The Dream Of The Blue Cougars
I’m actually looking forward to Avatar, and hopeful that Manohla Dargis is correct and it’s finally The Next Big SciFi Thing that displaces The Matrix aesthetic.
But what I want to talk about is Coltan.
Dargis, and David Denby in The New Yorker, among others, liken the Avatar story to that of John Smith and Pocahontas in Terrence Malick’s The New World, or to Dances With Wolves. But take away blue cat people and Roger Dean floating landscapes, and Avatar is the Congo. Cell phones, DVD players and probably the laptop I am writing this on use minerals whose extraction is inextricably tied up with a civil war that has killed an estimated 5.4 million people in the last 11 years.
When we download an mp3 for $.89 or $.99 cents we’re paying only for rights to the content. We’ve already paid for the storage space and bandwidth access. The media itself is literally so insubstantial that we can trade it, reblog it, copy it with scarcely a thought of the human costs of our constant electronic connectivity.
If Avatar is flawed as drama—Dargis writes that Cameron is “a masterly storyteller if a rather less nimble prose writer”—then maybe it’s not only a matter of clunky dialogue but because we sense that societies under pressure devour themselves (though who’s to say, when your people are blue?)
