"If I Could Just Leave My Body For A Night"
An Essay on Avatar
Note: The published version is online here.
The Major Motion Picture is, along with presidential elections and natural disasters, one of the few events still capable of giving our fragmented culture a brief sense of unity. The buzz surrounding the release of such movies, the "countdown" Widgets and the midnight showings, speak to America's genuine need for them, so desperate in part because it is so rarely fulfilled. If the idea of a divide between "good" art-house movies and merely "entertaining" Hollywood blockbusters rings true it is only because the latter usually are mere entertainment—which is precisely why the few mainstream movies that do manage to be genuinely good are met with such excitement. And these rare treasures, the good blockbusters, are ultimately the ones that really matter, because only they—unlike the rarefied "art-movies"—have an appeal universal enough to provide the moments of healing unity that we all crave.
James Cameron's Avatar was such a movie. From the gaping interval since Cameron's last feature—Titanic, the top grossing film of all time—to the tall-tale speculations on its budget, everything about it was larger-than-life, which fed both feverish anticipation and equally feverish skeptical naysaying. When it finally opened, less than two weeks before the end of the decade, its box-office performance was predictably extraordinary: as of now it has surpassed Titanic to become the highest-grossing film of all time. Critical reception was also overwhelmingly positive—even the New Yorker's notoriously snarky David Denby began his review with the disarmingly blunt declaration that "Avatar is the most beautiful film I've seen in years." Most reviews praised it along similar lines, focusing on the gorgeous and immersive 3D visual effects.
Few critics, though, ventured beyond these purely sensual pleasures to praise Avatar as a whole. They were careful to qualify their rhapsodical odes on its sensuous beauty by pointing out its hokeyness, its unoriginal plot, its flat characters—in short, everything that supposedly makes "good" movies good. The "entertaining/good" dichotomy remained intact—for all their enthusiasm, even the most positive reviewers were unwilling to bridge it by calling Avatar a good movie as opposed to merely an extremely pleasurable and entertaining one. Avatar also took fire on political grounds by non-film critics, who objected to the questionable racial politics that it inherited, along with its appropriated plot, from movies like Dances With Wolves. David Brooks, for instance, criticized it for perpetuating the racist "White Messiah" narrative in which a manly Caucasian hero saves the defenseless, oppressed natives, cementing their impotence even while superficially sympathizing with their noble cause.
Contrary to the party line faithfully toed by all these venerable pundits, though, Avatar is, without qualification, a good movie in the strongest possible sense of the word. Its mass-culture ambitions are all that separates it from a masterpiece of, say, a Bergman or a Kubrick, and the deftness with which it navigates the often conflicting demands of artistic integrity and mass appeal speak even further to its status as a work of great art. It was not media hype, or marketing, or even eye-popping visuals that made Avatar the most popular movie ever made. It was because Avatar is a great movie, a movie that earned every ounce of its excesses and every cent of its profits, and a movie that deserves to be hailed as a classic of cinema.
The most common criticism leveled at Avatar, that it has an unoriginal plot, is pedestrian and irrelevant—it is like criticizing "Hey Jude" for having an unoriginal chord progression. In fantasy movies, which take a risk by stepping out of the realm of immediate credibility and demanding larger-than-usual suspensions of disbelief, an unoriginal plot is more or less a structural necessity: the familiar story helps orient us in the movie's unfamiliar universe. Even beyond the fantasy genre, though, movies—or, for that matter, stories in general—hardly ever have original plots; instead they tend to stick to the dozen or so plots that work, which is precisely why we like them so much. And even if the charge of unoriginality is a legitimate criticism, Avatar should still be lauded for at least having original characters—which is more than can be said of Star Trek, The Dark Knight, Lord of the Rings, and many more of the decade's most popular movies.
The problem with the more serious criticism of Avatar's racial politics is that it glosses over the fact that the Na'vi are aliens, and therefore not racial minorities. This point may seem pedantic but it is actually crucial. Avatar, like all popular movies, is meant as fantasy fulfillment—the world it constructs is a phantasmic projection, the negative impression of the dissatisfactions with modern life from which its audience wishes to escape. People ensconced in the comfort and stability of late-industrial civilization, in order to live with the ennui and claustrophobia that is an unavoidable by-product of their security, must fantasize about breaking out of the confines of the society so they do not have to deal with the consequences of doing so in real life. These escape fantasies are solipsistic—their content is determined entirely by the needs of the psyche that generates them. They are, as it were, the negative space of society, and the imagined Other that appears in them—in this case, the Na’vi—can be anything that approximates the shape of that space. By the same token, Dances With Wolves was not really about Native Americans—they just fit the space. Given that these fantasies are a necessary coping mechanism without which modern life would be unbearable, Avatar should be commended for placing them in a fictional fantasy world instead of playing them out at the expense of real-life oppressed minorities.
