Do Impresarios Dream of 3-D Cinema?

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ESSAY

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Do Impresarios Dream of

Cinema?

Without addressing the eye, all art remains unsatisfying, and thus itself unsatisfied, unfree.

Richard Wagner, Das Kunstwerk der Zukunft (1849)

☁ Early on in AVATAR, the claw-marked bad guy gives the newly arrived mercenaries a safety brief. They’ve come to a place where death is in the air, literally. It doesn’t help that the natives aren’t friendly, either. “They are very hard to kill,” Colonel Miles Quaritch says of the Na’vi, grudging admiration in his tensely managed voice. The line could also be in Aliens or the Terminator films. Bodies that are hard to kill, unlike human ones, fascinate JC. That’s where the action is: humans going up against these hard bodies and killing them anyway, salivating space crea-

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JAMES CAMERON & RICHARD WAGNER

MARTIN ROSENSTOCK

tures with acid for blood or men of steel from the future. But Jake Sully is not going to be doing much killing, at least not in the body he’s got. It has been damaged, beyond repair for all practical purposes, and he simply can’t foot the bill to mend. As fate would have it, though, his twin brother has just quit this world. Jake sees Tom’s body for the last time lying in a cardboard coffin, then his earthly double rolls into the crematorium. A few scenes later, on another world, Jake is looking at a ten-foot blue creature floating, blissfully unconscious, in amniotic fluid.

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Scientists built this creature with his brother’s DNA: Jake’s double is about to be reborn. A look at your double sets the clock a-ticking louder. From the moment Jake’s face hovers as translucent mirror image in the birthing tank’s glass, the days of his human body are numbered. The double economy favors those who don’t see, who remain oblivious to the fact that they are not alone themselves. Eyes closed, the avatar twitches like a fetus testing the bounds of the womb. Shortly after, Jake lays himself down in a high-tech coffin. Like his brother’s body, he disappears into a machine: it does not incinerate him, but it might as well. He sees the blinding light, passes through it, and comes to life in a better body, one that is very hard to kill. For the remainder of the film Jake will body-switch, with the ava-

Avatar, 2009, dir: James Cameron, dist: 20th Century Fox.

tar increasingly becoming his primary seat of residence. Occasionally, he looks at a camera to video-blog his mind and to chronicle his divestment from human existence. In so doing, he is of course also looking at us, with our spectacles. We’re all in the same space. The blog’s sidebar informs us that it’s the year 2154. A little more than 300 years ago, on Jake’s home planet, a fugitive German anarchist with a few musical successes under his belt imagined this future. Not the future of science and technology, of space travel and spliced genomes, not the future of 2154, that is, but the future of 2010, of telling a story in this way. He also staked out the theme for this tale: The great Gesamtkunstwerk must comprise all branches of art, and thus in a sense must use them up and undo them for the good of all, for the unconditioned, absolute portrayal of perfected human nature—which is not dependent on the arbitrary will of some individual, but can only arise as the jointly conceived creation of future mankind.

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When Hollywood launches a project, the instincts involved are certainly mercenary in a way Wagner had not imagined. And JC’s name always gets top billing, blotting out even the stars: he makes them, but rarely needs them (Arnold is the exception). Nonetheless, his films, more than most others, mobilize the associated efforts of the best and the brightest in the biz. They make us see and hear, populate the scenes, set and shift them, as well as mix the sounds and blend them, contributors all to a communal effort of titanic proportions. And this time their efforts have us not looking in from the outside, but looking on from the inside: “So it is by watching and listening that the spectator is transported onto the stage…. The audience, as representative of public life, sees itself disappear from the auditorium, living and breathing only in the artwork that signifies life on the stage as the vastness of the universe.” In fact, JC and his cohorts have one-upped the master: the spectator need no longer transplant himself into the artwork—it comes to him, no effort required. 3D technology turns stage and auditorium into one, enclosing the spectator. All in the name of the goal Wagner conceived in his Swiss exile: the portrayal of the human being perfected. One could have seen it coming. JC’s earlier battles, with cyborgs and aliens, took place over turf, with ownership rights going to the better species. John Connor and Ellen Ripley are fighting not only for personal survival, but for all of their own kind. Their opponents have a lot going for them—unhampered by conscience or fear, faster, stronger, more durable than Homo sapiens. Their existence represents a counter-proposition to humanity. And yet they lose. The old-fashioned human being turns out to be the last species standing. Libidinous attachments trump mindless and single-minded efficiency. This time, though,

