The Politics of "Avatar" - Pandora in Retrograde

This is the final in my series of posts about James Cameron's recent science fiction blockbuster Avatar.  Be advised, it contains spoilers.

Apparently the United States of America of the 22nd century - or some hardly distinguishable successor state - is still without a program of universal healthcare, is still engaged in military adventures in Latin America, and is still so unilateralist in its approach to global problem-solving that it has undertaken a planet-saving expedition across an interstellar expanse without assistance from other nations or their citizens.

Welcome to the terrestrial world of the year 2154 that James Cameron offers as the political context for his extraterrestrial science fiction action-adventure film Avatar, set on Pandora, a paradisaical moon of a gas-giant planet orbiting a nearby star and inhabited by an ancient, wise and noble race of blue-skinned humanoids, the Na'vi, who live in harmony with their pristine environment.

A more forgiving critic would say that such seeming anachronistic false steps were intended by the writer-director as commentary on contemporary American politics, but a case can be made that Cameron, visionary though he may be at creating imagined future landscapes, is a dinosaur when it comes to developing stories that unfold there.

As the buzz that surrounded the run-up to the release of Avatar let us know, Cameron had begun mulling over the ideas for his latest blockbuster since the mid-1990s, only a few years after Kevin Costner's Academy Award winning Dances with Wolves  (1990) demonstrated the sustained box-office viability of the even-then recycled tale of a disillusioned white soldier who forsakes his own decadent kind and finds common cause with an ancient, wise and noble indigenous race who live in harmony with their (once) pristine environment.

Cameron has done Costner one better with Avatar and managed to incorporate elements from Tarzan mythology into his movie, having his white hero become not only a champion, but a god of sorts, to the adoring natives.  In defense of Edgar Rice Burroughs, his Tarzan was reared by apes from infancy and, as a consequence, learned their ways and the ways of neighboring African tribes over the course of years.  Cameron's alienated, dispirited ex-marine, Jake Sully, controlling the body of a human-Na'vi meat puppet, masters the world of Pandora and emerges as its great blue hope, after a course of study that would hardly constitute a semester abroad on planet Earth.

Honestly, I cringed at the point in the film when Sully in his Avatar skin, like some besotted cruise ship tourist, rallies the Na'vi troops before the climatic battle of the film with this call to arms, "we will send them the message, that this, this is our land!"  Leaning forward in my seat in the theater, I strained, hoping to hear some lone voice cry out from the ranks of the assembled Na'vi army, "what do you mean we, Kemosabe?"

What I found even more insulting than this warmed-over "dances with Avatars" storyline was the tired old "despairing gimp" setup that Cameron uses in Avatar to launch Sully on his mission to outer space.

When we first meet our would-be hero we learn that he is a survivor of American military action in Venezuela - be warned, future Hugo Chávez - and has been wounded so severely that he has lost the use of his legs.  Since it appears that employment opportunities for paraplegics on Earth in the 22nd century are bleak, our protagonist has opted to throw his lot in with some new-fangled version of the French Foreign Legion, mobilized to assist in the corporation-led plunder of Pandora, 6 light-years away.

Not fit for "real" soldiering, Sully has signed on to operate the body of an avatar, one engineered to his genetic specifications, and, using it, to go undercover as a member of the expedition's science team to spy on the Na'vi.  This assignment will provide him with the opportunity not only to serve the cause of his dying home planet and that of his human comrades in arms on Pandora, but also, since the link that connects him with his avatar is utterly realistic, for all practical purposes, to walk again.

As unsettling as it is to contemplate that U.S. foreign policy of the future would offer little more than a continuation of its centuries-old failed gunboat diplomacy in Latin America, it defies credulity to propose that medical advances in the next century and a half will have been so meager that those suffering even devastating spinal-cord injuries would be left wheelchair-bound, without recourse to the benefits of either sophisticated prosthetics or mobility-restoring surgery.

