Film After Film. J. Hoberman

Edwin Porter developed an anaglyphic system based on superimposed green and orange images. In November 1921, a few weeks after Harry K. Fairall showed the first anaglyphic feature The Power of Love, and less than two months before Dr. Hugo Riesenfeld demonstrated a rival 3-D system, D. W. Griffith told the New York Times that “motion pictures will never realize their ideal effectiveness until they are stereoscopic.”

      Sergei Eisenstein advanced a similar position in celebrating the 1946 part-color Stereokino production, Aleksandr Andriyevsky’s Robinzon Kruzo, a feature motion picture shot entirely in 3-D (and, as it was initially projected on a lenticular screen, the first 3-D movie to dispense with anaglyphic glasses). Robinzon Kruzo anticipates Avatar not only in its technological ambitions but in its immersive mise-en-scène. The first (and stronger) half of the movie is devoted to the protagonist’s solitary exploration of 3-D space in the form of a wondrous, verdant jungle populated by exotic tree-dwelling creatures.

      Eisenstein deemed 3-D to be inherently progressive (“Mankind has for centuries been moving toward stereoscopic cinema”) and hence, naturally, Soviet: “The bourgeois West is either indifferent or even hostilely ironical toward the problems of stereoscopic cinema.” Indeed, when bourgeois Hollywood turned its attention to stereoscopic cinema—along with widescreen formats and enhanced sound—it was not for art’s sake but rather to follow the logic of the capitalist system, an effort to regain its technological edge and reverse declining market shares in the post-TV era.1

      In the early twenty-first century, Hollywood is again compelled to compete with new forms of home entertainment (even as DVD sales dwindled from their 2004 peak). During the summer of 2010, some sixty 3-D features were reported in various stages of production. As pointed out by Dave Kehr in Film Comment, the studios acted as though 3-D were the equivalent of talking pictures, using the latest development in Total Cinema to sell exhibitors an expensive new delivery system and—not exactly an afterthought—to slap a hefty surcharge on ticket prices.2

      Six of 2010’s ten top-grossing movies—Toy Story 3, Alice in Wonderland, Despicable Me, Shrek Forever After, How to Train Your Dragon, and Tangled—were released in 3-D. All of these, save Alice in Wonderland (which was shot flat and subsequently converted to 3-D to catch the stereo wave), were examples of Pixar-style CGI “solid animation” and thus of post-photographic Matrix cinema. Not total cinema but digital will. A movie like Toy Story 3 is essentially redundant in imbuing virtual depth with virtual depth.3

      Avatar, described by many reviewers as “immersive” or “trippy,” is by contrast a cinematic experience that seamlessly synthesizes live action, animation, performance-capture, and CGI to create what is essentially a non-participatory video game: Jurassic Park’s menagerie running wild in The Matrix’s double eXistenZ. The game structure is operative throughout: the earthling Sky People are divided into hawks and doves, with the protagonist Jake as a sort of double double-agent, simultaneously reporting back to the base’s most militant Marine as well as acting as a tough but tender biologist. The former wants him to find out “what the blue monkeys want.” The latter knows that the Na’vi are ultra-green—a New Age matriarchal eco-friendly culture which, as demonstrated in a mass-swaying transubstantiation ceremony held several times beneath a cosmic weeping willow, is spiritually connected to Every Living Thing.

      As WALL-E makes a fetish of the photographic cinema that it has displaced, so Avatar presents itself as a critique of the system it embodies. This most global of cinematic triumphs is a blunt attack on rapacious globalization. More specifically, Avatar’s utopian vision is founded on an implacable repudiation of America’s history—as well as its present. The Sky People are not only heirs to the white settlers and conquistadors who crossed the Atlantic to colonize the new world but are explicitly associated with the Bush administration. They chortle over the failure of diplomacy, wage what is referred to as “some sort of shock-and-awe campaign” against the Na’vis, and goad each other with bellicose one-liners like, “We will blast a crater in their racial memory so deep they won’t come within a thousand clicks of here ever again!” Moreover, the viewer is encouraged to cheer when uniformed American soldiers are blown out of the sky and to root for a bunch of naked, tree-hugging aborigines led by a renegade white man on a humongous orange polka-dot bat.

      Thus, Avatar is an unusually robust, even blatant, example of Marcuse’s repressive desublimation, appealing to the public with images that are “irreconcilable with the established Reality Principle” and even at apparent odds with its manufacturer’s class interests. How could the Hollywood matrix—let alone 20th Century Fox, the studio affiliated with Rupert Murdoch’s rightwing News Corp—permit such a vision? The real question is: given cinema’s mandate to create a better world, how could it not?

      Not surprisingly, Avatar was criticized by conservatives as anti-capitalist, anti-militarist, or anti-American eco-propaganda, and by religious groups (including the Vatican) as anti-monotheist. Correspondingly, the Avatar scenario was passionately embraced by groups who experienced their own marginality. A widespread meme in which Photoshop-savvy fans recruited celebrities and pop icons into the Na’vi tribe peaked in mid-February 2010 with the poignant, real-world spectacle of Palestinian activists in blue body paint and full Na’vi drag protesting the Israeli barrier that had been erected around their village. More than any movie in memory, Avatar seemed to offer a hallucination that was also a fact, and some spectators responded as though they were players who had graduated to the higher levels of the computer game so vividly represented in Mamoru Oshii’s 2001 movie, Avalon.4

      Waking up back in the lab where his disabled body reposes in a metal box, Jake realizes that “out there [in Pandora] is the true world and in here is the dream.” Although it has been suggested that Avatar represented a paradigm shift away from the dystopia of The Matrix, it is only in the sense of presenting The Matrix in reverse. Pandora is a utopia—even a global network—in which, just as the protagonist is able to transmit his consciousness into a Na’vi body, so the pantheist Na’vis are able to plug into plants and animals using an umbilical cord that critics were pleased to compare to a USB cable.5

      The cable news network CNN coined the term “Post Avatar Depression” to describe the condition of those frustrated individuals who flooded online fan sites with posts that detailed their despondent, in some cases near-suicidal, state at not being able to continue to live in Pandora. Even allowing for the possibility of prankish exaggeration, these confessions attest to the continuing power exerted by what Bazin called “the recreation of the world in its own image,” and the attraction of that world, however fantastic. With Avatar, the tantalizing promise of Total Cinema—now decisively post-photographic—was viscerally experienced: Unbearably distant, yet overwhelming near.

      PART II:

       A CHRONICLE OF

       THE BUSH YEARS

      CHAPTER SEVEN

      2001: AFTER SEPTEMBER 11

      NEW YORK, SEPTEMBER 18, 2001

      Last Tuesday’s terror attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon blew a hole in the Toronto International Film Festival as well. Hundreds of journalists emerged from early-morning screenings to chaotic first reports (a publicist hysterically screaming “they bombed the Pentagon”), rushing from the insular world of round-the-clock movies to a total immersion in the big CNN picture and the hours of redial required to get a New York phone connection.

      All screenings were canceled (at least for a day). So far as the press was concerned, the festival’s 300-odd movies had already been abandoned in favor of a phantasmagoria of urban disaster, mind-boggling cartoon explosions, digicam special effects, world-obliterating violence, and incomprehensible conspiracy. In my case, the catastrophe was actually occurring a few blocks from home, but recurring “live” TV images of my neighborhood grocer, subway stop, and daughter’s public school didn’t in themselves account for the awful familiarity of the images.

      “He who imagines disasters in some ways desires them,” Theodor Adorno noted in the middle of the last century. Imagining this disaster is what the movies are all about. It was as though a message had bounced back from outer space. The giant dinosaurs,