Nineteen Ninety Nine.

I sit at the tail end of the new millennium’s first decade. A perfect cultural perspective, divided in half: my childhood growing up observing the decadent excess of the 1990s and my formidable years in the blatant reality of the new millennium – fleeting, promising, disappointing, redefining. A harsh reality, dumped like a brew of molded dangling carrots and ice-cold rancor.

What did my cinema see? It saw everything and nothing; the disillusionment of the people – the spectator, the mother – and the photoplay itself. It began with the unease of the unknown – a stench of fear that has emanated from the cultures of yesteryear: the ticking collapse of the stock market plummet; the echoing tick of doomsday clock’s minutes to midnight. “Reality! Reality!” they shouted, humming a prayer that only those with skin can offer. But the culture evaporated when the zeroes returned with comrades. The 2000s hit us in every realm – what did the cinema capture?

The machine. The device, the apparatus itself. Us in transit, now stalled permanently. The dripping jail cell rot of the mirror stuck to Neo’s finger as he pulled back in The Matrix. He digests the silver, delivering a scream echoed out by the bloodcurdling ambience of a server disconnect. He is agonized, tortured, but free. The apparatus was the allure of the organic in the light of its barren scope -- the green tilt of nature now replaced with the neon glow of a digital code. Reality, thus, was the scarcity, and the machine was our artificial prevention from the ‘real’. To feel the natural and the return of the organic we must unplug ourselves and face the chrome-covered intensity of actuality.

A warning. A sincere hope that the pratfalls of the horrorshow before us would never mimic the world that watches. We attempted to refuse. Now in 2009, the scaled blue skin of the Avatar in James Cameron’s titular film, offers the same sense of ‘real’. The artificial digitations of the organic, and our complacent stupor with which we watch, all rested in 90-degrees with glasses the sizes of the reel itself gazed appropriately on the screen.

Avatar preaches the beauty of the organic and the desperate need to preserve its natural allure, yet it is a plea made through the machine, the inorganic preaching the power of the tangible. Those in the Matrix pods are depicted as victims to the development of the real, and we truly do succumb to its ease: “it’s not organic, but it’s close enough”. Now, we watch the cinema not for how it reflects reality, but how it resembles it. The goal is to force the unreal to mimic until it reaches secondary existence, a sort of doppelganger to the substantial – the cluster of starspark freckles scattered along the electric blue flesh of the Na’vi’s, looking as if it mimics the ‘real’ feel of Cameron’s cat-smurf blanket of skin.

We are watching the birth of the matrix. We aid in the disintegration of reality itself. I watch with disbelieving eyes as the people lay within the pods in an electronic embryonic state of being – electronic replaces umbilical, our eyes sag because we’ve never used them before. I laugh disbelievingly, nodding my head in faux-critique posture until days later I am transfixed like a saucer eyed cub at the artifice of reality on a screen that preaches disconnect as a virtue: “look at your size in comparison to your creation – the machine has surpassed you”.

I am hell bent to experience the experience. I arrive an hour before the electro-cinematic rolls tape. I am eager to become the pod, allowing the cinema of attractions to continue onward. I sit back and am presented at. The fetal positions that humans-turned-batteries find themselves in within the hollowed human grapevine looks comforting, and I slowly find myself crossing my legs a little closer than before, until I find both legs atop my cushioned theater seat, feeding the machine (both the cinematic, that, in the wise words of Christian Metz, doesn’t exist until I watch it, and the industry machine itself).

How have we gotten here in only ten years? The shift from the warning of 1999 to the complacent and subtle transformation in late 2009; we face extinction on a mass level, and I return to my fetal position for another fix of the fantastical, larger, brighter, closer to both reality and the audience. I am blinded, and worst of all, I am becoming the very thing I shook my head at so confidently. In the era of the nines, I rallied against the necessitation of the plug in. Now my cinema depicts the organic as only achievable through the process – Jake Sulley feels more alive within the electronically accessed natural world – and through the spectatorship. The nines are over; we are at the tail end of the zero decade, and our warning to ourselves went unnoticed, resigned simply as spectacle, not statement.

