Thoughts on James Cameron’s Avatar and “Turn On, Tune In, Veg Out”
jseliger.com
jseliger.com
It's more anti-military / anti-imperialism than anti-corporate. Yes, the bad guys are a corporation, but I get the feeling that they did that to make the film more marketable. Americans probably would have a much harder time cheering for the aliens who are slaughtering US Marines. But very little about plot would have changed had the bad guys been military instead of a private corporation.
As for anti-technology, I think it's more about the dangers of abusing power of any kind, including the power that technology lends us.
Agreed. I think many people are reading way too much into this plot. Sometimes a story is just a story.
I want to make a movie about a technologically and culturally advanced people who encounter a primitive race. The primitives have high murder & infanticide rates, endless stupid tribal wars, etc. The technologically advanced people force assimilate or drive off the primitives and live happily ever after. The End.
There's almost always some crossover between the two, but it's important to remember that each is very difficult to do well. Very few artists are skilled at both. A work that tries to focus on both, as Avatar does, usually fails.
Avatar is an excellent example of world-building, on possibly a bit too grand a scale for a movie: there are a handful of things that should have been explained away or lampshaded, but the explanations just wouldn't fit into an already-too-long movie. Where it falls flat is in its attempted social commentary.
It is hard to imagine that the incentive for space travel to find new source would be outraced by extremely fast usage of resources.
Plus there are asteroid belts to mine, and probably tons of them in the system that that Avatar is occupied.
From my political perspective, this is mostly a libertarian film that pit a peaceful tribe who rightfully homestead the island against a fascist corporation that was granted evil government privilege.
Though I can't help but think that most people will think this is about environmentalism and planting tree and that greedy evil free market corporation ruins everything.
I think I read that somewhere...
A lot of the themes and messages in Avatar are very common in science fiction, in particular the parallels with the story of Dune are striking:
- greedy corporation seeks to exploit a resource with little regard for the native population (spice/unobtainium)
- saviour from same race as greedy corporation is accepted into native population and through a mythical prophecy, becomes leader and unites tribes against greedy corporation
- native population and their natural habitat are massively underestimated and through help of saviour defeat greedy corporation
Just like Postsingular made me wish someone would figure out how to strum the "lazy eight", Avatar left me wishing life on Earth came with an organic USB cable.
Sorry if there's a spoiler in there...
I think you're missing the point if what I said. Lots of things are economically viable to a corporation if it can externalise the downsides (either by dumping the wastes or getting a bailout when it make mistakes) or simply get the legislation that favours it (google "oil industry tax breaks" for an example).
You can't get away from legislation. Bailouts are legislation. But making polluters pay requires legislation. There is no mythical free, unlegislated market that will magically do the right thing. There's only good legislation and bad legislation.
Aren't there other more pressing forms of pollution than CO2 emmisions? What about strip mining, particulate emissions, and methane? Is this really about curtailing emissions, or creating a lucrative secondary trading market and taxation system to benefit people like Al Gore who are both heavily invested in carbon trading, and part of the legislature.
The story was entirely incidental to showing off cool tech and exciting action scenes. We might as well discuss his anti-technology stance in Terminator 2.