A long time ago, in a thought now far, far away, I was going to vent my frustrations about a semi-forced viewing of Avatar, a movie of which I knew near zilch about and was content having it remain so. A one and a two sum it up about parallel to my own repulsions, and probably far more eloquently than I'm capable of outputting these days.
Its characters are stubbornly two-dimensional (irony intended), either good or bad, and Jake alone is allowed to briefly transition from one state to the other. The natives are good, because they are unsullied, they are innocent, they live by traditional values and know their place in the order of things. The bad guys are cartoonishly evil, and likewise without depth. In equal part greedy and sadistic, they need to be asked to please not kill the children, which they really don’t mind doing if it means getting their hands on the precious ore of Pandora more expeditely. Hell, they might even throw in the killing for free. Which is why, in the end, Avatar is against imperialism in the same way that Tom and Jerry is against cats. It is a caricature of what critical cinema could and ought to be and indeed has been and is, if altogether too infrequently.
Avatar is the cinema version of an ongoing trend: the piles of logo-stamped reusable shopping bags at the grocer, the urbanites sporting the fashion meets function that is SIGG... the flashy, feel-good marketing of an ideology not for change but to assure us we're buying and entertaining ourselves just right as we are.
* * *
Enough! From a gripe of "I" to a gripe of "us", this blog consistently feels as if it's being dragged down too cynical of a path. My next entry will be a sort of where I am now and what do I do from here (being a new year and all). The writing of this entry has been delayed due to my recent demotion to au pair.
No comments:
Post a Comment