That’s a wrap on 2022 cinema. Oscar nominations are out, and the associated limited releases have mostly wound their way through theaters. I’m still months behind schedule, but who cares. This year’s Christmas smash hit, Avatar: The Way of Water, was finally fallen to no. 3 after seven weekends at the top of the box office, and the daunting questions surrounding its profitability have been answered. The release finally got me to watch the original, and I’ve already splorted out more than 4,000 words on the two of them.

There’s just one sticky question stopping me from turning the page, and it’s a weird question, and I feel weird asking it, but it won’t go away, and the question is this:

How come I don’t get to see any of those 3D Na’vi titties?

In Avatar and its sequel, females of the Na’vi species native to Pandora are drawn with titties, which are 3D just like everything else in the movies. Even though Na’vi are performed through motion-capture, that technology is really only for faces, the rest of their bodies are cartoon puppets that are animated based on points of reference the way video game characters are. It was, therefore, an active choice on writer/director/editor/producer James Cameron’s part to put titties on them, and it was also an active choice to not show them to me. How come, Jim?

The female Na’vi’s scant, almost uniform costumes seem purpose-drawn to call attention to their 3D titties. They all have thin strips of cloth or large necklaces, or often just hair, seemingly welded in place covering their chests up no matter how they soar through the trees or oceans, which, if you pay enough attention to their chest area, turns into a weird, constant contrast against the realistic physics that were studiously animated for the rest of Pandora. As I write about The Way of Water and how much research went into the most minute details of liquid physics, how much more data is in the film than the original just so they could digitally recreate water with such minute accuracy, how they came out with several patents for realistic water physics they’re going to sell for use in video games, I can’t help but wonder – why do the female Na’vi’s tops stay so firmly in place? Could they not find anyone who wanted to do similar research on the realistic physics of titties?

I guess the first part of this question is, why were the Na’vi drawn with 3D titties in the first place? There’s no reason to assume Na’vi sexuality and reproduction mirrors that of humans, and the films go into some detail on this subject.

We are shown the Na’vi’s heightened sexuality in Avatar. In a famous scene, Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) and Neytiri (Zoe Saldana) grab the long ropes of hair that extend from all Na’vi heads and peel back the ends to reveal a bunch of butthole worm-looking nerve endings and plug into each other, achieving a sexual ecstasy no human could ever attain.

This appears to be a purely recreational sex act, not how they reproduce, and promotional images of a pregnant Neytiri with a swollen belly and breasts seem to indicate Na’vi reproduction and nursing is roughly analogous to humans and other Terran mammals.

I can believe the male Na’vi have dicks, and I can believe those dicks could be hidden under the little rags they wear. Nature would certainly select for more compact Na’vi members – they aren’t needed for pleasure, that’s what the butthole worm-looking nerve endings are for, and you wouldn’t want a real meat mallet swinging around down there when you’re running through the trees like they do, that’d be untenable.

In The Way of Water, one of the Sullys’ adopted children, Kiri, is specified to have been bourn by the brain-dead body of Grace Augustine’s avatar, so while we can’t say for sure their reproductive systems are identical to humans’, it is a canonical fact that female Na’vi bodies are compatible enough to be raped and impregnated by a human and bring a child to term while brain-dead. That’s a possibility The Way of Water goes out of its way to tell you about.

Actually, there’s another question that comes even before that – why do humans have titties? The breasts of every other mammal on this planet only swell up during ovulation and nursing and then recede. Your cat could have as many as eight nipples, but she isn’t doing zoomies with eight permanent breasts. Full-time titties are uniquely human organs, and we’re not really sure why they evolved.  

The pill has been around for 60 years now, it’s no revolution to point out that sex can be for fun, and couples often engage in sex acts purely for fun – “business in the front, party in the back,” as they say – but the mechanics of sex and reproduction profoundly shape and separate societies. The way the Na’vi butthole worms demonstrate this is a central point of both Avatar films.

These butthole worms can plug into pretty much every plant and animal on Pandora for a variety of non-sexual applications, making them crucial not only to Na’vi sexuality, but also their ecosystem, lifestyle and worldview. Avatar is set up as a classical battle between colonizers who view the world as a collection of resources to be mined and hippies who want to be one with nature, but “being one with nature” means something very different when you can literally plug your nervous system into any passing creature. To the Na’vi, the line between them and a Pandoran dog, or even a tree, doesn’t exist, not in the metaphorical “I did a bunch of acid and the tree and I are friends now” sense, but as a concrete reflection of their biology. The ritual with the butthole worms probably isn’t even considered sexual, even if it’s portrayed as an exotic sex act to a human audience. 

