I've seen it twice, and I have too much to say about Avatar to get it all out in one sitting. So I'm dubbing this week Avatar week. The first point I want to make is simple: Avatar and audience responses to it put one more nail in the coffin of the myth that speculative fiction is essentially "escapist," at least any more than any fiction is essentially escapist.

Avatar, which may be on track to become the highest-grossing movie of all time, is clearly engaging people en masse. Is this because the economy is bad and everyone wants to get away from the grind of everyday life?

Well, yeah. To some extent, I think that's why most people seek out fiction in almost all its forms. But that's just the most superficial of hooks.

At some point, after you've built a world, you have to build a story. Ideally, you build a story your viewers will relate to. Once James Cameron set up the beautiful, engaging world of Pandora, he eventually had to decide, what will happen there? What's the story?

What he came up with is a story involving military invasion, genocide, romance, the idea of "playing" a character, and environmental destruction. These themes all relate directly to contemporary American culture. (In fact, the newest one relates to gaming in digital role-playing environments.) I believe these themes are why audiences have stayed engaged beyond the initial "ooh-ahh" moments when they pop on the 3D glasses and get dazzled by realistic depictions of zero gravity and the wonders of Pandora's iridescent forest.

If this movie were not rooted so deeply in American cultural mythos, it would not be creating a firestorm of emotional response and debate. In a half hour of Internet searching, I have pulled up articles that claim Avatar is another white man's going-native story, an anti-American hippie fest, and an oppressively heterocentric romance. All viewers who take positions like these are perfectly able to make the leap between Earth and Pandora, to see our culture projected into the future on another planet and recognize in it many of the same problems we have today.

I submit that there is no escape from culture. An author's culture and experience will influence her story, be it set in a bar that really exists on a street that really exists, in a town that is made up but feels like a town in middle America, or on another planet entirely.

I once wrote a Tolkien fan fiction story, and when I asked during workshop if it seemed believable, one of my classmates said, "Really? You're giving us talking trees and elves, and you want us to tell you whether or not it's believable?" This is the superficial attitude I'm confronting here (granted, high fantasy and futuristic dystopian sci-fi differ in important ways, but both have been called escapist). Friends and foes of Avatar have been able to identify aspects of our culture within the movie. In fact, if you can see beyond a speculative fiction's clothing, it is never an escape, not at the deepest level of story.

Read more: http://www.southwestauthorsguild.com/blogs/avatar-week.html#ixzz0cPlpuJIr
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