James Cameron's Avatar

Blockbuster Brilliance and Libtard Luxury Beliefs

“People call me a perfectionist, but I’m not. I’m a rightist.

I do something until it’s right, and then I move on to the next thing.”

—James Cameron

One of the long-standing jokes about James Cameron’s film Avatar, and the various sequels to Avatar, has been that Avatar has almost zero cultural footprint compared to any other major media franchise.

There have been three Avatar films released so far. Each film has brought in more than a billion dollars. And yet, if you walk around, it’s like the movies never existed. Nobody talks about them. The film’s ancillary merchandise is insignificant. Nobody remembers the movies. They are released, each film brings in a billion dollars, and then it’s never heard from again.

No legacy. No memory. No cultural inheritance.

I think the reason why is that James Cameron clearly doesn’t believe in his own ideas. Every movie preaches a sermon about why modern technology is bad, and humans should instead return to hunter-gatherer lifestyles in harmony with nature and animal wildlife. Notably, James Cameron doesn’t follow his own advice. He uses the most advanced cameras available, even to the point of inventing new technology, to film each blockbuster.

Jake Sully abandons humanity to live with the Na’Vi, leaving behind his crippled human body to enjoy a new life in his cloned Na’Vi avatar.

James Cameron is not out there in some African savannah, or some Amazonian rainforest, living in a grass hut under a tree listening to a bunch of half-naked women telling him how to fish and plant seeds.

He is a masculine dictator of the studio ecosystem, imposing his artistic vision with a brutal fist.

He is a technological savant who uses the latest cameras, animation, and computer-generated special effects to realize his creative ambitions.

He is a rootless globalist cosmopolitan who owns vast acres of land, and flies around the coastal and urban elite power centers of the Global American Empire, engaging in commerce, leisure, and self-promotion.

Audiences engage with his work on a shallow level, because that’s all his work is capable of. The pretense of metaphysical wisdom and spiritual enlightenment is skin-deep, and all of the franchise’s thematic claims are contradicted by the underlying structures and procedures and men used to create it.

James Cameron’s work is visually colorful, kinetic, and intellectually stale because it’s a representation of a dead America, the America which Boomers inherited and destroyed. The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there. The world of the Boomers no longer exists. But James Cameron’s Avatar is a recapitulation of the central tensions of the Boomer era, the social and political confrontation between transgressive hippie rebellion and urbanized yuppie materialism. And the fusion between these dueling philosophies is that yuppies won, or hippies won, depending on how you want to look at it. The Boomers settled upon yuppie lifestyles with hippie aesthetics. Consumerism, asset ownership, welfare dependency, and personal comfort framed within the faux-transgression of feminism, multiculturalism, hedonism, and consent-based individualism.

The Boomer cohort wants to eat their cake and have it too; they want to accumulate the moral accolades of sacrifice and self-reliance, while sacrificing nothing and benefitting from robust social institutions which they systematically dismantled and sold off to the highest bidder.

All of the Avatar films are old white Boomer sermons about the beauty of mass migration, deindustrialization, and white genocide, designed to punish young white men, and preached by old white men.

Audiences engage with this white genocide sci-fi power fantasy on a shallow level, because that’s all the movies are capable of. There is a combination of outward escapism and internal demoralization. The film’s message is demoralizing, and the same as Gran Torino (2008), or Yellowstone (TV Show), or Children of Men (2006), or The Girl with All the Gifts (2016): the colonial age of white families is done, and their civilization will be given to the hungry, primitive brown biomass foreigners of the world. White people no longer have a right to exist, and the good white people will betray their neighbors to join with the rising tide of foreign invaders. This is the long arc of progressivism bending towards justice; this is the Right Side of History™.

Audiences basically don’t care about, or connect with, or consciously understand, this genocidal sermon on any level. It just seems like a bunch of blue cat people running around playing cowboys and indians.

What people instead enjoy is the outward escapism of a fast-paced, high-octane, cinematic, large-scale adventure movie. There are fight scenes, and grandiose landscape panoramas, and monstrous animals, and impossibly huge buildings, and flying combat with winged animals battling sci-fi military helicopters, and weird psychedelic visuals.

It’s fun in an old-fashioned way. These are blockbuster studio movies, the kind of thing that used to be made in the 1970s, enhanced with all of the superior technological advances and animation tricks of the past 30 years.

The spectacle is fun, epic, and gorgeous, even if the underlying philosophy is built upon parasitic egalitarianism and pathological altruism towards a hostile out-group, aimed at pushing white genocide.

There’s always a question how much Boomer Libtards consciously understand their own intellectual contradictions, and where to draw the line between cynical rhetoric and sincere delusions.

