May 12, 2010

• Avatar and Alaska

  This entry is totally full of spoilers. It references the James Cameron film Avatar and John Green’s novel Looking for Alaska.

  You know how everybody knows that your expectations effect how you review a movie? The theory goes that if your expectations are high then the movie you watch will have to meet a higher standard to gain your approval, whereas if your expectations are very low you’ll likely rate a movie that isn’t that great higher. The principle example of this is the reboot of the Star Wars franchise with the prequel episodes I-III. The insanely high expectations of the core group of adamant Star Wars fans totally destroyed any chance of the movies ever meeting those expectations. Hence the most vocal critics of the new Star Wars trilogy are a lot of the people who were most adamantly in favor of the original series.

  Similarly, expectations might explain the whole “sequels” phenomenon that causes people to generally judge the second movie in a trilogy worse than the first. I’ve heard many people describe “middle” movies as generally worse in trilogies than the first and last movies.  On the other hand, if viewers see the second movie as a worthy sequel to the first then the third movie in turn tends to take an extreme the ratings dive. The idea is clear. Expectations are set higher on the first movie, making it harder for subsequent movies to measure up. The more successes in a row, the higher and higher expectations are built.

  Of course this is all anecdotal. I don’t have any numbers to back up those ratings shifts as a general phenomenon. But I think it’s an idea commonly enough expressed that most of us can at least posit it as possibly true. Certainly there seems to be some kind of relationship between expectations and reviews though that relationship might not be as simple as I’ve expressed here.

  Anyway, now back around Christmas time last year I saw the movie Avatar for the first time.  My expectations were more or less average. I had heard some good things about the movie, especially about the “amazing” 3D technology, and I knew it was likely to be one of the top selling movies of all time. But I’d also heard that the plot was fairly simplistic. But as always I tried to go into the movie with as neutral an attitude as I possibly could. I tried to not have out of whack hopes or expectations nor overwhelming cynicism. I really don’t think there was an expectations-bias that influenced my opinion of this film.

  But that doesn’t mean I wasn’t biased.

  Think about what the existence of an expectations bias really means. It’s saying that how you feel, at the moment when you consume a work of art has a non-negligible influence on what you think is your objective assessment of that art. That is to say when we try to measure the “quality” of anything we are often heavily influenced by whatever emotions we happen to be feeling when we made our determination.

  That of course can easily be universalized to apply to emotions more than your emotions like expectations that re related specifically to the art work in question. So yeah if you’re really hyped up and get your hopes dashed when you see a film you might be likely to think it’s a worse movie. But also if you’re just feeling down because you got a phone call just before you went in to see a film telling you that your significant other broke up with you and you lost your job and your house is being foreclosed on, etc. etc. well then you might also think that movie is a worse movie than you otherwise would.

  Don’t get me wrong. I understand that people can be aware of these biases and try to correct for them in order to give a truly objective opinion. But it’s unclear whether or not you can ever be completely successful in such an endeavor. The very fact that you were in a certain mood determines what you see and what you remember about a piece of art. Flaws that exist in a film might be more visible and more jarring for you if you’re in a bad mood when you see it, and virtues that exist in a film might stand out better to you if you’re in a good movie.

  That makes movie reviewing, or any reviewing process a somewhat questionable process altogether. Can we ever really objectively measure even our own opinions about the art works we experience relative to one another? Or are we all bound by our many very emotional reactions to lots and lots of things that have nothing to do with the art work which we critique? In the worst case, just how you react to the other people in the theater could be more relevant in terms of how you judge a film than the director’s vision.

  Of course a natural consequence of this realization is that your interactions with other works of art can also influence your opinion of a piece of art. That is, there can be a kind of artwork clash. You could experience one piece of art, just before experiencing another and that could totally ruin your ability to enjoy the second piece of art or vice-versa.  Don’t believe me? Try watching a movie that you don’t just think is bad, but one you absolutely hate just before you watch a new movie that is highly rated you haven’t seen before. You will have one of two reactions, either you will feel relieved to see the better film and that will make you think higher of it, or you’ll be unable to extricate yourself from the bad mood created by the first film making it impossible for you to enjoy the second film. With such an extreme example, I suspect you will be able to notice your emotional reaction and how it impacts your opinions fairly easily.

