In his 2009 film Avatar, James Cameron allegorically tackles our long history of colonialism here on Earth by shooting it up into space. The film made a trillion dollars and became a pop culture phenomenon. Some would argue it dissipated, but its colossal blue footprint remains unavoidable. What does get lost, however, is the film’s political nuance. The anti-imperialist bent is genuinely well-realized, largely by virtue of the striking nature of the imperialist imagery. The contrast between the vibrant Pandoran wilderness of Cameron’s invention and the harsh military tones of the invading earth forces provides the soul of the film, and the imagery remains what people mostly remember it for. But what that imagery represents, often ignored in discussions about the film’s vitality, is such a significant departure from what it usually does that the film earns a closer look.
Cameron, as arguably the blockbuster filmmaker, exemplifies the contradictions that can arise in these movies more than anybody. Avatar is the biggest movie of all time at the global box office, yet thematically and visually it feels like a reaction against other movies like it: movies, ironically, that Cameron could have made. The adrenaline-baked highs of True Lies, the magnetic final disaster of Titanic, the manifold explosions and setpieces of Terminator 2: Judgment Day. These are where Cameron best resides. Looking at True Lies especially, maybe the most essentially Cameron film, you can start to reach some conclusions about the overall ideology and positions of his work. It’s a colossal action extravaganza starring Arnold Schwarzenegger as a CIA agent fighting to keep nuclear weapons out of the hands of dangerous, standard-issue Islamic extremists. You could argue that its immense artifice is, at least in part, satirical, and you’d be right: at large, its commitment to this scale is of a piece with the unabashed, end-of-culture bombast of pre-9/11 Hollywood, using the era’s over-the-top nature against it. Taking the film at 100% face value is doing too much of a disservice to Cameron: the visual of Arnold Schwarzenegger riding a horse through a shopping mall is simultaneously too on-the-nose and absurd as an epitome of American exceptionalism to trust as genuine. But Cameron shoots it dead-on, playing up the fact that it works. To a base audience, it’s easy to get something extraordinary to sell through sheer exhilaration. Therefore, the often careless and offensive choices native to blockbuster spectacles are inherently political. Cameron’s work on True Lies lays bare the ways in which this spectacle, in the Hollywood tradition, is allied with depictions of militarism and imperialist rhetoric.
The fact that Cameron is so adept within a blockbuster methodology, demonstrated in less self-aware work like the Terminator movies, lends itself to perpetuation of whatever position is suggested by his images. Blockbuster form – that is, form fitting big-budget movies designed to thrill mass audiences – is extremely convincing in the hands of someone who knows what they’re doing. It’s designed to sweep you up in it without question, and so the connotations of ideas and images contained within become politicized. Cameron knows what he’s doing. Aliens and Terminator 2 would be effective propaganda vehicles if the realities of their stories were our reality. In an example of this inherent manipulation more divorced from a political angle, the final act of Titanic sees him sell the central love story through the palpable intensity and urgency of the collapse of the ship, staged as action and framed to put us in touch with our survival instincts, heightening the atmosphere of everything that is happening. True Lies sees him recognize this quality of his work and remark on it through total maximalism: Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jamie Lee Curtis kissing in the shadow of a mushroom cloud is an essential blockbuster image, one that, true to this spirit, could read as both winking or genuine and be effective either way. And then he arrived at Avatar, in which he takes this concept a step further, building a genuine, political narrative against the grain of the inadvertent, carelessly regressive politics of other films of its ilk.
Avatar, in its way, occupies a similar place in James Cameron’s body of work to the one John Ford’s The Searchers occupies in his. Ford, prolific across many genres and modes but iconic as a pioneer of the western genre, encountered a recurring theme throughout his career similar to the Cameron problem outlined above: Ford, despite being a self-asserted progressive who supported FDR and opposed the blacklist, made films that undeniably present a nostalgic vision of the old west, propping up stereotypes about masculinity and Native Americans that contrast with his personal politics. You could argue that Ford was the early-20th century analogue to Cameron in both his unique gift for entertainment blended with cinematic value and his place as a master of the studio system. His place within that system meant that his artistic vision, despite its consistent presence and potency, had to share space with other concerns. Ford was working with a set of recurrent ideas and pieces. He made these his own, reshaping and redefining them, but they stem from a crowd-pleasing mindset. In The Searchers, Ford attempts a reckoning with the images and themes that defined the genre he helped define. It’s the film of a man who has struggled between the alluring forces of the western as a genre and the nebulous reality of the western as an ideology. He closes the film with a literal shot of the door shutting on John Wayne, the ultimate old west icon of his own creation, and concludes with a definitive move to leave the idealized vision of the west in the past. The film’s most fascinating aspect is in this internal tension: Ford replicates his earlier films in their gorgeous landscapes and reverent shots of Wayne, yet he strips away the nostalgia at a narrative level. The connection between images and ideas here is significant, with Ford using the picturesque old west unabashedly as a setting, virtually unchanged from his past depictions, thereby lending that deconstruction of that past more gravity.
In Avatar, Cameron embarks on his own version of this. He initially presents the military as you would in a standard action flick, with technology you’re supposed to ooh and ahh at, might that’s supposed to titillate you, and righteousness you’re supposed to root for. Sure, there are early-established pockets of menace and corruption, but those are just small, avoidable sections. Yet instead of falling into the militaristic rhythms of your average blockbuster, Cameron uses this perspective to pull back, examine whether this world is really worth trusting blindly in, and ultimately indicting it. The full-throated presentation of the military as a destructive force only works with a vivid, often sympathetic visual rendering of that military, which Cameron weaves carefully so as to be indistinguishable from the action base he’s so engaged with. He puts us in the mindset of his main character, initially disoriented by the shifts from his world to that of the Na’vi but eventually more accustomed to the latter but put-off by the former. He does this not by intensifying his harsh, gray, unforgiving portrait of the human world, but by keeping it constant. His command of this aesthetic allows him to make it feel normal, so by gradually pulling back, his interrogation of its normalcy gains a dimension. Like Ford, Cameron spent so long in this mode that his eventual full-fledged breakdown of its themes draws heavily from past sincere presentations of them, often echoing choices and motifs, changing their meaning through context.
The fact that Avatar feels like such a conscious reaction to blockbuster filmmaking lays bare the realities of the (often) unconscious undertones of these films. The fact that Cameron, one of film history’s most established blockbuster filmmakers, was the one who made it speaks volumes about him and about Avatar. His decision to make the film on a big budget with blockbuster techniques echoes Ford’s western-to-end-all-westerns, both a reclamation of the form and, at some level, a recognition that its unique ability to to attract viewers makes it a perfect vehicle for a message. The messages of the films True Lies reacts to are not as purposeful as that of Avatar, but they are there, and for undiscerning audiences principally concerned with the explosions and chases, it seeps in without a second thought. This is why True Lies works to satirize this, and why Avatar works to subvert it. You can dissect to death whether it succeeds in its mission, whether it is faultless in it. But in the mission itself, in the reworking of ideas within the familiar blockbuster framework, it shows itself at the very least to be something innovative, something self-aware, something that displays Cameron’s versatility as unique.
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