Avatar as a Dream - My Lengthy Thoughts

When I first saw the trailer for Avatar, I just looked over at my wife and said: "That looks really good."
"Yeah," she responded, "it does."


I spent the next morning doing my standard procedure for things I discover to like: visiting the official website and gobbling up all the propaganda, over and over again. After another day spent away from anything Avatar, I regained some perspective. I wondered what the chances were of this movie garnering reviews with the following sentence: "The visuals are breathtaking, but the plot is cliched." Eighty percent? Ninety percent? I mean, 2012 came out just before that, and the only two things that anybody could say about that was "The plot was terrible, but the effects were amazing!" (I think that if Hollywood were to have a funeral, that would be its eulogy: "The plot was terrible, but the effects were amazing." And while we're on the topic, its tombstone would read, "The book was better.") But something about how James Cameron described his world, his Pandora, planted a seed of cautious optimism. Anybody who cares about his setting so badly that he'll pump $300 million into it must know what he's doing, right? (Wrong.)

He said the movie is based on a dream he had, which actually kind of pissed me off. Really? A dream? I've had dreams that felt like the most epic things in the universe that were actually about Bill Cosby and Jello monsters, but that wouldn't make for a movie. Frankly, it pissed me off because George Lucas said something similar about Star Wars Crime One: The Phantom Menace. There's this whole underwater adventure scene with giant fish and these weird frog people who sound like babies mocking Jamaicans, and guess where it came from? Lucas' little kid wanted them to go underwater. So he did it. Creativity is not just randomly putting crap into a story, and if that's the way that millions of dollars are going to be spent telling stories...well, that sucks, is my point. Ubersweet dreamz aren't reasons to make million dollar stories.

Or so I thought.

I intentionally avoided all reviews of Avatar the days leading up to my own viewing. I've found that reviews just ruin movies for me. As my wife and I walked into Star Trek, Allie mentioned that one reviewer had said: "This movie goes boldly where every other movie has gone before." And then for the rest of the movie, that's all I could see--the predictable plot, the standard jokes, the nice CGI. It's reviews that kept me from movies that I really wanted to see, like 9, and Where the Wild Things Are, etc. If I were to go see them afterward, I would only see those movies from the lens of these criticisms that I'd originally hoped wouldn't exist. I can't root for a movie if I read the review, because too often I'm forced to agree with the reviews after seeing the movie because I was looking for the flaw. And then movies that critics love, like Whale Rider, I loathe. It's like reviewers and I never match up. And you know why? Because entertainment doesn't exist so that other people can watch things for you. The best reviewer, for me, is me.

So now I'm trying a new policy of refusing to read reviews, and simply seeing movies that I want to see. (I guess that I'm a hypocrite because I'm kind of writing a review right now, presumably so that somebody else reads it.)

Okay, so far we've covered CGI splurge movies, basing movies on dreams, why we shouldn't read reviews, and how much I hate George Lucas. I swear, this all ties in. (All you clever kids who clicked the hyperlink will realize that I've already pulled the Star Wars card and come back to it again. This post will be one giant "The Circle is Now Complete" Darth Vader line, I swear.)

The movie itself. We saw it in 3D, which really, everybody should, even if they wear glasses like myself and are constantly readjusting their facewear for the first thirty minutes of the movie. Don't be put off by the 3D. I know that most movies that tag "3D!" to its title are complete losers, but the rule is not fast, my friends. Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs was fantastic even though they advertised its three-dee-ness, and usually my rule is that any movie with "In 3D!!!" on its poster is a waste of life. The previews in Avatar smacked of movies who coalesce to make that rule necessary. Piranha started out as a Spring Break movie with three dee hotties in bikinis, and ended with a guy sticking a chainsaw into my very face. The three dee in Avatar itself was...subtle. Artistic, even. It's as if James Cameron cared so much about his setting that he wanted his audience to be in it as much as possible. (Wait, maybe he does care.) And the typical punch-in-your-face tactics weren't enough: he wanted full and total immersion. The three dee is careful, and even beautiful.

