Credit: Roger Dean, Album Artist
Fair Value of Avatar Fire and Ash: $0. I spent 3 and a half hours, over an eighth of my day, in a theater watching this. And less than an hour later the details are already running like water out of my mind and memory. Either I’m growing demented or this film is utterly forgettable. But there really was never a point where any of the spectacle of this film grabbed me. Somehow, James Cameron made a film that literally has a drug-fueled blue catgirl orgy and yet I was numb to it all. That’s an amazing achievement in a way.
What’s Avatar: Fire and Ash About? Metaphorically speaking, a vaccine for Yellow Fever. Dreadlocked fuckboy Spider (Jack Champion) gets saved by a plot device which makes him the first human being adapted to survive in the atmosphere of the jungle planet Pandora. Which in turn makes him and the Sully Family (Sam Worthington, Zoe Saldana, et al) renewed targets for the rapacious colonizers of earth.
Also, it’s about how imperialism works. The Spanish didn’t conquer Mexico with a bunch of guns; they conquered Mexico with a bunch of guns, smallpox, and a whole bunch of pissed off Tlaxcala and Oaxaca and other tribes that were tired with how the Aztecs were running the show, and who decided that the weird albinos in the metal suits couldn’t really be any worse.
And that’s some of what is happening in Avatar: Fire and Ash. Much as the British exploited the Sikhs and the Naga in India, or as the Belgian favored the Tutsis over the Hutus. The old military villain Quaritch (Stephen Lang) figures out the best way to hunt and kill Navi (the smurf cat people with the dreadlock super-powers of empathy). And as well as with other, more resentful Navi, equipped with rocket launchers and guns.
Theory One: The Abandonment of Perceptual Realism: Avatar: Fire and Ash is a gorgeous, beautiful moving picture. It’s not a film; it’s three hours of teenagers walking around inside of a Roger Dean album cover (and btw, Roger Dean sued James Cameron and lost). But everything is overlaid in a day-glo Maxfield Parrish glaze and because of that, there’s no connection. It’s like Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within or any other all computer animated film- it’s entirely lost within the depths of the uncanny valley. People are not attached to Avatar for the same reason they’re not attached to rubber dolls or cartoons. There’s just very little of the human. Laura Marks developed the film theory of haptic reality, that cinema works or fails off of it’s ability to approximate the texture and feeling of lived human reality. The glorious and beautiful special effects of Avatar are like some polychromic Great Wall made out of Fordite, a great rainbow barrier which prevents the audience from every feeling a moment of connection to the characters on screen.
Theory Two: The Writing is Tripe: Nobody ever quotes the Avatar pictures the way that you’ll hear people quoting Aliens or Terminator. And that’s because the characterization is flat and the idioms are all highly banal. All of the characters talk like teenagers. There’s no idiosyncracy and therefore no individuality to most of the characters. The only memorable moments come from the subplot with the old villain, Colonel Quaritch flirting and developing a relationship with the new villain Varang (Oona Chaplin), the leader of the drug snorting Ash Tribe. This is a picture where you want to spend more time with the bad guys and you just grimly endure the scenes with the good guys.
Like the later instances of The Fast and Furious, Avatar Fire and Ash argues that it’s all about Family, and that the power of Family will prevail over gigantic techno-armada that includes mecha crabs and gunships. It’s like being forced to watch somebody narrate the play by play of their latest Warhammer 40K battle of the Tyrannids defeating the Imperial Guard. I’m sure it was fun to play it dude, but I don’t really want three hours to hear about it.
Theory Three: No One Really Cares about Tarzan the White Savior: Nobody cares about Avatar because it’s just the same story that rich white people have been telling for 3200 years. Ever since Hernan Cortes scooped up La Malinche (or really, since Christopher Columbus started raping assorted Taino children), Europeans have lusted for pliable nubile princesses from the cultures they are conquering. You’ll notice that I say 3200 years, and that’s because Western literature begins with this story: the reason why Achilles throws a hissy fit that sets of the main drama of the Iliad is because he doesn’t get to keep Briseis as his war bride.
Jake Sully is just the latest avatar (not sorry) of the trope of the white savior: the white man’s fantasy of not only being adopted or assimilated into a different, somehow more authentic society (Dances with Wolves, the Last Samurai), but that he will be feted, validated, nurtured, and affirmed, receiving all of the love that they were denied within our alienating capitalist monoculture.
The apologia for the imperial expedition is literally the foundation of western literature (the Iliad, Argonautica). And we’re the empire. We’re the genocidaires. We’re busy running CECOT and abducting South American heads of state for our kangaroo trials to distract from being our own head of state being a pedophile rapist. Asking Americans to care about the plight of the Navi is like asking the Orcs of Mordor to empathize with a soap opera about the Elves of Rivendell. We can’t even manage a quantum of humanity to our very own neighbors going into the concentration camps, what makes you think we’re going to care or remember the fortunes of athletic fuzzy aliens? I’m saying that the Avatar pictures don’t really exist in our culture despite record breaking grosses is because there’s not really a niche for it within the greater myth-schema of the American pop cultural landscape.
This fantasy of going native serves the imperialist agenda. Whether it’s being a church missionary or a peace corps volunteer, the empire needs some form of myth about the inherent worth of the young person finding identity by going out to the colonial fringe, whether as a soldier, a missionary, or as a doctor. James Cameron shows his true self with the scene at the end of the movie. He’s just a hippie surfer boy from California who never found his hippie tribe, whether at Woodstock or Burning Man. And all the rest of us now have to suffer through his entirely forgettable rasta smurf cat orgies because of it.
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