[lbo-talk] Avatar: The Exquisite Horror of The Strange Stranger

Dwayne Monroe dwayne.monroe at gmail.com
Fri Jan 8 14:30:03 PST 2010


Dennis Claxton wrote:

I think he's saying Hollywood anti-capitalism is not anti-capitalism at all. Here's the money shot:

What is foreclosed in the opposition between a predatory technologised capitalism and a primitive organicism, evidently, is the possibility of a modern, technologised anti-capitalism. It is in presenting this pseudo-opposition that Avatar functions as an ideological symptom.

[...]

full at, (once again):

<http://k-punk.abstractdynamics.org/archives/011437.html>

....

Just so.

H'wood's 'anti-capitalism' is the anti-captitalism of fools. Therefore, not anti-capitalism at all.

Just as H'wood's feminism -- represented in pop culture artifacts as the slovenly, clueless guy vs. the relentlessly organized, robotically perfect woman -- is one example of the feminism of fools. This also applies to pop ecology, which pushes the non-idea that the answer to our planet-wide distress lies in becoming more harmonious with "Nature". (This concept of nature leaves no room for contemplating strange strangers such as the viruses which helped make us and which form a part of our genetic makeup.)

I don't blame Cameron: he simply took Fern Gully and Dances with Wolves, added a sparkling cup of cutting edge CGI and produced a global blockbuster. Cheers.

But now others, seduced by high def and 3D (a 21st century malady in the making?) are greedily slurping from this thin stew of ideas. Mistaking pastiche (or perhaps, a thematic palimpsest) for a theory of life.

.d.

Dio! Time to go! You must give your cape and scepter...to me!



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