Episode 76 - Avatar (James Cameron, 2009) (with Rupert Read)

Avatar (James Cameron, 2009).

The Fantasy/Animation podcast takes listeners on a journey through the intersection between fantasy cinema and the medium of animation. Available via Apple Podcasts, Spotify and many of your favourite podcast hosting platforms!

The politics and proxies of James Cameron’s 2009 blockbuster Avatar provide the focus for Chris and Alex in Episode 76, as they plug into Pandora to make sense of the relationships between the film’s ecological sensibilities and its technological prowess. Joining them is Rupert Read, Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of East Anglia who specialises in everything from the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein to the contemporary climate crisis. Rupert was also a spokesperson for Extinction Rebellion (authoring the 2020 book Extinction Rebellion: Insights from the Inside), and was a Green Party councillor from 2004-2011 (having stood for both national parliamentary and European elections). Topics for this episode include Avatar’s anti-imperialist message and discourses of the post-racial in Obama’s America; racial passing, the politics of motion-capture and what Cameron’s reflexive puppet show says about the ‘state of the art’; fantasies of control, surrogacy, perception and the trust we place in (digital) bodies; blurred formal and stylistic distinctions between live-action/humanity and CG/Na’vi; the act of ‘reverse anthropology’ and Avatar’s claims for the power of ancient wisdoms; the awe of 3D technologies, the meaning of spectacle and links to ritualistic communal viewing experiences; digital farms, new media culture and human/machine connectivity; the material, mineral dimension of our own media consumption and creation, and the carbon footprint of digital backlots; and how in asking what we as spectators are going to do to ‘wake up’, Avatar invites us into a very real politics of ecology and activism.

Suggested Readings

• Brown, Tom. 2008. “Spectacle/Gender/History: the case of Gone with the Wind.” Screen 49, no. 2 (Summer): 157-178.

• Brown, William and Jenna Ng. 2012. “Avatar: An Introduction,” animation: an interdisciplinary journal 7, no. 3: 221-225, available here.

• Lovelock, James E. 1995. Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

• Maxwell, Richard, and Toby Miller. 2012. Greening the Media. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

• Ng, Jenna. 2012. “Seeing Movement: On Motion Capture Animation and James Cameron’s Avatar.” animation: an interdisciplinary journal 7, no. 3: 273-286.

• Read, Rupert. 2019. This Civilisation is Finished: Conversations on the end of Empire - and what Lies Beyond. Melbourne: Simplicity Institute Publishing.

• Read, Rupert. 2020. A Film-Philosophy of Ecology and Enlightenment. London: Routledge.

• Read, Rupert. 2020. Extinction Rebellion: Insights from the Inside. Melbourne: Simplicity Institute Publishing.