The surrealist movement focused predominantly on letting out all of the absurd, crazy thoughts in your mind. The result was a slew of bizarre, dream-like art, fascinating and highly entertaining. But after than the 1960s, other than a few David Lynch films here and there, surrealism seemed to disappear from the public consciousness.

But now it’s back.

When I was in high school obsessing over surrealism, I wondered why it wasn’t a speculative fiction genre right alongside sci-fi and fantasy. Unbeknownst to me, a lot of people were wondering the same thing at the same time, and started writing bizarro fiction. Weird books that are weird for the sake of being weird. It’s wonderful stuff.

While I’m not sure if it was influenced by bizarro fiction, Ugly Americans is probably one of the first truly bizarro shows on television.It depicts a world where humans, zombies, demons, wizards, koala-people, robots, floating-brain-things, and pretty much anything else the writers decide to come up with coexist (semi-)peacefully in modern-day New York City.

Also, it seems to be on some of the same wavelengths as Your Face is a Saxophone. (From Season 2 Episode 13)

Meanwhile, Dadaism — the inbred father/sister of the Surrealist movement — is seeing a resurgence as well. See, Dadaism was about doing stuff like turning a urinal upside down, signing it, and declaring it to be a sculpture. Now have a look at this:

That’s kind of Dada, isn’t it?

My heart skips a beat as the words touch my retinas, the notification chime ringing in my ears like a flashbang. I start to sweat. My stomach ties itself in knots. All I want to do is put down my phone, back away slowly, and get under my covers holding onto a little plush Siberian husky. But I’m not at home right now. I’m out with friends. Good friends, but not the kind who can wrap their arms around me and tell me it’ll all be okay if shit goes bad.

Clear the notification. Leave it for later.

“New reply to your comment”

Which comment? Where? What did I say? Was it a silly joke, or was it a thoughtful opinion? My heart races again. No. I don’t want to look at it now.

Next day, I’m home. I open up my inbox. There they are. I’d forgotten about them last night. I turn white. I’m all alone now; just me and the comments. The words of random, anonymous people somewhere on the other side of the planet, judging me. Taking the communications I’d poured my heart and soul into and scrutinizing them. Scrutinizing me.

I’ll look at the reply first.

“Wow, you don’t have any idea what you’re talking about.” Etcetera etcetera. Bashing me over the head with why I’m wrong. I’m not wrong, of course, and I clearly know what I’m talking about better than this guy. For some reason, the ignorance makes it sting more. And it really stings.

The knots in my stomach tie themselves into bows. My throat clenches. It was everything I’d feared: rejection, disdain, scorn, hatred. I know it’s meaningless and insignificant, but I’m helpless to stop the debilitating haze of gloom that overruns my senses. Everything looks flatter. Grayer. My head throbs with a dull pain.

I know people on the Internet are dicks, and I’ve seen it a million times before. But when it happens to me, it’s still a slap in the face. It still hurts.

This is why I wanted to let this wait until I was someplace safe. Because when you look at a comment on something you made — no matter if it’s the most insignificant thing — if it means something to you, then anything can happen. They can utterly destroy you in five words.

But on the other hand…

I open the reply to my video. “That was one of the best things I’ve seen in a long time.” He goes on for a whole paragraph telling me what he loved about it. I’m smiling. Beaming. Walking on air. I feel like I’m flying. Like I could take on the world.

This is how it goes. Every single time, when I open one of those emails, it’s a game of roulette. Am I going to feel stabbed in the heart for the next ten minutes, or king of the world for the next twenty?

We all know the basics of geometry. A line is one-dimensional. A square is two-dimensional, made up of four lines connected at their endpoints. A cube is three-dimensional, made up of six squares connected at their edges. And a tesseract is four-dimensional, made up of eight cubes connected at their sides.

Actually, you might not have heard of the last one. But take a look at the image up top: it’s a tesseract rotating through hyperspace. Whether that breaks your brain or not, the point is: there can be more than three dimensions to any given thing.

So how does this apply to characters in fiction? Let’s have a look at some examples.

First Dimension: Time

A one-dimensional character can be taken completely at face value, and never changes. They always react the same way, their mindset is always unambiguous, and they never learn from their experiences, alter their personality, or grow. Not that there’s necessarily anything wrong with that.

