Posted 20 December 2009 - 01:10 PM
Cameron, like Stephen King, has always betrayed a fixation on class warfare which gets a pass from mostly liberal critics who like to see caricatures of awful rich people get their comeupance at the hands of prole values. In Aliens he turned Ripley, originally a somewhat pissy officer class character into a HURR SHE-HULK GET AWAY FROM MY BABY YOU BITCH, and part of the transformation was making sure she got mistreated by a corporation and was forced to take a manual labor job (i.e. earning her prole stripes).
After The Terminator, you stop seeing authority figures in Cameron movies behaving with a shred of responsibility or nuance, and instead they become abettors of pure evil, at best hapless and incompetent, at worst totally complicit with foreknowledge of the scale of their atrocities. In T2, Sarah Connor becomes a raging anti-male feminist shrew, and while her animosity towards male power renders who an inhuman killing machine at least as bad as the future robots, Cameron actually seems totally unware of this irony in his own movie. He fails to capitalize on it with his typical sledgehammer bluntness and there is no dramatic resolution to this aspect of the character's transformation.
The Abyss was a straightforward misanthropist's lecture, a boring tirade about the ecological and other evils of humanity as seen by an egomaniacal director with the worst case of moral tunnel vision on record. (Cameron's sets do tend to produce unflattering stories about his tantrums and lack of respect for those beneath him, hallmarks of the lower middle class.) True Lies has the benefit of being the last movie to feature Arab terrorists (excepting United 93--a great and underrated movie, by the way), but its sexual politics are so confused that I wouldn't hazard a guess as to what its point was. The movie really never feels like a James Cameron film, in part because it is missing those telltale obsessions.
Titanic, aside from aggressively defaming the upper class passengers on that voyage who in reality sacrificed their lives for those women and children in steerage, is a ridiculous class warfare love triangle, pitting hack cliches of rube and swell against each other for the love of a frankly not that great-looking woman. By this point, Cameron's resentments are unmistakeable--he simply can't portray the third leg of the love triangle as having a single redeeming feature, even though failing to do so disparages his heroine's character. Instead we get the kind of dramatic conflict that dumbass peasants always love: us (peasants) vs. them (people who tell us what to do all the time). It goes without saying of course that neither of the male figures in the triangle behave like men at any point; watch Titanic and long for the days when Bogart and Grant and Stewart, et al, would give these whelps the back of their hand. It would certainly be a short first reel. (Today DiCaprio is 35 years old--and he still looks disturbingly immature, like a 19 year old ravaged by steroids.)
Which takes us to Avatar, a bloated magnum opus and which from a medium distance looks like more of his failure to seek therapy. Cameron of course has never been much of a writer--who else would actually stick the line "We're not in Kansas anymore" not just in the movie but in the trailer. But boy does he love his story tricks. Like Hawthorne, he works the same ones over and over again, delighting like a small child in the dumbest plot devices, stiffest romances, tinniest dialogue, and crudest villainy.
It's worth gauging the reaction to Avatar as a clue to how much dumber our narratives will be getting in the near future--they're already pretty stupid--whether big, dumb spectacles like Avatar and Transformers are the shape of things to come.
nancyboy was the best.. like a father to me. now after the divorce he's living on a boat in florida and i never see him.. nancyboy come back rickey misses you.. its my birthday soon, at least call --Rickey Henderson
Sign In
Register
Help
MultiQuote
