AVATAR EXCHANGE

A friend writes: “The biggest puzzle that lingers for me after Avatar is

the message that young ones take away having seen the recruitment videos for the Marines and the Air Force before The Show.  I think of the militaristic characters in Avatar as rogue Blackwater mercenaries

violating land and people but I wonder how kids connect the dots to all of the layers of allegory and analogy.  Any insights from your position as interlocuter with people ages 9-24?”

TR: I saw the film as outrageously pretentious movie-making adorning

ho-hum storytelling, although I did liked the lead performance quite a

bit, and that business about him being a gimp fulfilled only via

dream-fueled technology really has some swing to it. You know, for

example, that as his CO tells him he’s “got his legs,” that the guy’s

lying as only a true believer company-man grunt can. And Our Hero knows

this as well — the only “people” he can trust by that point are his

magic fairy natives. (Those cheeks! Those thighs!)

It works as ham-fisted Iraq allegory (“unobtanium,” OMG, squeak squeak),

and it’s in that grandiose RAMBO tradition of winning our internal wars

onscreen instead of in real life. (We want to outlaw PICTURES of guns,

not guns themselves.) But with recruitment previews at the top, thats a

deal Cameron MUST have made, it can’t simply be coincidental, so what

are we to take away? Fight the “necessary” wars on earth, but strive

towards a better fantasy life? That’s so HOLLYWOOD, so retro… so

beautifully self-contradictory it’s almost worthy of the rest of his

convoluted bad writing. Of course, how much Pentagon money funded the

technical innovations Cameron wields like so many light sabers? How much

is he leasing to defense if he invented it himself?

Kids don’t connect these dots, and that’s whats disturbing… it took me

some conscious thinking to figure this out, with help from you. The

young’uns drink it up like so much pop corn. It’s of a piece with all

the imagery they drink down every day. I think it’s up to us as parents

to hold nightly seminars on all this conflicting information and where

it’s gotten us.

The Alien series is a far more intriguing allegory about how Nature

humbles everybody… I think he wanted Sig. Weaver to redeem the role of

“scientist,” which he had crafted is pure evil previously. I loved it

when her dying words were almost: “I have to get some samples.”

–“Reminds me of a person I got to know in a dean search a few years

back. She’d been involved in Continuing Education programs at Chapman

University in Orange County, right next door to Disneyland  She told

such a great academic funding story about “real-gaming.”  How

developments in video-gaming technology were being used in medical

education and other critical, real-world domains.  Of course.  The

military-industrial-entertainment complex.

“Also reminds me of a summer in China in 1991, during the first Gulf

War.  The people I knew best were painters who were mostly not very

interested in politics except the interpersonal political maneuvers that

were pre-requisites to getting good school assignments, good job

assignments, good situations in life.  So I was very startled when my

good buddy Liu She spoke about the spectacle of US bombs zeroing in on

their Iraqi targets in appreciative, aesthetic terms, as ‘pretty’ and

George Bush I as someone he admired…”