James Cameron's Avatar: access for all

Abstract

In this extract from his forthcoming book The Persistence of Hollywood (Routledge, 2012), Thomas Elsaesser examines James Cameron's film Avatar in terms of its auto-representation and personalized narrative, affective engagement with diverse publics and ambition to effect through technology a change of paradigm.

Keywords:

• James Cameron
• Avatar
• auteur
• Hollywood
• military–entertainment complex

Notes

 1. An overview of identification from a cognitivist perspective can be found at: http://www.latrobe.edu.au/screeningthepast/20/entranced.html; from a sociological one at: http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Students/pjv9801.html; and from an anthropological–narratological one at: http://www.latrobe.edu.au/screeningthepast/classics/cl0499/jdcl1.html. See also Elsaesser and Hagener (2010), especially Chapters 2 (‘Cinema as Door: Screen and Threshold’), 3 (‘Cinema as Mirror and Face’) and 4 (‘Cinema as Eye: Look and Gaze’).

 2. See the chapter ‘Film as System: Notes on Close Textual Analysis, or: How to Learn to Step through an Open Door’ (Elsaesser 2012), for a more extensive examination of the classical system.

 3. Carroll credits (or blames) Roger Corman for this two tier-strategy: ‘Increasingly Corman's cinema came to be built with the notion of two audiences in mind – special grace notes for insiders, appoggiatura for the cognoscenti, and a soaring, action-charged melody for the rest. In this, he pioneered the two-tiered system’ (1982, 77).

 4. See, for instance, William Empson (1949 [first published in 1930]), one of the most influential books on close textual analysis in literature.

 5. ‘Dongria Kondh – The Real Avatar: Mine – Story of a Sacred Mountain’ (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v = R4tuTFZ3wXQ). The video now has a banner, reading: ‘UPDATE: Victory! The Dongria Kondh have stopped Vedanta from mining their sacred mountain’ (last accessed 28 March 2011).

 6. ‘Non-3D versions of Avatar to be pulled next week, in order to protect the nation's home grown films. The country's censors ruled that the epic had become too dominant and also worried about its effect on audiences, according to reports. […] Some Chinese bloggers had already said parallels between the plight of the film's Na'vi creatures – who are forced to flee their homes – and Chinese people who have faced the threat of eviction would have raised concerns. One wrote: “For audiences in other countries, such brutal eviction is something outside their imagining. It could only take place on another planet or in China”’ (Broughton 2010).

 7. ‘Bilin Reenacts Avatar Film 12-02-2010’, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v = Chw32qG-M7E

 8. Morales is quoted in Casares (2010). In the ‘conversation’ following this item one blogger denounces Morales: ‘Morales is an idiot who spouts platitudes, he is the “brown guy” front for Álvaro Garcia Linera. Alvaro is using Evo to trap the indigenous populations’, while another replies: ‘this movie Avatar has a lot of meanings for different people. Green peace activists would draw their own meanings, Iraqis who feel they were invaded for their vast oil resources, would have their own. What Evo Morales drew out of this movie, is relevant to most of us on this planet earth. Capitalism will eat us away, if we don't do something in time.’

 9. The Wikipedia entry on Avatar lists more than a dozen different voices, pairing the ones that flatly contradict the other. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avatar_%282009_film%29 (last accessed 29 March 2011).

10. ‘It was The Elephant Man's executive producer Smart Cornfeld (and not Mel Brooks, to whom it was attributed) who so adroitly represented this paradox with the phrase “Jimmy Stewart from Mars”. This works both as a humorous binary description and as deceptively simple shorthand for a more complex picture’ (Rodley 2004, xii).

11. The IMDb entry on Cameron lists Avatar 2 and Avatar 3 as in the works for 2014 and 2015, respectively. However, it should not be forgotten that unlike other franchise movies, Avatar presented, by Hollywood standards, original story-content: ‘The movie might be derivative of many movies in its story and themes’, [Brandon Gray] said, ‘but it had no direct antecedent like the other top-grossing films: Titanic (historical events), the Star Wars movies (an established film franchise), or The Lord of the Rings (literature). It was a tougher sell.’ Sarah Ball, ‘Why Avatar could Out-Earn Titanic’, Newsweek, 9 January 2010. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avatar_%282009_film%29-cite_note-www.newsweek.com-206 (last accessed 29 March 2011).

12. According to Box Office Mojo, by early 2011, Avatar had grossed $760 million in the USA and Canada, but $2.022 billion in other territories, bringing the worldwide total to over $2.780 billion, meaning that nearly 75% of income was foreign earned.

13. http://www.ted.com/talks/james_cameron_before_avatar_a_curious_boy.html (last accessed 30 March 2011).

14. ‘The Moebius Strip subverts the normal, i.e. Euclidean way of spatial (and, ultimately: temporal) representation, seemingly having two sides, but in fact having only one. At one point the two sides can be clearly distinguished, but when you traverse the strip as a whole, the two sides are experienced as being continuous. This figure is one of the topological figures studied and put to use by Lacan. On the one hand, Lacan employs the Moebius Strip as a model to conceptualize the “return of the repressed”, an issue important in Lost Highway as well. On the other hand, it can illustrate the way psychoanalysis conceptualizes certain binary oppositions, such as inside/outside, before/after, signifier/signified etc. – and can, with respect to Lost Highway, characterize Fred/Pete. These oppositions are normally seen as completely distinct; the Moebius Strip, however, enables us to see them as continuous with each other: the one, as it is, is the “truth” of the other, and vice versa’ (Žižek 2007).

15. True Lies is the title of Cameron's 1994 action comedy, whose husband-and-wife protagonists not only lead double lives, but where their different kinds of duplicity have to be doubled by another layer of undercover disguise, in order for the couple to find ‘true love’. Although two lies do not make a truth even in this film, the principle is broadly that of a double negative becoming an affirmative.

16. The quotations are taken from the Wikipedia entry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unobtainium (last accessed 31 March 2011).

17. See Tim Lenoir and Henry Lowood (n.d.), and Tim Lenoir (2000). See also Turse (2003). An early definition and use of the term can be found in an essay in The New York Times: ‘Call it the military–entertainment complex. The aerospace and entertainment industries, which in the past inhabited parallel universes even as they sat side by side in southern California, are starting to cross-pollinate, bringing a new level of technology to entertainment and perhaps returning dividends to the Pentagon as well’ (Pollack 1997).

18. This is evidently even more the case with computer-games, where the US army is an important client and partner of the film industry in developing the digital tools and technical capacities for recruiting, training and combat use of 3-D simulation. A succinct overview is given by Stockwell and Muir (2003).

19. It is a point also made by Žižek (2010), accusing Avatar of racism.

20. For an examination of the truth-belief-trust system, see Thomas Elsaesser, ‘Digital Hollywood: Truth Belief Trust’ (in Elsaesser 2012).