Avatar

Being tired and frustrated after two days dealing with an annoying delivery company I decided to give my aggression some focus by watching Avatar.

I've sort of had half a mind to for some time, but I just didn't see much value in it beyond it being a sort of strange cultural nexus point, which isn't solid motivation for me to spend a few hours engaged with it. Heck if that were my bag I'd occasionally pick up a book that didn't have pictures. Possibly not the most objective angle to come at it from, but realistically for me it was anger or apathy, and apathy couldn't be bothered.

I found that it's a hard film to actually hate. It's such a straightforward, unassuming tale that its closer to something like Jack and the Beanstalk than Dances With Kevin Costner's Career. Take out the swearing and its all but pure Disney, and no one went around saying that the Lion King was cliche to the point of parody. It doesn't bear that level of critique because it doesn't warrant it.

One thing did bug me, it's more of a point of irony really, but it's so central to the thing it eroded any sort of empathy I was supposed to invoke. The reason tribal lifestyles and simpler pasts are attractive to our culture is that they're held up as an image of authenticity. They seem closer to what is "real" in the "gangsta" sense of the word. Real as in meaningful. Our culture craves it. It's why home-made is a selling point, Seasick Steve beats the shit out of anything in the charts and why "Get A Life" is still an insult and not shorthand for "waste your time in a slightly different manner".

Now Avatar takes this desire, this equation of real and good, and offers up a dayglo idealised version of it. And clearly it worked, as people book holidays to rain forests to rush about and pretend blue chicks will dig their brand of good natured ignorance. But irony of ironies, it's as far from real as it's feasible to be. Quite aside from the obvious point that it's all CGI, there's no language barrier, no learning curve. Want to ride a horse? Who needs lessons when you can jack in and know Kung Fu? The Na'vi sense of spirituality isn't some hard to manifest cultural language, its a literal connection to Gaia, plug the phone in and have a natter. It's good to talk.

Now we don't really want to know about real life aboriginal cultures either, because authenticity is smelling of dead goat, drinking water with visible fecal content and dying from cholera at the age of 27, but the fact that they'd gone to all this trouble to create a a purely false image of what we consider real, and warranted or not, that is, I feel, a point of parody.