Horner's Corner

Tag: james cameron

“They killed their mother”: Avatar as ideological symptom

by on Jan.09, 2010, under film

Watching Avatar, I was continually reminded of Zizek’s observation in First As Tragedy, Then As Farce, that the one good thing that capitalism did was destroy Mother Earth. “There’s no green there, they killed their mother,” we are solemnly informed at one point. Avatar is in some ways a reversal of Cameron’s Aliens. If the “bug-hunt” in Aliens was, as Virilio argued, a kind of rehearsal for the megamachinic slaughter of Gulf War 1, then Avatar is a heavyhanded eco-sermon and parable about US misadventures in Iraq and Afghanistan. (What’s remarkable about Avatar is how dated it looks. In the scenes of military engagement, it is as if 80s cyberpunk confronts something out of Roger Dean or the Myst videogames; Cameron’s vision of military technology has not moved on since Aliens) At the end of the film, it is the human corporate and military interests who are described as “aliens”. But this is a film without any trace of the alien. Like most CGI extravaganzas, it flares on the retina but leaves few traces in the memory. Greg Egan finds little to admire in Avatar, but he does defer to its technical achievements: “mostly, the accomplishments of the visual designers and the army of technicians who’ve brought their conception to the screen appear pixel-perfect, and hit the spot where the brain says ‘yes, this is real’.” The cost of this, though, is that it is very difficult to be immersed in the film as fiction. It is more akin to a themepark ride, a late-capitalist “experience”, than a film.

Read more on avatar here, from  k-punk.

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