The Promise of the 'More'

Dear James Cameron,

There is something between an artist and a ringleader – the same way there is something between a speaker and a politician – that is a far better suited title for you and your cinematic cohorts. You don’t quite pillage our cultural landscape as much as you promise to. But we’ve seen what you’re capable of: taking the purposefully melodic horror of Ridley Scott’s Alien, and transforming it into a wartorn battlefield epic in Aliens, a film whose differences from its predecessor transcend simple pluralization.

What have we done to deserve this feast for the senses, devourer of the spectacle? A punishment for our culture’s abundant love of excess, perhaps – the equivalent of the parent who, one finding you smoking a cigarette, forces you to finish the whole pack. But we haven’t smoked just one in years. We’ve fallen for the desire of more, the desperation for more, the drug-infueled fix for the senses, the shutting down of the brain and the vicarious orgasm of the external: my eyes, my ears, but not my mind. Stimulation on a mass level; I feel dirty.

A marketing campaign built entirely on meaningless bombardment – first of the visual, then of the narrative. You have promised us this, and only this: we haven’t seen this before. But we have, just as much as we haven’t. So I ask you, rather bluntly: what the fuck is Avatar? What is it really? Not what it should be, or what it was 14 years ago. But what is it now? What do you want it to be/hope it to be/need it to be – not for you, but for us.

Because what would have simply entertained nearly a decade and a half ago is now left as more an analysis of us, our culture, our desire. You’ve produced something that you felt we needed before we needed it – a choice of your own accord. Now, we’ve seen it all, but we are still immersed in an industry, a society, that tells us ‘we’ve seen nothing yet!’

Progress. We do nothing but progress, but to no secure endpoint. Oneupsmanship on a grandiose level; I fear for the worst. Above all, I fear you, Mr. Cameron, are a puppeteer of this ambiguity. There is something larger – necessary even – in what Avatar seems to be presenting to us. But I know that it’s aware. Christian Metz speaks of the voyeur within the cinema, that film is not aware that we watch it, but needs us to in order to exist – it doesn’t want to know that it is being viewed, yet demands it.

Its one spoken word – “this is great” – is all we need as viewers. We watch, and the film demands that we care. And, perhaps most importantly, we are in the last legs of being able to pretend we have a choice. At 20, I stand at a point of reflection. Half of my consciousness inhabits the last half of the Twentieth century, while the other half persists through the first part of the Twenty-First.

“We have evolved! I swear it!” And what better place for that false promise – accusation, even – than through the photoplay, the cinema itself. You have taken on a debt of reflection, promising to show us things we’ve never seen before, and things that we can never see again. Because what film does is transcend the spectacle and capture the moment of evolution – on a cultural level, a mechanical level, and an internal level.

But what the early Twenty-First century has shown us is that there is no separation for film to document. The cultural landscape has become externalized, mechanical in nature, and absent in objective spectatorship. We watch to feel on a personal level – our only moments of internal solitude in an age of constant accessibility and expected voyeurism. And so there is your film, which comes to us mere weeks before we embark on the unknown, and continue down the already downtrodden new millennium’s second half.

These weeks of apparent anticipation should be looked at with a nervous eye – one that asks us all to make a decision as to which way we will go: the route of the tangible, the internal becoming externalized, and our cinema reflecting that. Or a refusal. A refusal to heed the promise of the ‘never-before-seen’, avoiding at all costs the empty, and, instead, demanding something more: something to hold on to; something that is not as fleeting as the memory of the moment the cinema showed us something, but the cinema itself.

We’ve disregarded the tangible ages ago; even the romantics, with a tendency to hold on for too long, have traded the photobooth strip of pictures for Apple’s Photo Booth album. We don’t touch anything. And so a film – about humans being transported into the body of a ‘non-human’ creature – begs the question of what it is that Avatar is doing? Depicting us, perhaps, exactly as we are: desperate to be submerged in the mechanical, loosing touch, but gaining power -- or a secondary sense of it. We are placed into the Avatar, and we loose ourselves as we gain a notion of 'our selves'. That is what the Avatar does, but what is it that Avatar is doing?

The answer is nothing and everything: it is progressing us, but without the tangible, without realism or motion on our part or its creators. So, instead, I await, with befuddled enthusiasm for subject matter which neither interests me nor intrigues me for its actual value, but instead for its zeitgeist defining prowess, its ability – or audacity – to claim refuge in the neither-regions of our cultural consciousness, as something surpassing cinema or experience, becoming both and neither in the process. This is not film.

Sincerely,

Rod Bastanmehr