In case you missed it, Avatar is now the all-time box office champion

I meant to blog on this subject a week or so ago, but we've had some action and movement with the Senior Bowl; ego I have been pre-occupied.

James Cameron now owns the top two grossing films of all time. A few years ago, it looked as if Batman: The Dark Knight might have a shot at the title, but it fell well short of Cameron's Titanic. Now Cameron returns after a long hiatus and breaks his own record.

There are many hilarious aspects to this story, if you ask me. I recall some (now) hysterical headlines in the Los Angeles Times Entertainment section which indicated that fan interest in Sherlock Holmes was far greater than interest in Avatar. According to this now infamous piece, box office experts were projecting higher earnings for Sherlock than Avatar based on fan interest. Try to take a breath in between belly laughs. You'll pass out if you laugh too hard. God knows I fell out of my chair when I found that old newspaper laying on the floor next to my easy chair.

By now, we know that Sherlock Holmes made a little less than $200m at the global box office. Many of us were stunned that this movie made so much money. Sherlock is now finished in the Theater. Avatar is still rolling and still #1 at the box office. Sherlock is destined to circle the drain at A&E Network sometime in the next 12 months. On the other hand, Avatar is destined to become the 3d benchmark for the new Blu-Ray era.

Recently, I monitored some hard push-back against Avatar on a number of film fan sites. In particular the forums at IMDB.com and RottenTomatoes.com had a few anti-Avatar and anti-Cameron campaigns running through them.

One of the focal points of this critical attack has been District 9, oddly enough. Critics of Cameron have stated that District 9 cost a mere $30m USD to make, while Avatar cost some $300m. They prompt you to decide for yourself which turned out better, especially on bang-for-the-buck basis.

For me, that is a no brainer: Avatar wins hands down. I barely even liked District 9. It is visually ugly film. It contains a very dim view of humanity and the Prawns too. This is dark movie, full of ugliness and gross-outs. I guess that's nice if you are 13 going on 14. It also has preposterous narrative moments, things no intelligent Sci-Fi fan could ever possibly buy into. Worst of all, there really is no hero in the movie. There is not one truly likable figure in the entire movie. On the other hand, Avatar is a visually beautiful movie. It has good characters, who are easy to like. It contains a decent and even optimistic view of both humanity and the Navi. I found Avatar far more enjoyable than District 9.

There is no doubt that Cameron has his detractors. They were vocal in predicting his failure before Avatar came out, and they are trying to play spoiler now. So why is that true?

The conventional wisdom in the media press says that it is 100% pure unadulterated jealousy. Hollywood is one of the most jealous places on earth. It is full of artists and money men who are absolutely distraught that the world does not recognize their greatness. It is also full of 'successful' producers with 50/50 records. Many long-time survivors in Hollywood have one economic failure for every success on their records. You can't even join the club until you have declared bankruptcy twice, according to most reports. This is primarily because they insist on boring audiences about their psychological hangups in (so-called) A-Films that no one wants to see.

In this environment, James Cameron is a marked man. You have to remember that Cameron is a dude with an undefeated record. Cameron has never had an all-out financial bust. The closest thing to it would be Strange Days (1995). Even this made a small modicum of money. Cameron has never bored audiences with emotional melt-down movies about one of his divorces, so he stands accused of never taking artistic risks. Ergo sum, he does not deserve his success.

A friend of mine, who happens to work at NBC Universal, put an even finer point on it: Cameron is not liked because he is not Jewish, and has never partnered with the Jewish financial aristocracy of Hollywood. He has never had substantial Jewish partners in his projects. He has his own little Anglo Canadian band he works with. When he wants visual effects, he doesn't do it in California; he takes the work down to Weta Studios in New Zealand. Since he has not contributed to the Holy Temple on high holidays, he does not deserve his success. It irks them that this Goy owns the top two box office blockbusters of all time.

It should be noted, in passing, that this particular friend {who will remain unnamed} is totally Jewish and from New York. He says all these things in a mocking and derisive tone, because he doesn't like the attitudes of some of his bosses in the business. He is a big James Cameron film fan, and wants to be just like him in a few more years.