In fact, Cameron acknowledges the likelihood of such progress, and suggests that such assistive technologies and restorative medical procedures do exist in 2154, but he indicates that they will be out of the financial reach of working class grunts like Sully, a disabled combat veteran, no less.  So much for the prospects of universal healthcare anytime soon.

What is troubling about Cameron's decision to use Sully's paralysis as a critical plot device in Avatar is not so much his predictions about future medical advances or his opinions on contemporary healthcare policy, but the decision to cast Sully's story, in some respects, as a flight from physical disability.   Without minimizing the hardships that accompany severe handicaps, the notion that disability makes life less than worthwhile is one that our society has struggled to get beyond for a couple of decades now.  Yet in abandoning Earth for Pandora, it seems that Sully wants more than simply to forget, the traditional motivation for Legionnaires; he seeks a kind of corporeal oblivion, which Cameron grants, allowing Sully to toss aside his broken, and by implication useless, human body at the end of the film.  Using disability as veritable death sentence as a premise for a movie would seem to be an idea whose time had come - and gone - some fifty years ago.

And who is this Jake Sully, destined to lead the Na'vi in an uprising against their human oppressors?  What qualifies him to be the only dream walker, as the remotely controlled avatars are called, to be fully accepted by the natives?  There are scientists who have donned hybrid human-Na'vi bodies, who have studied the ecology of Pandora, who have learned the ways and the language of the locals, and who have come to identify with their plight in the face of the inexorable expansion of the corporation-lead mining operation that is threatening their world.  They have failed to gain that acceptance.  Why has Sully been deemed worthy and these engaged researchers have not?

Well, it turns out that Sully, who couldn't locate Alpha Centauri B, Pandora's sun, on a star map to save his life, is distinguished from the brainy researchers by the fact he has a "strong heart".  Apparently intellectual curiosity and a humane regard for other cultures don't mean a whole hell of a lot to the Na'vi.  When it comes to picking friends, and, as it turns out, leaders, all you've got to have is heart.

I am not so naive as to imagine Hollywood and its mass market are prepared to embrace some eggheaded scientist-hero, but the fact is that Avatar has been characterized by commentators on the left and on the right as being critical of the contemporary American political scene.  Far from this being the case, the film seems to endorse the cherished American delusion that true leadership derives from the heart and not from the head.  Sarah Palin brought the recent National Tea Party Convention to its feet with the exhortation, "we need a commander-in-chief, not a professor of law."  If the sentiments regarding leadership celebrated in Avatar are any indication, James Cameron could have written that line.

Interestingly enough, Avatar is widely perceived to be a criticism of contemporary American foreign policy because, with its mercenary expeditionary army and the gun-metal-gray, hermetically-sealed fortress city which serves as their base of operations on Pandora, Cameron has constructed a microcosm of the contract security forces hired by the U.S. government in Iraq and the Green Zone of Baghdad which serves as their headquarters and as their haven, fortified in such a way as to keep danger at a distance but also to make humanizing interaction with the local population impossible. But does Cameron's recreation of this state of affairs really constitute a political commentary, much less a scathing criticism?

In some respects James Cameron's Pandora recapitulates Bush-era Iraq all too well.  By that I mean that, as with the atrocities of Abu Ghraib and the criminal misdeeds of Blackwater Worldwide and Halliburton, culpability for mistreatment of the Na'vi and the exploitation of their world lies not with real Americans like Jake Sully, but with sadistic "bad apples" and greedy, malevolent corporations.  Far from criticizing the arms-length arrangement through which we have subcontracted our ethical responsibilities to those chartered to act in our name, Cameron perpetuates the notion that the American public is exempted from blame because, although willfully ignorant, we were, nonetheless, well-intentioned.  Caught unawares, our noble cause was hijacked by miscreants and scoundrels.

I am not saying that Cameron could have told this part of his story otherwise - a commercial film that proposed to depict members of the armed forces of a future United States as heartless killers and elected political leaders as unapologetic war criminals would never see the green-light of day - but I am saying that his Avatar is little more than a recasting of a familiar anodyne fable in which the usual suspects - soldiers of fortune and evil corporations - are rounded up, presenting nothing of substance to upset the moral complacency of American audiences.