Second Dimension: Behavior

A two-dimensional character is, generally, one whose behavior does change over time. They literally have an arc.

If a character has both motivations and behaviors which don’t change at all over the course of the story, then they’re another variety of two-dimensional character. Speaking of which, let’s talk about motivation.

Third Dimension: Motivation

A three-dimensional character changes over time, but they may be more than what they seem at face value. They have subtexts and inner motivations which explain their actions and give a reason for their behavior, which may or may not be clear to the audience. Both motivations and behavior may change over the course of the story, but not always.

Other people may define “character depth” as the complexity of these subtexts and motivations. I’d say a better term would be “density” — a dense character has a rich, complex backstory, which leads them to behave in a variety of ways in various contexts. “Dense” is also a derogatory term that means “stupid”, though, which is probably why this hasn’t caught on.

Intermezzo: Who Sees These Dimensions

Back to geometry for a second. The world we live in is three-dimensional, but we’re only seeing a two-dimensional projection of it. Have a look at the palm of your hand. Notice that you can see every part of your hand on the X and Y axes.

Now — without moving your hand at all — take a look at your knuckles on the other side.

Can’t do it, can you? That’s because you’re only getting two dimensions of information at any given time. Your retina is a flat, 2D plane picking up a flat disk of light. You’re not seeing the entirety of the third dimension all at once, just a cross-section of it. To see what else is out there, you have to start rotating things, and build a mental model of what the totality of a 3D object — like your hand — actually looks like.

It’s the same with characters. The first two dimensions — time and behavior — are completely visible to the audience. The third dimension — the motivation — is only visible to the character. But sometimes, the actions of the character may reveal little bits and pieces of their motivations, and the audience can start to build a mental model of them.

But what about aspects that even the character can’t see?

Fourth Dimension: Consciousness

A four-dimensional character not only has behaviors and motivations that change over time, but also a varying self-awareness. The character may think they understand their own motivations, but in reality be very, very wrong.

I’m not going to draw a diagram, because visually representing a four-dimensional object makes my brain hurt. Instead, I’ll just describe an example: A bully beats up on an effeminate gay boy (behavior), because the bully hates gay people (motivation) — or so he thinks (consciousness). By the end of the story (time), the bully realizes (consciousness) that he’s actually gay too, and has been ashamed of it. So he apologizes and makes amends with the effeminate boy (behavior) in an effort to atone and find happiness (motivation).

In other words, the fourth dimension is the discrepancy between what the character thinks their motivation is, and what it actually is. In many stories, the character becomes conscious of their true motivation over time, which then alters their behavior and/or motivation.

This could also manifest itself as a character who isn’t conscious of their behavior. For one reason or another, they fail to see the consequences of their actions, and over time realize that they’ve actually been acting against their motivation. For example, the idealistic businessman who wants to change the world for the better, and fails to see that he’s actually become the very thing he hates until it’s too late.

Four-dimensional characters may not be all that uncommon after all. What examples in literature, film, or other media of fiction can you think of? Sound off in the comments.

A large group of devoted Mass Effect fans absolutely detested the ending to the game’s third, final installment. The outrage became so frenzied that developer BioWare announced that they were going to change it. This news has led to further frenzied outrage from game developers fearing that their artistic integrity will no longer be respected, critics decrying it as the death of games-as-art, and other general quasi-enlightened indignation.

The simple answer to all this is that video games are inherently a collaboration between author and audience. The more holistic answer is twofold:

1. An author’s intent is meaningless if they fail to communicate it to the audience
2. Art and meaning does not have to be intentional, and is often unintentional

The first point is a uniquely metamodern observation: it neither rejects nor accepts the validity of authorial intent, but makes it contingent upon its relationship to the audience’s interpretation. The second point is something that has been well-established since the dadaist and surrealist movements (but obviously not widely-understood). The result is that Mass Effect is not a mere series of video games. It is performance art, being unwittingly performed both by BioWare and their fans.

