'Avatar' arouses conservatives' ire
Conservatives are blind to the 3-D blockbuster's charms
By Patrick Goldstein
[avatar_movie_promo_screenshot]
It's no secret that "Avatar" has been stunningly successful on
nearly every front. The James Cameron-directed sci-fi epic is already
the fourth-highest-grossing film of all time, having earned more than $1
billion around the globe in less than three weeks of theatrical release.
The film also has garnered effusive praise from critics, who've been
planting its flag on a variety of critics Top 10 lists. The 3-D trip to
Pandora is also viewed as a veritable shoo-in for a best picture Oscar
nomination when the academy announces its nominees on Feb. 2.
But amid this avalanche of praise and popularity, guess who hates the
movie? America's prickly cadre of political conservatives.
For years, pundits and bloggers on the right have ceaselessly attacked
liberal Hollywood for being out of touch with rank and file moviegoers,
complaining that executives and filmmakers continue to make films that
have precious little resonance with Middle America.
They have reacted with scorn to such high-profile liberal political
advocacy films as "Syriana," "Milk," "W.," "Religulous," "Lions for
Lambs," "Brokeback Mountain," "In the Valley of Elah," "Rendition" and
"Good Night, and Good Luck," saying that the movies' poor performances
at the box office were a clear sign of how thoroughly uninterested real
people were in the pet causes of showbiz progressives.
Of course, "Avatar" totally turns this theory on its head.
As a host of critics have noted, the film offers a blatantly
pro-environmental message; it portrays U.S. military contractors in a
decidedly negative light; and it clearly evokes the can't-we-all-get
along vibe of the 1960s counterculture.
These are all messages guaranteed to alienate everyday moviegoers, so
say the right-wing pundits -- and yet the film has been wholeheartedly
embraced by audiences everywhere, from Mississippi to Manhattan.
To say that the film has evoked a storm of ire on the right would be an
understatement.
Big Hollywood's John Nolte, one of my favorite outspoken right-wing film
essayists, blasted the film, calling it "a sanctimonious thud of a movie
so infested with one-dimensional characters and PC cliches that not a
single plot turn, large or small, surprises. . . . Think of 'Avatar' as
'Death Wish' for leftists, a simplistic, revisionist revenge fantasy
where if you . . . hate the bad guys (America) you're able to forgive
the by-the-numbers predictability of it all."
John Podhoretz, the Weekly Standard's film critic, called the film
"blitheringly stupid; indeed, it's among the dumbest movies I've ever
seen." He goes on to say: "You're going to hear a lot over the next
couple of weeks about the movie's politics -- about how it's a Green
epic about despoiling the environment, and an attack on the war in Iraq.
. . . The conclusion does ask the audience to root for the defeat of
American soldiers at the hands of an insurgency.
So it is a deep expression of anti-Americanism -- kind of. The thing is,
one would be giving Jim Cameron too much credit to take 'Avatar' -- with
its . . . hatred of the military and American institutions and the
notion that to be human is just way uncool -- at all seriously as a
political document. It's more interesting as an example of how deeply
rooted these standard issue counterculture cliches in Hollywood have
become by now."
Ross Douthat, writing in the New York Times, took Cameron to task on
another favorite conservative front, as yet another Hollywood filmmaker
who refuses to acknowledge the power of religion. Douthat calls "Avatar"
the "Gospel according to James. But not the Christian Gospel. Instead,
'Avatar' is Cameron's long apologia for pantheism -- a faith that
equates God with Nature, and calls humanity into religious communion
with the natural world." Douthat contends that societies close to
nature, like the Na'vi in "Avatar," aren't shining Edens at all --
"they're places where existence tends to be nasty, brutish and short."
There are tons of other grumpy conservative broadsides against the film,
but I'll spare you the details, except to say that Cameron's grand
cinematic fantasy, with its mixture of social comment, mysticism and
transcendent, fanboy-style video game animation, seems to have hit a
very raw nerve with political conservatives, who view everything --
foreign affairs, global warming, the White House Christmas tree --
through the prism of partisan sloganeering.
But why is it doing so well with everyday moviegoers if it's so full of
supposedly buzz-killing liberal messages?
"It has the politics of the left, but it also has extraordinary
spectacle," says Govindini Murty, co-founder of the pioneering
conservative blog Libertas and executive producer of the new
conservative film "Kalifornistan."