In any case, Hollywood is a place loaded with Schadenfreude; these guys rejoice in each other's failures. Most of Hollywood still awaits a failure from either Cameron or Pixar.

What is the Romance of the Noble Savage

The term Noble Savage first came into use back in the 1800s. It was applied to the "Gentleman of Nature", the tribal fellow, living in non-western and non-eastern societies, who knew the ways of the wilderness. Charles Dickens once wrote a satirical screed titled "The Noble Savage". The term is now associated with the Sentamentalist movement of the time.

Cultural Anthropologists go to the field to perform ethnographies on non-western civilizations. The greater their differences from our society, the better. CAs like non-western groups, who speak unknown languages, living in small, low-population societies, practicing hunting and gathering, and perhaps a bit of horticulture. If they have a wildly different religion, and different manner of reckoning kinship, so much the better.

There aren't many hunting and gathering societies left in the world. Neither are there many horticultural societies. Populations have grown. Natural resource bases have been depleted. These older, low-intensity, low-integration, human powered systems are largely untenable now. You need machines and fertilizers to feed massive populations. Population growth triggers an unavoidable process of economic intensification, political integration, and social stratification.

Still, Anthropologists try to find groups like these for study to this very day. When they do, they all-to frequently flip out and loose their minds. Frequently, they fall in love with their host/subject society. They go native in a big way. Along the path, they have a near religious conversion experience, realizing that then entire way mass-urban industrial society lives is just plain damn wrong. This is what we call the Anthropological Romance of the Noble Savage.

Holding such an opinion would be fine, if it didn't interfere with your research. All to often, this fever correlates with a very strong tendency to ignore serious problems in tribal societies. All to often, ethnographers gloss over issues because they are in love. When confronted with some of these problems, romantic ethnographers are quick to blame the incursion of Western Civ for these problems. Being in love means hyper-exaggerating the good qualities of your loved one, and being blinded to the bad.

Napoleon Chagnon tripped off a ferocious debate back in 1960s and 1970s when he suggested that the Yanomamo warriors killed each other over women. Many anthropologists could not believe that there could be any such thing as murders over sexual jealousy in The Garden of Eden. Perish the thought. Certainly, no such thing was possible. It had to be because of Western incursion on their territory, creating protien scarcity, or something like that. No, it turns out that the Yanomano, like other people around the world, also share in humanity's best reason for killing: Sexual Jealousy. As Chagnon observed, Yanomamo warriors like to optimize their inclusive fitness. This can be accomplished by killing your sexual rivals and taking their women for yourself.

My own professor at UCLA idealized the hell out of the Machiginga people of South America, an Amazonian Group he spent considerable time with. He felt that Western Civ was plain damn wrong. He said that, if he could, he would reduce population down to a few hundred thousand human beings to see if we could undo the complexity of human society, and get back to nature. When pressed, he would admit that the Machiginga had a diet low in protein, that they lived very short lives, a small scratch could turn sceptic and kill them in a short matter of days. Simple bacterial infections, that kill no one in our society, are major causes of death among the Machiginga. He would admit this, saying he did not want to idealize their lifestyle, but anyone could see that he did.

You wouldn't like to see what happens when a good drought or scarcity cycle happens in these societies. During a hard down-cycle, the Inuit Eskimo people used to send their old folks out of the camp to squat on the ice, and await the coming of the polar bears. The same was true for the Navajo, although it wasn't polar bears in their case. Nearly all of these groups practice infanticide as the Spartans did. All deformed or imperfect children are discarded in the wilderness. If you want to romanticize these societies, you better like infanticide and euthanasia.

It is irrational and anti-factual to say that (a) because they live in a state similar to the environment of evolutionary adaptedness, (b) tribal peoples, living in small, tribal, subsistence economies have a perfect way of life. Still, Hippies around the world try to claim this every day.

It is equally irrational and counter-factual to say that (a) because we live in advanced technological industrial societies, (b) we are living life in an entirely wrong manner. Still, Hippies around the world try to claim this every day.

