Well, almost everything: Avatar

Let's just say (and without any spoilers), Avatar does a lot right that I said Star Trek does wrong. I was a little off in saying the movie does everything right, as I did in an overexcited tweet a couple days ago after seeing the movie. Star Trek might be the most lengthy popular meditation on what it means to stay within a world created by an SF series--and for that it deserves some serious credit, even if, by the cheap postmodern device of trauma (cheap, that is, when made formalistic--not when it appears as content) it often reduces this world to what is called a "franchise." Avatar instead is a mashup of all sorts of (properly) SF and fantasy devices (I mean to imply that trauma is not a generic-specific device, but one that typically disrupts things all across the board), from "unobtainum" to the concept of the avatar itself.

This doesn't mean at all that the movie is a ripoff--SF and fantasy, like any genre, work in this self-reflexive way (a way I don't think many commentators on the movie so far have really recognized, which is odd). I hesitate to call this way "intertextual," because that horribly vague concept precisely overlooks everything specific about genre (and more specifically form, but that's another post) which needs to be brought to bear upon any consideration of such works. Indeed, condemnations of the film as racist have to proceed as if it did not occupy any particular generic space. Thus, "Avatar is just Dances With Wolves" is the equation through which this critique makes its first steps, while it is only in reflecting upon that generic space (making allowances of course for the fact that it is pop-SF, or "scifi"--perhaps even "syfy"--that we're considering here, though that also opens up a question of genre from the inside as it were) that a condemnation really would gain its force. Of course, there are simply discursive codes that are racist, and there isn't any need to be more specific about them (one of the ways to remove the problems of racism is to suggest the accusation is only superficial): but the point is that the concept of code (when it remains only at the level of a wide-ranging discourse, and nothing more specific, like a filmic or even SF/fantasy code) may dissolve the presence of different racist elements in the work--and especially emerging elements, ones that don't fall into codified pattern.

Thus, what seems racist about the film is not the general portrayal of the Na'vi as othered in typical ways, but, I'll contend, the particular logic at work in their bodies as they intersect with the device of the avatar. The most important line of the film, for me, was the throwaway one which made this explicit: "I had to trust my body," the protagonist says. And is the properly SF situation that makes such a statement really weird and interesting and problematic: what does "my" mean when that is actually the body of something or someone else (the thing/person status of the avatar itself--a body grown for another--is really quite uncanny and disturbing when, even with the use of a pronoun, one begins to restore to it something like the capacity for its own control of itself)? Once we see that the whole colonial problem that is the main focus of the film emerges here in this scene of education in appropriation, the problems provoked by the presence or absence of racist codes have to transform.

But it isn't just appropriation that is at issue here, and this is the first way that the transformation occurs. What is almost more important than the question of who controls this body, or who is proper to this body in any vague sense (the sense in which postmodern theory stretches Heideggerian themes to sometimes foreclose less seemly questions of who owns this body--a question I'll just leave on the table, or take up later), is the way the body works in the film. The new motion capture cameras invented to shoot the picture most definitely come into play here--as well as the fact that it really a film made for 3D (I really recommend you see the film in 3D: if I saw it in 2D I think it would just be somewhat ordinary). It'd be crude to read the whole avatar concept, as deployed, as an allegory for this new motion capture technology (de Manian allegory is always a reduction of content to form masquerading as an opening of form--which mysteriously turns into language itself via a mystification of rhetoric--to content), but if this can give you a sense of the connectedness between the film's use of this technology and the issues central to the story and its development, then it might be worth suggesting. The technology quite simply signals the death of Jar-Jar, allowing for the seamless transition between closeups and full-body CG rendering of action, and then from CG to non-CG shots of the actors. The CG characters thus lose their CG-ness, and I'm actually quite certain that reports of the uncanny-valley experience still being made by people who have seen the film are really just mistaken registrations of the uncertainty produced by the concept of the avatar itself--in other words registrations of the plot. With the introduction of this technology, the valley frankly has been crossed, though of course by a sort of cheating--you are, through the CG, watching actual faces after all--which actually betrays the fact this isn't a technological "advance" (as it is being characterized and marketed, in a typical determinist manner) so much as a proper displacement of the old problem into an area where it now opens up new avenues (think of what the rumored Ghostbusters 3 would be like if it used aspects of this technology for ghosts!). And what this all allows is first and foremost--and finally!--a subordination of your interest in the CG-ness of the characters to your genuine concern with their activity. No longer, that is, do we care about the fact that a character is more or less "realistic." This is important because the suspension of the question about reality lets in fiction itself (and which makes possible something so far only really attempted by Pixar and others with natural scenery --vraisemblance).

When this is combined with the fact that the film is made for 3D, the effect is to make the problem of the body distinguish itself from the problem of any sort of representation of that body. For in these elaborately built 3D spaces, full of palm fronds, vines, waterfalls and bugs  in the foreground that your eye avoids, and backgrounds of stars, planets, or huge mechanical spaces into which you are drawn--in a spatial sense, almost on the level of basic motility (these spaces are brought closer to you, one critic rightly said)--the avatar body can move and interact and refuse to sit there as a spectacle. In other words the 3D aspect of the film stratifies or complexifies the environment against which the body is moving as much as the new motion capture deals with the body's most important surface aspects, such that both become something you deal with rather than look at (as you would deal with a landscape as opposed to a landscape painting: there are multiple points of entry into the former, say, while the latter--even if painted in the picturesque tradition--only attempts to give you those). This differentiation achieved, the problems in the representation of the body can return as part of the problems raised by those bodies.

