The right open fire on James Cameron

'When he was five, he saw the United States invade Vietnam, and was 21 by the time the US removed itself, which means that he spent his teenage years watching his giant of a next-door neighbour take the beating of its life. His politics are a strange admixture — the leanings of a liberal trapped within the titanium exoskeleton of a hawk — with an almost forensic fascination for How The Mighty Fall. Look at the enemy he concocted for Arnie in T2. Almost any other director would have come up with a Terminator that was bigger than him — heftier, more hi-tech — but Cameron went completely the other direction, devising a slim, sinuous shape-shifter — a Porsche” to Arnie’s Panzer tank, mercury to his might. What makes T2 such eerie viewing now is seeing how accurately that T-1000 prefigures the very real threat America would face on 9/11: a hydra-headed demon who uses the weight of its aggressors against them, absorbing every punch, its molecules scattering before regrouping again. Cameron is our foremost director of asymmetric combat, with an unerring feel for the way that small forces defeat larger ones, for the pivots and turning points by which overwhelming military strength is turned against itself. It’s what gives his fantasies their vicelike grip on the national consciousness, and what makes him a very useful director to have around right now. If I were on the right, I’d be kissing and making up fairly soon, celebrating the director for the keen-eyed, conservative critique he offers of Wilsonian foreign adventurism. Although do you want to know what I really learnt from Avatar? I learnt that the best way to catch a really big dragon is to come at him from above. “Tarouk is the baddest boy in the sky. He never gets attacked,” says our hero, Jake Sully. “Why look up?”' — my thoughts on the Avatar brouhaha here

My article on James Cameron and the politics of the blockbuster, for Slate, here