Žižek on Avatar
March 19th, 2010 § 26 Comments
Here’s something Slavoj Žižek and I have in common. We’ve both seen Avatar. I was not totally bewitched by it, maybe because balancing a pair of 3-D spectacles on top of another set of glasses while sitting two meters from the screen, tilting my head at a 30-degree angle in order to see it, detracted a bit from the visual experience. But still, Avatar was excellent: a sledgehammer of an assault on American corporate imperialism, the exo-skeleton clad high-explosive-wielding security forces a straightforward proxy for the American Army, engaged in a murderous resource grab.
Dud dialog and slightly heavy-handed (the never-to-be-obtained mineral named Unobtanium)? Sure, fine. But the plot’s lack of subtlety wasn’t the point, not amidst its political content, presented alongside stunning visuals: hallucinogenically colorful flora, chunks of mountains phantasmagorically floating in a thick fog, and blooms of shimmering jellyfish-like spirit-seeds that alight on the protagonist, Jake Sully, blessing him, and eventually anointing him. Their presence prevents the Na’vi—Hebrew for prophet—princess from shooting him dead with a bow and arrow. The Na’vi are humanoid blue creatures living in a pre-lapsarian relationship with their planet, capable of connecting to the biosphere and its fauna through their hair. They link directly to Aywa, the earth-goddess, a direct analog for James Lovelock’s Gaia. “We have nothing they need,” says Jake, bemoaning the inability of the corporate mercantilists to make an exchange to get the Na’vi out from the tree in which they make their home. Indeed: “You are so stupid!” the Na’vi princess lashes into Sully. Fair enough. They had already destroyed their planet—earth in 2154—and what could be dumber than to destroy your home and render it unlivable? Can an ecological criticism of corporate imperialism be more powerful than to simultaneously highlight its genetic avariciousness and its viral nature, destroying the world that birthed it?
Žižek did not like Avatar, but perhaps we saw different films. (Perhaps also one of us saw it and the other did not). When he glancingly touches on the film’s theme, he gets it really wrong. He writes that Pandora is “populated by aborigines who live in an incestuous link with nature… (The latter should not be confused with the miserable reality of actual exploited peoples.)” What an “incestuous” link with nature could mean is unclear. Meanwhile “actual” exploited peoples, usually invisible in the Žižekian imaginary, do tend to have more sustainable consumption and production patterns, if we take per-capita CO2 emissions as any metric.
Meanwhile, Žižek’s approach to ecology is habitually poorly considered. Stuffed underneath the gestures to stereotypes about aborigines is a stunning lack of awareness about what kind of planning patterns might truly be sustainable. Small communities living in homeostatic relationships with nature? Small is Beautiful? That’s just treacle, and anyway, there’s some posturing to do.
Amidst a bewildering, figure-eight tour, selected stops on Titanic, The Matrix, Dances with Wolves, Reds, and Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Žižek writes,
Cameron’s superficial Hollywood Marxism (his crude privileging of the lower classes and caricatural depiction of the cruel egotism of the rich) should not deceive us. Beneath this sympathy for the poor lies a reactionary myth, first fully deployed by Rudyard Kipling’s Captains Courageous. It concerns a young rich person in crisis who gets his (or her) vitality restored through brief intimate contact with the full-blooded life of the poor. What lurks behind the compassion for the poor is their vampiric exploitation.
I had not thought to see the day when a major leftist intellectual disparages the best-selling movie of all time for its director’s deployment of insufficiently nuanced Marxist politics. Nor is the movie’s Marxism as “crude” as Žižek would have it. It’s obvious that capitalism rests on a systemic egotistical logic, and radicals tend to think that the lower classes will be the ones to make the revolution—hence, “privileged,” whatever that means.
Avatar’s fidelity to the old formula of creating a couple, its full trust in fantasy, and its story of a white man marrying the aboriginal princess and becoming king, make it ideologically a rather conservative, old-fashioned film. Its technical brilliance serves to cover up this basic conservatism. It is easy to discover, beneath the politically correct themes (an honest white guy siding with ecologically sound aborigines against the “military-industrial complex” of the imperialist invaders), an array of brutal racist motifs: a paraplegic outcast from earth is good enough to get the hand of a beautiful local princess, and to help the natives win the decisive battle. The film teaches us that the only choice the aborigines have is to be saved by the human beings or to be destroyed by them. In other words, they can choose either to be the victim of imperialist reality, or to play their allotted role in the white man’s fantasy.