The fact that the Na'vi are aliens is crucial because it means they are not human. Native Americans might be different, but they are still no less human than white people, and therefore still bound by those laws of human corporeality in which so much of our unhappiness originates. The Na'vi, though, are physiologically different from humans in ways that point straight to the heart of what makes human existence so painful. For one, they, along with all the living creatures on their world, are bioluminescent—terrestrial light is a gift given to them freely by nature. We, by contrast, had to steal it from the gods. The human dream of filling the world with light, which we have only brought to dubious fruition with the advent of the lightbulb, is for them a pre-given reality. Another difference is their ability to fly by riding winged animals, something humans have always dreamed of but have only accomplished through the nerve-wrackingly unnatural technology of the airplane.
By far the most important difference between Na'vi and humans, though, is zahelu, their ability to overcome the isolation of embodied existence through direct neural interface with other living creatures. The central nexus of human sadness, from the fall of Adam onward, has always been our paradoxical estrangement from the nature of which we are still inescapably a part. The rift between nature and culture cannot be resolved either by returning to nature or by eradicating it completely—it must remain forever an unresolved tension. And, from agriculture and domestication of animals to repression of our own instincts, we have only been able to bridge the gap through brute domination. The Na'vi, with zahelu, are able to achieve what we cannot: a relationship between culture and nature that is mediated by symbiosis rather than domination, made possible by a nature in which the world-within-the-world of culture is freely given and need not be taken by force. Their culture is not free of domination, of course—the scene in which Jake Sully violently tames his mountain banshee is ample evidence of this—but even their moments of violence fit into a paradigm of symbiosis: Jake tames the banshee by binding it with rope, but it still must "choose him" first. In contrast, even the most seemingly symbiotic interactions between humans and nature still ultimately reduce to domination.
The irreconcilable divide between the Na'vi and humans is underscored by the ubiquity of technology—the "extensions of man"—in the human side of the story. It is significant that the humans cannot even breathe the air: while the Na'vi are seamlessly integrated into their environment, the humans require technological enhancements even to survive in the atmosphere. And it is surely no coincidence that Ewya, the spiritual network through which all life on Pandora is biologically interconnected, sounds a lot like a naturally-occurring Internet. The clearest foils, though, are the giant metallic exoskeletons, the closest thing the humans in Avatar have to zahelu. In the climactic duel between Col. Quartritch, ensheathed in a bayonet-wielding robot, and Neytiri, the comparison comes into perfect focus: for all our technological prowess, we are still prisoners in our own bodies, and we can interact with the outside world only through physical manipulation—the dream of a direct connection between mind and world remains a fantasy even 150 years in the future.
Or rather, it remains a fantasy with one crucial exception: the Avatar program itself. Animal Collective anticipated Avatar by almost a year when their album Merriweather Post Pavilion (whose cover art, incidentally, features a strikingly Avatar-esque design of green leaves over a blue and purple background) had in its first track the memorable line: "If I could just leave my body for a night." That line expresses in the simplest terms possible what may well be the deepest, strongest, most tragically impossible desire a human being can have, and Avatar dares to let us see that desire gratified. That, above all else, is perhaps the secret of the movie's appeal: it shows us a world in which technology has made it possible, at least to an extent, for human beings to leave their bodies and enter into an existence that, unlike ours, is truly worthy of its bearers. Beneath all our idealistic fantasies of a perfect world, it is ultimately the inescapable limitations of our own bodies, our hated corporeal frailty—signified just as much by Dr. Grace's smoking habit as by Jake's disability—that is the source of our pain, and from that pain we will never be free. Avatar, though, lets us almost believe, if only for a few hours, that someday we might be.
This all should make clear why Avatar is such a superbly enjoyable movie, and why interpretations that reduce it to a point-for-point allegory for some aspect of mere existence—capitalism, imperialism, whatever—do it such an injustice. By breaking free from the confines of reality and into the realm of fantasy, it offers us a vision of the reconcilement that in reality will remain forever beyond our reach. What remains to be shown, though, is what makes it a good movie. Blockbusters have always fulfilled our fantasies; that is what makes them blockbusters. What makes Avatar any different from the rest of them?
