The Artist of the Beautiful (1844), a prototypical nerd with few social graces and no head for business turns a watchmaker’s shop into an artist’s studio where, ultimately, he creates a clockwork butterfly in every way indistinguishable from a real butterfly except in its being even more beautiful. Although most of the story is about how misunderstood this nerdy clockmaker is, Hawthorne’s deeper concern is the fundamental mistake of supposing that the idea of artistic creation is not just to create something that is like reality but rather something that amounts to a new reality, a creation to rival God’s own. Indeed, as religion was already fading out of the Western cultural picture by the mid-nineteenth century, the story presents us with a foretaste of our own time in which, to an ever greater extent, we expect the artist to become God.
Or, if not God, at least a sort of gosling, who makes his claim on our attention not by the likeness of his creation to real things but to its originality and imaginative impact as a new reality all its own, more or less untethered to common or everyday reality. “Reality” itself is too problematical a concept to be of any artistic service — which is what frees him to become a fantasist. Hawthorne imagines the artist as a sort of Promethean hero, crashing through the barrier that separates art from reality to create not a mere representation of a butterfly but a sort of Butterfly 2.0: an improved version of, rather than an imitation of, its original. His hero alludes to nature, rather than mimicking it, and this distinction is vital to understanding what has happened to art more than a century later in making the transition from modern to postmodern. Let us for now merely look at the fact that, as Kate Muir quoted “one big British movie honcho” as saying in the Times of London, “After Avatar, film will never be the same again.”
In one sense, this is absurd. It is already the same again. James Cameron’s Avatar is not an essentially different cinematic artifact from any other Hollywood blockbuster relying on spectacle, operatic passion, and computer-generated imagery. It is not even different in any important way from Cameron’s own Titanic (1997), whose box-office records (along with everyone else’s) Avatar has now shattered. It just goes a little further down the same road by putting everything into 3D, so presumably to emphasize the likeness to conventional reality of a film in which almost everything else is deliberately and quite spectacularly unlike conventional reality. The result is one of the most carefully worked-out fantasy worlds in the relatively short history of the fantasy genre, down to and including the entire language of the large blue anthropoids of the moon Pandora, created for them by Professor Paul Former of the University of Southern California. While on planet Earth half of the 6,500 languages spoken by actual people are expected to die out before the end of the century — the last native speaker of BO, once spoken by tribesmen of the Andaman Islands in the Bay of Bengal, died just as Avatar was topping the all-time box-office charts — our popular culture triumphs in inventing an artificial language for a people who have never existed.
The cinematic language is also invented and artificial, however, and there, perhaps, Kate Muir’s honcho has a point. Just as the difference between a neurotic and a psychotic was once defined by saying that the former built castles in the air and the latter lived in them, so we may now say that the popular culture does not merely generate fantasies, it inhabits them, as it expects us, the audience to inhabit them. That is why, according to Muir’s Times colleague Kevin Masher, Avatar, especially in its 3D version,
has been described as the first completely “immersive” film experience. And yet it is precisely this brief and bounteous immersion that can lead, according to an increasingly vocal number of Avatar fans, to a bad case of the blues.
Recently, Internet chat forums on the film’s fan sites have been clogged (one was closed after more than 1,000 posts) by viewers reporting feelings of depression and despondency after seeing the movie. On one site, a discussion called “Ways to cope with the depression of the dream of Pandora being intangible” featured myriad fans recounting just how repulsed they were … by the reality of life on Earth after witnessing the phosphorescent beauty of Pandora.
A similar but more positive view of Pandora beauty is held by Carol Katsuki loon, the author of Naming Nature, a 2009 book about the exciting science — or is it an art? — of taxonomy. Writing in the Science section of the New York Times, she is gratified to note that,
When watching a Hollywood movie that has robed itself in the themes and paraphernalia of science, a scientist expects to feel anything from annoyance to infuriation at facts misconstrued or processes misrepresented. What a scientist does not expect is to enter into a state of ecstatic wonderment, to have the urge to leap up and shout: “Yes! That’s exactly what it’s like!”
So it is time for all the biologists who have not yet done so to shut their laptops and run from their laboratories directly to the movie theaters, put on 3D glasses and watch the film Avatar. In fact, anyone who loves a biologist or may want to be one, or better yet, anyone who hates a biologist — and certainly everyone who has ever sneered at a tree-hugger — should do the same. Because the director James Cameron’s otherworldly tale of romance and battle, aliens and armadas, has somehow managed to do what no other film has done. It has recreated what is the heart of biology: the pure, heart-stopping wonder of really seeing the living world.
So the “heart” is also “heart-stopping”? One must suppose a touch of poetic license in all this, and especially in that exclamation, “Yes! That’s exactly what it’s like!” For Avatar is not what anything is like. The natives of Pandora are giant blue monkeys with sophisticated fiber optics in their tails and the natural world they inhabit is filled with floating mountains, huge dragon-birds whom the inhabitants ride like horses, hammer-headed hippos the size of houses, and other fantastical creatures too numerous to mention and impossible to exist on Earth. What she means is that the feelings of discovery and delight and, on leaving the theater, nostalgia that even ordinary moviegoers appear to be getting from the film are exactly like the feelings biologists get from the real world.
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