1. Raising the bar
James Cameron deserves — no, he commands respect. He’s earned it tenfold (a billionfold). The Terminator is a perfect film, and only an ahistorical nitpicker of older-school animatronics would disagree. The will to have a nightmare like Cameron did about a metal skeleton rising from flames and turn it into one the most iconic images of cinema! Aliens is a perfect film, even if it exists only in a superposition of its theatrical and director’s cuts, each having some better scenes than the other. In either case, has any film captured and popularised an aesthetic as much as Aliens’ did for grimdark in the ‘80s and ‘90s? Then in ’94 Cameron released True Lies, AKA the best Shane Black film not written by Shane Black. And from “Iceberg! Right ahead!” Titanic is the greatest disaster movie ever made. So I yield my admiration for Cameron to no man. He raises the bar.
In Avatar: The Way of Water he, too, seems in the mood to survey his career, almost like he’s saying goodbye to a prior phase of it and inaugurating the next. He picks up where the last film left off, with the human colonisers expelled from Pandora and Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) the naturalised Na’vi, enjoying family life. But the humans be back: in particular, a team of avatar marines sent to manhunt Sully, led by a mind-copied Quaritch (Stephen Lang), villain of the last film. Alongside the expected building upon his last instalment, Cameron builds in references to Aliens: obviously the AMP suits which recall Ripley’s power-walker, but also Sully’s daughter Tuk (Trinity Bliss) being sucked into watery peril like Newt. Copied Quaritch, on discovering the skeleton of his original, crushes its skull in his fist like the T-800s crushed skulls underfoot in Terminator 2. And Sully’s adopted daughter Kiri (Sigourney Weaver) and human best mate Spider (Jack Champion) balance on the stern of a sinking ship identically to Titanic’s Jack and Rose. But with The Way of Water’s moon pool and submarines and threatened, intelligent sea-life, the film it most resembles is a ‘minor work’ of Cameron’s, if you can call a $90 million-grossing work minor. He’s stared too long into The Abyss and it’s given him Avatar sequel ideas back.
Even the first Avatar was a reprise of The Abyss. In the latter, jumpy marines sink a nuclear bomb down an ocean trench to try destroy the phosphorescent civilisation there; in the former, Quaritch and his marines send a bomb-ship to try destroy the Na’vi’s phosphorescent Tree of Souls. The civilisation in The Abyss (the director’s cut) retaliates by sending tsunamis to shake a watery fist at our coastline cities, a warning in the style of The Day the Earth Stood Still. Like those films, the Avatar ones have a moral and mission for humanity about how we treat the planet. Not ours explicitly but its past, its parallel, its promise: Pandora.
2. Save the space whales
Of the mistreated lifeforms in The Abyss, we saw a CGI water-tentacle, a few translucent manta rays and an undersea city. Meanwhile the Avatar films show off one ecosystem after another — forest, marine, and volcanic coming next – as part of their vision to immerse us in the whole Pandoran biosphere (and beyond?). The term ‘world-building’ gets tossed around in SF/F a little easily; Cameron, with characteristic zeal, is serious (like The Company in Aliens, he’s terra-forming). The 3-D photorealistic environment of Pandora is the Avatar franchise’s unique selling point.
How’s Cameron comparing so far with his one big rival: God? The creatures in the first Avatar had a this-meets-that quality, like Doctor Moreau’s: a rhino body with the head of a hammerhead shark, a panther with porcupine quills. (For some reason a trait that recurs across many species is big chins.) In the sequel there’s a new amalgam among the Islands of Doctor Cameron: the Tulkun, looking like a cross between a blue whale and some kind of crazy crayfish.
We first meet them when Sully’s youngest son Lo’ak (Britain Dalton) is fleeing a big shark-like creature, which is smushed by a Tulkun (“There’s always a bigger fish,” as Qui-Gon Jinn sagely said). What really makes the Tulkun new is they’re the first species we’ve met since the Na’vi who are highly intelligent. Following real-world discoveries in whale behaviour, Cameron depicts his alien whales as having culture. We read them speak via their subtitled songs and clicks. We get a mottled Tulkun’s-eye-view like the xenomorph-vision Ridley Scott gave us in Alien Covenant.
Lo’ak rescues the Tulkun in turn, pulling out an old harpoon stuck in its fin; despite their culture, the Tulkun are hunted by humans. In scenes paying homage to haute blockbuster Jaws, whalers force Tulkun to the surface with harpooned floats. There’s a sport-hunting glee to this — the speedboats that corral the Tulkun are named ‘picadors’ after the goaders in a bullfight — but whaling captain Scoresby (Brendan Cowell) also twice mentions quotas. There’s money to be made.
In the first film the humans were after unobtanium, a general SF term for a valuable but hard-to-get item, and in the context of exploited Pandora, an energy resource. In the sequel, the resource is “amrita”, which may have a linguistic hint of ambergris but involves the same butchery of whale blubber. In Hindu mythology, amrita was the immortality-granting ambrosia of the gods; now tapped from the brains of slaughtered Tulkun, it’s sold for millions to stop human aging. (Will every Avatar feature a resource the humans have come to exploit? Here’s to Avatar 3: Surplus Value.) The humans don’t just want these resources to sell back home however. Home has become uninhabitable. They’re here for Pandora itself. Turns out there is a planet B.
