Not Becoming-Posthuman in the Ultimate Postfilmic Posthuman Male Fantasy – Queer-Feminist Observations on James Cameron’s Avatar (2009)
Preliminaries
1With Avatar, as it was widely acknowledged in press and film criticism alike, James Cameron had gone viral – again, not only in terms of another elegiac U.S.-American Narrative – like Abyss (1989) or Titanic (1997) – but also in the sense of vaulting cinema into its next phase of digital enhancement. Critics excelled in mentioning the specific 3D-cameras, Cameron had have built for this special occasion, the improved motion-capturing device which recorded the actor’s movements and facial expressions in front of a blue screen but whose results (data) could be seen within the simultaneously generated graphic context of the environment of Pandora planet.[1]See for example Appleyard, Rodney. „’Avatar’. World of the Na’vis.“ inside film: FX, Issue 129 (March 2010): 32-34 and Turan, Kenneth. „A dazzling relevation. James Cameron’s ‚Avatar’ restores a sense of wonder to moviegoing that’s been missing.“ Los Angeles Times. Dec. 17 (2009). 24 pars. But also Kimberly N. Rosenfeld, who is critical about Avatar’s content and stresses the shift to the posthuman in comparison to Cameron’s former Terminator-series; see Rosenfeld, Kimberly N.. „’Terminator’ to ‚Avatar’: A Postmodern Shift.“ Jump Cut. A Review of Contemporary Media, 52 (Summer 2010). 28 pars. Much has been written since, about Avatar’s digitally enabled world of spiritual enchantment – even if criticised by religious groups for neo-paganism or natural religion respectively –,[2] An enchantment so intense, so compelling and convincing, that there is much rumor about people who wanted to commit suicide after leaving the movie theater and being confronted with an ever so harsh, cruel and ugly ‚reality’. See Boucher, Geoff. „’Avatar’ is a Pandora’s box of pop culture.“ Los Angeles Times. February 3 (2010). 5 pars. of a collective society living in total harmony with the conditions and requirements of a globe in a seemingly natural state. This has been mostly interpreted as an expression of (counter-cultural)[3] See especially Davidson, Rjurik. „Avatar. Evaluating a Film in a World of its Own.“ Screen Education, 57 (2010), 10-17. zeitgeist in the light of pressing scocial problems such as global warming, increasing pollution, augmented technization of human living, hyperaggressive and -exploitive capitalism and so on.
2But also critical voices were raised, from celebrity philosopher Slavoj Zizek to unknown-logogram directors on YouTube,[4] See Zizek, Slavoj. „Return of the Natives.“ New Statesman, March 4 (2010). 18 pars. and (the clip of) jxhensely. „The Progressive Racism of James Cameron’s ‚Avatar’.“ YouTube. January 10 (2010). that pointed fingers at the movie’s legacies of Euro-American Imperialism (Pocahontas-Story), of the myths of the white man’s supremacy and redemption, especially in comparison to other wellknown movies like Dances With Wolves (Kevin Kostner, USA 1990) and The Last Samurai (Edward Zwick, USA 2003).[5] See MacNamara, Alison, Anti-Racist Social Work, Lisa Moy. „An Anti-Racist Critique of ‚Avatar’.“ and also Newitz, Annlee. „Wen Will White People Stop Making Movies Like Avatar.“ io9: we come from the future. November 3 (2009). 15 pars.
3Some critics – media-wise-guys, like media theorist and internet specialist Ken Hillis, in analytical accordance with Klaus Theweleit –[6] Theweleit, Klaus. „Menschliche Drohnen“ („Human Drones“, transl. by C.K.). Spiegel online, March 3 (2010). 18 pars. called the network that connects the trees, animals and the Na’vi on Pandora by its real name: It is a global network, wired and WiFi based, just a little bit more biological wetware, with an allusion to a global brain (as the Sigourney Weaver-character, scientist Grace Augustine, puts it) and its electronic impulses and synapses like a fully biological version of a global village à la McLuhan. Interestingly enough, Hillis interprets the function of the connectedness of the Na’vi among themselves and with their environment on the semantic level as a Neoplatonic fantasy, wherein a deity engenders all matter. That is to say, all the living creatures on Pandora are meant to signify the embodiment of the one and only godly Spirit (Eywa). Though speaking of material hard wires, he sees in them the bodiless substance of transcendental abstraction.
4What strikes me when I read those interpretations is, generally speaking, their double strand of argument: Either, there is first the technique that attracts the interpreter’s awareness, which is finally at such an advanced stage to fulfil a director’s longlasting dream or is now the ultimate means to catch the audience’s eyes and nerves. Or, there is a foregrounding of the level of content, of semantics or of the narrative of the film, to whose’ old imperialist story the technology is just a very sophisticated supplement. In each case, though, the technique (technical reproduction of signs) and the cultural (cultural production of signs) seem to be ominously exterior to one another. Contrary to this dichotomous view on Avatar, I will argue in this article, that it is exactly the specific mutual constitution of technical reproduction and cultural production which lies at the very heart of the movie’s theme and is worth scrutinizing: the complex relations between materiality and immateriality, between real and virtual, between matter and idea, between embodiment and disembodiment that is broached with digital technologies per se.
5As a movie Avatar does not only joyously allude to actual digital environments on a semantic level but also is heavily based on digital technologies. Approaches that do not take into serious account that what we deal with here is a film as medium that tells/shows something about digitality by which it is simultaneously starkly inflected do lose a great deal of not only the meaning of the film but also of how digital technologies challenge film as a site of cultural production and meaning – as a cultural technology. To make it more obvious: The movie’s body is intruded by the body of the computer. But that is not just a way of integrating a new tool that make some director’s fantasies come true, because the body of digital technology has, if not an essence, but also epistemological, discursive and narrative features of its very own – what I will call “the digital” in the course of this article. Thus, the movie as film (as medium, as discourse and story) deals with not only the body but with the epistemological, discursive and narrative meaning of the digital alike – including the bodies it calls into being through this.[7] Let me state clearly what I am saying and am not saying here. I do not accuse those interpreations wrong that come to the conclusion – on the semantic level – that Avatar is a racist movie about U.S.-american white supremacy and imperialism. But claiming that Avatar is a mere reproduction of the Pocahontas-myth in a new shape is losing the option of registering the movie’s qualitative difference to the myth as a (contemporary) movie. Nor do I think Zizek is beside the point with his pop-lacanian result in saying that the ugly world of the bad humans is the needed phantasm for the two lover’s perfect world not to desintegrate. I have done that with his conceptual help referring to the trilogy of The Matrix myself some years ago (see Imagendering II. Gender and Visualization. gender forum 13/2006). My attempt here is just to stress the mediality of both the movie as film/medium and the digital technologies insofar as it is by their specific features that this world comes into being. Garrett Stewart stresses within this context that nowadays postfilmic cinema is inflected very much by the digital even if digital technologies are not explicitly addressed but modify film on a more deep-structural level – what he calls narratography. He has reconstructed a whole typology of the digital changing the discursive and narrative organization of film. See Garrett Stewart. Framed Time. Toward a Postfilmic Cinema. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007.