Aaron Johnson

 A cable, unimpeded from the inimitable denomination of Reality’s collusion, reads as such:

Reeboks demand apartheid’s reckoning

Hats are an enigma to be exploited

Glandular furrows matter, too

Cheap creeps shear sheep in the meadow

Aligning the cornerstones with magnetic fervor

Until the shimmering cloth groans otherwise, redeeming them

I can count on one finger the times I’ve tried

To face down the infinite atop an igloo of white horses

But even in the specular insights of the Fall

I remain unborn.

 A fascinating and, I think, helpful perspective:

www.newstatesman.com/film/2010/03/avatar-reality-love-couple-sex

I essentially agree with these criticisms of Avatar (for this reason, I find the film extremely troubling on many levels, from an integral ethical perspective), and I have many more of my own.  The film felt engaging on a surface-level, but I was immediately disappointed when I left the theater.  I'll try to come back later and give a more integral overview, but for now, here's a laundry list of what I didn't like about it (copy-pasted from a Facebook conversation):

It's massive cliche storm. It's one of the most egregious examples of the racist "noble savage" narrative. It's completely lacking in self-awareness. It's hypocritical, a film that uses more expensive technology than any film previously with an anti-technology message. Shallow characters, a generally uncreative fantasy world (ex. those big flying things are not fascinatingly weird alien creatures, they're cardboard-cutout dragons painted iridescent colors), sci-fi concepts that would've seemed dated ten years ago, some really bad dialogue, and some really lazy writing in general (you called it "Unobtanioum," really?).

Personally, I'm not usually one to be disappointed by a film due to hype, nor am I one to give negative reviews very often. I love film. I get very excited about a lot of films on a regular basis, and I'm usually not disappointed. But Avatar was marketed as an intellectually serious film; as one that was going to "revolutionize filmmaking". It didn't. There's nothing complex or innovative about the story, and the cinematic techniques used were pretty standard. Even in terms of technology, it wasn't revolutionary in any other way than the amount of money that was spent. Pixar has created more detailed digital characters in a lot of ways. For example, one of the reasons the Na'vi all have one big braid is that animating every individual strand of hair is difficult. Pixar has been doing it convincingly since Monsters, Inc. Cameron also doesn't seem to be very good at using 3D, for all his insistence on doing so. One of the main advantages of 3D is that it allows for the appearance of infinite depth of field, meaning everything in an image is in focus as far back as you can see. In Avatar, Cameron relies way too much on shallow depth of field to show you where to focus, which makes the 3D images appear distorted and misshapen.

Overall, it just didn't really feel like there was much there in terms of complexity, intellectually or emotionally.  There were so many films in 2009 that I felt were both much more integral and much better films, including The Box, District 9, Ninja Assassin, Star Trek, The Fantastic Mr. Fox, Up, Away We Go, The Men Who Stare At Goats, and Where the Wild Things Are, and the list goes on...

 The Matheson Brothers exchange nervous glances in the back of the car as I stare numbly through the rear window at the little lights going back-and-forth, back-and-forth from phosphorescent red to phosphorescent blue.

            “John.  Don’t fucking fuck us, John.”

            “Yeah, don’t fucking fuck us.”

            Cliché twin stereotype.  Echoing each other’s sentences, blandly.  I stare at their snide, self-protective expressions and I feel like I’m in a 1920s dime store novel.

            John lets out a deep breath with his lips in a little “o,” both hands on the steering wheel.  He keeps driving.

            “We’re going to be fine, guys.”

            The twins clench their teeth in delayed unison, one then the other in the exact same motion, as if they’re on a miniature West coast time zone video standby.

            “We’d better.”

            The first one puffs out his chest.  The other nods.

            “Or… what?” John breaks his stoic expression, for the first time today, into a barely perceptible grin.  “Hm?”

            The twins are silent.  The sirens’ wail seems to permeate the sweat on my skin with electric shrillness.  I speak up.

            “Are you going to stop?”

            “No.”

            John breathes deeply again, pursing his lips, as he does, like a morphine-addled quasi-mystic from the most decrepit slums of the Far East.

            A searchlight shines obliquely into my eyes through the right window, whiting out the flat, black landscape.

            “We’re on the six-o’clock news.”  I point in the direction of the helicopter noises, squinting.

            John just stares blankly into an endless river of asphalt and bright yellow paint.

            “It’s 7:04.”

            One of the twins squeals, impotently.

            The other one swallows an airy throatful.

            “That was mile-marker 184 towards Seattle.”

            “The drop is five-hundred miles from here.

            “We’ll never make it.”

            John breathes out again.

            “Silence your corporate egos, boys, and you’ll be fine.”

            John’s personal philosophy is a “metaphysically revisionist” blend of Buddhism and Marxism.

            “We’re terrorists, boys.  Don’t worry about it.  The labels and constructs of the capitalist hegemony are existentially impermanent.”

            The twins give their best deer-in-the-Channel-47-Action-News-Eye-in-the-Sky-Spotlight look.  I can’t contain myself.

            “Fuck you, John.”

            He breathes out again, whistling slightly.

            “What?”

            I grind my molars together.  Need to get that cavity looked at.