Bulldozing their biodiverse world to make a big smoky habitat for humanity, forcing the locals from their ancestral homes to get at minerals, cracking open their fellow creatures’ brains to feast on the goo inside — these are the outrages that inspire the Na’vi to resist, and Cameron to rewrite history.
3. Blue Saviour
It’s hard not to admire the Na’vi. And it’s impossible not to look up to them: they’re twice human height. (Who stitches the avatar tank tops? Where do they get sunglasses with lenses the size of dinner plates?) Cameron stacks the deck: as well as tall the Na’vi are graceful and beautiful, like the ‘emotos’ in Will Self’s short story ‘Caring, Sharing’, used for reassurance and comfort by neurotic humans. Some Avatar fans have even tried turning themselves into Na’vi, or gotten depressed they can’t. What is it that they long for?
One answer is the Na’vi homeworld; like Martians we regard their earth with envious eyes. Pandora is prelapsarian, the fall here being the Industrial Revolution, and the longing to live before it — in this, the Avatar films are as much fantasy as they are SF. Tie-in book The World of Avatar explains that the Na’vi aren’t primitive, they’re deliberately anti-industrial. The ‘Three Laws of Eywa’ command: “You shall not set stone upon stone / Neither shall you use the turning wheel / Nor use the metals of the ground.” A low-tech culture concerned for the planet is one of the ways Cameron associates the Na’vi with Native Americans (‘Na’vi’ is in the word ‘native’). That’s the other part of their appeal: they’re on the right side of history.
Their enemies are those who’d do to them what Europeans did to the indigenous peoples of the Americas. Said enemies the Na’vi call “the Sky People”, which might ring differently in the ears of any Brits who’ve had to wait at home for an engineer to come fix their satellite TV. Heading the Sky People is General Ardmore, played by welcome addition Edie Falco. Her attack dog is the back-up version of Quaritch, who boringly softens as he warms to the original Quaritch’s son, Spider. Fortunately there’s a more riling villain in whale-killer Scoresby; “Clever bugger!” he shouts like an Aussie version of Jurassic Park’s “Clever girl.” Counterbalancing him is Jermaine Clement as Dr Garvin, a Kiwi guilt-ridden marine biologist, cast perhaps because he’d played intelligent sea life himself as a crab god in Moana, and because perhaps the Na’vi one day will sing their own version of Flight of the Conchords’ ‘The humans are dead.’ For in Cameron’s revision of history the indigenous people might do what few others managed: vanquish the colonists.
Cameron’s been explicit about his counterfactual allegory. Of his support for the indigenous Xingu people in the Amazon, he said:
“I felt like I was 130 years back in time watching what the Lakota Sioux might have been saying at a point when they were being pushed and they were being killed and they were being asked to displace and they were being given some form of compensation… This was a driving force for me in the writing of Avatar — I couldn’t help but think that if [the Lakota Sioux] had had a time-window and they could see the future… and they could see their kids committing suicide at the highest suicide rates in the nation… because they were hopeless and they were a dead-end society – which is what is happening now — they would have fought a lot harder.”
Though criticised as blaming the Lakota Sioux for their lot — see Jason Asenap for Grist — Cameron’s words are similar to those of Dakota academic Waziyatawin:
“If my Dakota ancestors would’ve have been able to see the devastation that would occur within our homeland — if they could have seen a vision of what our homeland looks like today and know what this society would do to our beloved homeland — they would have fought a lot harder.”
Any people presented with a ‘time-window’ of a dire future would try change it by behaving differently, not just those in Terminator films. But few ever imagine the future will be that dire, or can’t imagine it could get any worse, and so don’t do enough — not from any moral failing but because no history ever has what a made-up story does: the benefit of hindsight.
Nonetheless, Cameron’s first Avatar story gave the lead role of fighting harder against the colonists to one of their own: human Jake Sully. Sully is anointed for this role as soon as he gets lost on Pandora; floating ‘seeds of Eywa’ land on him like the feather in Forrest Gump, which halts Neytiri (Zoe Saldaña) from shooting him on sight. (Sully, that is, not Gump.) Jake goes on to master the king of the Pandoran flying animals, ‘The Last Shadow’, and in doing so becomes ‘Toruk Makto’, a legendary figure who appears in times of crisis to unite the Na’vi clans (a storyline not dissimilar to Futurama episode ‘Electric Buggalo’, where Kif wows the Native Martians by flying one of their giant ladybirds).
It was this kind of stuff that got the first film accused of being a white saviour narrative. The accusation doesn’t tell the whole story (literally). Sully’s original mission was to wheedle his way into the Omatikaya Na’vi clan as a sort of non-native-informant, and so enable the rapacious plans of Quaritch and Parker Selfridge (Giovanni Ribisi). Although he turned coat against those handlers, his attempts to halt the Na’vi’s dispossession failed time and again. He did rally the Na’vi in their final battle but lost it himself. About to die at Quaritch’s hands he was saved at the last moment by Neytiri, an indigenous woman, and her indigenous animal ally, the thanator: even the Na’vi themselves were only saved when the local fauna joined the fight. That’s the ending, that’s the point: Pandora saves the white man. And, in Cameron’s vision, it may yet save us all: cinema and the planet both.