The entire concept behind Avatar is that of entering another world, both physically and culturally. The hero dreams of flight once he loses movement of his legs, and he refers to his Avatar adventures as a kind of dream. Eventually that place becomes real to him while his human life seems a dream. This isn't just Dances With Wolves meets Starship Troopers meets 300 million dollars. The romance is the best romance I can remember seeing in a movie for a long time, and that's not just some added bonus to the movie, I think. The romance, the Avatar concept, the 3D, the elaborate CGI, the dreaming--it's all about leaving one world and entering another, and isn't that a big part of what love is all about? Isn't that a big part of what story is all about?

I loved Avatar--I don't think that the visuals outshone the story, or overwhelmed it, or anything. To sound cool, I might even say that the visuals are the story. Cinema is not a form where Story and Visuals are forever damned to battle each other, mythological nemeses whose sparks of conflict power the very universes they embody. Movies don't have to be either story dominant or visually dominant. They're both essential, defining parts of the same medium. But we've reached that rotten state in Denmark where things must be diametrically opposed, and we've already been conned by too many million dollar CGI fests.

So the twitchular reaction to Avatar is naturally going to be that its visuals are too good. For that very reason, I myself was suspicious and had to make jokes about what all the reviews were destined to say before I ever even saw the thing. I'm just getting slogged by all these movies whose stories merely serve to prop up the visuals or the action or the fact that they got these two big-name actors into the same movie. I mean, text is the cheapest commodity in the world right now; you'd think Hollywood could find people who write compelling screenplays.

But Avatar is not that movie. Everybody who leaves that movie is smiling and happy, and it's not just because of some visuals. It's because it's a darn good movie. You just can't grade this stuff. James Cameron himself pointed out that Star Wars didn't win Best Picture; some movie called Annie Hall did. What is really the best movie of those two? That's what happens when you try to grade great movies.

The buzz and critical responses that surround movies have almost become more entertaining than the movies themselves. Half the time I only go to see movies so that I can make sarcastic comments and show how witty I am, and I know I'm not the only obnoxious guy you know who does that. Spitting out criticisms afterward is a traditional process that's almost become more satisfying and enjoyable than the movies we watch.

For example, my wife and I found a bunch of criticisms of Avatar online, all along the lines of it being a liberal tree-hugging fest. Even my dad admits, after seeing it, that the writers had a tree to hug. (The phrase "axe to grind" doesn't work quite so well for these people, I think.) In a string of comments I read six or seven different readings of how ridiculously liberal Avatar was.

Let me say that we're both conservative. In fact, my wife is the kind of person who wouldn't be offended if you called her a radical conservative. She'd only be offended if you had to ask. And she didn't get any of that when she saw Avatar. (And if anybody were to reasonably catch liberal bias in anything, it would be her; trust me.) Sure, nature = good and corporate greed = bad. I'd be agreeing with everybody if this were Hellboy II, WALL-E, or The Day The Earth Stood Still (which I have). But Avatar is just too good.

So all my ridiculous movie-watching rules, like "Let's make sarcastic comments about predictability," "3D movies are bad," and "any plot with nature is contrived liberal dogma"--they go out the window, because Avatar isn't one of those things we go watch so we can tell other people we saw it and we can then share our witty criticisms.
Let's quit swishing Avatar around in our mouths and measuring the aftertaste as if it's some kind of wine-tasting. It's one of those movies that remind us all why we love movies in the first place, why we even care about stories, about other people and other universes that don't really exist. It's an adventure worth having, a dream that sticks with you much longer than an episode of Bill Cosby and the Jello monsters.

So to check--I talked about reviews being lame in the beginning, and at the end. I mentioned Star Wars a bunch in the beginning and again at the end. Same thing with visuals, CGI, and dreaming. I even mentioned my wife at the beginning and again at the end. And did you notice that zinger about the Jello dream? Am I awesome or what? All that's left is a conclusion.

