From the people who brought you, "Richard Jewell Guilty!" and "Superpowered Arabs Attack America with Anthrax!" Comes "James Cameron is Crazy!" (Again.)
In James Cameron's Spider-man scriptment, Spider-man does great things only to end up getting slandered by the media and beaten-up by cops. For reasons young Peter Parker can't quite understand, people seem to resent his moral goodness and his great achievements. A wealthy businessman exploit's Spidey's confusion at the public's hatred to try to get him to join him in a Machiavellian quest to rape and pillage the common man.
While James Cameron is laboriously creating Avatar, an incredibly dynamic and profound David vs. Goliath epic like Hollywood hasn't produced in decades, we have an army of cultural critics waging war on him. All over again.
The media's assault on Avatar started right when the first preview was released (what a coincidence!) Now, I'm not talking about the mindless ninnying from the intellectual still-borns who call themselves “fanboys”. No, I'm talking about the far more serious slandering from the spiritual still-borns known as the “American media”.
After the Avatar preview was shown, here was how the media's first assault went:
Okay, seriously now: it would've taken any honest journalist two minutes on Yahoo or Google – two minutes, max! - to see that any accusations that Avatar copied Delgo were facially bogus (and even libelous). But maybe the media's bribes from the Pentagon aren't as big as they used to be and so they can't afford an internet connection to run that Google search, 'cause the corrupt bastards actually ran with the accusations! 'NY Magazine', USA Today, and the HuffingtonPost.com all had posts alleging and/or intimating that Avatar's story was plagiarized from a movie that it chronologically preceded!
Believe it or not, this first serious attempt to slander Avatar and to libel Cameron didn't stick.
'Avatar' Producer Jon Landau Totally
Discredits Plagiarism Charge in 30 Seconds.
Maybe there was another reality TV star staging a hoax about a kid in a weather balloon, but somehow or another, the Delgo idiocy, mercifully, fizzled away quickly.
But the media – probably taking a cue from their johns in the Department of Defense – were just probing Cameron's defenses. It was a salvo shot, and it missed. The media's next shot, though, would be a guided munition aimed right at Cameron himself.
This was fired in the October 26th issue of 'The New Yorker' magazine. (And really, what better publication to chronicle a Canadian citizen living in California than one called "The New Yorker"? I expect and demand that my next issue of "Michigan History" magazine devote twelve pages to a biopic of Chinese Olympian gymnast Li Ya.)
This is the headline from the libelous (I'll get to that in a sec) article in 'The New Yorker':
Okay, okay: it was actually called "A Man of Extremes", but if you could put those Annie Hall what-they-really-meant subtitles on it, that's what it would've been titled. The article tries repeatedly to spin innocuous – or even flattering – traits of Cameron into evidence of psychosis. Along the way, they wrote at least one potentially libelous lie (knowingly and maliciously) and it appears that they also copied some highly dubious claims from tabloid biographer Marc Shapiro.
Here's the demonstrative lie in the article:
The whole 'New Yorker' article reads exactly – and I mean exactly – like the petty, critical "biography" of Cameron written by Marc Shapiro in 2000. Both of them repeatedly use transparently bias turns of phrases to make Cameron look like a wacko. And there are also some very explicit symmetries between them that could not have happened by accident. For instance, 'The New Yorker' article claims, "[Cameron's cast and crew] call the dark side of his personality Mij—Jim backward."
Okay, here's the deal: I've been an enthusiastic fan of Cameron's since 1994 and I had never read this anywhere or heard this from anyone. Ever. ....Except in Shapiro's biography. So maybe 'The New Yorker' did some plagiarizing of their own? A Google search for “James Cameron+MIJ” turns up nothing save for this article and excerpts from Shapiro's book. Furthermore, the article's account of how Cameron responded to the PCP poisoning on the set of Titanic also sounds suspiciously like Shapiro's unique account. (For a version of that event that's probably much more in line with reality, read the book Titanic and the Making of James Cameron by the terrific showbiz writer Paula Parisi).
