Olivier Lacan { thoughts }

Note: This post is a work in progress. It had to get out of my sys­tem. Please bear with me and apolo­gies for the weird syn­tax, digres­sions and gen­eral half-assedness.

I don’t have respect for James Cameron sim­ply because he directed The Ter­mi­na­tor. I didn’t see this movie and its sequel until late in my teens there­fore the tech­no­log­i­cal supe­ri­or­ity didn’t make it a bet­ter or more enter­tain­ing story. For every­one who still has fond mem­o­ries of the orig­i­nal Ter­mi­na­tor movie, I urge you to go and see it now. See how badly it has aged, how dated it is, and how it relies too heav­ily on action and effects to prop up a clumsy story.

Sure at the time it was one of the few for­ays of mod­ern cin­ema into time travel, but boy was it a bad one. I won’t go into details, unless some­one cares to con­tra­dict me in the com­ments, which I invite you to.

Then there’s Aliens, a sequel to Rid­ley Scott’s orig­i­nal effort. And sadly I don’t remem­ber it enough to have an opin­ion. True Lies is a good movie, not an orig­i­nal work since it was a (good) remake of the french spy movie La Totale. Then the ocean liner in the room, Titanic. Far from his best movie, it’s still a solid story and a very good excuse to see Kate Winslet naked.

After Titanic and before Dark Angel, his TV project (don’t get me started), rumors about his next movie project leaked out. As Wikipedia tells it best:

“Avatar had been in devel­op­ment since 1994 by Cameron, who wrote a 114-page script­ment for the film. Film­ing was sup­posed to take place after the com­ple­tion of Titanic, and the film would have been released in 1999, but accord­ing to Cameron, “tech­nol­ogy needed to catch up” with his vision of the film”

Talk­ing about tech­nol­ogy brings me back to what I think is the most inter­est­ing (if not the most accom­plished) movie of Cameron’s career, The Abyss. As his under­wa­ter doc­u­men­tary adven­tures fol­low­ing Titanic and the flora on Pan­dora have shown, the guy’s more than a lit­tle pas­sion­ate about sea things and ocean stuff. From the bull-shark-nosed rhi­noc­eros to the con­cen­tric flow­ers that retract on touch the world of Pan­dora is rich with nods to under­wa­ter Earth crea­tures. It was a very clas­sic story of sci­en­tists Vs. sol­diers, involved a mis­un­der­stood oth­er­worldly crea­ture and revolved around an ulti­ma­tum against mankind because it has been destroy­ing its envi­ron­ment. Remind you of any­thing?
The Abyss is an old movie, its effects are surely not as shiny as Avatar’s. But it sure was awe-inspiring the first time around. The char­ac­ters weren’t incred­i­bly com­plex, they were arche­types. They were suited to the story.

Out of World, Out of Body

A few months ago I was lis­ten­ing to the lead­ing skep­tic pod­cast on the inter­tubes — The Skep­tics Guide to the Uni­verse — and they were dis­cussing what skep­tics dream about, where lies their hopes for the future. 90% of them, despite hav­ing thor­oughly debunked silly claims of Alien abduc­tion explained that they wished we could dis­cover and/or meet Alien life on other plan­ets in the Uni­verse. Bet­ter yet, they all thought this was very likely.

Sci­ence gives a high prob­a­bil­ity to the exis­tence of life given the vast­ness of the uni­verse. Unlike what is said in most holy books the Uni­verse didn’t con­spire to cre­ate on Earth an envi­ron­ment for Humans to strive, cir­cum­stances were sim­ply (quite an under­state­ment) so. Life is pos­si­ble, but how about humanoid life? Relat­able life? Give our mil­lions of years of evo­lu­tion and the bil­lions of vari­ables that influ­enced how we look and func­tion nowa­days, this is also prob­a­ble, but less so. Unless another planet in the Uni­verse has very sim­i­lar grav­ity, atmos­phere, fauna, min­er­als, water ratio, dis­tance to a sun, etc. Unless many of these fac­tors cor­re­late, it is likely that alien life will be exactly this — Alien.

What I don’t know and always won­der about is how dif­fer­ent humanoids can be, how wide the wig­gle room is for some­thing to walk on two legs, breathe, see, hear, think and repro­duce. Can they many color or instead of a skin, fur? Can they have more or less limbs with­out mak­ing their sur­vival too unlikely in the long term? In other words, are we highly opti­mized humanoids in the way we are today, or is there still room for dif­fer­ence and improve­ment, beyond size and skin color?

The other topic the skep­tics touched on was future tech­nol­ogy. Some of them were espe­cially fond of life exten­sion tech­nol­ogy. Hav­ing one’s body frozen until a cure is found for what­ever dis­ease you died of, but most impor­tantly if a cure for aging is found. But there also are prob­lems with freez­ing. Cryo­gen­ics is a destruc­tive method for con­ser­va­tion. Appar­ently our cells are a lit­tle more com­plex than bread.

