After multiple solicitations from the Indigenous of the world, James Cameron has gone into action, reports the NYT today.

Zizek’s predictable diatribe about the narcotic effects of Hollywood love in AVATAR makes for a very dispensable cliche. It should have been expected that the AVATAR political effect, if there was to be one, and if we had been interested really in contemplating the possibility of such effect, would be felt on the margins of Western intellectuals’ obsession with their Hollywood Other. Like, for example, on the dirt roads of Brazil or India. If AVATAR echoes the claims of indigenist movements, if the latter do seek to secure the symbolic support promised by the film’s worldwide popularity, it is because the movie is inspired by the same kind of environmentalist humanism that also suffuses the politics of “indigenous rights”.

From there, the question is not how delusional is the kind of romantic love presented in AVATAR (nobody needs an intellectual’s help answering that one), but how successful indigenous movements can hope to be, when attempting to harness the film’s power of traction. And how negatively this power will be affected, in return, by Cameron’s explicit support to significant yet always marginal causes. Can we imagine that AVATAR may serve as a blue banner and as a rallying point beyond any particular indigenous politics? Or rather, perhaps, that indigenous claims X and Y could snowball into a larger, more encompassing movement?

[Thanks Ola for sharing info]

UP IN THE AIR has been aired for a little while now, and journalists and bloggers have been airing opinions about it ever since. The film is as airy as the title suggests. So it can’t take too long to deal with it.

Its exploitative character was astutely analyzed by Dennis Lim a couple of weeks ago in the light of the filmmaker’s record of ambiguous aesthetic-moral-political embedding of preferences, of “the long history of evasion and denial in American cinema when it comes to matters of work and the workplace”, and of mainstream critiques’ complacency about the film’s alleged depth.
The icky, insistent, indecent proposition that family should be workers’ unique preserve against the hardships inflicted on them by late capitalism does not deserve much more attention than has been granted already. What about the singles who lose their jobs? Should they blame themselves for having nothing at all? Since the stress on family values probably comes from the interview material gathered by the filmmaker and edited into the movie, it could of course be interesting to reflect on the difference between acknowledging that someone may legitimately find comfort in the thought of her family and her dog after loosing her job, and using this same person’s testimony in a Hollywood piece such as this one. (By the way, does Ross Douthat of the NYTimes actually propose that the true societal problem represented in the film is the choice made by some powerful women of juggling family and extra-marital affairs in a strategic manner that turns both into pleasures, in good masculine fashion, or do I misread this?)

But enough.

There’s one light touch of a wing in Bingham’s sky that somewhat strikes a chord, and may deserve a short note of a completely different sort. It is the last long panning of the camera above the clouds in the epilogue-like sequence. It is the final touch, and really, somehow, this is nicely done. It is a precise and perfect moment of closure where the film comes together at once and almost becomes something else. A few seconds that transform the wing of Bingham’s plane into the wing of an angel of death, and Bingham himself into the dark angel of capitalism, fallen and unrepentant. People will be visited, and touched, and killed again. With or without an angel, the spirit of the times hovers over and embodies itself in business professionals, flight attendants, planes. Money. Goodies. Casualties. No matter how revolting its incarnations, the Spirit continues its route, building and destroying, sparing and erasing, in and out of America. Would the film be lifted out of its repulsive commercial demagoguery, and the Bingham character be raised from distasteful embodiment of upper-class misery to the status of an allegory of capitalism, by the grace of these few redeeming seconds?

She smokes, she curses, she’s bright, and experienced. She’s forward to the point of rudeness. Her goal in life is to produce better science. She bargains her way through the soil and peoples of the colony for more samples. She’s strong, and she doesn’t take shit from men, especially when they are soldiers.

He’s a paradoxical soldier–a solid man with dead legs. He’s in a wheel chair, he’s kind. Well, he seems a little bland at first, but we guess from the reflections of his face on the sleek glass surfaces of the lab that he sincerely mourns the death of his brother. And we see that he stands insult and challenge, bargaining his intelligence for new legs. Not bland, no, just young and wounded, but strong.

