most insincere filmmaker ever?
James Cameron is fascinating in how the themes and messages in his films always seem to actively contradict the guy's actual philosophy and worldviews. His movies always contain the most preachy, squeaky clean messages that are guaranteed to challenge and offend no one, but they seem fundamentally at odds with Cameron's real-life attitudes about the world.
This can be found in virtually all his films. The Terminator movies for instance, serve to tell a story about the dangers of our ever increasing reliance on technology and the possibility of us becoming obsolete in the process. Yet, as we all know, Cameron himself is clearly in love with tech, as evidenced by how much of a technical innovator and tinkerer he's always been. This contradictory relationship he has with technology is further presented in Aliens, where the movie seems to almost be making a statement at the start about how heavy firepower and state-of-the-art weapons can be stumped by well-planned guerilla warfare techniques (basically brains over tools), which goes right against Cameron's attitude of always having to be technically innovative every time he makes a film.
In True Lies, the whole arc of the movie is about Harry Tasker learning to be a better husband and father by being honest and actually being there, but Cameron himself has gone through a sum of five marriages over the course of his life, and has once even stated that he sees being a hotshot Hollywood director as a more fulfilling way of life than being a decent family man. Lastly, in both Titanic and Avatar, Cameron seems to espouse some sort of spirituality and belief in the afterlife, as evidenced by how Rose basically reunites with Jack in heaven at the end of Titanic and how the Na'vi are spiritually linked to all the plants and animals on Pandora. That all sounds well and good, until one comes to learn that James Cameron is actually a staunch atheist in real life with no seeming belief in anything remotely spiritual.
I'm not saying this immediately renders Cameron's work bad, as I still do like the vast majority of his films. But upon dissecting his work closely in comparison to his real life, it's hard to see him as anything other than a phony, insincere artist who makes movies that actively go against his actual worldviews to sell. He's like the world's greatest huckster in a certain way.
Who's with me?