Avatar is a great story and a great movie, because it knows that the visuals are part of the story. It knows that a great story is a kind of dream, an other-world worth visiting that makes us feel stronger in this one. You know how when you wake up from a dream and try to describe it to somebody, you go through narrating what happened and it sounds like the lamest thing ever, and all you can say is stuff like "While I was dreaming, it felt really, really scary/exciting/amazing/important"? That elusive element, whatever it is, that makes dreams awesome and after-dream explanations comical, is exactly what Avatar is. It's dreamlike in its amazing visuals, its emotions, its romance and adventure--things that, in the end, are exactly what make for an amazing story.

Children's Show Connossieur? Yes.

Due to a complicated set of circumstances, I watch roughly three hours per day of children's television. The result? This blog post.

There exists a formula for children's show success. I don't know that it's a successful formula, but it obviously exists. Here it is: Get something that normally shouldn't speak, such as animals, inanimate objects, vehicles, or the British, and make a show based around it. Examples:

Choo Choo Express: Talking animals, Vehicle
Pooh and Friends: Talking animals, British
Lola and Charlie: British
Handy Manny: Talking tools
Dinosaur Train: Talking animals, Vehicle
Jungle Junction: British talking animals that are also vehicles (not even kidding)

A few shows of note:

Mickey Mouse Clubhouse
Clubhouse is one of Disney's many Pimp-The-Franchise shows, where they make a show just because the characters are already famous. (Pooh and Friends is another such crime.) Probably only ten minutes of every 30 minute episode is original material; they rehash the same animated songs and dances every time. But is it educational? Let's put it this way--any show where every episode's climax is something called "the Hot Dog dance" isn't gonna bump your kid's IQ.

Little Einsteins
Of all the children's shows I've seen, this is probably the most educational one. It's also the only show whose DVDs were recalled because they're "not actually educational." This is a show where every episode features a classical composer or artist. For Halloween, they trick-or-treated in the Hall of Mirrors of the Palace of Versailles. Disney sticks this show next to regular brain stimulants like Mickey Mouse Clubhouse and then goes out on a limb and calls the show "educational." Apparently, when they tested Little Einstein watchers against non-TV-watching children, the Little Einsteiners weren't smarter. Well, duh. What do they expect non-TV-watchers to do when they're not watching TV? Tag buildings? Sell drugs? So while cinematic masterpieces like Dinosaur Train and Handy Manny run and sell like mad (all while insulting your kid's intelligence), shows that feature guest stars such as Mozart and Tchaikovsky get their wrists slapped. I mean, a recall? Really? Aren't those usually reserved for cases like when your faulty tires will lead to potentially fatal accidents?

Imagination Movers
This is one of those creepy kid shows where all the characters are adults. If you were to take the Wiggles and All-Americanize them, you'd get the Imagination Movers. They're a band of warehouse workers (band in both the musical sense as well as the camaraderie one) who solve incidental problems within fifteen minutes, finding excuses to play original music along the way. In short: some garage band tried to make it big, didn't, and opted instead to do a children's show. The result is an eerie sense of pedophilia:


I don't think any parent really wants Mr. Goatee prancing around in front of their children every day. But apparently, they do.

It Begins

It's on.

Atlas Shrugged

Atlas Shrugged is not a small book in any way. It's hefty. It's a veritable tome. My version has nearly 1100 pages, and each page is packed with chunky paragraphs in 8 point font. Additionally, the themes of Shrugged are pretty weighty themselves. It took me the better part of a year to get through this volume, and that's more because of the second fact than it is the first. The book's messages about free will and independence are delved into with incredible depth, and nearly every page demands that the reader sit back and reflect on its contents. At its base, though, lies a simple Good Vs. Evil conflict, where the heroes overcome enormous obstacles to save the world from disaster. There is mystery, intrigue, and foreshadowing. But the good guys are industrialists and the bad guys are lazy freeloaders and bureaucrats. It's an economics epic where the author pushes its philosophical message so far that it cannot be received as Just A Story. The book centers around its title metaphor, that of the great minds of the country going on strike and shrugging off the weight of a world that takes advantage of their successes and punishes them for their virtues. It's heady stuff, and it demands a heady response. While Shrugged's metaphor is poignant, especially during a time when the government is bailing out banks, owning car companies and firing executives, I still have some problems with how it's used in this book. Examples follow.