They both betray in unforgivable ways. But he lives, and she dies. The fate of the scholar in AVATAR, compared with the other ambiguous figure of this film, the crippled soldier, is perhaps key to the attraction and ideological power of the movie.

The scientist’s partner in the science-state bargain is the CEO. The businessman is an ally and a resource, the provider of funds for her expensive technologies, and for the schools that give her access, in peaceful manner, to the indigenous world. Her asset at the bargaining table is this very access she has: it is her knowledge that makes the businessman’s venture possible at all. Her action also provides, when necessary or possible, the moral cover that gives the enterprise the gloss of an acceptable, humane civilizational enterprise.

By contrast with the female scientist, the male soldier represents only himself: not a profession or an institution, but a biography. He stands metaphorically for his working class background, for a dead brother, for his grief, for his lost legs and future. He is an American can-do type who stands up for himself. That is what the feet closeups stand for: the young man stands, literally, on his avatar feet. Before he enters the deal that will buy him his legs back, the soldier is a perfectly innocent man. He is there by chance, as the twin brother of a dead scientist whose DNA makes him compatible with his brother’s “avatar”. He is a purely material resource for a state that seeks to secure at least some chance of some returns on the enormous investment that went into the production of the substitute avatar body. His poverty and grief make him an easy recruit. His intellectual virginity an all-American hero.

When Jake Sully (let us call this individual by name) volunteers to act as an undercover agent on behalf of the military, he looses his innocence. His mission: infiltrating the colonized and gathering intelligence. His cover: anthropological fieldwork, conducted in the body of an indigeneous creature engineered for this specific purpose. His payment: the complex and expensive operation of his lower limbs (no health insurance of course). His partner in the bargain: the right, weapon-bearing arm of the state, personified by a convincingly scarred, muscled-up, and inflexible-looking colonel.

The subtlety of AVATAR in representing the complex role of science in the imperial enterprise cannot be overstated. This is not just about the science of computers and technologies, the normal bling-bling component of the SF genre. It is about the science of matter, and of living beings. Sigourney Weaver (who once embodied Dian Fossey–the gorillas, remember? Tibor, this is bright once again), Sigourney Weaver plays here a combo of physical scientist, biologist, and anthropologist. She forces on Jake the discipline of the field diary (in the form of a video log).

The soldier-spy becomes embedded ethnographer.

More than a playful chance for a sci-fi tour-de-force, Cameron’s “avatar” concept captures to perfection all the slutty, deceiving, dramaturgical, adventurous, glamorous, treacherous games of empathy and identification played by the state’s proxies in foreign and dangerous lands. And since these games are only an extreme (extremely political, extremely cinematic) version of the masks assumed by each of us in our normal-life encounters of the first kind, AVATAR is in the end a lush, powerfully extravagant and immensely grabbing metaphor of human life itself.

Among the state’s proxies pictured in the film, least visible for all the masks s/he bears, yet most instrumental, is the social scientist. The social games played by the anthropologist are the most ambiguous and most morally questionable of all. S/he does not slip in an avatar’s skin because s/he is shrewd or strategic, trying to save her life. She does not cheat out of ignorance. S/he assumes another identity systematically, by profession, by training, and gratuitously, as an end in itself, for the sake of being that other. Because being that other is knowledge about the other. It is her job. Learning to pass as something s/he is not is her trade. This is what “field work” is. Doing fieldwork is learning and talking an other’s language. In the process s/he not only deceives others, s/he deceives herself as well. S/he deludes herself to believe that she IS ALSO that other she speaks to. She confuses her standpoint with her subjects’. She forgets that her role as a teacher, a mediator, a friend, makes her the instrument of the state or the corporation. She thinks she only speaks the indigenous language, when she is also translating the needs of state and corporation. In her avatar body, she forgets she is an avatar of imperialism as much as an avatar of the locals. Does she ever even realize that her translation work is a one-way road?