Here's an example of the hit piece in 'The New Yorker' using disparaging turns of phrases to make Cameron look bad:
Finally, 'The New Yorker' goes in for the kill. Cameron had invited the reporter(s?) into his home. The article paints a scene of placid domestic tranquility – the dog's names, the breakfast foods, what Cameron's wearing – and then, in a big “Gotcha!” moment, they set us up to expose James Cameron's craziest feature yet. This is his deepest, darkest secret. James Cameron is officially nuts, 'The New Yorker' says, because....because....He's protecting his family and his home from California brush fires!
Whoa, snap! You've got him now, 'New Yorker'!
I'm deadly serious. Cameron proudly details his system for protecting his wife, children, and property from fires (they pump the water from the pool and mix it with some flame-suppression foam) and the reporter writes about it like it's this horribly disturbing revelation. (Of course, servile Americans can only think of one thing to do when there's a fire: wait for “the authorities”. There's nothing pathetic Americans love more than the thought of being saved by men in uniforms – preferably government men with guns. Modern Americans can literally watch a man choking to death at a restaurant and not bother to do the Heimlich maneuver because “the authorities will take care of it”. They can see a man getting savagely assaulted at a diner and literally pretend to not see it. That's always the answer for modern Americans: look to the government, especially government men with guns. If you're independent and aren't servile and deferential to the government....they call you crazy.)
Disappointingly (but totally predictably), a few people did take the bait on 'The New Yorker's “He's Crazy!” article. Theawl.com sneered “James Cameron, Loon, To Make Lots More Money Soon” when they linked to the hit piece. Then there were a lot of pages with words like “James Cameron Exposed” in their summation of it. The LA Times's online site had a page sneering at Cameron's protecting his family and his home from fires. So this media attack wasn't the total flop that the whole “Delgo plagiarism” attack was.
But now, the American media's found another rocket to launch at James Cameron. This time, they think they've really got him in their crosshairs. Here's the latest charge:
"There's an old science-fiction tale also about an alien traveling to another planet and having two bodies: one as a weak, helpless man and the other as somebody who's empowered by life in the new planet. This is just like 'Avatar'."
They're claiming that Avatar copied Superman.
Whoops! My bad. Let me try that again.
"There's an old fantasy story about blue creatures with tails who live in harmony with nature who are threatened by a powerful outsider. This is just like 'Avatar'."
The media is now claiming that Avatar copied The Smurfs.
No, I screwed up again! Okay, okay: I re-read the articles and now I get it.
"There's an old sci-fi novella about a paraplegic who controls an external body on another planet. This is just like Avatar'."
Seriously, that's it. The sci-fi novella is (which I've never read or heard of) was called 'Call Me Joe'. (You can read one synopsis at Wikipedia here.) The similarities to Avatar in 'Call Me Joe' are as follows:
The main character is a paraplegic.
The main character remotely controls a different body on another planet.
The main character begins to prefer his alien body to his human body.
I've sifted through several articles about this latest charge of plagiarism, and those are seriously the only similarities I can discern. Let me tell you something, if that's plagiarism, then I think that I get to sue everybody else named “David” for identity theft. If that's plagiarism, then K-Mart gets to sue every other merchant with the word “mart” in their name. And if that's plagiarism....then what does it say about welfare queen Michael Bay stealing Cameron's stories, actors, shots, and themes in every single one of his taxpayer-financed military propaganda movies (only to be lauded for his “fresh” style by the media).
The thing of it is, I actually wouldn't doubt that James Cameron did read 'Call Me Joe' and that, consciously or subconsciously, he was inspired by it....along with dozens of other sci-fi and historical stories. This is by his own admission. It's not breaking news, and it's not a bad thing.
But the media thinks that this slanderous accusation of plagiarism will stick because, they say, “Cameron has done this before!” Ummmm....no, he hasn't. Yes, sci-fi author Harlan Ellison agreed to terms with the producers of The Terminator but that was not because The Terminator plagiarized Ellison's 'Outer Limits' episode. It was because Cameron made a stupid comment to a reporter – maybe jokingly, maybe self-deprecatingly – and said something that was a gross exaggeration. If Harlan Ellison had actually tried to sue James Cameron for plagiarism based on the actual similarities between The Terminator and the content of his Outer Limits episode 'Soldier', I think that the lawsuit probably would've been dismissed at the court's metal detector check-in.
