Years of Poems and Spirits

Finally watched Avatar–so many people told me so much about it, I figured that if I didn’t watch it now, I’d probably lose interest soon. It was good. I have to say the visual effect is less than what I expected but the story is more weighty. Overall, it is great. ZR and I had this discussion afterward. She thought the references in the movie about War on Terror (”we have to fight terror against terror”, etc.) was a little overbearing and unnecessary. I thought that was the part I liked it.

Not that the reference is any more clever or persuasive than the prosaic news columns we all have read. But I can tell Cameron is inspired by the absurdity sensible Liberals like him have to live through in the name of Democracy. Like other artists who created their masterpiece after years of mental agony, Cameron’s work is not a show for show’s sake. It is trying to say something. In that way, it is not unlike some of the great movies made after the Vietnam War, except the means through which Cameron & Co delivered the message is incredibly imaginary and beautiful. Still, at the end of the day, Avatar is a allegory, not just a fantasy.

I don’t know how many people truly get the message though. It was said that when the Pope first saw Michelangelo’s painting in Sistine Chapel, he immediately knelt and asked for forgiveness. I don’t see any tourists doing that nowadays. They just hold up their camera phones and say, “Wow, how beautiful!”

I can’t help but to sing praise to the movie District 9. Upon knowing how old the director (Neill Blomkamp) is, I was very impressed. The kid certainly has wisdom beyond his 30 years. Of course, he is from South Africa. Still, being able to distill an almost biblical human sin into a short movie, he’s got talent.

The reason it moved me so much is that it says so much about we Socio-sapiens. There is an exclusive impulse that is innate to us, not unlike the territorial instincts in beasts from who we evolved. But now that we did evolve and call ourselves creature-of-sapience, we therefore have to invent so many words and so much pretense to cover up our beastly inner-self, in order to carry on whatever brutality without a guilty conscience.

In fact, we don’t need a whole lot words in order to achieve that. One is enough, and that is the word ”alien”. Besides direct citations such as ”illegal alien”, there are other synonyms such as “terrorists”, “rogue nation”, and in an earlier ear, “the Communists”.

Once a collection of people is attached with the “alien” (or alien-alike) label, the cruelty, the violence, and the suppression of humanity directed toward them is henceforce justified. Such a pattern permeates time and space, so much so that I can pick out stories like this easier than picking the blackberries in my backyard in late August.

I grew up in Shanghai where people from Subei (and their descendants) were considered second class. If something goes wrong involving a native and a Subei-ren, it is without question the fault of the latter. On a more grand scale, the Old Testament is an epic tale of God-Man collaboration of alienizing “the other”. A more secular story, from a different angle, tells a similar belief. My father told me that when Deng Xiaoping visited the U.S. in the late 1970s, he hugged and kissed the girls greeting him at the tarmac. This simple gesture apparently left a deep impression with Jesse Helms who said something like: a Commie can do that?

Having observed endless stories like such, I found District 9 a very powerful rendition of who we are. In this case, Blomkamp stripped all the pretense and left the story to a bare-bone scenario—what if we are to live with aliens? Not the illegal immigrants, not people who speak different languages or practice different customs, or of different skin color or sexual preference. But real aliens.

More to the point: what if the reality–however it was lead to or sustained–offers us plenty of excuses to despise them. And we have the power to dispense them too. What do we do? The main character, Wikus van de Merwe, however cheerful, is a bureaucrat-henchman: he has no strong sense of right-or-wrong. If he had problem with soldiers carrying too much ammo it is because making-a-scene would hurt his career growth. Once at work, he is courageous, effective and even creative (as he improvised ways to get around the problem of the Prawns don’t know how to sign their names). So he is the perfect executioner of our collective judgment. The fact that the aliens have feelings like us–the desire to procreate, caring for their young and grieving for their dead–does not bother him at all. In a way, Blomkamp portrays John Yoo better than Yoo himself would recognize.

The movie didn’t try to come up with an answer. That is another reason I like it. It is hard to stare at myself in the bathroom mirror. Sometimes I wish I could lose a few pounds or to grow more muscles. But in the end, I have to live with the image in the mirror. To give the movie a wishy-washy ending would have ruined it altogether.

Last year, just before the Election, Frank Rich said in an opinion column, something like, “it is a shame that GWB was so banal a terrible President, he didn’t even give us a Richard Nixon to chew over”. I didn’t think it was a casual remark at all. I always thought that Nixon is a such a Shakespearean figure that the great playwright himself must be turning in his grave for not having met him. Or he would have written “Richard IV”. Ha.

The movie is wonderful. But of course, I am biased. I haven’t seen a Nixon movie that I didn’t like.

On the 2nd pass:
I like the movie using character’s recalling of the event to guide along the narrative. Michael Sheen’s eye movement is as good as his dialogue.

I just can’t believe they made a movie about this lousy interview. Now that is art. That is creativity.

One thing I didn’t care about is that the script unnecessarily makes Nixon the man look petty. Like when he insisted Frost’s check is made out to him or advised Frost to move to Monaco to avoid tax. The midnight phone call (and Nixon’s subsequent “forgetfulness”) is also too cheesy a skit to make a point. If Nixon hasn’t internalized the dissonance which lead to what we consider as excess, he wouldn’t be Nixon. At the end of the day, he, like everyone else, lives in his own universe.

The greatness of Richard M Nixon is in his will to impose his world, his being, onto ours. And needless to say, that is also the greatness of his tragedy.