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“The Curious Little Girl” (1860–1864), Camille Corot
The Avatar movies are crap. You don’t need me to tell you this, but I’m going to anyway. They’re about tall blue people on an alien planet fighting for liberation from Earthlings, and the results are hokey, overblown, and full of woo-woo. But they’re crazy-popular: The first Avatar, released in 2009, earned $2.9 billion in worldwide box office revenues — more than any movie ever — and the second one, in 2022, brought in $2.3 billion, putting it at the no. 3 spot. Another is coming later this year, with two more scheduled for 2029 and 2031.
All of them are among the worst movies ever made.
I don’t want to get too in the weeds of why they’re so bad. There’s much to say about the world-building, the plots, the acting, the writing, the pacing — but that’s not what I’m going to focus on here, because then I’d need to rewatch the movies, and I’m certainly not going to do that. No, what I want to point your attention to is that the Avatar movies look like absolute shit. Here’s the trailer for the new one:
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Now, you could be forgiven for being initially impressed. There’s clearly some fancy CGI at play, and boy those floating boulders are neat.
But you will quickly get over all that. And then you’ll see that although there are lots of bright colors, directed light sources, and fluttering shadows, there’s no actual aesthetic in Avatar. Instead, it’s a jumble, an overload. Everything goes in, in every frame, simply because (I assume) the computer lets you do it. James Cameron used to be a great film director, but he seems to have mistaken the ability to show something with the necessity of showing it. Just because he can doesn’t mean he should. In making these movies, he’s shown the restraint and the sophistication of a 13-year-old boy who wants everything to “look cool.” Fire! Guns! Willowy beings! Floating boulders! A sudden shift to grayscale with bloodred details! Every plane is in hyperreal focus, except when a shallow depth of field and blurred background would look even cooler.
It’s just so goddamn dumb. I’d call the aesthetic pornographic, except that would be dissing actual pornography.
And I realize his ideal audience may be those same teenagers who just want everything to always look cool, but this feels like pandering. Cameron’s Aliens and Terminator 2: Judgment Day came out when I was a teen, and those both had compelling aesthetics: the former’s dark, dripping claustrophobia and the latter’s dusty Los Angeles, where the only liquids are blood, milk, and metal. I loved those movies, my friends loved those movies, and although we wanted more xenomorphs, more terminators, we also knew that it was the filmmakers’ restraint that left us craving more. A little went a long way back then, but in Avatar a lot goes absolutely nowhere.
Why am I bothering to shit on a movie that’s the epitome of soulless greed, and whose makers at best don’t give a damn and at worst don’t even realize it? Because, obviously, I am a brave, brave writer. But also because there is always value in calling out the worst elements of our culture: to remind ourselves that even the holiest, most successful works (and people) are not immune from missteps, calamity, and corruption; to practice skepticism in the face of popular acclaim; to simply assert our own distastes (and therefore tastes) in a world that celebrates bland positivity. Hater is the easiest thing to be, the laziest pose to strike, and it can be tinged with unearned irony and the craving for coolness, but to really hate — to hate truly, madly, deeply — requires as much consideration and care as its antithesis.
Here are a few of my least favorite things1:
The travel advice from Travel + Leisure: Once upon a time, I idolized T+L, home of so many of my writing heroes. But today it’s a perpetual font of negativist clickbait, especially on Instagram. You’re doing sunscreen wrong. You’re annoying flight attendants. This beach is gorgeous but gross. Drinking water on planes is gross. Washing your hands on airplanes is gross. You’re wearing the wrong thing on planes. You’re eating the wrong thing on cruises. Put down that airplane blanket, you moron! Don’t get me wrong — I love a good “common mistakes” story. But these T+L advice pieces are fearmongering under the guise of service journalism; they exist to freak readers out about every tiny thing that once seemed normal (coffee on airplanes? that’s an ugh now!) and to assert the publication’s arbitrary, pointless superiority. Plus, they always make you click through the Link in Bio to see what they’re actually saying, and that’s a total pain.
Cryptocurrency: It’s a grift, plain and simple. Worse — it’s a tragedy. The idea of having a traceable digital currency that’s (1) not tied to a national economy and (2) used for everyday transactions is wonderful, even utopian. But since you can’t use Bitcoin or any of its digital brethren for a loaf of bread, a container of milk, and a stick of butter, they’ve all become mere objects of financial speculation, easy to gin up and pump up, to the profit of assholes unburdened by conscience. Please don’t go anywhere near this garbage.
DJ Qualls: You may remember DJ Qualls from Man in the High Castle, or from Z Nation, or from The New Guy. Or you may not remember him at all. I only notice him because he makes every TV show and movie he shows up in worse. There’s something about his Tennessee-yokel affect that grabs my attention and pulls me out of whatever fictional immersion I’ve achieved — he never looks like he belongs. His acting style is cartoonish, often in contrast to everyone around him; his fate is often foretold by his mere presence. I can’t stand him. I also pity him, both the characters he plays and the actor himself: He’s done nothing to earn my disfavor except continue to work in a challenging industry, getting the roles he can and doing the best he can with them. But his best, unfortunately, has a way of being so far below the abilities of his colleagues that he brings them down with him. That’s a very particular kind of curse! In fact, I’m now often on the lookout for him, half hoping he’ll show up on the latest semi-prestige Netflix series so I can again experience the uniqueness of his badness. I hate this guy so much I almost kinda like him.
And so there’s another argument in favor of hating: It requires us to lavish attention on the hated, and to not only explore the infinite ways in which it fails to be good but also feel its mere presence in our lives. Hating ignites in our souls the same plasmic passion we also know as love, and that feeling is addictive. Why do I watch every episode of Apple TV+’s craptacular Foundation series? So that I will know it intimately and relish every awful, overblown, underthought, time-wasting, life-wasting minute of its multiseason run. Also, it used to feature Jared Harris, the anti–DJ Qualls, who improves whatever he appears in. Sadly, he’s now but an occasional guest star. How do I hate thee, Foundation? Let me count the ways! 🪨🪨🪨
It’s Good and I Like It
Haha! Not today! But coming soon, a post full of praise.
Read a Previous Attempt: You Can’t Spell Friend Without ‘End’
1 I’m not going to mention the fascists here, because that just goes without saying. I’m sure I’ll rag on them another day, though…