The public reaction to Avatar, along with the predictable mixture of wild enthusiasm and cynical derision, included a remarkable, perhaps unprecedented facet: many people, in the days after seeing the movie, reported experiencing considerable emotional pain upon having to confront the fact that it was just a movie and not real. An article in the Daily Mail reported that fans were "plagued by depression and even suicidal thoughts at not being able to visit the planet Pandora," and a thread on the "Avatar Forums" website entitled "Ways to cope with the depression of the dream of Pandora being intangible" was flooded with over 1,000 posts, so many that administrators had to start a second thread. Many writers have criticized this phenomenon, bemoaning people's increasing preference for artificially synthesized fantasies over real life. Boston Globe film critic Ty Burr, in an article about how Avatar "feeds into our desire to escape," encouraged people not to abandon reality; "It's real 3-D out there," he wrote, "and it's amazing."
All these criticisms, however, miss the point. Popular movies, science fiction and fantasy movies especially, have always fed into people's desire to escape, and people have always had trouble dealing with the fact that they aren't real. In almost every case, though, fans who are unable to cope with this disappointment sublimate it in grotesque perversities: in the case of Star Wars, the elephantine world of novels, comics, video games and other merchandise that constitute the "Expanded Universe," along with the prequels and the odious Clone Wars movie; for Star Trek, the quasi-religious devotion of Trekkies, one of whom once famously served jury duty in a Starfleet uniform; for Twilight, the public obsession over whether Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart are "actually in love," as though their on-screen romance were not real enough. If Lord of the Rings has managed to avoid a similar fate it is surely only because of the utterly exhaustive Extended Edition DVD set, calculated to ruthlessly sate even the deepest and most elusive escapist desires.
Avatar has not inspired such perversions. Instead, it has forced people to confront directly the pain that they would otherwise have channeled into unhealthy escapist activities. The author of the above-mentioned Daily Mail article wrote that "the world of the sci-fi epic Avatar is so perfect that the line between fact and fiction has become somewhat blurred"—but this is the exact opposite of the truth. On the contrary, for all those suffering Avatar fans the line between fact and fiction is all too clear. One fan, whose wounds of separation must have been especially deep, has made a furtive attempt to start "an actual Na'vi Tribe" in Pensacola, Florida, but most have simply taken to the Internet message boards to find solace. The question, then, is: what is it about Avatar that so distinguishes it from other movies? Why has it made people so unable to repress the pain that always accompanies the return from any fantasy world more perfect than reality?
One common mark of a work of "high art" is the deliberate interpenetration of form and content—for example, the abundant references to theater in Shakespeare's plays, or Don Quixote's obsession with romantic novels. Through this self-referential turn an art-work may represent itself, as well as its audience, within its own narrative. In film, this maneuver is often accomplished through some indirect visual reference to the film medium. The archetypal example of this is Carl Dreyer's 1928 film The Passion of Joan of Arc, in which the breaking-wheel on which Joan of Arc is to be tortured clearly resembles a rotating film reel, with spikes suggesting sprockets. In this way the film, in addition to creating an illusory world, may at the same time acknowledge the inauthenticity of that world, as well as its relationship with its audience. The torture scene in Dreyer's film also features a monk who peeks into the room through a camera-like peephole, forcing the audience to confront the uncomfortably voyeuristic nature of the film medium.
Perhaps the Avatar has been so successful in getting people to confront their pain of separation because, like Dreyer's film, it also includes an element of self-representation in the form of the Avatar program itself. Like humans controlling avatar bodies, we can only experience the movie's fantasy world from a distance. We share in Jake Sully's joy as he explores Pandora, as he joins the Na'vi and fights to defend them against the greedy humans invading their world. But his adventure is haunted all the while by a silent but ever-present specter: the fact that, despite all appearances, he is not really there. No matter how much he feels at home in his avatar body, it is still a mere extension of the crippled human body that lies languishing in a metal cocoon. His experience, like ours, is vicarious, regardless of how beautiful and immersive and real it may seem to be. In this way Avatar represents within its own plot the tragic lacuna between itself and us, thereby forcing us, however subliminally, to come to terms with it.
