Waiting for the Barbarians Read online

  Criticisms such as Brooks’s are not to be dismissed—not least because the ugly complex he identifies is one that has consistently marred Hollywood representations of cultural confrontation from the earliest westerns to the more recent products of a supposedly more enlightened age. (One of the many earnest movies to which Avatar has been derisively compared by its detractors is the 1990 Kevin Costner epic Dances with Wolves, in which a Civil War hero similarly goes native, leading the Indian tribes against his former compatriots.) What’s striking is that so many critiques of Avatar’s political shortcomings often go out of their way to elide or belittle the movie’s overwhelming successes as a work of cinema—its enormous visual power, the thrilling imaginative originality, the excitingly effective use of the 3-D technology that seems bound to change permanently the nature of cinematic experience henceforth—as if to acknowledge how dazzling it is would be an admission of critical weakness.

  An extreme example of this is to be found in a searching critique posted by the critic Caleb Crain on his blog:

  Of course you don’t really believe it. You know objectively that you’re watching a series of highly skilled, highly labor-intensive computer simulations. But if you agree to suspend disbelief, then you agree to try to feel that Pandora is a second, improved nature, and that the Na’vi are “digital natives,” to repurpose in a literal way a phrase that depends on the same piece of ideological deception.

  But our “objective knowledge” about the mechanisms that produce theatrical illusion is beside the point. To witness a critic working so hard not to surrender disbelief—the aim, after all, of drama since its inception—is, in a way, to realize how powerful the mechanisms that seek to produce that surrender really are. (A notable exception to the trend of critical resistance was the New Yorker review by David Denby, which began, “Avatar is the most beautiful film I’ve seen in years.”)

  As it happens, the movie that haunts Avatar—one that Cameron has often acknowledged as his favorite film—is one that takes the form of a fable about the difference (and sometimes traffic) between fantasy and reality; a movie whose dramatic climax centers on the moment when the protagonist understands that visually overwhelming and indeed politically manipulative illusions can be the product of “highly skilled, highly labor-intensive simulations” (a fact that does not, however, detract from the characters’, and from our, appreciation of the aesthetic and moral uses and benefits of fantasy, of illusion). That movie is, in fact, the one the Marine colonel quotes: The Wizard of Oz. Consideration of it is, to my mind, crucial to an understanding not only of the aesthetic aims and dramatic structure of Avatar but of a great and disturbing failure that has not been discussed as fervently or as often as its overtly political blind spots have been. This failure is, in certain ways, the culmination of a process that began with the first of Cameron’s films, all of which can be seen as avatars of his beloved model, whose themes they continually rework: the scary and often violent confrontation between human and alien civilizations, the dreadful allure of the monstrous, the yearning, by us humans, for transcendence: of the places, the cultures, the very bodies that define us.

  Humanity and human life have never held much attraction for Cameron; if anything, you can say that in all his movies there is a yearning to leave the flesh of Homo sapiens behind for something stronger and tougher. The movie that made his name and established him as a major writer-director of blockbuster successes, The Terminator (1984), is ostensibly about the poignant conflict between the human race and a race of sentient, human-hating machines that create a lethal new weapon: a cyborg,—“part man, part machine … fully armored, very tough. But outside it’s living human tissue. Flesh, hair, blood.…” The plot, which essentially consists of a number of elaborately staged chase sequences, concerns the attempts by one of these, famously played by Arnold Schwarzenegger—an actor notorious for his fleshly armor as well as for his rather mechanical acting—who returns to the present from a post-apocalyptic future in order to assassinate a woman called Sarah Connor: we are told that she will one day give birth to the boy who, when he grows up, is destined to lead a successful human uprising against the machine overlords.

  But whatever lip service it pays to the resilience of the human spirit, etc., the film cannot hide its more profound admiration for the resilience of the apparently indestructible cyborg. As the story evolves, this creature loses ever-increasing amounts of its human envelope in various encounters with the woman and her protectors—an eye here, a limb there—and is stripped, eventually, of all human characteristics. By the end, it emerges out of an explosion as a titanium skeleton, hell-bent on pure destruction. In an interview with The New Yorker that appeared just before the release of Avatar, Cameron recalled that the inspiration for the movie, which he says came to him in a dream, was this sole image: “a chrome skeleton emerging out of a fire.” Everything else came later.

