Avatar--Is It Just Me Who Smells Smoke in this Crowded Theatre?

On urgings by techie friends, I went to see Avatar in IMAX last night. It is on track, I understand, to break the all-time box office record; and has already come out on top in the Critics' Choice Awards.

I thought it was drek. Take away the FX, and all you have is Disney's Pocahontas, without the songs, stretched out to three hours. It was drek in detail: no character ever said anything that was not a cliche. Whole scenes seemed to be taken from other recent movies; the final battle between the hero and the evil colonel in a mechanical suit was taken direct from Iron Man. And plausible? I'm as willing as anyone to suspend disbelief, but how about a few thousand armed with wooden bows and arrows taking out a futuristic fleet of helicopter gunships? How did the Na'vi tribe survive with no children? How does a soul pass through something like a USB port?

I read there is now something of a mental health crisis among those who have recently seen Avatar, and cannot adjust to not living in the “utopian” world of the Na'vis.

This I can understand, in a way, but it also surprised me, because I saw the Na'vis' world, personally, as anything but utopian. Although it is certainly a romanticised and falsified view of hunter-gatherer existence, if that is what it is meant to represent, there are lots of ways in which the movie itself suggests it is not really a utopia at all. First, obviously, the name of this world is “Pandora.” Pandora, in Greek mythology, was created by the gods as a punishment for man, and the most obvious association for most with the name is “Pandora's Box”--from which comes all the evils of life. Colonel Quarich at the start of the movie describes Pandora as worse than hell. If the Na'vi commune happily with some of Pandora's animals, they are also clearly tasty prey to many others; Jake survives the dangerous initiation ritual, but one must assume that most Na'vi are torn to shreds by it on the cusp of adulthood. If they have survived that long. There seems to be a nice level of community solidarity, but one can also apparently be put to death at the tribal leader's whim.

Note that the Na'vi themselves have some of the traditional characteristics of devils: the long, hairless tail, the pointed ears, fangs, a vaguely goatlike nose. To them, the invading humans are the “sky people,” and the association of up with good and down with evil is a strong one in the human consciousness. They are also creatures of the night: Jake's avatar awakes as he goes to sleep in our world, and vice versa. Their god speaks to them not from the sky, but from under ground; their religion is purely materialist. The term “avatar” in turn implies that we humans are gods, from the perspective of the Na'vi.

The Na'vi culture and village is built around a huge tree. Go behind the obvious “tree-hugger” reference, and you see the tree in the centre of Eden. Yes, Eden is a praradise, but the tree in its centre is the forbidden source of all evil; and these Na'vi actually worship the tree. To make the reference clearer, Jake Sully actually is offered and bites into a very big, very juicy fruit at the beginning of the movie, just after he is first transformed into a Na'vi; and the fruit is offered him by a woman, Dr. Grace, who is in charge of the mission and who is primarily responsible for turning him into a Na'vi. Adam, meet Eve.

To be clear, given their appearance, the fact that they worship the tree, and that Jake bites the apple on first becoming a Na'vi, I think we are to take them as representing, not the first humans, but the tempting devils, of Eden. They do not crawl on their bellies, like snakes—but neither did the snake of Eden, until after the fall and God's curse. He might as well have looked like a Na'vi. In becoming Na'vis, Jake and Dr. Grace are Adam and Eve.

Taken together, the symbolic point of the movie seems to be to tell the Eden story from the devil's perspective. If we only accept that apple, the apple in this case being the lovely imaginary world of the movie itself, and chow down on it hard, we inherit the world of the Na'vi, with all its glow-in-the-dark glamour and freedom from the ugly rules of civilization, that keep us from following our instincts and doing just what we want. All women will then be beautiful, all men strong and brave. Nature will conform to our wishes. There will be no children weighing us down with responsibilities, and we will live forever, in the Great Mother, become as gods.

Sounds good to some, clearly. But, at the same time, the devil is constrained to a certain level of honesty. If you really see Pandora as a paradise, you are not paying very close attention.

I doubt James Cameron himself sees or intends any of this—I gather his own sympathies are with the Na'vi. He has said, "the Na'vi represent something that is our higher selves, or our aspirational selves, what we would like to think we are." But all inspiration is ultimately from God; the devil must speak truth in spite of himself.

Of course, the movie is also quite harsh on the “sky people” --the communion of saints and angels. They have “destroyed their home planet.” There is nothing green there. They are prepared to kill all the Na'vi for the sake of an incredibly valuable mineral called “unobtainium.” So they too, loo like materialists.

Except that “unobtainium,” traditionally, is the term used by engineers for any ideal substance they would like to have, but cannot get. A substance, in other words, that exists entirely as an idea, but not in the physical world. A pretty good metaphor, when speaking to complete materialists like the Na'vi, for the human soul. And God did indeed, along with his avenging angel Colonel Michael, launch war on the celestial Na'vi for the soul of mankind.

If the soul is indeed of more genuine, absolute value, than all the material pleasures and perils of Pandora, or of this world, then it is just and not selfish for Selfridge to dispossess the Na'vi to obtain it; even if he is not God and did not create it in the first place. If there are more sky people than the total population of Na'vi, clearly quite small, in line to benefit, Selfridge is again justified, by JS Mill's principle of the greatest good to the greatest number. There is a point at which the common good supercedes the right to private property; hence the government right to expropriation when circumstances warrant. Selfish Selfridge is actually not being selfish if this is the case; and it quite probably is, given the movie's own premises. Of course, the mysterious corporation ought to do everything it can to convince the Na'vi to move peacefully before they send in the bulldozers—but the movie demonstrates that Jake and Grace themselves are certain the Na'vi will never agree to a peaceful settlement, and that the corporation knows this. It's all in their video logs.

The movie does what it can to keep you seeing everything from the perspective of the Na'vi, but it does make the moral issue fairly plain. You side with the Na'vi, you are siding with the wrong, merely because they and their world are attractive and they have big soulful eyes.

Sucker.

There's one fried every minute.