Up In The Air with Avatar

"Being in the air is the last refuge for those that wish to be alone." Jason Reitman) There are profound connections between Avatar and Up in the Air. Both movies come at a time that can best be described as dystopic. From Afghanistan, Iraq and other countries mired in war to the deepest and most serious recession since the 1930's, to the ongoing crisis of climate change, the first decade of the 21st Century has been characterized by waves of loss, violence and instability.

What then allows any individual to compose their identity and to maintain their sense of self as the air around the planet gets thinner and thinner? How does the imagination work within a dystopia?

Up in the Air explores the tropes of loneliness and travel -- the in-between of airports and hotels, those places that are not places but nevertheless retain many of the trappings of home without the same responsibilities and challenges. There are consequences to being on the road 300 days of the year and among them is the construction of an artificial universe to live in like the metal tubes we describe as airplanes. One of the other consequences is that frequent travelers have to build imaginary lives that are fundamentally disconnected from intimacy and genuine conversation.

Ironically, Avatar imagines a world that is for a time dragged into the dystopia of 21st century life and where at the end of the day, a new vision is constructed. Avatar's use of 3D will be the subject of another article soon, but suffice to say that the worlds James Cameron constructs through motion capture and animation are among the most beautiful that the cinema has ever seen.

Hidden behind both films is a plaintiff plea for love and genuine relationships. Avatar explores this through tales of transmigrating spirits and animistic notions that transform animals and nature itself into a vast Gaia-like system of communications and interaction. The N'avi are a synthesis of Cameron's rather superficial understanding of Aboriginal peoples, although their language is a fascinating blend created by Paul Frommer from the University of Southern California.

The flesh of avatars in the film are not virtual but as the main character, Jake Sully discovers, the N'avi are the true inheritors of the planet they live on, a exotic version of early Earth called Pandora. In Greek mythology Pandora is actually derived from 'nav' and was the first woman. The Pandora myth asks the question why there is evil in the world which is a central thematic of Avatar.

Up in the Air asks the same question but from the perspective of a rapacious corporation which sends its employees out to fire people for other companies or as the main character, Ryan Bingham says to save weak managers from the tasks for which they were hired. The film also asks why there is evil in the world and suggests that any escape, even the one that sees you flying all year doesn't lead to salvation.

Both films explore the loss of meaning, morality and principles in worlds both real and unreal. Avatar provides the simplest solution, migrate from a humanoid body and spirit to a N'avi to discover not only who you are but how to live in the world. **Up in the Air** suggests that love will solve the dystopic only to discover that casual relationships never lead to truth and friendship.

These are 21st century morality tales. Avatar is a semi-religious film of conversion not so much to truth but to the true God, who is now a mother. Up in the Air teaches Ryan that life is never complete when it is entirely an imaginary construction.

It is however, the reanimation of the human body in Avatar that is the most interesting reflection of the challenges of overcoming the impact of this first decade of the 21st century. Jake Sully is able to transcend his wheelchair and become another being, now connected to a tribe. He is able to return to a period of life when innocence and naivete enable and empower — when the wonders of living can be experienced without the mediations of history and loss. This of course is also the promise of 3D technology, to reanimate images such that they reach into the spectator's body, so we can share those moments as if we have transcended the limitations of our corporeal selves.

James Cameron's digital utopia, full of exotic colours, people, plants and animals suggests that escape is possible in much the same way as Ryan Bingham imagines a world without the constraints that are its very essence. 3D technology promises to allow us to transcend our conventional notions of space and time but it cannot bring the earth back to its pristine form nor reverse engineer evolution or history. At the same time, Avatar represent a shift in the way in which images are created, in the ways in which we watch them and also in the potential to think differently about our imaginations and about our future. (Imagine a 3D film about the destruction of the Amazon!)

Huffington on New(s) Journalism

A superb piece by Arianna Huffington on journalism on the Web with many references to the rather superficial claims of traditional newspapers that their content is being stolen through sites that aggregate the news. The paradox is that aggregation is exactly what newspapers and journalists have always been practicing, out of necessity. No one and certainly no organization can be everywhere at once. Associated Press is an aggregator and radio journalists have always borrowed from their cousins in other media. Information in the 21st century is not information as it was in the 20th century. Multiple sources may not be great journalism, may not even be accurate journalism, but inevitably through the cloud, through aggregation, truth and insight become integral to the process. Traditional news sources want to charge for their content. They have to survive. But, the very foundations for how to make money on the Web have not been built. New models will appear over time and during this interim period, the model developed by Huffington, aggregating revenue through targeted advertising will have to suffice. Read her post

The "Idol" Shows and Their Influence

A superb TED talk on the spread of American Idol and the many ways in which the show is being transformed to suit the demands and needs of different cultures. Talk by Cynthia Schneider.

Robert Frank and American Photography

The current Robert Frank Exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum in New York is not only important because of the extraordinary work of the photographer. It is a beautiful example of ethnography and photography intermingling without the need to intellectualize or in Roland Barthes's terms, without the need to declare the message in an open and direct fashion. Drawing upon a set of experiences that saw Frank criss-cross America in the 1950's by car sometimes alone and sometimes with his family, the images bring the rich diversity of American life into a wonderful inventory of the banal, the unusual and the fantastic. The images were published as a book and much has been written about them and about the book itself. Frank set the book up as a sequence of images and if you take the time, a story begins to unfold. The core of the narrative to me is displacement. To varying degrees, Frank witnessed post-war America beginning to redefine itself. Many of the images link landscapes to faces and most of the faces seem to be searching for some sense of definition. A coffee shop becomes exotic not only because of its unusual signage but because the people in it gaze outwards searching to define their experiences. In fact, many of the images have people glancing backwards at the photographer as if to say, there is not much here, why are you interested? The desolation is best represented by an empty gas station where all you see is gas pumps set against a dry landscape.

The only book comparable to Robert Frank's was "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men," published in 1941. Both books share a fascination with the human gaze, with that look that comes from not being able to see what the photographer is doing. The subject of the photographs can never take control and in knowing this they give a gift to the photographer of their most private feelings. Both Walker Evans and Robert Frank understood the irony of communicating something of the essence of a person or situation *because* of the power they held. In so doing they left a heritage of American life that is openly steeped in artifice but never the less profound for doing so.

Life After the End of History

For most of the last century, the West faced real enemies: totalitarian, aggressive, armed to the teeth. Between 1918 and 1989, it was possible to believe that liberal democracy was a parenthesis in history, destined to be undone by revolution, ground under by jackboots, or burned like chaff in the fire of the atom bomb. Read more at the New York Times