4. Going natural
The problems with the Na’vi aren’t whom they stand for but how. Whether or not they’re magpied from various unconsulted native cultures, or an unwelcome revival of ‘the noble savage’, they’re just not that imaginative as aliens. And this, for a SF story, is an aesthetic problem before it’s a moral one.
They do have plenty of indigenous affect: their tattoos, scant clothing, accents — i.e. things on the surface, whether they’re the Native American / African-style Omatikaya of the forests, or the Pacific Island-style Metkayina. Alongside this skin-deep intra-clan culture, there’s not much inter-clan politics. Trying to draw Quaritch’s violence away from their clan, Jake and his family are given refuge by another with only a little resistance and teenage scuffling. The Na’vi dispute over tactics and fight each other person-to-person, but so far we’ve seen no murder or inter-clan war. Na’vi goodness verges on blandness.
When it comes to capturing an audience’s imagination, it’s risky to scant on detail and local colour (more than blue). The specific, if not strange, usually make for a better story. And Cameron’s on the same page. He only meant for the binary of good Na’vi versus bad humans to last as long as the audience got acclimatised to Pandora; in an interview with ’20 minutes’ he revealed that from the next film onwards everything’s set to get murkier (plus you know shit’s gonna get real when David Thewlis turns up).
The single more elaborated part of Na’vi culture we’ve seen so far is ‘The Great Balance’. Jake and Neytiri say a prayer when they kill prey; the Na’vi hunt and gather only what they need — unlike humans; Spider is aghast at the wastefulness of their Tulkun slaughter. This harks to the semi-myth that native peoples maintained a respectful harmony with the natural world. Many did, certainly more so than industrial capitalism (as a matter of comparative means anyway), while others like the early Beni people would burn out tracts of savanna from the Amazon rainforest to make fishing and hunting easier. The Na’vi, meanwhile, sob at any environmental destruction.
Following their Great Balance with nature is the way Cameron depicts that nature itself. Most animals other than the Na’vi have four eyes, two either side of the head, meaning their monocular vision must have depth perception: fitting for a world where life is that bit more profound and the greeting is “I see you.” Granted, there are plenty of predators on Pandora, as Quaritch warned in his first briefing: viperwolves which stalk Jake and from which he’s saved by Neytiri; the shark-like akula which stalks Lo’ak, from which he’s saved by the Tulkun called Payakan. Nobody is successfully preyed on apart from background characters in battle scenes. In the making of Avatar, Cameron said his apex predator, the thanator, “could eat a T-Rex and have the Alien for dessert.” We never see it eat anyone! Cameron’s come a long way from face-huggers and “Please… kill me.” Are there parasites on Pandora? If Pandora has versions of our rhinos and panthers does it have a version of our microscopic acanthamoeba that eats your eyes from the inside out? For now the Avatar films have the same level of threat as a safari park. This is fitting for an audience most of whom don’t have encounters with nature any richer than cute animal videos or the occasional through-the-bars coochiecoo.
But then Cameron doesn’t want to gross us out any more. He doesn’t want the audience to feel alienated from his alien world. He wants us to feel at home, to connect. He references fellow nature-lover Terrence Malick explicitly. Kiri vibes with ripples of grass and water like Pocahontas in The New World. The scene where Kiri and her siblings dive around coral reefs is shot like the In Paradisum swimming montage at the start of The Thin Red Line. Jake talks of the ‘stones in my heart’, the name of a track from The Thin Red Line score; while ‘Converging Paths’ from The Way of Water score has the same melody as The Thin Red Line’s ‘Light.’
There’s more to the connection with nature on Pandora than metaphorical fellow-feeling. Melanie Klein wrote, in ‘Love, Guilt and Reparation’, “The relation to nature, which arouses such strong feelings of love, appreciation, admiration and devotion, has much in common with the relations to one’s mother, as has long been recognized by the poets.” The Na’vi call her Great Mother, or Eywa — a name formed out of the transposed phonemes of Yahweh (maybe a reference as well to the Lord of the Rings’s cosmos ‘Eä’). In a video diary, human scientist Grace (Sigourney Weaver) argues Eywa has objective reality. Eywa is the Gaia hypothesis proven right. When you say ‘everything is connected’ on Pandora it’s not a circle-of-life cliché but the truth. The Na’vi have queues out the back of their heads with which they can connect to the queues on other life-forms. And a vast “neural net,” depicted in a computer graphic like a globe-spanning root-ball, enables such collective efforts as the biospherical uprising at the end of the first film. Which raises the question whether the life-forms on Pandora are just drones of Eywa, the smothering mother goddess, as though the Avatar films were Starship Troopers but not funny and told from the perspective of the bugs. (Is Eywa the all-mother? If not, will dying Gaia see her as a sister or rival?)