There is a bet­ter way though, and Avatar explores it a lit­tle bit. The Inter­net is one of the great­est if not the great­est inven­tion in my life­time. Sim­ply think of what­ever you do in a week and then imag­ine your­self doing it with­out using the inter­net at all. No emails, no Skype, no Ama­zon, no pod­casts, no down­load­able music, TV, movies, no online school­work, no weather except for TV and radio bul­letins, messy paper maps. These are but a few things the Inter­net has changed for­ever, and for the bet­ter. Pandora’s flora is very sim­i­lar to our Inter­net. It’s a huge net­work, it cre­ates value out of con­nec­tiv­ity and also cre­ates a global memory.

In Avatar, a human being is placed inside a very com­fort­able box and a mesh of recep­tors is placed over on top of the human. Then, the human’s brain is “syn­chro­nized” with the brain of a com­pat­i­ble host (the Human-Na’vi hybrids) which look almost exactly like the local inhab­i­tants of the planet save for minor details like smell and the num­ber of fin­gers (5 instead of 4). Once the link is estab­lished, only three things can break it: wak­ing up the human dri­ver, killing him, or killing the avatar.

While dri­ving on Paris’s “Periph­erique”, a cir­cu­lar high­way that sur­rounds France’s cap­i­tal, I real­ized what had res­onated so much with me in Jake’s dis­cov­ery of Pan­dora. This is going to seem silly, but two years ago, thanks to a very dear friend of mine I went to Florida for the first time. What this con­jures up in your mind is surely visions of con­crete hotels, Dis­ney char­ac­ters parad­ing around and old jew­ish seniors have a good old time in squeaquy clean pri­vate res­i­dences. To me it was much more than that. I arrived there with barely any expec­ta­tions, my only expe­ri­ences of the US had been fleet­ing and I had never seen it through the “natives’” eyes.

What I mean by this is that I had never lived as an Amer­i­can lives inside his own city. I had been a tourist in New York City, albeit an adven­tur­ous one. And my first time in this part of the con­ti­nent had been the most mem­o­rable road trip of my entire life, on the West Coast from Los Ange­les to San Fran­sisco via the Mojave Desert, Mon­u­ment Val­ley, Bryce Can­nyon and the great wilder­ness of Yel­low­stone National Park. I had two very extreme visions of life there, the Urban jun­gle, and its wild coun­ter­part. But despite hav­ing met quite a few char­ac­ters on the road, I had never actu­ally “gone native”.

My first time in Florida was just that. Some­one who has now become a very good friend took me around and showed me every­thing she thought I should see, as I had taken her through the streets of Paris at night the pre­vi­ous sum­mer. She and her friends and fam­ily showed me parks, restau­rants, lakes, schools, stores. Places that tourist see and oth­ers they ignore com­pletely. This place had the best of both worlds, rich wilder­ness just across the road from most houses and vibrant urban life, although a very dif­fer­ent def­i­n­i­tion of Urban from that of New York City, a much less dense and intru­sive one. I remem­ber the last of the seven days I was there in Novem­ber 2007 because on the way to the air­port I was again notic­ing how the col­ors were all too bright, how the sun had this light that we only get to see in the few best days of Sum­mer in France, and never again till 8 months later. On that last day I was stand­ing out­side the air­port, I put on my head­phones, lis­tened to Your Hand in Mine by Explo­sions in the Sky, and I cried. At the time I wasn’t sure exactly why I was cry­ing. All I knew was that I didn’t want to go back. Go back to a life I see today on the Periph­erique while I type this. A life of grey, a life of oth­ers hav­ing a say before I do, a life with­out legs.

Now if you’ve seen the movie you surely under­stand what I refer too. I’m not one to assign clear sig­nif­i­cance to themes and sub­text in movies or books. This is a job for cir­cle­jerk­ing lit­er­a­ture teach­ers who like to give def­i­nite mean­ing to things that most authors didn’t intend to. But this is my main argu­ment in favor of Avatar’s story. Of course it is a mashup of myths, leg­ends, and other mod­ern sto­ries. A short list would include Poc­a­hon­tas & John Smith, the mas­sacre of the Indian pop­u­la­tion of Amer­ica, Colo­nial wars, the Gulf Wars, and quite a few more you might have in mind. Some crit­ics of Avatar’s story point this out as if it were uncom­mon, I invite them to take a course in any culture’s lit­er­a­ture to dis­cover how silly a con­tention point this is. Authors from all eras have used exist­ing myths and incor­po­rated them in their own sto­ries to cre­ate what is referred to in lit­er­a­ture as inter­tex­tu­al­ity. In plain eng­lish it’s sim­ply a way to make sto­ries res­onate not just on a sin­gle level, but with all the sto­ries one might have heard or read before this one.

