When we committed to write about Avatar several months ago, we had no idea that it would be the most profitable movie ever.1. The stratospheric costs of the film’s production set a very high bar for profitability. This film, which ultra-auteur James Cameron imagined 1975 but could not make until CG technology evolved to create this particular artificial world, both profits from and critiques technology. And in order to do this, it focuses on bodies–non-normative, genomically identifiable, gendered bodies. Annalee Newitz points out in “When Will White People Stop Making Movies Like Avatar” that the film’s plot revisits and revises of the narrative of going native, leading many, including television’s South Park, to deride it as “Dancing with Smurfs.”

Clearly, Avatar lends itself to a critique of empire, yet has not yet been read in terms of its most striking visual trope, exploited in the trailer: disability. It is precisely because gender and disability are persistently addressed in the film but not in commentary about the film that we know how central it is. As Cameron said in his interview with Newsweek this January, “It’s the Story, Stupid,” his attempts to “sell” the movie were far more successful when the trailers depicted Jake Sully’s disabled body than when they focused on depicting the lush landscape and ultra-expensive “effects”. Cameron claims that the second trailer emphasized “story” or narrative, a feature that even the most effects-driven films must have (and a feature that keeps them well within the genre of narrative film rather than spectacle, as most IMAX films have been) and that the film’s success is ultimately due to this.

Though technology can fix many things in Pandora and in our world, it still apparently cannot or rather chooses not to fix human bodies. This is of great note in a film that both displays and is about the transcendent qualities of CGI and biotechnology. When Jack Sully transmits his consciousness into the hybrid Na’avi body that he eventually comes to occupy permanently, a world of limits is evoked. We can see that the bias against disabled people is exactly the same in the future as it is at present–one passing soldier refers to Sully as “meals on wheels” and another replies “that’s just wrong,” apparently refering to Sully’s very presence on Pandora.2 Sully’s spinal injury is repairable, but he can’t afford it. However, as we see during the avatar-training scenes, the disabled body is viewed as “waste” that a thrifty military industrial complex can recoup. Disposable military bodies, often bodies of color in this film, are continually sacrificed: Sully is given the ability to acquire a prosthetic alien-soldier body not as compensation for his disability, but in spite of it–his genomic capital as the identical twin to his scientist-brother makes him the only possible match for the cloned Na’avi body, a technology far more expensive and precious than his own defective body.

The film’s tag line “I see you” points both to the film’s innovative technological apparatus, the glasses and screen and images that let us see like never before, and to the possibility of empathy…towards aliens. What does it mean that, while it’s possible in Avatar to see a critique of both gender and disability, this is not what critics seem to be “seeing”? The disabled body in this spectacular film is the sole spectacle we are meant to look away from, the blind spot in this visual field which otherwise seems to invite immersion.

While Jake’s masculinity is called into question via these disability hazing rituals, Avatar is constructed specifically for a heterosexual male fantasy of penetration–the question is whether the film’s revisions to this structure are decorative or substantial. The movie first hyper-masculinizes Jake, who bursts into his re-born ability in a boyish romp across the avatar base, but then pursues dual tracks of developing his violence-capable masculinity and at the same time steadily feminizing him. He learns not to stab Gaia with an improvised flaming spear, but instead to engage nature through a collaborative hairstyling.

This interbraiding is probably not an intentional homage to the performance artists Marina Abromovic and Ulay, who in Relation in Time (1977) sat for 17 hours with their hair braided together, though this lengthy film does give extended consideration both to asymmetrical warfare (involving both male and female warriors) and to an exploration of spiritual connection with the world which is figured as material–that is, as scientifically observable.

One obvious visual pleasure offered up by Avatar is the spectacle of the giant, blue-skinned nearly nude Neytiri; in an interview with Playboy Cameron acknowledged (or bragged) about the centrality of her “smoking hot” body to the picture: “Right from the beginning I said, ‘She’s got to have tits,’ even though that makes no sense because her race, the Na’vi, aren’t placental mammals.” However, Cameron’s feminist sensibility must be acknowledged, and the violent maternal figures played by Linda Hamilton in Terminator 2 (1991) and originally by Weaver in Aliens (1986) are central to the pleasure of those narratives. Cameron’s feminism, however, appears both narrow and generalized to the point of meaninglessness in Avatar.