It's hard to know whether to attribute this kind of by-the-numbers storytelling to the out-sized ego of the director or a cynical approach to movie-making - after all, the box-office success of a James Cameron movie hardly hinges on the quality of its screenplay.  Whatever the case, my primary criticism of Cameron in Avatar, and that is that he seems to think that transposing conventional - and often out-dated - story lines to a future time and a far-away place is the same as creating an interesting work of science fiction.  His exquisitely realized fantasy worlds deserve better than to be used as backdrops for lackluster and retrograde stories from days gone by.



The Politics of "Avatar" - Pandora in Retrograde by Marc Merlin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at thoughtsarise.blogspot.com.

Game Over, "Avatar" Dude

This is the third in a series of essays on James Cameron's recent landmark science-fiction film Avatar.  Unlike the preceding posts, this one does contain spoilers.

Immediately lauded as a masterpiece of technical film-making and, simultaneously, disparaged for its lackluster story-telling, James Cameron's Avatar offers us something else to consider.

Although reviews often mention that the title is taken from the term for the character an individual adopts as a representative in a multi-user game or simulated community - avatar itself is the Sanskrit work for the descended incarnation of a Hindu deity - not much has been said about how thoroughly the director has fashioned a story that recreates many of the features of a video game.

Avatar is set in the year 2154 on the world of Pandora, a paradisaical moon of a gas-giant planet orbiting a nearby star and inhabited by race of tall, graceful, blue-skinned anthropoids, the Na'vi.  There our hero, ex-marine Jake Sully, a paraplegic as a result of a combat injury on Earth, has been tasked to control - more aptly, to inhabit - a hybrid human-Na'vi body, genetically tailored especially for him.  This "meat puppet", to borrow a coinage from William Gibson, enables Sully to pursue his assigned mission in the hostile Pandoran environment without the use of life-support equipment and to insinuate himself within the native population.

The perfect projection of Sully's consciousness into the body of his avatar over arbitrary distances is accomplished by use of what could reasonably be described as an electronic sarcophagus.  When Sully climbs into this high-tech cocoon, lies down, empties his mind, and closes his human eyes, a seamless "psionic" connection is instantly formed, and his blue-skinned alter ego opens his eyes - in a literal flash.

So begins one of many cycles of digital death and rebirth for Sully, as his avatar ventures deeper and deeper into the world of Pandora, there to refine his physical prowess, to expand his knowledge of the Na'vi and their habitat and, bit by bit, to heal his war-ravaged soul.

The correspondence of Sully's hero's journey to that of a player in a fantasy role playing game is almost exact: Sully's avatar is his character in the game; the electronic sarcophagus is his exquisitely engineered game controller; each of his excursions into the world of the Na'vi is a turn of the game, and an opportunity to acquire knowledge or a skill that is critical to the advancement to the next level of play.  Likewise, Sully's progress is marked by the kind of achievements that are the expected rewards which come with mastering a video game: the ability to travel safely through and fight adroitly in a challenging new environment, a facility with novel types of weapons, the recognition of admiring peers - and defeated rivals - leading to enhanced status within a community of worthies; and, of course, the coveted sexual relationship with the most desirable of the native females, Neytiri, who is herself an accomplished warrior.

In addition, much like an adept in a video game, as a result of his diligent striving, Sully gains access to the esoteric spiritual wisdom of his guest world.  Armed with this knowledge he is able to lead the Na'vi to victory in the climatic battle of the film and, as final reward, shake off his damaged mortal coil, leave the community of venal, small-minded humans behind, and take up his rightful place - restored in body and purified in spirit - on Eden-like Pandora among the noble Na'vi.  Game over, Dude!