  All of this might seem like crazy obvious stuff that everybody knows instinctively, but I believe people don’t quite grasp the degree to which this kind of thing might influence your opinions and evaluations.  I didn’t. I mean sure I was aware of the concept, but it wasn’t until I saw Avatar that I had an extremely striking experience with this Art-Clash phenomenon that drove the point home in my mind far harder than it ever had before.

  You see, right before I went to see the movie Avatar last year I was reading a book. It was itself a powerful piece of art called Looking for Alaska by famous young adult author John Green.  I’d been reading it for a while somewhat entertained, starting to get a bit bored with it, though obviously intrigued enough to read pretty diligently whenever I could find time to spare.

  The book has an interesting time structure to it. The first half of the book counts down to an unknown upcoming event. This encourages you to read more and more to try and get to that event to figure out what the heck the count down was for. The second half then counts up from that event and deals with the aftermath.

  Have you noticed in our society that countdown almost invariably mean something bad is going to happen? Nobody ever counts down until moments of joy and happiness or world peace. It’s always like the timer on a bomb. Something explosive and unexpected happens at the end of the countdown.  Looking for Alaska is no exception. While you could argue that there’s a lot of foreshadow leading up the zero time event, it’s still an explosive extremely dramatic set of events. For me, who is generally oblivious to such pesky abstract concepts like “foreshadow”, it was shocking, devastating and utterly despair inducing.

  My reaction to the middle of Looking for Alaska was extreme. It felt like someone had decided to randomly beat the crap out of my emotional psyche for sadistic pleasure. I can honestly say I was doing everything I could not to cry in public where I was reading it waiting for my movie to start. It was something about the way John Green wrote that part that made it feel like it was happening to me. It felt like I’d experienced those changes in my life and had them so cruelly snatched away from me.

  I read on and as I read, the chapters of the aftermath showed all the major characters falling apart and that just caused me to spiral deeper and deeper into a sense of depression. It was like I couldn’t stop shaking as I read.  A part of me, abstractly, realized that I was taking this story way too seriously. A part of me said that this shouldn’t really strike me this profoundly, that this emotional reaction was just plain odd. I’ve read many a story where darker things happen, some even written by, with all due respect to John Green, more skilled writers. (Though John Green I think is highly underrated overall) But this story hit me harder than any I can think of even though I haven’t experienced personally anything like what the main characters in Looking for Alaska experienced. And even as I read there was a part of my thought processes going over my own life and reliving things that happened to me and trying to connect them to the emotions rampaging through my mind as I read. But this self examination only tended to inspire in me a deeper sense of misery and despair.

  And so this was my mental state. The last scene I read just before I left was a scene with the main character and his roommate’s relationship breaking down and their getting into a fight. It was a dramatic and heart wrenching scene, and strangely it was so even though I didn’t feel as if I really knew either of the characters that well. Seeing their friendship starting to disintegrate was painful especially given in the process they slung out the most hurtful truths to one another that they could find to state. I didn’t read through to the end of the scene. I had to get up because it was time. Time to watch a new movie. Right out of the depths of Alaska I went to see Avatar.

  Even as I walked toward the theater I knew it was a bad idea. I’d already bought my ticket but I seriously considered just burning it and not watching the movie. I really wasn’t in the mood to see it. I knew what I really needed to do was sit down and finish reading Looking for Alaska because I knew the author wouldn’t leave his reader like that straight through to the end of the book. There had to be more to the story and I desperately needed to get that story.

  But I’m really a big cheapskate and I’d already told people I was going to see it. I didn’t want to explain to people that I hadn’t bothered because the book I was reading just turned out to be too depressing so I needed to finish it first. I doubt anyone would even understand that explanation.  Plus there was a chance that in watching Avatar it might help. It might cheer me up and make reading the rest of Alaska an easier endeavor. So I went.

