Invitation to a Beheading or How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love Literary Aplomb

Sorry for the pun in the title, but not only is Nabokov obviously a genius, but borrowing from the title of the Kubrick movie seemed apt, considering the oblique (in my mind) similarities between the novel and film, although Invitation to a Beheading is seemingly less satire than it is surreal. At the time of writing this book Nabokov was living in 1935 Nazi Germany Berlin and, no doubt, had plenty of material to work with in building the absurdist totalitarian state of the novel - Kubrick had the Cold War and the absurd doctrine of mutually assured self-destruction via nuclear war. As with any good Existentialist-inspired art, both allow (read:implore) the reader, or viewer, to reassess self-meaning in the face of the senseless and abstract.

In Invitation to a Beheading we are introduced to Cincinnatus C., a prisoner of fictitious totalitarian-land, unable to blend into society and consequently convicted of "gnostical turpitude" and sentenced to the ax. The narrative concerns his final days, his inner-ruminations, and his interactions with the obtuse and "transparent" few including his jailor Rodion, the prison director Rodrig, his lawyer Roman, and the lone fellow prisoner a M'sieur Pierre, among others. Cincinnatus spends his days imploring his captors for the exact date of his death but is continually rebuffed for morbidity and deplored for not being gracious for their ridiculous outreaches. He writes his wife, imploring her to feel even a smidgen of remorse, to give his life some meaning - it is all for naught as he is defined not by who he is, but by who he isn't, by his lack of conformity - she rebuffs him, afraid such an acknowledgment would create an unsavory association. He also spends time writing, voicing his inner-dialogue describing his remoteness and disembodiment, as well as his dreams of a world where the semi-sleep of reality gives way to the ennobled and spiritual.

What we call dreams is semi-reality, the promise of reality, a foreglimpse and a whiff of it; that is, they contain, in a very vague, diluted state, more genuine reality than our vaunted waking which, in its turn, is semi-sleep, an evil drowsiness into which penetrate in grotesque disguise the sounds and sights of the real world, flowing beyond the periphery of the mind...

The book reminded me of Charlie Kaufman's work. In Synedoche, New York, Kaufman's character of Caden creates a semi-reality via performance-art through which his character "escapes," although in this case to a hyper-reality where suffering and experience are magnified, whereas in Invitation to a Beheading Cincinnatus uses his impending death as a springboard into an alternate dream-reality where he transcends the misery of his unreality. In the end, and not unlike the visuals in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, as he is lead away to his demise, his cell and the prison disintegrate, his chair and cot revealed to be props that fall apart, and even the spider in the corner of his cell is shown to be fake. Unreality is collapsing, shown to be the charlatan that Cincinnatus's mind finally deemed it, allowing him to finally, borrowing from Hamlet, "shuffle off" his surreal "mortal coil."

Review: Avatar 3D

Warning: Spoilers Within.

I'd be lying if I said I didn't enjoy James Cameron's latest blockbuster Avatar. An exercise in how much movie money can buy, he successfully brings to life Pandora, a distant moon full of hostile yet beautiful alien fauna and flora. It is both grand in scale and scope, and brought together with near seemless 3D and CGI. It is nothing short of visually-arresting. In this respect, Cameron has set the bar very high. In terms of plot, it is generic. As social commentary, the movie falls flat.

Ostensibly Avatar is an anti-imperialist film with an environmental-bent, a pedantic exercise in nativism versus technology, feeling versus thinking. In this case, the natives are the Na’vi, an indigenous nine-foot tall humanoid species whose culture bears more than a striking resemblance to many of Earth’s indigenous tribes. Those who can, speak an almost pidgin-English. The Na’vi are presented in their “natural state,” which in this case means living happily and harmoniously under the greater rubric of biological-planet as neurosystem. The Na’vi, apparently after repeated contact with humans, have consequently declared they don't need or want human culture or technology, instead favoring moral harmony and sustainability. To hammer this home, Cameron juxtaposes Pandoran ecological niches meeting the needs of the Na’vi with that of humans who have to create what they need. The film demands the viewer sympathize with the Na'vi, and to decry technology and the wanton environmental destruction that comes with.

Yet, as superficially anti-imperialist as Avatar appears, Cameron manages to come back and slap the viewer in the face by deftly weaving in the story of Jake Sulley as white savior. Sulley is a parapalegic marine tasked by a huge corporate entity with assuming control of his deceased scientist twin-brother's ‘avatar’, a remotely controlled test-tube Na'vi-human hybrid. These business interests basically want Sully to play the role of anthropologist, engaging in participant-observation research learning everything there is to know about the Na'vi. Eventually, they hope, humans will be able to mine for unobtainium, the immensely valuable mineral and reason for their presence on Pandora, without having to dodge the natives’ poison-tipped arrows. Apparently the bow and arrow is literally universal. Who knew? But I quibble.

After Sulley plays the bit of stupid white man (thank you, Nobody) and is saved by his future girlfriend, he is treated near-reverentially when ‘spirits’, seeds of a great tree, float down upon him to bask in his awesomeness. Eventually he falls in love with the Na’vi and their ways and goes native. Then the humans attack. Then he becomes the great motivator, convincing the Na’vi to channel some self-preservation and avoid their own annihilation. He also becomes the great warrior, conquering the biggest bird in the sky and consequently handing technology its ass.

Despite its condescending tone, I still have to admit I enjoyed the experience of Avatar. James Cameron successfully created an environment that is as much a character as the Na'vi and humans themselves. The irony is he did so through expanding the limits of our own technology, creating a film that questions our own relationships with technology. I doubt that was intentional though.