Much ado about Avatar

Welcome to the inaugural blog post of my sweeping, semester-long manifesto to junk culture, The Vulgarians Are At The Gate. Well, only inaugural if you consider this to be the first real post, and ignore my insanely long dissertation about the merits of seeing Flo Rida in a hockey rink, which I assure you if you read that post, are many. I assure you that most posts will be nowhere near as long as that incredibly pertinent thesis was. With that said, in this post, I plan to discuss a little bit about political manifestos of the 1800s, then talk about neo-classical Baroque revisionist music, before segueing into a treatise regarding all the batshit crazy allegations that have been lobbied at James Cameron’s Avatar, which has charmed people at the theatres with its heroic depiction of the blue people victory over those asshole humans.

But first, you might ask, why write a blog about idiotic culture ephemera? And more inanely, why call it “The Vulgarians Are At The Gate?” First of all, I chose the name of the blog based on a little-known book called Vulgarians At The Gate which was posthumously published by notable comedian Steve Allen. It was about trashy raunch culture (read: Jerry Springer), referring to the eponymous “vulgarians at the gate” as the people constantly pushing culture towards the lowest common denominator. In my own mind, I see this as a group mostly composed of several thousand Kardashians and possibly a Wahlberg. The less talented Wahlberg. The non-Funky Bunch, New Kid Wahlberg. Oh, and probably Rod Blagojevich as well. That guy’s just silly. And ... well, as you can see, the list can go on. And on it shall, on a weekly basis (read: most Mondays) for the entire semester.

The raison d’etre for this blog is simple: I love writing (and riffing) on bad culture, watching bad movies, listening to Chingy, and more. The worst of culture, much like yang to yin, is just as crucial as the best of culture in telling us who we are as a population at a moment. Personally, I have a theory, which I scientifically and academically developed thoroughly over the past weekend, that our culture, at any given moment, is dictated by the top 5% and bottom 5%. For example, just as many people are talking about Mad Men in the news, and how it influences us, our image of ourselves, and our society, as Jon and Kate, and I believe each tells us something specific and different about what we value. While the latter may be complete swill, it still tells us a lot about ourselves at that time.

I also encourage and appreciate reader feedback and comments. If there’s something ridiculous that happened in pop culture over the past week, leave a note in the comments and the next VATG post may just be ripping into the very thing you asked me to rip into. You can also get me on Twitter at @JonnKmech.

But, enough with the justifications and the tomfoolery and the merrymaking. Let’s move on to the main attraction, James Cameron’s Avatar. You may have heard of it. Avatar is a shoestring-budget indie film that has been gaining an amazing amount of hype on the arthouse scene, and has so far grossed a respectable $1.6 billion worldwide, despite the fact it’s only playing in less than 100 family-owned movie theatres. To give some context to that number, Obama just pledged $1.3 billion for U.S. education, meaning there will likely be a new section of American history in schoolchildren’s textbooks next year dedicated to the rich cultural heritage and traditions of the Na’vi.

Yet for some reason, Avatar has not been mentioned at the Sundance Film Festival at all, but continues to flourish and slowly gain popularity. Soon, it will be higher on the charts than #1. Avatar’s success apparently revolves around its novel use of blue CGI people to form a brazen post-modern commentary that subtly proselytizes about almost every aspect of our society and our lives. As such, everyone and their mother’s Vatican have been putting in their two cents, along with their $15.50 for Imax, regarding the film’s purported stance on several issues. Here are summaries of some of the most popular and preposterous ones.

1. Avatar is offensive to conservatives.
Perhaps the most obvious theory, and the first one that would likely come to anyone’s minds, is that Avatar is offensive to all those wifebeater-wearing, red-neck-having, shotgun-polishing conservatives who believe that anything that isn’t either the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution is a pinko threat that can be solved only in a way that involves nuclear armaments and destroying the environment. According to the Globe and Mail, conservatives in the U.S. have asserted that the film has anti–American and anti-capitalist values, a well-reasoned argument about a film on its way to making more money than any other film ever made.

