The best part of Avatar: The Way of Water is a whale hunt. Midway through the film, Captain Mick Scoresby (Brendan Cowell) stalks and kills a space cetacean, called the Tulkun, for its life-extending brain fluid, called amrita. The camera quits its ethereal, disembodied glide, bumps up and down with the speedboat, and gets water on its lens for the first time. The space Peaquod sends three submersibles after the whale, uses depth charges and sonic cannons to disorient it, and attaches floats to surface and harpoon it in a process historically known as “kegging.” The chase turns a film that feels as massless as a video game into something tactile and real. It’s a breathless and suspenseful sequence: I left with the sense that writer-director James Cameron thought very, very carefully about how to kill a space whale.
The rest of Avatar 2 is mind-numbingly boring. The Na’vi’s alien society cleaves perfectly to the nuclear family with conservative fathers, dutiful elder sons, and rebellious younger ones. Characters tell each other “I see you” and “Your heartbeat is felt” in dialogue so soporific it made me doze off in the theater. Pandora’s natural splendor exists only to serve its characters’ self-actualization. Space barracudas provide them with obstacles to overcome and space butterflies let them breathe underwater like video game power packs. I left the theater wondering why Cameron created the most advanced CGI technology in history to animate a Thomas Kinkade painting. “Surely the man who wrote Terminator can tell a better story than this?” I thought to myself.
James Cameron’s at his best when he stops moralizing and lets himself love what he loves: the amoral dominance of machines over nature. In his New York Review of Books essay on Avatar, critic Daniel Mendelsohn notes that Linda Hamilton, who played Sarah Connor in the Terminator movies, said her ex-husband Cameron “is definitely on the side of the machines.” Hamilton captures the throughline of Cameron’s work with her comment: he’s in awe of machines’ indestructibility and their ability to make humans superhuman. His machine worship is evident throughout all his films. Avatar 2 features a boat battle scene where a steel cable severs a man’s arm and sends it flying like a thrown stick, Cameron’s camera lingers on “tightly muscled bodies... so taut [they] may as well be metal” in the Terminator films, and Ripley’s (Sigourney Weaver) only able to kill Alien’s titular alien in a forklift: “a technology that puts the puny human, finally, on a par with her gigantic, razor-toothed, acid-bleeding adversary,” Mendelsohn writes. James Cameron loves machines, but Avatar reveals he also seems ashamed of their environmental impact. This makes for a strange, disjointed movie.
This shame manifests in Cameron’s depiction of humans, or “the sky people.” Early in Avatar 2, he shows how human spaceship landings obliterate Pandora’s natural landscape in apocalyptic fire. Our mechanized society dooms the world, Cameron seems to suggest, and the only way to save ourselves is to regress to pre-technological society. But he reconciles his desire for environmentally sustainable primitivism with technological convenience by making the Na’vi themselves machines. As critic Caleb Crain notes, their headtails are organic USBs, and their way of life’s so harmoniously balanced with the environment that they don’t need to create anything new. The Na’vi avatars humans create bespeak a desire to press oneself into the forklift and become organic technology: a hunger to join the planetary Gaia-like supercomputer that’s the evolution of manufactured utopian Fordist suburbs. Cameron’s presentation of Avatar as an ecofable suggests something unresolved in his environmental vision. He can’t seem to accept that Pandora’s about as organic as Disney’s animatronic crocodiles, and as a result, a very gifted filmmaker makes a very boring movie.
In Umberto Eco’s Travels in Hyperreality, he writes that public desire for artificial enclosures like zoos and Epcot relies on “the original [being] idolized, hence the kitsch function.” When you don’t see animals on real nature tours, “you risk feeling homesick for Disneyland, where the [animatronic] wild animals don’t have to be coaxed,” Eco writes. “Disneyland tells us that technology can give us more reality than nature can.” He later writes that “there’s an apocalyptic philosophy that rules these reconstructions. [Nature] is declining into barbarism and something has to be saved... the thirst for preservation from imperial efficiency is the bad conscience of imperialistic efficiency, just as cultural anthropology is the bad conscience of the white man who thus pays his debt to the destroyed primitive cultures.”
Avatar’s kitsch, its digital zoo, and its vivid dullness are the products of Cameron’s bad conscience. He can’t seem to reconcile his guilt for his love of machines with what he feels they’re doing to the environment. This shame results in our most exciting big-budget filmmaker spending his twilight years making movies that feel emotionally indistinguishable from Windows XP screensavers. Despite its financial success, I think of Avatar as a cautionary tale for myself and other artists. Figure out your shit, it tells me, or your work will put your denial on display for you.
Reading Recommendations
A few years ago, I used to select magazine stories for a recommendations website called Longform.org. I’d read between five to twenty magazine stories a week to select some for the website. Over time, I developed an instinct for distinguishing between technically masterful but emotionally lifeless writing and writing which had what writer Emily Gould called “a quality of aliveness... that’s the opposite of trying to get an A+” in journalism. I still read a lot and I’ll post work I particularly liked here.
Critic B.D. McClay’s “Taylor Swift Studies” series on Substack, where she writes about Taylor Swift, commercial music making, and star persona in the digital age is the best writing I’ve ever read on modern celebrity. I particularly liked her essays on how Taylor Swift writes about men the way men write about women, how she’s “writing songs no one else can write... not because they’re out of the box or avant-garde but because she’s the only one doing these things,” and how Swift changed her tune from Red to 1989 because “Red Taylor got as big as she was going to get. But Taylor-the-person Taylor wanted to get bigger.” I think McClay’s one of our best working critics and I strongly recommend subscribing to her Substack. You won’t regret it.
Labor reporter Alex Press published a Year in Review thread of her work covering strikes and unionization efforts and some book and art reviews. Whereas other workplace reporters describe labor shifts as “quitagions,” talk about the toil that subsumes people’s lives in inappropriately jovial tones, or write books about how we can solve labor exploitation with “intentional management,” Alex never fails to treat workers with the respect and dignity they deserve. She also covers important stories that for-profit publications gloss over, from the shakeup in one of the world’s largest unions to being the first to cover the U.S. postal strike. I trust her completely as a writer and I’m glad she’s on the labor beat. (I also liked her and Gabriel Winant’s appearance on the Know Your Enemy podcast to memorialize Barbara Ehrenreich, if you’re an audio person.)
I think Manhunt author Gretchen Felker-Martin is one of our best living film and television reviewers. If you subscribe to her Patreon you’ll get multiple essays a week on everything from blockbuster horror films like “M3GAN,” to Disney properties like “Ahsoka,” to the spectacular Polish horror-musical “The Lure” delivered to your email. Memorable lines from some her reviews include “There’s a shack at the heart of America that is always burning and always un-burning,” from her review of David Lynch’s “Lost Highway,” her description of the Brooklyn Bridge “heaving and flapping like a sheet in the wind” from her review of “War of the Worlds” (2005), and her description of planes in Christopher Nolan’s “Dunkirk” looking like “motes crossing the eye of God.” Her cultural criticism of safetyism in art is also the best I’ve ever read on the subject. I promise the $5 USD subscription to her Patreon is money well spent.