Don't be paranoid about a harmless foreign fairytale
- Source: Global Times
- [23:08 January 28 2010]
- Comments
The alien culture it shows is meticulously fabricated, the values it adheres to are universal, and a specifically US ideology is virtually non-existent in the film: Soft power is, in fact, absent.
One of my classmates, who saw the movie twice, told me that it was not the old school romance but the mythically lush and florescent jungle, the breathtakingly beautiful floating mountains, and the living creatures on Pandora that persuaded him to pay for a second ticket.
Computer Generated Imagery, or CGI, not plot, is the key to Avatar's success. Of course other indispensable elements, like the alien language invented by a linguist and the exotic animals and plants crafted by art designers, helped, but the success is an aesthetic, not an ideological, one.
Wang declares that the Chinese were completely defeated by Avatar. I was confused. Enjoying a fantasy is a loss now? What about when we eat US-grown fruit or enjoy a hamburger? Is every New Yorker chewing down on Chinese food a traitor in the soft power wars?
Wang's views represent a paranoia about cultural influence more suited to the isolationist days of the past.
If anything, Avatar's success can spur our own creativity, just as Chinese movies, especially Hong Kong cinema, have influenced Western filmmaking in the past.
To see an aesthetic achievement as merely a creation of US soft power or part of "a new round of power expansion" is a reductionist and narrow viewpoint.
The author is a graduate student at the University of Hong Kong. globaltimesopinion@yahoo.com
