Although Kubrick’s 1968 2001 is ruthlessly parodied throughout, a Hollywood movie made the very same year serves as WALL-E’s privileged artifact. An ancient VHS tape of Hello Dolly (once the epitome of elephantine, retrograde movie-making), seen solely in terms of a back lot musical number, is the robot’s most prized possession. This fetish serves to instruct the (male-coded) machine on the nature of the human, providing a synecdoche for the entire cultural heritage of the pre-apocalyptic Earth.7
Celebrating (or embalming) an obsolete technology, WALL-E is the 2001 of 2008—a post-photographic film set in a post-human universe. The movie’s single human actor is the designated special effect. A clip of cheerful prancing on a long-lost Hollywood soundstage signifies the Desert of the Real, as glimpsed from within the Matrix of Total Cinema. In the context of WALL-E, the tape of Hello Dolly functions as an installation, the equivalent of 24 Hour Psycho. The movie includes one other example of analog cinema—the holographic image of the Buy ’n’ Large Corporation’s long-dead CEO whose pre-recorded instructions are periodically delivered to the Axiom’s captain.8
At once avant and pop, horrendously bleak and cheerfully cute, WALL-E may be considered the twenty-first century’s quintessential motion picture to date. It is not, however, the most elaborate evidence of the New Realness. That, along with the furthest advance of Total Cinema, may be found in the revival of 3-D movies that began in the mid 1990s with a series of documentaries to which IMAX projection added the dimension of size, notably James Cameron’s underwater, digitally shot Ghosts of the Abyss (2003).
Cameron’s voyage to the bottom of the sea was also something else—namely, the avatar of his 3-D Avatar. Announcing the advent of digital 3-D, it was produced shortly before the director embarked on a motion picture which, as the highest-grossing movie in history, would rival The Passion of the Christ as the early twenty-first century’s most influential commercial release.9
CHAPTER SIX
POSTSCRIPT:
TOTAL CINEMA REDUX
The most seamless cyber-fantasy is, of course, James Cameron’s prodigiously successful Avatar (2009), a technological wonder that is essentially a 3-D science-fictionalized cavalry Western along the lines of Kevin Costner’s 1993 hit Dances With Wolves.
After fifteen years percolating in producer-writer-director Cameron’s imagination, Avatar shows earthlings on a mission from their own despoiled world to strip-mine the lushly verdant planet Pandora and, not coincidentally, subjugate its materially primitive but spiritually advanced inhabitants, the Na’vis—cyborg creatures that, thanks to extremely sophisticated “image capture,” are played by recognizable, if distorted, human actors. As preparation for taking control of the planet, the Sky People, as the Na’vis call them, attempt to infiltrate the Na’vis by linking human consciousness to Pandoran avatars. The movie is, in effect, a metaphor for its own computer game. Avatar’s hitherto disabled protagonist finds himself inside a twelve-foot-tall, blue-striped, yellow-eyed, flat-nosed humanoid—and he can walk! Ensconced in his game self (or avatar), our hero explores a mad jungle populated by six-armed neon tetra lemurs, flying purple people eaters, hammer-headed triceratopses and leathery demon dogs—as does the spectator, experiencing this CGI fantasy world in total depth.
Although Cameron was a prophet, the idea of stereoscopic cinema is as old as the medium. Motion-picture pioneers Thomas Alva Edison and the Lumière brothers mulled the possibility of 3-D; in 1915, Edison’s erstwhile employee Edwin Porter developed an anaglyphic system based on superimposed green and orange images. In November 1921, a few weeks after Harry K. Fairall showed the first anaglyphic feature The Power of Love, and less than two months before Dr. Hugo Riesenfeld demonstrated a rival 3-D system, D. W. Griffith told the New York Times that “motion pictures will never realize their ideal effectiveness until they are stereoscopic.”