(One other note about the Harlan Ellison incident, and this is just to be totally clear on the matter: there are indeed a few small but explicit similarities between The Terminator and the Outer Limits episode, 'Soldier'. But there are no similarities between The Terminator and the other episode of The Outer Limits written by Ellison, 'Demon with a Glass Hand'. None. Harlan Ellison has never alleged this, and I have yet to find one sane person who can identify any similarities. So the next time one of these petty sci-fi sites wants to bring that story up all over again, get your fucking facts straight. Aren't you guys supposed to be the ones who know everything about science fiction?)
Whatever ends up happening with the latest bogus assault on Avatar and James Cameron, you can be sure of at least this much: it won't be the last attack.
Putting aside the fact that I'm a big fan of him, here's the truth about James Cameron: he is an objectively great man who has done objectively great things. I've always thought that people who do great things should be applauded or else, if you can't find something nice to say about them, ignored. (Actually, this applies to any human being who's honest and who's trying.) But, unlike Bill Gates or Steve Jobs or men like that, Cameron's not a social conformist and he's not politically correct. From what I've read about them, Cameron's actually much more akin to the great men of the industrial age (Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, even Walt Disney to a certain extent) in his philosophies and temperament than to the few contemporary men who've created anything. Cameron's intensely moral and individualistic, but he has zero tolerance for the media, for lies, or for bullshit. Cameron's working methods on the set aren't contrivances to try and construct some persona (the way it is when many others behave eccentrically). He doesn't degrade and dehumanize his employees the way many people in power do....but he just knows more than they do about their own crafts, and so he knows when they're not producing good work. He just expects and demands that the people on his projects work hard to deliver their best work. This should be celebrated, not mocked. (I could cite numerous stories of Hollywood directors maliciously degrading their underlings, and yet the media doesn't slander those directors. So the message is out: if you're an idiot director who makes military propaganda like Michael Bay, you can arbitrarily insult people for no reasons at all and it'll be reported like, “Oh, he's such a man's man!” But if you honestly lose patience with people doing lousy work....you're Satan incarnate.)
Cameron came from a middle class Canadian family that couldn't even afford to send him to college. At 25, he was, basically, a burnout. He smoked a lot of weed, drank a lot of beer, and he had no money. Then, with no connections in Hollywood, no U.S.C. film school education, no buddies at Fox or Universal or the unions, he decided to try and make movies. He didn't expressly want to be a director, he just wanted to create movies. If you had seen James Cameron at that time, in 1978, you might have dismissed him as a socially inept, bearded quasi-hippie going nowhere. A failure. Just another wage-slave machinist who'll probably end up in a trailer park. But you'd have been wrong. With the help of one significant stroke of luck (getting $20,000 investment on a friend's film project), he created a very impressive science fiction short film filled with complex effects shots that he engineered.
From there, after years of labor, Cameron went on to make one revolutionary movie after another. Like a force of nature, he was inventing new cameras (with his brother Mike), pioneering new technologies, writing wonderful stories, revitalizing discarded effects techniques, and on and on and on. Then, going up against more challenges than Hollywood had ever seen in its history plus the sneering cynicism of the American media, he created, through sheer force of will, the most successful motion picture of all time....by a landslide.
Do movie fans recognize what a jaw-dropping achievement Titanic is? If you don't, I encourage you to read old newspaper and magazine articles from the time of its production. It was an orgy of insults. Everybody from the studio execs to the craft services guys were taking shots at him, and the media loved it. Cameron had to drop all of his financial gains from the movie to appease the businessmen.
But then the actual creation came out.
Titanic, on-screen and off, is the single greatest achievement in the history of motion pictures. Again, by a landslide. You might say that that's all a matter of opinion, but I don't think so. No honest person knowledgeable about movies would dispute that.
