Paint-By-Numbers Social Commentary

Why is Avatar so goddamn popular? It’s set to break every box office record in the book, and no one seems to notice that it’s a gigantic pile of intellectual porn? How is it that a movie with such terrible screen writing, acting, thematic development; indeed a movie that by every cinematic yardstick is an utter failure, is making so much money?
Because it’s Twilight adapted for the big screen (Robert Pattison aside)…it’s trash entertainment masquerading as profound social commentary.
If you look at all trash entertainment, from the ‘penny dreadfuls’ of George Orwell’s day, to the plotline of every first person shooter video game, to James Cameron’s latest offering, you can see the formula emerging. All these forms gain success by doing a few things extremely well.
First, they’re custom tailored to succeed because they are geared to provide something that is always in demand. In a society where the concept of work has been so discredited, where people want to spend their “free time” in ways as dissimilar as possible to “work”, enjoyment has come to be seen as whatever pastime requires as little effort and as much distraction as possible. Enter the paperback crime novel/ video game/ cheesy action movie… ‘Come one, come all, BE Entertained!’
Second, and most troubling, these types of entertainment are incredibly adept at reaffirming for the reader things that they already know and wish to have proven again. For example, the detective novel is an incredibly easy thing to write. Start with a Hero, come up with a clever way for the Hero to solve a crime, invent a criminal to commit said crime, and then fill the rest with a few hundred pages of insubstantial and ultimately ‘excludable’ filler. The specifics of the twists and turns don’t really matter, so long as you eventually end up at your oh so clever solution. Most common is for the Hero to be on his way to solving the crime, get sidetracked by an unforeseeable complication/ dastardly trick (substitute whichever one you feel like), and then fall back on his integrity, gut instincts and general bad-assery to pull out the squeaker victory at the end. What this does for the reader is reaffirm a number of things. Firstly, it make for an easy read, which is comforting to people who want to simply “forget the world” for a few hours. It also supports the popular myth that ‘the good guy always wins’, whether the bad guy is a Nazi, Russian KGB agent, or some evil Megacorp. Fairly simple critique, right? Ok, lets move on to something fleshier.
This simple schematization also provides the fastest and easiest way to manufacture automatic, immediate meaning. Authors, screen writers, producers of trash entertainment exploit and promote the audiences imaginative laziness (i.e. refusal to “work” during free time) by simply plugging in which every pre-fabricated stereotype they feel meets their objective. This doesn’t just relate to characters or plot either. It is most common, and most damaging, when in relation to the generation of psudo-social commentary. Twilight obviously doesn’t constitute high calibre literature, but it’s also largely harmless…it’s not trying to say something profound or meaningful, it’s just entertainment. Something as pretentious as Avatar on the other hand, is more menacing. To look break down Avatar more carefully, let’s contrast it with another socially aware film, Green Street Hooligans.
GSH follows the story of a young journalism student, Matt, (go ahead, draw all the conclusions you like) who is expelled from Harvard when his roommate’s drugs are found in his closet. His roommate, the son of an unnamed powerful political figure cuts a deal with Matt, in exchange for his silence. Matt then takes off to London, England, where he falls in with a group of soccer hooligans and becomes part of their ‘firm’. The subculture he immerses himself in is incredibly violent, leaning on old ideals of pride, honour and glory. At first Matt comes to love this untapped vent for his anger and frustration, and, in the process, learns to stand up for himself. All that is shattered though, when one battle with a rival firm ends with the death of his close friend and firm leader Pete. GSH has a glaring, unapologetic moral message, as, it appears, does Avatar. So what is it that makes Avatar’s social commentary so dangerous and GSH’s so meaningful?
Avatar begins, as any good movie does, with a hook. In this case the hook is the environment of the movie itself. A visually very beautiful utopia of plants, with vibrant colours and animals, all presented in 3D serves to stun the audience, in this case forcing them to immediately relinquish all powers of questioning and reasoning, as they are immersed in the world we all wish could be. With the audience sufficiently sedated by their awe of the visual effects (see the numerous news reports of viewers feeling serious depression and ‘Pandora-withdrawal’ upon leaving the theatre), the producers are free to develop whatever narrative they want, which will be gladly accepted by the audience. The narrative in this case is a hodgepodge of well-established stereotypes, from the scared, leather-lunged bravado of the Colonel, to the snivelling selfishness of the Corporate Boss, to the hardened yet secretly sensitive Marine. Even the social comments that figure so heavily in the movie are anything but original: human greed, human bigotry, the dangers of militarism and imperialism, all have been hashed and rehashed many times before. ‘So? What’s wrong with that?’ you ask? Just as we should not believe these morals to be ground shaking or new, neither should we imagine that the conflicts motoring this narrative entail a real questioning or evaluation of such ideologies. There is no actual debate over these well known issues, they are simply used as pawns, introduced merely to be smoothed away, and so in fact validated. By giving the slightest of nods to the accepted issues of the day, and then blasting them away with the heart-warming victory of good over evil (as if we expected any less), Cameron is actually validating these social problems by virtue of his dismissal of them. He is saying that we don’t need to fret out little heads over the destruction of the environment, or the increasing militarism of our society, or corporate greed because ‘good always wins the day’…someone will always solve the problem for us.
This stands in stark contrast to a film like GSH. In that narrative, characters that are at first intentionally presented as having the depth of a pancake are in the end revealed to be much more complex. The seeming villain of the movie, who ends up killing Pete, reveals in that act the pathetic, broken and helpless person he has become thanks to his addiction to violence and power. Bovver, who the audience first sees as nothing but a whining self-preservationist is revealed as one of Pete’s most loyal friends, again through his actions. What is most moving about GSH however is that it is in no way a feel good movie. That shouldn’t be surprising. After all, how do you expect to provide a meaningful critique of societie’s negative aspects while still making the audience feel all warm and fuzzy? Instead, GSH leaves the audience looking inward at themselves and asking questions about their own feelings of self-righteousness, anger, and self-worth.
Some might say that Avatar is just pulp entertainment, and that to critique it as anything more is a waste of time and breath. The problem with that argument is that even pulp is less uppity, less pretentious than either Cameron or his movie. Pulp readily acknowledges its pulp-ness, and celebrates it. Take the example of Brad Pitt in Snatch, or the characters in Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. There’s no social commentary there, nor is anyone pretending there is. Obviously, not all movies must be a browbeating lesson in morality. If that’s what Cameron was going for though, perhaps he should have spent 8 or 9 of the last 10 years learning how to write characters and plots with more depth than cardboard cut outs, and less time fretting over how many legs the Pandoran animals should have.