James Bowman: Of course the cartoon is a fake! But it's a genuine fake.
John Lanchester: If I had to name one high-cultural notion that had died in my adult lifetime, it would be the idea that difficulty is artistically desirable.
Bowman: While on planet Earth half of the 6,500 languages spoken by actual people are expected to die out before the end of the century, our popular culture triumphs in inventing an artificial language for a people who have never existed. Avatar is really not a simulacrum in the way that we are used to seeing movies, like other works of art, as being. Pandora is a new and improved creation unlike anything in the world -- though it may be, in a desultory fashion, like lots of things in the world -- and therefore, at its most fundamental level, a denial of the tradition of mimesis, the imitation of reality, in Western art.
Decius: I've gotten old enough that I now understand why adults seek to escape reality. Paradoxically, I think I was better at escaping reality when I was younger.
An exchange: Someone once accused Craig Venter of playing God. His reply was, "We're not playing."
Bowman: Pandora equals Earth, but with the addition of magic -- Earth re-imagined by a superior creator as a habitation much to be preferred to the tired old original by the vast throngs who have bought tickets in order to experience it. In that case, what is to be made, politically speaking, of the film's representation of Earthlings as we know them in the role of corporate exploiters of the alien world?
Paul Graham: It will always suck to work for large organizations, and the larger the organization, the more it will suck.
Louis Menand: Television was the Cold War intellectuals' nightmare, a machine for bringing kitsch and commercialism directly into the home. But by exposing people to an endless stream of advertising, television taught them to take nothing at face value, to read everything ironically. We read the horror comics today and smile complacently at the sheer over-the-top campiness of the effects. In fact, that is the only way we can read them. We have lost our innocence.
Bowman: Audiences expect no imitation but allusion to reality and to other "art" or artifice indiscriminately and would regard as irrelevant any complaint that it doesn't look like the real world. The world of the movies and television and the other visual media is probably more real to them anyway.
"Leonard Nimoy": It's all lies. But they're entertaining lies. And in the end, isn't that the real truth? The answer ... is No.
Peter Munro: Why bother the brain with dross when technology can pick up the slack? But deeper thought, too, seems to be skipping away in a ready stream of information. Neil Postman once asked if we had known the impact the motor vehicle would have on life, would we have embraced it so thoroughly. Robert Fitzgerald says it's time we asked the same question of computers.
Avatar and the Flight from Reality | 
