About Avatar (part 2): Fake versions of us
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Last point about Avatar I wanted to make: Movie-makers have had a lot of fun blurring the lines between the real world and artificial worlds. Only recently have they been doing the same thing with real and artificial selves. And I think there’s a reason for that. Only in the age of online communities and next-level gameplaying does it make sense to want to discuss the implications of surrogates.This theme interests me, because it’s something new that I think will become a cliche. What about artificial selves? What do we do about this complicated relationship we have between our real and our virtual selves? On the internet, you can be anybody, but what does that do to your real self, and to reality itself? And everyone else has the same freedom — so where are the boundaries? Similarly, in a computer game, you can have an avatar that is ever-young and eventually always wins. But since everyone has the same ability, youth and invulnerability become meaningless. So what are honesty and reality really worth? That depends on who’s telling the story.
In the movie “Surrogates,**” for example, the artificial selves were a bad thing; they were a fake. As in Avatar, the fake self is more beautiful, cooler, more well-adjusted. But in Surrogates, that was seen as a kind of trap, and one that a lone hero ultimately had to pull the plug on in order to liberate humanity (although, tellingly, he lost his wife by doing it, since she couldn’t conceive of life without her surrogate.)
In Avatar, the artificial self was just plain preferable to the original. For the protagonist, it was his salvation. It fixed what was broken in the him and allowed him to connect with the super-cool blue people. Eventually, it seemed like the earthers with avatars had to make a decision which they wanted. The woman scientist tried and failed, though she found religion in the process — interesting, that. But the hero tried and succeeded. At the end, he gets to live the fantasy, to unite the artifice with reality.
I think other filmmakers, graphic novelists and computer game-makers will continue writing different endings to this. They love depicting torment, but they rarely have any solutions. And the problem of virtual reality is causing a bit of anxiety and unhappiness — what to do with our fantasies, given that we can make them seem so real we can almost touch them. And given that we have also been getting more spoiled and self-centered with every passing generation, we’re having a harder and harder time dealing with the fact that we can’t always have what we want.
So I’m kind of interested in this one myself. I know how I’d like it to end, but it may not turn out that way. Fun idea to play with, though.
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- “The Hours” — Depression in movies
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Cool illustrations. Do you do them with Photoshop and a pen tablet?
I suppose I could over-spiritualize and orthodoxize Avatar by saying perhaps the return to Eden and the “image and likeness” is actually the reality and the “earth” is the fallen nature. When he becomes one with everything is when he becomes “real” an healed, and that after a lot of effort and moral conflicts. However, I think if one were to suggest that to people as the “true spiritual path” they’d probably opt for “easy Jesus-ism” and once saved always saved as the real “gospel”.
Thanks on the illustrations — I always aim to amuse myself.
I draw them on a sketchpad and scan them in, then use PS to colorize. I always feel like I’m getting the best of both worlds that way. I really like the action of drawing by hand, but there’s no beating the flexibility of a computer for finishing things off.
As for the orthodoxized(?!) interpretation, I like it! I’ve obviously been playing at over-analysis myself, so maybe I’m prejudiced. But I’ve got a theory that even the most secular writers and filmmakers can’t help telling stories that seem like Christian allegories — sin and redemption, sacrificial death and resurrection, and so on. They’ll grumpily admit as much from time to time and blame it on being “Christianized” or some such. But I’m just bigoted enough to think that it’s also because these stories are written onto our consciousness whether we’re aware of it or not.
On the illustrations, I like the feel of a quill pen and ink or pencil on real paper too, but I haven’t done any of that in over 30 years now. sigh. I just got a Wacom Tablet that I’m doing my “Orthographs” and cartoons with, and I’m enjoying it. I have an open source freeware version of PS that I use but the learning curve is steep. You make me want to pick up the pencils and pens again.
On Avatar, I agree… there’s a “Christian archetype” that touches more on Orthodox concepts than Protestant penal-substitutionary atonement ideas in “secular” movies. “The Green Mile” is awesome (JC taking the diseases and death into himself and overcoming it…) Avatar is pretty cool because all the ancestors can be communicated with through the “tree of life”… hmmmm… I’ve always thought of doing a “Catechism through Film” series of lectures. Anyway, good thoughts all around. BTW, did you see “The Book of Eli”? Awesome…
I loved the movie and also thought that some of the special effects and the concepts behind them could illustrate an Orthodox point of view. I couldn’t articulate this to my non-Orthodox husband or friends without confusing them, and maybe myself ! about the orthodoxy of Orthodoxy. But I especially was taken with the spidery feathery spirit creatures, and the soul-body connection made through strands of hair or mane, etc. The tree-city was a magnificent idea. So it was mostly the beauty of it and the Eden-esque character that I liked, and I had to ignore the utopian silliness–s-p’s term Dances with Giant Smurfs is hilarious. As Frederica Mathewes-Green wrote, This movie was not made by people who cooked over a fire.