The Current Cinema: Avatar, Kick-Ass and Questions of Film Ethics

Avatar (2009)--1/5
Kick Ass (2010)--2/5

What do I mean by "film ethics"? In a sense, I'm referring to the politics of a film. Not just in the sense of whether it can be classified as "liberal" or "conservative" or "left" or "right," as those distinctions are fairly arbitrary. In a sense, I think of ethics as being a higher, more idealistic form of politics--a way of discussing something and trying to understand the implications, assumptions and mythology of a work and--importantly--whether these are things we should accept or reject. And I would like to discuss these two films without resorting to a purely academic analysis, devoid of taste or concern for the art of a work and rooted almost completely in sociology. In fact, I don't think it's appropriate to discuss film ethics separately from film aesthetics. It's too soulless to discuss art from a purely ethical position--it's essentially a preachy and narrow way of understanding art and it deprives the artist of their identity as a creator and the art of what makes it most enjoyable--but it seems extremely naive to try to discuss aesthetics without any concern for ethics.

Critics approaching Avatar from what they consider a purely aesthetic position might say, for instance, as I actually read on Rotten Tomatoes, that the experience of watching Avatar in 3D can be compared favorably to what it must have been like seeing King Kong in the 1930s. I will always remember my moment, watching Avatar myself in 3D, that I saw a burning ember literally pop out of the screen at me, seeming to land right on my glasses, and being amazed. Can I discuss that moment from a purely aesthetic point of view? It was, well, pretty cool--someone surely spent millions of dollars and an enormous amount of time making that moment happen.
But once I mention the enormous expenditure of time and resources for that moment, I can't help but think of other moments of formal beauty in other films I've seen recently that cost much less to produce--the traveling steadicam shots through the outdoor maze in Kubrick's The Shining, which I saw on the big screen recently, or the numerous moments of formal beauty in the slow motion, over-saturated color sequences in Wong Kar-Wai's In the Mood For Love. Honestly, I was more impressed by the experience of seeing Stanley Kubrick's epic horror film on the big screen for the first time, scratched print and all, than I ever was by Avatar. But that's a purely subjective judgment--other people might not have been impressed by the Shining at all and find it boring (it is thirty years old, for Christ's sake.) But--and this is as "purely" aesthetic as I care to be--Kubrick's steadicam shots are intimately wedded to his narrative--the boy is running from his axe-wielding murderous father and the camera is frantically chasing yet consistently and disquietingly not shaking as it follows boy, conveying, I think, the persistent insanity of his father--and this, to me, is the ultimate aesthetic triumph of them. The barely comparable moment of formal beauty in James Cameron's film has little more narrative justification than, well, there's a fire in the scene.

Yet, I can't--and this is where the ethics come in--say that this much more expensive moment in a much more expensive film is worthwhile aesthetically, simply because it was just so goddamn expensive. How can I, who treasure my humanism, and hence, humanity, justify spending the equivalent of the national debt of one or several impoverished third world nations to make this film? And whose aesthetic value is only partial? Is the film world of Avatar itself, aside from the unethical cost to create it, even something I can endorse?

This is where the comparison to King Kong is ironically quite apt--that film deals with a brutish animal from Africa--typically black--who covets and kidnaps a white woman with rape on his mind. When you really think about it--and you don't even have to have seen it, because its turns are common knowledge--King Kong is the white male fantasy of the African-American "threat" to their white women personified in the character of a giant black African ape. And sure, we may be responsible for bringing the ape here, we may even feel sorry for the ape, but he has to be destroyed and the white woman wrested from his clutches. Peter Jackson's recent remake scarcely improves on the original's racist premise.
And Avatar is--despite being critical of the American military--also a damaging white fantasy, even if it happens to be a "liberal" white fantasy. The film is often read in a positive light by absentminded Americans as being a metaphorical story about the tortured history of Native Americans in the U.S. --represented by the aliens here--and the American military's ruthless exploitation of them and theft of their land. But going deeper into the film there are also implications that are more troubling: the whites are able to inhabit fake copies of the alien-natives' bodies and the hero of the story is a white male who inhabits one of these bodies, passes all the tests to become one of the natives, turns the native heroine from a strong independent woman into "his" woman, and becomes the supreme messianic leader of the natives who has been foretold by prophecy! Not only that, but at the end, he forsakes his white man body and fully becomes one of the natives. If this is all metaphor and even myth--and I would argue that it is, in some sense--then I'm freaked out, because, in reality, we have never atoned for our history with Native Americans and we can never really become Native Americans. But we--and I mean liberal-minded whites like myself--do often like to proclaim our respect for Native Americans by mythologizing and idealizing them, even adopting Native art and Native names for places at times in what can be read as an attempt to claim their history and their culture for our own. I'm not arguing that Native culture should not be displayed and celebrated, that Native place names should not be used, etc., but when this popular fantasy of a film is suggesting that we can actually become Native Americans and master their culture to the point that we not only become them, but we are the best among them to lead them, then the myth is really just justifying white racial superiority. It's a feel-good movie for whites to assuage their guilt and reinforce their sense of superiority, moral and racial, not a radical rewriting of history through metaphor in which the Natives come out victorious. I don't think James Cameron is the originator of this myth--it's a common one that I've seen perpetuated in other American films as recently as The Last Samurai--but that doesn't make Avatar any more ethical or aesthetically satisfying.

