By Peter Krämer
 |
| Avatar, dir. James Cameron (2009) |
Great Expectations
In April 2009, an
article in the New York Times entitled ‘Fan Fever is Rising for Debut of
Avatar’ opened with the following statement:
In an old airplane
hangar …, James Cameron has been working feverishly to complete a movie that
may
a) Change filmmaking
forever
b) Alter your brain
c) Cure cancer.
The writer was
obviously having fun with these exaggerations, which were inspired by the
larger-than-life persona of the filmmaker and by his many public statements
about his latest project, ever since it had been announced to the press in
January 2007: ‘Mr. Cameron has done his share to feed the hype with his
repeated assurances that a coming wave of 3-D cinema … would have the power to
penetrate the brain in a way that movies never have.’ The writer’s choice of
words here is interesting, perhaps designed to evoke the colloquial term
‘mind-fuck’, while also mocking Cameron’s machismo (only a very special kind of
man would want to ‘penetrate’ people’s brains).
Yet, beyond its
humorous hyperbole, the article also appeared to register a widespread and
sincere belief in the possibility of radical change. Referencing both the
religiosity of American society and the recent election of the country’s first
African-American president, the article stated that Avatar was ‘stirring
up a kind of anticipation that until now had been reserved for, say, the
Rapture’, and that the film’s ‘technological wizardry is presumed by more than
a few to promise an experiential leap for audiences comparable to that of The
Jazz Singer, the arrival of Technicolor or an Obama campaign rally.’
When Avatar,
which had originally been scheduled for a May 2009 release, belatedly appeared
in cinemas around the world in December that year, it certainly told a story about
dramatic change: parts of a distant moon’s ecosystem are severely damaged by
the operations of a mining company; a humanoid alien tribe has to deal with the
destruction of its ancestral home; for the first time in many generations the
moon’s scattered tribes unite so as to be able to confront the threat; the
neural network of trees, which constitutes a kind of brain for the planet’s
ecosystem and is revered as a Goddess by the natives, gives up its usual
practice of non-interference and helps to eject the operatives of the mining
company. All of this is explored through the central storyline of one of the
employees of the mining company who uses a specially grown body as his avatar
in the world of the natives, then takes their side in the conflict before he
finally abandons his human form for good so as to be reborn in the alien
body.
In addition to telling
this complex story about dramatic change, Avatar also initially lived up
to the expectation that it might in fact change cinema. In the run-up to its
release, there had already been a marked increase in cinemas with 3-D
projection capabilities around the world; some of this expansion had clearly
been fuelled by the announcement of a live action 3-D release (almost all 3-D
releases in recent years had been animated) by one of the world’s most successful
filmmakers. When Avatar then went on to break all existing box office
records, both in the United States and in the rest of the world, with a
particularly strong performance in 3-D cinemas, there was a perception that the
popular habit of cinemagoing, recently under a particularly strong threat from
alternative leisure time activities, had been given a new lease of life, and,
furthermore, that it had been transformed forever, insofar as 3-D could now be
expected to become a new standard, rather than the exceptional attraction it
had been heretofore.
Now, if one were to
claim that cinema was reborn through the 3-D technology of Avatar, which
allowed audiences to inhabit cinematic space in a compelling new fashion, such
a claim would constitute a curious echo of the very story the film tells about
its protagonist being reborn through the avatar technology which allows him to
inhabit a new body and through it a new world. Such echoing can also be
observed when the circumstances of the film’s release are considered. Its
original May release date derived from Hollywood’s practice to set up its major
releases for a high impact before the summer holidays which will hopefully
translate into a long run during these holidays. Once it became clear that Avatar
would not be ready for this early date, the only obvious alternative was a
release in December which would allow the film to profit from increased
cinemagoing during the Christmas holidays and also set it up for consideration
by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and other organisations
handing out awards in the first few months of the new year.
 |
| Logo for the United Nations Climate Change Conference 2009 |
In the end, the
precise release date chosen for Avatar coincided with the final stage of
the UN climate change conference in Copenhagen, which was widely regarded as a
catastrophic failure. Thus, as a film about environmental issues, Avatar
could, in very general terms, be said to have profited from the public interest
in, and intense media reporting on, climate change across 2009 which culminated
on the very weekend that the film was first shown around the world. More
specifically, the film’s story echoed real-life developments in at least two
striking ways, first by imagining a future humanity which has destroyed the
ecosystem of its home planet and now sets out to do the same on another
planetary body; secondly by imagining an alternative way of life. Here,
human-like beings are shown to live in harmony with nature and to achieve a
kind of global unity in their attempt to defend themselves and the ecosystem
they are part of against destructive forces.
