Okay, go with me for a minute here. I suddenly realized what this whole damn Avatar thing is all about.
For more than ten years, James Cameron made movies like this:
Right? You can almost hear the "clang...clang" of steel on steel; the blast of bullets; the explosions; people yelling "This ain't no drill, slick! Make me proud!" and "We're in the pipe...five by five!" and high-fiving and more explosions and bullets and lots of machines and exoskeletons and clanging steel and more explosions. Pure testosterone!
Then he makes a movie like this:
And it's the biggest hit of his career. It's the most successful movie ever made, and it earns a Best Picture Oscar and earns him a Best Director Oscar. Millions and millions of fourteen-year-old girls all over the world go see it again and again.
Confusing, right? After a decade of macho sci-fi action, suddenly he's made the ultimate chick flick...and it's gotten him nothing but acclaim! So what does he do next? Nothing, that's what! For ten years, nothing (except screwing around beneath the ocean). It's got to be a major identity crisis, right? With, maybe, some gender/machismo issues tied into it? I mean, this is a major tough guy, at least vicariously, right? (Look at that first montage again.) And suddenly he's all "My Heart Will Go On." You might say he's almost a...a visitor in a strange, alien landscape of feminine feelings and situations.
Kind of like this guy, right?
Check him out...Mr. Military Tough Guy, who probably knows how to fire every weapon ever made and how to fix the nuclear reactor...but he's on his way into....the land of fourteen-year-old-girls!
It's a magical land of unicorns and rainbows and shiny candy, and he's going to love it there. (The trailer's only line is, "This is great!") It's a good thing it's not really him, then, isn't it? It's an "avatar" of him. Because everybody knows that sci-fi Navy SEAL types aren't going to go anywhere near the magical land of lollypops and candy and "my heart will go on" for real. It's the "avatar" falling in love in a My Pretty Pony animated landscape. The sci-fi soldier is "really" back in the chrome-plated steel warship; he's not "actually" there to drop a diamond in the ocean or whatever romance-novel stuff awaits his "avatar."
Anyway that's my dime-store-Freud interpretation of what "The King of the World" is up to. He's made the opposite of The Matrix! It's a movie in which the superwarrior has to unleash his inner wuss.
5 comments:
This is a good theory. I think you should be a shrink to the stars.
Ha! This is great. I love the description of the Avatar planet as all unicorns and candy and such. It's a snarky description because of all the monsters, but then again they all are decorated like stained glass.
I'm reminded of your George Lucas analysis, that the reason he made the special editions of the first trilogy was to make it seem that all six movies were cut from the same CGI-rich cloth (rather than face the fact that he was a much better artist when he was younger).
I love this theory for exactly the reasons that Octo stated. The land of my little pony just cracks me up. Well thought *Applause*
Man, those collages of Cameron's earlier works are cracking me up. Especially because it looks like a COLOSSAL Kate and Leo are standing on the bow of the Titanic.
I didn't do that on purpose! I didn't notice until you just said that. I was just going for the typical MAD magazine-style Mort Drucker montage.
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