Tellingly, one life-form maintains its autonomy, even its supremacy, Great Balance aside. The Na’vi plug into other animals as a short-cut to temporary domestication (Neo voice: “I know horse-whispering”). They bond emotionally with the animals, they can see like them — Lo’ak and Payakan’s queue-connection is portrayed as a jarring flashback on the Na’vi side — but without any loss of their own Na’vi-ness. They talk and act as before, even a little better. It’s less a meeting of minds than the use of a tool. Contrast this with the novel A Wizard of Earthsea, when apprentice wizard Ged becomes a hawk: he doesn’t jack into its mind so much as its mind absorbs his, and dangerously so. For Le Guin, you don’t anthropomorphise animals, they animalise you.
The Avatar films, however, struggle to make the umwelt of their animals come alive, despite all the work that’s gone into them. Is it world building when it’s not discernible, or wallpapering? As Weta designer on the film, Leri Greer, said for an interview for io9, “[I]t’s hard to say how much filtered upward to the larger production.” We’re told a lot about Tulkun culture, their songs and mathematics, but Cameron doesn’t show much of it (we don’t even hear much whale-singing) — except for their tattoos, which we never learn were done by their own fin or by Na’vi hand. Under the guise of elevating all life the films slip into Na’vi chauvinism. ‘All life is connected’ can be a covert way to envelop nature with your ego.
Which is all the weirder when you consider Cameron’s nods to that philosophy about humans adjusting to nature, Taoism. You could do worse for an English epithet for Taoism than ‘the way of water’. Water is the, as I wrote elsewhere, “quintessential Taoist element: accommodating, yielding, easy, in flux.” Islander Reya (Bailey Bass) teaches the Sully kids the Taoist-flavoured principle that “the way of water has no beginning and no end… it connects all things, life to death, darkness to light.” And in scenes where Kiri marvels at grass banks and seabeds as though for all purposes she’s on mushrooms, the film edges towards Tao stillness and poetry. Nature, most of the time, is still, slow, quiet; Cameron gleans the importance of this to some extent, telling Indiewire:
“It was much to the studio’s surprise that in our test screenings, we found out that [one of the] most-liked scenes in the film [is one] they kept trying to get me to cut out. [T]raipsing around the forest at night in the bioluminescence and touching things and having it react and the wood sprites flying around… Their argument was it doesn’t advance the plot, and the movies were too long. I said, ‘Guys, this is what people are going to like the most.’”
But Kiri’s touching of nature turns into a superpower over it. While other Na’vi plug into the various life-forms, she doesn’t always need a queue to do so, and she does more than bend animals to her will. She manipulates the natural world from afar, in scenes where she marshals little sea horses and giant anemones. She’s like Magneto, but for fish. And in the film’s deus ex marina, a school of glow-fish show her where to find her mother and sister trapped underwater so she can save their lives.
What if saving the planet involved not manipulating it better, not connecting to it, but wising up to our disconnection, to that other abyss: between all species of life? Whenever Lo’ak and his aquatic pal Payakan twinkled at each other, I couldn’t help demurring with Angela Carter’s line about animals’ “dreadful speaking eyes.” Because life is both continuous and other. Sentimentalising it as something else dishonours it; not a reverence for but a fetishising of nature. For we always fetishise what’s nearly gone: wilderness; ‘simpler times,’ the ability to live off the land but in harmony with it. And like our theoretical crops, these ideas are corny.
5. Songs much revered
Many moments people find corny in James Cameron they’ve gotten wrong. Take Rose’s much-maligned art chat in Titanic, which always seemed to me a fairly accurate depiction of her sort of aristo dilettante. And the line, “I’m the king of the world!” sounds less puffed-up when you do the requisite magic-eye adjustment of art and remember it’s not Leo the movie star yelling it but a penniless drifter in his brief flush of “good” luck. I mean the guy’s aboard the Titanic! The line’s not without irony.
Other moments are harder to defend. Titanic’s ‘Nearer my God to Thee’ montage, with a random young mother (Vasquez!) and her cute kids, and a random cute old couple all about to die (that is, die a panic-stricken death in front of one another) was a tear-jerk too hard. And because I watched the Terminator films in order 2 then 1, I didn’t appreciate till I was older the naffness of a hunter-killer-cyborg turning wiseacre father-figure, like that He-Man special where Skeletor, to his whiny annoyance, gets ennobled by the spirit of Christmas.
As for The Way of Water the film asks the question: If Moby Dick could talk, what would he say? Payakan says in subtitled whale-song, “For me it is too painful.” (It’s like that low point in Arrival when the alien squid reveals its buddy “Abbot is death process.”) Cameron, having once written for Kate Winslet, “Draw me like one of your French girls,” now gives her the best-worst line of The Way of Water, when her character Ronal says of a slaughtered Tulkun: “She was the composer of songs much revered. She waited many breeding cycles to have this calf!”
What do you call this, though? Corny, sentimental, kitsch? Where do the Avatar films lie on the spectrum? One feature of kitsch is its camouflage. Usually it hides out as good taste, as what is generally revered as profound and moving and wise. While everyone knows the Avatar films are corny, that’s actually one of their draws. Instead what they are, as critic A D Jameson wrote of the Wachowskis’ Cloud Atlas, is primarily naive.
