The Case Against "Avatar"

Hmmmm. Awards season is coming up. And that means the Academy Awards are coming up. With the New Year's arrival, 2009 in film is officially over, and I think it's safe to say that Hollywood had a pretty good year. With big releases like Avatar, Star Trek, and Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen, I don't see any big movie studios collapsing under their own visual atrocities for a long time to come.

Official nominations for the 82nd Academy Awards will be announced on Tuesday February 2, 2010, and I'm already expecting a disappointing outcome. An article in the Los Angeles Times was released on December 21st with the provocative title, "Is 'Avatar' the new best picture front-runner?" This, along with countless other articles that I've been reading, has me cringing as I see the enthusiasm slowly shifting away from the previous front-runner (and my personal favorite), Inglourious Basterds, to Avatar, a movie which I will begin to give a fair shake, right now:

The film is visually captivating, stunning, and downright gorgeous. I don't think I've ever seen a film as mindblowingly beautiful as Avatar. The motion capture was flawless, the 3-D environments were impeccable, the editing was top-rate, and the mise en scène was that of a true auteur. James Cameron has secured (as if he hadn't already) his spot in the world of science-fiction and films in general. As far as the purely visceral goes, nothing can beat Avatar.

But let me make the case that countless other dissenters of the film have already made. First of all, no actor in Avatar will win an Academy Award; not Sam Worthington, not Sigourney Weaver, and not Zoë Saldaña. They almost couldn't have given Academy Award winning performances based on the weak characterizations of their characters. Sam is Jesus, Sigourney's wise, and Zoë's tough and blah blah blah.

The story is rather overtly political and echoes the post-colonial themes present in other science fiction films/novels, particularly Dune, in which the main character must adapt to a strange environment and ultimately embrace the natives in order to topple the superpower that is threatening to destroy their home, and with it, their way of life. Also, if you've been paying attention to the news for the last seven or so years, a war in the Middle East, which the ultra-hippies (Denis Miller) would say was fought purely for oil, has to do with a superpower who uses various pretenses to obtain a rich resource that is inconveniently located under the homes of an uncooperative bunch of savages. This is what Avatar is. A rather unedifying critique of imperialism and its effects on native peoples.

That said, Avatar will not win the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay. Come March 7th, if Quentin Tarantino doesn't have an Oscar in his hands by the end of the night, the Academy will be forever lost to me and anybody who thinks like me.

But let me make a point that I haven't seen made very much in other media outlets. For me, as a viewer and appreciator of cinema, I hold the Academy Awards on a particularly high pedestal. I love the ceremony, I love watching it, and I think, for the most part, it has done its best to recognize a kind of film that is important. This is to say, the Academy doesn't gush over indie, surrealist, obscure, unapproachable, and distancing forms of film like those produced by David Lynch, Jim Jarmusch, and at points, Quentin Tarantino (directors I adore). Neither does it embrace the explosive, hyperrealistic, maddeningly trite, ultra-blockbusters of Michael Bay, Bryan Singer, and Sam Raimi (directors I like⎯most of the time). The Academy, to me, has always awarded a particular kind of film, the kind of film that reflects the compromise that the Hollywood system represents; the compromise between style and substance; money and art; earnings and critical acclaim. If one were to look at the films that have been successful in the past (The Departed, The Lord of the Rings, Titanic, Gladiator, A Beautiful Mind, etc.), one would notice that these are all films that were made possible by the financial backing of big-money distributors (Warner Bros., Paramount, Universal Studios, etc.), but were also critically praised and spectacularly well-done in all areas of filmmaking: writing, editing, acting, directing, etc.

So, I guess what I'm trying to say is, Avatar was an amazing visceral experience. It worked on your visual and auditory senses like very few films are able to do. For this, it should be rewarded. However, aesthetics are only part of the game. Without the intellectual piece, without the well made points and thoughtfulness present in movies like Inglourious Basterds and Up In The Air, the facade of the film's visuals will (should) not blind the Academy's judgement. I think that people who are signaling Avatar's success are going to be a little disappointed.