Action films now seem either conscientious or trendy about including women capable of violence, as evidenced by the Lord of the Rings films’ efforts to beef up the roles of Liv Tyler and Miranda Otto. Here, while Weaver appears in a kind of homage to both her earlier role with Cameron and to her characterization of Diane Fossey in Gorillas in the Mist, Michelle Rodriguez essentially reprises her role from Aliens as a butch marine with a penchant for salty tag-line dialogue (and has her own moment of going native when she wears a discreet swoosh of war paint as she pilots her helicopter into battle against the human mercenaries). The film is full of gestures of equality and showcases female combat and leadership, yet those touches should not obscure how deeply the narrative is organized by gender. For example, the male Na’avi understand weapons, and the women understand the network.

The planet’s network-culture decides what peripherals or hardware can interface with each other; one could say that it organizes both ability and gender. It regulates what organ can plug into what port or orifice; echoing the technological machine culture of the military industrial complex, the planet’s animals are the peripherals or hardware that the natives employ as prostheses. The culture of positivist digital technology development, exemplified by Avatar’s telegenic, Minority Report-style interactive displays and 3-d imaging, echoed in the film’s exhibition itself, is contrasted with the earthy pleasures to be had from the groovy eco-spirtuality of the “Gaia Hypothosis,” in which the natural world is considered as a single living organism.

Near the end of the film, after the big battle has, in effect, been won, Colonel Miles Quaritch, wearing a mecha-suit, a metal prosthetic soldier body (very similar to the suit Sigourney Weaver wears at the end of the Aliens) goes to find Jake Sully for a form of personal revenge. This battle is fought between a stereotypically virile hyper-masculine marine who controls his mechanical body physically, and a biological being, “wet ware,” controlled by a disabled, feminized body so vulnerable that it cannot reach its own breathing machine. Ultimately, Neytiri joins the fight, bringing a third term to this hard body / soft body dichotomy. She is a real being. Her body is visually but not ontologically like Jake Sully’s avatar body. The thanator, a violent and uncontrollable animal that submits to her for the purpose of this fight, signifies the seamless and intuitive connection with “nature” that crunchy feminism has often attributed to women. Neytiri and her mount disrupt the oedipal conflict between two men and their prostheses.

Neytiri is then seen cradling Jake’s tiny, frail human body. While this scene replays–with genders reversed–the scene in which a giant avatar version of Jake Sully cradles a tiny dying human version of Grace Augustine, it also has some significant ramifications for our concerns with gender and disability. The scene is an odd pieta, but rather than the Virgin Mary cradling the dying Christ, we see powerful, authentic female nature nurturing the damaged vestige of masculine humanity. Here Cameron may for the first time in the film go beyond his earlier butch feminist heroines to offer a queerer formation of gender and ability.

It’s easy to bash Avatar. In fact, the proliferation of reviews in the popular press that do a good approximation of an academic critique of colonialism leads us to wonder how this critique came to be part of popular culture. So common is the “Dances with Smurfs” critique that when someone forcefully and coherently takes a contrary view it’s worth paying attention–as with the argument made by Metafilter user Pastabagel, who asserts that “the plot is completely predictable, not because you’ve seen it before, because you actually haven’t. Avatar differs from the plot of every single one of those archetypical films in one extremely important way – the forces of civilization/progress/technology lose.” Whether this defeat is either unique or transformative might be debated, but this argument usefully demonstrates our faith in science fiction’s ability to get us beyond the trap of our own historical postcolonial moment. It seems, however, that our current ideologies of gender and disability are harder for the film to transcend.

In the final scene of the film, then, we find Scully laid at the foot of Tree of Souls in order to transfer his “soul” from his human body to his avatar/golem. If Avatar suffers from the same traps of all the nativist fantasies that have preceded it, both filmic and literary, in this fantasy the protaganist must literally die (just as humanity has been literally defeated). In order to occupy a place in the world of the Na’avi “others”, Jake Sully must fully relinquish this human form. There will be no going back. While this could be seen as another Christian reference (this time to the Resurrection), it is also a fantasy of being able to live in virtuality, leaving our physical bodies, and their political baggage, behind.