Seriously though, I did see quite a few upside-down U.S. flags secretly waving around amidst all the lush CGI greenery, so their complaints may have merit, and Bolivian socialist president Evo Morales weighed in that the film is a “profound show of resistance to capitalism and the struggle for the defence of nature.” But how can people call such a film anti-American or anti-capitalist? The U.S. has been stealing and destroying the land of Aboriginals and other populations for years and profiting off of it, so in that sense, it seems to uphold strong pro-American values quite well. Wait, is that war thing over in the Middle East still going on right now?

2. Avatar is offensive to the military.
It apparently is. A lot of people have mentioned that the movie seems to be saying something about the Iraq War and the Americans’ razing and occupation of that country. Personally, I don’t see any connection between the Na’vi having their land occupied, razed, and their resources pillaged with the United States’ friendly and amiable invasion of Iraq. The military would never tell the United Nations that Iraq had unobtainium when it didn’t, right?

But surprisingly, the PR officer of the military differs. Colonel Bryan Salas attacked Avatar for taking “sophomoric shots” at Marine culture and stereotyping Marines, making it the first film ever to typecast Marines as square-jawed, crew-cutted, uncaringly steely and hardened cigar-chompers who finish every sentence with “that’s an order.” Avatar deals far more with Marine culture than say, G.I. Joe. I mean, that film depicts Marines as badass world-savers who protect everyone from the nano-particles that eat away buildings and additional ridiculous bullshit. I don’t quite understand — why would one Hollywood movie show Marines to be good, and another would show them to be bad? Which Hollywood movie can I trust to get an accurate idea of what constitutes “Marine culture?”

3. Avatar is offensive to liberals, because it’s racist.
Oh yes, those bleeding heart, cry-me-a-river liberals and their desire for us to all just get along can’t even let an innocent little billion-dollar movie off the hook. One of the most prominent topics trending about Avatar is that it’s racist to every population that has ever been infringed upon, and that it follows a “white saviour” mentality—since the movie totally would have worked with a Na’vi being given a Na’vi avatar instead of Sam Worthington and saving his own people alone.

According to a quote from the Toronto Star by blogger and York University student Orville Lloyd Douglas, who runs the blog GayBlackCanadianman, “I think it is racist, in the same way I see (racism) in Dances With Wolves,” — apparently the only man, much less the only gay black Canadian man, not in on the realization that the film basically is Dances With Wolves. See? James Cameron isn’t racist, only the people that he steals his film plots from are! As an aside, by this point, it’s almost inevitable that you have heard that Avatar is one of 3 films: Dances With Wolves, Pocahontas, and FernGully. So here’s a question: does taking the plot of other films that deal with the “white man’s burden” to ride in on his stallion to save the day for all the helpless indigenous people make you a racist or a plagiarist?

4. Avatar is offensive because it makes you worship nature more than the Baby Jesus.
This criticism was recently levied at Avatar by God’s pinch-hitters, the Vatican. According to their newspaper L'Osservatore Romano, Avatar “gets bogged down by a spiritualism linked to the worship of nature.” Since we can be assured that the Vatican has a direct line to Him, it appears that God himself has only given Avatar two stars — though, to be fair, His judgement can’t really be trusted after he gave Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel four stars and called it “A real laugh riot! Fun for the whole family!” in Rolling Stone. The article by the Vatican also labelled Avatar as “bland,” “sappy,” and “unoriginal,” putting forth several of the most lucid arguments they’ve ever made. Why can’t they be this upfront and honest about contraception? But I have to agree with the Vatican here. You should be spending your time worshiping God, not marvelling at the creations He produced on a green-screened soundstage using cutting-edge 3D motion capture technology. God created the 3D animators at WETA particularly so that they could produce the same environments artificially that he produced on the Fourth to Sixth days of creation ...