In his eco-jeremiad The Uninhabitable Earth, David Wallace-Williams wrote “because climate was so global and therefore nontribal it suggested only the corniest politics.” So too the progressive discourse on the Avatar films is that their naivety is noble and necessary. (‘Na’vi’ is in the word ‘naive’) That only by being earnest will James Cameron save cinema and the planet. (Let’s for now gloss over his initials.) As if Michael Jackson’s ‘Earthsong’ was just cringe enough to be the spiritual balm we need. Didn’t we already do this with The New Sincerists? How’d that work out?
Naivety is probably why there’s little humour in the Avatar films. James Cameron can do funny — see True Lies and Bill Paxton in Aliens. But maybe there’s no jokes without cities. Guy Davenport called them, “the sacred reservoir of the continuity of civilisation” and wrote that “Comedy is the salt of civilisation, its critical voice. Having, through Christian charity and Stoic dignity, forbidden cruel laughter (the ancient Roman thought pain of others to be hilarious), civilised man evolved a comic spirit concerned with his own necessary barbarity, animality, and lapses of breeding.” So, become a Na’vi all you want, but the only comedy on Pandora might be slapstick.
Look, I am on the side of the Avatar films. I think as far as using aliens vs. humans as an allegory for colonialism goes, Cameron’s heart is in the right place. I’m sympathetic to ecologically-minded philosophies like Taoism and Shinto, or the fluffier ends we get in the West, to what in the East they call European Buddhism (though it’s not like any of them ever stood in the way of industrialisation or war). A rewilded future world inhabited by a Native-American/Taoist culture is very appealing. Hell, in my more romantic jags I even reckon it all went sour for humanity when, unlike the Na’vi, we came down from the trees.
But are any of the Na’vi ends achievable through being naive? Or by elevating the naive, so that we no longer all agree it’s corny, but take it seriously, as noble and good? But the opposite of cynical apathy is not Dostoyevskian holy Idiocy but kitsch. And kitsch makes everything worse. Not because it’s untrue but because it seems true to so many. Solutions to the problems that worry the Avatar films will mean taking life accurately, which means not simplistically. That’s what shows you care (about indigenous peoples, about the natural world, about art). In the words of John Updike: “Precision is a function of attention, and attention is a function of concern.”
6. The agitprop department
Parallel to rating the Avatar films for their earnestness and positivity is rating them for their agitatory politics. Take the way the dastardly JSOC-style team of manhunting avatars yell ‘Get some!’ like many a marine in a Vietnam film. Or the Apocalypse Now reversal in Na’vi Sully emerging slowly from fiery water to fight off the imperialists, not do their dirty work. With The Way of Water Cameron continues the good work, so the story goes. He’s made the Americans the bad guys! (This ignores the film’s Australians and Kiwi, though at least they’re white?) And the director who made the spaceship USS Sulaco a big floating pistol has deliberately toned down the fetishising of weaponry, and so gone are all the luscious suiting-up montages.
Of course, you can appreciate, as much as you might be into that sort of long-distance cheerleading, Cameron’s flying-under-the-radar subversiveness. Everything from portraying the homicidal T1000 as a LAPD cop in a film set in a LA which, in the real word, was a year from bursting into anti-cop riots; and co-writing Strange Days, a cyberpunk film inspired by those same riots; to his recurrent anti-nuke theme; his concern for the environment going back to Piranha II: The Spawning; and his hippy-jock bolshiness in having the fist-pumping climax to a Hollywood movie be a triumphant indigenous rebellion against the American military-industrial complex.
Is that what makes the Avatar films good? Turns out all political persuasions want art to be an after-school special. As if the audience at the end of the whole Avatar saga, on their way out of Disney’s ‘Animal Kingdom Presents: The World of Avatar,’ after the final level of the tie-in video game, will recycle more, let alone make the leap out of the death cult of capitalism. And even those who insist they don’t believe art changes the world, and who’d never drag or refuse one film because of its bad politics or bad creators go on to praise another film only because of its good politics. They can’t conceive of art otherwise; in a very real sense they don’t see it. It’s like how Christopher Hitchens, for all he celebrated artistic freedom, was such a limited critic even, or especially, about the artworks he admired. How is this any different to when conservatives claim Dinesh D’Souza films are actually good? Both sides are rating one set of films because they promote their values (or they think they do), while trashing another set to spite its fans whom they deem their enemies, all under the aegis of not caring about whichever artwork beyond its political utility or how it can enhance their brand.
It’s all just vanity in the end. What if you don’t care about warring fandoms or which expanded universe is healthy or unhealthy for humanity? Whereas if you do think that “art” can “save” you, there remains a problem. Say what you will about the military-industrial complex, but it’s complex. Not just gung-ho jarheads and their smarmy bureaucrat managers but you, the maw at the top of the pyramid. Modernity cannot stand the advent of equality, wrote Zygmunt Bauman. And the Avatar franchise cannot stand the advent of Gaia-consciousness. There is Pandora, but not for us.
