Review #10: Avatar

We want the indigenous to win–on a pristine planet where antagonisms between humanoids and nature are easily resolved and amount to little; where nature is a benevolent terrestrial brain in love with her beautiful blue higher life forms; a pristine planet that resists, then allows humans of the more ordinary variety to assimilate and be absorbed, leaving their own imperfect bodies behind. The defeated humans leave, maintaining firm separation between planets, territories.

The indigenous Na’vi are genetically distinct from humans, their structures of empathy are so removed from those of humans, to understand them requires a thorough genetic transformation. There are no lasting, partial encounters. Is this symbolic of the West’s storied inability to accept other cultures, or is this a resurrection of race as an inherent property of bodies?

In contrast to these idealized amalgams of various ethnicities, the humans are divided. They develop and maintain various positions toward the Na’vi. Some remain committed to their genocidal interplanetary goals, whatever the cost. But some become traitors and identify with the oppressed to the point of becoming Nav’i themselves.

Does the film represent a cul de sac or a tipping point regarding popular Western thought about indigenous resistance? We’re willing to cheer on agents of the empire who take up arms against their own people–but for the sake of a pure race of beings whose society is free of contradictions. What if the oppressed are not aesthetically pleasing? What if they have practices we find uncomfortable, even after years of close contact? What if their relationship to the earth is no less fraught than ours? What if they are not willing for one of us to join and lead them?

Avatar has people talking about these things. And this should be celebrated, even if the film’s message is deeply conflicted.

Review #9: Up in The Air

In Up in The Air, Ryan Bingham tells us that humans are like sharks–we must keep moving. The question raised by the film is, over what and through whom?

The film patiently prompts this question through topography, both as metaphor and metonym for social dislocations. Bingham is above everything, spatially and emotionally, and so is the majority of the film–detached, airy, nonchalant, humorous. For the most part it’s a romantic comedy portraying, if quirkily, those patterns that allow us to cope with the contradictions society requires. Even when Bingham is ‘on the ground’ literally, he’s still up in the air for most of the film, and so are the viewers. Except that there are moments that radically disrupt this equilibrium. When Bingham fires people, we’re jolted at the callousness of his actions—moreso because his care isn’t completely manufactured. Bingham isn’t inhuman, but is only partially aware of his job’s gravity. Its real significance is necessarily repressed. Strangely these moments aren’t as shocking as the moment Bingham finds out the truth about his lover, Alex. Here, the brutality of the Real inserts itself, the film’s veneer of fantasy is ruptured, our narrative expectations are obliterated. Notions of ‘reality’ and common-sense notions of being ‘grown-up’ are shown to be disturbing. Bingham, a man who gives people the send-off for a living, becomes a naif, a willing dupe.

Epiphanies don’t set in. Neither of the ‘planes’ on which characters function are desirable. Neither being ‘Up in The Air’ or returning one’s attention to ‘what really matters’ in life is satisfactory. No one in the film embraces this, but the audience is pressed to recognize it. The film is a little bit Brechtian that way. It’s no masterpiece, but Up in The Air functions as an insidious depiction of a society with irreconcilable contradictions.

Review #8: Reno, NV

Gaming is like a mold that penetrates much of the city, audaciously visible in certain sectors and subtly annoying in others. Clubs and bars have gaming machines. Restaurants have gaming machines. Most of the full-time residents seem to ignore it, just as citizens in other cities take towering bank buildings for granted. Though it’s more appropriate to have rapacious forms of vice considered as such instead of legitimized as honorable and productive–as if banks and ad agencies aren’t sucking the labor and health out of people. But for Renoites, the casinos become part of the infrastructure, like lampposts, sewer drains, bridges, alcoholism, unemployment… Nevada has the 6th highest rate of unemployment in the country at 12.1%, despite that it has no personal or corporate income taxes. According to prevailing neoliberal wisdom, Nevada should be thriving. Instead, it relies on gambling taxes for revenue, so the state’s public institutions are being slashed. Who would’ve thought? The casinos I did venture into were depopulated–desperately so, as if the faith in striking it rich by chance, so intrinsic to the lore of the area, had been extinguished with the recession.

Not everything in the city is so dour. Unlike Las Vegas, the gaming areas are relatively small, and it’s easy to penetrate beneath their spectacles. Hidden behind the casinos are some beautiful public spaces. The promenade along the river forms a central, attractive and apparently useful space for non-commercial socialization. The city allowed enough of a buffer zone between this area and the surrounding commercial districts that it doesn’t seem hemmed in and claustrophobic. Reno’s downtown core is flat and easily walkable, and its architecture is fairly variegated in comparison with many cities in the mountain west. For all its brightly-lit garishness, Reno doesn’t have Boise’s brown-brick blandness, its intense fidelity to the nondescript.

