True Anglican Blog

Heh. A friend of mine — in the the “Millennial” demographic — and I were having supper the other night and she shared with me just how disappointed she was with Avatar. I reminded her that people were going to like it for its imagination and special effects and she interrupted with “yes, but it wasn’t imaginative or creative. All they did was use exactly what we see every day and make it prettier. There were no new categories or constructs — there were humans, only blue and prettier and taller. And nature was prettier than it is currently — but all the same. Maybe add an extra hoof or something over here, or there, but basically all the constructs were just the same only “nicer” as conceived of by the filmmakers or with a slapped-on addition.”

I haven’t seen the film — nor do I want to as I don’t care for overtly didactic works of art anyway. Avatar reminds me of The Cider House Rules, which took a lot of nice visuals and a nice soundtrack and interesting actors and made a little tract about how great abortion is and how heroic abortion doctors are and how we should support them — just exactly like the Puritan tracts about how little boys and girls should be good or will Come To A Very Bad End. Certainly that may be “teaching” — but it’s really bad art and bad movie making.

Here’s Jonah Goldberg on Avatar:

But I do love movies, and I’m fascinated by what they say about American life. Of course, movies don’t always reflect or articulate what moviegoers are thinking. Often they merely express what Hollywood thinks Americans are thinking or what Hollywood thinks they should believe.

For instance, over the last decade, Hollywood has unleashed a stream of high-profile films directly or indirectly about the war in Iraq. Nearly all of the polemical anti-war films bombed. Robert Redford & Co. were desperate to remake Coming Home and other anti-war films, but Americans weren’t interested. The few war movies that did well pretty much avoided the sort of preachy jeremiads you’d expect to hear at Susan Sarandon’s book club. For instance, The Hurt Locker — nominated for Best Picture — largely ignores the debate over the war and instead tells a gripping story about our troops’ heroism. The Kingdom, another War on Terror movie, was a hit despite the best intentions of director Peter Berg, who wanted it to be a parable about the cycle of violence. It succeeded because it was a good action movie that depicted Americans as heroes.

It’s a bit funny, then, to hear some people claim that Avatar, with its cartoonish environmentalism and hackneyed attacks on the military and those evil corporations, is proof that Americans love serious left-wing preaching with their popcorn. “For years,” writes Patrick Goldstein in the Los Angeles Times, “pundits and bloggers on the right have ceaselessly attacked liberal Hollywood for being out of touch with rank and file moviegoers, complaining that executives and filmmakers continue to make films that have precious little resonance with Middle America.” The last laugh is on them, cackles Goldstein, because Avatar “totally turns this theory on its head.”

I’m sure Goldstein’s right. No doubt James Cameron could have made Avatar for $300 million less and still made a fortune. After all, audiences didn’t need the 3-D digital magic, explosions, giant aliens, or spectacular backdrops. All they wanted was an extended lecture about the evils of corporate America and the cruelty of the military, and some gassy pantheistic blather about the need to get back to nature.