X-Posted at Plasma Pool

“For some time now, the accidental events on the street seem to the movie-goer just leaving the theater like the planned contingency of a film.  Between the mechanically assembled phrases taken from the language of daily life, the chasm yawns.”

 - “Trying to Understand Endgame” Theodor W. Adorno

© 2009 Avatar

Avatar entered wide-release last December and by now no one doubts that it has compelled many.  A CNN article reports on a largely internet-based community of people morbidly obsessed with the movie, offering the following post from one fan:

"That's all I have been doing as of late, searching the Internet for more info about 'Avatar.' I guess that helps. It's so hard I can't force myself to think that it's just a movie, and to get over it, that living like the Na'vi will never happen. I think I need a rebound movie,"  Elequin posted.

One reason Elequin may not have been able “to think that it’s just a movie” is that Avatar creates an extremely immersive experience for its viewers, especially when seen in 3-D in the theaters.  Reviewers like Kenneth Turan, John Podhoretz, and David Denby claim that the movie’s expensively-produced visual and auditory spectacle chiefly if not fully accounts for this intense immersion. Turan writes, “In Cameron's hands, 3-D is not the forced gimmick it's often been, but a way to create an alternate reality and insert us so completely and seamlessly into it that we feel like we've actually been there, not watched it on a screen.” And Denby suggests—without any real justification—that anyone “lingering over the irony that [Avatar’s] anti-technology message is delivered by an example of advanced technology that cost nearly two hundred and fifty million dollars to produce” should realize that such consideration is a waste of time.  The sensory experience, he says, “is striking enough to make it irrelevant.”

© 2010 CNN.com

I disagree.  The movie invites its viewers in with more than just its hyperrealism.  And if we allow ourselves to consider the tensions between the production, the experience, and the thematic elements of the movie, we may uncover a level of depth in Avatar that matches rather than falls short of the visual effects.

As I left the theater last December, having watched the movie in 3D IMAX, I removed my glasses and was struck by the impression that I was staring out of my own head.  What do I mean and what did the striking?  I mean that I felt something like the paraplegic Sully, waking up inside the avatar body for the first time.  Like Sully, I was finally able to stand after being confined to a chair.  Like Sully, I looked at my body as a thing that I had been inserted into (in that scene specifically, Sully looks at his hands).  Like Sully, some bizarre new technologies had made it all possible.  It was a strange sensation.  Once I began to think about the technological apparatuses at work in the production of this highly constructed movie, a movie that had bled into my apprehension of reality, the strange sensation led to stranger thoughts.

Stuart Klawans speedy review in The Nation is one of the few I found that share my thought and take it seriously.  He writes, “the ability of the film’s protagonist, Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), to take on Na’vi flesh…completes the circuit between viewer and film” and goes on to claim that the analogy between “you in your theater seat [and] the crippled Jake Sully in his box…makes Avatar’s techno-mysticism too thrilling to doubt.”  Getting back to my disagreement with Denby, Klawans also notes that Avatar encourages you to consider the “readily spotted irony” that “Cameron has sided with the tree huggers (literally) but used sophisticated technology to do so.”

And, to elaborate on a densely-packed point Klawans makes in his article, Dr. Grace Augustine (Sigourney Weaver), the empiricist scientist in the service of empire, erodes the distinction between the natural and the technological by constellating the human mind with the phenomena on Pandora and the Internet:

Dr. Grace Augustine: What we think we know - is that there's some kind of electrochemical communication between the roots of the trees. Like the synapses between neurons. Each tree has ten to the fourth connections to the trees around it, and there are ten to the twelfth trees on Pandora...
Selfridge: That's a lot, I'm guessing.
Dr. Grace Augustine: That's more connections than the human brain. You get it? It's a network - a global network. And the Na'vi can access it - they can upload and download data - memories - at sites like the one you just destroyed.

She’s not saying that electrochemical signals resemble the soul; she’s saying they are the same thing.  The spark of life becomes a mere spark.  The distinction between organic Na’vi and manufactured avatar starts to wither just as the viewer feels the distinction between their world and the world of the movie fade.  And as we lose track of the borders, this dialogue can also leads us to think of the technology that made this world feel natural in the first place.

So we find more than just the impressive phantasmagoria immersing the viewer.  There is an analogical engine at work in Avatar that draws on the experience of watching the movie and connects this experience to the shadows on the screen.  And it operates with more than just the relationship between viewer and viewed.  Promoters of the movie spent a good deal of time detailing the technology behind it in order to build it up.  According to a New York Post article, Cameron used something called a Virtual Camera to see the actors in their 3D environment, and Weaver explains in an interview for The Daily Show that the actors donned headsets allowing them to do the same.  By the time most people saw Avatar, the promotion had made them very well acquainted with the experience of the movie’s production, and, because of the latent analogies in the theater, this knowledge led to a feeling of intimacy rather than alienation.