This is weird. There is nothing “conservative” about an audio-visually stunning attack on capitalist militarism. Why is the “military-industrial complex” rendered in scare quotes? Inveighing against the prevailing social system usually doesn’t fall under the umbrella of “political correctness,” and the Aymara and Quechua in Bolivia would probably be surprised that their invocations of Pachamama are “political correctness.” The Ecuadorian CONAIE would be shocked to find that its denunciations of the Correa government’s policies towards the Yasuni-ITT are belittled as “ecologically sound” aboriginal tendencies. Anyway, is it really true that “The film teaches us that the only choice the aborigines have is to be saved by the human beings or to be destroyed by them…the victim of imperialist reality” or a “role in the white man’s fantasy”? The people of Bil’in, masquerading as Na’vi several weeks ago in a self-conscious and cunning ploy to play to the Western imaginary, aim to save themselves, with, yes, Western solidarity activists supporting their efforts. Same with the Dongria Kondh.
Avatar has its issues. It is, in part, a film playing to a colonial mindset—the white man as hero. But the hero in a sci-fi bang-up thriller that viciously attacks a vicious social system in a manner that no one can miss. Moreover, Avatar re-codes typical imperialist memes. It is the natives who have an advanced society, and they who civilize the invader, who can only fight with the invaded, for their land, after becoming one of them. This is not so much against the typical pattern as the creation of a totally new one.
Žižek knows his Freud/Lacan et al., and knows too that theoretical pyrotechnics can enliven any argument. Or at least impress other smart people. But he must also know that sometimes a cigar is a cigar, and a mainstream critique of corporate imperialism is just that. Give it a rest.
Thanks for the trenchant analysis of Zizek’s hipper-than-thou deconstructionism. For all his brains, he’s no more than a disinformation lackey. You are totally en pointe with this review of Avatar and your analysis of Zizek’s usual sophistry.
[...] Zizek on Avatar – Max Ajil from PULSEMEDIA [...]
I am no fan of Zizek and, as is typical of him, does not add anything that has not already been said in this critique. However, I do think he makes a good concluding statement concerning indigenous people in Orissa, India.
“So where is Cameron’s film here? Nowhere: in Orissa, there are no noble princesses waiting for white heroes to seduce them and help their people, just the Maoists organising the starving farmers. The film enables us to practise a typical ideological division: sympathising with the idealised aborigines while rejecting their actual struggle. The same people who enjoy the film and admire its aboriginal rebels would in all probability turn away in horror from the Naxalites, dismissing them as murderous terrorists. The true avatar is thus Avatar itself – the film substituting for reality.”
Suppose that Zizek is right. And so? The point is not those who would “turn away in horror”; the point is those who may have turned away in horror and now turn away in less horror, or those who used to turn away in less horror and now do so ashamedly, or those who used to turn away ashamedly and now sign a petition. Or through discussing the film, feel less atomized in an inchoate rejection of capitalist imperialism and 5 years later feel emboldened to join the movement? Zizek’s political position is masturbatory purism, as Critchley has pointed out repeatedly.
This is also unoriginal and obvious — art is not life. Is Zizek realizing that for the first time? The film is not the cause or enabler of “ideological division” — modern life does that for us every day. Explaining that people “would in all probability” do something is a phrase of incredible arrogance.
Yes, art imitates life. That’s a given. Should we reject all art b/c it might “subsitute” for reality? Zizek’s comments are precious. And meaningless….
Perhaps that is what Zizek meant by the statement, but the practice of art is as equally important to its politics as its ideals- that’s my Marxian belief anyways.
Palestinian protesters using the symbolism of the film to break this real ideological division is certainly awesome, but James Cameron is still a racist and the film is still a white man’s fantasy of the noble savage.
And you said it in half a sentence. Zizek needed a whole article to expound on that very basic point which all Western leftists are no doubt aware of anyway. The point is not Western leftists. The point is everyone else, and what they’ll get from it. Seems to me to take the good along with the bad is the way to go.