  Of course my reading until the last minute meant there were no good seats in the center so I had to sit off to one side of the theater. I really hate that, so maybe that effected my opinion as well. I waited listlessly through the uninteresting unimaginative trailers my mind’s voice demanding that the damn movie just start already. I wanted to get over with it.

  And then it started. And I saw it. And… it was… okay.

  The movie didn’t easily dispel my morose feelings, nor did it drive me into a deeper funk. I watched it with sort of a detached sense of awareness of the film while my mind was drawn toward other thoughts. For a while I found the film somewhat boring, but slowly but surely, the film dragged me into its narrative with its skilled story telling and immersive 3D to the point where I started to care about the characters and care about the outcomes. Avatar has a sort of deliberate entrancing effect wrought by the combination of extraordinary graphical technology, skilled directing, and carefully chosen musical accompaniment. The movie tries to give you nothing that would break you out of the spell it casts over you. So that means it avoids offensive rhetoric, poor puns or crass humor of course. But it also means it avoids deep or thought provoking dialogue or complex moral quandaries. The very story itself is meant to be simple and easy for the mind to follow so that you aren’t driven by any distractions to any kind of strong emotions outside of those the story intends for you to have.

  Nevertheless, as I watched, almost certainly because of the book I had been reading before the movie, I managed to remain detached from the film.  Part of me couldn’t let go and get drawn in and this inner cynical voice within me remained a constant running dialogue throughout the film.

  And what did this cynical voice tell me as I watched? Well many things but the core of its fundamental critique of the film can be summarized in just four words:

  These people are doomed.

  Even after I finished watching the film and even weeks later and even to this day I cannot find fault in that critique. My inner cynic I believe to be absolutely correct in its assessment. The Na’vi people really do have no chance of survival. The entire movie is, largely a expression of false delusional hope. Worse, it encourages people to make bad decisions in the face of insurmountable odds and then gives validation in the delusional belief that some mystical force, ie God, will suddenly appear to solve all their problems for them. And that, I felt and feel is grossly irresponsible and extremely disturbing.

  There is simply no way that a people with bows and arrows and knives can stand up against even a modern military apparatus. To say then can stand up against a futuristic military capable of space travel and giant heavily armed mech machines is beyond laughable.  The fact that these people happen to be somewhat bigger than normal humans and have some decent sized animals and birds to fly on does little to alleviate that enormous power gap.

  Think about it. Native Americans were crushed. And that was using the technology that existed from 1492 up until the late 1800s.  So get that straight. That’s before we had automated machine guns and sniper rifles and tasers and body armor and radar. That’s before we had nerve gas and tanks and sound cannons and airplanes and apache attack helicopters. That’s before we had nuclear weapons and unmanned drones. That’s basically before we had ANY of the regular things we think about when we think of modern warfare. And the indigenous population never stood a chance. I have never heard anyone suggest that there was ever a serious possibility that the native population might have won the day.

  Other popular struggles between vastly outgunned population show a similar story. Modern gorilla warfare can help even the odds in a battle but only when there is a comparable weapons base. Would Iraqis be able to mount nearly as effective a resistance if they had bows and arrows rather than AK-47s and giant horses rather than IEDs and Rocket Propelled Grenades? In every major war that lasted both sides had access to modern technologies. I can think of none where one side was deprived of it entirely and still somehow magically managed to mount a significant resistance.  Indeed, by and large conflicts with indigenous populations with primitive weapons wouldn’t even be considered a war these days. That’s usually a kind of police maneuver.

  Now in Avatar, you’re supposed to believe that the chosen one is able to rally the people together from all the tribes so that they can FIGHT BACK! It’s supposed to be a glorious inspiring kind of thing. They aren’t going to give in to the greedy and arrogant invaders who are destroying not just their homelands but the spirits of their ancestors.  So they put aside their petty differences (which are never explained or explored by the way) and unite for the greater good!

