Dehumanizing Apparatus, Spectator Spectacle Incarnate

"The hologram, the one of which we have always already dreamed… gives us the feeling, the vertigo of passing to the other side of our own body, to the side of the double, luminous clone, or dead twin that is never born in our place, and watches over us by anticipation."

- Jean Baudrillard, “Simulacra and Simulation” (and as quoted already in relation to “Avatar” by Nidesh Lawtoo (see Works Cited)).

“Avatar” arguably may not be one of the best movies ever made—and it’s taken a beating in some critical quarters over the years, after making more money than any other ever—but it’s certainly one of the most important or influential. It’s something of the standard-bearer of the digital revolution in cinema and doubtless has been so for motion capture and what there has been of a revival in stereoscopic filmmaking. (By the way, long before this or the 1950s craze, “3D” is older than film and some of the first series photography and films were stereoscopic experiments, so talk about “techno-indigenous.”)

Unfortunately, it seems many tend to focus on the stupid story in respect to how its environmentalism and anti-colonialism is analogous to Earth and its human history. Or, more so, the oft-recited trifecta of “Dances with Wolves” (1990), “FernGully” (1992), and “Pochahontas” (1995), contemporaries, surely not coincidentally, to when James Cameron began working on “Avatar,” although Peter Jackson’s “The Lord of the Rings” trilogy and Wētā FX are the more important visual antecedent. (And although I’m not sure where giant cat people came from.) And, it’s open to all manner of criticism regarding its heavily-relied-upon “white savior,” “white guilt,” and “noble savage” tropes. Mining “unobtanium” from the “Mother” nature of the moon “Pandora” populated by “Na’vi” natives; there’s not much subtlety going on there. Ditto the falling tree as referencing the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, and the preemptive warfare of “shock and awe” working off of the Iraq War. “Freaking daisy cutters,” we get it.

It’s almost good, though, that this narrative is such a simplistic, if not inane, shell for the most basic hero’s journey plotting. The wonder is how a great many words have been wasted on essays and books on these most uninteresting aspects of the picture, essays by the likes of Lawtoo excepted. Admittedly, I’ve been guilty in the past of this, but I think it may be best even if one tries to ignore all of that silliness. It’s not worth it, and it belies what really matters here. Not only the pure spectacle, that is, which I assume everyone recognizes—perhaps as a simple division of (lack of) substance versus style. That ignores, however, how the worldbuilding is reflexively the substance, the posthuman Baudrillardian philosophy, the point of the movie that’s actually consequential.

The analogy to pay attention to is the one revolving around sight. Being taught “to see,” told to “see through her eyes” the world, and the repeated line of “I see you,” for a narrative about a dream or video-game or virtual-reality-like interface technology that connects an earthling “operator” to its 10-feet-tall Na'vi “avatar.” Basically, what Mark Zuckerberg and company are trying to do in the real world now, what Second Life already did, with the Metaverse except in the movie it doesn’t look ridiculous. Anyways, clever then that the protagonist operator is wheelchair-bound. Not because this marks him, too, as an outcast, an “other” to society, but because it puts him in the seated position of the movie’s spectator. “Rear Window” (1954) stuff there—the classic example of a film about the act of “seeing” films. He is our avatar. The 3D becomes useful in this respect, too; mimesis by way of holograms and an artificial world. As Lawtoo points out, even his voiceover narration is technologically mediated by the video logs. Us abstracted into him, his referent several times removed by technological distance.

Otherwise and aside from Michelle Rodriguez sporting a non-regulation low-cut, breasts-flaunting shirt while everyone else wears unbelievably-consistently-reliable fig-leaf pasties, the only other important character, and only bit of apt casting, is played by Sigourney Weaver. She underscores the references, power loader exosuit to AMP suit included, to “Aliens” (1986). She’s the lead scientist on the Pandora expedition, the one who oversees the interfacing of avatars and the video diary logs; she’s the filmmaker and a perfectionist one. As Weaver has stated she well understood, she’s Cameron’s avatar. Roland Barthes’s “death of the author” literary criticism may not fully apply here, although considerations of death-as-film fit comfortably.

