So here are Jonah Lehrer (loving it), David Dobbs (arguing with Jonah), and Robert Augustus Masters (offering a whole different take on it). Gotta love the internet.
Avatar
Posted on: January 4, 2010 10:58 AM, by Jonah Lehrer
I loved Avatar. Sure, I chuckled at the schmaltzy dialogue and found the neon color scheme a little garish and could have done without all the pantheistic moralism...But the movie was still mesmerizing. For 150 minutes, I vanished into the screen, utterly absorbed in the stereoscopic world unfolding before me. I was lost in Pandora, transfixed by a perfectly predictable melodrama.
The modernist critic Clement Greenberg argued that art should be evaluated on its adherence to the "specificity of the medium". Painting, for instance, is defined by its abstract flatness, which meant that artists should no longer try to pretend that what they convey is real. While centuries of "realist" artists tried to escape the flatness with elaborate technical tricks, Greenberg argued that the flatness wasn't an obstacle or hurdle: it was merely an essential element of painting. This led Greenberg to become an advocate for people like Jackson Pollock, who celebrated the 2-D un-reality of their art form.
The point, though, is that every art is defined by its medium. The reason I've referenced Greenberg in the context of Avatar - and please pardon the pretentiousness of the above paragraph - is that I think Cameron has deftly realized the potential of his medium, which is film.
First, a little neuroscience. Consider this experiment, led by Uri Hasson and Rafael Malach at Hebrew University. The experiment was simple: they showed subjects a vintage Clint Eastwood movie ("The Good, The Bad and the Ugly") and watched what happened to the cortex in a scanner. To make a long story short, the scientists found that when adults were watching the film their brains showed a peculiar pattern of activity, which was virtually universal. (The title of the study is "Intersubject Synchronization of Cortical Activity During Natural Vision".) In particular, people showed a remarkable level of similarity when it came to the activation of areas including the visual cortex (no surprise there), fusiform gyrus (it was turned on when the camera zoomed in on a face), areas related to the processing of touch (they were activated during scenes involving physical contact) and so on. Here's the nut graf from the paper:
This strong intersubject correlation shows that, despite the completely free viewing of dynamical, complex scenes, individual brains "tick together" in synchronized spatiotemporal patterns when exposed to the same visual environment.But it's also worth pointing out which brain areas didn't "tick together" in the movie theater. The most notable of these "non-synchronous" regions is the prefrontal cortex, an area associated with logic, deliberative analysis, and self-awareness. (It carries a hefty computational burden.) Subsequent work by Malach and colleagues has found that, when we're engaged in intense "sensorimotor processing" - and nothing is more intense than staring at a massive screen with Dolby surround sound while wearing 3-D glasses - we actually inhibit these prefrontal areas. The scientists argue that such "inactivation" allows us to lose ourself in the movie:
Our results show a clear segregation between regions engaged during self-related introspective processes and cortical regions involved in sensorimotor processing. Furthermore, self-related regions were inhibited during sensorimotor processing. Thus, the common idiom ''losing yourself in the act'' receives here a clear neurophysiological underpinnings.What these experiments reveal is the essential mental process of movie-watching. (Other research has also emphasized the ability of stories to blur the difference between fiction and reality.) This doesn't mean that every movie needs to be an action packed spectacle, just as Greenberg was wrong to suggest that every painting should imitate Pollock. But I think it helps reveal why Avatar is such a success. At its core, movies are about dissolution: we forget about ourselves and become one with the giant projected characters on the screen. In other words, they become our temporary avatars, so that we're inseparable from their story. (This is one of the reasons why the Avatar plot is so effective: it's really a metaphor for the act of movie-watching.*) And for a mind that's so relentlessly self-aware, I'd argue that 100 minutes of self-forgetting (as indicated by a quieting of the prefrontal cortex) is a pretty nice cognitive vacation. And Avatar, through a variety of technical mechanisms - from the astonishing special effects to the straightforward story to the use of 3-D imagery - manages to induce those "synchronized spatiotemporal patterns" to an unprecedented degree. That is what the movies are all about, and that is what Avatar delivers.
*And just because I've already gone off the deep end of pretentiousness, I thought I though should mention the parable that Avatar made me think of. I found the quote via Borges, but it's from the Chinese philosopher Zhuangzi:
Once Zhuangzi dreamt he was a butterfly, a butterfly flitting and fluttering around, happy with himself and doing as he pleased. He didn't know he was Zhuangzi. Suddenly he woke up and there he was, solid and unmistakable Zhuangzi. But he didn't know if he was Zhuangzi who had dreamt he was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming he was Zhuangzi.
Avatar smackdown!
