What Happened to Avatar?

Written March 15, 2010

          Sometimes the right thing happens so naturally that no one takes much notice of it.  Which is exactly what happened when Avatar missed out on all the top honors at the recent Academy Awards, Hollywood’s annual pageant of back-slapping self-congratulation.

           The movie has already broken all domestic and international box office records with a “grand total” (after a mere three months of 3-D circulation) of more than 2.6 billion dollars, according to the IMDb, the International Movie Database.  And director/writer James Cameron has as a result received early pre-canonization that many believe will lead at the earliest possible moment to his becoming Saint James of Tinsel Town.

           It has been a giddy ride for Cameron, one that many could see coming as the result of his previous work, which includes such impressive blockbusters as Titanic (1997), $1.8 billion worldwide, and the four-movie Terminator franchise, $1.4 billion.  This is a man who has figured out how to make a buck making movies.

           So going into Oscar night on March 7, no one would have been surprised by a clean sweep for the gold-plated Avatar, which, instead, went down in spectacular, computer-generated flames.  The two great prizes of the evening went to The Hurt Locker, which captured Best Picture and Best Director honors, the latter going to Kathryn Bigelow, who managed to shoot it for the bargain price of $15 million, compared to the estimated $300 to $500 million it took to shoot Avatar.

           And it was nothing if not sweet justice to give the Best Director award to a woman for the first time in history—a woman who just happened to be the ex-wife of Saint James himself.

           It’s tempting to think Hollywood voters were rewarding small, independent film makers, like Bigelow, encouraging them to continue following their dreams by working on small gems of cinematic perfection.  And The Hurt Locker is certainly a good movie, a valuable addition to the growing list of fine independent films that come out more and more often from the American film industry.

           But the problem is that it isn’t so good as to have unceremoniously dumped Avatar from its pre-Oscar sanctification.  No, Avatar had to contribute to its own demise for The Hurt Locker to overtake it on Oscar night.

           Which it did.  Oscar voters apparently viewed with raised eyebrows this expensive and hugely profitable film as it drifted oddly into a nearly three-hour denunciation of American capitalism.  Even Hollywood types, it would seem, have a limit to the hypocrisy they will tolerate.

           It may not be too much to hope that voters also saw the silliness of setting this “futuristic” movie in the year 2154 on a distant planet, and then populating it with giant blue people who nonetheless look a lot like Native Americans from the 1800s.  They wear loin cloths, shoot bows and arrows, and worship nature.  Is this science fiction—or an American Indian romance?  Avatar wants to be both but in the end it merely looks lost in its own interplanetary wilderness.

           And just maybe the Hollywood types who voted against Avatar this year got a little weary of their industry’s tiresome, self-righteous, moral outrage, which it wears like a merit badge on all public occasions.  There isn’t anything wrong of course with a movie like Avatar being for conservation, equal rights, and peace; nor is there anything wrong with challenging aspects of American culture that need challenging.  But Avatar may have struck Oscar voters as insincere, nothing more than a vehicle for spray-shooting clichés that, with neat accompanying 3-D visuals, give the movie a veneer of high morality with a money-grubbing American capitalism at its bleeding heart.

           Oscar voters did the right thing.  In the words of a famous song, “Hooray for Hollywood!”

Short Shots

Working for a “Living”

            Being an employee is a heavy burden.  You never realize quite how heavy the burden is until you put it behind you. 

Strength Conditioning

            You’re only as strong as the last thing you say no to.

Cause of Death

            All “cause of death” information seems vaguely interesting in a statistical sense.  That is, by compiling all the data, we learn something about the things that snuff out lives on this planet—and that’s good to know.  The phrase takes on a vastly different color, however, when we hear from a doctor what is likely to be our own “cause of death.”

“Success”

         On occasion, everyone becomes vulnerable to the temptations of management and / or politics; however, only the true egomaniac succumbs.

 The Meaning of Life 

         A man’s biological imperative is to produce sperm.  It’s what he does, 24/7, all his life. 

  A woman’s biological imperative is to coax it out of him.

Virtue

  The only middle-class virtue more highly over-rated than good table manners is punctuality.

 The Single Most Over-rated Novel in American Literary History

   It’s The Great Gatsby, the celebrated 1925 novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald.  It’s the story of Jay Gatsby’s compulsion to reconstruct an adolescent crush that didn’t work out for him.  This is not praiseworthy behavior.  It’s delusional--and typical of the almost-always empty-headed Fitzgerald.  