  Only… to me it seemed grotesquely reckless.  Basically all our “hero” managed to do was bring people from all around the world to come and die with the first tribe he met.  It was an insanely irresponsible thing to do to sentence all those people to death and in my head I was screaming in my head “don’t do it!” as I watched.

  So when the battle turned south, not only was I not surprised, I thought it was probably unrealistic how much damage they were able to do.  The tactics employed by the Na’vi even under the great Jake Sully’s leadership were rather simplistic. Basically a single ambush followed by a pitched battle. There was no chance in hell that that was going to work in the long run.  I wouldn’t have been able to forgive the movie for its utter unserious portrayal of the events had the Na’vi somehow managed to beat back the invaders thanks to their newfound unity and the awesomeness of Jake. That would have been a ridiculously unreleastic story. Luckily Cameron didn’t go there.

  But what we got instead was almost as bad.  The Na’vi are rewarded for their bravery and determination and willingness to throw thousands of lives away by the great awakening of the planet itself to come to their aide. Animals all across the lands go on a rampage, totally beating the crap out of the invaders making the eventual conclusion a kind of fait accompli. We see a few more battles with our main characters that are only relevant because movie goers like to see the major villains die and want to be sure their favorite heroes and heroines live (though my favorite character, Grace apparently wasn’t so lucky).  And that wraps up the whole movie.

  Yaaayy! God saved us!!

  Aren’t you glad we were such brave fools?

  The idea repulses me. It’s not that in this fictional world it’s impossible for Cameron to posit a living planet, that is, a real God that actually exists, and really does have the power to save people. Sure, that’s fine. But the problem is that this story suggests that all you have to do is be brave, faithful, and foolhardy in order to gain the respond of God and then all your problems will be dealt with. That’s the overarching message of Avatar. It’s faith, not reason. There’s no rational assessment of risks and benefits. It’s be brave and fight! Be like Jake Sully! He doesn’t let being cripple keep him down!

  The emphasis on courage in this movie is sickening. There’s no sense in which skill or reason or intellect or realism or caution or even patience are admirable traits. There’s bravery. That’s it. That’s what the movie values. That’s the characteristic that Sully presents that makes him the “chosen one”. That’s what he shows throughout the film.  The only times his recklessness seems to cause trouble somehow magically “work out” in the end. It sort of what makes him capable of achieving his predetermined destiny. It’s apparently what makes him able to outdo all the native peoples at their own skills in just a few months time, eventually even becoming a warrior of legendary skill the likes of which the planet has not seen in generations.

  And why is that exactly? The brilliant comedian W. Kamau Bell covered this particular critique much better than I ever could. Basically he connects the story of Avatar to the stories of Dances with Wolves and The Last Samurai and others all of which involve a white guy going to a native culture and learning to do what they do far better than they do. There is something fundamentally disturbing about this narrative that bothered me as I watched Avatar as well. Why is it that the heroic figure is never a part of the native culture? It’s always the outsider who saves them from his or her own people out of sheer awesomeness.  Is this really a realistic story we should be telling? Is it really fair to these native cultures?

  But that wasn’t the big thing that bothered me either.  The big thing that my mind kept coming back to is still the fundamental facts of the situation.  The people are still doomed.  You’re supposed to believe that the invaders were successfully repulsed, the bad guys killed, and the remaining humans sent home humanely.

  Right. Sent home where they can share what from their perspective must have seemed like a horrible monstrous slaughter of their people by wild crazed animals on an exotic planet.   That will play super well in the press.

  OK, probably not everyone thought that way, but some probably did. No doubt they were all traumatized by the experience. How would the media on Earth funded by the most powerful corporation on the planet made rich by mining this ultra mineral with untold value cover this story?  It would be a tragic attack by dangerous evil monstrous alien invaders.  There’s no doubt in my mind of that.  And the people on Pandora have no way whatsoever to wage that propaganda war and convince the people of Earth that they are in any way shape or form, human enough to be worth bothering being sympathetic to.