VAGUE SPOILERS FOR MASS EFFECT 3 FOLLOW

Mass Effect 3 tasks the player, as Commander Shepard, with defeating the Reapers: an ancient race of synthetic lifeforms which live in intergalactic space, and return every 50,000 years to consume all intelligent life in the Milky Way. The technology which makes space travel possible in the Mass Effect universe was placed there by the Reapers as a trap for intelligent civilizations, urging them to develop along a predetermined path. It’s cosmic horror straight out of H.P. Lovecraft: humans — and all intelligent life — are insignificant in the face of something much bigger than ourselves, which we can never hope to understand.

The Mass Effect trilogy is all about defying cosmicism: yes, we can understand it, the player says. Yes, we can defeat it.

This is especially prominent in the third game. In order to raise an army to fight the Reapers, the player must unite all of the alien species in the galaxy. This is nigh impossible; hundreds- and thousands-year-old conflicts divide these races, preventing them from ever wishing to work with one another. Some of the most alien and strange races are believed to be inherently violent and dangerous — the insectoid Rachni with their hive mind; the artificially intelligent Geth who exist as algorithms on a server, and construct and destroy robotic bodies for themselves on a whim. Throughout the game, the player as Shepard defies this impossibility. Yes, we can unite all of these races. Yes, we can solve all of these conflicts.

This is exactly what happens. In the game’s final act, all of the intelligent species of the galaxy have indeed put aside their differences as a direct result of Shepard’s — the player’s — actions. Galactic peace seems inevitable once the war against the Reaper threat is won. The player has done the unthinkable. They have solved the unsolvable. Intelligent life is significant in the face of the cosmos.

But then, in the game’s final moments, all that is thrown away. The player is presented with a series of events so illogical that many fans believe it must have been Shepard’s hallucination as a result of Reaper mind-control. While logical, this “indoctrination theory” still constitutes a sudden about-face of Mass Effect’s underlying theme: yes, we can defeat the undefeatable.

Critic MovieBob has compared this sudden about-face to the bleak ending of Terry Gilliam’s Brazil, likely in an attempt to evoke the challenge that Gilliam faced in releasing the film with such an ending. What he fails to realize is that Brazil‘s ending was not a sudden about-face. The bleak, fatalistic tone is present throughout the entire film. Every moment of hope in Brazil is clearly false in hindsight, whereas Mass Effect 3 makes every effort to make its uplifting moments perfectly genuine. If Mass Effect 3 was trying to imitate Brazil, it only succeeded at imitating Repo Men‘s failure to imitate Brazil.

This is what the fans realized, as evidenced by the popularity of this alternate ending. Throughout the entire game, the player is able to make Shepard point out logical flaws in an effort to bring peace, but this option is suddenly gone at the 11th hour. When I played the ending sequence myself, I remember — halfway towards the green-explosion-ending-o-tron — turning Shepard around and having him fire his gun at the ghostly child. I don’t know why I thought it would do something. But I remember thinking, why should I have to make this false choice? I’ve never been forced to do this until now.

The game ended. But for many outraged fans, it did not. Before, it was Krogans, Turians, Quarians, Salarians presenting false choices to players, and they handily dismissed them all. Now, it was BioWare themselves. BioWare became the antagonist. And all of a sudden, Mass Effect wasn’t over anymore. The players had become Commander Shepard, and they refused to accept defeat; they were going to defeat the Reapers. But they could no longer do that inside the game.

Video games are a powerful medium because they are not stories about someone else. They are a story about you. For one hundred hours, BioWare had engulfed players in the emotion of defiance. For one hundred hours, players asked the question, why does it have to be this way? And for one hundred hours, their struggle against injustice paid off. The players had fully assimilated the notion that with enough effort, enough struggle, they could correct any perceived injustice against them, and make anything make sense.

What else did you expect they were going to do?

Mass Effect is about defiance, and its persistence in the face of a supposedly unsolvable problem. When I say that, I’m not talking about the games. I’m talking about the fans and BioWare. They are performers, playing the protagonist and antagonist of Mass Effect, on the stage of the world.

And the fans won. That’s not the death of art. That’s art on a level that we never could have imagined.

The common practice of using fake brand names is to avoid claims of trademark infringement. Production companies will go to great lengths to create fictional products to show on-screen because they fear a lawsuit from the trademark holder. This is because trademark holders will go to great lengths to sue every unapproved appearance of their logo on anything because they fear losing their trademark. Trademark law requires holders to maintain control over their marks, which generally results in them go completely overboard about it.