Atlas Skipped Sunday School
Rand goes out of her way to denounce the "mystics" of religion. Sharing, giving, and charity are all denounced strongly, on any level of interaction. But it goes further than that. Some basic immoral acts such as adultery are lifted up as triumphs of Rand's philosophy. The man who commits it feels guilt, and that guilt is considered, by the text, to be his great flaw. The woman he commits adultery with, Dagny Taggart, the main character of the book, has sexual relations with three different men--all considered to be exemplars of Rand's philosophy. Examples of sexual promiscuity and infidelity are tied uncomfortably to the rest of Rand's philosophy, and she goes out of her way to make those connections, and to justify them.

Atlas Didn't Know When To Shut Up
A lot of this book is abstraction. Probably 1247 pages of this 1100 page book are devoted to describing every philosophical nuance of a look or a stance or a thought. Adjectives aren't good enough for Rand. People look like extensive metaphors and feelings--everybody embodies some kind of philosophy, whether it's the way they drink their coffee or the way they cook food. It adds depth. It can also grate my freaking nerves after awhile. Like after an entire page. The worst, though, is a 60 page monologue given by the fictional champion of Rand's philosophy. This is given near the 900 page mark, after all of the events of the plot have illustrated Rand's theme. But that's not enough. She needs 60 pages straight of dialogue, all from one single character, to punctuate it. It's the single greatest example of breaking the Show versus Tell rule I've encountered. Not only does this guy outright state what's already been shown, he's also outright stating what many characters have already outright stated. Even worse, he outright repeats himself nearly the entirety of the monologue. We get it. The book's long enough already.

Atlas Ruled Candyland
One of the reasons that Rand's philosophy comes forward so strongly and clearly in Shrugged is the fact that the entire setting is devised to do so. The antagonists of the novel, the bureaucrats, politicians, and lazy people, are clumsily crafted caricatures. While it's true that the things they do and the things they believe are all too often represented in our real world, these characters are almost insultingly flat. They are better suited to warding off fowl than they are to representing human beings.

Rand works hard to condemn the existence of gray in her black-and-white view of life, but she does so through a novel which presents a black-and-white reality. Obviously, this is a problem intrinsic to her medium--we cannot comprehensively prove anything about reality through fiction, but that is especially true when that fiction is pointed towards proving a specific thing. So while Rand's allegory is intelligent and poignant, it still suffers from the fact that it is, after all, just an allegory.

Final Thoughts
In the end, this is a must-read. The only reason that I needed to summarize my criticisms of the book is because the book forced me to. Shrugged is so well thought out that, in order to really read the book, you have to digest what it's saying, page by page, and look at what you really think. I don't agree with it all. But the victory of Shrugged is that I have to make that decision. The book takes itself so seriously that you have to, too. You have to decide when it takes itself too seriously, and when it's speaking truth. By the end, I found myself considering a lot of my own philosophies. I didn't buy it all, and while Rand may say that I failed her book, I still think that Atlas Shrugged wins a victory.

Science joke

Okay, so I just came up with this, and I'm really proud of it. That will probably only continue for the next five minutes, so I'll hurry up and tell it:

So Stephen Hawking, Albert Einstein, and Niels Bohr all end up in this weird alternate universe where famous people (dead and living) get together for the sake of being material for great jokes. After years of walking into different bars and crossing that famous road, they finally all run into each other.

Upon meeting each other, they are all suddenly beset by an impulsive urge to engage in a footrace. For the sake of impartiality, they enlist Sir Isaac Newton as the official. Sir Newton spends two minutes jamming ball and powder into his 1700s pistol, and then he fires it in the air, signaling the beginning of the race.

Stephen Hawking wheels into a black hole and pops out at the finish line.

Albert Einstein grabs an anvil and yells that because E=Mc^2, he just performed the equivalent of beating everybody in the footrace.

Niels Bohr...it's hard to tell what happened with Bohr. Witnesses of the race say that he lost by a mile, but Bohr contends that he won while nobody was watching.

In order to settle the dispute, the three famous physicists all come up to Sir Newton to see what he says, being the father of physics and everything.