7. Preaching to the converted
For the films do have consciousness-raising in mind, both the boring educational sort and also a deeper one, a sort of transformation of its medium and audience…
Barring their cats’ eyes and tails, blue skin and height, the Na’vi look like us, and look distinctly unlike the big-chinned, six-legged, four-eyed phenotypes of most other Pandoran life. Cameron designed the Na’vi to be humanoid because the Avatar films are an allegory for humanity’s treatment of Earth and our history of colonialism, and so that we wouldn’t struggle to identify with them. Even their eating practices are essentially ours; they’re not vegetarian for one. How do the nature-friendly Na’vi decide which meat is food and which meat is murder? Not based on suffering but whether the animal is deemed smart enough. What’s more they live on a moon called Pandora, one of which already exists, around our gas giant Saturn. And when Lo’ak tells Payakan his father came from another star, the film doesn’t do the obvious and cut away to show it. All of this means we’re never snapped out of our identification with the Na’vi.
What else might Lo’ak and his family be, considered closer? Jake Sully himself was always meant to be the emptiest of Everymen. His avatar had been grown to host his twin brother, who died (and about whom we never hear more). Unlike said twin, who was one of what Quaritch called “limp-dick scientists”, Jake was a marine on a bad mission; he’s the same sort of inverted and empty signifier as Waluigi. Meanwhile his and Neytiri’s kids are over-determinedly hybrids. Neteyam (Jamie Flatter), Lo’ak and Tuk come half from their Na’vi mother, and half from their father, himself a gen-engineered hybrid of Na’vi DNA and the DNA from his twin but carrying his mind. Hybridity, fusion, adaptation — did Salman Rushdie write this bit? “You can adapt,” as Jake explains of his own journey to Na’vihood.
The films seem to be building towards a broader, redemptive, teachable version of this. Jake’s nullity means not only is he a blank canvas for audiences to project onto but that, at the end of the first film, he could “pass through the Eye of Eywa” and so go full Na’vi in a way that dying Grace had failed to, initially. By the sequel her braindead avatar floats in an incubator tank pregnant — mysteriously so. Although Lo’ak and Spider tease Kiri about who her father is, the pregnancy might have just been down to Eywa. Kiri is of ‘virgin’ birth, like Jesus and Anakin before her (OK, fatherless); plus she’s literally the daughter of grace (sic). Grace Augustine, in case you miss the religious implication.
Humans had designed the hybrid avatars to make it easier to infiltrate Pandora. With Kiri’s example, it seems Mother Pandora has adapted back, which might prefigure a wider adaptation of the human parasites (and audience) to her. Cameron named the Na’vi world ‘Pandora’ but not because of its horrors. What will be at the bottom of it, what is the hope of his Pandora? That we’ll all become some sort of hybrid Na’vi, like Jake Sully did, like Kiri. Call it The Way of Daughter.
8. Coz everybody hates a tourist
How Na’vi is that, really? When Jake is talking to his kids early on, the film phases out their subtitles Hunt for Red October-style, and in their place we hear accented English. To be fair, it suits the mixed heritage Sully kids to have accents like post-colonial English-speaking peoples. Less so their vocab. Even with a marine dad, the way they yell, “Bro” and “Dude”, the way they insult one another as buttholes, or complain, “Are we there yet?” or during arguments invoke “Times infinity!” are worse than incongruous. “Don’t make me come over there!” growls their dad before they take a group photo. (The cats’ eyes in the photo are the film’s one real joke). No, these aren’t natives; they’re a family of American tourists! And their way of life, to which we’re meant to aspire, follows suit.
Aldous Huxley once changed his tune from Brave New World to his last novel Island. The acidic satire in the first novel on the stupefying pleasure-drug ‘soma’ mellowed out, via his own experiments with mescaline, to a celebration in the last novel of the mind-opening hallucinogen ‘moshka’. Cameron, too, has mellowed out, but on technology.
The Avatar films might seem anti-tech at first. The Laws of Eywa ban industrialisation; the low-tech Na’vi twice defeat the high-tech humans. But underneath there’s something stranger going on. While the rapacious military-industrial complex is the bad guy, with their factories and tree-felling and AMP-suited soldiers, something else is celebrated on the sly.
Consider how the Sullies keep in touch from afar via a sort of shared family cellphone account. Or how Kiri manipulates objects as if using motion-sensor gloves. Like in Second Life, humans connect to their avatars ‘psionically’, that is wirelessly. The Na’vi think of these avatars as demon-blooded, but they have their own versions: the queues with which they connect to other life-forms, and the more general connectivity of Eywa’s neural net, accessible all over the world through ubiquitous fibre-optic cables. Whether via the Eye of Eywa or human tech, consciousness is down-and-uploadable. The new Quaritch was rebooted from his last save-point, as we learn when his past self gives him his mission like the briefing cut-scene in a video game. Meanwhile, dead Neteyam and Grace are partially recovered via their back-ups to the spirit tree. And, outside the film, there’s Cameron’s plan to make his films more like cross-media virtual reality experiences. Note that Tarantino’s guarded praise for the first Avatar film was that it was the kind of immersive ride he says he didn’t quite pull off with Kill Bill.
