Tag Archives: Films

Thoughts on James Cameron's Avatar and Neal Stephenson's "Turn On, Tune In, Veg Out"

December 27, 2009 By in Culture, Essays, movies, SF/Fantasy Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , 72 Comments

Despite reading Greg Egan’s brilliant review of Avatar, I saw the movie. The strangest thing about Avatar is its anti-corporate, anti-technological argument. Let me elaborate: there are wonderful anti-corporate, anti-technological arguments to be made, but it seems contrived for them to be made in a movie that is, for the time being, apparently the most expensive ever made; virtually all mainstream movies are now approved solely on their profit-generating potential. So a vaguely anti-corporate movie is being made by… a profit-driven corporation.

The movie is among the most technically sophisticated ever made: it uses a crazy 2D and 3D camera, harnesses the most advanced computer animation techniques imaginable, and has advanced the cinematic state-of-the-art. But Avatar’s story is anti-technological: humans destroyed their home world through environmental disaster and use military might to annihilate the locals and steal their resources. Presumably, if Avatar’s creators genuinely believed that technology is bad, the movie itself would never have been made, leading to a paradox not dissimilar for those found in time travel movies.

Avatar also has a bunch of vaguely mythical elements, including some scenes that look like the world’s biggest yoga class. The Na’avi, an oppressed people modeled on American Indians, or at least American Indians as portrayed in 20th Century American movies, fight against an interstellar military using bows, arrows, horses, and flying lizards. They live in harmony with the world to an extent that most Westerners can probably barely conceive of, given that more people probably visit McDonald’s than national parks in a given year.

So why are we fascinated with the idea of returning to nature, as though we’re going to dance with wolves, when few of us actually do so? Alain de Botton’s The Architecture of Happiness may offer a clue: he cites Wilhelm Worringer’s essay, “Abstraction and Empathy,” which posits that art emphasizes, in de Botton’s words, “[…] those values which the society in question was lacking, for it would love in art whatever it did not possess in sufficient supply with in itself.” We live (presumably) happy lives coddled in buildings that have passed inspection, with takeout Chinese readily available, and therefore we fantasize about being mauled by wild beasts and being taken off the omnipresent grid, with its iPhones and wireless Internet access. We live in suburban anomie and therefore fantasize about group yoga. We make incredibly sophisticated movies about the pleasures of a world with no movies at all, where people still go through puberty rituals that don’t involve Bar Mitzvahs, and mate for life, like Mormons.

Neal Stephenson wrote a perceptive essay called “Turn On, Tune In, Veg Out,” which examines the underlying cultural values in the older and newer Star Wars films. I would’ve linked to it earlier but frankly can’t imagine anyone returning here afterwards. Therefore I’ll quote an important piece of Stephenson:

Anakin wins that race by repairing his crippled racer in an ecstasy of switch-flipping that looks about as intuitive as starting up a nuclear submarine. Clearly the boy is destined to be adopted into the Jedi order, where he will develop his geek talents – not by studying calculus but by meditating a lot and learning to trust his feelings. I lap this stuff up along with millions, maybe billions, of others. Why? Because every single one of us is as dependent on science and technology – and, by extension, on the geeks who make it work – as a patient in intensive care. Yet we much prefer to think otherwise.

Scientists and technologists have the same uneasy status in our society as the Jedi in the Galactic Republic. They are scorned by the cultural left and the cultural right, and young people avoid science and math classes in hordes. The tedious particulars of keeping ourselves alive, comfortable and free are being taken offline to countries where people are happy to sweat the details, as long as we have some foreign exchange left to send their way. Nothing is more seductive than to think that we, like the Jedi, could be masters of the most advanced technologies while living simple lives: to have a geek standard of living and spend our copious leisure time vegging out.

The tedious particulars of modern technological life are both embraced and avoided in Avatar too. The villain, rather than being political chaos, organized oppression, ignorance, entropy, or weak/ineffective institutions, to name a few of the real but abstract contemporary bad guys, is instead replaced by an army / mercenary commander who might be at home in Xe Services / Blackwater USA. The military villainy and disdain for superior firepower in Avatar is especially odd, given that the United States has held the technological advantage in major wars for at least a century; the people watching Avatar are probably also the ones who support our troops. The studio that made Avatar probably cares more about quarterly statements than about the environment. The movie villains, however, apparently aren’t being restrained by an intergalactic EPA.

Avatar is really a Western about the perils of modernity, but it gets contemporary politics utterly wrong—or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that contemporary politics are utterly absent. There is no intergalactic criminal court or committee for the protection of indigenous peoples, which seems like a probable development for a race nursed on Star Trek and post-colonialism and that is advanced enough to travel the stars. In the contemporary United States, a bewildering array of regulations govern activities that might have an environmental impact on communities; the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), for example, requires that federal agencies to monitor and report on their activities. Such regulations are growing, rather than shrinking. They’re a staple bogeyman of right-wing radio.

But in Avatar, decisions aren’t made at the future equivalent of the Copenhagen summit. Instead, they’re fought in battles reminiscent of World War I, or the Civil War, leavened with some personal combat. The battles are jarring but anachronistic, although maybe Iraq War II: The Sequel would’ve turned out better if George Bush and Saddam Hussein had dueled with swords, but that’s not how wars are fought any more. And when one side has machine guns and the other side doesn’t, you get something as nasty as World War I, where all the élan, spirit, and meditation in the world didn’t stop millions of people from dying.