Review #5: Marriage

Of the numerous cinematic portrayals of marriage that exist, Ingmar Bergman’s Scenes From a Marriage (1973) is a fairly good one. The excessive drinking, the dread, the denial, the regression to infantile behavior and the caustic insults thrown back and forth between the male and female leads are all quite representative of this type of social relationship.

An even more accurate film, and requisite viewing for any twosome considering permanent cohabitation, is Leave Her To Heaven (1945). Gene Tierney is Ellen Berent, an heiress, Cornel Wilde is Richard Harlan, a writer. The two meet at Ellen’s dead father’s ranch in New Mexico where they fall in love, despite Ellen’s engagement to Vincent Price. Once married, Ellen assiduously plays the role of faithful housewife, fawning over Richard. One gets the sense though, that her performance is too eager. It becomes clear that something is wrong with Richard when he brings his younger brother on their honeymoon. The implication is that Ellen wants to have sex with Richard, but the brother’s presence won’t allow them the requisite privacy. In revenge, she allows Richard’s brother to drown. Afterwards Richard always seems to want to be around Ellen’s family, especially her sister, Ruth, who is much more wholesome. Ellen finally talks Richard into having a baby, thinking that this will force him to fulfill his role. While she’s pregnant, Richard acts aloof, so she throws herself down a flight of stairs, causing a miscarriage. Even less satisfied with Ellen now, Richard spends more time with Ruth. Ellen commits suicide, but in doing so, frames Richard for murder. Richard is acquitted and marries Ruth. Ostensibly the point is that Ellen is a crazed, neurotic woman—but this reading hardly holds up in light of Richard’s callousness. The real lesson is that marriage creates a disturbingly restrictive and harmful set of social expectations.

Review #2: Holiday Travel

For those of us who must cross great distances and climes to reach our loved ones for the holiday season, the travel day usually includes a concentrated exposure to airports and airplanes, spaces disembedded from any sense of continuity from the surrounding terrain. If I read him correctly, these constitute what Arjun Appadurai calls ‘translocalities’–places that don’t properly belong to any region or nation or other well-defined geographical area. Airports are oppressive translocalities, regions of limbo, of high anxiety, of desperation. Most desperate of all are the attempts to localize these spaces. Memphis has its barbecue and Sun Studios shop, Vegas has its slot machines, Charlotte has its rocking chairs and LaGuardia has… well… ferociously miserable dullness, like it’s somehow umbilically connected to a dying shopping mall in Ohio.

When faced with these conditions, books are necessary. Books found in the airports themselves usually won’t do, unless you’re at PDX or MSP, in which case you may find something suitable. One book in particular is always useful. Pessoa’s Book of Disquietude. Granted, it’s useful in almost any situation, sort of like the Koran or the I Ching for the  melancholy. For example, I turned to a random page and in section 213, found this: “We in this world are all living on board a ship that is sailing from one unknown port to another…” Not quite the holy grail of epiphanies, but uncannily appropriate. But later: “Good deeds are impositions; that’s why I categorically abhor them.” Something about statements like this just soothes the soul of the holiday traveler who is forced to endure the cognitive dissonance that comes from juxtaposing christmas cheer with packs of families all sporting bulging carry-ons while knocking into the slower-moving folks on the way to their gate. “I’m highly sociable in a highly negative way,” says Pessoa.

Review #1: Administering flea medicine to a pet

When I apply the flea medicine to the back of my cat’s neck, parting his hair to make sure it reaches his skin, I feel an uncomfortable flurry of emotions. I feel slightly embarrassed that the cat has fleas in the first place, even though he’s an indoor cat and the presence of fleas in the house is due to the porous condition of the structure. I feel  like a jerk for applying pesticide to a mammal; a pesticide that will spread itself over the surface of his body through the oils in his skin. I think of Round-Up, I think, inappropriately, of genocidal defoliants. The longevity of this product frightens me. I would hardly let someone give me a monthly dose of pesticide, not to mention one that hangs around for a month at a time. And I don’t even lick myself on a regular basis.

In performing a procedure that requires the parting of the cat’s fur, I feel like I’ve been placed in a role I neither want nor feel qualified to occupy. This is not the kind of relationship I want to have with the cat. He is of another species with its own rules for maintaining his body. Because he lives with me, I deal with the input and output, the scratching, petting, and admonishing, the cooing and the baby talk. I am somewhat like his much older brother. I’m not his doctor or his nurse. Yes, there is the veterinarian, but I don’t enjoy thinking about veterinarians. Veterinarians are almost an accoutrement of a class I don’t belong to, like chiropractors or hot tub salesmen.

Veterinarians also make me think of pet sickness and pet death, which is almost like real death, except that it cannot be overcome by the pet’s own efforts.