By now, surely, James Cameron must have cracked open the champagne. Or at least taken a long draft from a bowl of “kava-like intoxicant”. Which, according to the script of Avatar, is what the Na’vi, those tall blue aliens, drink on Pandora, the Edenic planet in Cameron’s wondrously imagined cinematic dream world. In the middle of last week, less than six weeks after his 3-D sci-fi epic was first released, Avatar had smashed through all known box-office records to become the biggest money-maker of all time. It has now taken about $1.9 billion worldwide, beating the record set 12 years ago by Titanic, Cameron’s previous feature film, which ended up with $1.84 billion. Even when inflation is taken into account, the speed at which Avatar has achieved this is amazing. Titanic passed the magic billion-dollar mark after about three months; it took The Dark Knight, now the fifth-biggest film of all time, eight months. Avatar took just 17 days.
What’s also stunning seasoned box-office observers is that Avatar shows few signs of slowing down. It has been at the top of the American charts for six straight weeks. While most films drop by about 50% at the box office from one week to the next, as new films arrive, Avatar, with little competition, has been dropping by no more than 10%-15%. It may only be when Tim Burton’s 3-D Alice in Wonderland arrives in March that Avatar will have to cede ground.
“We are witnessing box-office history,” says Paul Dergarabedian, box-office analyst for Hollywood.com. “We’re watching all of these big records fall, and there doesn’t seem to be an end in sight. It’s just unprecedented.” Even the fact that Avatar is the most pirated film of all time doesn’t seem to be affecting it much, probably because the pirated versions are in 2-D. At this stage, nobody dares to venture even a guess at what Avatar’s final box-office tally might be, although it will definitely be the first film in history to top $2 billion and could even reach $2.5 billion. Next week, it looks certain to pick up a significant number of Academy Award nominations, and only a fool would bet against its winning at least the best picture award and numerous technical Oscars, which will give it a further box-office boost. (Cameron’s only likely challenger for best director is his ex-wife, Kathryn Bigelow, for The Hurt Locker, about a bomb squad in Iraq.) Because ticket prices are higher today than they were when Titanic was released, about one-third fewer people have seen Avatar so far, giving the film an enormous untapped audience pool still to draw on.
Beyond that, of course, there will be the DVD release, which Cameron is already working on. It might be held back much longer than the usual three months, perhaps until the autumn, to build anticipation and excitement. Most people will watch it on 2-D TV screens, obviously; although 3-D TVs are available, they won’t be widely sold until at least the end of this year. The Avatar DVD set will contain a lot of extra material. Cameron says he will include sex scenes between Jake Sully’s avatar, played by Sam Worthington, and Neytiri, his Na’vi love, played by Zoe Saldana, that were filmed but deleted from the movie. Na’vi sex apparently involves much touching of the tendrils they use to mesh with other life forms. “If you ‘sync’ to your banshee, and you’re ‘syncing’ to a tree, why not ‘sync’ into a person?” Saldana says. “I almost feel like you’ll have the most amazing orgasm.”
Avatar’s astonishing success has fuelled speculation that Cameron will be making at least two sequels, speculation he is doing nothing to squelch. “We always planned on continuing the world and continuing the characters,” he says. “In fact, that was part of the original pitch to 20th Century Fox.” Even he admits he is stunned by the film’s performance. “People think I’m arrogant, but I don’t have that kind of hubris,” he says. “Avatar we thought would make money, but at a certain threshold. We didn’t think it would align with people’s emotional, spiritual, political, whatever the hell it is that’s the alchemy that’s causing it to work so well in so many markets. You can’t predict those things. I’m just sitting back with amazement, going, ‘Wooooohhh!’”
What is this “alchemy” Cameron is talking about? Why has the film affected so many people so deeply, even on a profound psychological level? Why do many feel depressed, when leaving cinemas, about stepping back into their normal lives, the so-called “Avatar blues”? Why does it seem to have touched such a deep nerve?
The first obvious answer is that, as anyone who has seen it can testify, it is just a sumptuous feast for the eyes. “The most beautiful film I’ve seen in years,” says David Denby, a film critic for The New Yorker. “Amid all the hoopla over the new power of 3-D as a narrative form, and the excitement over the complicated mix of digital animation and live action that made the movie possible, nobody should ignore just how lovely Avatar looks, how luscious yet freewheeling, bounteous yet strange.” Carol Kaesuk Yoon, a science writer for The New York Times, goes further, saying that Avatar “has somehow managed to do what no other film has done. It has re-created what is the heart of biology — the naked, heart-stopping wonder of really seeing the living world”.
