my five year plan. stumbling toward movies since 2006…

The Experience of Watching Avatar

I finally saw Avatar. My friend Tim and I had the same idea, apparently: see it during the Superbowl and hope you can avoid crowds. So we dutifully paid Fandango more money than the experience was worth and went to the AMC at Lincoln Center in IMAX 3D hoping to be dazzled.

The content of the film, strangely, doesn't really warrant too much discussion. Suffice it to say that I didn't much care for it. It's very pretty at times, and there are one or two really interesting concepts (the way the Na'vi 'plug into' nature I thought was a nice touch, as were the 'walking' robots used in battle - indeed, there are a lot of avatar systems in the film). But for the most part, I thought it was pretty bad, and the motion capture 'performances' made me want to retroactively hand a special Oscar to Andy Serkis, who between Gollum and King Kong is the only actor to ever give a convincing performance through mo-cap. But the film, some pretty production design aside, has little to recommend it: mediocre performances, terrible dialogue, completely unremarkable plotting.

But the experience of watching Avatar was unique. First, there was waiting in line for an hour. The line for Avatar is a unique experience, because it looks less like the line for a movie and more like the one for an attraction at a theme park, complete with constantly patrolling ushers checking to make sure we had our tickets and directing traffic. At the end of the 'film experience,' the music of the closing credits was immediately interrupted by an usher asking us to leave through the back of the theater, the way one does with an amusement park ride. But then there's the film itself: it gave me an intense headache, and afterward I felt exhausted, as though the constant work my eyes were doing to keep the film's images in focus had worn me out. Later I threw up. It's a day later and I still have an intense headache and can feel my eyes twitching, attempting to recover.

I don't consider myself someone with particularly bad vision. I wear glasses, yes, but most people who wear glasses, when they try mine on (this is, for the unacquainted, something of a rite-of-passage in any friendship between two people with corrective lenses), tell me that my glasses make no difference for them, because my prescription is so weak.

Maybe it's because I kept noticing how shallow the depth of field was in the film - I wanted to appreciate the shot composition, but Cameron keeps a lot of the film out of focus as a means of drawing attention to those objects that are 'in 3D.' Sometimes, as when the depth of field is rendering large objects close to the viewer out of focus, this can be profoundly ugly. One shot, in which a character with two arrows impaled in his chest turns his torso, the arrows breaking the plane of the screen, is laughably trashy. Often the 3D/depth-of-field has less the effect of true three-dimensionality and more the effect of being able to discern that certain objects have vague relationships to one another: this object is in front of that one, etc. etc. An object will be entirely flat and lacking dimensionality except with reference to other objects, which makes the film play as though populated by the cardboard standees of characters one would find in a movie theater lobby. Or the characters of Paper Mario.

I was reminded of the day in my film theory class when my professor brought in Eadweard Muybridge's stereoscopic images of taxidermy. Nothing on screen felt real. The primitive sense of three dimensionality simply rendered everything emotionally distant, as though I was watching someone else play a video game. It was very overwhelming, and hence very boring. I spent much of the latter half of the film feeling trapped - trapped in my oversized glasses that would not work if I turned or tilted my head even a few degrees to the right or left, trapped in the oversized IMAX theater and surrounded by thirty paying filmgoers on either side of me, trapped by the constant visual assault in front of me, by the pounding audio and the short average shot length and by the knowledge that if I took my glasses off, the entire frame in front of me would be out of focus. I wanted to escape but did not. The film made me feel completely helpless and drained me of any resistance. In short, it was one of the most unpleasant experiences I've ever had watching a movie.

I wondered how this could be the extraordinary experience people had been championing for months. How could this terribly written film (in which a character a hundred and fifty years in the future makes reference to Donald Rumsfeld's Shock and Awe campaign, the equivalent of troops today talking ground strategy in terms of Appomattox Court House) be the highest-grossing film of all time?

I'll give the overwhelming quality of the film's 3D visuals something: no other film would be able to convince so many Americans to embrace a message so startlingly anti-military that even I, a dyed-in-the-wool lefty, was offended by it. A film that treats the rank-and-file American military as xenophobic barbarians without a trace of dignity or sympathy.

So that's what I take away from going to see Avatar: a spectacle is able to convince people in messages they don't believe in. By overwhelming the senses, we can reinforce any ideology we so choose, even one antithetical to most of our viewing audience.

Shock and awe, indeed.