Simply out of this world
By Peter Aspden
Published: January 22 2010 23:16 | Last updated: January 22 2010 23:16
Like many outstanding works of popular culture, Avatar, James Camerons 3D science fiction epic that threatens to become the highest-grossing movie of all time, is not a profound work. To deride it for its lack of subtlety or the deficiencies of its script is spectacularly to miss its point: like criticising the lyrics of I Want to Hold Your Hand, or complaining that you cant dance to the late piano sonatas of Beethoven. There are certain works of art that magnificently achieve all that they set out to do; and others, rarer still, that radically change the direction of their very art form. Avatar does both.
That it has set new standards for movie-making is surely beyond doubt, and in some ways the least interesting thing about it. The effects realised by Cameron and his team in recreating an Edenic planet, Pandora, and its Navi inhabitants, who come under threat from earthly hooligans, are among the most beautifully rendered in film history. The 3D is a technical tour de force. What a privilege: we are living in a time that is literally adding an extra dimension to an art form. The journey from the flat, silvery sheen of Hollywoods great monochrome movies of the 1940s to the multi-layered pyrotechnics of Avatar is like the tentative voyage made by the great painters of the Renaissance. Of course Giotto was a master; but Caravaggio was something else again.
But back to its lack of profoundness. This is, contrary to negative notices, far from a flaw. If those early Beatles singles of the 1960s, the true flowering of mass culture, taught us anything, it was that art could address simple themes with great simplicity, and still be artful. It was the role of the great Beethoven sonatas to remind us that life was a rich and infernally complex business; it took I Want to Hold Your Hand to remind us that its giddiest joys were rooted in the most basic pleasures. Popular culture took off from this premise, and achieved mighty things over the succeeding half-century.
Avatar is in this tradition. It, too, addresses a simple theme the destruction of a planet through greed that has contemporary resonance. It places a love story at the heart of its message. It fulminates against avarice and spite, and favours the slow, painful business of open communication in good faith with alien cultures. It is breathtaking in its political correctitude: its male lead is in a wheelchair; its three strongest characters the sage, the warrior and the boffin are all women. My nine-year-old daughter came out of the cinema glowing with pride in her gender. If we had been to see the science fiction sensation of 1977, she would have wanted to be a winsome princess with a flowing white dress. That is what is known as progress.
. . .
It all seems reasonable enough; yet Avatar is attacked from a multitude of different directions. Those of a liberal intellectual persuasion hate it because it is ostentatious, simplistic and cost an obscene amount of money anything from $300m to $500m to make. Anti-capitalists hate it because of the obscene amount of money it is already making back at the box office $1.6bn worldwide, and counting.
The religious right is in a frenzy because it doesnt respect traditional values. On the Movie Guide website (A family guide to movies and entertainment), a reviewer scorns the films eco-message: The problem with life on earth is not Capitalism it is the wickedness of human nature, it froths. The cure for this is not found in hugging a tree ... If you want the truth, read the Bible. In China, the film has been pulled from 2D cinemas (thereby limiting its supply, because there are so few 3D screens in the country) for fear, perhaps, of its potentially subversive message.
As if its political opponents were not enough, the film is under attack from more bizarre antagonists. There are those who are worried about the reported bouts of depression suffered by young people who fall in love with the Navi way of life and cannot adapt back to life on earth when they leave the cinema. And then, and this seems positively old-fashioned, there are the little boys and girls who feel sick because of the films 3D effects, bless them.
All this bluster is partly hype, but also indicative of the films strengths. It presses buttons. It gets under the skin. It irks critics because of the apparent contradiction between its formal majesty and the thinness of its message. But Cameron, self-styled king of the world, the geek who spent his youth sketching Etruscan helmets in his local museum, has shown a consummate understanding of his art form. He has created the mightiest work of art of the new millennium.