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it’s different. The alternative is not a reduction, a creature of negation that embodies one or a few human features. Rather, the native inhabitants of Pandora constitute an extension and enlargement, intellectually on par with the invaders, psychically and physically superior. Just how superior Colonel Quaritch will find out in the showdown. But that fight is a long way off away. Before it can happen, the avatar must grow on Jake, from temporary residence to psychical home, to site of selfhood. It’s a fast transition. When he takes his new body beyond the perimeter for the first time, the planet claims him, splits him off from his own kind. A babe in the woods, he must run for his life, and then a jump into water provides the cleansing necessary for true rebirth. The plot gives two reasons for Jake’s ready embrace of his new corporeality—the physiological and the libidinous. Once lodged in his avatar, he can stand on his feet again and do all the things that by training and inclination he desires to do, like fly the pterodactyl. The new body is also the precondition for getting the girl, Neytiri, and consummating their love affair. Solidly motivated as this plot may be, the ground on which it rests is even more solid. The humans have named this ground after Pandora, first woman of Greek mythology, while the Na’vi call the divine presence that permeates this planet Eywa, which, likewise, seems oddly close to the name of the first woman in the Judeo-Christian universe. In any case, this planet is a she, and emphatically so. The Na’vi can connect to her via a neurological interface. In so doing, the contours of their identity blur and they become parts of a planetary organism. The humans, headed up by the Colonel, are in the business of raping this planet, all in the pursuit of highly priced dead matter.

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During his welcome-to-Pandora spiel, Quaritch also mentions his own job description. As head of security, his mission is to keep the freshly inducted Na’vi-killers alive; unfortunately, he tells his charges, his success rate will slip below the optimum. He is a patriarch who knows he will lose a few of his children. And, on some level at least, the Colonel also knows of his character’s fatherly dimensions. On the bombing raid to the Na’vis’ most sacred site his call sign is “Papa Dragon,” and when he fights Neytiri and her battle cat he beckons with the somewhat tired lure “Come to Papa.” Daddy Quaritch monopolizes Mamma Pandora and stands in the way of those who want to return to her. The story is old, but what is new is the size of its telling. Yet there are also more meaningful deviations from the paradigm. They ensure redirection of desire and plot resolution with an eye to generational futurity. In this round of the oldest of family feuds, Mamma does not remain passive. She has been taking it lying down for way too long. Even with his new body and all, the son’s forces remain too weak for Papa Dragon’s machines. Before the battle, though, Jake has let Eywa know that he might not have all that it takes for victory, that she ought to consider what happened to Mother Earth a few light years away. And in his hour of need Eywa sends in the cavalry. Creaturely life acquires historical purpose, and even the techno-warriors of the twenty-second century can’t withstand the onslaught of animal ferocity. The battle culminates in a duel: father and son need to find out who of them is harder to kill. In this fight not only is Jake’s life on the

line, he is also defending his new identity, his more-than-human existence. And as in the battle royal here too he needs help. It is Neytiri who finally puts the arrows through the Colonel’s chest and then presses the life-saving mask to her lover’s face. Had Jake’s triumph been a lonely one there would have been nowhere left for him to go. The eternal feminine may be a prize that can be deserved, but it can never be claimed, at least not by a time-bound existence. In Hindu thought, an avatar is the incarnation of a deity. Jake’s new body constitutes a step up from his human one, but a god he is not. Being the recipient of help puts him in his proper place, and in this place the proper object of desire stands waiting. Time to cast aside for good the husk that his human body has become. Wagner: “Only in death does a human being relinquish all personal egoism and fully ascend into the universal, not through chance but by his necessary death, the final act following from the fullness of his existence.” The double always wins, so Jake puts himself down. Na’vi spirituality, then, accomplishes what human science does not even dare to attempt: the transfer of intangible essence from body to body. What was once the puppet cuts the strings, and so will be able to walk on its own. Chances are this skill will prove useful. The primal foe tends to find substitutes, and Pandora will probably continue to need her defender. MARTIN ROSENSTOCK teaches at the University of Connecticut, Storrs. For Wagner excerpts (translated by the author), see Gesammelte Schriften von Richard Wagner: Dritter Band (Leipzig: Verlag von E. W. Fritzsch, 1871), 87-88, 74, 180 & 195.

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