So why is a man who achieved all this so reviled? Why is it that, time after time after time, the American media launches these stupid, slanderous hit pieces? Is it because they only have room for so much idolatry and they reserve all that for the military? Is it because they don't like it when somebody who's self-educated and an immigrant achieves more than any thousand of these power-class elitists combined? Is it just because they love tearing down men who don't conform to their worldview?
In Canada, James Cameron is all but revered. The Canadian articles about him and the biography written by a Canadian author, they get it. In his hometown of Chippawa, he's celebrated like Charles Lindburgh returning from Paris. Why is it that they can recognize his objectively great achievements but all Americans can do is scoff and sneer?
The CBC ran a feature on James Cameron's
hometown throwing a parade for him: complete with
a band, the town firetruck, and a speech from the mayor.
Personally, my larger problem with this is kind of broad and philosophical. I honestly think that America has completely and totally lost any sort of creative spirit. James Cameron says we're “cowards”. He might be right, but I just think that we're spiritually inert simply because we can't create anything anymore. Worse still, we don't even want to create anymore. Our great heroes are no longer Franklin and Edison and Jonas Salk and Neal Armstrong. Nowadays, our heroes are “our troops” and Sarah Palin and Barack Obama. Bureaucrats! We celebrate government bureaucrats! (Especially those with guns.)
This isn't just weird, it's destructive. It's antithetical to the very idea of civilization and humanity. Maybe I've been wrong my whole life, but I've always just intuitively thought that man is meant to build and to create. Animals just accept their system (nature) and deal with it like bureaucrats. But, like the ape in 2001: A Space Odyssey, man is supposed to look at dumb matter and impose his intelligence upon that. This is called “creation”. Man is supposed to make clubs from bones, fire from wood, paintings from mud, sculptures from clay, steam engines from iron ore, glass from sand....you get the idea.
Maybe I'm wrong, but that's what I've always thought.
And James Cameron embodies the spirit of creation, and he has his whole life. The man practically is creation. If you think I'm overstating it, I encourage you to do your research on everything he's accomplished – not just the hit movies, but everything that went into those movies and what he did between movies and what he did as a teenager and what he did after Titanic. It's hugely inspiring, and a great example of what humans should aspire for - not the celebrity aspect, but the sheer creative force. Yes, he's a human being and, as any of us Christians will tell you, human beings are inherently imperfect, so he undoubtedly has a lot of failings (and no, I'm not just talking about Dark Angel!) But that's assumed. Taken as a whole, the man and his works should be held up and celebrated by America, and they probably would be if this were 1950 or even 1980. But something has happened to us in the past few decades.
Here's a prediction: Avatar will make a disproportionate amount of money in the Eastern countries (Buddhist-, Hindu-, and Muslim-based countries) than it will in America. I think this because I also think that, ironically, the Eastern people are now more American than America is. I can tell you from my own personal experience that it's chilling how much more adventurous and innovative immigrants are than Americans. And because Avatar is an adventurous story by an innovative man, those people will get it.
But, just like they are with James Cameron himself, Americans might be too busy sneering or putting on a tough guy act to recognize something that's great sitting right in front of them.
(Here comes the obligatory “bookend” closing.) At the end of Cameron's Spider-man scriptment, Spider-man rejects the businessman's misanthropic, Darwinian proposal and decides to stand up for the common man. He takes $250 million of the businessman's money and spreads it out across Manhattan like confetti. Soon after, Peter Parker also stands up to a bully at his school and:
Carlton Strand:
The only thing they love more than a hero is to see that hero fail, fall, screw-up....to see him exposed with his pants down.... You know why? It lets them feel better about their own miserable lives.While James Cameron is laboriously creating Avatar, an incredibly dynamic and profound David vs. Goliath epic like Hollywood hasn't produced in decades, we have an army of cultural critics waging war on him. All over again.
The media's assault on Avatar started right when the first preview was released (what a coincidence!) Now, I'm not talking about the mindless ninnying from the intellectual still-borns who call themselves “fanboys”. No, I'm talking about the far more serious slandering from the spiritual still-borns known as the “American media”.