Oddly enough, despite the public outcry over the film from established and heavily moralistic critics like Roger Ebert, who seemed to have no serious qualms with Avatar, I found Kick-Ass to be less immediately offensive. It was off to a good start in the first half-hour or so when it was taking on the superhero myth and playing with it, especially in the scene where the wannabe superhero Kick Ass tries to stop a couple hoods from breaking into someone's car and gets stabbed and sent to the emergency room. The comedic pacing of this scene is near-perfect and the message--essentially a cinematic deconstruction of the silly, yet probably harmless fantasy of masked vigilante crime fighters--is a much needed injection of reality into the blockbuster superhero movie genre, which has gotten pretty stale as of late. The plotline with 12-year old Hit Girl, played by the talented child actor Mindy Moretz, and her father, Big Daddy, played with spunk by Nicholas Cage, seems promising at first, because it is again playing with and undermining genre conventions, this time by placing a child in the dubious position of killing the bad guys under the direction of her psychotically driven father, which seems to promise--we could hope--some complex examination of their characters. But for some reason director Matthew Vaughn, who was also one of the film's screenwriters, decides to leave their relationship and the effect that being trained to kill from a young age has had on this young girl--who is easily the most interesting character in the film--essentially unexplored and after the 30-minute mark the film turns into a fairly conventional superhero movie with only average direction and a little more blood than we're usually given to expect.
But that's just the aesthetics--it stopped playing with genre conventions pretty quickly, spent too much time following a typical boy-who-is-secretly-a-masked-avenger-meets-girl plotline that we've seen in every superhero movie since Spider-Man and left its most interesting character unexplored. By leaving Hit Girl unexplored and her status as a "superhero" unquestioned, though, I think Vaughn made an ethical, as well as aesthetic, choice--this film was obviously banking on it's shock value to make money, as evidenced by Hit Girl uttering the word "cunt," which I really couldn't care less about, and by having her commit brutal murders, which, ultimately, disturbed me. Don't get me wrong--there was novelty in it at first--but after awhile I couldn't stop thinking about child soldiers in Africa. These are children that are pressed into military service by their families and extended families as much as by larger political entities to fight for their particular ethnic group, right? Don't they believe that they're fighting for good too? For their lives, for their people, for the morally correct cause, whatever, but this is universally acknowledged as something horrible. If Vaughn had examined Hit Girl more closely as a child soldier--which she is, make no mistake--who knows? Would we conclude that she was suffering from trauma or Daddy-induced Stockholm Syndrome (Patty Hearst, anybody?) or would we discover that the child is actually some sort of born sociopath or a created sociopath, influenced by her father and by the American culture surrounding violence to never have empathy for her victims and to never consider any real consequences of violence?