  It would be hard to claim that Cameron—who has managed to wring clanking and false performances from fine actors like Kate Winslet, Leonardo DiCaprio, Billy Zane (Titanic), and Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio (The Abyss)—is an actor’s director; his films’ emotional energy, and certainly their visual interest, lie in their awed appreciation of what machines (and inhuman creatures) can do, from the seemingly unkillable cyborgs of the Terminator movies to the unstoppable alien monster queen of Aliens to the deep-sea diving capsules and remote-controlled robots featured in Titanic and The Abyss. The performances that work in his films, significantly, are either those of mediocre actors like Schwarzenegger who actually play machines or good actors playing tight-lipped, emotionally shut-down characters, like Sigourney Weaver in Aliens (1986), which Cameron wrote and directed.

  The Terminator had a dark sense of humor about our relationship to technology, an issue that is at the core, in its way, of Avatar. In one memorably disturbing scene, a woman can’t hear her boyfriend being beaten to death by the Terminator because she’s listening to loud pop music with her headphones on; in another, we—and the Terminator—overhear a crucial message on Sarah Connor’s answering machine, which greets callers with the sly announcement: “Ha ha, I fooled you, you’re talking to a machine. But that’s OK, machines need love too.” The joke is that they don’t—and that’s their advantage. It’s no accident that by the end of Terminator 2: Judgment Day, Cameron’s hit 1991 sequel to the original, Sarah Connor has become rather machinelike herself—pointedly, even cruelly suppressing maternal feelings for the child she has borne, strenuously working out, hardening her body, arming herself to the teeth with an eye-popping arsenal of handguns and automatic weapons.

  The fascination with the seeming invincibility of sophisticated mechanical objects, and an accompanying desire to slough off human flesh and replace it with metal (and a celebration of flesh so taut it may as well be metal: Cameron’s camera loves to linger on the tightly muscled bodies, male and female, of the soldiers so often featured in his violent films), is a recurrent theme in the techno-blockbusters that cemented the director’s reputation in the late 1980s and throughout the 1990s. Aliens famously ends with Weaver’s character, Ellen Ripley, battling the dragonish alien monster queen after strapping herself into a giant forklift-like machine whose enormous pincers she mechanically controls by maneuvering her own slender arms—a technology that puts the puny human, finally, on a par with her gigantic, razor-toothed, acid-bleeding adversary.

  This kind of exaggerated mechanical body gear, which endows people with machinelike strength and power, is a recurrent prop in Cameron’s films. It’s crucial in Aliens and it pops up again in his 1989 submarine fantasy The Abyss, which imagines an encounter between a deep-sea oil-drilling team and an ethereally beautiful, bioluminescent species of marine aliens. Even in Titanic (1997), the clunky “human interest” subplot, about a doomed romance between a feisty Main Line nymphet and a free-spirited artist in third class, cannot compete with the swooning representation of machines—the ship itself, the whirring turbines and purring hydrauli
cs—and, later, with the awful, methodical disintegration of those mechanical elements. There are a lot of glittering modern-day gadgets, too: the famous disaster story is intercut with scenes of present-day dives to the great wreck, during which human operators remotely manipulate treasure-hunting drones by means of sympathetic arm movements.

  A violent variation on the same mechanical bodysuits reappears, memorably, in Avatar, which culminates in a scene of bloody single combat between a Na’vi warrior and the evil Marine colonel, who has strapped himself into one such machine. If anything, the recurrent motif of humans inserting themselves into mechanical contraptions in order to enjoy superhuman powers reaches its fullest, most sophisticated expression in the new movie, whose characters can literally become other, superhuman beings by hooking themselves up to elaborate machines. All this seems to bear out the underlying truth of a joke that Linda Hamilton, the actress who played Sarah Connor in the Terminator movies, told about her first, unhappy interactions with the director (whom she later married and divorced): “That man is definitely on the side of the machines.”