No, the scientist’s forgetfulness is absolute: in the ultimate seconds of her life, as she lays dying under the tree, her last words are for the soil samples she could collect. Her last sigh makes for an utterly comical moment. The audience’s laughter signals how absolute and unforgivable her sin is, and how indifferent, or even perhaps how deserved, her death feels. It also puts in bold relief, by contrast, the male soldier’s moral superiority. Jake Sully learned the ways of the locals by means of ethnographic methods. But his trade is elsewhere. His trade is the love, the anger and the suffering of a bare living being. And so Jake Sully chooses his camp, and stops the avatar game. He becomes Jaksully, the other, the blue monkey, and from ethnographer turns warrior again. Drops the video log, grabs a bow.

Science is dead, long live action. By taming the giant flying dinosaur, the “Last Shadow” red scary thing, Jaksully becomes the king of the tribe. So yes, I know, I’ve read my share of postcolonial critique, this is deja vu all over again, whiteman dominates coloredman, and the Na’vi are now colonized not just on their grounds but in their heads. This sounds terrible. But who wants to reproduce the white-centric guilt trip, when another, more de-centered view can be produced with the same material? Who wants to depress us with half empty bottles when they are still half full? The reverse side of the hegemonic picture is that Jaksully has stopped interpreting the world and has taken sides. He is not a white human in disguise. He is a blue monkey at war.

So yes, the working class hero is a male soldier. The sexy latina chick warrior, like the strongheaded scientist, both die as sacrificial victims. We know this is also terrible politics. But who knows if these deaths are not the reverse side of a bottle half full, milestones on a path of ideological transformation which we cannot predict? The metamorphoses of the soldier-cyborg are remarkable on their own male terms, and their popular success is more than reasonable. Who knows what will be their fate in politics? Which clever Cassandra would not tune down her pessimistic predictions and start laughing seeing this, for example?

The imaginary deficit is obvious in Avatar when it comes to putting the colonized on the screen. The millenial tool kit comes in handy: a tight community of people dancing with bows and arrows around a fire, under the charismatic command of wise chiefs of tribe, some vague possibility of matriarchy, fascinating body paintings, scary and loud rituals, harmony with nature. My friend Tibor adds: there is no fat individual in this world, that is, in fact, no deviance from a model-like, hard-body, Californian physical type. How racist and classist is ultimately this neat picture? The colonized are forever condemned to remain barbarians–no utopia productive of an alternative culture, of an alternative imagination, of a political alternative, but a fantasy of otherness forever fantastic and beyond reach. A tale for children of all ages.

The imagination of nature in AVATAR suffers a similar inventive deficit. It is difficult not to think back to Miazaki’s haunting PRINCESS MONONOKE, which seems to have inspired so much of whatever is inspiring about AVATAR. The seeds of the tree of life in AVATAR are an avatar of the white spirits of the forest in Miazaki’s film, like the long dream-like rides on giant wild animals, like the trees themselves and the forest, like the destructive Armaggedon systematically implemented through unleashed productivist ideology. In Cameron’s film however, nature remains an externality. It is ultimately a god to be worshiped, a god that grants wishes, a god we don’t see but that is there to respond or not to prayers, a god with arbiter and sovereignty. Not the unseizable, ubiquitous vital principle that the audience of PRINCESS MONONOKE fails to locate in the girl, the wolf, the boar, the stag, the tree or the spirits of the tree. Cameron’s nature is a fetish. Such fantasy of “nature” keeps solid roots in the Western imagination that has made the destruction of nature possible. The environmentalist message of AVATAR, like, tragically, most forms of contemporary environmentalism, is forever condemned to undermine the wholesale salvage of us-in-nature that at this point is the only possible way. (there is also this reliaRadical cultural change is required to make this salvage possible, and AVATAR shows that we have not reached this point.