Put It Another Way

 "Fitzgerald has been given a gift for expression without

very many ideas to express."  

Edmund Wilson, The Shores of Light, 1952

The chief irony in Fitzgerald studies is that his trashy magazine stories may turn out to be his most lasting contribution to American literature because those are the ones with the most obvious local color and the ones that have the most detailed pictures of Jazz Age life and manners among one class of people.  His so-called mature work in Gatsby is so immature as to be embarrassing.  It's one thing to praise Fitzgerald for his very real talent at painting a scene and describing characters, but don't make this shallowest of adolescent writers into a thinker for God's sake.  Hold on to your common sense and good judgment.

May 2011

It's pathetic these days to see so many big-bellied, middle-aged men wearing faded Bruce Springsteen tee shirts. 

More on Rock and Roll

Rock music is a tonic for the adolescent soul and an embarrassment to the adult. 

Corollary:  The only rock music an adult can bear is the music of his own adolescence—and what he is after is the past, not music appreciation.

Happiness

Happiness should be the byproduct of a well-spent life, not the goal.

Dating Advice for Boys

            “Dating” is just women’s way to hold open tryouts for husbands.  Boys don’t much care about it except as the only female-sanctioned way to get sex, so they participate (of course)—knowing all the while that the sex, which is hardly guaranteed, is not likely to be worth the trouble it will cause them.  Unfortunately, however, there aren’t many options.  But here is the real rub:  as open tryout dating is by its nature a wide-angle approach, it amounts to the old-fashioned notion of “playing the field,” which is fine until the woman focuses her attention on one boy, who, if he should still be part of some other woman’s open tryout dating, is then accused indignantly by woman number one of cheating.  The whole thing’s a trap—proceed very, very carefully.

My People

            On most days when I don’t play golf, I walk a couple of miles around the pond at the park in Zephyrhills.  It’s a good park, with lots of ducks and kids, and it has groups of musicians who gather every Sunday to play for mostly older locals who sit on lawn chairs and have picnics.  And there are always birthday parties for little ones and old ones alike, with banners that read, for example, “Happy 80^th Agnes!”

            I usually listen to my own music while I walk.  I thought about getting myself an iPod, but decided in the end that I didn’t want to learn about music files, how to download them, and how to operate the device.  I didn’t figure it could be too hard to learn, but why bother, I asked myself, when I have a perfectly usable Walkman somewhere in the garage?   

Sony still makes some version of the Walkman these days, but when I got mine in the 1980s, it was still pretty new on the market.  It was a wonderful technological advance that let us do pretty much anything we wanted to and listen to our music at the same time, our ears just about completely covered up with clunky headphones. That was more than thirty years ago, and I was already into my middle age, but I thought back then that it would be very cool to keep up with music and with technology and to have a Walkman.

            Now I’m going on seventy and keeping up doesn’t seem so important any more.  The Walkman is just fine, thank you very much.

            And the music I listen to is from my own first forty years, mostly doo wop “classics” from the 1950s and 1960s, songs by groups like Dion and the Belmonts, the Five Satins, and the Del Vikings.  I especially like the ballads with a pure falsetto line that lingers sweetly just above the melody.  Even today the songs remain dear to me, evocative of a time when everything was larger than life, magnified to distortion—my adolescence.

            So when I began walking around Zephyr Park, I fished out my old Walkman, recorded a couple of dozen old songs from CDs to cassette tapes, and now I can be as technologically and musically oblivious to the present as I want to be.  And I do in fact want to be exactly that.

            In fact, the present weighs less and less heavily on me as I live my seventieth year, and the past is more and more comfortable to me.  I doubt I can be unique in this, so I deduce from my own experience a related thought, that death must come as a relief to many old-timers (most, maybe) simply because so many of the people we have loved all our lives have already gone before us, leaving us in a constant state of mourning, more and more alone every year. The people and things we cherish most are largely in the past.  There comes a time, I think, when we begin to feel that we are currently living in a place that has too many holes in it.  Too many absences.  And very often, too many heartbreaking pains.