5. Watching Avatar may cause depression and thoughts of suicide.
... and apparently, His 3D animators bested God on this one. Several news agencies have reported in the last week that, bizarrely, thousands of people have come down with “Avatar depression” after viewing the film’s exquisitely rendered 3D worlds and deciding that reality just can’t compete. The fan forums “Avatar Forums” reportedly has had thousands of posts in a thread entitled “Ways to cope with the depression of the dream of Pandora being intangible,” by people affected by a malaise caused by the sudden realization that their life doesn’t consist of walking through tropical fluorescent forests and riding on the backs of giant pterodactyl-like creatures around floating mountains. Unfortunately, they can’t rewind 2.5 hours to a happier time when their lives were perfectly fine. It has apparently even driven people to thoughts of suicide because they feel that their pedestrian lives can’t possibly be as exciting. My god, I never thought of that — why can’t my life revolve around the relentless pursuit of unobtainium as well?

According to CNN International, a user going by the name of Mike said, “Ever since I went to see ‘Avatar’ I have been depressed. Watching the wonderful world of Pandora and all the Na’vi made me want to be one of them. I even contemplated suicide thinking that if I do it I will be rebirthed in a world similar to Pandora and everything is the same as in ‘Avatar’.” Please, don’t jump! You have so much to live for if you’d perhaps just stop reading fan forums about a Hollywood movie, get off your computer, go outside and maybe plan a trip to some place in the world that doesn’t have Cineplex in the title. Such fans are also apparently having feelings of disgust with the human race over the raping of the Na’vi’s land. I don’t quite understand—such luscious biodiversity actually does, in fact, exist in the world’s forests and oceans. Maybe these people should try going to the Amazon Rainf...oh, right, we’re cutting that down and filling the oceans and atmosphere with pollution! And of course, people only feel the need to be disgusted with human activities when they’re depicted in a Hollywood movie where their own actions have no bearing on the outcome. It makes vast amounts of sense to worry about not being able to see a world as beautiful as Pandora (which can be fixed simply by buying another ticket or setting your DVD player to ‘repeat’) rather than put equal time and energy into keeping this world clean and habitable. James Cameron, could you make some kind of film about the environement of “reality?” Because maybe then people will watch it and start getting depressed for the right reasons!

6. Avatar promotes smoking.
Even stranger than the assertion that Avatar makes people lie in bed all day, wondering what it all means, is the claim by a group called Smoke Free Movies that Avatar encourages children to take a cool, refreshing puff of a Virginia Slim. The group took offense to Sigourney Weaver’s character Dr. Grace Augustine lighting up onscreen, to which James Cameron himself responded to this allegation in the New York Times by saying that he had the character smoking to signify that she was “evil,” not that she hung out with the cool kids.

First of all, I had thought that the film had promoted smoking for entirely different reasons, as the film presents an obvious allegory to the encroachment of Marlboro Country onto an indigenous population who are being maliciously encouraged to come to where the flavour is. Furthermore, I’m pretty sure that at some point in the film, one of the Na’vi warriors is actually a blue-rendered Joe Camel who is trying to convince his people that they will be protected by the gods from the invaders if they will only just slow down and pleasure up. There’s also no information yet as to whether being around a person while they’re watching Avatar can lead to lung cancer via second-hand Pandora. But this allegation towards Avatar makes two things abundantly clear:

a. Seeing smoking in a film is far more damaging than wanton violence and destruction to the psyche of children, and
b. If James Cameron made a version of Dudley Doo Right, Snidely Whiplash would forego mustache twirling, sneering, and tying women to train tracks. Rather, he would be a dapper, clean-cut young gentleman taking a drag on a Du Maurier.

7. Avatar is so good, it could kill you.

All right, that’s enough — I’ve had it (and I’m sure you have too). This might just be the tip of the iceberg for wacky claims about Avatar (I didn’t even deal with the reported Na’vi sex scene), but if I’ve learned one thing, it’s this — no other picture besides Avatar deserves an award this year. None. Awards should actually be created for it. In fact, is there any way we can get a “Best Best Picture” award, which will be awarded to Avatar for being the best picture in comparison to all the other films that have won Best Picture in history?

Ah yes, and next week: Jersey Shore — as if you haven’t already heard enough about it. And possibly something else, if something else happens in the world of pop culture in the next week.