Hollywood's Real Glass Ceiling

Kathyrn Bigelow is about to become the first woman to win an Academy Award for Best Director.

Whether she deserves the Best Director prize -- and I happen to think she does -- is beside the point.  Ms. Bigelow will come away with the Oscar for Best Director as a consolation prize, because the Academy can't afford to admit that The Hurt Locker was the best picture of the year.

The Hurt Locker is up against Hollywood's real glass ceiling:  the industry's profit margin.

Can Hollywood acknowledge that a low-budget movie that has grossed less than $20 million is a better film than the box office event Avatar that has grossed over $1 billion and is on its way to becoming one of the most profitable films of all time?  Can the industry tell moviegoers:  Thanks for the bucks, but the 3D spectacle you blew your money on last Christmas wasn't a great movie after all?

The face-off between The Hurt Locker and Avatar has been billed as woman against man, ex-wife against ex-husband, blockbuster against art house breakout.  But, in the most basic sense, the confrontation looming at the Academy Awards is about whether movies can come to grips with the human condition instead of trying to escape from it.

Can we afford to make movies that synthesize real experience, to support producers and directors who engage the world as artists, or can we only support escapist spectaculars that distract us from the real world?

Rejecting The Hurt Locker will be a clear statement that Hollywood doesn't have the heart to take on the real world.  In the head-to-head match-up between The Hurt Locker and Avatar, there is no question that The Hurt Locker is the better film.

Avatar is a significant motion picture event, designed to revive a floundering industry by providing a 3D experience that can’t be matched by television or DVDs. Its release has been accompanied by the kind of marketing campaign you’d expect for a film that took over 10 years and a few hundred million dollars to produce. It’s probably the first of many 3D blockbusters Hollywood will crank out over the next couple of years, and, in that sense at least, it represents the future of the industry.

Unfortunately, Avatar is a very bad film. The story, dialogue, art, characters, sound and music are all trite. It’s even weak in the one area you’d expect a 3D film to deliver: retinal pressure and the sensation of movement. There’s not enough subjective viewpoint to suck the viewer into the action and provide real thrills. Worst of all, the film consciously tries to rise to the level of myth, but can’t quite make it. That’s what happens when a film maker succumbs to the idea he can create myths rather than channel them.  In a medium that lends itself to metaphor, Avatar is remarkably without characters, scenes or images that point to anything beyond themselves.  Cameron's images, like his film, are, essentially, meaningless.

There is more real meaning in any single scene of The Hurt Locker than there is in all of Avatar.

Ms. Bigelow's film conveys both the incredible pressure American troops in Iraq have been under to make instant life-and-death decisions and the limits of high-tech to take the pressure off of them.  As she develops the film's premise that war is addictive, it doesn't take us long to discover it's not just Sgt. James who's addicted to war, it's America itself that's addicted as well.  In James' case, it's an addiction that craves the unmediated experience of danger.  He disarms bombs with his own hands.  But it's an addiction that's tempered by James' and his team's regard for human life.

Ms. Bigelow's GIs are reluctant killers who risk their own lives to save the lives of others.  Somehow, as we watch James' teammate, Specialist Eldridge, struggle to engage the enemy, Ms. Bigelow leads us to the realization that we are all Specialists now.

Critics of the Iraq occupation will find no cheap shots at America or the American military in The Hurt Locker.  Ms. Bigelow invites us to see the war from the point of view of our best kind of soldier -- one whose job is to save lives, not take them.

That one of them is unable to find his way home, that by the end of the film all he wants is another moonwalk down a deserted Baghdad street in search of another bomb,  says something important, though disturbing, about what it means to be a human being -- or a nation -- at war.

Nevertheless, Hollywood will split the Oscars between Ms. Bigelow and Mr. Cameron.  Ms. Bigelow will win the Best Director Oscar, but the Best Picture award will go to Avatar.  That's the bottom line.

Avatar: Cameron's Epic Failure

Be sure you see the 3D version of James Cameron's Avatar (2009). The 3D visuals are the only thing Avatar has going for it. Without them, it's a second-rate effort with a hackneyed plot and dialogue from a director who seems to have entered his long fingernails phase. Cameron spent so much time making Avatar that the world moved on, leaving him to obsess over yesterday's themes alone.

While Avatar, like American banks, is probably too big to fail, it will be interesting to see if America embraces Avatar the way it did Cameron's most important film, Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991), or Michael Bay's excellent summer blockbuster, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (2009).  It was Cameron's genius to create a myth in T2 that resolved the conflict between human beings and machines by uniting the best of humans and the best of machines in Schwarzenegger's cyborg.

In the Transformers films, Bay went beyond the man vs. machine myth to pursue a vision of machines transcendent. Bay's machines embody the best and the worst of human nature, while in Avatar, Cameron rejects humanity to pursue a comic book vision of nature in revolt against man and his efforts to subdue it. Bay celebrates the kickass technology of the U.S. military and its projection of power anywhere at any time, Cameron comes down on the side of the men and women who oppose the cynical exploitation of people and nature by corporations -- a theme he developed far more successfully years ago in Aliens (1986) and in The Abyss (1989) -- although Cameron's efforts along those lines never approached Roland Joffe's moving and historically accurate film, The Mission (1986) . They still don't.