This cycle of fear results in the censorship of reality. Part of what we’re trying to do with Your Face is a Saxophone is to vehemently point out how pervasive branding, commercialization, and consumerism actually are in our world. We casually refer to “drinking a Coke”, “buying an iPhone”, and “checking Facebook” in everyday conversation. We’re surrounded by our electronics from Audiovox, LG, Sony, and Antec; our office supplies from Scotch, 3M, Bic, and Sharpie; our Kraft macaroni, our Heineken beer, our Hershey’s candy, and our Mott’s fruit. This is what the real world looks like, people.

But the moment we start populating our real-world settings with bizarro-world brands, the impact is gone. We’re no longer satirizing the real world, we’re escaping from it. Perhaps we’re vaguely commenting on the concept of hyper-commercialization in general, but the unreality of drinking a Doke while using a Pineapple uPhone to check on Friendbook neuters it entirely.

I’m chiefly referring to the incidental use of brands there. There are certainly examples of fictional brand names being used to great effect in satire, without lessening the impact very much at all.
So, in Your Face is a Saxophone, I suppose we could structure our plots not around Pepsi, but around Schwepsi; not around Miller Lite beer, but around Schmiller Lite. But it’s those little things in the background — the Apple computers, the Lay’s potato chips on the receptionist’s head, the Motorola/Verizon logos on Leora’s phone — that we can’t ignore. We’re not going to let fear of a trademark claim (which we’d have a very strong fair use argument against) stop us from pointing out that in the real world, real brands and real logos surround us everywhere we go.

Perhaps it’s jarring that all of the characters are decidedly bizarro-world — nobody in the real world has a light bulb for a head — but the brands and logos aren’t. Good. We want you to notice the brands. That’s the point.

In Your Face is a Saxophone, we refuse to make up fake companies* to make fun of. If we want to make fun of Pepsi, then dammit, we’re going to make fun of Pepsi.

*Yes, there was Sqwoogy in the first episode. Sqwoogy was not a parody of Twitter, it was a parody of Silicon Valley startup culture and all of the dumbassery that stems from it.

You are not consuming this blog post. It is not being depleted by you so that it will never be available to anyone ever again. Instead, perhaps you are reading it on a large computer screen. Perhaps you’re reading it on a laptop, large or small, sitting on a desk or in your lap. Perhaps you’re reading it on the screen of a tablet computer, or on the small screen of a cellphone. Perhaps it’s been printed out onto paper, maybe a plain letter sheet, or onto the glossy pages of a magazine, and you’re reading it off that. Perhaps you’re reading it aloud to a group of people, or perhaps you’re in that group of people, having it read aloud to you. But whatever you’re doing as these words enter your brain, you’re most certainly not consuming any content.

There is no such thing as content. There is no content industry full of content creators who create consumable content for content consumers. Instead, there is a diverse field of people, young and old, amateur and professional, communicating and manifesting ideas and information using a wide variety of methods and techniques. The end products of these efforts may be in the form of text, imagery, sound, or interactive experience, but none can be categorized as a generic, consumable commodity known as “content.”

If you are an artist, you are not a content creator. Perhaps you’re a painter, a musician, a filmmaker, a novelist, a comedian, a dramatist, a playwright, a game designer, a sculptor, a photographer, an animator, a puppeteer, a poet, or perhaps you’re a combination of all these things and more, but you do not create content. You make art.

If you are a journalist, you are not a content creator. You may report your stories through written words, through spoken words, through pictures, through video footage, through motion graphics, or a fusion of all these media, but you do not create content. You do journalism.

If you are an entertainer, you are not a content creator. You may entertain by telling a story, by doing a dance, by making people laugh, or by recording your conversations with fascinating people, but whether you broadcast this entertaining act with pictures, sound, or anything else, you do not create content. You do entertainment.

If you are an educator, you are not a content creator. You may write informative articles for an encyclopedia, deliver an enlightening speech to an eager audience, or create a presentation with charts and graphics, but however it is that you communicate your knowledge, you do not create content. You teach lessons.