  So what happens next? Perhaps the evil company tries again with a bigger, stronger military force. Sure that’s possible. And it’s possible even then that having the whole living planet behind them enables the Na’vi to somehow achieve another resounding victory in spite of all the people who died in the last battle and their sparse population to begin with.  They can just keep on doing that too. Eventually by attrition the Na’vi will be defeated. The question only is how long does it take to mass and send an army to Pandora and whether it is worth the cost. Judging from how the movie portrays unobtanium, yeah it probably is worth it. If a corporation is ruthless enough, why would they EVER stop sending forces? The only way they wouldn’t is if public opinion somehow turns against the endeavor and forces a change. I just don’t see how that would happen unless you can get avatars into the hands of regular people on Earth so that they can know and understand who the Na’vi are. Or at least video cameras observing their lifestyle. Even then it’s not a sure thing. Not by a long shot.

  But the sad humans don’t even have to risk any of that. They totally don’t. What they are after on Pandora is a ROCK. That’s it.  So what reason do they have, at all to preserve the environment.  Before they were willing to destroy a tree regardless of the cultural significance that tree had to the indigenous population. Next time, maybe they’re willing to destroy the atmosphere. Maybe they just bombard the planet with orbital armaments that are more powerful than our nuclear weapons, radioactive or not. Thje planet is already unlivable for humans without a suit, what difference does it make whether they make the air more un-breathable or make it so that a radiation suit is needed in order to do the mining?  They can just do that. It’s easy. Probably far cheaper than landing and mounting land missions to try and push the indigenous people away. And then you just mine the damn rock. They could use all kinds of massive robotic machines to mine the rocks faster once the planet has become a barren lifeless wasteland.  And that’s what they’d probably do.

  The only reason really this corporation probably didn’t do that to begin with is because they likely thought they would later be able to gain value by studying the plant and animal lifeforms on Pandora. That’s why they had scientists on staff no doubt. The possibility of new drugs or materials or other ways to exploit Pandora’s resources was probably too great. Likewise they could learn a lot from native Pandorans. Maybe they even imagined selling trips to Pandora and stints in avatar bodies to humans so they can go amongst the Pandorans for a vacation. The possible ways to make money off of a new planet full of life like Pandora are unquestionably endless.

  But apparently none of those other ways were worth more than the unobtanium. If it were then the company would have been more cautious in upsetting the natural balance on that planet and would have worked more closely to formulate a treaty with the Na’vi. Why be in such a rush really? Their communication strategy was basically working. There’s no logical reason they couldn’t have worked out an agreement whereby they tunneled under the damned trees to get the rock. Possibly they could have even had the Na’vi do the work to ensure that the mining operation didn’t interfere with the trees themselves. The only explanation is that the unobtanium is just THAT much more valuable than anything else they could get out of the planet so getting it fast was the priority.  That only supports my theory that the Na’vi are destined to be firebombed out of existence for their insolence.

  Now don’t get me wrong. It’s not that I don’t believe in the importance of bravery and faith in a struggle for indigenous rights against a superior force. I’m not a fatalist.  I really believe people can make a difference if they are willing to fight for what they believe in. I’m all for people chaining themselves to fences, standing in front of bulldozers, and going to jail for what they believe in. And I know full well that doing things like that takes extraordinary courage, much more than your average person has. Indeed it’s often a gargantuan feat of courage for an ordinary citizen these days even to just choose not to go to work one day in order to attend a protest. So yes, spotlighting and stressing the importance of bravery is very important.

  Faith too I believe in, though not necessarily faith in a God per se. I think in order to be able to fight credibly for significance change you have to have faith in your movement. You have to really believe in what you are doing and that things can get better. That’s the kind of belief system that compels people to join you and fight with you. It was as much Martin Luther King’s dream as his methods that people followed. And that was a dream based on faith not fact. It was a hope of what might one day be, not a guaranteed inevitability.  I think that’s important. You have to have that kind of dream, that kind of vision in order to make real change a reality.

