Waiting for the Barbarians (2 page)

As any working writer knows, the large part of what’s successful in a piece of writing is the work of the editor. This collection owes its existence in particular to the three editors whom I’ve been enormously lucky to work with over years: Bob Silvers at
The New York Review of Books
, a figure who needs neither an introduction nor my accolades, and to whom in many ways I owe my career; the indefatigable Leo Carey at
The New Yorker
, by now a great friend; and, in many ways hovering over all these pieces although he only actually edited one, Charles McGrath, with whom I worked so often at
The New York Times Book Review
and who, you might say, has been my Chiron. He was particularly great about helping me think through this book and what should be in it. It goes without saying, once again, that Bob Gottlieb has had an enormous influence on nearly
everything I’ve written from the start, a debt I doubt I’ll ever be able to repay (among so many).

The person who got all this into book form (following the welcome suggestion by Rea Hederman) is Michael Shae at New York Review Books, whose patience, good sense, and generosity toward me, during an especially trying time, made this collection possible. Lydia Wills shepherded it through with her usual grace and common sense. To all of them, as Bob S. would say, “great thanks”!

TWO HUGELY POPULAR
mashups—homemade videos that humorously juxtapose material from different sources—currently making the rounds on the Internet seek to ridicule James Cameron’s visually ravishing and ideologically awkward new blockbuster,
Avatar
. In one, the portentous voice-over from the trailer for Disney’s Oscar-winning animated feature
Pocahontas
(1995) has been seamlessly laid over footage from
Avatar
, in which, as in
Pocahontas
, a confrontation between dark-skinned native peoples and white-skinned invaders intent on commercial exploitation is leavened by an intercultural love story. “But though their worlds were very different … their destinies were one,” the plummy voice of the narrator intones, interrupted by the sound of a Powhatan saying, “These pale visitors are strange to us!”

The other mashup reverses the joke. Here, dialogue from
Avatar
—a futuristic fantasy in which a crippled ex-Marine is given a second chance at life on a strange new world called Pandora, and there falls in love with a native girl, a complication that confuses his allegiances—has been just as seamlessly laid over bits of
Pocahontas
.
In one, we see an animated image of Captain John Smith’s ship after it makes its fateful landing at Jamestown, while we hear the voice of a character in
Avatar
—a tough Marine colonel as he welcomes some new recruits to Pandora—sardonically quoting a bit of movie dialogue that has become an iconic expression of all kinds of cultural displacement. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he bellows, “you are not in Kansas anymore!”

The satirical bite of the mashups is directed at what has been seen as the highly derivative, if not outright plagiaristic, nature of
Avatar
’s plot, characters, and themes; themes that do, in many ways, seem like sci-fi updatings of the ones you find in
Pocahontas
. In the film, the ex-Marine, Jake Sully—wounded in a war in Venezuela and now a paraplegic—begins as the confused servant of two masters. On the one hand, he is ostensibly assisting in a high-tech experiment in which human subjects, laid out in sarcophagus-like pods loaded with wires that monitor their brain waves, remotely operate laboratory-grown “avatars” of the indigenous anthropoids, nine-foot-tall, cyan-colored, nature-loving forest-dwellers called Na’vi. All this technology is meant to help the well-intentioned scientists to integrate and, ultimately, negotiate with the Na’vi in order to achieve a diplomatic solution to a pesky colonial problem: their local habitation, which takes the form of an enormous tree-hive, happens to sit on top of a rich deposit of a valuable mineral that the humans have come to Pandora to mine.

The problem is that Jake’s other master—for whom he is, at first, secretly working, infiltrating the Na’vi with an eye to gathering strategic reconnaissance—is the mercenary army of Marines employed by the mysterious “Company” that’s mining the precious mineral. (Anonymous, exploitive corporations are a leitmotif in the movies of this director.) It’s clear from the start that both the Company and the Marines are itching to eschew diplomacy for a more violent and permanent solution to the Na’vi problem. The dramatic arc of the movie
traces Jake’s shift in consciousness as he gradually comes to appreciate Na’vi culture, with its deep, organic connection to nature (and—the inevitable romantic subplot—as he comes to adore a lovely Na’vi princess bearing the Egyptian-sounding name of Neytiri). Eventually, Jake goes over to their side, leading the native people in a climactic, extremely violent uprising against their thuggish oppressors.

So far, it would seem, so politically correct. And yet most of the criticisms that have been leveled at the film since its premiere are, in fact, aimed at the nature of its politics rather than at the originality (or lack thereof) of its vision. Many critics have lambasted Cameron’s film for what they see as the patronizing, if not racist, overtones of its representation of the “primitive” Na’vi; the underlying hypocrisy of a celebration of nature on the part of a special-effects-laden Hollywood blockbuster (to say nothing of the film’s polemic against technology and corporate greed); and the way it betrays what David Brooks, in a
New York Times
Op-Ed column, derided as the movie’s “White Messiah” complex:

Criticisms such as Brooks’s are not to be dismissed—not least because the ugly complex he identifies is one that has consistently marred Hollywood representations of cultural confrontation from the earliest
westerns to the more recent products of a supposedly more enlightened age. (One of the many earnest movies to which
Avatar
has been derisively compared by its detractors is the 1990 Kevin Costner epic
Dances with Wolves
, in which a Civil War hero similarly goes native, leading the Indian tribes against his former compatriots.) What’s striking is that so many critiques of
Avatar
’s political shortcomings often go out of their way to elide or belittle the movie’s overwhelming successes as a work of cinema—its enormous visual power, the thrilling imaginative originality, the excitingly effective use of the 3-D technology that seems bound to change permanently the nature of cinematic experience henceforth—as if to acknowledge how dazzling it is would be an admission of critical weakness.