Great piece, but I can’t help but think, the film’s meanings are totally lost in post-modern fragmentation…
Zizek’s argument is correct: there is no subversive potential of Avatar that comes close to opposing the brutal process of capitalist expropriation. One commenter wrote about a choice of optimism and pessimism of the Left and how Zizek is too pessimistic. With this choice of optimism about the potential of Avatar, there is no Left. No one should be optimistic about being an impotent liberal who is looking for ways to comfortably enjoy libertarian fascism, which is precisely what Avatar offers: you get to act as a degenerate liberal (caring about “naturally” primitive and passive victims who are destroyed and saved by your civilized people), while mobilizing the contempt implicit in your capitalist “humanitarianism” to defend yourself from having to truly act to stand with the struggle of the dispossessed on Earth, since these people are not the eco-friendly Navi, but despicable violent terrorists who disgust you and threaten your access as grown-children to a miserable life of un-enjoyable pleasures. (The fact that some third world people have tried to appropriate this theme does not detract from the comfortable position the movie allows their oppressor to take in regards to their own activity, they can comfortably wipe out a third world group and be a fan of Avatar, distinguishing those they killed on the fact that they do not have the Western-liberal eco-friendly innocent savages content that Avatar projects onto the Navi: they kill, oppress women, do not follow human rights, are anti-democratic terrorists, etc.)
Your Starbucks hero is the marine who continually enjoys “death from above” and saves the primitives, who pray to him at the end of the movie for his charity, with the help of the scientists. The hero remains fully immersed with his identity as naturally violent person destined to be a marine, as opposed to the naturally “enlightened” corporate scientists who are initially fully willing to go along with the slow expropriation and murder of the naturally inferior Navi until the process of expropriation becomes too brutal and close for them to effectively ignore. The main catalysts for action for the scientists against the expropriation process is some kind of “human rights” colored ethics, a simple reaction to suffering, still fully embedded in the ideological coordinates that are conducive the expropriation process and are always priori politicized in favor of those expropriating. So the marine and the scientists who never realized that their roles in the capitalist world were structured to dispossess the Navi, taking them as some kind of “natural” fate, fitting nicely with the “organic” theme of the movie, they never go through the proletarianization process (surviving through living dead, etc.) and remain embedded in contemporary post modern reality, that cannot be Communism, and as such, is anachronistically conservative. Avatar may very well encourage people to join some kind humanitarian NGO, or even the marines, but poses no threat to the expropriation process that threatens the Navi. The true naivety here is to expect that something so comfy with capitalist expropriation, trying to win gains piece by piece, will ever yield any real results.
So the problem of Avatar, and one of the reasons it sold so much, is that it approximates your reality too closely and allows you to identify directly in “life as you know it”, not allowing you to violently break out of the current postmodern coordinates, solidifying you in your roles which participate in the process that will eventually, if we rely on the heroes of Avatar, expropriate the entire Navi. The problem here is not that the positive meaning of the movie is lost in a postmodern analysis, it is that your post-modern coordinates of reality and existence (no stable identities, forced to act as if you were free, etc.) are strengthened by the movie, and that acting under these coordinates already defeats any attempt to realize the positive content. You can go to Starbucks and feel good that they are flipping a quarter at people, endorsing a step by step process of helping third world farmers, but under the same coordinates, these farmers will always need the quarter because Starbucks is entitled to “a reasonable profit”. One can watch Avatar and play the caring Lefty that supports the solidarity and charity efforts under postmodern capitalism (white TV anchors holding children in Haiti to show how much universal love exists under our current system, etc.) while deep down you know, when push comes to shove, that you, after all, “naturally” only care about your immediate interests and are willing to comfortably buy Starbucks coffee while despising terrorists and trying pathetically to enjoy your sterile hedonism. Avatar allows for and promotes this disgusting space, and third world efforts to appropriate the symbols of Avatar do not redeem it. If anyone is serious, they need to make a radical break with the staging of coordinates Avatar fully endorses.
When you start from a defective premise, you continue very logically to a defective conclusion. I’m afraid the string of pseudo-radical cliches you marshall in support of your argument don’t make it sound less inane than it is because you are engaging a strawman.
there is no subversive potential of Avatar that comes close to opposing the brutal process of capitalist expropriation.
