Posts Tagged unreality
James Cameron’s Avatar: Was It Worth It?
I’ve been disappointed with most CGI-heavy films over the last few years. It started with Peter Jackson’s King Kong remake. I mean, how is it possible to watch a giant monkey fight a giant dinosaur and be so bored? Then Michael Bay’s Transformers movies managed to give clashing giant robots all the visual impact of differently coloured paints mixing together.
So despite a predictable childhood obsession with James Cameron’s Aliens and Terminator 2, I approached Avatar with a healthy dose of skepticism. With its maybe $300 million budget – and the swirling rumours of much, much more – I was afraid that no matter how good a film it might be, I’d be stuck staring at the price tag dangling invisibly from the corner of the screen and wondering if it was worth it.
But Avatar successfully stopped me thinking about its dollar signs. It’s a massive 160 minutes long and I didn’t once look at my watch. Yes, it trades in clichés – ‘naive scientists’, ‘evil corporations’, ‘noble savages at one with nature’, and (perhaps unfortunately) ‘white man saves the day’. Some are already complaining that the story’s too simple. Well, ‘complicated’ doesn’t equal ‘good’ – Matrix sequels anyone? – and Cameron’s simple story is masterfully told.
It’s far too deliberately paced for action fans, and barely a sci-fi at all. Cameron has little interest in exploring any ideas behind the projecting-human-minds-into-alien-bodies technology that provides the film’s title. It’s a deeply earnest and old-fashioned adventure story. If anything, Avatar is a conceptual, mirror-world sequel to his Aliens from 1986. Imagine if one of Aliens’ marines had a change of heart and decided to fight alongside the creatures with acid for blood. It even has a new Paul Reiseresque corporate stooge!
And here’s the ultimate compliment for Avatar’s special effects: they’re so good that I don’t feel much of a need to talk about them. Yes, the world of Pandora and its giant blue inhabitants is visually overwhelming at first. Too busy, too day-glow, too outdoor rave. Once you adjust, Avatar is completely immersive. The Uncanny Valley that turned films like The Polar Express into horrific parades of undead fleshbots is nowhere to be seen – thanks to being artfully subsumed into alien facial features.
I’m nervous about saying it in case Avatar completely falls apart on a second viewing, but there were brief flashes where I felt like a kid watching Star Wars for the first time.
All Avatar’s above pleasures, however, depend on your ability to process this pair of facts: it’s about a noble indigenous population fighting corporate greed and American imperialism in defence of their world’s vibrant ecosystem… that also happens to be the most expensive film ever made.
As Alanis Morisette might say: that’s the black fly in your chardonnay.
Does the production of a film affect your enjoyment of it? Read this unmissable New Yorker piece about Cameron’s creative process on the set of Avatar, and wonder if we should dismiss all art made with money that could have been better spent. I think it’s only human to hear an obscene Hollywood budget like this and have a flicker of thought about starving third world children – but if you follow this logical path, it becomes increasingly difficult to justify the cost of any art at all.
Is the disjunction between Avatar’s moral message and its decadent production an unforgiveable hypocrisy? Or is the fact that Cameron convinced his backers to throw hundreds of millions at a film that’s so overtly anti-corporate and anti-America the ultimate act of insider subversion? Does it matter?
If it sounds like I’m making excuses, I don’t mean to be. It’s perfectly reasonable to think the amount of money spent of Avatar is repulsive, and avoid it for that reason alone. It’s to James Cameron’s credit, though, that I was so completely taken in by the movie that these questions didn’t even occur to me until after the credited rolled – and after the hideous Titanic-style ballad began.
Scrubbing Tombstones With A Toothbrush
I love high-concept screenplays. When I heard the storyline for the movie Stealth – “an artificially intelligent fighter jet is struck by lightning and turns evil!” – I swear I nearly burst into applause. I’m not necessarily defending the films themselves; just the ludicrous poetry of the idea that drives them.
