About Avatar (part 1): Cultural comfort food artfully served

  • avatar1a.jpgSaw “Avatar” two weeks ago, and some obser­va­tions about it stay with me  — some things it was try­ing to say, some things it did say, and the dif­fer­en­tial between the two.

    (Two quick caveats: 1 – This will include spoil­ers. 2 – I’m not sure it will make sense if you haven’t seen the movie.) (Come to think of it, I’m not sure it’ll make THAT much sense even if you have. But I’m wast­ing keystrokes ..)


    It may seem too thinky to even bother decon­struct­ing a movie like Avatar look­ing for meta mes­sages. After all, no one was really say­ing that you were sup­posed to be get­ting seri­ous about the plot, char­ac­ters, dia­logue and such. This movie has been promis­ing to rede­fine life as we knew it, right? But always for the spe­cial effects. Tech­no­log­i­cal break­throughs! Breath­tak­ing CGI! A sound­track that’ll make your ears bleed! Non­stop fly-throughs that will make Amer­ica puke! … and so on.

    avatar1.jpgAnd it did have awe­some spe­cial effects, no doubt. But it’s the fact that Avatar didn’t worry too much about con­tent that makes it an inter­est­ing study to me. It means that they were try­ing to stay on well-trodden ground with the story, stick to the stuff we can all agree on and add just enough new things that every­one says it was ‘thought-provoking.’ So what did they think we could all agree on? What are our mod­ernist post-modernist clichees?

    • Bad guys/good guys – The white-hat to black-hat slid­ing scale is still fairly intact. Mil­i­tary guys and cap­i­tal­ists were the heav­ies in this; out­casts and sci­en­tists were the good guys. Bad guys have a plan; good guys dis­obey orders, go with the flow and only get a plan at the very end when they have to.
    • Are we cool yet? West­ern civ got points, but indige­nous peo­ple got more. Gigan­tic next-level weapons, trans­ports and tech­nol­ogy: good, but abo­rig­i­nal, feline, blue peo­ple: better.
    • Give us that Olde Tyme Reli­gion. Given that movie-makers are gen­er­ally Christianity-challenged (to put it mildly), have you noticed how many of them really, REALLY like to depict prim­i­tive spiritism as if was always right and always worked? Chris­tians who speak of mir­a­cles are treated to skep­ti­cism and con­tempt, but abo­rig­i­nal peo­ples who speak of mir­a­cles are treated with great respect. Avatar is just the lat­est to man­i­fest that dichotomy. I’m guess­ing that it bespeaks a cer­tain will­ing sus­pen­sion of dis­be­lief for those who don’t like Chris­tian­ity: If I HAVE to believe in some­thing, let’s make it a vague mish-mosh of spirit-gods.
    • Nat­ural Man vs. Civ­i­lized Man. An increasingly-popular sec­u­lar theme. Those among us who seem the most addicted to tech­nol­ogy also express the deep­est yearn­ing to chuck it all. I think they want it all — the speed and the fan­tasy of incred­i­ble games and gad­gets, but the whole­ness of being in touch with cre­ation. All human beings wish they were in the Gar­den; only the most wired-in want it bad enough to obsess.

    That last one bears closer exam­i­na­tion. The con­flict of emo­tion is writ large in Avatar (as it has been in many com­puter games). At the same time that it pays great homage to mas­sive weaponry and the infra­struc­ture that is the result of our human inge­nu­ity and curios­ity, the movie ulti­mately votes against all of that in favor of The Peo­ple — the natives. it’s a breath­less valen­tine to the kinds of prim­i­tive soci­eties that most of us wouldn’t last five min­utes in. Up with hunters and gath­er­ers! Down with mas­ter plan­ners and indus­tri­al­ists! Loin clothes, good; clothes, bad. (Uni­forms, very bad.)

    avatar3.jpgPer­son­ally, I take this kind of mes­sage with a grain of salt, com­ing as it does from those who want to pos­sess the Cre­ation with­out acknowl­edg­ing a Cre­ator. I do love Cre­ation; I don’t wor­ship “Nature.” At one point, the movie hints to us that the rea­son that earth-folks are col­o­niz­ing other plan­ets is because they’ve ruined earth. I assume that was sup­posed to be a Big Moment; it just made me roll my eyes.

    There’s one more theme that was going on here, but it’s worth break­ing out separately.

    (BTW, in case it needs to be said, all the images are com­ing from the offi­cial Web­site HERE at their per­mis­sion, and if you take them and put them on the side of your truck, I’ll go to James-Cameron-jail, which I believe has real ter­mi­na­tors in it.)


