effects intensive blockbuster) it currently has a higher rating (94%) among Rotten Tomatoes' "top critics" than it does among the broader field of critics which contribute to the film's overall Rotten Tomatoes score (82%). I won't play footsie with you: I think Avatar is one of the most important films of the decade—which is not necessarily to say that it is one of the "best." This essay is not intended to be a review of the film, but rather an analysis of its production—cultural and technological—as well its historical significance for cinema.

Many critics have disapproved of Avatar's plot, generally calling it derivative of one thing or another. Comparisons have been made to films like FernGully: The Last Rainforest (1992, Bill Kroyer), Dances with Wolves (1990, Kevin Costner), The New World (2005, Terrence Malick) (or Pocahontas [1995, Mike Gabriel and Eric Goldberg] if that's more your style), as well as "politicalî narratives such as the war on terror, the war for the environment, the war on the "Other." These critics are all correct in their comparisons. Avatar's plot is not new, but nor is any of the film's content. We've seen and heard everything in Avatar before. The sci-fi technology used by the humans is recognizable to anyone familiar with Cameron's oeuvre (e.g. the lumbering mech-suits [Aliens]). The characters have also all been seen before—the colonizers, the natives, the kindhearted scientists, the disaffected soldier who "goes native."

This familiarity is, in my opinion wholly intentional. Just take a look at the character's names. The kindhearted doctor (Sigourney Weaver) is named "Grace." The selfish corporate man (Giovanni Ribisi) is "Selfridge." The nerdy scientist is "Spellman." The evil general (Stephen Lang) is "Quaritch." Not much work went to into making these names or the characters which wear them "naturalistic." They are archetypes—avatars, if you will, of film characters past instanced into intentionally "two-dimensional" roles in this new, three-dimensional film.

Just because the familiarity of the plot and the characters is intentional, doesn't mean it's a "good" thing, and to be fair and provide some outside perspective, here are just three criticisms of Avatar's derivative content. Some harsh words from Bob Grimm at newsreview.com: "The worst thing about Cameronís latest epic is that he wants—practically demands—for you to take it seriously, with its environmental message and 'war on terror' parallels. Itís a nearly three-hour message movie that couldíve been written by an eighth grader. No, make that a fifth grader."

More nuanced in his criticism of the familiar colonizer-native plot is Michael Phillips, Jr. at Goatdog's Movies who writes, "It's actually worse than Dances with Wolves in terms of cultural imperialism. Like so many other 'white guy goes back to nature' movies, it posits that the best native is in fact a white guy gone native. He was raised in the offending culture so he understands how it works, but he's also able to learn the native culture almost instantly, become an accepted member of that culture, become a better native than the erstwhile best native (usually a young, hot-tempered man), and lead the natives into battle, either showing himself to be an honorable leader or dying valiantly in the attempt. It's a bunch of racist hoo-haw, even if we're dealing with made-up blue Gumbys."

And lastly Philip French at The Observer: "It preaches a sermon about our duty towards the preservation of the environment while leaving the biggest trail of carbon footprints since Godzilla trampled New York."

Each point is valid so far as the film's content goes, but Avatar is special because its content cannot be separated from its form without seriously distorting the film's achievements and inner conflicts. And when it comes to the form, even skeptical critics have acknowledged the impressiveness of Avatar's technological spectacle. I saw the film in IMAX 3D and for the first half-hour I kept mumbling to myself every time the film's 3D technology "surprised" me.

I had expected the cliché thrusting of objects "at my face" as has been popular in 3D horror movie franchises, but Avatar's use of 3D is really an extension of realist(ic) cinema's "deep focus." Deep focus is a film technique popularized by Orson Welles and Greg Toland's work in Citizen Kane (1941) which allows for objects in both the background and foreground of a shot to be in focus. The effect of deep focus—and the reason for its association with realist cinema—is that the viewer can 'choose' what part of the shot to focus on—foreground or background. The ability to choose what to focus on is supposed to correlate to how the viewer perceives reality—hence the suspect term realist cinema.