Avatar has too many film-historical references to be considered original art. The warmed-over plot and characters will appeal to viewers who think of the Battle Of The Little Big Horn as the high point of the westward expansion or of Dances With Wolves as a good film. The rest of us will have to wait for a new director with fresh ideas to exploit the 3D technology Cameron has pursued so faithfully and so completely frittered away.

The 3D Bubble

After single-handedly creating a 3D bubble with Avatar, James Cameron is trying to fill it. Since Avatar was released last year, the universe of available 3D screens has doubled internationally. That's a lot of seats to fill.  So Cameron's Avatar, already the highest grossing movie of all time, is being re-released today.



The marketing angle for the re-release, aimed at filling some of those seats in the over-built world of 3D theaters, is nine -- yes, nine -- previously unseen minutes of film, picked up from the cutting room floor.

Avatar fans will see their beloved Na'vis mourn the death of a fallen warrior in a "big, emotional scene" that Cameron claims is the best CG he's done. (Like Jesus, Cameron has saved his best wine for last.)  We're also promised a "rousing action-adventure, pulse-pounding" hunting sequence.

Following the re-release today, an extended Avatar DVD will be released in November that includes the new footage, plus an "alternate reality version" of the film that is 16 minutes longer than the original.

Cameron says it will be a long time before there is an Avatar sequel -- if we're lucky, it will be a very long time -- but, apparently, Cameron will be able to find plenty of scraps to keep Avatar fans on the hook during the long wait.

The success of Avatar is a sign of the times. It tells us more about ourselves and the world we live in now than about whether Avatar is a particularly good film, or even a particularly entertaining one.
Escapist movies do well in hard times. And the times these days are hard enough to require exceptionally escapist movies. Avatar fills the bill. More than anything else, it's a movie about escaping from the reality of the human condition.

Sadly, it's not a good movie to boot. In fact, Avatar is a very bad film. The story, dialogue, art, characters, sound and music are all trite. It’s even weak in the one area you’d expect a 3D film to deliver: retinal pressure and the sensation of movement. There’s not enough subjective viewpoint to suck the viewer into the action and provide real thrills.

Worst of all, Avatar consciously tries to rise to the level of myth, but can’t quite make it. That’s what happens when a film maker succumbs to the idea he can create myths rather than channel them. In a medium that lends itself to metaphor, Avatar is remarkably without characters, scenes or images that point to anything beyond themselves. Cameron's images, like his film, are, essentially, meaningless.  Maybe the times are too hard for films that synthesize real experience. Maybe Hollywood can't afford to support producers and directors who engage the world as artists. Maybe the market will only support escapist spectaculars that distract us from the real world.

Avatar is a significant motion picture event. It was designed to revive a floundering industry by providing a 3D experience that can’t be matched by television or DVDs. Its release was accompanied by the kind of marketing campaign you’d expect for a film that took over 10 years and a few hundred million dollars to produce. The industry is betting it will be the first of many 3D blockbusters that will be cranked out over the next couple of years. The theaters and seats are waiting. And Cameron has set the bar low enough that Avatar might represent the future of the industry.  That's a pity, because Cameron has done much better in the past. In Avatar, the 3D technology Cameron pursued so faithfully and so completely was just frittered away.

In his best film, T2, Cameron resolved the age-old conflict between human beings and machines by uniting the best of humans and the best of machines in Schwarzenegger's cyborg.  In T2's Wagnerian finale, the cyborg sacrifices himself to save the human race by following his evil counterpart into the cauldron to make sure that the last remnant of the mad scientist's work, the computer chip inside the cyborg's own head, is destroyed. As the cyborg prepares to enter the flames, Cameron uses a series of close-ups to create a beautiful and unforgettable portrait of the cyborg. Half of the face is human, the other half, where the skin has been torn away to reveal the gleaming metal armor underneath, is machine.



But in Avatar Cameron rejects humanity to pursue a comic book vision of nature in revolt against man and his efforts to subdue it.

To his credit, Cameron has always sided with men and women who oppose the cynical exploitation of people and nature by corporations. But that's a theme he developed far more successfully years ago in Aliens (1986) and in The Abyss (1989), although Cameron's efforts along those lines never approached the movie Avatar reduces most blatantly, Roland Joffe's moving and historically accurate film, The Mission (1986).  Cameron's reprise of The Mission is pure escapism that offers his audience the temporary and vicarious thrill of watching alien natives defeat well-armed corporate mercenaries.

Ultimately, films exist as memories. I saw Avatar twice when it was first released, once in digital 3D and once in IMAX 3D. I don't vividly remember a single image from the film.  Maybe that's the key to a successful re-release. If you don't remember a film at all, it makes sense to see it again. In the inside out, upside down world of pop culture, the most forgettable films will have the longest lives. Viewers will watch them again and again, as though they're seeing them for the very first time.