Retributive violence and the tragedy-industrial-franchise
James Cameron and a mercenary army of creative professionals have spent the most money in the history of movie-making to produce a disgusting spectacle of super violence and ruination. Suffering through its 3.5 hours, thankfully without the added affront of 3D glasses, it becomes clear how films of sensational and retributive violence mirror the profitable military industrial complex and normalize and enculturate its machinations, particularly within young viewers. Upon finishing the film I turned to my companion and whispered, this is even worse than Annie Ernaux winning the nobel prize. The film is predicted to be the most profitable ever and at the time of writing this has made over a billion dollars at the box office.
The film franchise, and we might as well just call it The Film Franchise and include all the other like blockbusters, is a never ending cycle of retributive violence that takes as its engine the grief of one or a few nuclear families. These families are unsurprisingly powerful, extremely gifted, and reeling from horrific loss, ready to put everything on the line for—what exactly? It’s hard to be sure, as it's always shifting, and borrows trivially from topical ethical discourses. But who can follow along with the hyper-manipulative doses of affect, special effect trickery, shamefully banal dialogue and never ending displays of glorified violence? It celebrates and naturalizes war, which is analogous with profit, and illustrates wars profitability with its own.
James Cameron creates the ultimate Other, a pastiche of grade school tropes about peoples and cultures that could be excluded from only the most boring, non-existent, white guy understanding of Western culture. I couldn’t bear to go through shot by shot and line by line and deconstruct all the toxic ideology. In fact, the film actually resists analysis, in its mush of tragic archetypes, free floating affective tropes, meaningless dialogue and unrelenting violence. What are the implications for children, developing a worldview, to saturate their consciousness in this horrific mess? We see the children of powerful couples nearly kill each other in hazing rituals that form deep bonds. Do we want to accept the normalization and romanticization of these toxic rituals? Films made expressly for children should be subjected to scrutiny and their ideologies unpacked. Any gesture towards an ethical position felt almost immediately superseded by a stunningly hypocritical negation, or regression into more disorienting violence.
I imagine this review would more-or-less map onto any of these Marvel-like spectacular tragedies. At this juncture of history, with all our urgent social and ecological needs, the only appropriate application of these kind of narrative devices I can imagine, would be at the meta or pedagogical level, as in Exhibit A of what should be avoided in life and art, and how this kind of thoughtless reproduction of these narratives only serves to make these stories more permissive and natural-seeming.
Even the animal rights sequences, where we become invested in the livelihood of certain maritime creatures, becomes immediately fraught when moments later we see the same characters hunting and eating other like creatures.
These films are a kind of drug, a feverish hallucination. They produce an endocrine-level, adrenalized response and I imagine many people get hooked to this neurochemical intoxication. I experienced it as sickening and it poisoned my dreams. The amount of time and resources wasted on this monument to ruin is staggering. What are the opportunity costs of something at this scale? What are the effects on the millions of people who watch it? What do children internalize from this? This kind of mass cultural event is world building. Is this the cosmology we are willing to accept? Our most invested film to date? I can’t imagine this represents anything more than the cartoonish articulation of a violent patriarchy performing its only trick on itself. An ouroboros of spectacular commodified violence. A superficial ecosocial criticism that only inoculates the viewer and legitimates its complex of retributive violence.
If there are anything like positive features or messages encoded within this nuclear reactor of hateful spectacle, they are thin, poorly developed, hypocritical and instrumental to the perpetuation of ever more violence and capital accumulation. I begged my daughter not to mistake this for entertainment, not to mistake this for something to be enjoyed, celebrated or repeated. This is the opposite of meaningfully dealing with the urgencies of our time. The mass extinction and the physical and social structures of social and ecological ruin. This kind of ‘entertainment’ begets violence and hatred and should be named and resisted.
