http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=urNyg1ftMIU
Nowait, that’s not what I mean. Wrong avatar.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8WT85fv1dkw
Not quite this either.
There’s been a lot of intelligent criticism of Avatar–its grandiose claims to being technically revolutionary, when the 3D technology has actually been around and more inventively done for awhile.
Then there’s the whole reiteration of the American Messianic Colonizer Fantasy, of which Dances with Wolves and Ferngully are examples. Annalee Newitz outlines what’s wrong with the seemingly benign fantasy here. Even thoughtful conservative centrist David Brooks sees the same general problem.
I ended up getting into a huge argument with some friends about this issue, which I find fairly non-controversial. People either feel that analyzing the ideological layers of a movie deprives them of their enjoyment of just watching it, or they don’t see what’s wrong with white guys identifying with and trying to help the blue people, or else they’ll go the other extreme and think that the fact that what little plot this movie has is little more than a reinscription of this problematic but familiar American narrative means that people shouldn’t see the movie.
But nobody so far has talked about the movie the way I want to talk about it. As it happens, I do have a problem with the White Messiah narrative, and I wish I could see a different kind of story, one in which the white guy isn’t the main character, for example. And it’s not like such movies don’t exist. Even The Matrix did a better job with multicultural representations. And I am also skeptical of the movie’s own claims that the whole 3D thing changes the movie watching experience forever and ever.
But here’s what I want to talk about. I loved watching that movie. Not the movie itself, which I was just ok about, but the experience of watching it. I loved looking at it. The 3D thing did something wonderful to my brain, as if some kind of actual brain candy was coming in right through my eyes, activating some visual pleasure center that’s never been activated quite that intensely before. Part of the original pleasure and delight of cinema, for sure, is the pleasure of looking. We’ve forgotten what it was like for those original silent movie audiences to just sit in a dark room and watch images of places that they weren’t flickering black and white on a silvery screen.
On a related note, I finally decided to have a look at Farmville, in a sort of pop culture scientific way, to see what all the freaking fuss was about. I was really bored tending my six little brown patches, until I started adding some friends. Looking at what they had done with their farms–the colors and the brightness and the shininess, but also all the money and presents that suddenly started piling up, made me feel like I was suddenly shooting into a whole different, brighter universe. Except this universe is all blingy and with ads and scams. Its blinky brightness has a slimy sheen to it, and playing for more than an hour or so makes me feel queasy and craving.
This is addictive.
Stuff that happens to your eyes can be addictive. How does that work? What part of the brain is this that gets hooked on interesting, bright colors?