Sir Newton opens his mouth to answer, but only blood comes out. He had been suddenly struck by the ball he had fired into the air minutes earlier, because as we all know, what goes up must come down.

Everything You Need To Know

Over the last eight months, I’ve seen a...healthy amount of teenage chick flicks. They are...thoughtful, inspired, intelligent exposés of teenage life, and, obviously, of life in general. Here is the wisdom I’ve been taught:

EVERYTHING I NEED TO KNOW, I LEARNED BY WATCHING TONS OF TEENAGE CHICK FLICKS:


1. It’s not your looks that are important, but who you are on the inside, especially when you’re being played by Lindsey Lohan, Amanda Bynes, Anne Hathaway, Hilary Duff, or Mandi Moore.

2. When life gets hard, you just need to power on through it by having a fairy godmother/rich royal relative/understanding father/presidential father/sensitive boyfriend.

3. The best way to resolve every complication in your life at once is by making a heartfelt speech in a large public setting, to everyone, including random strangers who have no idea who you are but who will still nod their heads in understanding as you talk vainly about yourself.

4. Popularity doesn’t mean anything—except that you’re a jerk.

5. Never feel like you need to change yourself. Unless you do. In that case, a radical wardrobe switch will do the trick (see number 2).

6. Someone always has a crush on you.

7. While looks aren’t important (see number 1), your true love will always be good-looking, anyway. Not that that’s important.

8. You shouldn’t judge others and fit them into stereotypes.

9. Cheerleaders are always freaking jerks, unless you’re a cheerleader.

10. When you make a mistake, everyone will eventually forgive you and you’ll come to a greater understanding of your true self (which was pretty awesome in the first place, anyway). This will all happen at the same time (see number 3).

Well, I have to go now. I’m off to find a fairy godmother/rich royal relative who’s willing to buy me a new wardrobe so that I can better understand that it’s my inside which is important, giving me enough maturity to have a sexy significant other.

New Blog

I've always been wary of "second blogs." I'm more especially wary of third and fourth blogs, but they don't have the same ominous slippery-slope feeling of the second. I feel like the division of people's online personalities into several different blogs does not translate very well to real life. You don't have a political self, a casual social self, a religious self, and a funny-comics-that-I-happen-to-like self that you direct your friends to in real life. They're all the same self.

I think this is why people don't have more than one facebook page. (Well, most people don't.) So, I hope that my desire to start a second blog doesn't irreversibly fracture some vital part of my Actual Personality. I feel like there are now Two Of Me online, involved in some kind of less antagonistic Gollum/Smeagol relationship. I don't know why I don't just merge all of this hypothetical content I suddenly aspire to write with the content of this blog. Either way, for now I have two blogs, and the Gollum to my * is Short Stories That Don't Suck.

Short Stories That Don't Suck is inspired by my curiosity with the short story genre as a writer. I love to write short stories, and from what I can tell, a lot of writers do. But according to a lot of people, the genre's passed the point of no return, received orange pips in the mail, forgot to wipe the blood of a lamb on their doorpost, etc. But I hypothesize that during such a period of history when all we want are shorter and quicker things (see: text messaging, Twitter, commercials), short stories should not be sucking. If anything, there should already be some kind of iTunes-like service where you can purchase a single short story for 99 cents instead of having to buy the entire collection from a bookstore.

Stephen King suggested that short stories are becoming a little too elitist and literary. He might have a point, though I love my literary fiction. I want to find the stories that are good whether you're an English major or not, the kind of story you'd recommend to both Uncle Archibald and Uncle Bill. What I've opted to do with SSTDS is post, three times a week, a different short story you can read for free online. (Not the same story three times.) They'll be, in my estimation, short stories worth reading and worth remembering. I hope the blog turns out to simultaneously be some form of defense for the genre as well as a successful exercise in articulating my aesthetics.

Meanwhile, * will probably remain a forum for me posting short, random crap with intermittent and inconsistent intervals. Meanwhile, go read a good short story every now and then. Email me (cduzett@gmail.com) a list of what you think some of the best short stories you've ever read are; that'd be enormously helpful.