It’s trite to point out the ‘irony’ in a film like Terminator 2 having a computer villain when its success was based on computer technology. How could Cameron be anti-tech when he started out in the industry in special effects? So too the Avatar films — and films full stop — wouldn’t exist without industry and technology. But, under the guise of being pro-nature and anti-tech, the Avatar films are pro-tech of another kind. Of that other neural net we all spend our time on, cosplaying as other selves in the metaverse, using Oculus headsets to race with the panthers or, as in one of the first Oculus demos, swim with whales; of Memories on Facebook and iPhoto where clips of your dead ones are just a connection away; of constant connectivity to everyone and everything, being always wired in, never in solitude, never free even in the rainforest where Mark Zuckerberg’s drones are coming to give you WiFi. Eywa is Skynet by biological means.
9. The current condition of your eyeballs
It’s not implausible that the Avatar franchise and its special FX crew at Weta will play a big role in any achievement of true VR. ‘Fucking your eyeballs in 2009’ was the unofficial, bro-ey slogan of the original film. With my eyeballs having kept their honour, I saw the new film projected at the much-vaunted 48 frames per second, twice the previous film’s. Yet the experience was still like what a lot of people have described as watching live digital TV or a video game. So is 48 fps the Emperor’s New Frame-Rate?
But there’s no reason 24 fps should be the ‘natural’ way we watch films. The Lumière Brothers films were slower, Thomas Edison’s faster. And our eyes don’t see in any kind of frame rate; 24 was only settled on because it was the bare minimum needed to incorporate sound on the talkies that took over cinema. 24 fps was culturally learnt as the ‘default’ of visual reality (as was ‘realistic’ film grain). So it might just take a generation or two for higher frame-rate to become the new natural.
Having said that, viewing the film a second time at 24fps, the CGI on the Na’vi and Pandora verged on photorealistic (if we can talk in terms of photorealism when it comes to unreal things.) Certainly it’s getting to the point where it’s impossible to tell apart what is and isn’t CGI, except for the obvious fictional banshees and Tulkuns and whatnot. Only the Na’vi eyes are still a bit iffy. With their amber over-largeness, they’re like the satanic eyes effect in the film Angel Heart. Talk about demon blood! Maybe the uncanny valley will always have a vanishing point.
Not to be a Luddite, but, if that point is finally reached, what will be the point? The standard response is, so anything a filmmaker can imagine can be put on screen and seem real. As a case of de facto rights, artists need freedom, art is a sort of freedom. But in practice, art is also a process of restrictions, eliminations, holding back, winding in, suppression as much as expression. Cameron, like all FX-heads, might argue that the hitherto impossibilities his Avatar films have made possible are exactly the kind of fruitful obstacles that fired their creativity. But his past solutions to technical obstacles were also always solutions to narrative problems. Whereas, when conjuring up leather harnesses and the way sea-water trickles over knuckles has been perfectly achieved, now that enough smarts and cash have been thrown at it, isn’t it a bit like Tesla inventing electronic car door handles to solve that great engineering problem of physical car door handles? Because do you know what else can be depicted in movies without being in the uncanny valley? Things. Stuff.
To what great purpose are The Way of Water’s visual capabilities used? Cameron’s action direction remains as clear-cut as ever (even if blocking and cinematic geography have become this weird rubric for the sole justifiability of spectacle in a Hollywood movie). Less impressive are all the crash zooms, in-shot focus-pulls, Snyder-esque slow-mo-then-back-out. Dare I say not even the sequel’s gotten past first base? Then again Cameron might no longer be interested in cinematic spectacle in and of itself. It’s more the vehicle to keep his audience on board. His real destination, in a very real way, is Pandora.
10. Avatar apotheosis
I’m not a subculture war Cameron stan, i.e. a follower of a cult of personality. I rate him too highly as an artist: meaning I take his filmmaking seriously. With Aliens and The Terminator, he proved Hollywood movies don’t have to pander to be popular or even populist, and that they can be commercially successful while still being great artworks.
According to Nicholas Brown in his book Autonomy, what makes The Terminator an artwork is that it was formed according to an internal logic primarily, as well as to please the audience, whereas Avatar was formed by what the audience wanted, that is by market logic. Take for example what Cameron told Playboy magazine about Neytiri and other female Na’vi, despite admitting they’re not meant to be mammalian: “She’s gotta have tits!”
Clearly Cameron doesn’t need lessons from anybody on how to keep being the most successful filmmaker of all time. But then Studio Ghibli’s eco-SF epic Nausicaä: Valley of the Wind was a box office success without being simplistic in its depiction of nature or our waste of it. If George Lucas can still make billions of dollars with those batshit giant messes of his most personal and crowd-unpleasing films, so can James Cameron. He’s such a provokable perfectionist that walking IMDb-goofs-page Neil deGrasse Tyson nitpicked him into correcting the starscape above the drowning and freezing hundreds at the end of Titanic. Can he also be persuaded to make the next Avatar films great art?
But what if, like Neil deGrasse Tyson, I’m massively missing the point?