  The awed appreciation for superhuman powers—and an understandable desire by human weaklings to lay claim to them, in times of great duress—that recur in Cameron’s work before Avatar surely betrays a lingering trace of his formative encounter with The Wizard of Oz. That movie famously shows us a helpless twelve-year-old, set loose in a strange world inhabited by scary monsters and powerful aliens, discovering her own hitherto unknown powers—and learning, in the end, that certain supposedly supernatural powers are produced by knowing how to maneuver the right gears and levers.

  Another inheritance from that visually revolutionary work, of course, is Cameron’s taste for plots that have to do with encounters between humans and aliens of one sort or another. Avatar would seem to be the most obvious manifestation of this particular debt by Cameron to his favorite film. Apart from a number of explicit allusions to Oz—the line about not being in Kansas anymore, a corporate stooge’s sneering reference to the Na’vi as “blue monkeys,” which recalls the blue-tinged flying monkeys of the 1939 movie—the encounter between the human world and the world of the Na’vi is imbued with a sense of thrilled visual amazement that deliberately evokes a similar experience provided by the Hollywood classic. In the latter, Dorothy’s life in Kansas was filmed in black and white; only when she awakes in Oz does the film move into dazzling three-strip Technicolor. In Avatar, Cameron quotes this famous gesture. Jake Sully’s world, the world of the humans—the interior of the marine transports and fighters, the hangars and meeting rooms, the labs of the scientists and the offices of the nameless corporation—is filmed in a drably monotonous palette of grays and blues (the latter being a favorite color of this director, who uses it often to represent a bleak future); the world of the Na’vi, in contrast, is one of staggering color and ravishing light.

  The colors, apart from the opulent greens of the Na’vis’ jungle homeland, tend to be lusciously “feminine” on the flora: violet, mauve, delicate peaches and yellows. They grow stronger on the fauna, a series of brilliantly imagined creatures among which, persuasively, certain morphologies recur. (Crests, say, and hammerheads.) All, the plants and animals both, share one trait that clearly owes much to Cameron’s lifelong passion for marine exploration, and that provides Avatar with much of its visual delight: bioluminescence. As the characters tread on plants or trees, the latter light up delicately, for a moment; the ritually important Tree of Souls looks like a weeping willow made of fiber-optic cables. It’s a wonderful conceit that had me literally gasping with pleasure the first time I saw the movie.

  This visual ravishment—which is the principal experience of the movie and which is, too, enhanced by the surprisingly subtle use of 3-D technology (there are gratifyingly few shots of objects projecting into the audience’s field; you just feel that you’re sharing the same plane as the creatures in the movie)—is part of a strategy intended to make us admire the Na’vi. Not surprisingly, given all this natural synergy and beauty, the native people, as we are told again and again, enjoy a special bond with all those colorful creatures and, more generally, with the ecosystem, to which they have given the name Eywa. (Cameron, apparently as much a stickler for linguistic as for biological verisimilitude, had a professor at the University of Southern California work up a functional Na’vi language.)

  This, in turn, is part of the film’s earnest, apparently anticolonial, anticapitalist, antitechnology message. These creatures, rather sentimentally modeled on popular notions of Native American and African tribes, are presented as being wholly in tune with nature—as preagricultural hunter-gatherers who subsist on the flesh of the animals they kill by means of their remarkable skill at archery. When they do make a kill, they solemnly apologize to the victims: “All energy is borrowed and one day you have to give it back,” Neytiri rather officiously informs the avatar-Jake when he makes his first kill. They stand, therefore, in stark contrast to the movie’s humans (the “sky-people”), with their heavy, rumbling, roaring copters and tractors and immense, belching, grinding mining-machines—the representatives of destructive “technology” who have, we are told, “killed their mother”: which is to say, destroyed their own planet.

