So Avatar seriously missed out on a major marketing opportunity. I went to see it with a classmate of mine in mid-January, although during the film, I started to feel bad (headache, dizziness, sore throat, etc.) and I probably should have just gone home. Instead I saw the film and I also went out for Mexican food with them afterward. I was in so much pain. Poor judgement on my part.
Anyway. If you haven’t seen Avatar, don’t read the following. I’ll spoil the film for you.
I think a minor plot change toward the end of the film would have helped out Avatar greatly. The writer should have made Sully (the hero) permanently switch bodies with his avatar before the big action finale, rather than after. This would have produced three major advantages.
1. This would have provided a shocking moment of dramatic tension at the end of the film.
In the last struggle between the villain (whose name I’ve forgotten—Colonel Quidditch, I think?) and Sully, the villain could have destroyed Sully’s (now dead) human body, while the audience still thinks that Sully is inside it. There is a moment when all hope seems lost, and then Sully’s avatar body could spring back to action and kill the villain when he lets his guard down. Later, the audience would realise that Sully switched bodies the night before the battle, the way that Ellen Ripley tried (and failed) to, earlier in the film.
Tolkien coined a term for these moments. He called them, “eucatastrophes.” We really like it when stories end with a eucatastrophe. It’s satisfying to see parts of a well-told story come together to bring the hero to a point of seemingly utter defeat and then to glorious victory. We experience a wide range of emotion and that can be very cathartic.
2. Second, this would eliminate one of the endings, and shorten the film. We already saw the botched body-switching with Ripley, earlier in the film. We didn’t need to see it again. The movie’s too long anyway. Or maybe I just felt that way because when I went to see it I was coming down with the symptoms of a nasty viral infection.
3. The third major advantage that this would provide, is that the movie could then be marketed toward Evangelical Christians. If they had changed the plot in the way I suggest, it would suddenly become a Christian allegory.
A chosen one comes into a world from the heavens and takes on the flesh of the men who live there. He dies and rises again, draws all the nations to himself, and saves the world.
All you would need is a short Biblical message from Kirk Cameron at the end and you could probably even get Fred Phelps’ approval for this movie. Unless, according to Fred Phelps, God hates blue, spiky-eared, cartoon aliens as much as he seems to hate everything else. (By the way, did you know that God hates Twitter?)
Oh wait. On second thought, I take it back. Fred Phelps would never approve of this movie, because everyone in it smokes cigarettes. And if there’s one thing that Fred Phelps has taught us, it’s that God hates fags. That’s what he meant, right?
I came out of the theatre, and all I could think about was all the embodied mind and cognition stuff we learned in Merleau-Ponty class. Those who have read my blog know how I feel about Merleau-Ponty. Sometimes I’m afraid I will have Merleau-Ponty nightmares again. The ones where everyone speaks in Phenomenology. In my Merleau-Ponty nightmare, they all use words like:
- Tacit cogito
- Prenoetic I can
- The being (sometimes as distinguished from the becoming)
- Phenomenal field
- Our being-in-the-world
I haven’t got a clue what any of these things mean. If someone can enlighten me, please do.
And at the end of the nightmare, everyone turns to me for comment. I shuffle papers nervously, clear my throat and scream on the inside. But there is no escaping Merleau-Ponty.