One thing that used to distinguish Cameron was not his brisk storytelling or always well-staged action but his iconography: the T-800 and T1000 emerging from flames; Ripley in her power-walker; Arnie and Jamie Lee Curtis kissing in front of a mushroom cloud. But, as Peter Bradshaw wrote of The Way of Water, “There isn’t a single arresting visual image.” The wealth of production design hasn’t paid off; for all their literal encyclopaedias of detail, both the animals and tech are nothing we haven’t seen before in SF art. (Or elsewhere: the Na’vi swim with the Tulkun like in BBC’s Planet Earth.) In fact, if you could do an information-blind taste test, I reckon most of us wouldn’t even name the films as being made by James Cameron but for references in them to his older work.
It’s as if he’s signaling he’s moved beyond them. “I wouldn’t make Terminator today,” he told Esquire magazine. Like, are the Avatar films even films? I don’t mean that as a dig. Why would he be interested in making films any more? What has he got left to prove?
With Titanic, Cameron turned a film that was an industry joke before it’d been released, a turkey-in-the-making, not only into a success, but the most successful film of all time. Which then won him Best Director and Best Picture among dozens of other awards. All that considered, yelling “I’m the king of the world!” at the Oscars was the least he could do. I’m surprised he didn’t yell, “In your face!”
Wouldn’t it actually have been a little disappointing if, following Titanic, he’d made another historical epic (or Alien movie or spy romp)? He’s gotten as far as his sensibility wants with the hundred-years-old medium of celluloid film. To paraphrase Adaptation’s John Laroche, he’s done with film. Now on to a task equal to his self-belief. He’s going to transform the film medium and its point.
Cameron isn’t one to bemoan the decline in cinema-going. Instead he’s looking for a new way for cinema: something that’ll replace it or at least provide an alternative. “The idea of what a movie is, is being defined” as he said in his interview with Denis Villeneuve. Already cinemas are used to broadcast sports, theatre and for story-less IMAX spectacles like Terrence Malick’s Voyage of Time. So why not make cinemas venues for virtual reality, albeit not yet of the interactive sort?
Titanic combined practical effects, model work and CGI. Avatar was always going to do something more game-changing than that. A lot of critics have been perplexed by Cameron’s plan for so many sequels; surely we’ll be all Avatared out by 2028? But each film is a stage rocket in a space race that’ll lead to new animation technologies. Alongside each film’s exploration of a new ecosystem, there’s an opportunity to master a new effect, the current schema for this being elemental: they’ve done air and water, next is fire and earth (or Earth?) and then perhaps Milla Jovovich. Each film will advance an aspect of virtual reality, in the same way each subsequent Pixar movie nailed water, fur, sunlight etc.
That’s why Cameron is using the 48fps frame rate, for the very VR of it. The ‘too smooth’ image is not a bug, it’s a feature; it’s not meant to look like the films or film ‘reality’ we’re used to. Criticism of the frame rate and general computeriness of the films is wrong-headed. Computers are where Cameron is placing his bets.
Maybe then I’ve been suffering from the ‘Maude Lebowski Fallacy’. In the Coen brothers film, Julianne Moore’s Maude, a sophisticated artiste, is showing The Dude her step-mother’s porno, about which she comments, “The story is ludicrous.” But that’s just the kind of stupid comment a ‘smart’ person would make. Because why would a porno – one called Logjammin’ for chrissakes! – have any kind of good story? The Avatar series has a story only as compelling as needed to carry its audience through a virtual reality which they can’t actually be in yet. As Cameron told The Academy of Achievement, “We’ll create a world for people and then later present a narrative in that world.”
He’s been open about needing The Way of Water to hit all four quadrants to make its massive budget back and make enough profit to justify the whole saga and its transformational ambitions. That’s why the dialogue is so broad, the characters so generic, the Na’vi culture is so thin and nature so sentimentalised, and why he got Leona Lewis and The Weeknd to do their terrible, terrible songs. He can’t risk anything less than a world-pleasing hit. As he said during a legal dispute over Avatar, “It’s not meant to be subtle.”
If he, beyond a filmmaker, is a tech entrepreneur, if the two Avatar films so far are a proof-of-concept for the coming hybrid of films and virtual reality, then why make three more sequels? Hasn’t he proved his way works? Yet it’s no coincidence the films also align with his ideological and ecological vision. It’s as if they’re meant to be the Empathy Box from Philip K Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? They’re forging the way towards that sort of tech, the Avatar films heralds of actual avatars: a virtual reality that people can plug in to, to empathise with other cultures and appreciate the wonder of the (un)natural world before it’s gone. So adjust your emotion-flow-settings; Cameron’s taking us home to Pandora. The reason is the same as the first film’s ending: nature, indigenous culture won’t be saved by but will save the West. They’re there, gap-year style, for our redemption. Achieving that is for Cameron the best use now of his mega resources and talents, at this stage in his career and his life. When those are the stakes who cares about art? Are you trying to say there are better ambitions than even saving the world? Better things for humans to dream of than electric blue Na’vi?
Thanks to Adam, Duncan and Marion for discussions that informed this piece.