An extreme example of this is to be found in a searching critique posted by the critic Caleb Crain on his blog:

But our “objective knowledge” about the mechanisms that produce theatrical illusion is beside the point. To witness a critic working so hard not to surrender disbelief—the aim, after all, of drama since its inception—is, in a way, to realize how powerful the mechanisms that seek to produce that surrender really are. (A notable exception to the trend of critical resistance was the
New Yorker
review by David Denby, which began, “Avatar is the most beautiful film I’ve seen in years.”)

As it happens, the movie that haunts
Avatar
—one that Cameron
has often acknowledged as his favorite film—is one that takes the form of a fable about the difference (and sometimes traffic) between fantasy and reality; a movie whose dramatic climax centers on the moment when the protagonist understands that visually overwhelming and indeed politically manipulative illusions can be the product of “highly skilled, highly labor-intensive simulations” (a fact that does not, however, detract from the characters’, and from our, appreciation of the aesthetic and moral uses and benefits of fantasy, of illusion). That movie is, in fact, the one the Marine colonel quotes:
The Wizard of Oz
. Consideration of it is, to my mind, crucial to an understanding not only of the aesthetic aims and dramatic structure of
Avatar
but of a great and disturbing failure that has not been discussed as fervently or as often as its overtly political blind spots have been. This failure is, in certain ways, the culmination of a process that began with the first of Cameron’s films, all of which can be seen as avatars of his beloved model, whose themes they continually rework: the scary and often violent confrontation between human and alien civilizations, the dreadful allure of the monstrous, the yearning, by us humans, for transcendence: of the places, the cultures, the very bodies that define us.

Humanity and human life have never held much attraction for Cameron; if anything, you can say that in all his movies there is a yearning to leave the flesh of
Homo sapiens
behind for something stronger and tougher. The movie that made his name and established him as a major writer-director of blockbuster successes,
The Terminator
(1984), is ostensibly about the poignant conflict between the human race and a race of sentient, human-hating machines that create a lethal new weapon: a cyborg,—“part man, part machine … fully armored, very
tough. But outside it’s living human tissue. Flesh, hair, blood.…” The plot, which essentially consists of a number of elaborately staged chase sequences, concerns the attempts by one of these, famously played by Arnold Schwarzenegger—an actor notorious for his fleshly armor as well as for his rather mechanical acting—who returns to the present from a post-apocalyptic future in order to assassinate a woman called Sarah Connor: we are told that she will one day give birth to the boy who, when he grows up, is destined to lead a successful human uprising against the machine overlords.

But whatever lip service it pays to the resilience of the human spirit, etc., the film cannot hide its more profound admiration for the resilience of the apparently indestructible cyborg. As the story evolves, this creature loses ever-increasing amounts of its human envelope in various encounters with the woman and her protectors—an eye here, a limb there—and is stripped, eventually, of all human characteristics. By the end, it emerges out of an explosion as a titanium skeleton, hell-bent on pure destruction. In an interview with
The New Yorker
that appeared just before the release of
Avatar
, Cameron recalled that the inspiration for the movie, which he says came to him in a dream, was this sole image: “a chrome skeleton emerging out of a fire.” Everything else came later.

It would be hard to claim that Cameron—who has managed to wring clanking and false performances from fine actors like Kate Winslet, Leonardo DiCaprio, Billy Zane (
Titanic
), and Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio (
The Abyss
)—is an actor’s director; his films’ emotional energy, and certainly their visual interest, lie in their awed appreciation of what machines (and inhuman creatures) can do, from the seemingly unkillable cyborgs of the
Terminator
movies to the unstoppable alien monster queen of
Aliens
to the deep-sea diving capsules and remote-controlled robots featured in
Titanic
and
The Abyss
. The performances that work in his films, significantly, are either those of mediocre actors
like Schwarzenegger who actually play machines or good actors playing tight-lipped, emotionally shut-down characters, like Sigourney Weaver in
Aliens
(1986), which Cameron wrote and directed.

The Terminator
had a dark sense of humor about our relationship to technology, an issue that is at the core, in its way, of
Avatar
. In one memorably disturbing scene, a woman can’t hear her boyfriend being beaten to death by the Terminator because she’s listening to loud pop music with her headphones on; in another, we—and the Terminator—overhear a crucial message on Sarah Connor’s answering machine, which greets callers with the sly announcement: “Ha ha, I fooled you, you’re talking to a machine. But that’s OK, machines need love too.” The joke is that they don’t—and that’s their advantage. It’s no accident that by the end of
Terminator 2: Judgment Day
, Cameron’s hit 1991 sequel to the original, Sarah Connor has become rather machinelike herself—pointedly, even cruelly suppressing maternal feelings for the child she has borne, strenuously working out, hardening her body, arming herself to the teeth with an eye-popping arsenal of handguns and automatic weapons.