            Making it worse is that old people gradually find themselves in a place run by (and overrun by) young people, whose language and life styles and tastes (and music too) are very different from their own, from the generation they grew up with and were a part of.  They don’t fit in any more, even with their children and grandchildren.  The only place they feel at ease is with the rapidly diminishing members of their own generation.  Eventually, it just seems a comfort to think about dying and taking one’s place among the legion of dead and buried whom they belong to, belong with.  That’s what I think, anyway.

For me survival at any cost has lost its urgency and been replaced by a calming sense that death may really be nothing more than a desirable and natural release from a life lived as well as I could live it, but which perhaps is on the verge of being a tad too long for comfort.  I can see that when the final sickness and death are upon me, I won’t fight it very much—may even welcome it.

            Mind you, I’m happily married for forty-five years and have not yet arrived at that unhappy state—nor do I have any inclination to speed the process along.  My Walkman will be fine for the immediate future.  But when I squint a little bit, I can dimly see a band of already-gone saints (and sinners) looming on the horizon, beckoning to me.  My people.

Living by Slogans

I’m drawn to slogans and bromides that border on tired platitudes, but that also seem to me to be oftentimes elevated to the status of axioms or proverbs.  I mean the sort of wisdom you sometimes read on bumper stickers or dig out of fortune cookies.  Regardless of what they're called, being fond of them is not, I don’t think, something to be proud of.

Most of the ones I like I've borrowed from somewhere else and put into words that work for me, like “Enjoy the process,” which is a not-very-clever way to keep myself centered in the moment.  The slogan itself is pedestrian, of course, and the idea is threadbare, but its directness keeps me in the present, keeps me from getting ahead of myself and worrying about tomorrow’s problems today.  Never trouble trouble till trouble troubles you, as my father-in-law used to say. 

Reminding myself to enjoy the process is also how I get through parts of a day that are difficult to tolerate, let alone enjoy, like waiting on lines, visiting the dentist, going through airport security.  Or just talking to boring people.  Take the sweet with the sour, I say--it's all good.   

I often have to remind myself to “slow down,” mostly because my natural inclination is to speed through every-day activities—hurry to the bank, rush to the Wal-Mart, jog around the track, stop for gas, and so on and so on. It's a constant round of one errand or chore after another.

Slowing down and enjoying the process were both hard life changes for me, but in the end I discovered (surprisingly) that I liked the slower rhythms of life better than the speedier ones that caused me to race along every road and rush to the front of every line.  In fact, inviting someone in a hurry to go ahead of me in the supermarket line makes me feel good—calmer and more in control.  And it’s a good lesson for the person who eyes me narrowly as he or she edges by with a few groceries in hand. 

But saying “Haste makes waste,” doesn’t suit me—it’s one of the platitudes that I can’t warm to.  It amounts to just another invitation to slow down, after all, and I like the idea very much, but it suits me to say it differently, contradictorily:  “Slow is fast,” is the way I say it.  And slow is fast because slowing down usually keeps me from having to do the same job twice, once the wrong way, and then the right way.  Haste, you see, really does makes waste.

A few years back, everyone was talking about “multi-tasking,” but that sort of speed-up keeps me from enjoying anything I ever do.  I’d rather slow down and uni-task.  I want to be disciplined and deliberate, not fast.  Slow down and calm down, I say.  Keep your composure.  Don't worry, don't hurry.  That's the ticket.

The same idea applies to what passes for conversation these days.  Words fly around so fast that there isn’t room any more for even the shortest of thoughtful pauses.  I have to remind myself that I don’t have to say anything in response to sweaty, over-stated words when they’re hurled at me, words that are self-centered and self-congratulatory and aren’t really being spoken to me at all.  I do have the right, as they say on television cop shows, to remain silent.  And I do.

When I feel my life speeding up, however, as it wants to do when left to its own devices, I sometimes have to tell myself to “dial it down,” or “take it down a notch,” two hopeless but useful slogans for calming myself and simplifying my life.  John Wooden, the legendary basketball coach at UCLA, used to say, “Be quick, but don’t hurry.” 

Wooden had another slogan that I like enormously:  “Make every day a masterpiece,” he used to say.  That one’s so good, I can’t believe it came from a basketball coach, and not, say, from Leonardo DaVinci or Pablo Picasso.   Or maybe Dr. Phil. 

I think Wooden also said “there is no I in team,” but that one’s just annoying.