    Related posts:

    1. My spam avatar
    2. Com­fort and haste
    3. Cul­tural crisis
    4. Fast­ing fast food … or is it fast fast­ing food?
    5. What’s wrong with movies these days?

    February 20th, 2010 | Grace | 5 Comments |

5 Responses and Counting...

  • s-p 02.20.2010

    I told my daugh­ter it should have been titled “Dances With Giant Blue Smurfs” (she had just seen “Dances with Wolves” in his­tory class.) The great­est irony to me is those who seem to embrace the “mes­sage” are the ones who are most in awe of the ben­e­fit of our capitalistic/industrialized cul­ture: lim­it­less RAM, GHz of pro­cess­ing speed and tech­nol­ogy up the yingyang that it took to make the movie. sigh. (BTW… you need to edit the post, looks like you cut and pasted too much stuff a cou­ple times. That wouldn’t have hap­pened on a IBM Selec­tric :)

  • Anam Cara

    I thought it was “Dances with Wolves” meets “Fer­n­gully” meets “Brave­heart” meets “Poc­a­hon­tas” or, to give it a new title, “Pocag­ully Wolf­heart in Space.“
    On the other hand, it was pretty spec­tac­u­lar in 3D! I know I wanted to paint myself blue and shout “FREE-EE-EE-EE-D-_O — - — M” there toward the end.

    Our daughter-in-law said that she couldn’t imag­ine an instance of one race try­ing to wipe out another after see­ing that. I told her that, sadly, it was just a mat­ter of time before the guys who were exiled regrouped with big­ger and bet­ter and came again. If they’ve got some­thing peo­ple who think the are supe­rior want, the “supe­ri­ors” will get it — and they won’t feel bad in the process.

  • Grace

    s-p:
    Fixed that. Maybe I should’ve claimed I was try­ing a 3-D effect in print?

  • Grace

    AC:
    I thought of that, too. Unfor­tu­nately for the happy end­ing, the blue guys won’t win this one long-term.

    Since James Cameron felt like re-doing this and giv­ing the native peo­ples tremen­dous nat­ural advan­tages, I appre­ci­ate him stick­ing to the truth as far as the actual effi­cacy of bows and arrows against tanks and machine guns. In the end, it was Mother Nature who deliv­ered the smack­down to the earth­ers. That’s an inter­est­ing twist, but it doesn’t have any par­tic­u­lar applic­a­bil­ity as the moral of the story. That’s okay; not every story has to have a moral.

  • Grace

    AC:
    BTW, about the Westerners-dominating-others part, I’m think­ing that there’s a few caveats I would want to throw in:

    *  Avatar is pre­sent­ing a VERY one-sided view of things, and using a lot of poetic license. They’ve cleaned up and glossed over some of the cru­elty to ani­mals and fel­low humans that is com­mon in these soci­eties. I’m not say­ing that they’re (cap­i­tal b) Bad; just that they may not be as (cap­i­tal g) Good as the movie showed them.
    *  The exam­ple that’s usu­ally upper­most in everyone’s mind is  Euro­pean colonists vs. North Amer­i­can Indi­ans. But you could’ve seen the same thing take place with Span­ish vs. South Amer­i­can Indi­ans, Eng­lish vs. African tribes, Aus­tralian colonists vs. abo­rig­ines, etc. etc. And yes, the out­come was always the same — the West­ern­ers took over. So in that way, it’s not an IF but a WHEN.
    *  But if you ask why that kept hap­pen­ing, the answer isn’t as clear as it is some­times por­trayed. To take the Amer­i­can exam­ple, the major­ity of Indi­ans weren’t wiped out by aggres­sive action, but by the dis­eases that the Euro­peans brought. (Good link on that HERE.) And the cul­ture was sup­planted in part just by com­ing into con­tact with the West­ern cul­ture — why would you knock your­self out try­ing to kill a deer with a bow and arrow when you could feed your fam­ily all win­ter by killing a buf­falo with a gun? And once hunt­ing and gath­er­ing were less capri­cious, did you need to call on the gods as much? etc. etc. (That’s putting aside our Chris­t­ian belief that ortho­dox Chris­tian­ity is the Truth, uni­ver­sally and in every age. Just because colonists might have turned that into the ugly idea of man­i­fest des­tiny doesn’t mean that we should for­get that Christ is Lord to every­one, every­where.)
    *  That’s not to say that dirty tricks didn’t occur, but in the times and places that native peo­ples have had the upper hand, there’s not much to sug­gest that they didn’t pull dirty tricks of their own.
    Prob­a­bly you knew all that, but I can’t believe how often the revi­sion­ist his­tory is taken as gospel.

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