ABSTRACT
The fallacy that great events have great causes tempts both film critics and civilian interpreters to explain mass ticket sales in pretty grandiose terms. Avatar, touted to displace Titanic as the movie with the biggest box office gross in history, has provoked this impulse with a vengeance. The film critics are the least of it: Evo Morales, populist president of Bolivia, is enthusiastic about what he takes to be a “profound show of resistance to capitalism and the struggle for the defense of nature,” while a Vatican spokesman thinks Avatar espouses a somewhat sinister pantheism, and an NYT opinion columnist had a similar thought. Some Palestinians, taking themselves for Na’Vi, painted themselves blue and created a photo-op. Enough Chinese take themselves for Na’Vi ejected from their homes—by rapacious party bureaucrats—to have caused the film to be pulled from 2-D theaters after a very short run. Self-described anti-militarists not implausibly think the film anti-militarist, while some neo-cons think Avatar the first great neo-con film (Ann Marlowe, writing in Forbes, exults that the baddies are independent military contactors—in effect, high-tech Pinkertons—rather than GIs). At least one Libertarian thinks Avatar a stirring defense of private property (someone from Cato). Other critics on the right more plausibly detect something less flattering.