The most high profile
attempt yet to achieve global unity so as to take action against global warming
fails at the very moment that Avatar begins to draw audiences all over
the world into its story. One might go as far as saying that, whereas politics
fails to achieve global unity and bring about necessary change, this film does
not only offer a vision of such unity and change, but through its impact on
individual viewers and its international success also laid the groundwork for
potential real-life personal change and unified global action. At the very
least, a substantial proportion of the world’s population now shares the story
that Avatar tells. It is conceivable that such sharing will contribute
to an awareness of the shared fate of humanity and indeed of the Earth’s
ecosystem, and perhaps even to the willingness to take action on its
behalf.
Audiences and Their
Avatars
The title of James
Cameron’s science fiction epic resonates with ancient myth and with
contemporary cultural practice: an avatar is the shape an Indian God takes when
walking among humans, and it is a player’s audiovisual representative in the
electronic world of a computer game. In the film’s story, Jake Sully, a
paraplegic ex-marine, is employed by a mining company to enter the dangerous
jungle outside the fortified human compound on the distant moon Pandora. This
is achieved by projecting his consciousness into an artificially grown body,
which mixes human DNA with that of Pandora’s intelligent humanoid species, the
Na’vi. In this way, Jake, who has come down from Pandora’s heaven as one of the
‘sky people’ - the Na’vi designation for humans - can walk among the Na’vi, and
he can temporarily lose himself in the adventures he experiences in their
world. In the course of the story, Jake learns a lot about the capabilities of
his new body and about the Na’vi and the other life forms he interacts with,
and this provides him with an increasingly critical perspective on the human
world he comes from. In the end, he is willing and able to leave his human body
behind so as to live permanently as a Na’vi on Pandora. The player thus
exchanges what he took to be his reality for his game world; the one who came
down from the sky joins the web of life on this new Earth.
 |
| Avatar, dir. Cameron (2009) |
Through its mythical
and gaming associations, the film’s title also comments on the very nature of
the cinematic experience. As viewers and listeners, members of the audience
descend from their own reality into the fictional world of the film, using its
protagonist as their avatar. Like gamers, they may concentrate on learning
about this world and confronting numerous challenges within it, which in turn
allows them to engage with it ever more intensively. While they have no actual
control over the actions of their avatar, like divine beings audience members
may feel that this whole world is at their service, and that everything is
ultimately organised for their avatar’s convenience. So what are the
implications of Jake’s decision to switch permanently into his avatar’s body
and thus stay in his gaming world? Where does this leave the audience for whom
Jake is an avatar?
Similar questions are
raised by the film’s opening sequence. The film begins with the camera flying
over a dense forest, and a voiceover explaining that this was a recurring dream
the protagonist (Jake Sully) had when he was in a veterans’ administration
hospital. Given that this is a 3-D movie and that initially it was shown on the
largest available screens (including many IMAX screens), the opening emphasises
one of the main attractions of widescreen and 3-D technologies, namely the
possibility to create a heightened sense of movement through space. Jake’s
dream has been the dream such technologies have pursued ever since they were
widely introduced in the 1950s. Right from the get-go, Avatar confirmed
to viewers that this dream has now become a reality.
At the same time, the
opening scene offers references to a particular tradition in Hollywood
filmmaking. In recent decades, thoughts of war veterans and jungles are most
likely to evoke the Vietnam war and in particular Hollywood’s numerous
representations of that conflict in films primarily of the 1970s and 1980s. If
one makes this connection, then the dream flight over the jungle landscape
represents more than simply the age-old human dream of flying, or the specific
desire of an injured soldier to compensate for his restricted mobility in a
hospital with the heightened mobility of flight; it also entails a potential
threat, because American soldiers might just start firing into the jungle,
dropping bombs and setting fire to it (which of course they do later in the
film).
Finally, the opening
scene is presented as arising from within the protagonist’s consciousness, and
it does so in two ways: first it is said to be a dream of the soldier lying in
a hospital, secondly the voice-over narrator explains that it is a dream he
used to have in the past; even the dream is now only available as a memory.
