So I’m doing a series of essays on Oscar movies this year—the theme is nostalgia, or at least visions of American history. First, James Cameron’s Avatar movie, a sensational success that also reveals a fairly coherent plan to rewrite American history in order to overcome it. It’s an America in which the Americans are the bad guys, of course, which many people already do believe is the case... Here’s a quote from the essay:
The arrival of Avatar: The Way of Water at least makes clear what it is Cameron wants America’s children &, by extension, the world’s children to see & to believe. The first movie was an obvious retelling of Euro-American conflicts with Native Americans in the 19th century. The story summarizes, of course, but it also focuses on a simple teaching: Americans are evil & possibly monstrous. The Natives were innocent &, though proud warriors, peaceful. One may say this is nonsense & historically dubious; one may add that it is unpatriotic. But it may nevertheless be rather persuasive, especially because Cameron makes no arguments & starts no fights—he merely uses images that speak to things most kids are ready to believe.
Next, Tom Cruise’s new Top Gun movie, Maverick, also an astonishing success. This is also an attempt to rewrite history, but much more limited & altogether happier. Top Gun is about an America where the Cold War victory didn’t lead to horrible failure in the Middle East which divided the nation on a partisan basis & then broke the nation’s confidence, rather like the Vietnam war did. Still, it’s an appeal to American patriotism American audiences loved.
Maverick is not just Cold War nostalgia but nostalgia for the situation American audiences love best—the underdog winning, democracy triumphant, the everyman becoming a hero. It’s impossible to think of Iran as a world-threatening power & the U.S. as the imperiled, scrappy newcomer saving civilization, but Maverick makes the attempt anyway. It has a certain plausibility with audiences because, although America has a military far more powerful than all others, it seems unable to win its wars (Afghanistan). Moreover, American might across the world doesn’t seem to make for happy or even reasonably content Americans, but instead feeds a worrisome partisanship.
I’ll have at least two more essays up in the following weeks, focusing on the post-War, mid-century America that created the generation now dying out, yet still most influential in America, the Boomers. The third essay will be on Spielberg’s autobiographical Fabelmans, a very sentimental family & coming of age picture, very well made, but decisively flawed in its long third act. The fourth essay will consider a movie about music rather than the movies, Tar, a fairly remarkable character study of a classical music conductor. Ultimately, the movie is about how the cultural ambitions of the mid-century, of Leonard Bernstein’s classical music & media celebrity, are brought to ruin by woke Progress, which is quite a barbaric thing.
Please read & enjoy! Maybe more will come…
I wonder if you saw Mary Harrington's review of a book on the metaverse in the recent First Things, which discusses Avatar in relation to tech-gnosticism. https://www.firstthings.com/article/2023/02/surviving-the-metaverse