1. A Merry Christmas!

2. It’s been a very laid back, half-hearted kind of Christmas on my end, keeping with the whole of these past few months. The experience has been (so I imagine) similar to that of a functional alcoholic; there are good days and bad days, and a kind of fog over everything, a sense that all is not right, but of being too focused on getting through the next day or on recovering from the one just past to be able to really do anything about it.

I intend to get myself in order for the new year, but for now I’m allowing myself the bare minimum of stress for this Christmas.

3. Avatar 3.0 is out now; consensus seems to be that half-a-billion people will pay to see it and not one of them will remember a single thing about it by this time next year.

The one exception being Stephen Lang’s character, who remains the true hero and highlight of the story whatever Mr. Cameron imagines.

4. The commentary on YouTubes these past few days relative to the franchise has largely been around the fact that the humans were very much in the right in the first film, while the conflict was largely caused or at least escalated by the protagonist and his team.

Which raises the interesting question of how Cameron seems to have missed that fact and why he didn’t write it to make the bad guys actually bad or the good guys actually good.

I think the answer is that the core concept simply will not allow for it. If you want to pit a space-age society against a stone-age one, the obvious problem is that the Jetsons could genocide the Flintstones any time they wanted. This means that every effort at negotiation, everything short of orbital bombardment is a concession by the space-agers: a willingness to do the right thing. There is no similar sign of concession or good faith from the other side (you could create one, of course, but as I recall, Cameron never does).

Likewise the very existence of the avatar bodies shows that the humans are willing to invest a huge amount of time and resources into trying to find a peaceful solution (it also compounds the ‘good faith’ issue in that they apparently had to do this just to talk to the Navy Blues). This means, again, that they are the ones going above and beyond to try to be reasonable and avoid conflict, something we never see from the Blue Man Group.

In other words, the logic of the story imposes this moral dichotomy of its own nature: the premise of ‘space-age humans create avatar bodies to negotiate with stone-age aliens’ requires the humans to be the more reasonable and restrained party. Hence the disconnect between what the film wants us to think and what we actually see.

Essentially, this set up cannot support a morally black-and-white narrative (or at least, not in the direction Cameron wants it to be). The appropriate goal cannot be one side conquering the other, but rather compromise and harmonization, the two sides coming to understand and make peace with each other. I’m not a big fan of Disney’s Pocahontas, but it at least understood this. The goal there was not the Indians forcing the English out, but of the two sides making peace and living in harmony (it was still unbalanced in that the English apparently had nothing to offer the Indians, but at least the story was aiming in roughly the right direction).

It says something that the literal cartoon made for children understood this better than the blockbuster films by an A-list director.

5. Most recent reading has been Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier (it’s on my school list). I had seen the film by Alfred Hitchcock, of course, so I knew all the twists and turns, but I’ll try to avoid spoilers for those who haven’t read it. The story is of a young bride who feels haunted by the legacy of her husband’s revered first wife (the titular Rebecca).

One of the most famous and memorable aspects of the story is Mrs. Danvers, the grim, spectral housekeeper who terrifies the unnamed bride. Mrs. Danvers (played brilliantly in the film by Judith Anderson) is arguably one of the classic villains of gothic fiction, creating, or at least codifying a whole character type of the sinister housekeeper.

In any case, I enjoyed the book very much; it’s delightfully gothic, grim, and psychologically rich, told from the perspective of a naive and fairly neurotic, but nevertheless (mostly) sympathetic heroine.

6. Incidentally, this is a good book to read to see the ‘featureless protagonist’ done right. The narrator here doesn’t even have a name, has minimal background, and very little physical description. She tells the story in that very reflective, stream-of-consciousness style which can so easily be disastrous. Yet, thankfully, she comes across as a clear personality, and her feelings and observations never get in the way of the setting or story. Manderley, the big old estate where the story takes place, has definite atmosphere, and we’re able to get a good sense of the other characters through her eyes (including when her impressions are not completely reliable).

Contrast this with A Separate Peace, which did this very badly and was essentially ruined by it (though it had other problems which contributed to its fundamental failure). In that one, Gene the protagonist was too introspective and reflective to have any personality at all and what character he did have was too unpleasant and petty to take much interest in.

7. For instance, in Rebecca, we get a very clear idea of what the narrator is like from the opening chapters: that she is shy, diffident, and fairly neurotic, but with a passionate streak that she’s afraid to let out for fear of overstepping herself. From this baseline we then see how the events of the story push and pull her in different directions until, by the end, she’s matured into a stronger character, but at the cost of her innocence.

In Separate Peace, we have no clear idea of Gene’s character prior to coming to the school and meeting Phineas, or even what their dynamic is as friends, since Gene spends too much time describing his own feelings and no enough time describing what he actually does or says. We know he’s smart, but doesn’t seem to care about subjects for their own sake. He lets himself be pushed into things he doesn’t want to do, which only makes his real personality all the more elusive. What would he do normally? Why would he do that?

What do other boys think of him? What does he think of them? Apart from Phineas, the other characters are all glimpsed, as it were, in passing, and none emerge as anything like a clear personality. And, since they have no personality, there’s no contrast for Gene himself to show up against. Trying to figure Gene out is like trying to read pale grey text against a white background.

The characters in Rebecca, on the other hand, are all clear and vivid personalities: the absent, aloof masculinity of Max, the gaucheness and unconscious selfishnes of Mrs. Van Hopper, the coldly polite malevolence of Mrs. Danvers, the gentle, helpless kindness of Frank, the battering-ram of good intentions that is Beatrice. The character new Mrs. de Winter shows up clear and strong against a backdrop of humanity.

Gene is like a mirror reflecting itself; it shows essentially nothing and gets smaller and smaller the more you look.

Mrs. de Winter version 2.0 is more like a diary entry; a narrowly-focused lens, but one looking outward rather than on itself.