Avatar

Yesterday I got out to see Avatar at the theater. I have to say, I have not been that immersed in a film environment since I saw Star Wars as a kid. With all due credit to Cameron and his cinematography team (not so much the actors, however) I don't think my response was simply because of cool visuals. Or rather, it had to do with the visuals, and with the film production team's ingenuity, but not in the way that these comprise the productive forces of most other films. What was unusual about my experience with Avatar was that the cultural studies hemisphere of my brain--the skeptical, ideology-critiquing, perpetually discontent half--was at one with the nihilistic, pleasure-seeking half. This union is the object of thought for thinking about the viewership of Avatar and for the future of cinema.

The movie quite obviously calls attention to what an 'avatar' is, what it means to inhabit, act through, and be affected through another's body. You don't need a Judith Butler bibliography to figure that out. Nor is it especially coy about linking various layers of avatarism. The perfect form is that which provides the jumping-off point for the film's narrative: the transfer of one consciousness from one whole body to another. This is then weighed against the avatarism of a human controlling a robot body from within, or controlling a robot body from a distance; or, in the other direction, the philosophical avatarism in which the universal (or life force) takes shape through the particular (or organismic). These are problems worked on within the film, but raised to such a pitch that one almost has to confront the avatarism of film itself. Precisely to the extent that the protagonist effectively inhabits his Na'vi avatar, the viewer does the same. Lapses in affect--body and mind as a unitary being--are the criterion by which the viewer judges in cinema. Even the film's failures (like its unoriginal plot, Fern Gully Redux) are intelligible within its formal success at the level of technicity.

I wouldn't recommend this movie on the basis of its narrative elements. Nor would I recommend approaching cinema in general as if it were a medium of pure narrative. Avatar is important because it basically accomplishes a theoretical trajectory set out early in the twentieth century concerning what it means to have a body and the possibility of exchanging that body--that mass of flesh strangely dis/obedient and inescapable--for another. Cinema has gestured toward this exchange for the whole of its existence; so has literature. We are now extremely close. Avatar points to the technological, factical gap between 'literally' inhabiting another body, but it performs the fallacy of that distance. That form of difference belongs to an old and dead imaginary of the body (Mary Shelley never saw cinema). It is not so much 'technology' as some imaginary externality belonging to the gods that has changed as us, and by virtue of the actual existence of technicity as something embedded in humanity. Avatarism is the new affect. As tangential evidence, I would also point to the huge effect Cameron had in determining affective modes with Titanic (the young female Werther of its day) and Terminator.