In many ways, the "thrusting" of older 3D movies is the opposite of deep focus. It forces the viewer to focus on the object which is rapidly "approaching." In Avatar, rather than feeling that the image occasionally thrusts out at me, I feel like I am looking "into" the image—almost as if it were a diorama—a box rather than a screen. Never mind the flying dinosaurs and space ships, What impressed me most about the film's 3D technology is that even the "screens within screens" (there are all kinds of monitors used by characters in the film) have this same "box" effect—dioramas within dioramas, within dioramas.

It is, of course, still illusion and like any cinematic illusion it relies on apparatus to create its effects. J. R. Jones for the Chicago Reader states, "Watching it, I began to understand how people in 1933 must have felt when they saw King Kong." A. O. Scott, in At the Movies, claims, "I had the feeling coming out of this movie that I haven't felt since maybe I was eleven years old in 1977 and I saw Star Wars for the first time." The reference to each film is apt, but in my opinion Avatar's "newness" goes even farther back in cinematic history.

In the essay, "An Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early Film and the (In)Credulous Spectator," Tom Gunning addresses one of the more pernicious myths of early cinema, in which audiences were said to really believe that the trains and other objects captured in motion would "fly off the screen" and into the audience—an effect not unlike a viewer flinching when 3D Jason Voorhees reaching out through the screen to stab you him with a knife. Gunning argues that it is unlikely audiences really believed these moving objects were "real" enough to cause them harm. Instead, Gunning believes that the real "spectacle" and thrill of early cinema was in the performance and ritual surrounding the "magic" of the film's apparatus. Often, Gunning writes, the film was presented as still image and then—with much fanfare—the operator of the cinematic apparatus "brought the image to life" before the spectator's eyes. "Belief and terror are larded with an awareness of illusion," Gunning writes, much like the thrill of riding a roller coaster.

Going to see Avatar in cinemas closely parallels Gunning's account of early cinema. At the IMAX where I saw the film, prior to the movie's start a voice came over the speakers. The voice described the technology of the IMAX presentation—the special screen which fills my peripheral vision, fully immersing me in the film; the surround speakers which feature crystal clarity. Finally, I was instructed to don my 3D glasses as the film was about to begin. In other words, before Avatar even began this authoritative voice of IMAX prepared me to watch the flat, gray screen in front of me to transform, before my 3D glasses-apparatus-cloaked eyes, into a world of virtual depth.

It worked. I was "astonished."

At this point it can be fairly said that I agree both with the critics who deride Avatar's content as well as those who celebrate its formal, technological innovations. Of more interest, however, is a circular hermeneutics which reads the film-as-closed-product in the context of Avatar's particular historical circumstances—especially the phenomenon of its popular consumption as novelty and nostalgia at once.

By circular hermeneutics—a term used with more precision by Martin Heidegger and Hans-Georg Gadamer—I mean the reading of the part into the whole, and the whole into the part. Or in this case, the reading of the film (content/form) into the audience (phenomenon/history), and the reading of the audience into the film.

It has been stated that the plot of Avatar is simply that of Pocahontas except that the natives win and the colonists are exiled. Despite this "twist" on the history of colonial America, the plot is so familiar that it produces little conflict in the viewer. Because of my "received knowledge" of Hollywood films, including James Cameron's, I am fairly certain that the "good guys" will win the climactic battle. In fact, I can even guess with decent accuracy which characters will be slain and which will survive. For me, the viewer watching the film, even the film's conflict does not conflict with my expectations. Consider the words of Gadamer: "We are fundamentally open to the possibility that the writer of a transmitted text is better informed than we are, with our previously formed meaning. It is only when the attempt to accept what he has said as true fails that we try to 'understand' the text, psychologically, or historically, as another's meaning." In other words, since I fully expect Avatar's good guys to win and since the good guys do in fact win, there is little need for me to interpret or "understand" the plot of the film. This is largely why critics complain about Avatar's plot—everything is as expected.

