BETRAYED BY MY OWN CREATION! HOW!?

Or: Dr. Moreau's Legacy in John Wells' The Company Men

Most of you probably haven't seen The Company Men, considering it was just shown this week at the Sundance Film Festival. For your sake, then, I'll include a short synopsis. The film follows 3 men working for one Boston-based shipbuilding company – sales associate Bobby Walker (Ben Affleck), his boss Phil Woodward (Chris Cooper), and upper manager Gene McClary (Tommy Lee Jones) – as they cope with getting laid off. The acting is a treat, the writing is crisp, and perhaps the only sour note is a lack of perspective.

I'll get my gripes out of the way first because this review isn't about those. Sometimes it seems to ask, "Oh heavens, who will think of the white males? See how they suffer at the hands of this cruel recession! Have they not endured enough?" I found it difficult to refrain from cackling with glee when sad music plays as Ben Affleck's character Bobby is forced to sell his Porsche, much less sympathize with him. Getting laid off is obviously a difficult and unhappy time for anyone, but even in America there are people harder-hit by this recession than affluent white males.

Despite this, the film is an excellent piece of work. It follows the classic story archetype of the mad scientist: scientist corrupts natural order to create monster, scientist sends monster against enemies, monster turns against scientist to punish hubris. In this metaphor simply replace "scientist" with "the white man," "monster" with "capitalism," and "enemies" with "poor people." "Natural order" still applies, I suppose, simply because capitalism is an unnatural construct, but perhaps the same could be said of all economic systems.

Really I can't be too hard on a movie that shows capitalism in an unfavorable light, but that's just me. The film culminates in the dilapidated husk of a Boston shipyard after a funeral. Tommy Lee Jones grumbles to Ben Affleck that "we used to make something in this country." Two victims of a predatory system lament in the skeletonized corpse of a third. The denoument, to avoid spoilers, is bittersweet but not without hope.

If you can still catch a Sundance showing, you won't regret it. If you can't, it's at least worth a rental when it comes out on DVD.

White People Are Getting Fucked Up By A Movie About Blue Cat-Elves

Or: The Consequences of Idolization in James Cameron's Avatar

James Cameron, I have a small suggestion next time you’d like to make a film. Nothing huge, mind you. It really just boils down to one minor quibble:

Next time hire a writer.

No one’s criticizing the strength of Avatar’s visuals, except maybe some stodgy old luddites angrier about CG than I am. Instead they (not the luddites, that is, but the hypothetical critics implied with “no one”) are criticizing how goddamn cartoonish the plot is.

I have to be really careful in discussions about Avatar because sometimes I’ll hear people defend the name “unobtanium” as a legitimate name for the movie’s MacGuffin mineral. I have to be careful about this because when I hear someone defending something indefensible it makes me question if I’m even alive and living in reality. Such facile and lazy writing couldn’t possibly have survived the production process of a multi-million dollar blockbuster release. “But it’s a legitimate term that has been used in the aerospace engineering field for decades!” the defender might say. “Get out of my bathroom, I’m trying to shower,” I might reply were the defender arguing this point in my bathroom. Otherwise I might say “Legitimate? Pfah! Only so far as an in-joke can be legitimate.”

It’s one thing to call an essentially unobtainable material “unobtanium” as a joke, but it’s quite another thing to call it “unobtanium” when they have enough of it to justify a floating display chunk and an extensive mining operation harvesting more every day. They have clearly obtained unobtanium. And why? Because otherwise the movie wouldn’t have a one-dimensional conflict. Oh, sorry, I mean, “because this little gray rock sells for twenty million a kilo.”

This brings me to the crux of this article, for without our cartoonishly villainous antagonists, we couldn’t have our insultingly virtuous protagonists. The Na’vi are the result of post-colonial atonement-seeking filtered through the lens of lazy storytelling equipped with an enormous budget. But the movie would like you to accept that - despite existing on a planet that already had some form of planetary consciousness and an entirely alien physiology - they evolved into a sentient and miraculously humanoid race of giant blue cat-elves.

Fair enough, I suppose. Except then they just so happened to develop a perfectly idealized subsistence-based culture that reveres nature and abhors senseless killing. And I do mean a singular culture, because apparently the Na’vi are so homogenous that the only differences between Pandora’s various tribes are their geographic locations. Far be it from me to criticize the ideals of environmentalism, but in this case the Na’vi are literally too good. They are romanticized right out of their own biology. Are we supposed to believe that there are no diseases whatsoever on this lush jungle world teeming with fungal life?

I’m not asking for a complete ethnography on a fictional alien race, simply a modicum of depth. Perhaps if we had seen some of the downsides to living as the Na’vi live then we wouldn’t see the schadenfreude-laced laments of broken internet denizens stricken by Avatar-induced depression. As morbidly hilarious as this situation is, Mr. Cameron, let’s try to avoid it next time. And there’s only one way to do that: Hire a writer.