James Cameron just added his voice to this collection. If you weren't struck by how Hippy the heart of Avatar is, you just weren't paying any attention to the story. Mr. Cameron presents you with a super-idealized group called the Navi. I doubt the !Kung/San, Yanomamo, the Inuit, or the Machiginga would measure up to this lofty ideal if you saw them clearly. Nevertheless, Cameron presents them this way, because he is making the case for rejecting established society.

The best and the most reputable authorities in the field of Cultural Anthropology guard against the Romance. It is a form of insanity and/or religious fever. A balanced view of the empirical facts will show that Western Civ isn't all bad, and hunting and gathering isn't all good. Another one of my Profs, Robert Edgerton, enraged the anthropological world when he published his magnum opus: Sick Societies. In his opening shot, he fired this line "All societies are sick, but some are sicker than others." This line blew up cultural relativism as we knew it.

Avatar and the Athropological Romance of the Noble Savage

I majored in Anthropology at UCLA. I graduated Magna with departmental honors. I was elected to the Golden Key Honor society for packing a 3.925 GPA during my Junior year, but who brags about these thing?

I only mention this because Avatar has hit the scene. Overall, it is a dandy. It's one hell of a movie. James Cameron never fails. I sat engrossed 160 minutes (2 hours 40 minutes), and never even got up to go to the restroom. Of course, my busted knee would have made that a tad painful, but I always take at least one break during a long movie. I generally hate long movies. The longer you run, the lower your grade will usually be. Not this time. Avatar flows. It has great rythm and pace. It keeps you locked on. There isn't any loose, spare-change rattling around in this movie. It stays on point.

At the core, Avatar is an example of the Anthropological Romance of the Noble Savage. This is a complex of fallacious reasoning which ethnographers are extremely prone to fall into. I am sure you have seen many examples of this story form. A man or woman goes from a technologically advanced Western Industrialized Society to a tribal society of hunters and gatherers. They are anything but industrialized or technologically advanced. They live close to nature. This Westerner lives among The People; and their self-identified corporate name usually boils down to The People. He gets in tune with nature for the first time in his life. He loves it. He goes native in a big way. Then he has a near religious revelation that entire way advanced civilization is living is just plain damn wrong. He then defends The People against the incursion of Western Civ.

If you have seen any of the following movies, you know what I am talking about:

1. Farewell to the King (1989)
2. Dances with Wolves (1990)
3. The Emerald Forest (1985)
4. Little Big Man (1970)
5. A Man Called Horse (1970)

Avatar borrows heavily from Farewell to the King. Infact, you could state the following formula:

• Farewell to the King + Aliens = Avatar

And you would almost be right. You have to mix in some of The Ewoks Battle for Endor in there and a little bit of Star Wars: Phantom Menace in there also.

So what happens in this movie? Sam Worthington plays a crippled Marine named Jake Sully. Jake becomes an accidental ehtnographer, as he is embeded by the military industrial complex into a alien society on an alien world name Pandora. He must learn about the Navi (sorry for omitting all your diacritical bullshit) and report back to his miliary master. Oh did I mention he is driving the body of a Navi warrior throughout this process? I guess you figured that out during the trailer.

Jake goes native in a big way. He becomes trusted. He falls in love with the daughter of the chief. She falls in love with him also. They fuck (once). This really puts the zap on his head. When the miltary decides to destroy the tree home of the Navi to acquire a precious rare mineral, Jake has to take up arms against his species. In so doing, he turns out be The One, The Messiah, and The Golden Child.

The whole thing is very powerful and effective argument against the destruction of the Amazonian Rain Forrests (jungles) here on good old planet Earth. For this reason it also resembles The Emerald Forrest, but the story structure is quite different. The ultimate point is the same.

This is all very entertaining and I give it 97 out of 100 points. That's a damn high score. You gotta see this one. Pretty awesome.

So what about the fallacious Romance of the Noble Savage that we Anthropologists are so prone too? Let's talk about that next time, in my next blog entry.