Quick thought. Here’s a CNN article on people feeling blue after seeing Avatar because their own lives now seem so impossibly plain. It might be total bunk, and probably is, but it got me thinking.
Let’s assume people really do feel ‘let down by life’ after seeing the film. I wonder what this has to do with 3D. Here’s why: what if escapism has, in 3D, gained a kind of ‘materiality’ or a sort ‘presence’ (I use those terms very much sous rature) in which what was once distanced, both metaphorically and literally – on the screen ‘over there’ – has now come too close, has now ‘entered’ (penetrated?) one’s field of vision and consciousness. What if 3D film, in pushing the image past the flat mimetic mirror into your life has become the culmination of the simulacrum (the film is, after all, for all its sci-fi, new world hubbub, referential), the thing that, in a way that moves beyond Baudrillard’s initial idea, supercedes the real by rendering the real ’2 dimensional’?
More to the point, what if the ‘Avatar blues’ are themselves the apotheosis of the spectacle? If we, unaccustomed to 3D, are thrust into it – as it thrusts itself into us (yes, I know, loaded language) – perhaps we are less equipped to deal with a mimetic or representational form that literally occupies our filed of view.
To see something grand on a screen is one thing.
What if, to be placed in something grand, is to produce a simulated memory of being there?
Murky, messy thoughts. I apologise. But even if this is all nonsense, something here still seems worth thinking about in more and clearer detail. Really, the interesting thing is going to be how we reshape the idea of film – the gaze, the shot, authorial intent – in response to this new technology.
My initial thoughts on 3D film from way back can be found here.
#1 by Margo on January 12, 2010 - 6:29 pm
Not to be a luddite about it or anything, but I don’t really see how this whole “3D blues” business is any different than lamenting the fact that Mr D’Arcy still hasn’t come along to sweep me off my feet. Isn’t all art, from poetry to pyrotechnics, about the enhancement of reality? Or have I been reading too much Aristotle?
#2 by Margo on January 12, 2010 - 6:41 pm
Oh, and yes, I am shamelessly involved in habitual blog-commenting with the aim of pooh-poohing contemporary studies, purely for reasons of professional self-advancement.
#3 by Nav on January 12, 2010 - 7:10 pm
No, you’re probably right Margo. It was just one of those ideas that hit me late at night when I should have been doing something else.
I guess what intrigues me is whether we’ll need a set of different – or maybe slightly adjusted – theoretical tools to deal with 3D. My bro and I saw, erm, Harry Potter in 3D and there was a scene where there were just 3 characters in a room. To trot out a cliche, ‘you felt like you were there’. What interests me is how that might reconfigure the notion of ‘the presence of the actor’ – and whether that changes how we relate to art, particularly as the simulacrum.
It’s sorta’ analogous to the difference of video games: representational art asks you to identity with someone; games ask you to identify as someone. I wonder if there’s a vaguely similar thing going on here, where the implied gaze of the viewer isn’t an external, mimetic (if Brechtian) one, but someone who places themselves in the scene.
Though, no, I think you’re right: it’s the same step in the imagination, isn’t it? Oh, but then! Is there a difference when what was once a projective act of the imagination of ‘putting yourself in the scene’ gains a strange there-but-not ‘materiality’?
Okay, I’ll shut up.
#4 by mir on January 15, 2010 - 12:43 pm
It makes me think of how when you go away on a vacation and come home, your apartment or house – before a perfectly acceptable, even loved, habitation, seems dirty, humble, and annoying.
This how the quotidian feels compared to the spectacular. I think you have a point that watching Avatar seems more like a voyage then the average film. So when you are finished immersing yourself in the film and find yourself back in a kind of itchy seat smelling other people’s winter boots and your own breath it’s pretty depressing.
#5 by Jef on January 15, 2010 - 1:43 pm
That’s interesting. But the film is also shown in 2D, so who knows. Also, don’t discount the film’s narrative itself, which deals with not just shedding your former life, but your very body and all it represents. For anyone who might not like themselves (or this world) very much, I can see how the story, in 3D no doubt, could lend itself to a powerful experience. As much as it draws comparison with “Dances With Wolves” and the like, “Avatar” really goes a step further than merely switching cultures. Shedding or outrunning your skin is a popular idea in amateur poetry for a reason (or at least it was in mine when I was a teen), and I think “Avatar” hits that sweet spot.