Why It's A Good Thing I Can Barely Remember Much of AVATAR 2
THE WAY OF WATER is to slip through your fingers
Last week I was writing about Avatar: The Way of Water, and as sometimes happens I walked away from the piece for a couple of days. When I returned to it, I found myself in a strange predicament - the piece, which was predicated on some specific details from the movie, could no longer be written because I just simply could not recall specific details from the movie. It’s possible that this is a symptom of my increasing age, and a sign that perhaps, after 20 years of writing about movies, it’s time for me to start taking notes (I have never taken a note in a movie in my life). But this is one of the few films of the year that has dissolved so much in my mind - and the exact same thing happened with the first Avatar.
There are some reasons why this movie has evaporated for me. One is that there’s not much of a plot to the thing, it’s more a three plus hour hangout film with a hugely violent climax, like if Dazed and Confused ended in an all-out war. The characters are not exactly gripping, either - I didn’t hate any of them this time (a whole section of that discarded piece was about how much I hated Jake Sully in Avatar and what a blessing it is that he’s barely in this movie) but they’re largely thin and archetypal in a way that, in the hands of a lesser filmmaker, might be lazy (it’s kind of lazy here too, to be honest). Avatar: The Way of Water is a lot of movie, clocking in at more than three hours, but it’s not much a movie, if you get my drift. A whole lotta ocean, not much motion.
With the first Avatar this was a problem. Revisiting that film earlier this year on the rerelease I see that all of my original critiques hold up, but the biggest critique I gained since then is that the movie is spiritually hollow. For a film that’s all about mystical environmental connection stuff there’s nothing meaningful happening, no real sense of awe beyond the ironic awe of seeing this completely computer generated world. James Cameron and the crew of Titanic got dosed with PCP one day on set, and it’s often been speculated that the visuals of Avatar were inspired by Cameron’s unexpected trip. But as is so often the case with inexperienced psychonauts, Cameron came back from his trip unable to really articulate the amazing revelations he experienced. In Avatar he’s like a stoned 17 year old telling us, “Whoa, it’s all connected, man.”
In the decade between the first and second Avatar he seems to have deepened his ability to express spirituality. They’re night and day, these two movies - where Cameron seemed to be unable to find the visual language to express to us the interconnected nature of all existence in the first film, here he does it effortlessly. To be fair, the ocean makes a much better metaphor for this than the vicious, kill-or-be-killed jungle, but within that milieu he truly brings the metaphysical thunder.
A huge improvement is the introduction of the character Kiri, played by Sigourney Weaver. This is a character who would have been unthinkable in the first film, which felt like a much harder-edged science fiction story. Kiri is the daughter of Weaver’s character’s avatar from the first film, and if that seems weird - good! It should be! There is a mysticism missing from Avatar that is present in The Way of Water, and part of it is this mysterious, unexplainable child who is born with a deep connection the Eywa, the spirit of the planet*.
*Brief aside - Pandora isn’t a planet - it’s a moon, as we see a number of times, and the eclipses caused by the planet it orbits plays a role in this movie, but it feels weird calling it a moon. This world? Maybe that’s the better term?
In Avatar we had no such character - no shaman, no mystic. We had tribal leaders with those roles, but we did not have characters with visionary connections to the unseen. And Jake Sully’s journey was not going from a meathead to a medicine man but going from one kind of warrior to another kind of warrior. It seems as though he never truly gets a taste of the magnitude of the metaphysical aspects of Pandora.
Kiri is probably the most interesting character in the movie as a result; her burgeoning powers and understandings open the door to metaphysical realms unimagined by Cameron last time around. Of course he still needs to hedge his bets; doofus Norm shows up to tell everybody that her trance is actually epilepsy, but the fact that Norm is literally helicoptered into a scene to just drop this information on us undercuts the information totally. Sure, Joel David Moore, I’m sure she’s just having seizures. Go back to your metal buildings and fuck off!
Some of the details of the movie stick with me - like that Norm scene - but now, a few weeks after seeing the film I am mostly left with images, feelings, concepts. There’s very little solid for me to hold on to, and this makes talking about the thing very difficult. At first I thought this was a sign that Cameron had done it again - made a huge, blockbuster movie that was just totally empty and that nobody would ever think about again until the next one came out. In a lot of ways that was what I was writing about last week as the film slipped, like some Pandoran sea creature, through my fingers.
But then something else happened; as the details dimmed the larger whole became clearer. I have been left with impressions of Avatar: The Way of Water, and that’s because the movie itself is less of a movie and more of an experience. The comparison to experiential movies is always a theme park ride, but that’s not quite right for this film - it frankly is not as exciting as a theme park ride. There are truly huge stretches of this one that feel like you’re kind of floating in the movie, not treading water but just bobbing up and down. What this movie reminds me of, a few weeks after seeing it, is a meditation retreat.
When you’re on a meditation retreat you may have incredible experiences. Your ways of thinking change as you spend days in silence, hour upon hour sitting on a cushion and delving inwards. Without your phone, without distractions, without a need to do anything or be anywhere you acquire a whole new perspective on yourself and the world around you. It is amazing, eye-opening, maybe even life changing.
And then you drive home and it all slips away. Every mile you get from the retreat center the more distant all of those feelings become. You get home and there are aspects that stick with you, images, feelings, concepts, but after a couple of days back in life and work you’re no longer in direct touch with those experiences. This isn’t a dig on meditation retreats - these states are not granted permanently, they need continuous work to maintain, just like a nice set of muscles - but rather a reflection on how the spiritual experience works. This isn’t just true of spiritual experiences from retreats or meditation or other wholesome activities - it’s very true of spiritual experiences from psychedelics.
You trip and you have all of these insights and understandings. You see the universe in a whole new way. But then you come down, and as every hour passes from the high point of the trip these insights and understandings recede just a little bit more. When you’re finally sober you’re left with just images, feelings, concepts. Tripping is, in general, not the ideal way to reach these states; back when I tripped a lot I had the bright idea of tape recording myself explaining my mystical insights as I was tripping. The results were pure gibberish.
However you get to these places, they do not last. They are experiential - they exist only in the moment when you are experiencing them (which itself is a spiritual understanding of existence) - and this is their very nature. These truths cannot simply be known, they must be felt, and for those of us who have not spent hours and months and years training to achieve these states they must be felt momentarily, as the result of an effort.
The fact that Avatar: The Way of Water pulled away from me, like a tide from a beach, is a bad sign for a movie. And I do not believe this is much of a movie. But it is very indicative of a spiritual experience or understanding, and that is where I think Cameron got it right. If the first movie was the clumsy babblings of a kid who had his first trip, The Way of Water is more like the words of a good student. They understand the ideas, and can articulate them; they’re not masters and can’t quite bring you to these states, but they can guide you in your efforts to get there.
It’s not much of a movie but as an experience it’s something else, and while the corny plot and the thin characters sometimes yanked me right out of things, in general I spent a lot of the film’s enormous runtime being, which is the goal of all meditative practice. The hollowness of the first Avatar is gone, and Cameron has shown that he has greater spiritual understandings than he did ten years ago; now to see how and if he can expand and elaborate on them as the series moves forward. This becomes the balancing act, as there are two times this movie comes alive - when Kiri and her family are first experiencing the world of the ocean tribe and when they are communicating with the whales, and when people are getting absolutely wrecked and destroyed in battle. The first Avatar only came alive in battle, so there’s growth. But Cameron has these two sides of himself as a filmmaker, two sides that are not entirely compatible. It’ll be interesting to see where he goes and which side wins.