So presumably the subversive potential recognized and appropriated by the Palestinians doesn’t count because what they are faced with is not ‘capitalist appropriation’? In other words, if one’s worldview is not constrained by crude materialism, one has lost the potential to be subversive?.
No one should be optimistic about being an impotent liberal who is looking for ways to comfortably enjoy libertarian fascism, which is precisely what Avatar offers: you get to act as a degenerate liberal
Strawman.
(caring about “naturally” primitive and passive victims who are destroyed and saved by your civilized people)
Admit it, you haven’t seen the film.
contempt implicit in your capitalist “humanitarianism” to defend yourself from having to truly act to stand with the struggle of the dispossessed on Earth, since these people are not the eco-friendly Navi, but despicable violent terrorists who disgust you and threaten your access as grown-children to a miserable life of un-enjoyable pleasures.
There’s a logical fallacy if there ever was one. A film works as a metaphor; of necessity it leaves out many details. For example, it didn’t show anyone defecating. From that I won’t deduce its position on human nature, fertilization, or recycling.
The fact that some third world people have tried to appropriate this theme does not detract from the comfortable position the movie allows their oppressor to take in regards to their own activity, they can comfortably wipe out a third world group and be a fan of Avatar, distinguishing those they killed on the fact that they do not have the Western-liberal eco-friendly innocent savages content that Avatar projects onto the Navi: they kill, oppress women, do not follow human rights, are anti-democratic terrorists, etc.
You appear remarkably immune to irony. While no human being, even your presumed oppressors, would automatically identify with blue-skinned humanoids. The oppressors — the mercenaries, and the military leader threatening to unleash ‘shock and awe’ — are more immediatley identifiable as ‘us’. Yes, it is indeed a symptom of this pseudo-radical celebration of defeat that you should focus on the sketchy details of the Na’vi, than on the rich symbolism of the oppressors that few could miss.
Your Starbucks hero is the marine who continually enjoys “death from above” and saves the primitives, who pray to him at the end of the movie for his charity, with the help of the scientists.
As i suspected, you haven’t seen the film. You couldn’t have missed the fact that it is the ‘starbucks hero’ who is saved by the native woman.
The hero remains fully immersed with his identity as naturally violent person destined to be a marine, as opposed to the naturally “enlightened” corporate scientists who are initially fully willing to go along with the slow expropriation and murder of the naturally inferior Navi until the process of expropriation becomes too brutal and close for them to effectively ignore.
So you expect the film to show the oppressor as being genuinely oppressor-ish, yet take exception to the fact that he is shown as being naturally violent? As I noted earlier, you appear remarkably immune to irony. You missed it in the fact that the white man, as a naturally violent brute, is civilized by the natives, who eventually harness his violent disposition to forward their cause.
The main catalysts for action for the scientists against the expropriation process is some kind of “human rights” colored ethics, a simple reaction to suffering, still fully embedded in the ideological coordinates that are conducive the expropriation process and are always priori politicized in favor of those expropriating.
Beneath all the verbiage, I detect no comprehension of such a thing as a structural constraints.
So the marine and the scientists who never realized that their roles in the capitalist world were structured to dispossess the Navi, taking them as some kind of “natural” fate, fitting nicely with the “organic” theme of the movie, they never go through the proletarianization process (surviving through living dead, etc.) and remain embedded in contemporary post modern reality, that cannot be Communism, and as such, is anachronistically conservative.
Dude, you need to pull your head out of wherever it is. Even Hegel didn’t claim that you descend from Absolute Spirit on down to fix the awry details of lived reality. The path to revolutionary consciousness, except in the realm of insular philosophy, always begins with personal epiphany.
Avatar may very well encourage people to join some kind humanitarian NGO, or even the marines, but poses no threat to the expropriation process that threatens the Navi.
You do realize that you are talking about a film right? So it is at the same time a metaphor and not a metaphor.
The true naivety here is to expect that something so comfy with capitalist expropriation, trying to win gains piece by piece, will ever yield any real results.
Yes, if I had indeed expected that my visit to Cineworld with a pair of 3d glasses was an overture to the imment collapse of the capitalist system, you could rightly call me ‘naive’.
So the problem of Avatar, and one of the reasons it sold so much, is that it approximates your reality too closely and allows you to identify directly in “life as you know it”, not allowing you to violently break out of the current postmodern coordinates, solidifying you in your roles which participate in the process that will eventually, if we rely on the heroes of Avatar, expropriate the entire Navi.