Avatar forces us to look at sex and reproduction as two separate things, even if they overlap in our species, and because of that overlap, it’s very, very easy for us to have children by accident. It’s shocking to think directly about how dramatically this fact shapes our societies when you measure it against a species that doesn’t have that problem. Many of the biggest political fights of the past century have been over women’s ability to choose whether or not they become or remain pregnant, not just through abortion but through access to birth control, regular gynecological care, accountability for rapists or access to weapons to fight them off – even women’s right to vote on all this in the first place is only 103 years old in this country.

Queer people add another dimension to this – sexuality and reproduction only overlap for partners with different sex organs, meaning only some couples are equipped for and inclined toward sex that can result in accidental pregnancy. Heteronormativity, the idea that only this type of couple is normal or valid, and the misogyny and homophobia written into ancient religions both make a lot more sense when you think about it this way. Heterosexual couples are far from the default in adult life, but they are the only ones producing children, so they’re treated as the default by institutions that cater to families, which is most of them. Many religious texts are derived from laws written for a time when reproduction was a critical function of societies and lineage had to be tracked manually, and all the lingering stigmas around homosexuality and women having sex outside of marriage fit much more soundly into this context than modern ones.

That’s probably it, that’s probably why Cameron gave the Na’vi their 3D titties – titties are fun! Whyever they came into being, they’re a huge part of human attraction and foreplay and some recreational sex acts. But there’s the contradiction. One of the funnest things you can do with titties is show them to me, and Cameron does not do this. How come?

Animating a motion-capture character to have breasts is an active choice – you’re not pointing a camera at a woman who comes with them built-in, you’re drawing them onto a blank canvass. The body of whoever is playing the character doesn’t matter at all. In fact, motion-capture technology developed specifically to get around the limitations of actors’ human bodies. In Lord of the Rings, 5’8 and full-bodied Andy Serkis plays the gaunt, 3’6 Gollum, and in The Hobbit, 6’0 air-breathing Benedict Cumberbatch plays a 427-foot long fire-breathing dragon. Cameron is certainly aware of this – in The Way of Water, he casts 73-year-old Sigourney Weaver to play the 14-year-old Kiri.

In Alex Garland’s 2015 film Ex Machina, Alicia Vikander plays Ava, an artificially intelligent android with female attributes and expression, equipped with a vagina and programmed to be heterosexual – the decision to give her gender and sexuality is not treated as neutral within the film. As the other characters point out in as many words, she could have been a black box, but she was given sexuality as a tool to make her more human and to help her convince others of her humanity. I think every teenage boy has wondered at some point if girls are human or calculating robots covered in beautiful skin who wield that beauty as a weapon when they want something from us. Ava was built from the ground up to reflect this conception of women.  

Vikander plays her in a bald cap and a tight bodysuit, with arms, legs and midriff painted to be transparent in post-production, giving her the shape of a two-piece, and in one scene, she puts clothing and a wig on top of all that to look more human. Then, in the film’s climax, Ava covers herself completely in artificial skin and pauses to examine her body in a womb of mirrors. Ironically, but also quite poetically, Vikander plays the scene fully nude, removing all the layers she had been wearing to play a moment when her character has put her final layer on, and her body is noticeably smaller and unrestricted now that she is naked.

The scene isn’t about gazing at Vikander at all, this is Ava’s moment. This automaton has been given, in many ways cursed with, the gender of a species she does not belong to because her creator was awkward at parties, and now that she’s mastered it as a tool, she gets to look at her mature, naked body and fully realize this part of herself for the first time. It’s a shockingly powerful moment. To a film that is much more about gender identity than it is about artificial intelligence, these are crucial decisions. The scene, and the entire movie, wouldn’t be nearly the same if it didn’t use the full scope and detail of Vikander’s body, both in and out of costume.

I try not to pay too much attention to actors’ private parts, but mainstream sex appeal is a key casting consideration, and breasts are a key part of movie costume design. This goes all the way back to the Golden Age, when just about every movie was the same meet-cute will-they-won’t-they between an interchangeable cast of actors under a given studio’s umbrella. The bottom line was thought to hinge on how many people wanted to see the lead actors fuck, meaning that conventional attractiveness was the dividing line between leading and supporting actor jobs, and being seen as attractive was crucial to a career.

In the mid-‘00s productions for Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean movies, star Keira Knightley describes having 45 minutes per day spent just on her breasts in make-up, which included literally painting in cleavage. This is one of the most beautiful women in the world, but Disney has bet a cumulative $700 million or so on absolutely everyone being attracted to her, so they decide to devote that amount of time in makeup just for the tit men in the audience.

Again, Cameron knows all this, and his films demonstrate it better than many. Horniness and the desire to return to the nuclear family are at the heart of The Terminator, Aliens and T2: Judgment Day, and he even brought nudity to the PG-13 screen for the first time in Titanic, refusing to cut the iconic painting scene or crop Kate Winslet’s breasts out from it.