All of these things are expressions of human thought, and yet rather than respecting their nuances, their diversity, and their individual importance, we marginalize them with our language, relegating all of what makes us unique as human beings to the generic, soulless, meaningless, newspeak descriptor of “content,” and their authors to a status of “content creators”. Yet, we do not refer to architects, carpenters, industrial designers, and the forces of nature themselves as “object creators”, and rarely, if ever, do we collectively refer to the results of their efforts as “objects”.

If you are a maker of things, a disseminator of knowledge, or anyone who contributes to the collective intellectual output of human beings, do not accept the notion that your work is less significant than a house, a chair, a piece of electronic equipment, or a rock. Do not allow yourself to be labeled as a mere “content creator.” Have more dignity than that.

To the extent possible under law, Zacqary Adam Green has waived all copyright and related or neighboring rights to This is Not Content; This is a Blog Post.
This work is published from: United States.

I decided to give it a try, and I’ma let you finish but Beyonce had one of these days I’ll bet your life on the road today and they are nothing but another form of therapy for these patients. The experience is as exhilarating and possibly confusing as a first step in the right direction for them to become more involved in their children can vary greatly due to company policy and procedures for their use. Unfortunately, it’s all about themselves and their families in their homes and their lives are nothing.

The problem is that there is anything you would not believe how much I loved them all. Google Scribe of this article with a FREE trial to HighBeam Research: Online Press Releases and Newsletters fast and elegant 3D photo gallery on their website and buy this product again and again and I’ma let you finish. There are no comments for this user yet and can not believe that there is anything… I’ma get you something to do with themselves on and off the field and then press the button to the right of the people who are not interested in them.

To be fair, there are not any posts in the last few years and I have been able to find anything in these search results from RT on your Google searches by subscribing to the feed via email to state their case and their ownership of their owners and are strictly for viewing and printing of these books. I’m sure that some people might believe that they are not therefore to be understood that these embodiments are provided solely by this site are property of their respective owners, but with their own unique style of musical composition and performance of their duties and responsibilities of their jobs and their proportion against the total number of page views delivered based on the seller and the listing broker as an agent of the present invention is to provide and maintain their own calendars and schedules for their employees.

There is a certain element of surrealism to the results, and you can not print this page this way, they can become and to remain in their own right and do not want to be related to their particular field or industry in which they are attached. It’s almost as if Andre Breton had anything to do with themselves on and off the field and then press the button to the right of the people who are not interested in them. Google Scribe is a haunting look into the digital psyche of the American Chemical Society and American Society of Clinical Oncology and the American Pain Society Published by Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved • Designated trademarks and brands are the property of their respective owners.

As an actual writing aid, though, I don’t find it very useful.

It is never, ever, ever, ever, ever a good thing for anything at all, under any circumstances, to be even one single Planck unit more complicated than absolutely necessary. Needless complexity decreases the number of people who can understand something and contribute to or use it effectively, and adds extra hoops to jump through for people who are capable of understanding it.

Take music theory, for example. The other day, I was trying to write down the chords for a song I’d accidentally banged out on the piano, and I’d hit a roadblock with one in particular.

Musical notes, as you may be aware, are represented by the letters A through G, with sharps (♯) or flats (♭) representing the notes in between the letters (except for E and F, B and C, which don’t have anything in between them). They’re arranged in a variety of scales, which are structured based on whether you jump one note (“half step”) or two (“whole step”) at a particular time, but realistically, at least with the well-known Major and Minor scales, most people just figure them out by their distinctive sounds.

So, it’s pretty easy to figure out several chords. An E Major (or just “E”) chord consists of the first, third, and fifth notes in the E Major scale, which are E, G♯, and B; E Minor is E, G, and B. Then you can throw in other notes from the scale to make things like E2 with the 2nd note, (E, F♯, G♯, B) or E7 with the 7th note (E, G♯, B, D (in 7th chords, the minor 7th is usually used because it sounds better; if you used D♯ you’d call it E Major major 7th)), or play with “suspended” chords which replace the third note with others — for example, Esus2 (E, F♯, B).

