Avatar's Savage Message
The plot as avatar
An avatar is,
originally, the embodiment of a Hindu god. Today the term also refers
to an embodiment or personification of some principle, attitude, or
view of life; online it’s a graphic image that represents some person
or thing. Cameron’s movie is filled with avatars, but not just the
strange, hybrid creatures to which the title refers. We also see them
in the silly, subtle-as-a-brick-to-the-head parallels that he makes
between current events and his imagined world. Let’s turn to the story.
(Warning: Spoilers ahead!)
The planet Pandora, a
beautiful, verdant jungle paradise, is an avatar for anywhere the
American military might show up. It contains the costly and rare
substance Unobtainium, an avatar for oil, which is critical to the
Earth’s economy. The private company Resources Development
Administration, an avatar for Halliburton, has set up operations to
ravage the planet to extract that substance. The problem is that this
planet is inhabited by ten-foot-tall blue aliens called the Na’vi,
living in primitive, pre-technological conditions.
The company employs a
private army, an avatar for Blackwater as well as the American
military. As is explained, “Back home they fight for freedom. Here
they’re hired guns for the corporation.” The mercenaries are led by the
evil Colonel Quaritch (Stephen Lang),
who gives cartoon villains a bad name. He’s gung ho simply to clean out
the “savages” by force, an attitude avatar representing how Cameron and
his ilk see American history and foreign policy. See, it’s the evil
military-industrial complex in your face!
The company’s
administrator on Pandora says that the corporation’s investors would
prefer to avoid the bad PR that they’d garner by killing off all the
Na’vi, but they’re even more concerned about avoiding a bad balance
sheet. See, capitalism leads to killing!
The corporation has
made half-hearted attempts to win the hearts and minds of the Na’vi by
teaching them English and setting up schools and roads for them. How
white of them! But it hasn’t worked. Still, it would be better to
figure out what the “blue monkeys” (see, Americans are racist!) want
and somehow to get them to leave the potential prospecting property.
Mind to body
Enter the scientists. A team led by Dr. Grace Augustine (Sigourney Weaver)
has mixed human and Na’vi DNA to produce avatars. These Na’vi bodies
can be operated by the human whose DNA is used. The human’s mind is
linked to and controls the avatar as the human rests on a techno-bed to
which he or she is wired. Humans can’t breathe the atmosphere of
Pandora, but their avatars can. So perhaps an avatar can re-contact the
Na’vi, who aren’t very fond of the nasty, callous, heartless
American—err, sorry, Earthling—soldiers who tend to gun them down at
the least imagined provocation.
Jake Sully (Sam Worthington)
is a crippled ex-Marine who volunteers to operate an avatar. His dual
mission is to look for a peaceful way to move the Na’vi out and to
provide military intelligence to the evil colonel for the probable
removal of the Na’vi by force.
Pandora living paradise
Jake is thrilled with
his avatar body, which allows him to walk and run again on healthy
albeit alien legs. But he becomes lost in the jungle and captured by
the Na’vi who, rather than execute him, decide to show him their ways
in spite of their suspicions about this “dreamwalker,” this demon who’s
part human and somehow controlled from afar.
You can predict the rest of the story from here. Jake goes native in an interplanetary Dances with Wolves. Here Cameron can’t offer a parallel with the real targets of
Jake wins the trust
and respect of the Na’vi by passing all the challenges required to be a
warrior. He is declared one of The People. And he falls in love with
the Na’vi woman who helped him along his path.
One with the world
In the process, Jake
learns about the Na’vis’ religion and their unique relationship to
their world. When they hunt and kill an animal they thank it for its
body as its spirit goes to Eyra, their god. When they ride or fly on
the backs of Pandora’s fantastic fauna, the Na’vi must entwine special
nerve threads at the ends of their long hair with those of the animals
in order to form a mental and spiritual bond. They also can entwine
their nerve hairs with a tree that allows them to hear the memories of
their ancestors. They are literally one with nature!
The Na’vi talk
incessantly about flows of energy. And there’s the Tree of Souls at the
center of their world. The scientists who created the avatars find that
it has a strange, unexplainable flux field around it. Can you say, “May
the Force be with you?”
Needless to say, the
military moves in with helicopter gunships and heavily armed infantry
to lay waste to the forest and the Na’vi. So the Na’vi, lead by Jake in
his avatar, unite with other tribes and, like the army of primitive
desert “Fremen” in Dune or the teddy-bear Ewoks in Return of the Jedi,
use their command of the environment and its animals to beat the evil
masters of technology. In the end, the Na’vi load the captured
Earthlings onto their ships to send them back to their dying world on
which all that was green has been destroyed.
Savage myth
In Avatar
Cameron perpetuates the enduring, seductive, yet morally false myth of
a Garden of Eden or lost paradise inhabited by noble savages. This myth
has done no end of harm to humanity. In modern times, it found its
voice in Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
In the eighteenth century the Enlightenment had dragged
He argued that in the state of nature humans were governed by two instincts: self-preservation and pity for others. We thus lived in idyllic harmony with our fellows and our world. But when we started to think, to use our minds, we worried about the future. That’s when all the trouble began. We sought private property to give us personal security. In the process, we became selfish and put ourselves as individuals in conflict with others. We created creature comforts that cut us off from our natural world and our natural selves. Civilization was the enemy of our virtue.
This, of course, is moral nonsense. A look at primitive peoples from the prehistoric to the original inhabitants of
There are noble and
virtuous individuals in primitive as well as advanced societies. But
there’s nothing noble about ignorance of one’s world. There’s nothing
noble about the impotence over one’s world that comes from one’s
ignorance. There’s nothing noble about being unable to build adequate
shelters against the forces of nature, produce adequate food against
famines, or discover adequate medicines against illness.
It is the height of
irony—to say nothing of hypocrisy—for Cameron, the master of
movie-making technology, to have as the theme of this movie the utter
evil of technology.
Talk to the trees
In Avatar,
Cameron helps the modern environmental movement continue to morph into
a new religion of Gaia-worship that, disguised as a love for nature, is
anti-human in its essence.
This new cult treats
“nature” itself as a conscious, living entity at odds with and morally
superior to human beings. Of course, a strong counterargument is that
the world itself, the environment itself, is not a conscious entity.
Only we humans are self-conscious, living, breathing creatures with
free will who must choose to act and to seek values. Human life is our
standard of value, and to survive and flourish we must make use of the
materials of our world.
In Avatar,
Cameron gives us a sci-fi version of the Gaia superstition, showing the
Na’vi living in an animate and conscious world, in which animal and
human minds can join, in which we can talk to the trees as we would
with our friends and family. Of course, that’s not the reality. That’s
not the world. But powerful images like those in Avatar have nothing to do with reality. Unlike rational arguments, they can create and reinforce deadly ideas in a culture.
Hudgins directs advocacy and is a senior scholar at The Atlas Society, the center for Objectivism.
For further reading:
*Edward Hudgins, “Star Wars and the politics of republics.” May 21, 2002.
*Edward Hudgins, “Star Wars: Are the Sith Selfish?” May 25, 2005.
Copyright, The Atlas Society. For more information, please visit www.atlassociety.org. This TRA feature has been edited in accordance with TRA's Statement of Policy.Click here to return to TRA's Issue CCXXV Index.
Learn about Mr. Stolyarov's novel, Eden against the Colossus, here.Read Mr. Stolyarov's comprehensive treatise, A Rational Cosmology, explicating such terms as the universe, matter, space, time, sound, light, life, consciousness, and volition, here.