My implicit argument isn’t perfect: Avatar does criticize our reliance on oil through the parable of the cleverly named “unobtainium,” but the thrust of the movie is unambiguous. We want to fantasize that solutions are as simple as putting a hole in the right guy, which will make things right again. That’s probably a comforting notion, and an easy one to fit into a two- to three- hour movie with a three-part arc, but it’s also a wrong one, and one that ignores or abstracts the world’s complexity. The people who tend to rule the world are the ones who pay attention to how the world really is, rather than how it was, or how they would like it to be. The real question is whether we are still people who see how the world is.

Ten Days in the Hills

May 1, 2008 By in Books, Reviews Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Jane Smiley’s Ten Days in the Hills is an easily skippable novel—not in the sense of being easy to ignore altogether, although it is that too, but in the sense of having interwoven character threads with some of those threads more worthwhile than others and too many scenes that consist of unformed and poorly reasoned argument, chiefly over Iraq but occasionally over love. That so much of Ten Days in the Hills is skippable might be a problem for a review, were it not for how the novel’s extraneousness conveys whether it should be read.

When Ten Days in the Hills came out I bought it chiefly based on Jane Smiley’s reputation, as she wrote two wonderful novels—Moo and A Thousand Acres—along with at least one dull novel, Good Faith. Since that impulse purchase, Ten Days in the Hills has sat around till I began foraging for something light and easy while I digest To the Lighthouse. Alas, however, Ten Days in the Hills is light even when it tries to be serious—only at one moment, during a late declaration of love, does it feel like it has some heft—and too heavy when it tries to be light, and not in a positive way like Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being.

As an exercise in seemingly endless self-reference, Ten Days in the Hills succeeds like the first phase of the Iraq invasion. About ten characters unintentionally gather during March 2003 in the Los Angeles hills as the Iraq war begins. They’re movie types and L.A. wastrels, so they have nothing better to do than tell stories and sleep with one another. The positive news it that Jane Smiley writes unusually good sex scenes, although “unusually good” doesn’t mean “good” in an absolute sense, as I’m not convinced that it is possible to write a good explicit sex scene. The negative news is that most of the novel consists of navel gazing, which is sometimes more interesting and sometimes less so, as in this long bit of dialog:

You want to make a Hollywood movie about an unmarried couple with grown children talking about the Iraq war and making love, with graphic sex? You know better, so this must be a joke. It has every single thing that Hollywood producers hate and despite, and that American audiences hate and despise—fornication, old people, current events, and conversation. You might be able to do it with Clint Eastwood, but unless the girl was forty years younger than he is—

Instead of a movie, we get a book about often unmarried couples with grown children talking about the Iraq war and making love, with graphic sex. A lot of the novel is, I think, a joke, but one that grows old before the punchline, if there is a punchline. Certainly there’s too much movie talk, all of which is more about the book we’re reading than the movies they’re discussing. I’m sure the Iraq war is supposed to function as a metaphor for something, though I’m not sure what that something is. Still, Ten Days in the Hills has its moments, as when a college student describes a ludicrous, idiotic movie idea some of his friends propose and then we find that “it occurred to Stoney [a movie agent] that he should find out who these kids were and see if they had representation.” Many scenes are very L.A., and I’m not surprised that the dust jacket says Smiley lives in Northern California. The crowd she runs with must have its share of conversations like these:

“Okay, how many regular vegetarians?”
Zoe’s hand went up, then Paul shrugged and put his hand up.
“Vegans?”
Only Isabel.
“Anyone lactose-intolerant?”
Delphine nodded.
“Low-fat?”
Max’s hand went up. Cassie said, “What about Charlie?” and Stoney realized he wasn’t present. Max said, “If he isn’t, he should be.”
“Okay, let’s see. How about hot-pepper-intolerant?”
No hands went up.
She said, “Do you care, Elena?”
“No okra.”
Cassie wrote that down, then said, “I don’t like lamb. Hmm.” She showed the list to Delphine. “Simon likes everything?”
Stoney nodded.

As satire goes, it’s pretty good, but with 450 pages, including debate about Iraq at the quality of what I heard in dorm rooms at the time. I’m tempted to quote it—the novel debates, not the dorm room ones—but my capacity for sadism just isn’t that high. Fortunately, when you skip pages, you read quickly and can blast through the Iraq debates, but you’re also reading a book you want to skip large chunks of. Two characters even comment on this:

“That’s Weekend. That’s only one movie. And it’s French. French movies are a special taste. What would you watch?”
She flopped back on the bed. “Nothing. I would read a book. Books move a lot faster.”
“There’s a revolutionary idea.”
“Well, they do. You never have a shot in a book of two people walking down the street in real time, step step step. That drives me crazy […] And you can’t speed it up. You can cut in and out of it, or you can cut to another scene, but otherwise you’re just stuck, because if it moved faster they would be running and that would look weird. If I’m reading a book, it takes a few seconds for my eye to pick up the lines of dialogue that in a movie take much longer to say, and once my eye has picked it up, I can go on to the stuff I’m really interested in, which is what the characters are thinking or whatever. I think books move a lot faster even than a movie everyone thinks is fast, like The Matrix.”

I agree with her analysis and began applying it to Ten Days in the Hills, lightly at first and then with steadily more ruthlessness. This made some characters hard to follow, but fortunately they’re almost all unidimensional, making your own dramatis personae reasonably easy to construct. I will say that Isabel, a 23-year-old who delivered the book philosophy just quoted, and Stoney, her much older lover who is also the agent quoted in the first blockquote, are the strongest characters, and it’s not an accident that I used their quotes as examples. Nonetheless, they can’t sustain a book, even one with its moments of wonderful humor and deep satire, and too much of Ten Days in the Hills is random commentary instead of what Isabel calls “stuff I’m really interested in.”