  But what I don’t believe in, what I cannot and will never accept is faith and bravery superseding reason. I don’t believe in people just recklessly throwing their lives away. That’s when you get crazy movements that lead to disastrous consequences, or false pointless movements that just get a lot of people hurt or killed with no gain. You have to think first. You need a strategy. It’s not enough to have the right ideas and the right principles and the courage to fight for them. There has to be a realistic path from those principles and beliefs to bring them into reality. Saying I’m going to boycott company X because they are doing Y doesn’t mean shit if you don’t have a way in which you can see your choice to boycott company X will lead to company X actually STOPPING doing Y.  There has to be a plan. Otherwise you’re just tilting an windmills. At best you only hurt yourself. At worst, you hurt a lot of other people along with you.

  That’s the core problem I have with Avatar. The Na’vi people given what they knew at the time could not and should not have fought back. That was the worst possible thing they could have done.

  It’s possible that the Na’vi people weren’t in a position to know or even understand how badly they were outgunned. They could have been choosing to fight back out of ignorance. But the problem there is, that Jake Sully should have known. Really it’s absurd for him to think that the tribes of the Na’vi stood a snowball’s chance in hell. The fact that he was instrumental in convincing the Na’vi to fight anyway makes him extraordinarily callous, irresponsible, and reckless. Someone should have smacked him upside the head and said “what’s the matter with you? Do you want all these people to DIE???”

  But nobody did. And what followed would have been a complete and total bloodbath. The Na’vi forces would have been annihilated. They very nearly were. But, thanks to the magic of hollywood, Jake Sully and his Na’vi forces got lucky. The earth rebelled and fought the invaders saving Sully’s stupid butt. Yay Pandora! I can’t think of anyone who deserved it less.

  Think about the message this sends people. Should the indigenous people of our planet who are fighting desperate wars over resources against overwhelming odds pray really hard and then launch an all out fight to the death with sticks and stones and teeth and nails if need be to save their lands? Is THAT what you think the Palestinians should do? Of course not. It’s an absurd proposition. It would only get them killed in the millions. God will NOT strike down your enemies no matter how faithful and sacrificial you are. Leastwise it’s utterly irrational to depend on that as your main liberation strategy. That’s the kind of lazy nonsense that Osama bin Laden spouts. It’s dumb. That’s the thinking of people who have given up not people who have real hope for a better future and a chance of bringing it about.

  Now you might say to me: “well what should the Na’vi have done instead, just turned tail and run?”  And I know this will sound utterly repulsive to some of you but the answer is absolutely clear. YES.  The Na’vi did not know that Pandora would help them. They had no reason to believe that Pandora would suddenly help them. They had no reason to believe that there would be anything other than two possible outcomes. One is they leave and flee and lose their ancestors, but most of them live. The other is that most of them die in a bloody brutal war and then they lose the spirits of their ancestors anyway.  It’s a hard, harsh reality. But it’s the truth. Nobody sane or rational would choose to fight anyway. It’s certainly NOT reasonable for a leader to ask their people or demand that their people do so. And certainly not if you are doing so based on your sense of faith that some miracle will happen to save you in the end. That’s fundamentally immoral. And Jake does worse than that. He brings in more people from all around the fucking moon so they can join in on the slaughter! No. Jake Sully is no hero. He’s a monster nearly as culpable for the destruction of the Na’vi as the military forces that attacked them.

  It would be somewhat different if there was a way in which this last stand had some kind of value for the Na’vi. Like if it were all televised around the galaxy in real time so that peoples across the galaxy might react in outrage and some good might come of it. Then maybe fighting would be worth it.  Likewise, if the Na’vi knew that the planet might come to their aide and they knew that shedding enough blood in brave acts of sacrifice might increase the probability of that happening, then maybe at least an argument could be made for fighting. But there’s no such justification given for the Na’vi psychotic resistance movement. They fight only because Jake Sully manipulated them using their own superstitions into thinking they can win an un-winnable battle. And that’s just sick.

  And I do not and cannot forgive Jake for that just because things happened to work out in the end for them at least for the time being. 

  That was the overarching impression I left the theater with. I was entertained but I was angry too. Excited and repulsed at the same time. I felt like I loved and hated the movie all at once. I wanted the Na’vi to live. I wanted everything to be okay and work out and for everyone to be happy in the end. I just couldn’t bring myself to believe that things would.