Avatar reminds us, in preemptive response to Ty Burr's criticism that it feeds the unhealthy desire to escape from real life into illusion, that this "real life" is itself structured by illusion, and always has been. To be human is to live in illusion, and to experience reality through the lens of illusion. Before the age of modernity these illusions took the form of religions and myths; now, in our disenchanted world, we must create our own illusions; or, in the case of movies, partake of the illusions created by others. We should not, however, fetishize "real life" shorn of all illusion as something that is valuable in itself simply because it is real. Movies are illusions, but we need illusions to sustain us in our real lives. Avatar also reminds us, though, by means of its brilliantly self-referential structure, that illusions should nonetheless not be mistaken for reality—and, more importantly, that the gap separating us from the illusions we create, preventing us from entering into them once and for all, is a painful wound that will never fully heal.
Not all popular movies are so honest about the tragic limitations of their medium. Recall, for instance, The Matrix, which was the overture to the last decade just as Avatar ushered in this one. The Matrix was a paean to the sort of jargon of authenticity trumpeted by Ty Burr and his ilk: the machines have imprisoned us in a computer-generated simulation world, we have to wake up from the dream of our lives and embrace authentic reality—you remember. Perhaps aware of the glaring hypocrisy of a movie, chock full of CGI special effects, preaching the gospel of reality over illusion, the directors took great care to make the back-story as credible as possible—the baroque narrative contortions of the two sequels were apparently the price they had to pay in order to avoid plot inconsistencies. (James Cameron, in contrast, let us know precisely how much he cared about his back-story by actually naming the Pandora's rare mineral "Unobtainium," as if to tell any quibbling sci-fi nerds, "Just shut up and watch the damn movie!")
For all their diligence, though, the Wachowski Brothers left one massive plot hole unaccounted for: the fact that Cipher, supposedly the bad guy, was completely right when he said the Matrix was better than reality. "The desert of the real" is just that, a broken wasteland completely stripped of all but the bare necessities, in which one must constantly run and hide to avoid being exterminated by the machines—and yet we are supposed to believe that this empty freedom is preferable to the Matrix, just because the Matrix "isn't real." If you take away the movie's glamorizing rhetoric, getting "unplugged" is no different from the renunciation of "childish" imagination and fantasy that is expected of all of us upon settling into the solemn monotony of grown-up life. In short, The Matrix is a fantasy movie whose message is that we should stop fantasizing and get real, even if that means giving up all that makes us human in our fanatical struggle to preserve our humanity. Avatar, by that token, is The Matrix in reverse: its message is that the very essence of humanity has always resided in our imagination—that part of us that extends beyond reality, creating the unreal illusions that nonetheless constitute reality itself.
James Cameron has made some remarks to the effect that Avatar is meant to suggest new ways of living in harmony with nature and paving the way for a brighter future—all standard Hollywood-liberal platitudes. In all seriousness, though, in what ways could this movie suggest a new ideal for living in the world? Surely not by directly emulating the Na'vi—that would be biologically, not to mention socially, impossible. Nor would it even be a greater respect for the balance of nature—most of us, at least in theory, feel that way already, and it has not helped much. In fact, the only people who truly suggest a new way of living are the audience, all those people who felt so acutely the pain of not being able to live in a perfect world. In these difficult times, the only way to live better lives might be simply to allow ourselves to feel the pain that we struggle every day to outrace. In time we might discover that this pain, far from a demon to be exterminated, is actually an essential constitutive moment in happiness itself.
Which brings to mind one more convergence of medium and message: Avatar's much-lauded 3-D technology. Classicist Anne Carson, in her book Eros, the Bittersweet, analyzes the curious way in which desire, as expressed by Sappho, manifests as a paradoxical mixture of pleasure and pain. It yearns to consummate itself by attaining its object, and yet its object remains forever transcendent, because the lack that it longs to fill is desire itself. The only way to live is to accept this lack, and the pain it brings, as an element of desire that will always accompany it, to incorporate into the ideal toward which we strive an acknowledgement of its own impossibility, its own unreality. "The difference between what is and what could be," writes Carson, "is visible. The ideal is projected onto the screen of the actual, in a kind of stereoscopy." So there you have it: the "utilitarian" way of life, which insists only on total pleasure and wants to end all suffering, is one-dimensional, which is why it is always unsatisfying. Only through the dual perspective of pleasure and pain, of the joy of fulfillment mixed with the sadness of disappointed expectations, does the depth of reality become visible. In this respect Ty Burr was right: the real world is three-dimensional, but only if we are able to see it that way—and it is only with the help of illusions, like Avatar, that our depth-perception is renewed.