As media critics, we have a responsibility not just to bash Avatar, but to come to terms with its remarkable popularity, which has occurred either because or in spite of the ease with which the film can be critiqued for its virtual colonialism. Avatar is popular because it provides a good deal of spectatorial pleasure to a relatively diverse audience, pleasure that for some has turned into depression as they realize that Pandora is an artificial world, and not one they can enter at will. It’s no wonder that some audiences are said to experience such powerful post-Avatar blues, a nostalgia for an entirely artificial place. The film gives us a navigable-looking virtual world (modeled after the groovy visual style of Roger Dean, a favorite of the stoner set from the 70s) and it’s not surprising that audiences are disappointed that they can’t live there (without dying first). And its narratives about transcending or “losing” the defective bodies resonates particularly strongly in the age of reality programming such as The World’s Biggest Loser and Extreme Makeover.

Avatar manages to bring together spectators that like war movies with spectators that like peace movies. It’s of equal interest to adults and to children. It offers points of identification for folks who are diversely positioned by race and by gender. Can we derive any reasonably hopeful message from this popularity? Is there any chance that these differently positioned audiences are talking to each other about the issues raised in the film? Or are we simply seeing the movie side by side, taking away our separate messages, and going home changed only by the weight we gained from our buttered popcorn and twizzlers? The centrality of disabillity and gender in the film’s narrative is easily hidden within its lush CGI-generated landscape–a visual achievement which is its most powerful agent and advertisement–yet which grounds it back in the body, just where the viewer finds herself when she takes off her 3-D glasses.

Image Credits:
1. Avatar movie poster
2. Jake Sully, the wheel-chair using hero of Avatar
3. Na’avi and Jake
4. Thanator attacks Sully

1. see Acland, “Avatar as Technological Tentpole,” http://flowtv.org/?p=4724
2. Avatar, p8–the screenplay is available at http://www.foxscreenings.com/media/pdf/JamesCameronAVATAR.pdf

“The TV title sequence is a branding endeavor and a legitimate art form. It is the sole, consistent, and iconic moment that carries through a show’s lifespan and beyond.” (Digital Kitchen)

The opening title sequence of True Blood (Allen Ball, HBO) produced by Digital Kitchen is a aesthetically stunning hoax. The production company that made the title sequence for True Blood, Digital Kitchen, has also done beautiful and complex credit sequences for Six Feet Under, Dexter, House, and Nip/Tuck, but True Blood’s is most completely a compelling and separate paratext. And unlike other title sequences whose innovative use of film technique and imaging to make it stand out from the film itself rather than blend unnoticeably with it, such as Se7en, its position at the beginning of a serial television show guarantees that it will viewed repeatedly. It tells a story and presents the viewer with a set of visual images that are uncomfortably sutured to the television program itself.

Edited to the catchy tune of Jace Everett’s “Bad Things”, this montage promiscuously merges what seems to be stock footage with more clearly original sequences, frequently using an art video (grainy, hand held) aesthetic to give documentary credibility to constructed materials. We believe that the clip of a man being carried away by police is civil rights era documentary footage and the child in the klan uniform seems also to be “real” while we assume that the “God Hates Fangs” sign is produced for the show. But the religious ecstasies and bar erotics and the many shots suggesting a seedy and inbred south are more ambiguous. And while we know the time-delay animal decompositions shots are “found” they are not contemporaneous to the work of the show.

Old man in rocking share from True Blood opening credits

The True Blood title sequence indulges in fascination with Southern Gothic cliche: alligators, catfish, ecstatic spirituality and sexuality, and an atmosphere of decay that bespeaks a perhaps in-bred mutation. The varied perspectives of Southern Gothic visual culture–from the imagery of Faulkner to many Tennessee Williams plays to the film Deliverance (1972) and even the photography of Ralph Eugene Meatyard (1925-1972) or William Eggleston (b. Memphis 1939) – all stare at the bodies of the south. These include enslaved deep black bodies, immobile obese pale bodies, deformed and violated bodies, repressed church lady bodies – and in keeping with this tradition the True Blood sequence stares even harder at the gyrating religious and sexual bodies that appear to emerge from this context.

