Avatar

I was blown away by D. Cameron's "Avatar", as most everyone has been. I was so wowified by the kinetic art that dominates the movie that it took days for it to dawn on me what a lousy and even offensive movie it is. As to the technological dimension, I am sure that this movie will become a cultural icon. Its "distance" in technological progress from "Star Wars" and "Jurassic Park" is about as far, in a far shorter time expanse, as the distance from "Star Wars" back to "Fantasia."

But here is the essence, at least as it seems to me: The movie depicts humanity as technologically precocious, intellectually mediocre and morally degenerate; but that is a statement which just happens to perfectly fit the film, too, rendering it an unintended parody of itself.

The film is, as I have said, technologically precocious and genuinely a form of kinetic art--much, much better, I would say, than those silly mooey-eyed mass-produced little girls and kitties and doggies of the 1970s to which the depiction of the natives in the film has been compared. But it is intellectually mediocre. The vocabulary in the dialogue reaches maybe to an 8th grade level; it contains no wit and has no literary center. The plot is banal; it's just a war film, essentially Cowboys and Indians in space. (The natives fight with bows and arrows, you know.) Pretty much nothing happens that isn't telegraphed, sledgehammer-like, at least ten minutes beforehand.

And morally, the movie is close to if not flatly degenerate. The fact that a white guy, a crippled U.S. Marine no less, has to be the one to save the noble savages, who are depicted as a cross between Gandhi and the Cherokee, is sort of offensive. The natives thus come off like eight foot tall blue pets, who can talk. Neat. But all they do as a collective is strut and chant; they seem to have inter-generational responsibility thrust upon them from the inner mystique of planet Pandora, but they do nothing obvious to exercise or earn it. It short, they are depicted as morally conscious but without moral agency, which is kind of absurd. (It sort of reminds me of our recent discussions about counterinsurgency in Afghanistan, where our guys high and low seem to consult with everyone about what to do except the Afghans.)

I am tempted to suggest that the movie is an unwitting parody of itself for a reason: It is an early 21st century commercial American artifact. In other words, if America today as a civilization is itself technologically precocious, intellectually mediocre and morally degenerate in this advanced stage of the Third Plutocracy of the United States, then how could we expect its high-financed entertainment products to reflect anything different?

Darn, there I've gone and given in to temptation again.