What a great season for film technology! We can, without space travel, meet live creatures from another planet, fly with them on great winged dinosaurs, swoop into chasms, soar to the clouds, and rejoice in their great courage as they defeat, with only bow and arrow, the monstrous villainous machines which have come to decimate their forest. Incredible. Imagination flung outward toward the stars!  And then, magically, we can travel inward to a quirky dream-scape where Alice falls once more down the rabbit hole to a world where logic no longer rules: little fat creatures have human faces; a queen has a human head on a tiny body; cats float in space. The Mad Hatter is probably less mad than the rest of his world, and little cushiony adorable piglets act as foot-warmers. Fantasy exterior-interior and we come away from both hugely entertained.

But, as in Greek theater, you leave the stage with a message — perhaps not as clear as Oedipus which tells us that no matter what we do, we’re stuck with what the gods ordain, or Arthur Miller’s social message in All my Sons (1948) which reminds us that, with those boys fighting out there, it’s wrong to profit from their sacrifice — they are all our sons.  In Hurt Locker’s final scene in the grocery store, you come away with the cognition that the soldier returns from the horror of a life/death struggle and finds ordinary life flat and without meaning, just as you learn, in the last tragic scene in Chinatown (1988), that no matter how you fight the system, ultimately it prevails. Just as in A Serious Man, you come away with a strong message about the nature of God, although three viewers can see the same film and come away with a different meaning.  And so on with every good film.

Yes, entertainment, but we learn from films, if only subliminally. I understood, in 1934 (coming from a home where hope was a dangerous word, where failure was the norm), that Tarzan, in his great and sheltering tree-house, could take hold of one vine and swing out with great courage, confident that there would always be another vine waiting for him (1934, Tarzan and his Mate). To believe in the possibility of the waiting vine was a whole new life for me.  In 1936, watching Leslie Howard die in Petrified Forest, I understood that there was nobility in sacrificing for love.  In 1964, I learned in Night of the Iguana, in a wonderful scene played by spinster Deborah Kerr, the recognition and acceptance of sexual diversity. And on and on. When Marlon Brando stands at the bottom of the steps calling “Stella!” you know that his bad behavior has cost him a wife.  So what were the messages of those two great fantasies that have delighted us this hard cold season?

In Avatar, the forest people, so stunningly beautiful and so concerned with man’s connection to the natural world, turn out to be oddly close to 19th century American Indians who battle against the big bad military guys — a sci-fi Dances with Wolves. So you come away with the hope that individual courage (and bows and arrows) will win out against monster machines. Man’s courage can triumph.  Avatar tells us, as have many other films, that power corrupts and that rapacious and grasping men have ravaged this beautiful planet but that the noble savage can ultimately win and help his wonderful forest to flourish.

Alice is a tract on feminism. Yes, says the Mad Hatter, we all need a touch of madness. A good sentiment, but Alice shows us that a boring marriage is no longer the safe haven for a woman — that since she has already beheaded dragons, she can go off to become CEO of some foreign trading company…without a Johnny Depp to turn up as a sailor on the real ship in her real life.

Actually, what is happening on our planet in this great technologically advanced year of 2010?  Our own “gentle savages” gave up the battle against the “machine” long ago, their forests turned into parking lots for Wal-mart, and they only won, finally, not by fighting but by joining, building their great gambling casinos without even a “non-smoking room” for Mother Nature.  Just as our own Las Vegas, which in the ’50s was still a bit of the old west where you could, for a few bucks, play a little blackjack and get cheap food, has transformed into enormous overdone, overdecorated monster hotels where they pipe in perfume to cover the smell of cigarette smoke to lull you into thinking that you are not actually suffering secondary smoke lung damage, the same stuff the TV ads urge us to spritz into our own homes to cover the fact that we forgot to take out the garbage or neglected to clean the toilet. Our own great monoliths of banks are eating us alive, and TV commercials frighten us into buying drugs (legal) so we are too drugged to take out our bows and arrows and at least try a shot against the monster credit card companies who, with their small print, can trick us into usurious rates. Hey, we tried in the ’70s, and we’re just too lethargic now to make the move. As to Alice, the institution of marriage is not too great this season. Look at the rate of divorce. Every romantic film has the protagonists in the sack making love which has become recreational and not procreational, and although marriage is implied end of film, no great hope it will survive.  As to the appreciation of our great wonders of nature, guns are now  permitted in some national parks. Sea World is in the hot-seat for making pets out of great wild creatures of the sea. And one political party absolutely denies global warming, with polar bears stranded out there on bits of floating blocks of ice.

And yet, in spite of the fact that the Jabberwockies have taken over the land, that our monoliths are over-towering as we shrink smaller and smaller…in spite of the fact that this is not the protesting ’70s and it’s easier to relax in comfy stadium seats eating popcorn and being entertained by these two great fantasies, there is a subliminal message, or maybe just a suggestion…or maybe it’s just something that permeates the spirit as the perfume pervades the Vegas lobby. A little hope, a small lighted candle in a dark theater.  We are creatures blessed with imagination.  We are not just sitting on a cushy seat in a theater rooted to solid earth: we are actually bright spirits on a planet spinning through space in an unknown solar system, and the only thing that roots us here is gravity, whatever that is.  We can’t help but sense that we are, as well as these “created fantasy creatures,” ourselves remarkable.  We have blood that flows and carries nutrients where they need to go! We have hearts that beat for almost a hundred years before the batteries run out! We have  imaginations so incredible that they have taken us from the creation of the wheel to the creation of little phones that connect us with hidden corners of the planet!  We have imagination enough to understand that, although right at the moment we are pretty tired of the fight and are allowing a few almost helpless leaders  to figure out why in 2010, when we are supposed to have evolved (look back at sci-fi predictions of the ’30s), we have actually regressed to a planet fighting holy wars, divided into ideologies that give no recognition of the humanity of the other side.

The great message of both these fantasies is that we, the audience, live in a world of possibilities that challenge the imagination. That we can, with courage, go anywhere, fly anywhere, do anything, set out once again to fight a world where power corrupts. That message sits down deep in the psyche, waiting.  And when we wake up from our dreams and the lethargy of seeing those great bulldozers continue to scrape our forest clean and wonder whether we have once again the courage to confront that terrible Jabberwocky who seduced us with low-rate credit cards, it’s possible that, sitting here chomping popcorn with artificial butter, we are becoming aware that soon we may be getting tired of their reality programming and may be getting ready for some reality excitement of our own. That when we leave the darkened theater and get our second wind, we might just find the courage to take the next step in our evolution.

Imagination rules!