March 7, 2010
Our New National Pastime Is Reviewing Avatar
Even Slavoj Zizek gave his critique:
Cameron’s superficial Hollywood Marxism (his crude privileging of the lower classes and caricatural depiction of the cruel egotism of the rich) should not deceive us. Beneath this sympathy for the poor lies a reactionary myth, first fully deployed by Rudyard Kipling’s Captains Courageous. It concerns a young rich person in crisis who gets his (or her) vitality estored through brief intimate contact with the full-blooded life of the poor. What lurks behind the compassion for the poor is their vampiric exploitation.
In Cameron’s defense, after District 9, every Sci-Fi film narrative is sure to pale in comparison. His was just the more glaring of failures.
Tonight’s awards should be interesting.
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Ah, Avatar and Marxism…seems like a bit of a stretch considering the main character would be considered a member of the proletariat class in Marxist thought. Dear Zizek, please help me recall which part of Das Capital categorized poverty draft, paraplegic war veterans who cannot afford their needed medical attention as the bourgeoisie elite. Perhaps you can also help me understand how our hero in this reactionary myth is not in fact another victim of the “cruel egotism of the rich” having just come from a planet that has already exhausted its resources worshiping a market mantra of constant growth at any human and ecological cost.
It has been pointed out that this story has been told before and is similar to Fern Gully, Dances with Wolves and Pocahontas all of which have a protagonist who comes to question the sanity of their force fed zeitgeist after an encounter with a culture with values diametrically opposed to greed, excess and the wake of loneliness that ensues in these iterations of empire, colonialism, material obesity, and globalization. When has familiarity detracted from the force of an argument albeit one hidden in narrative? Is it possible that this film was so popular because it speaks to a general alienation felt by those of us who, like our hero feel a sense of desperate longing for a more sustainable community based existence? As the economist E.F Schumacher pointed out, “when economic, political and social structures are too large, they become impersonal and unresponsive to human needs and aspirations. In such an environment individuals feel disposed , voiceless, powerless and alienated”.
Is it then appropriate to label this morality tale that questions the ideology of the cancer cell a “vampiric exploitation”?
At the risk of an ad hominen poke, can I suggest that Zizek and others who I suspect did not even see the film (I wont name names ..Josh) stop looking for reasons to feel so intellectually superior to the masses (Damn Marxism is just bleeding out) via a smug, overly critical condemnation of a film because of its pop culture appeal.
This movie made me want to go live in a big fucking tree. If a piece of art can cause you to question your surroundings and cultural assumptions then maybe it need not be discarded so easily.