After the Avatar preview was shown, here was how the media's first assault went:
- AMERICAN MEDIA: “In 1995, James Cameron invented a time machine and, with that time machine, Cameron traveled forward in the future to December of 2008. Like any good time-traveler would do, Time Traveler Jim made good use of his chrono-vessel and....went to the multiplex. At the ticket counter, Time Traveler Jim told the cashier, 'Gimme a ticket to the biggest turd now playing!' (They initially offered a ticket to the remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still, but Cameron refused to witness the bastardization of a sci-fi classic.)
So, Time Traveler Jim ended up seeing Delgo. Naturally, he had the whole theater to himself, and he used this time to take scrupulous notes.
After taking his notes on Delgo, Time Traveler Jim then promptly went back to his time machine (he was smart enough to make it look like a VW: they blend in in any era), traveled backwards in time to 1995, and wrote his 85-page 'Avatar' scriptment based off of his notes from the future.”
Okay, seriously now: it would've taken any honest journalist two minutes on Yahoo or Google – two minutes, max! - to see that any accusations that Avatar copied Delgo were facially bogus (and even libelous). But maybe the media's bribes from the Pentagon aren't as big as they used to be and so they can't afford an internet connection to run that Google search, 'cause the corrupt bastards actually ran with the accusations! 'NY Magazine', USA Today, and the HuffingtonPost.com all had posts alleging and/or intimating that Avatar's story was plagiarized from a movie that it chronologically preceded!
Believe it or not, this first serious attempt to slander Avatar and to libel Cameron didn't stick.
'Avatar' Producer Jon Landau Totally
Discredits Plagiarism Charge in 30 Seconds.
But the media – probably taking a cue from their johns in the Department of Defense – were just probing Cameron's defenses. It was a salvo shot, and it missed. The media's next shot, though, would be a guided munition aimed right at Cameron himself.
This was fired in the October 26th issue of 'The New Yorker' magazine. (And really, what better publication to chronicle a Canadian citizen living in California than one called "The New Yorker"? I expect and demand that my next issue of "Michigan History" magazine devote twelve pages to a biopic of Chinese Olympian gymnast Li Ya.)
This is the headline from the libelous (I'll get to that in a sec) article in 'The New Yorker':
James Cameron....He's CRAZY!!!
Okay, okay: it was actually called "A Man of Extremes", but if you could put those Annie Hall what-they-really-meant subtitles on it, that's what it would've been titled. The article tries repeatedly to spin innocuous – or even flattering – traits of Cameron into evidence of psychosis. Along the way, they wrote at least one potentially libelous lie (knowingly and maliciously) and it appears that they also copied some highly dubious claims from tabloid biographer Marc Shapiro.
Here's the demonstrative lie in the article:
- "After he finished making 'True Lies,' Cameron called Kubrick, by then a recluse, and invited himself over."
- "I was really honored, 'Oooh, Stanley Kubrick wants to see my movie!'" remembers Cameron. "But it turns out that he does this with everybody. He's like a brain vampire. He likes to get people and suck what they're doing out of their heads." The two viewed the film on an editing machine at Kubrick's home and talked about the effects shot by shot.
The whole 'New Yorker' article reads exactly – and I mean exactly – like the petty, critical "biography" of Cameron written by Marc Shapiro in 2000. Both of them repeatedly use transparently bias turns of phrases to make Cameron look like a wacko. And there are also some very explicit symmetries between them that could not have happened by accident. For instance, 'The New Yorker' article claims, "[Cameron's cast and crew] call the dark side of his personality Mij—Jim backward."
Okay, here's the deal: I've been an enthusiastic fan of Cameron's since 1994 and I had never read this anywhere or heard this from anyone. Ever. ....Except in Shapiro's biography. So maybe 'The New Yorker' did some plagiarizing of their own? A Google search for “James Cameron+MIJ” turns up nothing save for this article and excerpts from Shapiro's book. Furthermore, the article's account of how Cameron responded to the PCP poisoning on the set of Titanic also sounds suspiciously like Shapiro's unique account. (For a version of that event that's probably much more in line with reality, read the book Titanic and the Making of James Cameron by the terrific showbiz writer Paula Parisi).
