Sunday's Cool: Say 'Nope' to 'Avatar'

Jordan Peele and James Cameron are in unlikely conversation in two of this year's most impressive filmmaking spectacles.

I agree pretty much entirely with my pal Alissa Wilkinson’s Avatar: The Way of Water review over at Vox. As she noted, the plot is pretty hacky and the dialogue is frequently, terrifically stupid, but “this new Avatar filled an awe-shaped void in my heart, and for that, I thank James Cameron.” No lies detected.

What I like about Alissa’s take is that it doesn’t dismiss the visuals as a secondary concern to the overall product. Movie reviews that amount to “pretty, but still bad” just don’t understand the visual medium. Beauty is a good thing in and of itself, and if your movie is beautiful then it’s adding something valuable to the world. I do wish Cameron could get back to finding sturdier story vehicles for his technical genius, but I hesitate to be overly critical of something as gorgeous as The Way of Water. The second act, in particular, contains a few sequences that are simply among the most wonderful images ever crammed up my eyeballs. 

And yet. I can’t help but feel a twinge of unease as I type all this, mostly thanks to some thoughts stirred by another movie that came out this year: Jordan Peele’s Nope. 

Both The Way of Water and Nope are triumphs of technical spectacle. But unlike Way of Water, Nope is also a commentary on spectacle. It holds itself at arm’s length, so to speak, both entertaining and critiquing our zeal for entertainment. In that movie (and I’ll try to avoid spoilers), OJ (Daniel Kaluuya) and Em (Keke Palmer) run Haywood’s Hollywood Horses, training and renting horses for movies. But when their animals start getting spooked by something in the sky, OJ and Em smell an opportunity to bail their struggling operation out by capturing and selling video proof of a UFO. 

They put together a ragtag team to capture their “Oprah Shot” — a perfect, compelling image of whatever it is plaguing their ranch. Their cast of characters includes a tech wizard and a hotshot cameraman, all of whom map neatly onto a film crew. And together, they set about risking it all for the footage. This mission comes at no small amount of personal cost to either our heroes or many of the dozens of gawking bystanders summoned to witness the spectacle they’ve captured on camera. (“Captured.” Interesting word, that one.)

It’s Peele’s way of arguing that our relationship with these spectacles is not as simple as we think it is. Just how sure are we that we’re the ones capturing them? 

Meanwhile, all the 13-year-old critiques about how the first Avatar is just Dances With Wolves for aliens hold up pretty well for Cameron’s sequel. He can trumpet the whole “industry bad, nature good” mantra until he’s as blue in the face as a Na’vi, but is Biden really going to be so moved by the twice-quoted “the way of water connects all things” speech that he’ll draw up the plans to ban offshore drilling when the credits roll? Or is he going to leave thinking about what the rest of us are thinking about, what this Substack itself is all about: how good it looked?

But now I find myself drifting back to my first paragraph here. It didn’t just look good, it looked amazing! And isn’t that worth something? Isn’t there something important about cultivating a sense of awe? Is Peele maybe a little too paranoid about his alien creature (“Jean Jacket”) and what it all means about our lust for diversion? How thick is the divide between “that looked cool” and rapture anyway? Pretty subjective, I’d guess.

Maybe it’s all Neal Postman all the way down, a guy everyone seems to know about but nobody can figure out how to apply. If Postman’s argument that when “people become an audience, and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk; culture-death is a clear possibility” is on the money, then things are pretty dire and the time to act is now. But what would acting even look like? 

Peele seems to think it’s a moot point. You can’t escape Spectacle Culture. You can, at best, only be aware of what it’s doing to you and take cover from the blood and offal it rains down over your house. The toll is enormous. But you can’t beat the view. 

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• I made a little mix of Nashville and Nashville-adjacent music as Liz and I get ready to make our return to Music City. Yippee ki-yay, music lovers.

• Currently reading Tom Perrotta’s The Leftovers which reminds me that you should really watch Lindelof’s televised adaptation if you haven’t. One of my favorite television shows ever and, like everything else on HBO Max these days, vulnerable to disappearing without a trace, vanishing into thin air. Don’t be left behind!

• Finished McCarthy’s Stella Maris, which is being pitched as the coda to The Passenger. Others found it bleaker than I did, though I suspect others may have wrapped their head around its math passages better. I never had a head for that stuff. At least part of what makes McCarthy one of our best novelists is a simple matter of the number of wrinkles in his gray matter. He’s smart! He’s got a big and very capable brain! Gives him a leg up on the competition.