  All this would be well and good enough, in its genially eco-friendly, Pocahontas-esque way, but for the fact that Cameron is the wrong man to be making a film celebrating the virtues of pretechnological societies. As, indeed, he has no intention of doing here. For as the admiring scientists—led by a chain-smoking, tough-talking woman called Grace Augustine, played by Sigourney Weaver (the chain-smoking is an in-joke: Aliens’ Ripley had the same bad habit)—protest to the trigger-happy Marines, Na’vi civilization is in fact technologically sophisticated: by means of a pistil-tipped appendage, wittily described by Caleb Crain as a kind of USB cable, which plugs into similar appendages on both plants and animals, they can commune not only with other creatures but with what constitutes a planetwide version of a technology with which we today are very preoccupied. “Don’t you get it?” an exasperated Dr. Augustine shouts at the corporate and military yahoos who clearly intend to blow all the Na’vi to kingdom come. “It’s a network—a global network!” She goes on to describe how, by means of the pistil-thing, the Na’vi can upload and download memories, information, and so forth—and can even communicate with their dead. (One such upload to Eywa herself, transmitted through the Tree of Souls by Jake’s avatar, will, in the end, help lead the Na’vi and their furry friends to victory over the human exploiters. This, of course, is the Dances with Wolves paradigm.)

  And so, even as it looks like it’s celebrating nature, Avatar is really a valentine to the digital technology that makes so many of its effects possible. Here the film, for all its richly imagined and dazzlingly depicted beauties, runs into deep and revealing trouble. As we know by now, Cameron’s real attraction, as a writer and a director, has always been to the technologies that turn humans into superhumans. However “primitive” they have seemed to some critics, the Na’vi—with their uniformly superb, sleekly blue-gleaming physiques, their weirdly infallible surefootedness, their organic connector cables, their ability to upload and download consciousness itself—are the ultimate expression of his career-long striving to make flesh mechanical. The problem here is not a patronizingly clichéd representation of an ostensibly primitive people; the problem is the movie’s intellectually incoherent portrayal of its tribal heroes as both admirably pre-civilized and admirably hypercivilized, as atechnological and highly technologized.

  Avatar’s desire to have its ideological cake and eat it too suggests something deeply unself-aware and disturbingly unresolved within Cameron himself. And how could it not? He is, after all, a Hollywood giant who insists on seeing himself as a regular Joe, a man with what he called, in the New Yorker interview, a “blue-collar sensibility”; more to the point, he is a director whose hugely successful mass entertainments cost hundreds of millions of dollars obligingly provided by de
ep-pocketed corporations—a “company” man, whether he knows it or not. And these shows depend for their effects—none more than Avatar—on the most sophisticated technologies available, even as that director tells himself that the technology that is the sine qua non of his technique isn’t as important as people think; that, in fact, what makes Avatar special is the “human interest” story, particularly the love story between Jake and Neytiri:

  Too much is being said about the technology of this film. Quite frankly, I don’t give a rat’s ass how a film is made. It’s an emotional story. It’s a love story. They’re not expecting that. The sci-fi/fantasy fans see the trailer and they think, Cool—battles, robots. What you really need to get to is, Oh, it’s that [a love story], too.

  But of course, when you see Avatar, what overwhelms you is what the technology accomplishes—not only the battles and robots, to be fair, but all the other marvelous stuff, the often overwhelmingly beautiful images of a place that exists somewhere over the rainbow.

  Even beyond the incoherence that mars Avatar and hopelessly confuses whatever it thinks its message may be, there is a larger flaw here—one that’s connected to Cameron’s ambivalence about the relationship between technology and humanity; one that also brings you back, in the end, to The Wizard of Oz; one that is less political than ethical.

  If it’s right to see the movie as the culmination of Cameron’s lifelong progress toward embracing a dazzling, superior Otherness—in a word, toward Oz—what strikes you, in the end, is how radically it differs, in one significant detail, from its model. Like the 1939 classic, the 2009 film ends with a scene of awakening. By the end, the Na’vi (under Jake’s leadership) have triumphed, but the human Jake, operating his avatar from within his computerized pod, has been fatally hurt. His dying body is brought back to the Tree of Souls where, in a ceremony of the greatest holiness, the consciousness of the human Jake will be transferred, finally and permanently, into his Na’vi avatar. (Technology at its best, surely.) In the closing moments of the film the camera lingers suspensefully on the motionless face of avatar-Jake; suddenly, the large, feline eyes pop open, and then the screen goes black. We leave the theater secure in the knowledge that the rite has been successful, that the avatar-Jake will live. (And that there will be sequels.)