The Red Circle

In a perfect world, James Cameron’s Avatar would have died like a quiet fart in the dark night of the director’s imagination. Instead, we live in the depressingly “post-Avatar” world where late night hosts are tossed aside like so much Avatar-related promotional material, catastrophic earthquakes bring systematically oppressed island nations to their knees, and American economic policy is held together by bits of tape and chewed gum. It didn’t set in after the opening weekend numbers or even the third to be honest, but the director of Aliens is currently riding the tidal wave of a fifth straight weekend at the top of the box office right through the fabric of America and the essence of what makes film great. For all their summer-tentpole-style promotions (James Cameron’s Avatar Big Mac Meals! James Cameron’s Avatar Coke Zero Cans!), it seems like it’s the perfect storm of TV shows on hiatus, lackluster competition, stay-cations and the public’s growing interest in the new 3D movie technology that is driving Avatar towards beating James Cameron’s previous highest grossing film of all time, Titanic.

That’s right America. We have given this asshole the TWO highest grossing movies of all time. We live in a country where directors whose vision, ambition and follow through have created incredible depictions of events, true or fiction, that exceeded the limits of our very imaginations. And the guy who made your two most popular movies phoned in a script, sat on it for fifteen years to wait for technology that could make up for his lack of technique and in the meantime somehow got lucky on the world’s riskiest bet: a movie that made one of history’s most intriguing disasters into one of its most predictable movies. I think that’s why we (and I’m using “we” here because I too am guilty of buying into “event” entertainment, not because I’ve seen this abomination) support these guys. We love a gambler, win or lose. We’ll vote for the guy who bombs a country on a hunch even AFTER we’ve figured out that he was wrong. We’ll sit our fat asses down on the couch night after night to watch people humiliate themselves on American Idol auditions. We’ve somehow sustained Kenny Rogers for decades now on the shoulders of one novelty “story song.” (“Islands In The Stream” doesn’t count because that could’ve been anyone and Dolly and it would’ve been a hit. He’s the Peabo Bryson to her Roberta Flack.)

And we’ve basically just written James Cameron a blank check to make his next recycled braintrash into the the next thing we’ll slap down fifteen dollars to see in hyper-real 5-D (I skipped a D because Dreamworks will have figured out the fourth one by the time he dusts off whatever other script he finds in his high school writing assignments.) Though I can’t say I’m not disappointed in our new cultural depths, I think the film’s record setting profits make a strong and definitive argument for how to get the American economy back on track. While Barack Obama promised to revive our troubled financial system by “harness(ing) the energy and ingenuity of the American people,” his first year in office has passed and there are no new financial regulations in place. The U.S. is still hemorrhaging jobs. James Cameron has doubled half a billion dollars in five weeks inviting us to see his distinctly American mediocrity. Like many of our American heroes (and presidents), James Cameron’s success came because the American people don’t want “exceptional.” They want “middle of the road. “ They want a plot that they understand because they’ve seen it before. They would rather look at Avatar’s half-human half-puma Navi and “exotic” (read: colorful) locales because then they don’t have to think about whether life that formed from a different set of primordial oozes would look anything like any life we’ve seen. Even the film’s proper nouns lack imagination: Pandora. Unobtanium. Jake Sully.

Mining well-worn ideas isn’t the end of the equation though. Washington hasn’t stopped doing that. What they lack is James Cameron’s magically unceasing sense of self-importance. The kind of mind that writes an eighty page treatment and then abandons it because he honestly believes that he’s ahead of his own time has to be coupled with the will to revive and create it fifteen years later on a reportedly almost half-billion dollar scale. Finally, when the moment comes and the big reveal occurs, you’ve got to keep up a strong front regardless of how many holes your idea has. Remind your angry elitist friends that the nifty idea and the technology make up for the flimsy plot and crude execution. (I say “crude execution” because no matter how realistic everyone claims Pandora looks, it will never make most rational people care if the Na’vi will save their planet the way one could care if William Wallace will defeat the English at Stirling or if Tom Hanks will ever find Private Ryan or run with leg braces on. Also, Americans generally don’t care about planets. Or races other than their own. Sorry, Slumdog Millionaire, it just wasn’t gonna happen no matter how many Oscars you won. You too, Spike Lee.

Which brings me to the end of this rambling mess. James Cameron’s Avatar already won the Golden Globe for Best Picture, a prize that these inbred third cousin to the Oscars had to share with a slightly more heartening success story, the relatively amusing 2009 box office smash, The Hangover. James Cameron was named the “Best Director” by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association. Allow that to sink in. Now remember that genuinely beautiful, moving and provocative films like Inglorious Basterds, Moon and The Fantastic Mr. Fox were released this year. Films that engaged audiences with their depth of imagination and creative vision and were all relative box office flops. The American people have spoken time and again. We’re so desperate for simplicity and escapism that we’ll flock in droves to every intellectually bankrupt 3D movie (or Tea Party) because it allows the viewer to focus on the shiny objects and never consider its obligatory morality. We’ve just given James Cameron the two highest grossing movies of all time. Let’s just declare “film” dead, give him another Oscar and hope the band knows how to play whichever songs the Black Eyed Peas have won Grammys for while America tries to rearrange its deckchairs.

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