Thus, within your experience of these bodies on-screen, you begin to notice that the avatar body, and the alien species of which it is a modification, take on problematic shapes. Besides the fact--way, way underutilized--that the Na'vi are about twice as big as humans, they remain somewhat boringly humanoid, except for their little neural hook-ups that connect them to the planet eco-network (but I won't get too specific). This is different with the animals, which are simply the most amazing things in the film because they blend SF and fantasy so well: they remain sufficiently alien while they also behave almost like magical companions--and yet the balance always is tilted in favor of the alien (it can only be tamed through work, not through immaterial communion with it) but without the easy move of making the animal into a monster. One gets the sense--and it is the real achievement of this film--that the creatures work in many different and interesting ways. I think Cameron wanted the Na'vi to be something similar: thus their larger catlike ears, eyes, and, of course, nose (the most significant sign of differentiation), and their tails. But the film seems to founder here: a culture has to be built, and that seems to do the work of erasing the animal in them. Or, more probably, a vitalism and spiritualism--to which we'll return--comes in to take over the animal aspect, and dissolve whatever was interesting about it in the bodily realm.

And now is when we begin to notice that the aliens all remain exceedingly fit, slim, and trim--there's not a pudgy one in sight. And it is here that I think a critique can be levied--now that we have also hit a terrain also familiar to feminism: fitness is allied with race here in a weird way, to do the work of making this alien body alien. In the place of something like a completely different anatomy (always a possibility, though it is perhaps the easiest--and indeed it is explored with the animals themselves), or any other qualitative difference, we have some implication that the aliens experience their bodies more. And this sheer quantitative differentiation does not produce any significantly different "trust" of the body--which is what, I think, would be required here for a genuine experience of the alien as opposed to what it can always (and too easily) be dissolved into: race and sex. The film tries to balance this (along a technology/nature binary) by setting up the colonizers as fit and powerful (something like a different kind of fitness)--even to the extent that they make the protagonist's body get a little flabby the more time he spends as his (increasingly fit) avatar--but it's not really convincing when we gawk at sweaty seething flesh moving rhythmically in ritual (like in Riefenstahl's weird and obsessive late photos). Everything gets leveled to some sort of bodily experience aligned with a re-discovered naturalness (that is, artificiality--or rather the artificial flow between them which can magically partake of both) and then to sexuality, which--besides lacking any gender differentiation or play (women are either reduced to Amazons [i.e. men] or lusty nubile objects)--offers less bodily possibilities precisely as we're meant to think it offers more (and in a way that seems similar to how many theorists talk about "the bodily," taken as a site of pure, uninterrupted or uncitational production).

But, these problems now have to be routed through plot, insofar as the real subordination made possible by the new technology's subordination of spectacle to action is that of all the visuals to the story. What I thought was really lamentable in Star Trek was that this relationship to plot was never set up. Characters were there only, surrounded by a really interesting visual experience. And while characters can generate plot (the best example being Arrested Development), Star Trek decided to turn in circles with the most minimal story--that of trauma. In fact, it even subordinated the most interesting character to this story, as if the character himself wasn't interesting enough: we become familiar with Spock through his trauma, as if the only real relationship with a character that we could have is that of a shared and ultimately minimal void... While this perhaps cleanly avoids issues of race that the alien brings up by draining all of those problems--remember, Spock is an alien--into a trauma that is apparently pan-species (an old, and typical, postmodern displacement of humanism: the "everybody's trauma" or formalistic/constitutive trauma of Cathy Caruth) I'd frankly rather risk an encounter with that (and isn't the possibility of that encounter precisely constitutive of SF itself as a genre?) to see a genuine story--or something, at least, that will make issues out of all these minimal markers. While the plot of Avatar might be a bit too old and oversimple (Cameron himself admits as much), this is what the movie achieves. The real feeling of an "advance" in the technology I think stems from this: that now the CG people and the actors can be on the same team for once, and try to tell a story together through the technical setup. It's in this sense that Jar-Jar is really dead (along with, perhaps, Shrek and Nemo: animation itself can now go down a really interesting route that rotoscoping perhaps only really traveled on seriously before).

So when it comes to plot, the problematic racial relation to the body is solved by a disturbing ending, that affirms the pleasures of conversion into this avatar body rather than make it interesting. Here religion (into which fantasy elements easily slip, though--like in Harry Potter--they don't have to) come back to interrupt whatever was properly sci-fi about the whole situation (though religion and science fiction are also not opposites: see VALIS for the most amazing, if perhaps too soft-SF and self-reflexive, example). And, more than that, they make us question what was scifi to begin with about the various biological neural "networks" that connect the whole planet together: the scientific explanation only really becomes science-fictional when it loses its ties to empty spiritualism. And while the whole movie provides an immersive ecological experience that is sure to drive the importance of biodiversity home to anyone who sees it (and counter cynical religious anti-science drivel), unless it provides something more than an optional scientific explanation for relations between the Na'vi body and its environment--for that is how it is presented--we regress. Something like a real experience of this relation (which is what is required) is, indeed, brought home right before the ending--in the planet-wide rebellion against the colonizers (I try to remain vague so as not to spoil), on a scale that is large enough to render nature itself alien (again). But then the ending kills that off and makes these relations spiritual and familiar.