"Jim Cameron didn't come out of nowhere. He came on the heels of all the
left-wing filmmakers who went before him, who knew that someone with
their point of view would have the resources to finally make a
breakthrough political film. But even though 'Avatar' has an incredibly
disturbing anti-human, anti-military, anti-Western world view, it has
incredible spectacle and technology and great filmmaking to capture
people's attention. The politics are going right over people's heads.
Its audience isn't reading the New York Times or the National Review."
I suspect that's a good explanation. But if I were trying to get to the
bottom of conservative complaints with "Avatar," I'd offer three more
key reasons why the film has set the right's hair on fire:
Glorifying soft-headed environmentalism:
If you hadn't noticed, the conservative movement has become the leading
focal point for skepticism about global warming. The Wall Street
Journal's ardently right-wing editorial pages have been chock-full of
stories ridiculing everything including government sponsorship of
alternative energy, nutty Prius enthusiasts and scientists who allegedly
suppressed climate change data that called into question their claims
about global warming (a flap the WSJ dubbed "Climategate").
Ever since Al Gore took center stage with his documentary, "An
Inconvenient Truth," conservatives have been falling over one another in
their attempts to mock liberal planet savers, taking special pleasure in
slamming Hollywood environmentalists who fly private jets or live in
huge houses.
(As soon as Climategate erupted, two Hollywood conservatives surfaced,
asking the academy to take back Gore's "Inconvenient Truth" Oscar, even
though, inconveniently, the Oscar had actually gone to the film's
director, not Gore.)
So Cameron's giddy embrace of a primitive people who live in harmony
with their land -- and his scathing portrayal of a soulless corporation
willing to do anything, including kill innocent natives, to steal and
exploit their planet's valuable natural resources -- is the kind of
anti-technology, pro-environment dramaturgy that sets off alarms.
Godless Hollywood triumphs again:
Conservatives have complained for years that Hollywood ignores, laughs
at or disrespects religion. And to be fair, they are not so wrong. It's
almost as rare to see a film with a sympathetic portrayal of an openly
religious character as it is to see a film with a leading role for an
African American actress. I think it's a stretch to call Hollywood
godless, but it would certainly be fair to call it an extremely secular
world.
Conservatives are always quick to point out that when someone actually
made an openly religious film -- and of course we're talking about Mel
Gibson's "The Passion of the Christ" -- it made hundreds of millions of
dollars.
Of course, they usually fail to mention that when Hollywood made 2005's
"The Nativity Story," a sweet, very respectful religious drama, it
earned $37 million in the U.S., just about what it cost to make. Ross
Douthat is probably right. Moviegoers are far more comfortable with a
fuzzy, inspirational form of pantheism than they are with an openly
biblical message.
Hollywood's long history of anti-military sloganeering:
There is no doubt that "Avatar" portrays its military contractor
characters as barbarous mercenaries, willing -- even eager -- to wipe
out innocent natives in their pursuit of Pandora's precious resources.
It almost feels as if Cameron is drawing parallels, not only to the Iraq
war, but to Vietnam. But while Hollywood often makes antiwar movies,
"Avatar" is something different -- a peaceful warrior film, celebrating
the newly aroused consciousness of a Marine turned defender of a higher
faith.
What's fascinating is that the American people, who have almost always
shown strong support for our foreign wars, would happily embrace a film
that portrays its military characters in such an unflattering light.
My guess is that audiences have seen past the obvious because the film
is set in a faraway, interplanetary future, not in present-day America.
When Russian political dissidents wanted to criticize their oppressive
regimes, they would often write stories or make films that were set in
the past, inoculating themselves by using a 15th century czar as a
stand-in for the tyrant of the day. Cameron has done the same thing, but
by moving forward into the future, creating a safe distance for his
veiled (and not-so-thinly veiled) social messages.
"Avatar" has, of course, far more on its mind than its politics. It's a
triumph of visual imagination and the world's first great 3-D movie. But
it is fascinating to see how today's ideology-obsessed conservatives
have managed to walk away from such a crowd-pleasing triumph and see
only the film's political subtext, not the groundbreaking artistry
that's staring them right in the face.
http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/la-et-bigpicture5-2010jan05,0,\
5932910.story