High concepts can quickly curdle, though. The movie blog I Watch Stuff crystallised this for me while discussing the poster for the latest Jackie Chan film Spy Next Door. The headline: “Actual Spy Next Door Poster Marks End of Spoof Movie Posters”. Take a look. It’s hard to argue the point.
For me, it’s the recent Bruckheimer blockbuster G-Force that hurts. A squad of celebrity-voiced, crime-fighting, wise-cracking 3D animated guinea pigs? When the worldwide landslide of promotion began, I thought: “You’ve got to be kidding.” Actually kidding, I mean – because G-Force looks exactly like one of those fake movies that act as an easy in-joke inside real movies.
The clip made available of the fake sitcom “Yo Teach!” was perhaps the single best thing about Judd Apatow’s recent (and disappointing) Funny People. It’s freakishly plausible. The script, the set, the laughter. You could drop it onto prime time TV and no one would notice. The same goes for the “MILF Island” clips featured on Tina Fey’s 30 Rock. It barely even functioned as a joke; more an only-minutes-away-at-best Reality TV prophecy.
(In both these cases, you can easily argue that the fake shows are cultural artefacts that are far more likely to exist in the real world than the actual shows that spawned them.)
This confusing play of reality-versus-parody leaves me suspicious of satire. Consider how studies seem to show that the reason Stephen Colbert is beloved by all sides of the political spectrum is that his refusal to break character makes him unpindownable. He’s a Rorschach blot in a classy suit.
I keep thinking of a quote from Steve Aylett’s faux-biography of science fiction writer Jeff Lint. In it, he writes that “satire was like scrubbing tombstones with a toothbrush, but honourable nevertheless.” Sometimes it’s impossible to tell whose tombstone Colbert’s cleaning.
And if Colbert’s fanbase can leave me feeling bewildered, something like G-Force mostly just leaves me feeling old. (You kids and your confusingly parody-tinged entertainment! Turn that music down!)
Old, that is, until I think back to the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. It began as a parody of Frank Miller’s Ronin, but its stars became bona fide pop-culture heroes. When the Adolescent Radioactive Black Belt Hamsters inevitably appeared on comic book shelves soon after, I don’t remember batting an eyelid – despite the logic puzzle of parody squared staring back at me.
So to all the wise-cracking, gun-toting, celebrity-voiced guinea pigs out there? I may not understand you, but I salute you nonetheless. Just make sure you’re not struck by lightning.
Final Fantasy’s Dancing Corpses
Years ago, I watched Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within (2001), supposedly the first ‘photorealistic’ computer-animated feature film. I remember exactly zero percent of the plot. My memories were overwhelmed by the lead character’s 60,000 individual strands of hair forming a hypnotic CGI shampoo commercial atop her head.
The one thing I remember clearly is an easter egg tucked away on the DVD that features the entire cast of the movie doing the dance from Michael’s Jackson’s “Thriller”. And it’s as creepy as hell. Watch:
I was reminded of this by writing about the anthropomorphic mutants living in M&M’s World, but also when putting together a piece on art that features forced dancing as punishment. It’s something seen in everything from the classical ballet to “Once More With Feeling”, the infamous musical episode of Buffy The Vampire Slayer. Sometimes – as in the original Brothers Grimm telling of Snow White – it’s the kind of torture that wouldn’t be out of place in the next Saw sequel. The queen’s feet are placed into red-hot iron clogs until she ‘dances’ herself to an agonising death.
In other examples – such as Hans Christian Anderson’s The Red Shoes or the ballet Giselle – it’s forced dancing through magical possession. That’s somehow even worse. Moving against your will taps into the fear inherent in the cartesian split: that your body is not your own. Your brain might be screaming commands, but your limbs aren’t listening. It means the choice of “Thriller” here is more than just novelty. When the Final Fantasy characters are animated without individuality, they become zombies – corpses, jerked around on invisible strings.
Despite the fact that the BBC ran a hilariously panicky story on how human actors could quickly find themselves replaced by these ’synthetic actors’, the stars of Final Fantasy are never exactly convincing. So why is watching them dance like Jackson – with soulless expressions and in perfectly calibrated clockwork time – so disquieting?