Yes, I habitually consort with blue aliens, and I’ve given up airtravel in favor of flying dragons. I barely noticed I was in a different world, it approximated my reality that closely. Must have been the 3d glasses.
I’m afraid that’s enough nonsense for a day.
p.s. Perhaps I am missing the irony here, and you wanted to present a caricature of the reactionary ‘radical’ who can’t write a sentence without breaking into slogans and platitudes. But here’s a tip: you’ll be taken more seriously if you learned the merits of concision.
So presumably the subversive potential recognized and appropriated by the Palestinians doesn’t count because what they are faced with is not ‘capitalist appropriation’? In other words, if one’s worldview is not constrained by crude materialism, one has lost the potential to be subversive?.
The Palestinians who appropriated it are right to recognize that they are victims of the same process that is demonized in Avatar, the point was that directly identifying with the film and playing within the staging it sets is like chopping off your legs, then trying to run a marathon. Of course the chopping is done “spontaneously” in thought if the subject does not recognize that they are “naturally” embedded in postmodern capitalist ideology.
Admit it, you haven’t seen the film.
I don’t see what this really has to do with it, but I did see the film: the one in which the God of the Navi would not listen to the Navi, but to Sully, where the Navi prayed to Sully for his charity at the end of the movie. The movie staged the Navi as fated to remain in that state, naturally, and the humans as naturally the “mechanistic” phallic who save the Navi out their own benevolence.
There’s a logical fallacy if there ever was one. A film works as a metaphor; of necessity it leaves out many details. For example, it didn’t show anyone defecating. From that I won’t deduce its position on human nature, fertilization, or recycling.
Yeah, I was saying that it wholly consistent to not translate Avatar into support for any group suffering from proletarianization (Palestinans, for example); the movie allows and encourages the space for the viewer to walk away more embedded in the ongoing brutality, since the Navi are nothing but postmodern liberal fantasy projections, not the people on Earth, and that any metaphoric translation into benevolent actions the movie produces is already stuck within the racist staging of the movie (saving and destroying the passive natives with humanitarian assistance).
You appear remarkably immune to irony. While no human being, even your presumed oppressors, would automatically identify with blue-skinned humanoids. The oppressors — the mercenaries, and the military leader threatening to unleash ’shock and awe’ — are more immediatley identifiable as ‘us’. Yes, it is indeed a symptom of this pseudo-radical celebration of defeat that you should focus on the sketchy details of the Na’vi, than on the rich symbolism of the oppressors that few could miss.
The point of mentioning that is because so many people were celebrating the fact that some Palestinians were appropriating the symbols of Avatar, I was trying to say that if anyone is serious about the plight of such groups, they should not look at this as a positive sign resulting from Avatar, but as a showing for the desperate need for hard work and struggle from the proletarian position which the Palestinians occupy but do not recognize, if they are looking to Avatar. If anyone is serious about the Palestinians, they should not be hoping on some kind of humanistic charity where the oppressor suddenly recognize that, after all, everyone is human. The communitarian groups carrying on the process depriving these people of their life-worlds define their community by continually excluding those they see as animals less than them, their very constitution precludes them from recognizes the other as “just another human”; begging them for recognition and/or appealing to Avatar as a sign that most people are “humanist” is the best way to celebrate defeat as a “progress”. If anyone is serious, they need to radically break from the postmodern liberal fantasy that will make sure the Palestinians and many others do not get the justice they deserve and that the most righteous acts never occur.
So you expect the film to show the oppressor as being genuinely oppressor-ish, yet take exception to the fact that he is shown as being naturally violent? As I noted earlier, you appear remarkably immune to irony. You missed it in the fact that the white man, as a naturally violent brute, is civilized by the natives, who eventually harness his violent disposition to forward their cause.
Sully’s interactions with the Navi never made him break from his identifications with the oppressor (corporate marines, etc.), he was still celebrating “death from above” while fighting with the Navi; showing that his process was not a civilizing transformation, they simply sit back while the marine takes over, appeals to their god where they cannot, harnesses their life world in ways they cannot (getting the big bird to ride), and is eventually crowned King and prayed to at the end of the movie. They harness his disposition as a marine, but he never becomes a Navi (in a sense that matters, not the physical body) or a genuine subject with true emancipatory potential.