Once we realize this, the movie lights up and we can finally take a real look at what so many critics, including Klawans, sought to avoid: the colonial narrative.  Klawans dismissively calls the plot “familiar cowboys-and-Indians fare,” and many other reviewers say that the movie allegorizes such real-life events as the Iraq War and every colonial encounter in what we now call the Untied States.  Certainly, as many of these reviews suggest, Avatar draws on white guilt, but more importantly it draws on white guilt narratives.  Articles describing Avatar as a version of another story, including Disney’s Pocahontas, Dances With Wolves, Dune, Ferngully: The Last Rainforest, The Jazz Singer, and King Solomon’s Mine far outweigh the number of articles saying that it points directly to an actual historical moment.

Avatar gets you to think about the form of such a narrative as well as the narrative itself.  Critics complain about the formulaic plot and the hackneyed dialogue, but the obviousness of the story’s form and the jarring clunk of cliché phrases spilling out of the actors’ mouths makes you reflect on the story as a story.  I think of an old car trying to make its way to the top of the hill.  The engine roars, you try to shift gears, and all the sudden the peripheral awareness you had of this thing that sped you along the freeway becomes a painful consciousness of a big, messy machine.  It still works, but you can hear the gears straining.  You become aware of car as car.  In the car, your destination draws you on.  In Avatar, it’s the analogies and the sensory explosion (on which the analogies are partially predicated) working together.

And the analogical machinery we discussed above extends into the colonial encounter narrative at nearly every level.  The science team, led by Dr. Augustine, attempts to immerse itself into the everyday theater of Na’vi life, not only performing biological research, but anthropological research as well.  In so doing, Dr. Augstine begins to empathize with them, even as she helps bring about their destruction.  If you left the theater wondering why you couldn’t decide whether you hated or loved the movie, it may be because of figures of immersion like this one, to which you were analogically linked like a Na’vi warrior to its horse-like creature, that feel either wrong or right or both.  Avatar presents us with a whole slew of them, from the penetrative imperial invasion of Na’vi land (wrong?) to the literal penetration of the sex act (right?).  It could also be, because the protagonist, to whom the movie so formally binds us, suffers from a conflict of allegiances for the majority of the movie.

© 2009 Avatar

But let’s conclude with the sex.  We can see the sex scene as emblematic of all of the above analysis.  First, our analogical engine is up and running, because Sully and Neytiri (Zoe Saldana) can only “hook up” through the technological mediation of Sully’s avatar body.*  Second, we can become overly conscious of the technological heights of the movie, since the scene takes place in the artificially constructed Pandoran jungle, where everything glows and the flora seems to respond with an animal intelligence.  Third, we saw it coming; the story reveals itself as story when the star-crossed lovers (Romeo and Juliet) come to the Edenic garden beneath the wise tree and act in a way that will anger their authority (Old Testament).  Fourth, it’s a trope of both colonial and post-colonial narratives to use a sex act as a metaphor for the encounter between the imperial power and the invaded or controlled community.  The male almost always functions as a metonym for the imperial power and the female stands-in for the invaded community.** 

Finally, the sex scene, on the level of the plot, boils over with conflicted feelings.  On one hand, we want the two attractive protagonists to consummate their love.  On the other hand, we still think that Sully’s interests may rest with the corporation and getting the use of his legs back.  We may also feel a tug of dramatic irony, because we know that Neytiri understands this act as one that binds her to Sully forever.  Taken in by the pathos of the moment, she isn’t aware of the hyperreality of her experience.  She doesn’t know that Sully actually lies in a coffin-like box in a laboratory and that she makes love to a synthetic body.  So what is she bound to?  It’s not unlike the more general experience of watching a drama on stage or screen, forgetting that the actors inhabit characters, and seeing the characters as merely real people.  So what are we immersed in?  We feel implicated, but, strangely, in something familiarly fictitious.  It’s not just a movie, it’s also a reflection on the way we understand and narrate our world.

Podhoretz claims that “[t]he real question is this: If Avatar were drawn like a regular cartoon, or had been made on soundstages with sets and the like, would it be interesting?  Would it hold our attention?  The answer is, unquestionably no.”  A valuable inquiry no doubt, if we recognize that we do not have such a movie before us.  We have Avatar’s spectacle and Avatar’s plot combined. Avatar attracts us enough to entertain and Avatar repels us enough to give room for reflection.  The resulting tension produces a powerful effect, wherein the movie compels us to criticize and astonishes us too.

-  Neima Jahromi

* Seeing this emblematic sex scene, this climactic entry point in the movie, as a metaphor for our interaction with the movie as a movie is not without precedent.  In his "Personism: A Manifesto," Frank O’Hara says we can see “the poem squarely between the poet and the person, Lucky Pierre style, and the poem is correspondingly gratified.”

**To see two exceptions, read The Comedians and Travels with my Aunt by Graham Greene.

Update: I recently came across two great articles on Avatar.  One meditates on the roles of gender and disability in the movie, and the other reflects on the significance of recasting a historical narrative in the future and the meaningful ways in which Avatar alters this narrative.