            “I said, fuck you.”

            John smiles again, broadly, his teeth gleaming in the penetrating white now pouring in from every window.

            “I’ll stop this car.”

            “No you won’t.”

            “I will.”

            He checks his blind spot, theatrically, twisting his neck around once, twice, and again; and then he presses down hard on the brake pedal and sends the vehicle screaming to an immediate halt.  The groan of the engine tumbles down into quick submission under a blanket of sirens, drawing closer each instant.  John turns to me.

            “We’re a team.  Take it back.”

            “John, what the hell…?  Hit the gas, man!”

            In the back, the twins are hyperventilating.  John’s nostrils flare, and I can hear the thick, hot air he’s pushing through them.

            “We’re a team.  Take it back.”

            “John.  It’s okay, man.  Just go!”

            “We’re a team.  Say it.”

            “Fine.  We’re a team, John.  Fuck!”

            The tires spin steam high over the ragged pavement and the car threatens to drive on into the night once again until an overzealous policeman who forgets his breaks runs his cruiser headlong into the right rear door.

            There’s this momentary consciousness of weightlessness, less a perception than a perceptive lack, until the seatbelt tugs violently on my larynx and on my ribcage, the relentless motion of impact burning my skin into thick, bleeding hives, ripping my flesh apart from all directions.  The sunroof cracks and our heads hit the blacktop.  I can swear I feel my gray matter sloshing and rattling in my head as the upturned Oldsmobile skids and skids over stray gravel and potholes.  There’s a horrible screech of grinding metal that spiders deep into my viscera.  I can’t tell if it’s real.  The whole world seems to fade into the news chopper’s searchlight.

            Somehow, my gaze is twisted in the direction of the back seat without my moving, some whim of shattered bone, because when I open my eyes I’m looking at the twins.  The same aluminum pole, the kind you use for hanging clothes, has stuck itself straight through both of their heads like a shish-ka-bob stick, splayed mirrors of each other to the bitter end.

            I turn to John through miles of agony.  He’s struggling with his cobalt blue jacket from L. L. Bean, gets it open, breaking the zipper click by click.  Underneath, there’s a mess of wires and canisters.  He reaches deeper inside.

            I spit and sputter in protest, blood and drool spraying from the corners of my mouth.

            “N-n-n-n-nuh.  No.”

            John smiles, radiantly.

            “Fuck you, Damon.”

            I hear a click.

            I’m told the explosion could be seen for several kilometers in every direction.  Embossed against the evening mist and low-hanging clouds, it looked like lightning until the smoke started to rise from some distant roadway.

            I don’t even close my eyes this time, but already I’m sprawled on freshly clipped grass in a clearing cut deep into the adjacent woods.  All that is left of the lower half of my body are the charred remains of a femur, hanging limply from a mess of bright red spaghetti.  An invasion of fire-ants surges over what’s left of my skin.

            Parked police cars canvas Route 72B, seven miles from the nearest intersection, labeled Exit 203.  The police officers leave cruiser doors open and wander into the clearing with weapons raised.  They stop at the sight of a charred, writhing torso.  For a few seconds, they just stare at the suicide bomber’s abortion, unsure of what to do.

The dog that always barks, manic and severe, when Henry turns around the bend of Osprey Court and begins the long passage through rows of gleaming-white, square-box houses until he finally lights upon the box he now claims as his own is, this time, silent.  He wonders what might have become of the yipping motherfucker, the little reactionary, seeing unconventioned monsters in every shadow, writhing in paranoia until each bubble of biting sound boils up from its limbic brain.  Had its frightful, deathly Other finally materialized through the evening fog, creeping in from a vestigial legacy of primordial violence?  Had it, in more secular terms, been taken by a bear or wolf in the night, dragged out into the woods to be consumed?  What are bears and wolves if not the impotent attempts of domestic grasping to categorize, define, and colonize the implacable darkness of the undomesticated world?  The little dog itself is one such attempt.  But eventually the wolf takes over, reclaims its own.

The dog might have turned on its Master.  Spurred on by some undisclosed bacteria, in the gut or in the folds of the cortex, it may have sunk its teeth deep into a stroking hand.  This hand wanders absently among tufts of fur until a vague attempt to transcend the line of species designation through conditioned affection is punctuated in the spilling of blood, splattering like abstract expressionism onto the rug.  The wound can be dressed, but the relationship is assassinated in an instant, the illusion of eternal closeness shattered.  Time to put the fucker down.  He’s gone wild, ornery, or rabid.  And so the people who took his balls come back for the rest of him.  Ashes to science, dust to doctorate.  We think we’ve put the wolf down, but we’ve only silenced a representation.

The next night, like every night, Henry stalks the rows upon rows of ranch-style, white vinyl siding in silent repose.  The numbers pasted onto mailboxes in little golden pieces of aluminum count down to five-hundred as twenty-mile-per-hour winds rip dead and dying leaves off of autumn branches.  Like every night, he passes the bend in Osprey Court on the way back to the orientation of walls he now calls home.  He listens and hears the dog’s barking, high-pitched and ragged, each frantic spasm of the vocal cords cutting in on the last, resounding through the great asphalt basin of the suburb.