What is striking in Cameron's realization of this premise is not only the way he uses his film to create parallels with on-line games, such as World of Warcraft, but also the way he suggests similarities with the cultural context in which these games are played.  In this, our ordinary world, (mostly) adolescent males, debilitated not as a result of war wounds but due to persistent coach-potato inactivity, build their own makeshift electronic coffins out of available materials - such as sofa cushions and closed bedroom doors - into which they then climb to escape the demands of social interaction and the nagging of parents or girlfriends.  With only modest exertion and the assistance of state-of-the-art game controllers, they are reborn as rampaging heroes in an alternate digital universe.

As compensation to the (mostly) real-world women cast aside by these self-exiled virtual combatants, Cameron offers this, the prospect of profound and effortless communion with their men by use of luminous bundles of exposed neural fibers which the Na'vi sport as ponytails and which function as a sort of digital biological interface for unmediated person-to-person connection.  Given the solitary nature of on-line gaming - which makes conversation with already emotionally unavailable partners effectively impossible - this is a ray of hope that the game world itself will provide relief from the frustration with the failed conventional approach to building relationships, one which relies on spoken words to communicate thoughts and feelings and states of mind.  Surprisingly, because of the appeal of this fantasy solution to girlfriends left behind, it appears that Avatar succeeds in a small way as something of a chick-flick, too.

And so, with Avatar, James Cameron has delivered not only an imagined world which is, in many respects, the realization of a video game, but also one  which is a reflection of the effects this on-line gaming phenomenon has had on contemporary culture.


Game Over, "Avatar" Dude by Marc Merlin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at thoughtsarise.blogspot.com.

"Avatar" - Nature Blue in Tooth and Claw

This is the second of in a series of posts about James Cameron's new film Avatar.

As Luke Skywalker might say, finding fault with the science in science fiction films is about as challenging as bull's-eying womp rats from a T-16 back on Tatooine.

Yes, every now and then a science fiction film takes as a central premise an intriguing theory and expands upon it using plausible extrapolations of current technology and scientific knowledge.  The movie Contact (1997) and its treatment of the search for and discovery of intelligent extraterrestrial life shines in this regard.

More often, the science of a science fiction film serves as a device used to transport a conventional story to a dramatically different setting, where, stripped of the distractions of our everyday world, its themes can be amplified and so stand out in starker relief.  This kind of borrowing is as old as the visionary 1927 silent science fiction masterwork Metropolis and its "scenes from the class struggle", set in a near-future urban dystopia.

It would be fair to say that Avatar falls squarely, and respectably, into this second category.  Its narrative is so similar to Kevin Costner's 1990 Academy-Award winning film, that I began to refer to it as "Dances with Avatars" after only seeing the theatrical trailer.  Director James Cameron re-situates this story of the American West, itself many times retold, to the Eden-like world of Pandora, where the encounter of a rapacious, imperialistic human culture with a noble indigenous people, living in harmony with their ecosystem, unfolds, in part, as a work of contemporary political commentary and, in part as cautionary environmental tale.

Science enters the picture, so to speak, in several ways.

Cameron has gone to some length in the early scenes to fashion a realistic spacecraft to be used to transport his human characters to Pandora, a moon orbiting a Jupiter-like gas giant planet of a presumably nearby star.  The passengers, themselves, have been placed into some sort of cryogenic sleep, the better to endure the apparently lengthy voyage. Echoes of the technologies of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) are quite vivid here, and they remind us how diligently Stanley Kubrick labored - 40 years ago - to imagine realistic long-duration space travel.  It makes the scientifically-minded among us wistful for the days before the invention of warp drive.

The Macguffin that drives the human plunder of Pandora is a mineral named - in the best self-mocking science fiction tradition - unobtanium.  We are told little about other than that it is extraordinarily valuable, and that its mother lode lies directly beneath the arboreal habitat that is the hub of the community of the tall, blue-skinned, anthropoid natives called the Na'vi.

Although it would be hardly sensible to send a ship into deep space to obtain a "precious" resource that - given the technological advances that would make such a mission feasible - could be manufactured much more cost-effectively here on planet earth, this plot device has become such a fixture of the science fiction canon that it was long ago exempted from being considered a threat to the suspension of disbelief.