Posted on: January 5, 2010 10:48 AM, by David Dobbs
I rarely take direct exception to anything my friend Jonah Lehrer writes, and I fully recognize he's just quick-riffing on a Hollywood movie. But if I understand his Avatar post correctly, my good man Jonah is arguing, at least in a minddump-at-the-bar sort of way, that James Cameron's latest movie is a pretty full neuro-aesthetico-art-critico realization of film's medium. His is a fun post, and worthwhile just to see Cameron crammed onto the same page, with appropriate apologies, with Clement Greenburg, Clint Eastwood, and Jorge Luis Borges. But I must differ. In Avatar, which I saw last night, Cameron has not deftly realized the potential of his medium; he has deftly exploited its crudest powers of visual seduction while leaving its full potential untapped.
Every art [writes Jonah, channeling Clement Greenberg] is defined by its medium. ... And I think Cameron has deftly realized the potential of his medium, which is film.But what's the essence of the filmic medium? (Film geeks, commence to argue. The of you, read on.) The crudest aspect of a medium is not necessarily its most important or elemental. Film gives a rich sense of visual reality; add a bit of story (no one would have sat through a random 150-minute tour of that planet), and you can get people to sit back and unthinkingly go with the story. The visual immersion is unique to film, perhaps, but the shutting down of the prefrontal cortex surely isn't -- you'd surely get the same thing if you scanned people who were listening with eyes closed to a good yarn.
So perhaps Cameron has a) fully immersed us visually and b) seduced us into shutting off our PFCs (as love has been found to do in other studies). But by doing so he has hardly fully realized film's potential. For if he has, how do we explain the far more powerful and profound effects of movies that are every bit as immersive visually while being far more moving emotionally and intellectually -- movies that grip you even more thoroughly than Avatar does while you're watching them, but leave you moved and thinking for days afterwards?
Three such movies jump readily to mind: The Ice Storm; The Incredible Lightness of Being; and The Hours. (Sorry about this last one, Jonah, I know it border on cheating to bring our beloved Woolf into the mix.) Toss in The Godfather too if you'd like. All of these movies are as immersive visually as Avatar is; all three evoke as completely a foreign world (I'd argue Cameron's imagined world is no more original or imaginative than the others); and all three make you utterly forget your own life -- for me, anyway, far more completely than Avatar did. But all three left me far more deeply moved afterwards than Avatar did -- deeply shaken, in some cases, and thinking for days afterward.
Why? Because at some level these movies, even while immersing us so completely, challenge rather than indulge our existing systems and tangles of ideas and emotions. They didn't make us self-conscious or plan or think-consciously-in-a-PFC-sort-of-way; but they do engage in a richer way (much as good books do) the places in our heads where ideas and emotions meet. Their engagement is rich whether or not you're familiar with some of the ideas and history they draw on directly (political history in Lightness, Mrs. Dalloway and the life of V. Woolf in The Hours) -- but even richer to the extent you are familiar with some of that material. I need simply to recall them, even years later, to feel some of the complex, still-dynamic interplay of emotion and ideas they explore and evoke. Avatar will mean very little to me ... oh, by lunchtime.
These movies draw on these various ideas and sources and emotions using the same basic tools that Cameroin uses, a mix of visual, filmic, and storytelling conventions and structures. They are every bit as filmic as his, and rely no more heavily than Cameron does on "extra-filmic" elements (that is, those that Greenberg -- whom I actually think was wrong about painting's limitations, though I'm all with you on Borges and Clint -- would consider out-of-medium). But they are a far more complete realization of the medium. For me, anyway, simply remembering them makes Avatar seem not a deft realization of film, but one that, however beautiful and immersive, is impoverished.
If I had more time I'd find a way to get Borges, Woolf, Eisenstein, and Godard into this. But alas, I must work!
(reviewed by Robert Augustus Masters)
When you are asleep at night and dreaming that you are doing something somewhere somewhen, where exactly are you? Are you the body/person in the dream or the body/person asleep on the bed, and if you are identified with neither —for you in fact are capable of holding both as objects of your attention —then who or what are you? Do these bodies you “see” contain you, or do you contain them? Perhaps both are not literal containers for “you” but rather are expressions, different expressions, of the essential you, means through which you can relate to your current environment, however unusual or alien that might be...
The body through which we make an appearance in our dreams allows us to navigate and interact with our 3-D dreamscape —and however bizarre the scenery and context may be, we generally adapt to it fairly quickly, much like Jake, the protagonist in Avatar, does when he finds himself embodied as a native of an alien world called Pandora. Whether our dreams frighten or elate or trap or wing us, we generally take them at face value, rarely asking ourselves at the time if we are indeed dreaming. But sometimes we do realize that we are dreaming while we are dreaming — and Jake finds himself in a situation akin to this, knowing that he is “really” back in human form in a sleep-like state in a high-tech pod, even as he immerses himself in the world of the Na’vi, the indigenous people of Pandora. He is fascinated, blown away by the beauty, but not fully — he initially keeps his depths removed from the hypervivid wonder so greenly and vibrantly alive all around him, sticking to his role as a good soldier who doesn’t question what he is being told to do, especially given what he has been promised by his commanding officer, Colonel Quaritch.