I hope I don't have to eat my words come March 7th.

Some Good 'Uns

Sometimes (far more often than I'm willing to admit), I see a film that's so good I can't verbalize why it's good. For all I know, a "close reading" of the film might provoke some negative sentiments, or even, reveal some overlooked hackishness. Who knows? (If I'm going to make a claim to any kind of knowledgeability, I guess I should.... Oh well).

So, instead of trying to explain what the following films were about, I'm just going to write some initial impressions and possibly gush over the extremely high quality of the following:

Wild Strawberries (1957) is an Ingmar Bergman film about an aging old man who travels to Lund to receive an honorary degree. The film is a Kafkaesque mindfuck heavily laden with dream sequences and flashbacks, which the protagonist takes part in. These flashbacks slowly reveal to the audience the protagonist's callous past and how it has led the old man to be a misanthropic but repentant senior. The film deals with WEIGHTY issues, including marriage, youth, old age, God, abortion, absurdism, existentialism, etc. In keeping with Bergman's MO, the film is visually stunning. The first dream sequence in the film is like a surrealist painting come to life which merits continual watching and studying. The film is a superb meditation on old age, which I have a feeling, at such a young age, I'm incapable of completely understanding.

La jetée (1961) is an art film directed by Chris Marker composed entirely of still photos. The film, labeled science-fiction by Netflix, takes place in a post-apocalyptic France. The only words in the film are spoken by a seemingly omniscient narrator. This is one you're just gonna have to see.

Obsession (1976) is my new favorite Brian de Palma film (which will probably be replaced by the next de Palma film I see). It's a pretty standard format thriller penned by Paul Schrader (dir. Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters, writer. Taxi Driver) equipped with all of the things you think are going to happen, which don't, until the very end when you've forgotten that you already knew they were going to happen. It's one of de Palma's best thrillers, right up there with Dressed to Kill and Blow Out. (I almost said Raising Cain, but then no one would take me seriously!). This is a must see for de Palma fans. It's on Watch Instantly on Netflix. Go. Watch it. Now.

Panic Diaries

Recreational reading. It's something I haven't had a chance to do since....

I finished reading Panic Diaries: A Genealogy of Panic Disorder (2006), a book recommended to me by one of my instructors for an upcoming script I'm reworking about the manifestation of anxiety disorder in high-crime, low-income, high-stress neighborhoods.

The concept of "genealogy" expressed in the book's title is not, in any sense, used to imply "genetic" in a strictly denotative way; rather, the term refers to a specifically Foucaultian conception of a "genealogy" that deals with the formative aspects of a discourse. In this case, the title refers to a history of the formation of the concept of "panic disorder" through various affirmations and negations that have, in the process of formation, come to define how "panic" is viewed in society. In a time when psychopharmacological corporations like Pfizer make stacks & stacks of dough in their supposed alleviation of mental health issues, which Jackie Orr, the author of the work, describes as having been achieved by a demarcation and production of the "dis-ease" known as panic disorder, the work could not be any more relevant.

The work tracks panic from what Orr designates as an originary national panic scare, the War of the Worlds broadcast in 1938, to the turn of the millennium. Originally seen as a subset of collective behavior explained by the psychological concepts of emotional contagion ("catching" the emotions of others, as if infected) and suggestibility (described by Robert Park as "a process of communication resulting in the acceptance with conviction of the communicated proposition in the absence of logically adequate grounds for its acceptance"--italics added) in group behavior, Orr moves on through time introducing concepts such as cybernetics, which she describes as "a cross-disciplinary subfield devoted to understanding communication and information feedback as the main control techniques in a range of self-regulating 'systems,'" and how these fields and countless others (i.e. neurology, psychopharmacology, biology, etc.) have proposed and tried to reconcile their epistemological disciplines in the attempt to accurately codify a workable, uniform, and invariable definition of "panic."