It starts to get a bit complicated as the chords get less common. For example, if you wanted to merge E2 and E7 to create an E, F♯, G♯, B, D chord, the chord is called E9. Is that because 2 + 7 = 9? No, that’s a complete coincidence. The actual reason is that this kind of chord is normally expressed E, G♯, B, D, F♯ — the F♯ is higher now, so that makes it the 9th note instead of the 2nd. However, *9 chords always include the 7th note, a concept which may not be immediately intuitive. In order to include just the 9th note with no 7th (E, G♯, B, F♯), you call the chord Eadd9. Which is totally not the same thing as E2 this time for some reason. But that’s not too difficult to figure out, at least. It may not be 100% obvious, but it sorta works.

So, anyway, about that roadblock I hit: what if you wanted to make a chord that consisted of A, C, D, and E? Well, A, C, E is an A minor chord. So if you add D, which is the 4th note in the A minor scale, it follows that the chord would be called “A minor 4″, right?

Well, no, because there’s no such thing as a 4 chord. There’s a sus4 (suspended 4) chord. But no just plain 4 chord. You can’t even say “add4″. Well, you could, but it would be wrong. A 4 chord, according to music theory, does not exist at all.

So, what’s the name of a chord consisting of A, C, D, and E? Well, that’s simple. It’s called “E7sus4♯5″, of course.

You see, E7 is E, G♯, B, D. Add a suspended 4 to that, and you replace the G♯ with an A. And since there’s no such thing as B♯, if you sharpened the B you’d jump right to C. So now you’ve got E, A, C, and D, and all you have to do is play the E on top to get the chord you’re looking for.

I mean, like, duh.

Now, that makes sense and all, except for the fact that it makes no fucking sense whatsoever. It would save so much trouble and produce a much more comprehensible-looking chord to just write “Am4″ (“m” is shorthand for Minor), but that’s not allowed, because the chord doesn’t exist.

My brother, Alex Green, explained to me exactly why this is the case:

It’s all about function. Am4 means nothing in the key of A Major.

Actually, yes, it’s true that in my particular case, the song I was writing was in the key of E Minor, so Am4 wouldn’t mean anything in the key of A Major unless I happened to be writing a song that was in the key of A Major with a random A, C, D, E chord thrown in somewhere. However, this E Minor-based song also uses chords such as “D Major”, which is, interestingly enough, not referred to as “E7add2sus4 without the E” in this particular context.

Providing to the vast majority of songwriters a logical explanation for exactly why chords such as “Am4″ do not exist would be about as useful as explaining to your 90-year-old grandmother the countless advantages of being able to make kernel modifications to your installation of Ubuntu versus the proprietary, locked-down nature of Windows, when all she wants to do is get to her email. Songwriters want to write things that sound good, and as soon as the theoretical stuff stops being in service of that goal and begins to make it needlessly harder, it only causes problems.

WARNING: The following post discusses key story points in Avatar. They are not “spoilers” per se, because everyone has already seen this movie (if not literally, then figuratively).

Avatar’s story is the one thing that has elicited a near-universal “meh” from the entire world. We’ve all heard it before: hero infiltrates enemy, learns the enemy is his friend and his friends are the enemy, helps former enemy fight former friend, and said fight is a standard progression of hero almost succeeds, then he fails, but then he miraculously succeeds. Archetypes like this aren’t a bad thing; after all, we humans have been telling this same basic story for thousands of years, keeping it fresh with minor variations (i.e. Avatar’s transhuman motifs), and it’s always interesting if not particularly groundbreaking. But with all the love and attention Avatar’s visuals got over the alleged 14 years James Cameron worked on them, the script is admittedly less polished. That’s probably one of the big reasons why Avatar didn’t win Best Picture at the Academy Awards.

There are many little things which Cameron could have done to twist the Hero’s Journey archetype — perhaps Jake Sully should have betrayed the Na’vi willingly before feeling remorse later on, for example — or simply cleaning up some of the dialogue and filling some plot holes would have sufficed. But perhaps the best thing Cameron could have done to Avatar is to make one simple removal, changing nothing else. This one removal would make Avatar’s criticisms of the War on Terror, racism, technology, and destruction of the environment immensely more powerful.