  Only here’s the thing. I completely believe those thought I had and as of yet I haven’t read an account that would persuade me to think otherwise, but I also know that I shouldn’t have had those thoughts. At least not as strongly as I did. I’ve seen other movies with similar themes and similar events and by and large they don’t bother me. I can accept that certain elements of the film are stupid or biased or irrational without having that taint my overall appreciation of the film. I don’t think Avatar was a particularly egregious example. If anything it was just a run of the mill example.

  Which brings me back to the idea of how attitude effects our perceptions of art. All those flaws that stood out glaringly in my mind when I saw Avatar probably would not have stood out as glaringly had I not been reading Looking for Alaska first. In fact, it makes perfect sense.  Avatar is a movie about winning against all odds. It’s about getting lucky and having things work out even in an unlikely circumstance where it ordinarily would not. Looking for Alaska is the exact opposite of that.  It’s a bout an utterly normal circumstance where something totally unlucky happens and things completely don’t work out. Avatar is about bravely rejecting the tragic inevitability in front of them. Alaska is about coming to grips with and moving on after a tragic unpredictable life event.

  Do you see what I mean?  Reading Alaska got me into this mindset of thinking about the bad things that happen that we can’t change and we can’t undo no matter how much we might like to. They are so often unfair, so often cruel, so often despair inducing. But they happen. They happen to all of us eventually. And then I see Avatar and it blithely goes along showing its hero totally oblivious of the dark consequences of his actions, consequences he could prevent, things that didn’t have to happen. And yeah, it TOTALLY pissed me off. A part of me absolutely hated Jake Sully and indeed the entire cast of stupid stubborn idiotic characters in that movie that have to be such morons about everything. Can’t they see that life is already hard enough? Why bring about more death and misery when you don’t have to?

  Furthermore, that sense of inevitable unstoppable loss that Alaska inspired in me, permeated my every reaction to the film. That’s why at every step of the way I was incapable of seeing the Na’vi as having a real chance to get out of this situation in one piece. And even after the victory, that’s why all those thoughts of what a terrible future the Na’vi likely have in store for them came immediately to my mind. You’re supposed to be in a celebratory mood by the end of the film. The goodguys won! Yay!  But the mood I was in, I just couldn’t celebrate. It just wasn’t right to me to celebrate. At that time, this fucked up life we lead just wasn’t a thing worth celebrating.
   
  But then I went home. I finished reading Looking for Alaska either that night or the next day I can’t remember which. And as I expected it didn’t leave me in that state of absolute disenchantment with all things good in life. The story carries you through along with the main character as the events that happen to him change him and he grows along with them. Eventually he is able to accept what happened even though he’ll never forget.

  The thing about Avatar and Alaska is that Alaska although marketed toward the Young Adult fiction is far more adult than Avatar. Avatar sort of lets you be a kid and believe in glorious struggle for the greater good against the obvious “bad” people. Alaska doesn’t let you off that easy. It starts off with pranks and silliness but it forces you to grow up. You have to learn to accept the complexities of this world and the people in it who we think we know but we really never knew at all. For good or ill.  And as the book forces you grow as you read, so too did it lead me to accept and resolve my criticisms of Avatar as well. I can see now the value of the film and sing some of its praises. Such as I’ll always be glad that Cameron wrote a film that does bring attention to how overwhelming powers can try to exploit the resources of poor people who have no means to fight on their own. I can respect that. And I can respect Cameron’s usage of the films popularity to fight for indigenous rights around the world.

  But in truth, I’ll never personally like Avatar. Those flaws stand out too fresh in mind like unhealed wounds. But I can’t bring myself to think of Avatar as a good movie. It isn’t even a movie I want to see again. It’s an acceptable movie. It may make a lot of money and it may bring a lot of joy and it may even have good effects. But that’s as far as I’ll go. In my mind it’ll always be a very sad movie with an underlying message I could never sanction.

  • 8:46 pm
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