For instance, towards the end of the book, Orr recounts a theory proposed by Donald Klein, who she describes as an "indefatigable theorist of panic and psychopathology for over four decades." His panic theory uses both the vocabulary of evolutionary psychology and cybernetics to propose the idea that separation anxiety, or a vulnerable infant's tendency to seek out his/her parents, and the idea of brain "alarms" being communicated and manifested in the form of a "cry" every time this separation anxiety is felt to be a legitimate threat, are the root causes of panic in individuals. The manifestation of panic, then, is the presence of too many alarms where the root (the legitimated threat) is not fundamentally present. In other words, a panic-prone person would hear this alarm capriciously even when the threat of separation is not legitimated and would be triggered to panic. After its proposal, the theory was shut down by the social psychological community as being too biologically deterministic. Klein countered by citing separation anxiety as purely psychoanalytic and the concept of physical "alarms" as being purely biological, appealing to the multi-disciplinary aspect of his theory. The community combated by saying, "No, you're wrong," and the DSM-IV, published in 1994, decries the "reductionistic anachronism of mind/body dualism," effectively shitcanning the work of Klein and cyberneticians who conceived of cybernetics as a way of transcending this dualism through their work on the materiality (body) of messages and signals that also have the ability to contain ideas (mind).

All in all, the book was immensely edifying, and I didn't even get into the whole, psychopharmacology-as-an-economic-powerhouse-for-the-mass-production-and-exploitation-of-panic thing. (But seriously, shit's scary).

Check it out.

Fuck History!

Hmmmm. So I took a history course this semester called, "HIST110: History of the Ancient World." The course dealt mainly with Ancient Greco-Roman history⎯which is to say, Ancient Greco-Roman politics⎯dating from Ancient Mesopotamian to the Pax Romana (from the commencement of the Roman principate to around the mid-Third Century AD).

The class was the epitome of all arbitrary entry-level college courses. First of all, we had three grades all semester: one paper, a midterm, and a final. If that's not bad enough, the system of grading was such a contrivance that the TA's would tell us that if we didn't address a specific part of the text/historical period, we'd automatically get docked a letter grade.

An example:

One of our papers asked us to address the "historical significance" of the Delian League and Peloponnesian League. Using the textbook assigned for the course, I defined what the two leagues were, what they led to, and then I posited the historical significance as being a shift in the traditional city-state construction of the standard Grecian political unit to a larger federation of city-states that, in some ways, lessened the amount of agency of individuals living under the Leagues. To which my TA responded:

WRONG!

The historical significance of the Delian League and Peloponnesian League was the Peloponnesian War! After not being satisfied at all with his conception of the term "significance" I went to my TA's office hours to find that he was an enormous box of tools. He said, "If you don't address how these leagues led to war, you missed the whole point!" To which I responded, "You're a hackish pedagogical idiot."

Bad idea.

He's grading my final right now, and I'm probably not going to get the best grade. Nothing too bad, maybe a "B-." But the thing that gets me about this entire thing is how history as a discipline⎯especially the history of Antiquity⎯has to be constantly defended by connections to contemporary issues. One of my professor's favorite lines: "Polybius had it right." One time, a guy, presumably a history major, actually took Polybius seriously by applying his cyclical interpretation of government institutions (monarchy, tyranny, aristocracy, oligarchy, democracy, mob-rule, then back around again) to the contemporary United States. Here he is trying to defend himself:

"Like, if you look at, like, the United states right now, like, there are, like, a few people who, like, change, you know? Change stuff. Like Barack Obama would be considered an oligarch."

To which I responded:

B-b-b-b-b-b-bullshit!!!!!!

I made the argument that the history of the American republic is less akin to Polybius' (hackish) theories and more akin to Fukuyama's interpretation of history as being a constant push towards liberal democracy by pointing out that the political bosses (mob-rulers) of the late Nineteenth Century predated the progressives (democrats), and that, if anything, the political history of the United States has been a history of democratic approximation (as in, we are constantly approximating a pure form of democracy, but have never fallen into monarchical, tyrannical, or oligarchic patterns of governance).

