The Mind-Boggling Hypocrisy of ‘Avatar’

That’s the headline that Big Hollywood uses to link to this piece in Popular Science on the duality of James Cameron:

It’s an intriguing paradox–the success of a film as technologically elaborate and ambitious as James Cameron’s Avatar will come down to a simple question: Will audiences marvel at the movie’s groundbreaking production methods enough to forgive Cameron’s curious choice to frame everything on a script that is, almost above all else, obsessed with the evils of technology in the wrong hands?

Not only did Cameron wait more than a decade to make his more than $300 million passion project, but he spurred the invention of the cutting edge equipment to make his creation possible [read our January issue’s feature on Avatar’s 3-D tech here]. The construction of a new dual-lens 3-D shooting system and the development of an ever-improving motion capture and virtual camera system allowed Cameron to take his audience to the distant inhabited world of Pandora without compromising his ambitious vision for the place.

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Unlike Lucas’ more playful science fiction epic, Cameron reaches for a heavy environmental message. Avatar is every militant global warming supporter’s dream come true as the invading, technology-worshiping, environment-ravaging humans are set upon by an angry planet and its noble inhabitants. But the film’s message suffers mightily under the weight of mind-boggling hypocrisy. Cameron’s story clearly curses the proliferation of human technology. In Avatar, the science and machinery of humankind leads to soulless violence and destruction. It only serves to pollute the primitive but pristine paradise of Pandora.

Of course, without centuries of development in science and technology, the film putting forth this simple-minded, self-loathing worldview wouldn’t exist. You’d imagine Cameron himself would be bored to tears on the planet he created.
There are no movies on Pandora, so he’d be out of a job. The Na’vi rarely visit a multiplex. They sit around their glowing trees, chanting; they don’t build and sink titanic ocean liners, and they don’t construct deep-sea mini-subs enabling certain filmmakers to spend countless days exploring said cruise ships.

But then, this sort of duality exists in so many Hollywood movies: the original 1977  Star Wars itself was a massively-disguised paean to North Vietnam, with the Rebels as the NVA and the eeeevil Empire as America (complete with the Emperor as Nixon, as Lucas himself admitted). The Rebels won their battles due to their goodness and the mystical Force much more so than their technology — even though Lucas himself is far more a technocrat than the traditional Hollywood director, who typically focuses his energy on gauging his actors’ performances and the believability of their dialogue. (Both of which have been Lucas’s biggest weaknesses since the start of his career.) And of course, Lucas was far from the only filmmaker working in Hollywood in the mid-1970s to praise the NVA — even though their careers could only exist in a nation as free and prosperous as the US.

Flash-forward to the naughts, when Hollywood routinely praises terrorists. They’re like Einstein, Oliver Stone once exclaimed, shortly after 9/11, which is likely why they don’t appear on screen in Stone’s World Trade Center film. And what on earth was Paramount thinking when they hired him to direct that?

And of course, if terrorists are the good guys, who are the baddies? Two guesses.

Slightly less grandiose than the evil Empire of Lucas’s Star Wars series, Steven Spielberg’s War of the Worlds remake cast the Martians as stand-ins for the US military. Red planet, red states, get it? As David Koepp, Spielberg’s writer told an interviewer:

“And now, as we see American adventure abroad’ he (David Koepp} continues ‘in my mind it’s certainly back to it’s original meaning, which is that the Martians in our movie represent American military forces invading the Iraqis, and the futility of the occupation of a faraway land is again the subtext”

Hollywood celebrities decry the American automobile — yet we’ll happily do voice-over work in a film like Cars. They’ll complain about “binge tourism”, yet Life magazine happily runs photospreads titled “‘Avatar’: Jet-Setting With the Cast.” As Charles Krauthammer noted in 2007:

Remember the Leonardo DiCaprio and Al Gore global-warming pitch at the Academy Awards? Before they spoke, the screen at the back of the stage flashed not-so-subliminal messages about how to save the planet. My personal favorite was “Ride mass transit.” This to a conclave of Hollywood plutocrats who have not seen the inside of a subway since the moon landing and for whom mass transit means a stretch limo seating no fewer than 10.

Leo and Al then portentously announced that for the first time ever, the Academy Awards ceremony had gone green. What did that mean? Solar panels in the designer gowns? It turns out that the Academy neutralized the evening’s “carbon footprint” by buying carbon credits. That means it sent money to a “carbon broker,” who promised, after taking his cut, to reduce carbon emissions somewhere on the planet equivalent to what the stars spewed into the atmosphere while flying in on their private planes.

In other words, the rich reduce their carbon output by not one ounce. But drawing on the hundreds of millions of net worth in the Kodak Theatre, they pull out lunch money to buy ecological indulgences. The last time the selling of pardons was prevalent–in a predecessor religion to environmentalism called Christianity–Martin Luther lost his temper and launched the Reformation.

Hollywood routinely casts big business as the baddies — yet there are few bigger corporations than Time-Warner, GE-NBC-Universal-Vivendi, and Sony-Columbia.  I could go on, but you get the gist.

To paraphrase Fitzgerald, the test of a first-rate Hollywood intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to hit your marks, and remember what was in the the last script polish.