The “God Hates Fangs” sign from the opening sequence

Gothic visuality offers an idea of the “truth” of the South, revealing the violence, sexuality and faith that lie behind stereotypically polite Southern facades. True Blood’s opening promises to show us a continuation of this fascination with diagnosing the South’s mutations, and the single shot of “God Hates Fangs” on a church sign (and its rhyming of the image of boys eating bloody barbecue/strawberries) intimates that it will offer Gothic with a new twist. But vampirism, while played for its erotic fascination, is not really integrated into a Southern Gothic milieu in True Blood. (Sookie arguably engages and dispatches the vestiges of white Southern Gothic depravity in the first episode, when she defeats the Rattrays, a trashy couple who are bleeding vampire Bill to death.) The violence, sexuality and religious ecstasy of the show itself are imported from other styles and genres.

Like the opening credits for Dexter (also produced by Digital Kitchen), the True Blood sequence promises to show us the ways in which everyday life is filled with the “same kind” of horror as vampire stories. Both explicitly and implicitly, the sequence suggests that the American south is full of the all kinds of real political, social, and natural violence: racism, homophobia, religious fundamentalism, and decomposing bodies. The credit sequence suggests that there “might as well be” vampires in the south and promises a show in which vampires as metaphor will be used to reveal a “truth” about ongoing historical violences. But this is not the show that follows the credit sequence. The south may be the back drop for Sookie Stackhouse and Bill Compton’s adventures, but it is not the world they engage. The rights of vampires, both political and domestic, are front and center, and the rights that the credits sequence suggest they stand in for are rarely represented, either narratively or in exposition.

Sookie Stackhouse, the program’s telepathic waitress protagonist, can hear what people are thinking; she has an interior radio permanently tuned to the South’s repressed. Sookie hears voices but these voice rarely document racist or sexist thinking, though classist assumptions abound. Either Sookie lives in a utopian future in which racism and homophobia are resolved or she is oblivious. Given the program’s preoccupation with the South as a site of struggle over various types of social integrations, race is the program’s repressed thing, the thing that if we tune closely enough into we, we can faintly hear in the background. And it is repressed for a reason—race has had its day as a concern, the credit sequences depict it as part of an antique and literally crumbling or melting past. Race struggles were never sexy in the way that vampires are in this program; vampires are self-fashioning sexy subjects in ways unavailable to and indeed impossible for people of color. Vampire rights are the world of the show and it is these rights, both political and domestic, that the show elaborates. That virulent (and excessively white) heterosexuality of vampires is an unlikely vehicle for the rights of gays, lesbians, and people of color and the relative absence of their (political) story lines does not address True Blood’s metaphor problem.

Instead, race is displaced onto the credit sequences, which lead the viewer to expect extensive engagements with civil rights struggles, racialized violence, and affectively charged engagements between whites and blacks. Instead, this affect is entirely located within relations between vampires and humans. True Blood’s appeal has much to do with sex—surely the MPAA’s policies regarding obscenity and adhering to the “less than x number of thrusts” rule has been repeatedly violated in this program—but it’s sex with a difference. In an era in which Asian male protagonists rarely get any girl, and almost never a white one, and filmic miscegenation is still exceptional, despite our supposedly post-racial state, True Blood lets human-vampire sex stand in for the racial affect that is promised in the credits, but cannot occur in the program itself.

True Blood also shares with Dexter (and a remarkable number of other “hip” television shows including Big Love, The Riches, Weeds, and Nurse Jackie), a sense that justice requires vigilantism. A contemporary remake of an old west or “Dirty Harry” ethics, these shows ask us to empathize and root for figures who have created moral codes outside the law. The shows authorize their “vigilante” aesthetics by various means (Dexter Morgan’s childhood, Nancy Botwin’s widowhood, Jackie Peyton’s excessive work load, etc.). In True Blood, it is the implied identification of vampirism with other socially marginalized groups that authorizes Sookie, Bill and others to take things into their own fangs. But it is also a presumption about the general “fucked-up-ness” of the south that authorizes these behaviors, and this turns out the be the role of the credit sequence of the show, to alibi certain violences through the argument that the rest of world is so much worse.