Following the scene after Hometree’s destruction, when we see slow-motion shots of Jake and Grace being wrestled out of the avatar links, Grace shouting “you murderer!” at Parker, fade to black. Roll credits.

Okay, that may be a “simple” cut, but it’s pretty major. Still, it would have made Avatar a much better film. Hit the jump for why:

Let’s look at what occurs up until that point. Jake has gained the trust of the Na’vi, he and Ney’tiri have fallen in love, and he’s beginning to feel “like out there [in the avatar] is the true world, and in here [in his human body] is the dream.” But there’s nothing he can do to stop the military from coming to blow up the Na’vi’s Hometree. The attack is devastating, and the Na’vi know that Jake was fully aware it was coming. Ney’tiri rejects him, says he will never be one of them. It’s heartbreaking. Tragic. The evil corporation with the big guns killed the innocent natives, destroyed the beautiful forest, and tore Jake away from the woman he loved, all so they could mine a stupid rock.

If the movie ended there, everyone in the audience would leave with one thing on their mind: blood for oil is a horrible thing. Look what it did to the Na’vi. Look what it did to our boy Jake.

But no, the story keeps going. Jake escapes and gets back in his avatar body to find that the Na’vi are still alive and well (albeit badly beaten and grieving for their lost people), and all he needs to do to become “one of them” again is to ride on the back of a really big dragon. He leads them into battle against the humans, and apparently their advanced technology is no match for flying lizards, rhinoceroses, and kitty people with bows and arrows (the same kitty people with the same bows and arrows that didn’t do squat just a few scenes before, but now they’re angry kitty people, so it totally works). In the end, the evil humans are defeated, and the kitty people live happily ever after with Jake among them.

So, what is the audience thinking now? Holy shit, we just saw dragons killing helicopters. That was cool. It was like Reign of Fire, but fucking awesome instead of fucking awful.

Yes, the battle scene was awesome, but what happened to the anti-war, anti-corporate, environmentalist message? Oh, yeah, that. Yeah, I guess the whole Iraq thing really does suck. Anyway, remember when that angry cat guy just like jumped onto the ship and shot like seventeen soldiers with his bow? That was fucking sweet!!!!!!

If James Cameron had ended Avatar on a horribly tragic but realistic note, it would have been a bold, ballsy, daring move, and an extremely effective one at that. Most if not all arguments about the story being derivative and cliché would be rendered moot, and its message would pack more of a punch than any recent film of its type in recent memory. It would impress not only with its visual technology, but with its audacious injection of seriousness and maturity into a blockbuster. Here would be a big-budget, spectacular film telling us that a hero cannot save the day; only we, the people, can do so by preventing the horrors just witnessed in glorious 3D from ever occurring in reality. In terms of making pacifists out of us, “war is a drug” has nothing on that.

Alas, dragons killing helicopters is a much more impressive demonstration of glorious 3D technology. It’s not Best Picture material, though.

Béla Tarr is the director of cult classic Hungarian films such as Sátántangó. Hideo Kojima is the designer of massively popular Japanese video games such as Metal Gear Solid 4. These two men actually have quite a lot in common, save for the medium they work in, their popularity, and their pretentiousness when discussing their craft.

Let me describe Sátántangó to you, briefly. The opening consists of an eight minute shot of the camera doing almost nothing while watching a bunch of cows:

The film continues with these similarly lengthy shots, some of which have literally nothing moving for minutes at a time, for seven hours. The film could have been a series of still photographs, and not much would be lost.

Metal Gear Solid 4 opens with a 20 minute cutscene, during which the player has no chance to do anything meaningful with the controller. Here’s a snippet of it, presented Mystery Science Theater 3000-style to make it more palatable:

The game continues with these similarly lengthy cutscenes, interrupted occasionally by short interactive sequences which are heavily scripted and offer the player no chance for creativity, for 40 hours or something. The game could have been a Japanese animated film with giant robots and guns and explosions, and not much would be lost.

The key difference between Hideo Kojima and Béla Tarr is that Tarr has gone on the record saying that he doesn’t want to adhere to the conventions of “good” filmmaking and storytelling. Kojima, on the other hand, is trying so hard to prove that you can tell wonderful stories through interactivity, when in fact the interactive elements of his magnum opus add nothing to the storytelling.