2009 was not a big year for political film.  But, that’s not particularly unusual.  The most lucrative audience for feature films is the moviegoer, on average a 16 year old boy, who pays a full price admission during the first couple of weeks of a film’s release.   It is during that period, the studio’s cut of a film’s revenues is the highest.  The longer a film is on the market the smaller the take for the film’s producers.  While there is money to be made in television rights and DVD rentals, it is in those first few weeks that a film gets its “legs”.  Word of mouth and the “buzz” combine to make one out of one hundred Hollywood realeases a Jackpot Film; a film that audiences will pay full price to see more than once.

In 2009 there was released what looks to be a quintessential Jackpot film, AVATAR.  Released on December 18 the film became the top grossing film of the year in just twelve days.  In that time Avatar grossed $1.3 billion dollars worldwide ($429 million domestically).  Already, Avatar is, after Titanic, the second top grossing film of all time (58^th when adjusted for inflation, right ahead of Back to the Future).   The rest of the top grossing films of the year are mainly Hollywood confections and franchises targeted at the puerile hordes, but Avatar is a different creature altogether.  It is a political film.  One gets the sense that in the main, audiences don’t go to see Avatar for the story but at least the plot doesn’t seem to get in the way.

Warning, I’m about to discuss the plot.  However, I don’t think that’s important.  In other words, I don’t think you’ll enjoy the film less for me telling you what’s going to happen.  If you can’t guess that in about the first fifteen minutes of the film, you wouldn’t be reading this column or attending this film festival.

Avatar is set on the planet (moon) Pandora which is rich in a mineral called creatively enough “unobtainium”.  An evil corporation in strip mining the planet runs afoul of the native population, the Na’Vi who besides being a pleasant shade of blue have the bodies of runway models.  Earthlings sent to negotiate mineral rights with the Na’Vi go native (literally) and eventually conspire with the Na’Vi to fight the evil corporation.  The Na’Vi are a peaceful people who live in a tree, hunt with bows and arrows and recognize that they don’t own the planet, the planet owns them.

Philosophically there is some pretty tricky work going on here.  The plot’s attack on corporate culture, on mainstream religion and capitalism is pretty straightforward.  To summarize; corporations bad, religion misguided, and capitalism wrong.  As a state employee I was relieved to see that the Government was not the evil doer (always bad for us bureaucrats) but I was also a bit surprised that the Government was no where to be found.  Isn’t the evil company violating some law, rule, treaty or something?  I guess an implicit message of this film is that the UN will survive into the future, doing nothing for eons to come.  The real, real bad guys in the movie are a retired Marine and his private army.  James Cameron (who directed and wrote the film) was not afraid to take on most of the icons of Western Civilization with the exception of the military.

Let me repeat.  I don’t think most people go to this film to get a dose of New Age religion but it doesn’t repel them either.  In making this film a top grossing behemoth, we accept the message that humans are the problem not the solution; and that we could solve our environmental concerns by shooting ourselves into outer space (pass the Kool-Aid!).  Or I suppose we could move into trees, hunt with bows and arrows and ride around on the backs of pterodactyls.

Daniel P. Franklin is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Georgia State University, and the author of Politics and Film: the Political Culture of Film in the United States.

Some of the best movies of all time are political films – “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington”, “All the President’s Men”, “Dr. Strangelove” – to name just a few.

The industry is in the midst of its annual awards season, and as it happens, many of the nominees and winners have been political – “The Hurt Locker” (Producer of the Year Winner, Producers Guild of America), “Inglorious Basterds” (Best Ensemble Cast Winner, Screen Actors Guild), Morgan Freeman (Golden Globe Nominee for  Best Actor, “Invictus”) and “District 9” (Golden Globe Nominee for Best Original Screenplay).

Politics on Film is launching our own survey to highlight political movies, asking movie fans to weigh in on what the best political movie of the previous year was. This is a non-scientific survey, intended simply to create a record of some audience members’ views on political films and what they offered to the culture or dialogue.

The notion of doing this annual survey came about for a number of reasons. One, I was reading a book, “Politics and Film”, by Georgia State University political science professor Daniel P. Franklin, which in part examines the question of whether movies reflect the current culture, or if the current culture is influenced by what people watch in the movies.

To the extent one adds the notion of “political films” to that question, you get an interesting idea about how political films fit in a given year with what’s actually happening in the world. Did political films in 2009 change cultural perception? Or did they more accurately reflect the culture at the time they were being made?

Since the main goal of Politics on Film is to unite different political viewpoints around the shared experience of a movie, what better way to extend that dialogue beyond a single annual event and look at political films throughout the year?

We have a number of guests lined up to comment about some of the films of 2009 and why they were relevant. Of course one of the most interesting and consistent questions that arises with the concept of “political film” is how to define what that means. And from an initial list of movies like “Inglorious Basterds” and “Invictus”, some of our guests are introducing discussion about less overtly political movies like “Avatar” and “Up in the Air”.

Speaking of “Avatar”, The New York Times last week featured a page-one story about the reactions people are having to the metaphors and messages they believe are playing out onscreen. The fact this story appeared perhaps answers the question posed by Professor Franklin: film both impacts AND reflects our views – both as individuals and as a society.

We encourage you to take a few minutes before February 1 and respond to the very short survey.

Politics on Film is featured in the January issue of DC Magazine in its Best of the City 2010 section. Check out the write-up, and other neat things to love about Washington, DC at the magazine’s web site.