One of the problems with “vigilante” hero stories is that they occlude, displace, or erase social movements. And if the series fails to deliver on the title’s implied promise of prurience, it also disdains the political tensions summoned by the sequence. True Blood occurs in a post-racist (if not post-racial) south, where racial mixing is treated with a pointed nonchalance. And if the church sign summons up the kind of homophobic bigotry displayed by notorious figures such as the Revered Jim Phelps, the show’s gay characters, most notably Lafayette, are sexually unconflicted and deal with homophobia and AIDS phobia with unalloyed triumphalism.

Lafayette

True Blood’s vampires have a fully developed television media campaign and even a spokeswoman, but she is far from the Cesar Chavez/Martin Luther King/Nelson Mandela styles of civil rights leader. Instead, her work is entirely banal, cast in the visual language of Fox News. The program’s frequent citations of her television appearances on mainstream television talk shows remind the viewer that rights-based movements, such as the gay rights, women’s rights, indigenous rights, and general civil rights group actions, require the right kind of mediation in order to succeed. The successful deployment of the language of civil rights, part of the South’s legacy, and their formation of a rights organization, depends greatly on their access to media and screen culture. “Visibility” is a requirement for rights, and television is the most penetrative and valuable medium in this regard — though the Zapatistas famously circumvented television’s cultural and industrial gatekeepers by leveraging the Internet to get out their message via Subcommandante Marcos in the nineties, their movement was the exception rather than the rule (see Manuel Castells’s The Power of Identity).

The vampire’s successful acquisition of prime time Fox-style talk television time is depicted as the only possible means of legitimation for vampires. Television is endowed with enormous power to create successful social movements; as vampire spokeswoman Nan Flanagan says to a rebellious Eric Northman, “I get to decide. Why? Because I’m on television.” This confirmation of traditional mainstream broadcast media as the way to “mainstream” into society contrasts greatly with the current media landscape as it stands now, where broadcast television and radio are in crisis, and YouTube means that everybody can “broadcast themselves.”

Nan Flanagan

Within the logic of True Blood, however, the right to have rights must be earned through banal and hyper-conventional media campaigns. Bill’s on the ground efforts to integrate with the small town of Bon Temps are depicted as mostly sexual rights — nobody seems to contest his claim to own property, but they object greatly to his miscegenation with Sookie or any human female — and he is not involved in the “movement.” He is a model of civic virtue — as he states to his vampire teenager Jessica, “we recycle in this house!” — but ultimately is depoliticized as a social actor for vampire rights, indicating a neoliberal present that also views individuals as ultimately responsible for their own welfare, and also as responsible for broadcasting their claims for these rights in conventionally mediated ways. His desire to marry Sookie — the cliffhanger of season 2 — is fully domesticated as the fulfillment of an entirely individual desire rather than as part of a marriage-rights movement for vampires or other “others.”

Vampire Eric Northam

True Blood is socially conservative, gesturing towards a radical politics (or any social movement based politics) that it cannot (or will not) deliver. Likewise, the form of the medium itself is conservative. Like its vampires, True Blood is a relic – it airs on television, not the Internet, and it is broadcast rather than streamed. Though HBO claims “it’s not television, it’s HBO,” we know better. Like the credit sequence’s time-delayed decayed foxes and possums, True Blood is a memento mori – to the Civil Rights South, to broadcast television, to civil rights organizing and “unsexy” rights-based movements. True Blood pursues vampire politics, which are all about sexy self fashioning. Were it not for the exquisite Godric’s self-immolation in season two, the program’s credo might be “survival of the sexiest.”

Image Credits:
1. HBO’s True Blood
2. Old man in rocking share from True Blood opening credits – Author’s screenshot
3. The “God Hates Fangs” sign from the opening sequence – Author’s screenshot
4. Lafayette
5. Nan Flanagan
6. Vampire Eric Northam

Please feel free to comment.

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