Here's an example of the hit piece in 'The New Yorker' using disparaging turns of phrases to make Cameron look bad:
- “[James Cameron] is an exacting critic, and an exuberant showoff....”
Finally, 'The New Yorker' goes in for the kill. Cameron had invited the reporter(s?) into his home. The article paints a scene of placid domestic tranquility – the dog's names, the breakfast foods, what Cameron's wearing – and then, in a big “Gotcha!” moment, they set us up to expose James Cameron's craziest feature yet. This is his deepest, darkest secret. James Cameron is officially nuts, 'The New Yorker' says, because....because....He's protecting his family and his home from California brush fires!
Whoa, snap! You've got him now, 'New Yorker'!
I'm deadly serious. Cameron proudly details his system for protecting his wife, children, and property from fires (they pump the water from the pool and mix it with some flame-suppression foam) and the reporter writes about it like it's this horribly disturbing revelation. (Of course, servile Americans can only think of one thing to do when there's a fire: wait for “the authorities”. There's nothing pathetic Americans love more than the thought of being saved by men in uniforms – preferably government men with guns. Modern Americans can literally watch a man choking to death at a restaurant and not bother to do the Heimlich maneuver because “the authorities will take care of it”. They can see a man getting savagely assaulted at a diner and literally pretend to not see it. That's always the answer for modern Americans: look to the government, especially government men with guns. If you're independent and aren't servile and deferential to the government....they call you crazy.)
Disappointingly (but totally predictably), a few people did take the bait on 'The New Yorker's “He's Crazy!” article. Theawl.com sneered “James Cameron, Loon, To Make Lots More Money Soon” when they linked to the hit piece. Then there were a lot of pages with words like “James Cameron Exposed” in their summation of it. The LA Times's online site had a page sneering at Cameron's protecting his family and his home from fires. So this media attack wasn't the total flop that the whole “Delgo plagiarism” attack was.
But now, the American media's found another rocket to launch at James Cameron. This time, they think they've really got him in their crosshairs. Here's the latest charge:"There's an old science-fiction tale also about an alien traveling to another planet and having two bodies: one as a weak, helpless man and the other as somebody who's empowered by life in the new planet. This is just like 'Avatar'."
They're claiming that Avatar copied Superman.
Whoops! My bad. Let me try that again.
"There's an old fantasy story about blue creatures with tails who live in harmony with nature who are threatened by a powerful outsider. This is just like 'Avatar'."
The media is now claiming that Avatar copied The Smurfs.
No, I screwed up again! Okay, okay: I re-read the articles and now I get it.
"There's an old sci-fi novella about a paraplegic who controls an external body on another planet. This is just like Avatar'."
Seriously, that's it. The sci-fi novella is (which I've never read or heard of) was called 'Call Me Joe'. (You can read one synopsis at Wikipedia here.) The similarities to Avatar in 'Call Me Joe' are as follows:
The main character is a paraplegic.
The main character remotely controls a different body on another planet.
The main character begins to prefer his alien body to his human body.
I've sifted through several articles about this latest charge of plagiarism, and those are seriously the only similarities I can discern. Let me tell you something, if that's plagiarism, then I think that I get to sue everybody else named “David” for identity theft. If that's plagiarism, then K-Mart gets to sue every other merchant with the word “mart” in their name. And if that's plagiarism....then what does it say about welfare queen Michael Bay stealing Cameron's stories, actors, shots, and themes in every single one of his taxpayer-financed military propaganda movies (only to be lauded for his “fresh” style by the media).
The thing of it is, I actually wouldn't doubt that James Cameron did read 'Call Me Joe' and that, consciously or subconsciously, he was inspired by it....along with dozens of other sci-fi and historical stories. This is by his own admission. It's not breaking news, and it's not a bad thing.