And we, with our 3-D glasses firmly on, enter the Na’vi world with Jake, resonating with his awkwardness and surprise and wonder, perhaps still somewhat conscious of where we’re sitting, popcorn noises all around, absorbed but not fully absorbed, just like Jake. But it doesn’t take long to really get into the film, unless perhaps we are a movie critic on the outlook for simplistically presented conflicts between greedy capitalists and noble savages. Like a city dweller who’s been on a lushly treed hiking trail long enough to stop thinking about his or her city concerns, we soon stop looking at the Na’vi world as nothing more than sensual digital magic, just as Jake stops looking at it as nothing more than a place to exploit for a “higher” purpose. Before long, Na’vi reality becomes more real to him than his “normal” state —just as our dreams sometimes seem more real to us than our so-called waking state, sometimes so much so that we feel a kind of fleeting grief upon reentering our usual state, as if we’ve lost something extremely precious and important —and intrinsic —to us.
As the film progresses, we feel increasingly at home in the Na’vi world, because what it so viscerally represents — our primal, radically connected nature in the fully-embodied raw — is starting to really resonate with us, unless we’re locked away upstairs in our cranial headquarters, uneasy with such a blatantly unapologetic presentation of the noble savage motif. Jake now has the legs to stand on a truer ground, and we feel something similar stirring in us, however slightly, grounding us to much more than our seat in the theater. Avatar moves and shakes many people quite deeply, not just because of the incredible special effects, but also because they have been reminded with considerable impact not only of their own primal nature-attuned core, but also of their estrangement or disconnection from it. So there’s a simultaneous sense, however subterranean, of deep opening and deep loss, a more-than-intellectual recognition of having lost touch with something truly essential to us.
In this sense, Avatar serves as an awakening force, a jolt to our core, inviting us to awaken from the entrapping dreams we habitually animate. Earth is Pandora, getting ever closer to being one massive clearcut, and we know it, regardless of our distractions. The popcorn falls from our hands, waves of green energy branch through our torso, tears come, and something very deep in us starts to open, to unfurl, to reach through us with unmistakable urgency, calling us to a deeper life...
Some may view Avatar as a romanticizing or naive endorsing of a more primitive, “noble savage” state, a seductively regressive call to a prerational, naturoholic condition oozing oneness and a touchy-feely connection with all living things. And it’s not all that hard to view Avatar as doing this, once we push aside the psychedelic visuals and armchair wonder — but if we choose not to be so literal and shed our disembodied rationality, we might sense a deeper layer to Avatar, beyond all the prerational exhorting that we had determined was there and critically zeroed in on. And that layer, that marvelously fecund and expansive depth, is not prerational, but arguably transrational (both transcending and including rationality), especially as Jake plunges and plugs into it. We the viewers —and psychoemotional participants, too! —don’t have to abandon our rationality as we root ourselves in our own Na’vi way of being (we can simultaneously reason and feel and intuit), though there is of course the danger of doing so, as exemplified by those contemporary spiritual aspirants enmeshed in magical thinking.
Going back to our roots doesn’t have to be mere regression or an anti-intellectual trek, but it really does ask for a depth of embodiment that is not all that familiar to many of us. It is not a retreat, but a kind of descent, a dropping-down or grounding that awakens and uplifts us (“Down” is not “up” having a bad day; “down” is where seeds grow and roots fly free). As a Na’vi, Jake gets more and more embodied, but not denser or thicker or cut off from subtlety and spirituality; his is far from a body-negating path! The more rooted he becomes, the more he can soar, really soar; he has developed the necessary ground from which authentic flight, responsible and lucid flight, can take place. There is great risk in this, but even greater risk in staying put. The Na’vi are so embodied that they feel the body of Nature in a very palpable way; they literally plug themselves into the forest and its inhabitants. And as we witness this, we feel both our longing to be thus plugged-in and our disconnection from so doing in our lives. It is to Avatar’s credit that it has been able to put so many viewers in touch with that longing, if only for a few minutes.