Robert Thompson, a professor of popular culture at the University of Syracuse, believes the film affects audiences on more profound levels. “The real achievement of Avatar is that it is just such an extraordinary physical experience,” he says. “One of the great appeals of the movies has always been immersing oneself in a different world. Avatar does that more than virtually any film ever has on a purely technical level. You really do get more of a sense that you have been someplace else.”
Cameron acknowledges that this was exactly his intention. “Audiences should feel like they’ve been somewhere, that they’ve had an experience outside of their day-to-day life, outside of this world, maybe outside of their body,” he says, adding that he wanted Avatar to be “a visual journey, a physical journey, in the sense that you feel like you’ve actually climbed that mountain, and an emotional journey. Ultimately, and most importantly, an emotional journey”.
Beyond the immersive, physical thrill of Avatar, the film explores — controversially — a number of themes that have clearly added to its appeal. Cameron’s depiction of the violent despoiling corporation in Avatar is obviously a metaphor for the destructive footprint of America, especially in war zones such as Iraq and Afghanistan. Its “bad guy” is a corporation that will stop at nothing, including the destruction of entire civilisations, to get the mineral it needs for the survival of its own planet, which it has all but destroyed. This has also been taken as a critique of the white man’s destruction of Indian life in the Americas, and of European imperialism in Africa and elsewhere. While this made American conservatives foam at the mouth in fury, it has undoubtedly added to the film’s appeal to audiences in many other countries.
Beyond that, Avatar promotes an attractive, pantheistic view of what man’s place in nature should be, a pro-environmental theology. Movieguide, the “family guide to Christian movie reviews” attacked the film for an “abhorrent New Age, pagan, anti-capitalist world-view that promotes goddess worship and the destruction of the human race”.
Yet for all the huffing and puffing about these various themes, Thompson says: “If they were in a film that didn’t take place in such an incredibly lush, technologically jaw-dropping universe, we would have paid them absolutely no heed whatsoever. Can you imagine a low-budget live-action film with the script of Avatar? That isn’t to say that that kind of stuff doesn’t work in a film like this, aimed at a mass audience. It’s rather like Star Wars. When you get right down to it, the first three Star Wars films were really a simple-minded retelling of that whole Joseph Campbell business, the hero’s journey. However, combined with the amazing special effects, the whole universe Lucas created, it worked.”
Others believe that a significant part of Avatar’s appeal — in fact, the appeal of most of Cameron’s movies, including, most obviously, Titanic — is that women find as much in them as men do. After initially drawing more men than women, lured in by the more techno-geeky side of the project, Avatar now seems to be attracting both genders in equal numbers.
“Cameron has stuffed Avatar with enough futuristic battle scenes and fantastical creatures to rally hordes of 14-year-old boys to the box office,” says Rebecca Keegan, author of The Futurist, a new biography of the director. “But, as always in a Cameron film, the most interesting roles in Avatar belong to the women.” Kim Masters, a commentator for National Public Radio, agrees. “He makes movies for women disguised as movies for men. Every one of them — Terminator, Aliens, The Abyss, right on through Avatar — involves an exceptionally strong female lead and an old-fashioned love story, whether it’s man-woman love or mother-child love. From Sarah Connor to Ripley to Rose, Cameron’s women can kiss you or kick your ass.”
There is another component, I would suggest, a crucial compositional one, that has been overlooked. Which is that Avatar has such an astonishingly powerful psychological impact on audiences because, more closely than any film ever made, it mimics a human dream. Interestingly, this is something Cameron makes absolutely clear, right at the beginning of Avatar. In his first voiceover, the first words spoken in the film, Sully says: “When I was lying there in the VA hospital, with a big hole blown through the middle of my life, I started having these dreams of flying...” He then says, prefiguring the inevitable end of the dream, the end of the film: “Sooner or later, though, you always have to wake up.” We are, Cameron is clearly telling us, in a dream, Sully’s dream. But it is our dream, too, in which, as one can in dreams, we can fly, find love beyond all understanding, but also have to confront our deepest fears and face down our most terrifying demons. Quite explicitly, throughout the film, Cameron makes it clear that Sully — and through him, we the audience — can only be on Pandora, in his and our dream world, when he is asleep.
The film’s very last shot, in close-up, is of Sully’s eyes opening. He is awake, the dream has ended. But Sully is now a living part of his own dream — and, frustratingly for those who have loved being along for the ride, we can’t follow him there. We can, though, pay up for more tickets and re-enter the dream again and again. And wait for the sequel
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