Sergei Eisenstein advanced a similar position in celebrating the 1946 part-color Stereokino production, Aleksandr Andriyevsky’s Robinzon Kruzo, a feature motion picture shot entirely in 3-D (and, as it was initially projected on a lenticular screen, the first 3-D movie to dispense with anaglyphic glasses). Robinzon Kruzo anticipates Avatar not only in its technological ambitions but in its immersive mise-en-scène. The first (and stronger) half of the movie is devoted to the protagonist’s solitary exploration of 3-D space in the form of a wondrous, verdant jungle populated by exotic tree-dwelling creatures.
Eisenstein deemed 3-D to be inherently progressive (“Mankind has for centuries been moving toward stereoscopic cinema”) and hence, naturally, Soviet: “The bourgeois West is either indifferent or even hostilely ironical toward the problems of stereoscopic cinema.” Indeed, when bourgeois Hollywood turned its attention to stereoscopic cinema—along with widescreen formats and enhanced sound—it was not for art’s sake but rather to follow the logic of the capitalist system, an effort to regain its technological edge and reverse declining market shares in the post-TV era.1
In the early twenty-first century, Hollywood is again compelled to compete with new forms of home entertainment (even as DVD sales dwindled from their 2004 peak). During the summer of 2010, some sixty 3-D features were reported in various stages of production. As pointed out by Dave Kehr in Film Comment, the studios acted as though 3-D were the equivalent of talking pictures, using the latest development in Total Cinema to sell exhibitors an expensive new delivery system and—not exactly an afterthought—to slap a hefty surcharge on ticket prices.2
Six of 2010’s ten top-grossing movies—Toy Story 3, Alice in Wonderland, Despicable Me, Shrek Forever After, How to Train Your Dragon, and Tangled—were released in 3-D. All of these, save Alice in Wonderland (which was shot flat and subsequently converted to 3-D to catch the stereo wave), were examples of Pixar-style CGI “solid animation” and thus of post-photographic Matrix cinema. Not total cinema but digital will. A movie like Toy Story 3 is essentially redundant in imbuing virtual depth with virtual depth.3
Avatar, described by many reviewers as “immersive” or “trippy,” is by contrast a cinematic experience that seamlessly synthesizes live action, animation, performance-capture, and CGI to create what is essentially a non-participatory video game: Jurassic Park’s menagerie running wild in The Matrix’s double eXistenZ. The game structure is operative throughout: the earthling Sky People are divided into hawks and doves, with the protagonist Jake as a sort of double double-agent, simultaneously reporting back to the base’s most militant Marine as well as acting as a tough but tender biologist. The former wants him to find out “what the blue monkeys want.” The latter knows that the Na’vi are ultra-green—a New Age matriarchal eco-friendly culture which, as demonstrated in a mass-swaying transubstantiation ceremony held several times beneath a cosmic weeping willow, is spiritually connected to Every Living Thing.
As WALL-E makes a fetish of the photographic cinema that it has displaced, so Avatar presents itself as a critique of the system it embodies. This most global of cinematic triumphs is a blunt attack on rapacious globalization. More specifically, Avatar’s utopian vision is founded on an implacable repudiation of America’s history—as well as its present. The Sky People are not only heirs to the white settlers and conquistadors who crossed the Atlantic to colonize the new world but are explicitly associated with the Bush administration. They chortle over the failure of diplomacy, wage what is referred to as “some sort of shock-and-awe campaign” against the Na’vis, and goad each other with bellicose one-liners like, “We will blast a crater in their racial memory so deep they won’t come within a thousand clicks of here ever again!” Moreover, the viewer is encouraged to cheer when uniformed American soldiers are blown out of the sky and to root for a bunch of naked, tree-hugging aborigines led by a renegade white man on a humongous orange polka-dot bat.
Thus, Avatar is an unusually robust, even blatant, example of Marcuse’s repressive desublimation, appealing to the public with images that are “irreconcilable with the established Reality Principle”
