“Born into this”: a review of three seasons of HBO’s “The Wire”
flower that ever made an innocent child smile, even and especially when those flowers grow in magical, extra-terrestrial forests full of shiny blue indigenous people with carefully constructed super-sensual Angelina Jolie lips.
The unbelievable superficiality and childishness of Avatar’s moral outlook derives mainly from its cartoonish portrayal of oppression and exploitation as principally deriving from a lack of sensitivity and wonder, and thus as something that couldn’t possibly be abetted or perpetuated by normal, sensitive, beauty-loving people who don’t actively relish the sight of Arcadian innocence being summarily cluster-bombed by steroid-abusing thugs.
But, of course, the problem with this portrayal of capitalist Imperialism is it implicitly identifies the standard cinema-going audience’s rudimentary capacity to be moved by drama (“I’d be all like ‘Go blue cat people, I’ll> endure a cosmopolitan inter-species shag with Cat Woman Pocahontas if it stops those nasty U.S. marines from their ogre-like brutality”) as the key to solving the planet’s plunge into ecological degradation as well and at the same time as the best way to improve the condition of that inconveniently poor and dying billion people currently living who so recalicitrantly refuse to be ‘uplifted’ by what economists have long been telling us is the inevitable downward trickle of global wealth.
By doing this, i.e. by portraying exploitation as a reality that is in no way compatible with the existence of the average movie goer and his feelings, the film completely negates what is nonetheless its enormously inflated moral-political pretensions to ‘communicate’ an important message to the people via the multiplex. In the end, Avatar and its filmic fraternity will never be a call to arms for anyone to anything simply because (like Cameron’s much less watchable, and indeed execrable ) it feeds and flatters pervasive ideological illusions rather than dispelling them in the name of truths that might re-orient the field of what we think we know.
To make the more general point: there’s a certain way that people in general and Hollywood films in particular have with dealing with “Imperialism” (say, the British Raj) as if it were mainly the consequence of “Whig notions of the upward march of progress and civilisation”, as if racism, class-distinctions,Titanic and exploitation all comes down to someone saying explicitly “screw these savages/poor people/they’re not civilized so we can do what we want to them.”
Now, while of course, this was (and is) undoubtedly an element of the colonial mindset, the illusion here is that Colonialism would never have happened (or would have taken another rosier road) if only the Colonial Offices of say, the East India Company, were filled with the standard movie-going public of our time, i.e. with people who defined themselves by what is mistakenly believed to be the opposite of the “Whig” attitude: i.e. a capacity for wonder at the beauty at “difference” – at the cultural wealth and depth of ‘other cultures’.
The problem with this argument is that it is, of course, super-sized nonsense. In a bag. Where the bag has a full-body shot of James Cameron’s’ gripping his Academy Award and calling for a minute’s silence for the victims of the Titanic. (Yes, he really did that.)
Thus, I’m continually surprised and shocked by how many post-colonial studies types [yes, I just crossed myself ostentatiously] types who are supposed — surely — to take Edward Said’s Orientalism as their bible – seem entirely unaware that Orientalist attitudes (“ah, these blue cat-people have a spirituality and contact with nature that our grey ugly civilization has tragically left behind, but perhaps can regain if only it opens its heart to the mysteries of the East) goes perfectly well if not better with imperialist domination than a Whiggish sense of one’s own cultural superiority: in fact it’s the ultimate (not-so-dangerous) supplement to Imperialist ideology that makes the system function all the more smoothly: allowing the Company to sell the odd sari, and copy of the Vedas back in London along with the tea. Two words for you people who don’t get this: Lord.Curzon.
Along these lines, one of the really great things about The Wire is how utterly un-Cameronesque it is.
This is principally because more than any American television show that I’ve seen (even The Sopranos this a program that shows poverty and even a certain ‘not-what-is-usually-meant-by-the-term’ racism in a way that makes everything else I’ve seen from the U.S. look as sanitized as Tom Sawyer’s fence after his inaugural scam. Best of all, The Wire manages to achieve this without either sentimentality of the ‘every drug dealer in the projects is a hero in their own special way if he’d only discover the power inside himself to