As with the nudity in Ex Machina, this is a crucial part of the movie. Jack isn’t just spunky, he’s full of spunk. Rose’s fiancé wants to share bank accounts, attend parties and presumably have some children to help him get onto other steamships’ lifeboats, but Jack wants to fuck! Even in this scene, when he’s all out of salami and Gatorade and has to take a breather, he’s still obsessed with Rose’s body and soul, wanting to capture it, all of it, on canvass. If you remove that element of their relationship, or even if you just say it happened offscreen, it’s no longer the same movie.

Cameron has said that he wants Pandora to be immersive. Well, what if someone – not me – wants to immerse themselves face-first into some 3D Na’vi titties?

We like to think that porn and technologically advanced blockbusters with nine-figure budgets aren’t the same thing, but actually, in many ways, they are. Again, one of Cameron’s own films, 1991’s Terminator 2: Judgment Day, illustrates this best. Cameron chewed through around $100 million to bring the terrifying liquid metal T-1000 to the screen with effects that are considered a turning point for the use of computer-generated imagery decades later. Avatar was a singular cultural phenomenon, but Cameron has always been at the tip of the special effects spear, punching new paths open so the rest of the shaft can come through.

In an essay that had a deep impact on me but that I can’t find now because I don’t remember who wrote it, one of Judgment Day’s scant few detractors called it “CGI porn.” The argument went that T2 is structured as a handful of scenes of intense visual stimulation connected loosely by a bunch of poorly acted talking scenes, just like the average adult film. It’s a dismissive argument that doesn’t give the film nearly enough credit made by someone who was probably old enough to have seen actual pornography in a theater, maybe even the same theater where he was now seeing Judgment Day, but the exercise of applying this logic to other CGI-heavy films can be revealing. “A special effect without a story is a very boring thing,” as they say. And what does it matter that movie cameras these days pornographically leer over meticulously sexless CGI superheroes instead of over people doing it? You’re an adult, you can pound off to whatever you want!

Cameron went to extraordinary lengths to expand technology for T2, Titanic and Avatar to tell the story he wanted to tell, but historically, advances in visual technology have always been applied almost immediately to porn. The agreed-upon first pornographic film in history was made in 1908, making pornos older than Westerns. Archeologists have found erotic art and graffiti on artifacts from Mesopotamia, Egypt, East Asia – they’ve even found pornographic cave paintings.

Historically, it’s not a stretch to say the camera was invented for the express purpose of showing me your titties. One of the first uses of the Daguerreotype was to spread pictures of naked women, ostensibly so artists could practice painting them. With the explosive spread of smartphones putting a high-quality camera in many people’s hip pocket, it’s been estimated that more photographs were taken in 2015 than the entirety of human history up to that point, and I’d make a safe bet that most of them were nudes – this was also the height of Snapchat’s growth, the app tripled in daily video views from May to November of that year.

This pattern of new technology immediately becoming nudes technology plays out with Avatar just as much as any other major advance. In 2011, during 3D’s long “in” cycle that followed in Avatar’s wake, Hong Kong brought us 3D Sex and Zen: Extreme Ecstasy, billed as the first ever IMAX 3D erotic film – this is in error, IMAX wouldn’t let it screen in their theaters. This is a real movie. I saw trailers for it. It got released in 12 markets and made $10.3 million in theaters worldwide. Someone really did want to immerse themselves face-first into some 3D titties, and son of a bitch, they made it happen.

Sexuality is baked in to all of our imagery throughout history. “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder,” as they say, but now, the beholder has the technology to show everyone the world through their eyes. That’s it by the way, that’s how come the Na’vi have 3D titties – Cameron thinks they’re beautiful that way, or at least he knows most viewers will think they’re beautiful that way, and I don’t get to see them because every frame of these movies cost a lot of money to make and Cameron reportedly self-censored so the MPAA would give him a PG-13 without any static.

Beauty, and definitions of it which must now be shared, is a contentious social and political issue – who gets to define beauty, who gets to think of themselves as beautiful, what subcultures’ definitions of beauty are normalized through mass depiction, how images of beautiful people are controlled and spread, who has access to the technology that allows all this – like the decision to give Na’vi 3D titties, these are active choices. All fictional characters, even ones portrayed by a live actor, are actively made up by someone, and their sexuality, which can range from completely implicit to painting cleavage onto them to getting to see them unfurl their butthole worms, is also made up, and the sexual features and inclinations of made-up characters is never neutral. They reflect something about the person making them up and something about their target audience.

I suppose I could have just rewatched Ex Machina instead of writing all this.