The highlight of my Christmas holidays was taking the family to see Avatar. It’s not often a film comes along which wife, Boy (11), Girl (9) and I are able to adore in equal measure. But James Cameron’s $200 million epic ego-fest hit the spot perfectly and for those families out there still wavering, I can’t recommend it highly enough.
Whenever I’ve mentioned this to my right-leaning friends, though, the general reaction has been one of appalled horror. ‘But how could you?’ they want to know. Well, I tell them, for a start I think the blue cat-girl love-interest creature is seriously hot; the realisation of the jungle planet and its extraordinary flora and fauna is simply beyond amazing; and I really, really loved that chunk of the storyline where — not unlike Neo in The Matrix — the wheelchair-bound hero is gradually initiated into the ways of the blue-cat-jungle-people and becomes a kind of superhero.
‘No, not that,’ say my right-leaning friends. ‘How can you bear the politics?’ Ah yes. The politics.
Avatar is set on a lushly beautiful rainforest planet called Pandora, whereon dwell a handsome blue-skinned native race called the Na’vi. They wear Maasai-type jewellery and commune with nature in a, like, totally holistic way. When, for example, they kill one of the ravening beasts which stalk the jungle, no matter how vile and dangerous it is, they give its departing soul a lovely blessing in the special new language that James Cameron paid a linguist to invent. They are good and pure and noble.
But now the space marines have arrived from Earth, and they’re, like, totally evil. Already they have reduced their home planet to a grey, polluted husk, and now they’ve come to do the same to Pandora, which happens to be abundant with a valuable mineral called Incrediblivaluablemineralum (something like that). The space marines are there to protect the machinery and operatives of the evil mining consortium on its evil mission to plunder and rape the virgin forest.
For any conservative looking to take offence, there is, I would concede, an abundance of rich rage-fodder. You could get irritated, for a start, by the wearisomely overfamiliar, oh-the-Truffula-trees eco-theme. Or by the film’s depiction of the US as heartless, fascistic, greedy, militaristic and utterly callous towards other races, other planets. Or by the explicit comparisons it invites with Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, and the way it encourages its audience to take the side not of the crop-headed American boys selflessly risking life and limb for their country, but of those occupied peoples who seek to destroy them. Or just by the unutterable, ‘only connect’ hippy bollocks in its portrayal of the Na’vi, up to and including the infuriatingly smug apostrophe in the middle of their name.
It’s at this stage in my argument that I need Paul Johnson. The great Paul I’m sure could give me — straight off the top of his head, without having to look a single thing up on the internet like the rest of us do, or could do, if we were bothered — a list of all the writers, film-makers, playwrights, painters, poets, sculptors, actors, directors, musicians and so on from history who weren’t incorrigible libtards.
This list, I imagine, would be very short. I know Dr Johnson would be on it, because he quite rightly said that the first Whig was the Devil; George MacDonald Fraser would be there too of course; as too would composer James MacMillan; Clint Eastwood, Chuck Norris and Kelsey Grammer (of Frasier fame: a registered Libertarian). And Michael Caine, he’d definitely be on the list — do you realise he chose as his Desert Island book Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead?
But you see my general point. If we conservatives were to spend our lives vetoing works of art on the grounds that we disagreed with their creators’ ludicrously misguided politics, then we’d scarcely be able to look at a painting or read a poem, let alone listen to a pop record. Luckily, thanks to our constitutional pragmatism, we are generally able to rise above such annoying distractions. It’s a bit like having tinnitus. When you’re enjoying a Radiohead album, say, you learn to filter out that part of the message which says ‘capitalism is wrong; man is evil; we must make amends by giving all our money to Al Gore and Third World kleptocrat dictators’, and simply go: ‘Gosh, what a pretty voice. I expect it has something to do with the fact that Abingdon gave the boy such a marvellous public-school education.’
Not that I’m arguing we should abandon our critical faculties altogether. We just need to choose where to fight our battles. When a big dumb blockbuster from incorrigibly libtard Hollywood presumes to lecture us on class, race or the environment, we should treat it with the same respect we would accord a young student in his first year at Berkeley holding forth on ‘climate change’ or George W. Bush: ‘Yeah, yeah, yadda, yadda. Whatever. Dork.’
Where, on the other hand, I believe we should get angry and combative is over works of art which our intellectual classes take seriously. A good example would be Alan Bennett’s The History Boys, which really ought to have been torn to shreds by conservatives for its poisonous disingenuousness. Sure, it’s funny and charming in places, but it is also an inexcusable apologia for the ravages which have been inflicted on our education system by generations of left-liberal agitators.
Instead of fingering the real culprits (the teachers’ unions, the progressive educational theorists, the cynical politicians, etc) or the real problems (dumbing down, grade inflation, the politicisation of the curriculum, the refusal by left-wing ideologues to teach using old-fashioned methods that actually work), Bennett lets the whole debased system off the hook by pretending that the problem all boils down to two distinct approaches to teaching. On the one hand, there’s the rounded, expansive, teach-the-whole-man method of his gay hero Hector; on the other there’s the nasty, pointy, right-wingy, flip, gratuitously contrarian, teach-to-the-exam tack taken by his anti-hero Irwin.
Yeah, you wish, Alan. And the reason you wish it is that being of a liberal persuasion you just can’t bring yourself to admit that it was bien-pensants like yourself who brought our schools to this dreadful pass and who destroyed most of the cultural values you cherish.
This isn’t a point that I would ever expect left-liberals to grasp. Why should they? But I do think there could have been a stronger reaction from the numerous conservative types who must have gone to see it. A fair few of them, I imagine, will have experienced the horror of trying to get their children into a halfway reasonable state school; the irritation of seeing their kids drip-fed Mary-Seacole-global-warming-and-Eid studies; the disgust at GCSE science papers asking ‘Which is healthier: battered sausage or grilled fish?’; the worthlessness of a system where examiners are now discouraged from marking down papers for mistakes in spelling or grammar. And how did they respond when Bennett managed to fob off the blame for all this on hard-hearted (and — couldn’t resist this one, could he? — closeted gay) right-wingers? By applauding the man’s deep, sensitive insights, for God’s sake!
If we conservatives are going to reach for our Brownings over cultural atrocities, at least let us get our targets right. Make it the likes of Bennett, any day, rather than harmless buffoons like Cameron.
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