For all the colonialist and environmental talk, see what’s truly at stake here. The dehumanizing of the “other” perpetrated by the evil industrialist and military men stock characters is nothing compared to what Cameron and postmodern company have done, which is to literally dehumanize humans—that is, make them not human, but rather rotoscoped CGI. And, there’s no protecting a natural environment, but rather an artificial, CGI one. In fact, “Avatar” is pro-dehumanization and anti-environmental. Wētā, the visual-effects wizards behind this, are the movie’s evil RDA mining corporation. Or maybe it’s Industrial Light & Magic. More flatteringly, since the bullets-and-missiles warfare here is quite old-school for futuristic interplanetary space travellers, perhaps the FX teams are represented by the neural circuitry of the Mother Nature of Pandora, which Weaver’s Cameron avatar specifically compares to computer networks, of global uploading and downloading, by way of USB-like “tsaheylu” bonds, which calls to coordinated action all the CGI environment. Regarding reference to neural networks, even the scans of brain activity here are but more computer imagery.

Getting back to dead twins and doubled rebirths from coffin-enclosed VR capsules, though, “Avatar” always reminds me of Lee Manovich’s essay on “What Is Digital Cinema?” and proclamations that film as an indexical media is dead. What’s left is animation, specifically computer animation. In most performances, actors have become avatars, movies have become cartoons. We’ve especially witnessed this in the onslaught of superhero simulations that had already gained momentum when this was released and has continued since in ever increasingly cartoonish fashion. It’s hardly even cinematic anymore, either, as most recently expressed by Mark Ruffalo, post the “She-Hulk” (2022) TV streaming series, of the dehumanizing nature of CGI acting. I don’t even know if Zoe Saldaña is blue or green in real life.

Ultimately, the magic trick pulled here is that any of this simulated artificiality and dehumanized avatars and humanoids (or post- or trans-humanism or whatever you want to call it) is considered natural and human. Not quite as effective, but early shots of construction crews, mixing CGI and non-motion-captured actors, remind me of those working on Xanadu in the optical-printer matte work of “Citizen Kane” (1941). That gives way to the spectacle of floating mountains and the flying gaze (I just want to mention, too, that I love Sara Ross’s comparison of these (post)modern aerial aesthetics to WWI cinema of yore such as “Wings” (1927)) blinding us to the fact that there’s no camera there. This won an Oscar for Best Cinematography. What cinematography? It’s computer graphics. This should’ve been competing with “Up” (2009) for Best Animated Feature Film. It has less live action than “Who Framed Roger Rabbit” (1988), which was mostly toons in a live-action environment, whereas this is the reverse. It’s not as though Pandora is exactly photorealistic, either. It’s total worldbuilding, philosophy included, that impresses here and makes “Avatar” still a remarkable experience.

That philosophy methinks extends to the otherwise bizarre bestiality of the bonding between Naʼvi during sex and for riding animals. It’s all a perversion of what it means to be human once the Homo sapiens enter their avatar interfaces. It’s just a moon of an internet, plugging in everything everywhere. Personally, I think we have plenty already with the plugging in of all our digital screens. Pandora is a technological dystopia, or, I’m sure, a utopia as Cameron and company see it. So, forget the cowboys-and-Indians triteness, “Avatar” is a movie about its own making, its own worldbuilding philosophy, the speculation of spectacle, a world where nature is artificial, humans become obsolete, film is no longer film. Indeed, when we destroy our world, we see Pandora.

Works Cited
Barthes, Roland. “The Death of the Author,” 1967.

Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation, 1981, 1983.

Lawtoo, Nidesh. “Avatar Simulation in 3Ts: Techne, Trance, Transformation.” Science Fiction Studies 42, no. 1 (2015): 132-150. www.jstor.org/stable/10.5621/sciefictstud.42.1.0132.

Manovich, Lev. “What Is Digital Cinema?,” 1995. manovich.net/index.php/projects/what-is-digital-cinema.

Rampton, Mike. “Mark Ruffalo on the ‘dehumanising’ nature of acting with CGI as he reprises role of Hulk in new series She-Hulk.” Metro. Website. metro.co.uk/2022/08/11/she-hulk-mark-ruffalo-on-dehumanising-nature-of-cgi-acting-as-hulk-17153696/.

Ross, Sara. “Invitation to the Voyage: The Flight Sequence in Contemporary 3D Cinema.” Film History 24, no. 2 (2012): 210-20. www.jstor.org/stable/10.2979/filmhistory.24.2.210.