Hence the flying scenes are twice removed from narrator’s present reality: they
are memories of past dreams. Yet, for the viewers (especially those in a 3-D
IMAX cinema) they take place very much in the present and may well have the
power to affect them physically. There is a gap, then, between the narrator’s
highly mediated connection to the flying scene and the viewers’ immediate
experience of it. One might expect that this gap will be closed in the course
of the film (as indeed it is).
This expectation is
also raised by the conventions of Hollywood storytelling: We can assume that,
if a dream is so clearly stated at the beginning, the protagonist who has this
dream will strive to make it a reality, and that eventually he will achieve
this. We can also expect the distantiation created by the voice-over to fade in
the course of the film, so that the sense of present tense overrides the fact
that everything presented in the film is in fact a memory. In this way, then,
Jake’s experience of his own dream will catch up with that of the audience.
(Indeed, the voiceover of the protagonist looking back into his own past can in
places be mistaken for, and is eventually dissolved into, the present-tense
commentary that Jake records for his video log.)
 |
| Avatar, dir. Cameron (2009) |
A Hero’s Journey in
3-D
Let’s take a closer
look at the kind of change the story of Avatar focuses on. Hollywood
cinema is centred on the transformation - the personal growth, psychological
maturation etc. - of the stories’ protagonists. According to script guru
Christopher Vogler, filmic protagonists go on a journey (a hero’s journey) into
a ‘special world’ which mirrors, in a highly exaggerated and fantastic manner,
the everyday concerns of their ‘ordinary world’, and which allows them to
resolve internal and external tensions and conflicts, so as to emerge from this
adventure as more rounded, more socially integrated individuals.
Films such as Avatar
first establish an ordinary world for the protagonist - a world of family,
community, work, which is comparable to our own world. This world is full of
problems. In Avatar’s case, it is characterised by Jake Sully’s low
social status, his inability to carry out his previous job due to partial
paralysis and his lack of qualification for the new job he is given, his loss
of the cameraderie with fellow soldiers and the initial hostility of his new
boss, the death of his brother, and the absence, or active destruction, of
natural surroundings. Once this ordinary world is established, the film
transfers Jake to, and immerses him - and us - in, the special world of the
jungle of Pandora. Cutting-edge film technology is used to make the ‘special
world’ as extraordinary as possible.
How does 3-D
technology function with regards to the hero’s journey? And how does the film
itself reflect on that technology and that journey? It is certainly the case
that 3-D effects allow viewers to immerse themselves deeply in the natural
world of Pandora, and motion capture (or ‘performance capture’) and computer
generated images bring its alien beings to life. However, a word of caution
about the importance of 3-D for the film’s impact is in order: Both in cinemas
and on DVD and television, the vast majority of the film’s viewers worldwide
saw the 2-D version. And although Avatar was by far the most successful
3D-Film in history, the expectation that its success might make 3-D a new
standard for Hollywood releases has not been fulfilled. Nevertheless, I want to
concentrate on the particular contribution that 3-D makes to the experience of
the film.
Before entering the
cinema auditorium, we are given 3-D glasses, which we have to use to cover our
eyes so as to be able to enter into the world of the film which is going to be
projected onto the screen. If we were to refuse to wear them, watching the film
would be an exceedingly unpleasant experience. Putting on the glasses reminds
us of how utterly dependent our cinematic experience is on technology. It also
constitutes another threshold we are crossing in the transition from our
everyday world into the world of the film adventure (other such thresholds are
the departure from our homes, the purchase of the ticket, entering the
auditorium, the lights going out). Each threshold serves to emphasise how
different our cinematic experience is going to be from everyday life. At the
same time, the donning of glasses brings us closer to the people who are going
to share this experience with us. Not only are we all converging on this
particular cinema auditorium at this particular moment in time, but we also
cement our connection by all donning these glasses, creating a uniformity of
appearance. But the glasses also serve to distance us from each other, insofar
as looking at each other rather than at the screen is discouraged by wearing
them.
 |
| 3-D IMAX cinema audience |
Now, in the story of
the film, after a long journey across space, a group of people arrive on a
planet with a poisonous atmosphere. Before they set foot on this planet they
are told that they have to wear a mask on their face which will enable them to
breath. The mask is a reminder that their presence on this planet is heavily
dependent on technology, and that they have moved far away from their previous
existence. It also serves to emphasise their shared humanity in contrast to the
natives who require no such technological support to breath. Of course, they
are not required to wear the mask all the time because they can move within the
man-made environments constructed on the planet; in other words, instead of
wearing a mask, they can inhabit a technological construct that is like living
inside a giant mask. Still, whenever they cross the threshold between their
built environment (buildings as well as vehicles) and the outside world, they
all have to wear the mask, which makes them look alike and also creates a
distance between them, a physical barrier between one face and the next. The
necessity for human characters to wear a mask thus echoes in quite a profound
way the necessity for viewers of the 3-D version to wear glasses.