It would be interesting to think further about the relation between AVATAR’s failed environmentalism (noted by environmentalists such as Mark here) and its possible failure to translate into practice the radical message that has deeply upset conservatives in the US.

Writing about Cameron’s last blockbuster apparently has to be a balancing act. For the film writer or the cultural critic, acknowledging the true worth of this film seems to be a painful admission of something like doubtful esthetic taste. This is at least what the frequent reservations in the press about its substantive superficiality and “thin plot” suggest. Well, with these reservations on my mind, I went, I saw Avatar, and I liked it very much. The plot could have been thicker but it is quite fine. Many avenues are open that are not explored in depth, indeed, such as the psychological makeup of the main character, a man without legs whom technology transforms into a blue cyborg with four powerful limbs—and, bonus, a sensory ponytail that harnesses the power of animals to his will and wishes like a magic plug! But that is a really minor price to pay for a hell of a three hundred minute of good time, and with a touch of independence of judgement from the habitual cultural critics who only want to seem clever through their reviews, you allow yourself to just be wahwed. (see my previous post about the sensory aspects of the same subject)

The film is not only beautiful and entertaining, it offers something gratifying to the mind in times when corporate cheats and lies have been laid bare, although it is utterly strange to find in a Hollywood film: a radical world view! By which I mean a crisp, simple and relatively accurate picture of power relations in society, and one particularly devoid of cheesy, psycho-babbly candy around (unlike for example IN THE AIR, which is the most outrageous piece of visual opiate produced lately—a post TK I guess). Well, there is love and life at the end of Avatar, but that is off the point. Love and life happen when destruction has become beyond repair, so clearly not as a solution for characters or a relief for the spectator. Also, love and life happen outside of “our” world. They happen outside of the human world, a metaphor for “Western world” here. This world, as we know and as the film assume, is dominated by a complex of military and corporate forces colonizing territories by both educational and murderous means, under the guidance of a few scientists ambivalent about their own ethics and motives, the whole thing leading to global ecological disaster. How is that for sharpness and economy?

Now this is where the interesting part of the film really lies, because in the place of an ordinary blockbuster we now are dealing with a (thick and deep) puzzle: being that popular (see Michael’s post, for example) and that radical, how can it be that useless to social progress? Because we haven’t seen riots at the exits of theaters obviously and it is likely there won’t be any for a long time. Where is the “ideology” that keeps people quiet on this one? Or is something cooking after all?

Seen today in the NYT, about the film YOUTH IN REVOLT:

“He’s 16 (in the novel, he’s about to turn 14), an age that helps make Mr. Cera’s casting seem a touch less absurd and the character’s obsession with sex more comfortable. It’s a bit of a squirm when a near-child natters on about all things penile.”

Magnolia Dargis of the New York Times, are you out of your mind, or from out of this world?

The experience was sensational: it appealed to your senses in an intense, not new exactly, but clearly unusual way that you do not wish to deny. Let us recount it in the second person, in imitation of the corny experimental techniques that the writers of Nouveau Roman, back in 1960, imagined to be provocative, reflexive, appealing to the educated ironic reader. Just for the sake of style.

You are about to watch a very widely advertised, publicized,  film. Your appetites were solicited way ahead of time: “be ready, Cameron, Titanic, titan-like enterprise.” You were warned also by anticipated critiques: “not much to expect, perhaps a failure, commercial venture, thin plot, Cameron, Titanic, titan-like enterprise (as in: overly ambitious)” . Your brain waivers between silly expectation and profound doubt. You enjoy all of it, the ambiguity itself. You enjoy the prospect of an experience that is like an experiment.

AVATAR is on your mind. It has grown in you like desire itself, a desire you know is mundane, a desire yet that you have let take sway in you, the vanity of which you are just welcoming in you to enjoy. It will be shown in 3D and you have never watched a film in 3D. You remember your childhood, in the 80s, when what-was-it was made and your friends incessantly were talking about it in the school yard. What was it this film, glasses one lens red one blue, some horror film. You play the game, you let yourself be carried away by memories, by hopes, by greed, and defiance, and hope again, all at once mingled in the promise of a different experience.

