alone 20th Century Fox, the studio affiliated with Rupert Murdoch’s rightwing News Corp—permit such a vision? The real question is: given cinema’s mandate to create a better world, how could it not?
Not surprisingly, Avatar was criticized by conservatives as anti-capitalist, anti-militarist, or anti-American eco-propaganda, and by religious groups (including the Vatican) as anti-monotheist. Correspondingly, the Avatar scenario was passionately embraced by groups who experienced their own marginality. A widespread meme in which Photoshop-savvy fans recruited celebrities and pop icons into the Na’vi tribe peaked in mid-February 2010 with the poignant, real-world spectacle of Palestinian activists in blue body paint and full Na’vi drag protesting the Israeli barrier that had been erected around their village. More than any movie in memory, Avatar seemed to offer a hallucination that was also a fact, and some spectators responded as though they were players who had graduated to the higher levels of the computer game so vividly represented in Mamoru Oshii’s 2001 movie, Avalon.4
Waking up back in the lab where his disabled body reposes in a metal box, Jake realizes that “out there [in Pandora] is the true world and in here is the dream.” Although it has been suggested that Avatar represented a paradigm shift away from the dystopia of The Matrix, it is only in the sense of presenting The Matrix in reverse. Pandora is a utopia—even a global network—in which, just as the protagonist is able to transmit his consciousness into a Na’vi body, so the pantheist Na’vis are able to plug into plants and animals using an umbilical cord that critics were pleased to compare to a USB cable.5
The cable news network CNN coined the term “Post Avatar Depression” to describe the condition of those frustrated individuals who flooded online fan sites with posts that detailed their despondent, in some cases near-suicidal, state at not being able to continue to live in Pandora. Even allowing for the possibility of prankish exaggeration, these confessions attest to the continuing power exerted by what Bazin called “the recreation of the world in its own image,” and the attraction of that world, however fantastic. With Avatar, the tantalizing promise of Total Cinema—now decisively post-photographic—was viscerally experienced: Unbearably distant, yet overwhelming near.
PART II:
A CHRONICLE OF
THE BUSH YEARS
CHAPTER SEVEN
2001: AFTER SEPTEMBER 11
NEW YORK, SEPTEMBER 18, 2001
Last Tuesday’s terror attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon blew a hole in the Toronto International Film Festival as well. Hundreds of journalists emerged from early-morning screenings to chaotic first reports (a publicist hysterically screaming “they bombed the Pentagon”), rushing from the insular world of round-the-clock movies to a total immersion in the big CNN picture and the hours of redial required to get a New York phone connection.
All screenings were canceled (at least for a day). So far as the press was concerned, the festival’s 300-odd movies had already been abandoned in favor of a phantasmagoria of urban disaster, mind-boggling cartoon explosions, digicam special effects, world-obliterating violence, and incomprehensible conspiracy. In my case, the catastrophe was actually occurring a few blocks from home, but recurring “live” TV images of my neighborhood grocer, subway stop, and daughter’s public school didn’t in themselves account for the awful familiarity of the images.
“He who imagines disasters in some ways desires them,” Theodor Adorno noted in the middle of the last century. Imagining this disaster is what the movies are all about. It was as though a message had bounced back from outer space. The giant dinosaurs, rogue meteors, and implacable insect-aliens that had destroyed movie-set Manhattans over the past few years were now revealed as occult attempts to represent the logic of inevitable catastrophe. Jerry Bruckheimer’s justly maligned big-budget re-creation of Pearl Harbor in particular seemed to have emerged from some parallel time-space continuum to provide an explanation for what was even now occurring. (Wednesday’s news that Warner Bros. was postponing much of its fall slate—including Collateral Damage, the Arnold Schwarzenegger movie whose West Side Highway poster was already an anti-landmark, visually footnoting the fallen towers—only served to confirm that terrorist warnings were no longer necessary.)
Screenings did resume during the restless thirty-six hours before the first packed, New York-bound trains were able to cross the US border. But there was a clear distinction between the films one saw prior to Tuesday morning and the films one saw while killing time in the big waiting room that Toronto became after Tuesday. Seen on September 12, the tragic beauty of Jean-Luc Godard’s cinema eulogy In Praise of Love was all the more piercing; the callow posturing of its rote anti-Americanism was now impossible to shrug aside …1
The events of September 11 were a cinema event, the most immediately and extensively documented catastrophe in human history.
In the days following the cataclysm, the Los Angeles Times reported entertainment industry concern that “the public appetite for plots involving disasters and terrorism has vanished.” Thus, Warner Bros. postponed Collateral Damage, and the screenwriters, David and Peter Griffiths, suffered another setback when Fox suspended their top-secret project, Deadline, a hijack drama written for James Cameron. Jerry Bruckheimer decided that the time might not be right for World War III, which called for nuclear attacks on Seattle and San Diego. Even comedies suffered collateral damage. Disney put off the release of the Tim Allen vehicle Big Trouble, which involves a nuclear bomb smuggled aboard a jet plane; MGM shelved Nose Bleed, with Jackie Chan starring as a window washer who foils a terrorist plot to blow up the WTC. Scheduled telecasts of the X-Files movie and Independence Day were canceled, along with a Law and Order episode about bioterrorism in NYC.
The CBS show The Agency dropped a reference to Osama bin Laden. (Concerned about bin Laden’s charisma, the Bush administration contrived to have his video removed from heavy TV rotation and his subsequent US tele-appearances curtailed—except in the context of the Fox show America’s Most Wanted.) Sex and the City trimmed views of the twin towers; Paramount airbrushed them from the poster for Sidewalks of New York. Sony yanked their Spider Man trailer so as to eliminate images of the WTC and similarly ordered retakes on Men in Black II that would replace the WTC with the Chrysler Building. DreamWorks changed the end of The Time Machine, which rained moon fragments down on New York.
A prominent TV executive assured The New York Times that post-9/11 entertainment would be “much more wholesome” and that “we are definitely moving into a kinder, gentler time” (presumably 1988 when candidate George H. W. Bush introduced that phrase). A DreamWorks producer explained that the present atmosphere precluded his studio from bankrolling any more movies like The Peacemaker and Deep Impact. What then would movies be about?
Hollywood expected to be punished. Instead, it was drafted. Only days after the terror attacks, the Pentagon-funded Institute for Creative Technologies at the University of Southern California convened several meetings with filmmakers—including screenwriter Steven E. De Souza (Die Hard, Die Hard 2), director Joseph Zito (Delta Force One, Missing in Action), and wackier creative types like directors David Fincher, Spike Jonze, and Mary Lambert. The proceedings were chaired by Brigadier General Kenneth Bergquist; the idea was for the talent to “brainstorm” possible terrorist scenarios and then offer solutions. (Why not? Did we not live in a country where Steven Spielberg had been called upon by Congress to offer insight into hate crimes and Tom Clancy was interviewed by CNN as an expert on terrorism?)
For the first time since Ronald Reagan left office, it became all but impossible to criticize the movie industry. After George Bush’s late September suggestion that Americans fight terrorism by taking their families to Disney World, Disney chief Michael Eisner sent an e-mail praising the president as “our newest cheerleader.”
