James Cameron’s Avatar has been a curious juggernaut, completely reshaping the future of visual entertainment while leaving no lasting impressions. Personally I enjoyed it, apart from the massive headache induced by wearing 3D glasses for 3 hours, but there’s no getting away from the fact that Avatar is a terrible film dressed up as the most incredible spectacle you’ve ever seen. Describing the storyline immediately exposes how feeble it is – just like the soldiers in the film that require massive robotic exoskeletons to enter combat, the plot needs the exoskeleton of CGI just to stay upright. The phrase “I guess you had to be there” has never been more appropriate.
I previously expressed my doubts about the Economy of Presence, then I went away and thought about it a bit more. I had doubts about my doubts, you see. One of the things that caused doubt was the coverage of “as if it were the last time“, the subtlemob event that was held in cities across the UK last year. With a title taken from Casablanca, punters taken from university, streets taken from London, Birmingham and Bristol, the deliberate slap in the face to the flashmob phenomena, this is as much a hybrid entertainment as Avatar, and it similarly reshapes the cultural landscape. Unlike Avatar, it does so one street at a time. Watch the footage to work out why you had to be there to understand.
Imagine “being there” as a spectrum, and imagine these two events occupying opposite ends of that spectrum. Being there is important to Avatar because you have to be sitting in the cinema in order to experience it – but if you aren’t there, the film will go on without you. That a showing of Avatar happens is irrelevant to whether anybody is watching it, so Avatar demands your presence solely in order for you to experience it happening. Being there is important to Subtlemob because if you aren’t there, then it doesn’t happen – it emerges from the activity of the audience, not because of the passivity of the audience. Avatar wants to take you out of your everyday life for 3 hours, while subtlemob wants to put you even deeper into the quotidien.
Avatar is the highest-grossing film of all time, so clearly we’ll pay to experience that passivity; but perhaps we’ll look back and see it not as the beginning of something new but the end of something old, as the lines between fiction and nonfiction, real and virtual, experience and entertainment become increasingly blurred. I will see you on the street, laughing and waving, and wonder if it’s real life or if it’s your latest performance, just like I always did.