Beneath all the verbiage, I detect no comprehension of such a thing as a structural constraints.
The talk about “naturally” violent, “enlightened”, etc. was to sort of point out the strict naivety of the movie that sees these sort of identifications as something inevitable and part of nature, and thus portrays the natives as naturally “non-mechanistic” passive victims that are saved and/or destroyed by the humans. Human rights fits into this, giving its beneficiaries the dubious role as victims that cannot take care of themselves, demanding a humanized intervention (an element there alongside the attempts to genuinely care). All this identification of victims prevent the true acts that would radically explode the situation and address the injustices with righteous act from taking place through international struggle, thus existing as a stuffy conservative ethics supporting injustices and expropriation.
Dude, you need to pull your head out of wherever it is. Even Hegel didn’t claim that you descend from Absolute Spirit on down to fix the awry details of lived reality. The path to revolutionary consciousness, except in the realm of insular philosophy, always begins with personal epiphany.
It is somewhat more complicated. It is not a simple person epiphany, which ends up being spontaneous thought stuck in and in favor of the unjust existing ideological situation, but something coming radically from the outside as well, starting with a radical break from the situation; which spontaneous identifications with suffering does not allow you.
Yes, if I had indeed expected that my visit to Cineworld with a pair of 3d glasses was an overture to the imment collapse of the capitalist system, you could rightly call me ‘naive’.
I was not saying that cinema should lead to a collapse of capitalism, I was just saying that Avatar does not have a positive effect on addressing the injustices that its positive contents denounce because of it is embedded in the current coordinates that create the injustices and are incapable of remedying them.
Yes, I habitually consort with blue aliens, and I’ve given up airtravel in favor of flying dragons. I barely noticed I was in a different world, it approximated my reality that closely. Must have been the 3d glasses.
Again, the ideological staging is why Avatar approximates “reality”, not the positive contents.
I’m afraid that’s enough nonsense for a day.
p.s. Perhaps I am missing the irony here, and you wanted to present a caricature of the reactionary ‘radical’ who can’t write a sentence without breaking into slogans and platitudes. But here’s a tip: you’ll be taken more seriously if you learned the merits of concision.
Sorry about that, I realized I did not make it concise enough after I had posted.
Murat, in a sentence, your point is that because the film recapitulates some oppressive ideology, it is incapable of upsetting other ideological structures, even ones it criticizes. I think. Amidst “coordinates,” “life-world,” and the rest, I’m a bit lost.
I had thought we live in a world where one of the major destructive forces is corporate mercantilist imperialism. Mainstream ideology naturalizes this force, and atomizes people. The movie criticizes this force, and makes people think, there are hundreds of millions of other people who will pay to watch a criticism of corporate imperialism. This matters. See, we are not exactly discussing Zizek here but you’re repeating him, e.g. the true acts that would radically explode reality, a divine violence, or whatever. This is fine except it’s not at all how social change occurs.
Max,
It is getting people to think, but in what ways and what types of criticisms will it encourage? The movie seems to fit well within our current idea of “real life”, how we cannot imagine anything past capitalism and have accepted our fate; Cameron treats the capitalist structure as “natural” as he treats the Navi, right down to the identities of the hero and the scientists.
In addition to what I attempt to say above, people can easily come out of this movie throughout the world’s cities thinking: “Well, what is happening is bad, but what are we going to do, go back into nature and become the victims? We feel bad for the Palestinians and other distinct groups of proletariat and are willing to donate some charity here and there and express our pity for their situation and even pressure our politicians, who will hopefully try to tinker the system a little bit to lessen their pain, but really sacrificing everything to stand with them, that is not how social change really works. It was a nice story, now back to real life everyday grind in the postmodern capitalist world. At the end of the day, we are not suckers, we can wisely see where the chips really fall, when we talk about Palestinians, we really know they are finished.”