But the media thinks that this slanderous accusation of plagiarism will stick because, they say, “Cameron has done this before!” Ummmm....no, he hasn't. Yes, sci-fi author Harlan Ellison agreed to terms with the producers of The Terminator but that was not because The Terminator plagiarized Ellison's 'Outer Limits' episode. It was because Cameron made a stupid comment to a reporter – maybe jokingly, maybe self-deprecatingly – and said something that was a gross exaggeration. If Harlan Ellison had actually tried to sue James Cameron for plagiarism based on the actual similarities between The Terminator and the content of his Outer Limits episode 'Soldier', I think that the lawsuit probably would've been dismissed at the court's metal detector check-in.
(One other note about the Harlan Ellison incident, and this is just to be totally clear on the matter: there are indeed a few small but explicit similarities between The Terminator and the Outer Limits episode, 'Soldier'. But there are no similarities between The Terminator and the other episode of The Outer Limits written by Ellison, 'Demon with a Glass Hand'. None. Harlan Ellison has never alleged this, and I have yet to find one sane person who can identify any similarities. So the next time one of these petty sci-fi sites wants to bring that story up all over again, get your fucking facts straight. Aren't you guys supposed to be the ones who know everything about science fiction?)
Whatever ends up happening with the latest bogus assault on Avatar and James Cameron, you can be sure of at least this much: it won't be the last attack.
Putting aside the fact that I'm a big fan of him, here's the truth about James Cameron: he is an objectively great man who has done objectively great things. I've always thought that people who do great things should be applauded or else, if you can't find something nice to say about them, ignored. (Actually, this applies to any human being who's honest and who's trying.) But, unlike Bill Gates or Steve Jobs or men like that, Cameron's not a social conformist and he's not politically correct. From what I've read about them, Cameron's actually much more akin to the great men of the industrial age (Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, even Walt Disney to a certain extent) in his philosophies and temperament than to the few contemporary men who've created anything. Cameron's intensely moral and individualistic, but he has zero tolerance for the media, for lies, or for bullshit. Cameron's working methods on the set aren't contrivances to try and construct some persona (the way it is when many others behave eccentrically). He doesn't degrade and dehumanize his employees the way many people in power do....but he just knows more than they do about their own crafts, and so he knows when they're not producing good work. He just expects and demands that the people on his projects work hard to deliver their best work. This should be celebrated, not mocked. (I could cite numerous stories of Hollywood directors maliciously degrading their underlings, and yet the media doesn't slander those directors. So the message is out: if you're an idiot director who makes military propaganda like Michael Bay, you can arbitrarily insult people for no reasons at all and it'll be reported like, “Oh, he's such a man's man!” But if you honestly lose patience with people doing lousy work....you're Satan incarnate.)
Cameron came from a middle class Canadian family that couldn't even afford to send him to college. At 25, he was, basically, a burnout. He smoked a lot of weed, drank a lot of beer, and he had no money. Then, with no connections in Hollywood, no U.S.C. film school education, no buddies at Fox or Universal or the unions, he decided to try and make movies. He didn't expressly want to be a director, he just wanted to create movies. If you had seen James Cameron at that time, in 1978, you might have dismissed him as a socially inept, bearded quasi-hippie going nowhere. A failure. Just another wage-slave machinist who'll probably end up in a trailer park. But you'd have been wrong. With the help of one significant stroke of luck (getting $20,000 investment on a friend's film project), he created a very impressive science fiction short film filled with complex effects shots that he engineered.From there, after years of labor, Cameron went on to make one revolutionary movie after another. Like a force of nature, he was inventing new cameras (with his brother Mike), pioneering new technologies, writing wonderful stories, revitalizing discarded effects techniques, and on and on and on. Then, going up against more challenges than Hollywood had ever seen in its history plus the sneering cynicism of the American media, he created, through sheer force of will, the most successful motion picture of all time....by a landslide.