Bring Peo­ple In

The first time I saw Avatar it was pre­sented after a trailer for The Clash of the Titans with Sam Wor­thing­ton (Jake Sully in Avatar) play­ing a demi-god fight­ing against the Greek gods and mon­sters as Her­cules in Homer’s myths. This helped me grasp exactly how well Cameron had writ­ten his main char­ac­ter. Demi-god in Greek myths were surely there to help the mere mor­tals read­ing or hear­ing the sto­ries to iden­tify with peo­ple like Her­cules. Sure they have incred­i­ble strength and much more dan­ger­ous in-laws than most peo­ple, but they also lead human lives, with wives and chil­dren. In some ways, they are like us, which helps us see the story through their eyes.

In Avatar’s first trailer, which was shown before Dis­trict 9 last sum­mer in the US, there wasn’t a sin­gle shot reveal­ing that the hero of the story was para­plegic. I can under­stand why it was decided to omit this impor­tant fact. Maybe to sur­prise the audi­ence, or to sim­plify the trailer. But I think this explains some of the neg­a­tive reac­tions to this trailer, espe­cially since the rest of it con­sisted of too many dif­fer­ent shots of diverse (and some really cru­cial) scenes of the movie. It was too fast, to con­fused and never achieved the feel­ing of awe that the dis­cov­ery of this new world does in the film. While still con­tain­ing too many shots of the movie, the sec­ond trailer was much bet­ter han­dled. First it included some orig­i­nal score, instead of ten­sion induc­ing “action” sound cues, but most impor­tantly it showed Sully in a wheel­chair, vul­ner­a­ble. It also showed faces react­ing to Pan­dora and Michelle Rodriguez’s char­ac­ter Trudy Cha­con say­ing “You should see your faces”. The music included tribal voices, there was an estab­lish­ment of stakes: natives with arrows and fly­ing birds against heli­copters and mechan­i­cal suits with heavy weapons. And as such, many peo­ple I know and with which I dis­cussed my lack of inter­est for the movie (hard to believe, eh?) agreed with me that this sec­ond trailer was a big improve­ment and actu­ally peaked our com­mon interests.

The Good Savage

One of the worst con­cepts to ever come out of French phi­los­o­phy is Rousseau’s Good Sav­age myth. Being a bit of an explorer, Rousseau dis­cov­ered prim­i­tive tribes in remote parts of the world, and con­cluded hastily that their prim­i­tive state and sim­plic­ity proved that civ­i­liza­tion had cor­rupted mankind and made them become liars, thieves and mur­der­ers. Of course he didn’t notice that the tribes he was mar­veling about had been in con­stant tribal wars since times immemo­r­ial or that mor­tal­ity (espe­cially in chil­dren) was incred­i­bly high. He was one of the first to expe­ri­ence of what was dubbed The White Man’s Bur­den, a mis­placed guilt cre­ated by the incred­i­ble con­trast between mod­ern (wealth, health, peace) and prim­i­tive (poverty, sick­ness, war) societies.

Gaia Killers

Talk­ing to my iPhone on the way home after the movie I said that I didn’t care about the point of the movie — the morale of the story. I also rec­og­nized that you could care, just like you could care about the some­what cyn­i­cal view of human­ity in Pixar’s Wall-E. But just like any good story, what comes sec­ond is what the artist thinks, his world­view. What comes first, is plot. The jour­ney the char­ac­ters take takes prece­dences over the “edu­cat­ing” mes­sage. After hav­ing seen the movie again, I want to qual­ify this, since there is one impor­tant scene in the movie when the mes­sage almost over­takes the story.

When Jake Sully returns on the wings of the “Last Shadow” (the myth­i­cal bird that is on top of the food chain in the skies of Pan­dora) and ral­lies the Omat­icaya peo­ple together telling them that they need to join forces with the other Na’vi clans on Pan­dora against the RDA para­mil­i­tary forces. Except that isn’t what he does. He ral­lies them against the “sky peo­ple” (i.e. the Humans) who “destroyed their mother”. It’s a quick point in the movie and it has some dra­matic rel­e­vance I think. More impor­tantly, this is James Cameron’s uni­verse, and if in his uni­verse he decides that the Humans’ neglect of the Earth caused its destruc­tion and the dis­ap­pear­ance of “the green”, then fine. It’s his story.

But while respect­ing the author’s vision of his story, I can decide that with this over-simplistic and naive com­ment on ecol­ogy, I will ignore any­thing else he has to say on the sub­ject and con­cen­trate on his story instead. Thank­fully, I don’t think there is any other occa­sion in the movie when the par­al­lel is quite so heavy handed.

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Posted on Friday, February 5th, 2010 at 4:21 am. Filed under Neurons. Follow responses to this entry with the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.