Jake’s greatest flight is initially a descent, as he freefalls — and he has to thus fall — onto the back of Pandora’s mightiest, most feared flying creature, an enormous scarlet bird-dragon. Is this just another version of the white man being the hero, the savior, the man, for a tribe of in-trouble indigenous people? Or is it a heroic leap born of extreme necessity, a leap through which Jake leaves his usual self, both human and Na’vi, behind? Some might see a stereotype here, but I saw wild archetype, feeling it right to my marrow, like I was not just taking the leap, but was inside the leap, completely aligned with it. No thinking, just pure action, guts and heart and vision operating as one. Quintessential warriorhood, as practical as it is sacred. It wasn’t so much that I identified with Jake, but that I felt what he had become as a living force within myself, right down to my toes.
And to manifest this fully, to truly live such an ancient but everfresh passion (call it a full-blooded leap into life-enhancing connection/action), its opposite must be faced, deeply encountered. This is most strongly dramatized as the conflict, armed and otherwise, between Jake and Colonel Quaritch, who by the almost-end of the film is but the operator of an enormous humanoid killing machine, a monstrous metallic G. I. Joe figure amped up with enough steroidal intensity and weaponry and square-shouldered violence to make a bloody mess of any opposition. Not something at which to wave flowers or spiritual platitudes! There’s nothing subtle here — just brute force and an environmental insensitivity that is as insane as it is driven. The final battle is an ancient one, played out over and over again in myths and comic books and our own ecological illiteracy, but this does mean that it is stale or banal — because this very battle, however mildly armed, is going on in just about all of us, and not just now and then.
Many of us think we have to pick one or the other, especially when we live in cultures that are big on either/or considerations. But how about being rational, even transrational, and deeply emotional and full-bloodedly alive at the same time? How about being at home both in primeval forest and executive office? How about cultivating a second innocence, an awakened innocence, rather than regressing to a naive innocence or hiding out in cynicism and irony? Many of us have lost touch with our Na’vi territories, and are just not finding adequate compensation for this loss in our gains in even the finest things that contemporary culture can offer, trapped in our very “freedoms.”
The “noble savage” of Pandora is a strawman for those who, knowing that many indigenous, nature-attuned cultures were appallingly barbaric, see Avatar as just one more film that overlooks or marginalizes the darker side of such cultures. But Avatar is not about showing the full spectrum of Na’vi behavior; there simply isn’t time, and more to the point, there is no real point in doing so — what needs to be shown, and shown with enough depth and intensity to really sink in, is the relationship the Na’vi have with their environment. We need not to be told this — though we are to some degree — but to see and feel it as much as possible. There’s no point leaving the theater with just the idea of interconnectedness, for other ideas will soon crowd it out. No, better to leave the theater actually feeling the reality of such interconnectedness, and not in a sappy or sentimental way. No need to romanticize it; just breathe it in and out, letting it branch and stream through your body for a bit, being aware that you are walking while you are walking, feeling each step...
And what about the seemingly one-dimensional portrayal of the Terran capitalists and their military allies? Yes, of course they could have been given a more multidimensional presentation, but do we really need to be assured that the filmmakers get that the “bad guys” have more to them than their greed and violence and ecological stupidity? However they are presented, what they portray exists, and exists with enough abundance and force and sociopathic infusions to be a major player in the accelerating desecration of our world. In Avatar we are seeing the encounter of two opposing archetypal forces; the film focuses mainly on what stands out most about each force. Early on the capitalist/militaristic force is pretty much fully formed and clear about its mission, but the nature-immersed/interconnected force is barely formed,being mostly embryonic, hardly having the legs to survive. As the film progresses,however, the latter force matures, flowers, becomes capable of taking the kind of standneeded to meet its opposition.
Sometimes in a dream in which there is extreme difficulty, as when we are being pursued by something monstrous, we simply have to turn around, and face it, even if it means our death. It is a stand that serves us well, even if we die — and usually in dreams when we face what has been pursuing us, we do not die, but start living more deeply, more often than not absorbing the energies of our adversary, until we realize right to our core that we and this other being are one and the same. Avatar only skims the surface of this, but it does nonetheless show transformation occurring, as the ground underfoot becomes holy ground. There is deep communion with Nature, and there also is communion, at least to some degree, with subtle forces and even with consciousness itself. (I’d love to see an Avatar-like film that explores the far reaches of who and what we truly are in as visceral a way as possible.)
Avatar is, among other things, a fledgling awakening call on a massive scale; the destructive forces that it so compellingly displays are at this very moment literally eating away at our world, and at the same time eating away at many of us from the inside, asking not for some Disneyesque fantasy of Bambi with a submachine gun taking down all of the villains, but for an open-eyed empoweredness that arises from within each of us, a power overflowing with fierce compassion, a power which can effectively counter the psychoecological insanity and numbness that pervades our planet. Avatar is a movie, and it is also more than a movie; treat it as both.
Copyright© 2010 by Robert Augustus Masters
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