Chalk it up to the peculiar narcissism of human beings. Remember the rumbles of controversy about the Oscar-winning documentary March of the Penguins attributing comforting human motivations to its feathered stars? (The New York Times quipped in an articled called “Penguin Family Values” that it “…may be fun to find a moral lesson in that enthralling penguin movie, but anthropomorphism, like after-shave, is best used sparingly.”)
In his book on the mechanics of sequential art, Understanding Comics, Scott McCloud says that we’ll often see anything with two dots and a line as a human face – and we’ll be more invested in it, too, because of the extra imaginative work we’ve had to do to turn the abstract into the familiar. It’s one reason why comic art is so involving; it’s also why everyone with a beating heart loves the socks-with-eyes that are the Muppets. We can’t help it. We’ll anthropomorphise anything we can get our human eyeballs on, and we’ll certainly attribute souls to stiff and charismaless Final Fantasy stars. McCloud goes on to say:
We humans are a self-centered race.
We see ourselves in everything.
We assign identities and emotions where none exist.
And we make the world over in our image.
We’re unable comprehend how anything could be, or think, or feel differently than us. Sure, it’s narcissism – but at least its side-effect is sometimes random excesses of empathy.
Unreal Superheroes: “The one thing I can not do…”
The thought bubbles of the Superman story “Unreal” read like poetry once you take the pictures away:
I can defy the laws of gravity.
I can ignore the principles of physics.
I can breathe in the vacuum of space.
I can alter the building blocks of chemistry.
I can fly in the face of probability.
I can bring smiles of relief to a grateful populace.
But unfortunately…
…the one thing I can not do…
…is break free from the fictional pages where I live and breathe…
…become real during times of crisis…
…and right the wrongs of an unjust word.
A world, fortunately, protected by heroes of its own.
Does this story – by Steven T. Seagle and Duncan Rouleau – sound a little too sincere something that’s only two pages long? It’s because it belongs to DC Comics’ second volume of artists’ reactions to 9-11, released in 2002. It’s a fascinating cultural document of dozens of writers and artists struggling to make sense of the attacks. Some go for grand symbolism, and others for raw, personal moments. Some are genuinely moving; some are well-meaning but wince-inducing.
Because this is DC Comics, though, superheroes necessarily wind their way through many of these stories. For example, Superman helps children to symbolically rebuild twin towers with toy blocks. A kid draws his own superhero stories while waiting for news about his father. A godlike hand plays with superhero action figures around a glowing tower. Weirdest of all: Krypto, Superman’s superpowered dog, flies in a giant water-dish for the rescue dogs who’ve been looking for survivors.
The presence of these characters creates a conflict between heroic reality and heroic fantasy, and it’s never far from the surface of the page. In Brian K. Vaughn and Pete Woods’ story, “For Art’s Sake”, it’s the actual plot. It features a comic artist who doesn’t see the point in drawing superheroes any more. “…we’re sitting here telling meaningless stories about imaginary heroes,” he says, “while, out there, hundreds of real heroes are dead.”
Steven T. Seagal has dealt with some of these same questions of pesky reality in his autobiographical graphic novel It’s A Bird. In it, he explains how difficult he finds it to write Superman. “I’ve been thinking it over and the pieces don’t add up… the costume, the secret identity, the origin…” he says. “Superman doesn’t hold water in the real world.”
(I write about this odd Superman story, as well as Doctor Doom’s less-than-villainous reaction to the 9-11 attacks, over here.)
What I love about Seagle’s story in this volume, however, is that it draws attention to Superman’s fictional status without compromising his character. Even though it shows Superman as just pencil and ink, flat on the page, he’s still allowed his thought bubbles. We see him wishing he could travel to our world and offer us help.
In fact, it’s like a mirror-image of the volume’s cover. 
There, Superman is the one who appears three-dimensional. From the safe distance of his own fictional universe, he’s looking up with admiration at a two-dimensional representation of rescue workers – peering into a flat representation of our world, just like we peer down at his heroic deeds on the comic book page.
Superman simply says: “Wow.”