CFV 426 – Avatar/Pocahontas Mashup FINAL VERSION from Randy Szuch on Vimeo.
The point was made previously on this blog, but this excellent mash-up makes more visible the parallels between Avatar and Pocahontas. It reflects how the cultural myth of romantic savages versus colonial war machine (or loss of innocence/ fall from grace) continually persists in popular culture. Because it is a product of an industrialized culture and the radical transformation of its place on Earth, the continued popularity and re-working of this theme should not be simplistically reduced to false-consciousness. Yes it’s true that it is a distorted picture and Native Americans are right to criticize the stereotypes that ossify their culture and flatten them. Additionally, it is fair to say this is a necessary myth for the colonial culture, so it is not innocent or immune from these idealogical critiques.
Nonetheless, Pat Breton points out in Hollywood Utopia: Ecology in Contemporary American Cinema that critics need to develop an ethical kind of intervention that doesn’t ignore the legitimate (and very real) response of the audience. Likewise, Adrain Par argues in her discussion of Dances With Wolves that the film’s popularity was working on both latent and manifest sensibilities, the latent coming from the primal and repressed, whereas the manifest derives strictly from our response to the storyline. She suggests that in order to transform our culture from militarism to sustainability, it is important to recognize the “affect” that comes from deep responses to media with transformative themes. I remember really being inspired by the film, but than “learned” to hate it after all the criticism. But since militaristic and mechanistic thinking is so prevalent in our society’s cultural output, we need to recognize that when the Primal Matrix asserts itself, it does trigger a genuine revival of Spirit.
In this sense, I believe Avatar represents a good case study. Yes we can dwell upon its simplistic genre recycling and tropes (as the above mash-up alludes to), but clearly there is a deeper emotional response emanating from the cultural feedback loop happening with this film (Adrian Ivakhiv has a good round up at his Immanence blog). I see similar signs of this when the cultural commons reveals itself through the emerging economic practices of the Web. Lawrence Lessig, Clay Shirky and Henry Jenkins all document how the audience is quite alive in its response to media. People engage in all kinds of creative and participatory practices that were not reflected by the older, hierarchical structure of media of yore. So we should stop thinking about the “dominant” media with old models (this is the plea from David’s Gauntlett’s Media Studies 2.0).
Participatory cultural behaviors are not new, nor did they ever go away. In the 20th Century we can go back to Dada and follow a line through various avant-garde cultural movements to punk and hip hop that show active and often resistant behavior working beneath (or occasionally blinking on) the radar of the culture industry (albeit the industry’s machinery has become a lot more ravenous when it comes to commodifying subcultures). But the way in which marketing constantly repurposes grassroots cultural expression is a healthy sign that 1) culture constantly adjusts in ways the resist domination and 2) marketers still depend on authenticity as a reference point. This is all a long-winded way of saying that rather than being a deadened populous walking around like zombies in a shopping mall simulacrum paved over a dead planet (as critics like Chris Hedges would have us believe), the spark of life (however dim it may be) still persists among us, and can be brightened when certain stories speak to our inner moral compass and its sense of justice. No wonder that Palestinians and indigenous peoples are drawing upon the Avatar meme to highlight their causes. The “Fall”‘s mythology can play a subversive role in changing the meaning of dominant symbols, serving as a kind of fulcrum that can shift the culture’s center of gravity into a new direction.
I’m hopeful from reading Jonah Sachs and Susan Finkelpearl (makers of Story of Stuff), who argue that the open secret of marketing’s past successes (such as the Marlborough Man and Volkswagen’s populist appeal) were based on powerful (visual) stories. Propaganda has also achieved such successes through promoting narratives like the Clash of Civilizations. In terms of the environment, scientific facts about the planet’s perilous state are not penetrating the populous to the same extent as the disinformation flak spread out by the oil industry whose simplistic screed have a way of guiding the discourse just enough to scramble the facts (“confuse and conquer!” was the surrealist manifesto we used to use back in college). But what the energy companies lack is a connection to the Primal Matrix (although now that I think about it, crude oil is essence of primal goo and the fact that we burn it is an interesting psychological response to our planetary Id). Movies like Avatar, on the other hand, draw upon the repressed within all of us, the billion dollar response of the buying public a good sign that it is strongly active.
I’m struck by a quote from Bill Moyer’s interviews with Joseph Campbell, who said, “The myth is the public dream and the dream is the private myth.” If ads are the dreamlife of corporations, then perhaps films like Avatar are the dreamlife of the Planet. Which, of course, includes us.
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