Avatar's Kitsch Conscience: Why This Is A Bad Movie & Why We Should Still See It

via youtube.com

Ok, so this has been bugging me since I finally saw Avatar last week - As I sat watching the onslaught of cinematic & cultural cliches I couldn't decide which camp Cameron's Avatar falls into based on T.S. Eiot's distinction that 'good poets borrow, great poets steal.' If we took away the technical brilliance of Avatar I know I couldn't sit through it, without howling with the disbelief that kicks in watching unapologetic kitsch on the scale of Showgirls, Any Given Sunday, and any of the other movies that have ranked as some of the high budget worst films of all time. And because the technical delivery is so brilliant, so immersive, so seductive, I had to go back to Susan Sontag's "Notes on 'Camp'" and the knowingness of camp's viewing everything in quotation marks and Whitney Rugg's analysis of kitsch in order to lay to rest the fact that no matter how gorgeous or ground-breaking the technology is, this is one bad movie.

So for those who are pounding their keyboards in disbelief, pause for a moment and think about kitsch as the hallmark of works produced for a mass audience and 'as a type of creation that reaffirms rather than challenges the collective norm, a source of sheer entertainment in opposition to the elevated perception generated by high art.'

Granted, the distinction between high art & popular culture collapsed decades ago, and Cameron's undeniable technical achievement in skinning his actors into the 3D immersive experience could arguably be enough to justify viewing this film as genius. And arguably, Cameron's mastery of popular narrative form is demonstrated in Avatar's pastiche of countless other sci-fi stories, though I would counter that Cameron is no Joyce or Tarantino. What is lacking in the dizzying swirl of extra-textual references is any reflexive engagement with the genres (action movie/sci fi) or the form (technology's double-edge of life enhancement vs. environmental degradation) or the cultural context of American consumerism in which Avatar is produced.

A further comment reminds us that kitsch cannot be conceived as distinct from the dynamics of power in a given society in that the term was used increasingly 'to describe both objects and a way of life brought on by the urbanization and mass-production of the industrial revolution' directs us to think about both the 'aesthetic as well as political implications, informing debates about mass culture and the growing commercialization of society.'

Viewed in this context, Avatar's environmental message boldly foregrounded in the plight of the Na'vi is countered by precisely the technology that makes this fantasy so alluring. I am not the first to comment on the irony of the expense of realizing this virtual experience in the context of environmental concerns. And where the film fixes Jake Sully's physical disability through the quantum magic of the Ewya Tree, we in this world do not have the opportunity to transfer our 'souls' into other forms on other planets in order to escape the consequences of what Eisenhower foretold as the dangers of the military-industrial complex.

Perhaps what was most galling for me in Avatar was the complete absence of any recognition of how hollow the innumerable cliches spun throughout the film are, which again is the very definition of kitsch. The invention of the term, 'unobtanium,' marks the creative deficit of the storytelling in the deliberate waiving of any metaphorical richness that might have been embedded. As is, it is a term that signals the writer's conviction that audiences can no longer respond to symbolic language and it demonstrates a lack of trust in the intelligence of the audience and in the power of an intelligent story (Eywa tree & seeds aside).

One might then weigh the the gain of disseminating an environmental message against the environmental footprint of the film (production & that arising from screening the film and the car cultures that support suburban multiplexes). And one might say, ok, maybe the paucity of the story is offset by the delivery of this green message to a much wider audience than Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth can ever achieve. The recent sell-out success of the Ewya seed sold on etsy.com attests to what could become this year's pet rock, kitsch with a conscience (see post below).

The question I would rather pursue is whether Avatar should be the model for the next wave of 3D entertainment that the focus on 3D TV at the 2010 Consumer Electronic Show so clearly heralds. And if we are at the point of another massive technological shift, do we really want 3D experiences that are solely driven by a technology that renders us rapt & passive consumers of narrative pap?

Now I had to ask myself what I would have written into the story, if I were on the team. And what I would have wanted to see would have been a more layered awareness of the complexities of the human plight that serves as the backstory, the death of our planet which presumably has impacted all of the human players on Pandora. Adding this complexity could have brought the characters into the 3D of human experience rather than the 2D cut-outs the film dishes out as reassuringly familiar types. Something that could have touched on the profound paradox of our time in the schism that exists between the extraordinary inventions that herald the 21st century as an optimistic sensorium of ubiquitous computing and the digital divide that determines who has access to this new era and who does not.

So if we are at the brink of another tipping point in terms of where our consumer and entertainment driven culture will move next, we should be aware of what may be the unacknowledged caution in Avatar. Unlike Jack Sully, we are still bound by the physical world, still geolocated by the physical coordinates and condition of our bodies. Rugg's thinking on kitsch points to the danger of this fantasy when he writes:

'Kitsch tends to mimic the effects produced by real sensory experiences [compare simulation/simulacra), presenting highly charged imagery, language, or music that triggers an automatic, and therefore unreflective, emotional reaction.'

This might not have been your response to the film but I know I experienced the lure of the unreflective in the cinematic lizard portion of my brain. Let us not forget that the immersiveness of Avatar's simulated world, both in the human and Na'vi realms, is designed to render us acquiescent, and that the disaster that haunts dystopic visions of our future so pervasively that Cameron doesn't even bother to fill in the details, is one that we can still choose to respond to. Assuming that we are moving inevitably towards a virtually enhanced and/or enabled existence is to accept the demise of the physical world we know as predetermined. And so I would choose not to accept Cameron's vision of the future without critically assessing the paths within and without the film that lead to Pandora. And don't get me started on the choice of name for the planet which may be in a meta-critical way brilliant in its implicit reminder to think of the consequences of our actions before we realize them.

Counter-arguments welcome! Convince me.

Posted via web from Siobhan O'Flynn's 1001 Tales