Big ship moons audience, makes a zillion dollars

Rating: Null/10 (22 December 2009)

"Technological progress is like an axe in the hands of a pathological criminal." – Albert Einstein
Most damn the "romantic subplot" at the heart of "Titanic" and overlook the larger romance that extends throughout director James Cameron's filmography. This is not just a film about the budding love between two characters on a ship, but about man's love affair with technology.
Cameron presents Titanic as a modern marvel. A beautiful ocean liner, with sleek lines, sensual curves and chrome plumbing. His camera caresses the ship, bathing it in sunsets, starlight and pinkish hues. It's not only a stage for romance, but the embodiment of romance. A kind of fetishized symbol for man's, and Cameron's, love for technology; his godlike desire to lord over his landscape with machines. The name "Titanic" is itself suggestive of an almost divine or Olympian creation.
Of course the ship then hits a chunk of ice and promptly sinks. Cameron's camera then surveys the carnage, watching with delight as the machine goes down, taking a couple hundred passengers with it. This is not just a maritime disaster. This is judgement day, the machines rebelling against their creators.
One character, an artist called Jack, goes down with the ship, but not before saving the life of a plump girl called Rose. Man's creative spirit may sink into the void, but it is promptly revitalised by the blossoming of Rose, a previously reticent young woman who regains her spark through contact with Jack.
This tension takes place throughout Cameron's filmography. His films are all about beautiful machines violently rebelling against their makers. This push-pull tension itself infects Cameron's work methods, for he is a director obsessed with machines, but who spends his career warning us of the very robots he creates, promotes, proliferates and relies on.
What's strange, though, is that Cameron's latest film not only repeats this message, but then goes further into a kind of hippie utopianism. "Avatar", a zillion dollar action fantasy shot in 3D, features a world in which aliens use their "brain stems" to literally plug into trees, animals and nature. For Cameron, technology is not only evil, it now prevents us from "connecting to nature". "Nature is what's real", Cameron says, populating his film with aliens who "hook up" to a kind of biological network. Cameron takes the cables, modems, routers, telephones and computers of the modern world, and turns them into their biological equivalents, trees, roots and bodies linked by organic conduits. "Avatar's" aliens even store their entire history on a "harddrive" in the form of a giant tree. In other words, the "internet" should be "out there". All should be dependent on physical connections to nature, not virtual connections mediated via machines.
But there is always a danger of "naturalising" nature. The natural world is not some kind of utopia to which we can return in balanced harmony. Man has always been at war with nature and nature itself is not a balanced system. It is a mass of conflicting bodies, constantly adapting, jostling, vying for position, always changing. This kind of fetishizing of nature, the need to turn it into some kind of mystical utopia, is the same kind of confused thinking that led to designer-Buddhism becoming popular in the 60s. Indeed, "Avatar" only works because Cameron romanticises the "noble savages" in his film, portraying them as "kind hearted" "mystical creatures" who are "one with the land". Compare this to someone like Herzog or Terrence Malick, who constantly crash the Romantic ideal of nature with post-Enlightenment thinking.
Then there's the ironic fact that though Cameron's films have all been cautionary tales about technology, he is the biggest techno-whore in all of Hollywood. For a zillion dollar film to be so pro-chlorophyll reeks of hypocrisy. Reconnect to nature via CGI jungles? It's like Bill Gates telling us to get back in touch with trees...but BUY WINDOWS VISTA because that's where the real vistas are.
So with its computer generated jungles and CGI ships, these two films are really showcases for technology. They don't ask us to consider our relationship with tech, but push us further into hyper-reality, further into the simulacrum, selling us the notion that technology can offer us "more nature than nature can". High definition TV, 3D film, wide screen, youtube videos, surround sound etc...technology is nature without the hassle (technology is itself nature, part of our extended phenotype). It is nature purified by machines. This all has the opposite effect of Cameron's message, people retreating further "inwards" into their "utopian homes" rather than plugging into the "outside". And why not? To homo-sapien 21C, "nature" isn't real enough anymore. It lacks the definition of the simulacrum.
Imagine a director like Cronenberg handling a film like "Titanic" or "Avatar". Mybe he'd focus on "Avatar's" more disturbing, unconscious elements. That this is a film about a guy who is essentially "watching a film". That the hero needs to be comatose and "asleep in a machine" to experience a better life. That his virtual experiences are more "real" than his limited body. That the cast themselves require "avatars suits". That their performances are all "virtual". That the 3D nature of the picture requires one to wear glasses to view it, the distance from subject to fantasy constantly meta-morphing.
And so revisiting all of Cameron's films, it's clear that "Aliens" and "The Terminator" represent him at his peak. Each successive film has been increasingly childish, his exponentially inflated mega-budgets dictating that his films cast a net across as wide a demographic as possible. The super-violent R-rated worlds of "The Terminator" and "Aliens" are now too niche market, the director succumbing to the machine that is the almighty dollar. And the further Cameron gets from the B-movie masculinity of his early career, the more simple minded and proselytising his films get.
8/10 - Oscilates from jaw-droppingly spectacular to cringe-worthy.