Hyperglyphics

As I surfed the Web on Christmas day (having nothing better to do than Web surf by a roaring fire while watching my cat play with the new toys from her stocking), I came across this editorial about James Cameron’s blockbuster, Avatar, by Adam Cohen in that day’s New York Times online and I tweeted it the next day so I’d have it bookmarked for some later reflection once I’d had the chance to see the movie (which I did the day after Christmas with my buddy Lance). It’s later now, I’ve seen the movie, and it’s time to reflect. I’m actually glad I haven’t gotten to this until now, actually, because David Brooks weighs in on Avatar in today’s NYT, and he’s raising some of the issues that Cohen’s piece brought up for me, so now I can bounce off both articles and try to weave together some of the threads that have been dangling loosely in my mind. Gotta love it when stuff connects. Curious yet?

What struck me about Cohen’s editorial was his praise for Avatar’s much-heralded technological achievements. His point that the technology actually works in service of the story, that form and content are inextricably bound up and work together to advance the movie’s major themes, naturally appealed to me, as the form/content relationship is one that I deal with daily as a writing teacher and a specialist in rhet/comp/new media. What tools do we have in our arsenals for composing texts and how do we use those tools most effectively and wisely and consideredly for the stories we wish to tell? How do we ensure that form reinforces and reflects our content and how do we see to it that content makes the most of form? Composing a text isn’t just about choosing words to put on a page anymore, rather it’s about choosing a medium, a platform, an application. Composing texts in the digital age brings the issue of form to the forefront. Certainly there have always been questions of form for writers. Selecting a genre is about form. Experimental writers have played around form/content using the latest technology to do so for ages. Advances in technology inspire certain kinds of artists and they are the ones who push the envelope in ways that often lead to the development of new genres or in breakthroughs in narrative or poetic technique. And at certain moments, with certain texts, we see the power a new technology has for conveying messages. This is Cohen’s point about Avatar: that the technology, the form, in this movie works brilliantly in the service of the theme, which he identifies as a message about seeing - in this case, about seeing the “humanity” of the Other (here the 9 foot tall, blue-skinned alien Na’vi).

I think Cohen has a great point and I have to agree with him that the way Avatar so beautifully and seamlessly creates this fictional race of beings is truly one of its strengths. As I watched the film, the Na’vi were real to me, as real as the people sitting beside me in the darkened midtown Atlanta theater. Of course, movies (and novels and TV and many other narrative genres) have been bringing alien races and other nonexistent beings to life for a long time, but I think the Na’vi really are a step forward for fiction’s ability to make the unreal real. They seemed so real as I was watching the movie that it seemed unimaginable that they were not real, that they didn’t really exist. And when technology can make us believe, truly believe, that there are such beings, so different from ourselves in so many ways and yet so alike in others, then perhaps something has fundamentally changed for storytelling’s power for evoking empathy.

Empathy is, of course, one of the aspects of ourselves that stories helps build and strengthen. The ability to put ourselves in another’s place, to see our own emotions reflected in the struggles and triumphs of another, to feel someone else’s pain, to hurt for someone else - our fictions help us do these things and this ability is paramount to our progress as a species. When we can see another person’s humanity, understand that others feel the same things we feel, struggle with similar things that we do, rejoice in love and triumph like we do, then we have a much harder time doing them ill. Or so the story goes. But I do believe in that line of thinking and I do agree with all those who have seen literature’s (taking this term broadly to cover lots of narrative genres and media) power to help us learn to empathize and sympathize. And that’s Cohen’s point in a nutshell. Avatar succeeds because it makes us believe so fully and empathize so completely with the radically Other.

However, while I loved the experience of the movie and see its revolutionary use of technology as a good thing,  I was troubled (even as I watched the movie) by the simplistic-ness (as opposed to simplicity) of the basic story and the way it reinforces some negative ideas even as it seemingly turns the tables on us by making the humans the bad guys and the aliens the heroes. In a nutshell, my complaints are the very ones Brooks articulates so nicely. I agree with him that the movie trades in some imperialistic “White Man’s Burden” stereotypes in the way it uses the human protagonist as a messianic figure, without whom, the Na’vi would be annihilated. It also brings back the Noble Savage stereotype, a figure that decades of postcolonial theory has exposed as just as racist and damaging as any depiction of the abject and degraded tribesman, no matter how “noble” your intentions, Cameron.

My concern, my problem, with the Noble Savage stereotype and the way it is mobilized in Avatar, in particular, is largely that it potentially reinforces the nature/technology binary. However, one of the commenters on Brooks’s op-ed noted that the Na’vi plug themselves into a repository of information about their society and their planet via the interface of their neural tendrils and a special tree, thus the Na’vi are not illiterate or non-technological. Another poster writes:

The planet’s technology, in which inhabitants of every species take part, which proves superior to that of the invaders, and it is by mastering this alien technology that this human proves himself worthy to become one of these higher beings.

Both of those comments, among others, recognize (rightly, I believe) that technology and literacy are not necessarily “unnatural.” I’m not entirely convinced that something that arises out of evolutionary processes (which, presumably, the Na’vi’s cool plug-in head-tails did) can be correctly labeled a technology if we define it as an “art,” which the OED does, by the way. Art is artifice. Not natural. Man-made. An extension of man (hat-tip to Marshall McLuhan). But certainly we co-evolve with the technology we create, so, in a certain sense, technology does become part of our natural environment and I believe very strongly that reinforcing the dichotomy between nature and technology is naive, if not dangerous. But there’s no indication in Cameron’s film that the Na’vi had any part in creating the neural net that seems to connect all life on Pandora. Still, what I think is important to consider here is the idea of the information that is passed through that neural net. Information, in whatever form it takes, be it twisty strands of DNA or binary computer code or text or images or neurotransmitters, is everywhere and in all kinds of forms. We need multiple literacies in order to read the genome, the program, the book, the film, the mind. So the poster who noted that the Na’vi are not necessarily presented as natural and untainted, in opposition to the technologically advanced humans, has a point. Once we learn to interface with informational systems and to read the code contained within - in whatever form it takes - we are literate. And literacy is an effect, a product, of technology and, I guess, a new technology in and of itself. Plus, the Na’vi speak. Much is made in the film of the human efforts, particularly those of the hero, to learn their language and, pace Walter J. Ong, “language is a technology.” I suppose that may blur the lines between natural and unnatural more, really. Well, good. As I say, we have co-evolved with the tools we have made and language is, I would argue, the most valuable and indispensable tool we have created. And it has become so naturalized that the vast majority of us probably would never consider it unnatural or artificial. I’m still not convinced that the representation of the Na’vi is not a romanticizing of nature over technology, but I think the fact that it is at least raising that question is good. Now we can grapple with the question of just what technology and nature are and how they are related.

So Avatar is a dazzling, yet flawed, creation. I think that it is a first step, though, toward figuring out where we take storytelling now that we’ve developed these amazing digital capabilities. It doesn’t do anything radical in terms of the story it wants to tell, but I think it does radically, for some of us, unsettle our sense of what is real. It doesn’t break new ground in terms of narrative technique, either, but I think that is something that comes only with time and with artists who are more willing to experiment with the technology in ways that will not produce blockbusters, but difficult art. I can’t wait to see what’s to come.