The worst thing about this is, the professor of the class deemed any essay containing contemporary content as being "BS," yet, if he is going to be taken seriously at all in his medium of discourse, he has to connect these outdated concepts⎯like Polybius' conception of anacyclosis⎯to contemporary politics.

So here's my rather informal "fuck you" to Arthur Eckstein, Will Burghart (TA), and HIST110: The History of the Ancient World. You guys can all go rot in hell together.

Two Good Ones

I finally had a little bit of time to watch some films (a lot of films, actually), and decided to post about two particularly good ones. The first is La chinoise, a 1967 film directed by Jean-Luc Godard, which, effectively, ended the auteur's forays into the collective avant-garde movement of the French New Wave and saw his experimental eye pursuing more overtly political (as if the New Wave itself didn't have strong political undertones⎯mostly because of Godard himself) films. The film stars New Wave icon Jean-Pierre Léaud as an actor/revolutionary, who holes up with a few other students of the communist revolution in an apartment etched with little red books filled with Maoist sayings. The film is three-quarters fiction, one-quarter documentary as Godard, rather blatantly, makes the point that leftist students living bourgeois lives in Paris, for lack of a better term, don't know what the hell they're talking about. The film itself is a visual masterpiece, again, reiterating Godard's only real stake in the film industry⎯his revolutionary visual style. As far as dialogue/content/plot, this is probably a film you'd find on Stuff White People Like. However, even though I'm not white, I thoroughly enjoyed it.

The second film is definitely not as intellectually stimulating as the first, however, given my continued obsession with Brian de Palma, I must report back my thoughts on his 1986 feature-film, starring Danny DeVito and Joe Piscopo, Wise Guys. This film is a romp through the various clichés of the mobster movies that preceded it; namely, the reverence for the "boss," playing the ponies, exploding cars, caricatures of Italian mobsters (the fat Luca Brasi-type, the Vito Corleone-type, the random Jew-type, etc. etc.). The film had me sitting on the edge of my seat, rooting for the two small-time mobster protagonists as they continually got way in over their heads to the point where each was hired by the boss to kill the other. The film takes continuous turns this way and that way until, finally, the audience gets a payoff that's worthy of a standing ovation. I highly recommend both of these movies to everyone and anyone who has thumbs.

More blog posts will follow, I'm sure. Right now, I must go study the Ancient World.

Modes of Knowing & Doing

Yo! This is a clip I made for my ARHU205: Modes of Knowing & Doing class. It's an experimental dealy, which incorporates a ton of the different editing methods developed by the Soviets in the 1920's. A lot of footage has been ripped from online web sources, P2P networks, Youtube, DVD's that I own, etc. I won't explain what the film does or means because the explanation will probably be more complex than the film is. Enjoy.

New Post!

So, I have nothing really going on....

BUT I HAVE A FEW THINGS IN THE WORKS!

1. First thing on my mind is a little piece I'm working on called, "Sam Borks Aislinn." It's my usual romp through the terrain of intense philosophic unconsciousness and film stuff. But seriously, it's about borking people....

2. Second goal: make Off The Wall not suck! This is a pretty tough job all things considered. There are about four comics who are actually dedicated, and only three or so who are any good (I'd be that fourth stinker). However, I do think it is possible to get this group back on its feet.

3. Third goal: more film stuff! I am getting deep into some good ideas for a few shorts. I also have a full-length POS that I'm trying to make into a passable screenplay. Who would've thought it'd be so hard to write a feature?

4. School stuff! I am registering for my Spring '10 classes. Next semester I hope to be taking the following shizz:

SOCY230: Sociological Social Psychology

ENGL305: Shakespeare and His Contemporaries

SOCY105H: Contemporary Social Issues

SPAN302: Advanced Composition II

HONR259z: Philosophy of Perception: Pecha Kucha

ARHU206: Research Seminar

I'm really excited about all of these classes. It's only a matter of time before a combination of bad teaching and arbitrary grading disheartens me to the point of suicide (or to the point just before that).

On the real, be wary for my shit. I'm 'bout to 'splode, I tell you hwhat.