The Japanese film Battle Royale, from a couple years back, satirizes something even more transgressive than Kick-Ass--violence perpetrated by children on other children--and it examines the question of child sociopaths in a more gratifying way, but hasn't been released in a decent edition here, presumably for fear of controversy. Quentin Tarantino's films also have transgressive violence, but there too is an element of play in them and an element of ridicule in regards to violence and convention. I'm not saying that Tarantino land or Battle Royale are entirely ethical either--I'm undecided--but these examples prove to me that Vaughn didn't have to make the film unfunny or unenjoyable to deal with the stuff it brings up. Ultimately, by saying, "yeah, she's a bad ass!" and "look at that--a child committing bloody murders, wow!" and not saying anything else, not even giving her enough scenes, the film fails on both the aesthetic and the ethical count. Perhaps if these filmmakers at least thought of ethics sometimes instead of simply trying to alternately shock, awe or appease us, they'd develop more considered and interesting aesthetics too. But perhaps that would risk negating the real concerns of Cameron and Vaughn (as well as their producers), which is ultimately not aesthetics or ethics, but commerce. And to their credit, Kick-Ass and Avatar have made a lot of money.

Grave of the Fireflies: An Anime Weepie

When I heard this movie was going to make me cry (and it did), I immediately thought: soap opera, weepie, melodrama. Though melodrama sometimes has a negative connotation to it—as in labeling someone melodramatic—I think there’s a time and place for every genre. And the time and place here—Japan in the waning days of World War II, beginning with the firebombings and ending with surrender—works perfectly for this type of film. The two best definitions of melodrama that I’ve come across are: (1) from the director Sidney Lumet, who argues in his book Making Movies that melodrama is the sort of drama that moves forward based on plot, which creates the events that move the action forward, rather than being “character-driven”; and (2) from a Western teacher, that melodrama is a “drama of the unsaid.” I think both of these definitions are applicable to Grave of the Fireflies, and it’s none the worse for it.

For the first definition, I think it’s important to note that the characters in this film are static, rather than dynamic, which is a good cue to melodrama: Setsuko remains a cute, gentle little girl throughout, and Seita remains strong, defiant and somewhat foolhardy. The big events are the loss of their house, the death of their mother, moving into the bomb shelter out of the aunt’s house, Seita being caught for theft, and Setsuko dying of malnutrition. As in most melodramas, you can see the plot twists coming from a mile away, and, as in the good ones, it doesn’t make a bit of difference. The plot twists are related to character, sure—other children, we think, might have gone back to the aunt, but not bull-headed Seita—but honestly this movie isn’t about how war changes people, as is the theme in many war dramas, but about how it kills them, even the little ones, which has much more melodramatic potential.

Now that I’ve begun thinking about it, I think the two definitions I had handy are actually quite complementary, and the second works as a deeper explanation of the first. Where dynamic characters are the heart of drama--their shifts in perspective moving the plot forward--dramas with static characters have to be based on something else, and that is what is withheld from them or what they withhold from others. When the unsaid comes to light it makes them either cry or act irrationally, in accordance with their narrow characterization, and much to our delight or misery, depending on how we feel about said characters. Right from the start, the film begins the tension of the unsaid, with the narrative itself withholding information from us the viewers: we see Seita die, but find out he had a little sister—what happened to her? The plot twists and subplots are also based on the unsaid, as in the case of the children’s mother: first, we don’t know what happened to her; then we know that Seita knows she’s dead, but is withholding this from his aunt and sister; then Seita, unable to bear it any longer, blurts the truth out to their aunt, whose attitude, if not characterization, changes immediately; Seita leaves with Setsuko, believing she doesn’t know, only to find out that his aunt had told her much earlier, unbeknownst to him. And, as I said earlier, at each point someone either cries or behaves irrationally—two counts of crying and two of irrational behavior for this subplot.

I think Grave of the Fireflies works so well because its melodramatic form is perfect for its subject matter—this is one of the cases, where, to present reality accurately, melodrama might be the only acceptable form. In war dramas, such as Apocalypse Now, people crack under the strain of war, whereas in war melodramas, such as Gone With the Wind, people persevere. The story of these children’s deaths in war might be truly impossible to present if, say, Seita had cracked and killed his sister. This, though it would be extremely upsetting, would ruin him for us as a sympathetic character and possibly destroy the whole meaning of the movie. A child dying in war is so far from any moral gray area, so unequivocally awful, that it seems natural, even correct, to line children up on the one side of good, without hesitation or movement, and war and everything that supports it on the other side as bad. And perhaps another characteristic of melodrama is this tendency to line everything up in black-and-white terms, as in All About Eve, where she’s evil and all the other characters are sympathetic. A child dying in war is perverse enough not only to make melodrama appropriate, but to make it the only dramatic strategy that’s ethical.