Do movie fans recognize what a jaw-dropping achievement Titanic is? If you don't, I encourage you to read old newspaper and magazine articles from the time of its production. It was an orgy of insults. Everybody from the studio execs to the craft services guys were taking shots at him, and the media loved it. Cameron had to drop all of his financial gains from the movie to appease the businessmen.
But then the actual creation came out.
Titanic, on-screen and off, is the single greatest achievement in the history of motion pictures. Again, by a landslide. You might say that that's all a matter of opinion, but I don't think so. No honest person knowledgeable about movies would dispute that.
So why is a man who achieved all this so reviled? Why is it that, time after time after time, the American media launches these stupid, slanderous hit pieces? Is it because they only have room for so much idolatry and they reserve all that for the military? Is it because they don't like it when somebody who's self-educated and an immigrant achieves more than any thousand of these power-class elitists combined? Is it just because they love tearing down men who don't conform to their worldview?
In Canada, James Cameron is all but revered. The Canadian articles about him and the biography written by a Canadian author, they get it. In his hometown of Chippawa, he's celebrated like Charles Lindburgh returning from Paris. Why is it that they can recognize his objectively great achievements but all Americans can do is scoff and sneer?
The CBC ran a feature on James Cameron'shometown throwing a parade for him: complete with
a band, the town firetruck, and a speech from the mayor.
Personally, my larger problem with this is kind of broad and philosophical. I honestly think that America has completely and totally lost any sort of creative spirit. James Cameron says we're “cowards”. He might be right, but I just think that we're spiritually inert simply because we can't create anything anymore. Worse still, we don't even want to create anymore. Our great heroes are no longer Franklin and Edison and Jonas Salk and Neal Armstrong. Nowadays, our heroes are “our troops” and Sarah Palin and Barack Obama. Bureaucrats! We celebrate government bureaucrats! (Especially those with guns.)
This isn't just weird, it's destructive. It's antithetical to the very idea of civilization and humanity. Maybe I've been wrong my whole life, but I've always just intuitively thought that man is meant to build and to create. Animals just accept their system (nature) and deal with it like bureaucrats. But, like the ape in 2001: A Space Odyssey, man is supposed to look at dumb matter and impose his intelligence upon that. This is called “creation”. Man is supposed to make clubs from bones, fire from wood, paintings from mud, sculptures from clay, steam engines from iron ore, glass from sand....you get the idea.
Maybe I'm wrong, but that's what I've always thought.
And James Cameron embodies the spirit of creation, and he has his whole life. The man practically is creation. If you think I'm overstating it, I encourage you to do your research on everything he's accomplished – not just the hit movies, but everything that went into those movies and what he did between movies and what he did as a teenager and what he did after Titanic. It's hugely inspiring, and a great example of what humans should aspire for - not the celebrity aspect, but the sheer creative force. Yes, he's a human being and, as any of us Christians will tell you, human beings are inherently imperfect, so he undoubtedly has a lot of failings (and no, I'm not just talking about Dark Angel!) But that's assumed. Taken as a whole, the man and his works should be held up and celebrated by America, and they probably would be if this were 1950 or even 1980. But something has happened to us in the past few decades.
Here's a prediction: Avatar will make a disproportionate amount of money in the Eastern countries (Buddhist-, Hindu-, and Muslim-based countries) than it will in America. I think this because I also think that, ironically, the Eastern people are now more American than America is. I can tell you from my own personal experience that it's chilling how much more adventurous and innovative immigrants are than Americans. And because Avatar is an adventurous story by an innovative man, those people will get it.
But, just like they are with James Cameron himself, Americans might be too busy sneering or putting on a tough guy act to recognize something that's great sitting right in front of them.
(Here comes the obligatory “bookend” closing.) At the end of Cameron's Spider-man scriptment, Spider-man rejects the businessman's misanthropic, Darwinian proposal and decides to stand up for the common man. He takes $250 million of the businessman's money and spreads it out across Manhattan like confetti. Soon after, Peter Parker also stands up to a bully at his school and:
- From James Cameron's Spider-man Scriptment:
Everybody cheers. Because the truth is: we really do like heroes. Especially when they're underdogs.