Oddly enough, Avatar's significance not only as a science fiction film but as a science film has little to do with technological gimmicks, like interstellar travel and a rare superconducting mineral, and everything to do with the unprecedented detail with which Cameron has crafted the biology - both flora and fauna - of the hypothetical world which serves as the setting for his film.

As the credits rolled at the end of Avatar I turned to my friend Carol Potter, a high school biology teacher in Gwinnett County, Georgia, a state not known for holding Darwin in particularly high regard, and said, "if it weren't for all the tall, lithe, athletic, semi-nude blue bodies, this movie could make a great addition to your curriculum on the theory of evolution." *

By that comment I did not mean to endorse Cameron's wide-eyed vision of an alien biosphere so interconnected that it behaves as though it were a single organism (in accordance with the speculative and widely-criticized Gaia hypothesis), but to point out that the director had sketched the outline of an intriguing version of an alternative Galápagos, a world in which familiar ecological niches are occupied by strange and exotic creatures related, mostly, by common descent. **

Unfortunately, the scientists of Avatar - exoanthropologists, one might call them - are consigned to secondary roles.  What a difference it would have made had James Cameron seized the opportunity - in the very year that marked the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin's birth and the 150th anniversary of the publication of his On the Origin of Species - to position a scientist-explorer, and not a disillusioned imperial soldier, front and center as the hero of his movie.  With more artistic daring this recycled tale of thwarted neocolonial conquest could have been replaced by a bold re-imagining of Darwin's Voyage of the Beagle. Avatar could have taken its place as not only a technical tour de force of film production but also, by making a scientific adventure the center of its story, a work of science fiction of the highest order.

---

* Depiction of the naked human form, I imagine, is even less welcome in Georgia classrooms than the notion that we, as a species, are descended from apes.

** I say "mostly" here, because the humanoid Na'vi have 2 arms and 2 legs, unlike the 6-limbed creatures with whom they share Pandora.  This concession to commercial necessity - that the Na'vi appeal to general audiences - is best captured by a quote from an interview with James Cameron in Playboy  in which he says of the native heroine Neytiri that he knew from the start, “she’s got to have tits.”




"Avatar" - Nature Blue in Tooth and Claw by Marc Merlin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at thoughtsarise.blogspot.com.

"Avatar" - James Cameron Dreams of Electric Actors

This is the first of in a series of short posts about James Cameron's new blockbuster Avatar.

Make no mistake about it, out of the gate Avatar is a landmark science fiction film.  People may argue whether it succeeds as a work of story-telling, but no one can deny that Cameron has orchestrated a combination of cutting-edge movie-making techniques to realize a vision of an alien world in a realistic and compelling way that will serve as the standard of comparison for science fiction films for years to come.

In this regard Avatar springs into the world full-blown, much as Stanley Kubrick's 2001, A Space Odyssey did in 1968 - so different from its predecessors that it startles us, and demands we revise our expectations for the medium.  Everything that came before is revealed to have been nothing more than cardboard spaceships sporting sputtering sparklers and bow-legged actors cavorting in foam-rubber monster costumes.

It's important to keep in mind that science fiction films, as much as they aspire to be movies about ideas, first and foremost strive to fabricate believable visions either of the future of our own planet or of the landscapes of others light-years away.  With Avatar Cameron has triumphed by creating a marvelous new world for both his characters and his audience to inhabit.

In addition Avatar will likely establish itself as a watershed in the relentless march of cinema from its reliance on flesh-and-blood actors to the routine use of what may come to be called "synthetic" players.  The melding of live action and CGI (computer generated imagery) through the use of motion-capture technologies will give way to the construction of genuinely autonomous virtual actors, informed, perhaps, by the smoky voice of Marlene Dietrich or the smoking curves of Marilyn Monroe.

So, with Avatar James Cameron has allowed us to glimpse another future world, one in which the film director has become a painter of characters, methodically composing actors from a palette of performers, some living, some dead, and some drawn solely from his or her imagination.


"Avatar" - James Cameron Dreams of Electric Actors by Marc Merlin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at thoughtsarise.blogspot.com.