But even as my expectations of good versus evil were being met by the film, something felt odd. As the Na'vi (good guys) slew the Marines (bad guys) with poisonous arrows, spears, and rampaging fauna, I felt personally conflicted. I knew that I was expected to sympathize with the Na'vi and despise the colonizing Marines, but watching humans get impaled or squished in various ways made me feel uneasy. Less so when one of the Na'vi bit the bullet. Where did this conflict come from? Was I a bad guy too? Sympathetic to colonial interests? Was I a specist/racist unable to get passed my affinity for the Self over the Other? If so, then there would be no conflict in understanding me, either. That is, there is nothing "unexpected," nothing to "understand" about a white, American male holding racist, colonial views.

There is, in my opinion, another possible understanding of this conflict which derives its meaning from my relationship to Avatar as product of content/form as well as historical phenomenon (in which I participate). I am asked by the film to identify the Na'vi as the good guys because Pandora is their home world, because they are a pre-industrial society, because they are in harmony with nature, and because the colonizing Marines are almost uniformly depicted as ruthless and greedy. The problem with the film's demand on me, however, is that this distinction between the Na'vi and the Marines is, in at least one respect, inaccurate. In terms of the phenomenon of cinema, the Na'vi are in fact the hyper-product of post-industrial culture. They are the pinnacle of computer generated images. The "future" of cinematic performance. It is the human actors playing the Marines who, by contrast, seem quaint and pre-industrial. These actors are surrounded by a giant, imaginary world which threatens to swallow them up both in the three-dimensional technology (it literally "swallows" the image of the actor into the hyper-real space) and literally in the context of the film (the actors are swallowed up by the computer generated beasts of Pandora). Simply put, it is these human actors who cannot compete against Avatar's onslaught of special effects and computer wizardry. It is they who are protecting a human tradition as old as Ancient Greece from the seemingly unstoppable progress of computer generated hyper-images.

The word which ties up my point comes from Frederic Jameson's essay "Postmodernism and Consumer Society" is nostalgia. Above, I cited critics who compared Avatar to such technological innovators as King Kong and Star Wars, but all of these films, despite their technological advancements, are ultimately nostalgic in their effect upon the spectator. Jameson points out that Star Wars is not "a historical film about our own intergalactic past," but rather a pastiche of science fiction and adventure serials from the 1930s and 50s: "Far from being a pointless satire of such dead forms, Star Wars satisfies a deep (might I even say repressed?) longing to experience them again: it is a complex object in which on some first level children and adolescents can take the adventures straight, while the adult public is able to gratify a deeper and more properly nostalgic desire to return to that older period and to live its strange old aesthetic artefacts [sic] through once again."

The nostalgia of Avatar is overdetermined—it is nostalgia for justice, for Star Wars (and the regression of its nostalgic artifacts), for benevolent science, for a pre-terror, pre-industrial, pre-global warming society. But as much as those points of nostalgic interest are overdetermined in the film's content, they are seriously undermined by its form. I come to realize that what Avatar conveys is that these nostalgic plots can exist only as hyper-real, computer images.

Avatar is an important film not because of its popularity or its technical achievements, but because it marks an evolutionary step on humanity's alienation from its own nostalgic literature. This alienation only serves to strengthen the nostalgic desire and I suspected that it is not merely Avatar's technology, but the deployment of this technology "against" nostalgic familiarity (the oft-maligned plot) that has propelled Avatar to commercial and critical success. Consider: by film's end, the humans are exiled from Pandora; they return to their broken, polluted, war-torn planet. Their exile is ours, just as I file out of theater back into the Opry Mills Mega Mall (and from there to the parking lot, to the car, to the house, and on and on). The nostalgia is ever more removed and is therefore ever more potent; hell, the 3D glasses aren't even color-tinted anymore.