At the same time, the
wearing of the mask expresses the tension at the very heart of the film’s
narrative: in it humans confront an environment that is dangerous to them,
developing a range of strategies for how to deal with that danger. Broadly
speaking, there are two strategies: first, the mask and the built environment;
second, the avatar programme. Both are heavily dependent on human technology. In a
surprising twist, towards the end of the film, a third strategy arises which is
no longer dependent on human technology: the permanent transfer of a human mind
into the avatar, brought about by the planet’s neural network. The avatar
programme thus constitutes a transitional stage - inbetween the initial stage
of a fundamental physical separation between humans and environment, and the
final stage of full human immersion in that environment. One might even say
that the avatar programme marks that moment when a cinema audience, awkwardly
conscious of the glasses in front of their eyes and thus of a physical barrier
between themselves and their surroundings and also of their dependence on cinematic
technology, loses itself in the 3-D cinematic space their glasses allow them to
see and in the story unfolding in that space, with the film’s protagonist
acting as their own avatar.
While the transition
from an awareness of one’s own body, of a technological process, of the real
space of the auditorium and the people in it, to an immersion in fictional
space and story is typical of all cinema experiences, the 3-D technology
enhances the transformative nature of this transition. The use of the word
‘avatar’ in the film’s title, and the way it is literalised in the story, marks
this heightened sense of transformation by suggesting that viewers can
physically enter into a different world (as gods walking among mortals, as
players in a computer game). Yet, the term also is a reminder of the fact that
this entering into a different world is only a partial and temporary experience
(the gods will eventually return to the heavens, the players never actually
leave the physical world around them and they can not play on forever).
 |
| Avatar, dir. Cameron (2009) |
All of this is
mirrored in the story of the film. On the one hand, the story emphasises how
physically liberating and stimulating it is for the protagonist to inhabit the
avatar body (here his disability serves to heighten the difference between his
everyday existence - which is, of course, characterised by a restriction on
mobility similar to that of the people in the cinema auditorium - and the
technologically facilitated experience of the avatar’s world - once again
mirroring the viewer’s technologically facilitated experience of the cinematic
world). On the other hand, this experience is constantly disrupted (initially
in a planned fashion, later through violent outside interventions), and the
reminders of the needs and vulnerability of the human body left behind become
an increasingly important issue. The story comes to focus ever more on the
nuisance and danger of having a human body, and it culminates in its
abandonment.
If the protagonist’s
journey echoes that of the viewer, what are we to make of that final
transformation? One might say that it simply takes the logic underpinning the
cinematic adventure (the transition from the everyday world into an alternative
reality) too far so that instead of heightening the vicarious experience the
viewer has through the protagonist (and through the 3-D glasses), it actually
serves as a painful reminder that such total transcendence of the everyday is
simply not available in the cinema. Our connection with the protagonist does
not go as far as physically and permanently being able to leave our regular
lives and bodies behind. Of course, the film’s action ends precisely at the
moment when the protagonist has achieved what is impossible for us to do: The
last shot of the film is of his eyes opening and staring at us (and Neytiri -
but that is another story); then the story ends (although as soon as the
credits begin there is more material from the story world projected on the
screen; once again this needs to be considered separately).
When the protagonist
has finally done what is impossible for us to do (to abandon the old body and
permanently inhabit a new one), our connection with him has to be severed.
After all we are only viewers - and the fact that he stares at us, mirroring
our own staring at the screen, tells us that this is all we are, and the
contrast between his uncovered eyes and our own eyes, covered by 3-D glasses,
confirms our essential difference. At the same time, the protagonist’s face
points forward to the moment when we remove the glasses and thus enter into a
much more unmediated relationship with our surroundings again. In other words:
when Jake awakens in his new body, he prefigures our imminent awakening into
the reality of our own body and our actual surroundings. If Jake’s story ends
with leaving behind what he has come to regard as a lesser existence, we also
ultimately have to recognise that watching a film is a lesser reality than our
actual bodies and social connections.
 |
| Avatar, dir. Cameron (2009 |
