Why Avatar is a ballet

I know, Avatar was a long time ago. Well, Giselle was even longer ago, so cut me some slack.

I loved Avatar. Yes, I know the plot is hackneyed, predictable, and even somewhat somewhat embarrassingly Orientalist (or would be, if there were an Orient on Pandora). Even if you hadn't read about the movie, you could predict the plot after the first ten minutes. So what? I suppose Cameron could've made an Ingmar-Bergman-in-outer-space flick, and the three people who saw it might've loved it, or, probably, they'd say the arty plot ruined what should've been good, simple, entertainment, and what kind of a snob was Cameron, anyway?


Getting back to the movie he actually made, I couldn't help but notice a certain snobbish condescension in many of the opinions I read that slammed Avatar. "Oh, yes, the -- sniff -- special effects were ok, but the plot was so predictable, and I'm all about the plot." These are usually the same people who go on and on about what a great movie The Hurt Locker was, and how it's some sort of triumph of artistry over crass commercialism that it beat Avatar for the Oscar, blah, blah, blah. While parts of The Hurt Locker are dramatically compelling, much of its depictions of military operations are ludicrous, at least according to most of the comments I've read about it that have been made by real soldiers. And the plot -- a soldier gets addicted to the thrill of combat and can't stand civilian life -- well, we've never seen that before, now have we?

When you get right down to basics, there aren't that many plots in the world, and most of them are hackneyed and stupid -- cliches, even. So what? There's a reason cliches have become cliches -- they are useful, and they're useful because they have a kernel of truth. If not, nobody would bother repeating them even once. I think those "all-about-the-plot" people should ask themselves who they think they're really kidding.

I'm rather fond of ballet and opera. Most (not all!) ballets and operas have stupid plots; often they're really stupid. What makes most ballets and operas great isn't the story, but how it's told. It's not hard to imagine Mr. Plot Snob saying of Swan Lake, "Well, all that toe stuff was ok, but the plot was stupid, and I'm all about the plot." Or of Il Trovatore, "They've got good voices, I'll grant you that, but ..." You might say that anyone going to a ballet or opera expecting a brilliant plot is missing the entire point of going to the ballet and opera. In most ballets, the story (if there is one, and let's not go there today) is the vehicle for the dancing, and not the other way around. It's the same for opera (and as I'm an opera noobie, I'll just stick to ballet from here on). You don't go to the movies for a story; the story brings you the movie.

To repeat: it's not the story; it's how you tell the story that counts.

I've mentioned from time to time that when I was a kid, I was fond of superhero comic books. Among other things, they were about people in tights defying gravity. I'll never forget the first time I saw Baryshnikov do those amazing traveling brise voles in Giselle. Here was a guy in tights, defying gravity! And to music! He was a comic-book hero come to life, using, by virtue of his years of training, nothing but his own muscles and sinews (and costumes and lighting, etc., but let's not get into that now). It's from these grueling years of obsessively hard work that we see sylphs and wilis take flight, maidens transform into swans, puppets come to pathetic life, or a floating rose awaken a young girl's dreaming sensuality.

Ballet is one big special effect. It's also many other things, of course, but it's a trick, a technique, for making the unreal real, for bringing magic to life, for astonishing us.

Avatar is the same. It astonishes us. Well, it astonishes me. The people who complain that the plot is just an excuse for the special effects are entirely right, yet entirely mistaken. It's not deplorable; it's wonderful.

I was fortunate enough to see Avatar in an IMAX theater, with the huge, hemispherical screen. The 3D effects were amazing -- I felt entirely pulled in to Cameron's wild, crazy and wonderful world. Floating mountains with waterfalls spouting into the void? A ten-foot-tall cat-girl who rides her personal flying dragon? The insane variety of glowing, floating, creeping and crawling life? I was entirely entranced.

It was entirely appropriate that the "hero" was a human discovering the world of Pandora. That eager but not-too-bright Marine is a stand-in for us. His discoveries are ours, and he's our vehicle for entering the magical unknown. He's not that different from that ballet archetype, the man surrounded in amazement by the supernatural manifested through toe-dancing women: James among the sylphs, Siegfried and the swan-maidens, Prince Florimund and the Vision Scene's dryads, Solor and the Shades of Bayaderes Past, and so on.

I doubt Cameron studied ballet, I mean, studied about ballet. He owes more to Kipling than Gautier, but it doesn't matter. He's showing us the impossible made real, using as best he could the tools at his command, just as centuries earlier ballet masters did the same. You could argue that his conflation of the unknown with the exotic is as demeaning to his own fictional creations as any number of nineteenth-century ballets' evocations of exotic climes and peoples. I'd say, "so what?" Let's learn from it what we can, and move on. Shall we pillory Bournonville for Napoli's happily cliched Italians, or for the cruel exploitation of trolls in A Folk Tale? Or dance Gautier to death for his unsympathetic portrayal of betrayed dead women as vicious harpies bent on destroying every man in their path (like they have to be dead to do that)?

One thing I've learned from my time as a self-appointed occasional dance critic is to be very wary of watching the dance in one's head instead of the one that's before one's eyes. It's easy to see Avatar in the context of everything we think it should or shouldn't be (and that list grows longer as movie plays on), yet miss the wonder of what it actually does, which is, in my humble opinion, pretty damn fantastic.