What audiences see in Avatar
Note: The following letter contains spoilers about the movie Avatar.
IN THEIR letters about Avatar, Shaun Joseph ("A look at Avatar's Achilles' heel") and Scott Johnson ("Avatar needed a better script") argue that socialists need to "explain how and why a work of art succeeds or fails" in order to help "our class discover more conscious, and therefore more pleasurable, modes of experiencing art."
Given the lofty tasks that they have set for themselves, I am surprised at the shallowness of their analysis.
Both Shaun and Scott take shots at the movie for its gargantuan budget. If one wants to argue that it's obscene to spend $237 million on a movie while schools--and now entire countries--are crumbling, that's one thing. But Shaun and Scott both imply that with all that money, director James Cameron should have been able to buy a perfect movie. I'm pretty sure that's not a Marxist view of the nature of art.
In fact, compared to most Hollywood blockbusters, Avatar's budget is well-spent. Neither Shaun nor Scott even mentions the film's spectacular beauty (which Shaun dismisses as mere "technical achievements"). But cinema as a medium is defined as much by its visual elements as those of plot and character.
James Cameron has always been better at telling his stories through images than through dialogue. The iconic (and endless) sinking scene in Titanic is an indelible picture of failed ruling class hubris. Similarly, the luminescent beauty of planet Pandora at nighttime gives the audience the Na'vi's perspective of the value of nature and exposes the insanity of a corporation's desire to destroy it for some mineral under the ground. $237 million didn't create that beauty by itself. It was envisioned and realized by artists: Cameron and the thousands on the Avatar crew.
Avatar does have its weaknesses, in particular the thinness of the Na'vi characters. Like Bill Linville ("Avatar's political shortcomings"), I wish that Jake didn't become leader of Na'vi and agree that we should "sympathize with people who have seen one too many 'white savior' movies."
It is not true, however, that all the characters in Avatar are flat. The central character (like it or not) is not a Na'vi, but the human Jake Sully. Scott may have found Jake "dull" but I thought he was convincingly portrayed by Sam Worthington as a physically and spiritually crushed veteran whose cynicism is transformed by his experiences to a belief that a better world is possible.
As for Scott's complaint that "Sully's paralysis...is primarily a plot device to get him into an avatar" and is dealt with superficially, I'm not sure if we saw the same movie. I found the scene in which Jake first enters his avatar and discovers the joy of once again being able to run and jump to be moving.
As Nagesh Rao has noted, Jake's disability and the oppression he faces because of it lies at the heart of his identification and liberation with the Na'vi. Furthermore, for all their complaints about Avatar's conventionality and stock characters, can Shaun and Scott at least acknowledge that it is not predictable to have a leading man in a wheelchair?
In fact, it might be that, at a time when more Americans know a wounded veteran than any time in recent memory, it is Jake's character, along with the film's tremendous spectacle, that is contributing to the movie's box office success.
Shaun and Scott don't address Avatar's popularity, an odd omission for socialist analyses. But Shaun offers this revealing nugget: "Cameron...can make virtually any film that he likes, for any amount of money, with a guaranteed mass audience."
A guaranteed mass audience? Is Shaun claiming that most moviegoers are sheep who will go to whatever movie is heavily promoted? Not only is this view elitist, it is contradicted by the litany of big budget-Hollywood busts, from Waterworld to Pearl Harbor. Maybe the mass audience is seeing something that some socialists are missing.
Danny Katch, New York City