You have bought tickets online because you wanted to be sure you will have a seat that night in the theater.  You know it will be packed. You know you will be in the pack. You enjoy it, you look forward to it, you just go for the pleasure of it: a twinge of excitement gets at you every time you think about watching this film. Anticipation, excitement, pleasure of anticipating pleasure, pleasure of possibly being a victim, possibly a critic confirmed in disillusion. Not any longer will you be an outsider, that is what you know, no more an ignorant hearer of things being done.

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You are now standing in line. The crowd is indeed impressive in the Lincoln theater. The fifty individuals who made it before you are holding enormous pairs of glasses in their hands. They also have them stand comfortably on their heads, as if at ease already with a new fashion trend. All this makes you anxious already in spite of all your good sense. How did they get their glasses? Are you supposed to ask for a pair? Will someone come and give you one? When? You came an hour early but you worry about having come on time. It’s all about the glasses. Deprived of glasses, you wonder what organizational mystery lies behind your benign misery at this precise point of your life.

Your friend will be late, this may pose an additional problem. How will you give her her ticket if the line moves before she comes? You make a plan. First get two good seats. Then leave your coat on them. Then swim back against the current and wait for her. That’s it, that’s what you’ll do if she does not find you before the doors open.

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You have finally been let in. Your companion has not arrived yet. You do according to the plan. You have grabbed your pair of giant glasses at the entrance to the screening room. You are happy only fifty people were ahead of you, and several hundreds behind you. The very best seats in the middle of the amphitheater were taken when you got there, but there are still very good seats available around that circle of the very best. Unflinchingly you move toward the second best seats, take two of them, settle in, stick a chewing gum in your mouth, make yourself at home until it is just time for a return trip to the entrance where she must be waiting.

She is waiting. You smile. She smiles across the fatigue of her work day coming to an end. You’re excited to have made it work so well. She’s excited everything is falling into place. You both go back to the pile of your clothes marking the territory where you’ll both be watching a spectacle for close to three hours. You have just enough time to discussed the obstacles that could have prevented both of you from making it there that day. The lights dim. It’s barely become pitch dark that the obscurity already glows with the white and yellow letters of the titles. Your glasses sit on your nose and you can see already that they sharpen your view of a screen that looks blurry without them.

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The first five or ten minutes are overwhelming. [to be continued]

Braudel is the pen name of a French American sociologist currently experimenting with writing genres other than academic.

As some people know, Braudel writes about large issues and objects, such as civilizations, their genesis, and their decline. Given the historical context in which it is produced, this blog has chances to be about the descending part of the route.

The name is not Twilight Zone but, in homage to one of Braudel’s favorite Coetzee novels: Waiting for the Barbarians. As in the novel, the name of lands of origin do not truly matter here. Only out of some professional scruple was the author’s double nationality indicated, as a token social origin of the posts that will be placed on this immaterial site. As in the novel, what really matters is that the posts are outposts of something like a crumbling empire. As such, of course, the places of origin make full sense.

As we wait for the barbarians anytime, here is the chronicle of a civilization on the edge. The precise outcome of its becoming is not known. The texture, the shape, the very density of the brink on which we are sitting cannot be fathomed. It is a matter of palpation, assessment, guess, at most. Between terrorists and legal torturers, between ethnocentrism and progress, between Bobo neurosis and sheer combustion, what is our fate? Authoritarianism, anarchy, or something we cannot name because our imagination is bounded by models of a century past? Organized labor or better policy, Sarkozy or Obama: are these our options?

For the time being, there are clues, indexes, indicators. Things happen. New ways offer themselves, of talking and perhaps acting, perhaps rallying, perhaps forming new assemblages. Who knows.  For the time being, there are stories to be told and there is a voice to be found.