Avatar 3d, a real case study where extra visual dimensionality leeches from narrative depth, where imaginative visuals decouple from substance. Worth seeing for it's intense psychedelic jelly-fish design alone, beyond that, a high fructose corn syrup jewel, rife with a Hollywood cookie-cutter Noble Savage approach to native culture. After the visual insulin jolt, a mean limbic bottom awaits where one feels empty, cheated..and the cruel twist is that we'll suffer the formulaic polarizations of Cameron to witness the beautiful design.
Yes, I thought we were done with the 18th century Noble Savage approach, but Hollywood has been running on cultural fumes for years. Salient to that dated concept, is that through exposure to the pure natives, white man regains his mojo and outdoes the natives at their own game. But what's most troubling about Avatar's depictions, is not the white Messiah perspective mainstream Hollywood feels compelled to frame narrative, but the lack of awareness on how the leveraged wholesale homogenizing of cultures driven to extinction is constantly trotted onstage by same cudgel-like ethnocentrism.
We like easy targets, and there's plenty of "The Other," they make nice pawnish paper tigers, they're easy to colonize with our ideologies--narrative or political. For Avatar, the native reference is a mishmash of fragile shamanistic mystery, nothing to differentiate, grounded in sledgehammer Disney-esque poles of them vs. us. The most irony for the loss of the unique character of Native American civilization is blabbed in the trite words of the director who says that his film "asks us to open our eyes and truly see others, respecting them even though they are different, in the hope that we may find a way to prevent conflict and live more harmoniously on this world."
If Avatar is a consciousness raising device to this end, we are all doomed in a cycle of revenge and black and white thought.
Allegorical science fiction? Yes, but we want to be entertained at the expense of conscience, so history can wait outside the theater until we're done with our cultural fix.
WHO THE HELL?
- David Alexander
- Los Angeles, California, U.S. Outlying Islands
- David, son of David, was raised by clairvoyant penguins on a steady diet of irony and mayonnaise. Reconstituted by organs donated from his "parents" via a Catholic charity, the Frankenstienian child fresh from a Hollywood hospital was dubbed David, given such moniker as it closely matched his last name, David. As the sentient being grew, it realized the only filter for cultural smog was a hybridized union of incompatible concepts, a methodology inspired by his birth circumstance. While not foisting his scribblings onto the cinematic screen, David invents failed business models and exercises compassion by not launching them upon the public.
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