AVATAR 2 and The All-American Love Affair with Guns [20 Dec 2022]

There is an old axiom in storytelling known as ‘Chekhov’s Gun.’ The name comes, of course, from Anton Chekhov who wrote, ‘if you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off.’   Well, times have moved on since Chekhov, and I should like to identify a new principle. Let’s call it ‘Hollywood’s Gun.’ It goes like this: ‘If a (generally male) North American film-maker tells a story, he absolutely must include a gun.’ 

It is strange, isn’t it? Most of us will go through life from cradle to crematorium without a gun ever becoming a central feature of our storyline. But this isn’t true at all in American cinema; and the curious thing is, this visceral American love affair with guns is so ingrained, and so profound, and so much a part of cinema-DNA that I don’t believe film-makers are even aware of it anymore. Guns have simply become an essential and inescapable part of the story, just as much as the character arc, or the love interest, or the final epiphany. Often more so. There must be a driving itch in the screenwriter’s brain that keeps him awake at night until he has written in a gun. And from that point onwards, Chekhov’s rule kicks in and the whole narrative becomes subservient to the gun.

Am I exaggerating this? I don’t think I am. I offer you Exhibit A - Avatar: The Way of Water. (Oh, and by the way I know James Cameron is Canadian, but the gun-mind-virus has clearly infected him too.) Now if ever there was a landscape with a richer potential for stories than Cameron’s fictional planet Pandora, I don’t know what it would be. The artists and designers have created an utterly sumptuous world full of beauty and narrative potential; yet into this cinematic Eden, James Cameron has dropped a lazy western-inspired revenge tale where a mad army colonel armed with unlimited stocks of assault rifles, ammunition, and other assorted weaponry chases down an innocent family armed with bows and arrows. Really? Is that the best Hollywood could do?  Sadly, it seems it is. And I suspect that every dire review the film gets is on some level due to the disappointment every reviewer has felt on being served up with another gun-driven narrative.  

Guns in films give birth to four lazy memes that crop up so frequently you will readily recognise every one. The first is the ‘deus ex machina,’ hook where Good-Character A is about to be shot by Bad-Character B but is saved by a shot from Unexpected-Offscreen-Character C. It is quite depressing to see this meme show up in Avatar.  (The second meme - which Avatar thankfully avoids - is ‘gun-on-the-floor’ where a gun is kicked around, and two fighting protagonists have to wrestle to reach it first. Yawn.) The third meme is especially heinous. This is the ‘good-guys-never-get-hit’ rule, where the hero and his family can duck and weave through streams of machine gun fire, picking off random bad guys, but never catching a bullet themselves. (Man but those automatic weapons in Avatar must be so inaccurate!) Finally however, and most egregious of all, is ‘the Bonanza injury.’ Cinema would have us believe that gun shots don’t do that much damage. Bad guys topple over and die quietly. Good guys take one to the shoulder but carry on bravely. A fatal gunshot on a good guy is an ‘oh dear, I appear to be bleeding,’ situation. (Avatar is guilty of this too.) In reality of course, assault weapons tear moon-sized chunks out of people and leave gore and body parts everywhere.

Can I appeal to Hollywood to find a new generation of directors and screenwriters who aren’t obsessed by guns. Even Titanic has a ‘gun chase’ sequence where (in surely the least believable scene of the film) Billy Zane’s Cal steals a gun and tries to shoot Jack and Rose, firing reckless several times in a chase down the stairway and through the lounge. Thankfully the ‘good-guys-never-get-hit’ rule applies. But was it really necessary in the first place?

In the meantime, Avatar 2 is not an awful film. It should be shorter, but it is perfectly watchable. And beautiful. And I wanted it to be better than it is. But with the biggest budget in cinema history it is a missed opportunity for some real science fiction storytelling, and yet another platform for dull NRA clichés.    

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