Nisi Shawl on Avatar

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Thanks to Nisi for providing this interesting view of Avatar, which I think is useful for fiction writers. – JeffV

Sort of following up on Cynthia’s post about Up In the Air:

I’ve seen the hit, Oscar-winning movie Avatar twice. Not because I dig it so very much, but because I wanted to make sure I didn’t miss anything—especially anything the director didn’t realize he was putting in there. And that goes double for catching him leaving things out.

I do agree with Richard K. Morgan’s two-word review, but I had a bit more to say the first time around, when I wrote about Avatar on the Carl Brandon Society’s list serve. I can say even more about it now, and with more authority. So herewith my remarks, which include modifications and expansions of my original bullet points

I allowed my first viewing to be a submersive one. Easy to do—the forest scenes in particular had an aqueous quality to them, and the 3-D effects made of the darkened theater an undersea of the unconscious. I felt like a filter feeder, bound to the rock of my understanding while waves of gentle beauty pulsed through me, filled with the food of perception. Or something.

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Cynthia Ward on “Up in the Air” and Diversity

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Cynthia Ward and Nisi Shawl are guestblogging on Booklifenow this week. Here’s Cynthia’s first solo post.

[SPOILER WARNING: If you haven’t seen the movie Up in the Air, you may want to skip this post.]

I don’t own a television and rarely get to the movies, so I tend to mentally drift into a happy fantasy world, one in which I imagine Hollywood has finally started to reflect the everyday human diversity you find merely by driving off a movie lot onto the L.A. streets.

My fantasy world is not, however, one in which all Hollywood releases have become great works of art. So I’m always pleasantly surprised to encounter an exceptional movie like Up in the Air. You get strong writing, sharp dialogue, superior acting, and even the occasional unpredictable plot twist. You also get timeliness, since its topic is corporate downsizing.

What you don’t get so much is diversity.

I should probably provide some context, because, after all, if the movie were set in Maine, and featured a man driving all over Bangor firing people, no one remotely familiar with the state would be surprised if the guy’s boss and coworkers were all white.

However, given that protagonist Ryan Bingham lives in the Midwest and jets all over the United States firing people, this is a remarkably white movie. His coworkers, his boss, his lover, his siblings, and their friends and families—white. Racial diversity is pretty much confined to the characters being fired, which gives the unfortunate message—oubtless unintentional, but still present—that minorities exist to be fired.

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Nisi Shawl and Cynthia Ward on ROAARS and The Unmarked State

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Nisi Shawl and Cynthia Ward are guestblogging here on Booklifenow all this week. Their book Writing the Other is a remarkable exploration of character, situation, and perception. It’s a recommended text in Booklife – JeffV

Cynthia and I want to begin our joint stint as guest bloggers here by sharing an excerpt from Writing the Other: A Practical Approach, the book we wrote together based on the workshop we co-teach. The excerpt will help you get into the spirit of our upcoming posts, which are going to riff on related topics

First, we’ll define a couple of the terms we use:

The unmarked state—Possessing demographic characteristics considered “unremarkable” by the dominant culture.

ROAARS—This is an acronym we created to talk about a group of differences from the unmarked state that are, in this culture, considered to be deeply significant differences. These differences are: Race, (sexual) Orientation, Age, Ability, Religion, Sex.

Keep those concepts in mind as you read the book excerpt below. – Nisi Shawl

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Nisi Shawl and Cynthia Ward: Guest-blogging on Booklifenow This Week

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Nisi Shawl and Cynthia Ward, authors of Writing the Other, among other books, will be guest-blogging this week on Booklifenow. Please help welcome them–I think you’ll find their posts fascinating.

Here’s more about both writers…

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