Most Boomers are passively plugged into a media ecosystem and rigged economy which enriches their lifestyle through byzantine layers of fiat currency dilution, global supply chains with foreign slave labor working in economies of scale to deliver cheap products, and passive asset inflation. Passivity is all that’s required for the ordinary Boomer cohort to maintain their lifestyle. I think it’s safe to say they don’t understand much of the modern world, they aren’t curious to explore any gaps in their knowledge, and they repeat top-down, focused-grouped slogans which resort to emotional rationalizations and moralistic lectures that allow Boomers to remain in a lifelong state of denial, shirking any responsibility to shepherd or steward the American nation.

But I think elite Boomer Libtards like James Cameron, the tastemakers and storytellers and propaganda artists, have a very clear view of the world they’ve built. They don’t see the bottom. They don’t interact with the Rustbelt casualties of globalization, deindustrialization, and multiculturalism. But there is a clarity and precision to the aging, geriatric ruling class: they know on an intimate level the strict mechanics of how to manufacture consensus, how to propagate the illusion of the self-proclaimed liberal-democratic order.

The skeleton key of the Avatar sequels is a character I’ve always disliked: Spider.

Spider is a small human boy adopted by the Na’Vi blue cat people.

Miles “Spider” Socorro is the son of the story’s main villain, the badass military officer Colonel Miles Quaritch, who is Jake Sully’s primary mentor and antagonist during the first Avatar movie. The colonel dies at the climax of the first movie, and he is reincarnated as a blue Na’Vi clone in Avatar 2 and Avatar 3.

Spider has always been a boring character I disliked, because he’s a small human boy running around half-naked with a gas mask in the Na’Vi jungle. He slows everything down, reduces the dramatic tension of every scene he’s in, and interrupts the main power fantasy, because his body is much smaller and weaker than the body of Jake Sully or the other Na’Vi, so the danger and adventure of each scene has to be downsized and constrained… in order to keep the movie internally consistent and logical, to retain a sense of realism.

What Spider represents is the education system of the Global American Empire.

Feminism, egalitarianism, Gay Race Communism, Wokeness, Girlboss careerism, striver credentialism, whatever phrase we might call the eunuch priesthood of the modern neoliberal managerial bureaucracy, depresses the fertility of its adherents.

Blue America reproduces by colonizing the minds of Red America.

Avatar 2 shocked me, because it was one of the most explicit articulations I’d ever seen anywhere in film of the Leftist belief that if you believe the wrong things, Leftism has a right to ownership of your children.

It’s the same message as Dead Poets Society (1989). Leftists infest the credentialed apparatus, the media ecosystem, the newspapers and TV networks and film studios and book publishers, the indoctrination of K-12 public schools, the Woke madrasas of colleges and graduate schools. All of these institutions exist to evangelize the religion of Gay Race Communism, to promote multiculturalism, sexual liberation, deindustrialization, and the contemporary set of trendy ideological delusions.

The whole movie Avatar 2, and Avatar 3, is about the two sets of divorced parents fighting for ownership of a child (Spider, the son of Colonel Quaritch), and battling it out to determine which tribe and religion the young boy will devote his loyalty to serving. In the moral conception of the Boomer Libtard worldview, as a white man you can be one of the “Good Ones” if you betray Western Civilization in order to fight on behalf of the Global South.

This message is not winning in the marketplace of ideas, so much as it has been the last survivor standing. Every alternative viewpoint has been purged.

Spielberg, George Lucas, James Cameron, Ridley Scott, Clint Eastwood, Martin Scorsese, Quentin Tarantino — the best directors of the past decade have been the same directors who dominated in the 70s, the 80s, and the 90s. They pulled up the ladders behind them. They went on 30 and 40-year runs of cultural dominance, because they were mentored and elevated by worldclass talent to become worldclass talent themselves, and then the young white men behind them were viciously suppressed, so that the only competition coming up were DEI mediocrities and Girlboss feminist strivers who lacked the ability to compete.

A few rare Gen X autodidacts, like Christopher Nolan, Matt Reeves, Shane Carruth, Robert Eggers, or Denis Villeneuve, were able to teach themselves and sneak past the filters suppressing their generation. Most simply got crushed and never developed their talent.

What makes Avatar special is that this multimedia franchise represents the last gasp of the Boomer cinematic renaissance. Even if audiences don’t care about the story itself, the movie is fun. And each movie has been created with a rare technical craftsmanship and aesthetic form which is unmatched by similar studio films. There is gorgeous immersive spectacle, with a big ensemble cast of well-developed characters, and intercutting subplots with extremely sharp, deft pacing.

That kind of technical complexity, crisply implemented, just doesn’t happen anywhere else today.

We are living in an age of mediocrity, trapped in the ruins of a once-great culture, and the reminders of how beautiful and exciting and dramatic the world used to be, and could be again, draws a large audience.

There’s a lot to learn from Avatar — the film embodies the best and worst aspects of the Hollywood blockbuster era, and it’s an honest reflection of the Boomer Libtard worldview and their deepest, most passionate religious fantasies which drove the modern world.

Their legacy will be forgotten as soon as something better comes along. And it will.