James Cameron’s The Way of Water vs. David Cronenberg’s Crimes of the Future
Escapism got a bad name with James Cameron’s 2009 sci-fi spectacle Avatar. The just-released sequel, Avatar: The Way of Water, completes the diminishment. At a cost of $350 million, Cameron practices his own form of brainwashing deprivation.
Hostile indifference to practical needs is all that an over-quarter-billion-dollar escapist movie means. It’s a crime, like the perverse artworks in David Cronenberg’s Crimes of the Future, which, distinct from The Way of Water, challenges escapism. Its macabre satire of self-mutilating performance art exposes our political pretense. Cronenberg provides the perfect anti-escapist antidote to The Way of the Water and how it commands the zeitgeist.
The offense of Cameron’s futuristic vision (turning American technological might aginst domestic interests) is already here. The Way of Water is predicated on an escapist mindset that prevents moviegoers from thinking (or expressing dissatisfaction). When a film like this is sold for its 3D, 48-frames-per-second High Dynamic Range teachnology, protect your credit card.
Avatar had weak-minded folks wishing to live in Neverland/Pandora, portending the susceptibility of Black Panther fans seeking plane tickets to Wakanda. The Way of Water perpetuates the geopolitical displacement by which Hollywood keeps us docile — as when celebs sell Ukraine as the new site of global interests. After all, everyone from Bono to Ben Stiller to Sean Penn, along with Mitch McConnell and Nancy Pelosi, went there for grip-and-grins, as if having a great time in the midst of warfare.
Jokes aside, the peculiarly humorless The Way of Water uses warfare as a virtual-reality metaphor for the wildest political misadventures, from the Iraq War to Ukraine. Remember Cameron’s blue people, the Na’vi? Now they must fight against the bellicose humans (“Sky People”) who attempt an imaginary version of imperialistic ethnic cleansing where the Omaticayas and the Metkayina interspecies alliance is laughably similar to the land and sea clans in Wakanda Forever. Thinking moviegoers need to know no more than that about The Way of Water. In art as in politics, can you just say no to hype?
Crimes of the Future (NEON)
It’s conceivable that Cronenberg’s sensual-political fantasy might alienate viewers: Performance artist Sam Tenser (Viggo Mortensen) and his wife, Caprice (Léa Seydoux), pursue their narcissism so intently that they fall into the trap of anarchists who want to transform humans into plastic-eating mutants. Credit Cronenberg for at least thinking up an allegory for contemporary political and cultural compliance. Cameron does not. Crimes of the Future is an adult film, not an expansion of adolescent comic-book delirium as in The Way of Water.
Both movies pose the question “Is cinema a thrill ride or art?” Cronenberg interrogates the culture’s forensic-pathology tendencies as Tenser excavates then displays his own cancerous growths as art projects — evoking Stan Brakhage’s avant-garde The Act of Seeing with One’s Own Eyes (1971). But Cameron uses special effects to betray us. The immense, immersive underwater imagery in The Way of Water returns cinema to its carny origins. It is anti-intellectual, and the corrupt media has gone along with his infantilizing scam.
If you love Hollywood hype, The Way of Water might seem dazzling. Cameron is dedicated to F/X, advancing Avatar’s loathing of the U.S. military to new perversion: the genuine fascination/fetishization of white–blue miscegenation. (Sam Worthington’s Jake Sully marries Zoe Saldaña’s Neyteri and procreates the next generation of race warriors.) The paltry point of this is to sentimentalize the blue transformation/degradation of the West. Yet it’s shown without a pang for the Old World.
Cameron cashes in on how Marvel circumvents pop-culture logic. But Crimes of the Future becomes fascinating when Cronenberg satirizes high-art smartness: Tenser feeds himself, choking and growling, while sitting in a skeletal dentist’s chair that recalls Matthew Barney’s Cremaster project. He shape-shifts from Barney’s studly artist pose to wearing a hoodie that evokes both Trayvon Martin and a perverse monk.
When Cronenberg’s domestic art-hounds reveal their devilish insanity, the high-brow spoof outstrips The Way of Water’s banal interplanetary combat. Tenser and Caprice mix careerism with private sexual pathology, the same travesty of inspiration and creation represented by Cameron’s hubris. No less arrogant, Tenser is godless: “I never know if I’m working on something new. It doesn’t seem to be my decision.” Envying him, Caprice succumbs to art fashion and gets half-moon welts implanted across her forehead. The image of Tenser and Caprice cradling each other in a cocoon recalls that bravura shot in Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Alien: Resurrection of Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley writhing amid black-velvet monstrousness. These images of flesh, scars, and desperate desire are transgressive versions of Fra Angelico.
Cronenberg knowingly implies that this is the least creative time in film history, and his scrutiny of aestheticism defines the horror of fake art — of junk like The Way of Water. In Crimes of the Future, Cronenberg entices us to be suspicious of escapist art. In The Way of Water, Cameron’s escapism limits our imagination, forcing ticket-buyers to wear 3D glasses, to look but not to see.