Trying to be short, the entire movie is completely overwhelmed by the ideology of the system it attempts to criticize without even being aware of it, and thus fails from the starting line in its criticism. What you said about “how change really happens” sounds eerily too familiar to Obama’s recent talk after the pathetic health care bill he barely squeaked out of congress, when he said: “This is what change looks like”; an evil manipulative statement diverting the genuine enthusiasm behind his election into this capitalist “reality” as the only potential for our generation, which has never seen anything like the worldwide aura of Obama. It seems like this was Obama’s purpose from the beginning, to delimit and neuter any potential for real acts/events to take place that seemed to be ready to boil throughout the world at the end of Bush, an exercise in a sort of technocratic management and channeling of acts/events to make sure we cannot envision anything past our “reality”, and as such is genuine evil. It would be as if the Prophets had some kind of Pagan handlers that made sure what they did would not upset paganism, while wearing the mask of God. Thinking that this is the way that “change really happens” is a pretty good way to make sure that we do not get to where we need to go. If you accept that, our future seems to be fated to the Sarah Palins of the world, whose remark about the Democrats at the Tea Party convention seems to resonate deeply in this “reality”: “How’s that hope-ey change-ey stuff workin’ out for ya’”?
If the film is stuck within our current idea of ‘real life’, which vantage point are you speaking from that allows you to transcend it? It seems your ideology is more constraining than the one that you assume entraps everyone else. Maybe you are unable to ‘imagine anything past capitalism’ and have accepted your fate. There’s no reason to assume others are similarly disabled.
But since you want to talk about ‘real life’, I can assure you from my vantage point outside post-discipline academy, that much of this po-mo claptrap has been out of vogue for at least 20 years. In the 21st century it is possible to discuss radical politics without having to bring up the phallus.
Murat,
When you write “you,” “we,” etc it’s hard to tell what you mean and who you’re addressing. Once again social change often starts with a no: no war, no war taxes, no prisons, no draft. Constructive proposals are harder. Zizek is notoriously poor at constructive proposals, has he written a line about his preferred Utopia?
Now, you could also try to be honest. I said how change doesn’t happen, not how it does. Change often begins with consciousness-raising. The movie undoubtedly raised some consciousnesses. Others came out feeling that they could not do anything. Sure, fine, but they went in the way too. You want a pure, catalytic event that will affect everyone, a philosophers stone transmuting everyone into revolutionaries, but again that is not how the real world works, having nothing to do with Obama and everything to do with the cultural bases of change, or socialism.
When you write, “Trying to be short, the entire movie is completely overwhelmed by the ideology of the system it attempts to criticize without even being aware of it, and thus fails from the starting line in its criticism.”
once again, the ideology normalizes technological prometheanism, capitalism, and war. The movie does not. The issues of empowerment are real but are here secondary. And we are talking in circles.
Dear MURAT— You sound like you’re really FUN at parties. A vast exploding intellect, but I don’t detect much heart. I wonder how many butts would be in the seats if you had been at the helm of turning this subject matter into a movie. The fact that AVATAR has sold a billions $$$ of tickets just might mean that it struck a cord deeper than visual phantasmagoria. It stuck a artist’s knife into the very belly of the beast – that we have become the very definition of Fascism – a very courageous subject for Cameron to take on. Something that all the exploding heads intellectuals (such as yourself & Zizek?) have not managed to bring above the radar screen.
Suggestion: stay OUT of the Starbucks — Friends don’t let Friends Starbuck — and you might want to curb the intellectual masturbation … “don’t play with that, you’ll go blind.” It seems to have blinded you to your Heart.
Zizek tries to redeem himself. With The Hurt Locker he’s on the mark.
Avatar is a gift to anyone who is pro-environment and anti-military, anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist. It takes incredible risks by subverting 9-11 WTC iconography, cheer-leading the defeat and death of U.S. military personnel, and even high-lighting the evil of one of the main symbols of Zionist occupation (the armored bulldozer).
It is accessible, watchable and incredibly popular. In fact, it will be the most watched movie of all time. And it’s anti-capitalist, anti-militarist and anti-imperialist. And glorifies insurgencies. And teaches respect for different cultures. And the need to build alliances between different groups. And has a touching love story. And incredible special effects. And is an ode to tropical forests and bio-diversity.
But no, little lefty intellectuals aren’t happy. Maybe they could make a cryptic black and white movie that three cultural studies grad students could enjoy. This is why the left is largely irrelevant.
Fuck this pisses me off.
Does it show?
Paul
Thank You Paul … for seeing the SAME movie I did. And for aknowledging the incredible courage and vision Cameron exhibited in turning out a movie exposing these destructive social / planetary issues. I also appreciate your comments about the blow-hard innalectuals … I had room-mates like the people posting (this is my first visit to this site).
” … the man standing next to me, his head was exploding … I hoping the pieces wouldn’t fall on me … ” / Dylan
I measure my growth as a caring / feeling person by the tears flowing from my eyes each of the 4 times the message of this movie washed through me … and the feeling of hope it inspired that this corporate / brute force UGLINESS has been addressed!
Peace / Out
Hah. Someone else who shares my disdain for the cultural studies type.
Re Avatar: I couldn’t agree more.
After following several dialogues criticizing or defending Avatar and it’s message, I am still left with one intellectual paradox rolling around in my head. No matter what the story or message of Avatar is, be it anti-imperialist, deep ecology, or white messiah the FACT is that it functions to serve modern corporatism and it’s continual process of concentrating wealth. The gross earnings of Avatar ranks higher than the GDP of 29 countries, including Belize, Liberia, and East Timor. In keeping with the ‘concentration of wealth’, we all know that it takes money to generate that sort of profit, and Avatar cost $237 million to make and $150 million to promote. So capital generates more capital, all into the hands of the same people (Rupert Murdoch and Fox).
No comment about how green/ecological or sustainable it is to produce such a monstrosity, we can’t even imagine the energy footprint this must have produced.
So who cares what the message, the medium is the message. The medium here is corporatism, capitalism, and commercialism, the story seems secondary.
“Avatar re-codes typical imperialist memes.”
“…takes incredible risks by subverting… cheer-leading… even high-lighting… main symbols…”
“…exposing these destructive social / planetary issues.”
for disdaining the “cultural studies type” you two have no qualms about (mis)using their techniques. you hate zizek although he has written volumes on these same destructive issues, spent a lifetime thinking about them, and has never shrunk from defending his ideas in public. you celebrate the “consciousness raising” properties of hollywood but scoff at a serious writer/theoretician.
i’ll address some misunderstandings. zizek reserves his harshest criticism for the “impotent left”, and also offers ways to break out of it. zizek uses movies not because he thinks they are “catalytic events” that will redefine our politics, but because it makes his theories simpler to understand (and because he enjoys them). his theories are the ones that do the “exploding reality” for you, provided you spend time to study them. you called zizek postmodern and then name dropped the phallus as if that is some important aspect of his political critique – you’ve either misread him or not bothered at all. yeah, he’s wordy, but he’s very accessible compared to the authors HE reads. you’re the ones who expect it to be fast food enlightenment and then condescendingly express your “disdain” at the author for not giving it to you.
you might also consider that fox (as darren pointed out) gave cameron the go to make this film. you know, the same guys who endorse wars, who downplay the systemic ecological/political violence occurring everywhere, and show us celebrity ass all day long? thus you receive your critique in inverted form: you call intellectuals who work all their lives to understand the world snobby/useless, but then hail cameron for producing essentially fern gully redux and making a billion dollars for corporate interests. and you do this all the while praising the film for its subversive imagery, throwing in half digested bits from literary theory (they highlighted the armored bulldozer!).
Zizek now admits that he wrote the ‘review’ without actually seeing the film. Embarassing, isn’t it?
it’s not embarassing because he’s been saying this for years. he exploits films for their theoretical value, sometimes only taking a fragment of its plot (he often makes noticeable errors/simplifications when describing plotlines).
he’s not aiming to explicate the content but to critique the position from which the film’s content is delivered. obviously he is not for imperialism or ecological damage. his point is that the way this message is structured undermines its effectiveness.
But he evidently doesn’t know how the message is structured. What’s the value of theory that is based on a false premise?
historians don’t need to be immortals to do meaningful analysis. you don’t know the theory’s premises, but zizek has a good idea of the movie’s.
the problem with avatar is the perspective the movie comes from, i.e. the western liberal gaze, which allots a particular role to aliens/dispossessed in their fantasy. whenever a movie is widely successful it’s evidence that it touched upon our collective fantasy. therefore zizek is examining this fantasy, not the actual film production which is mostly viceral action. the fact that other disenfranchised peoples are using the na’vi as their avatar to the west cements his argument – they think the west will only notice them if they play the proper role in the fantasy.