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.

Sustainable Transportation Forum: Swiss Hit, Swiss Miss

As a committed transit bicyclist and an occasional advocate for pedestrians in Atlanta, I was eager to attend last week's Sustainable Transportation Forum hosted by Georgia Tech and the local Consulate General of Switzerland, a 2-day public policy symposium which promised "to explore solutions to Georgia's growing traffic congestion."

I enjoy going to these kind of symposiums, and I imagine the excitement that I feel about them is in some way like the excitement my father felt at the prospect of making the trip from Atlanta to visit the City of Tomorrow at the 1939 New York World's Fair.

After attending the better part of the first day of the forum, I could confidently report that I had seen the future, and it was the Swiss national transportation network.

But like the Futurama of the 1939 Fair and similar exhibits at later world expositions, this is an elusive future, always beckoning, but forever out of reach; a tantalizing future city, draped in a facade of technological hopes but unanchored in any foundation of social and political reality, at least as far as transportation in metro Atlanta is concerned.

Representatives of Swiss rail and transportation agencies had been enlisted to introduce the "gathering of regional planners, advocates, policy makers, business leaders, and political decision-makers" to the remarkable Swiss transportation system and to highlight some of its most significant engineering and logistical achievements as the central parts of the program.

First and foremost among the featured projects was the Gotthard Base Tunnel, currently under construction and expected to open in 2018 at an estimated total cost of $8.7 billion.  When completed, at 35.5 miles in length, it will be the longest tunnel - of any type - in the world and will not only cut passenger travel time between Zürich and Milan by an hour, but also significantly reduce the amount of through-traveling truck traffic on Swiss roads.

No less impressive than how well the Swiss have built their transportation network is how well they operate it.  By manipulating the times trains arrive and depart and the speeds they travel between stops, Swiss Federal Rail is able to insure that trains leave regularly every half hour and are synchronized with not only other trains, but also buses, at some 28,000 stations around the country.  An integrated national timetable stitches together all publicly- and privately-owned transport services; everything from high-speed trains to sight-seeing ships is included in this schedule.  The level of planning required to coordinate the operation of this system, which functions as precisely as, shall we say, a fine Swiss watch, is phenomenal.

Ironically though, the most significant words spoken with regard to the reality of the future of public transportation in the Atlanta region were not those of the Swiss representatives in their technical presentations, but of Michael Meyer, Professor of Civil Engineering at Georgia Tech, a member of the introductory panel, and the person who had been asked to characterize the transportation problems to be addressed by the symposium - that is, the current and projected levels of traffic congestion in the Atlanta region - in order set the stage for the discussions to follow.

Having completed his assigned task with a few minutes to spare, Dr. Meyer struggled - out loud - with a difficult personal decision:  should he wrap up and keep his commentary within his limited charter or should he take the opportunity to say important things that needed to be said, even at the risk of offending his hosts and souring the optimistic mood established by the opening speakers.  Erring on the side of integrity, Meyer chose to speak his potentially discordant truths.  It was like watching the story of a minor "profile in courage" in the making.

Professor Meyer began by noting that he had lived in Atlanta for more than 20 years and that, during that time, he has seen many fine transportation plans come and go.  Indeed, he said that he had contributed to a number of them, and that, truth be told, had any of those plans been fully adopted, we would not be in the transit mess that we find ourselves in today.  Finally, he concluded that the sad fact of the matter was that we had failed at providing citizens of this region with a quality transit network not because of any lack of good planning or shortage of technological know-how, but because we have lacked the leadership and the political will to get the job done.

What Meyer had to say with these cautionary words was an unexpected, but an oddly appropriate, kickoff for a transportation forum that could otherwise well be described as a dog-and-pony show for Swiss good planning and technological know-how.

Interestingly enough, the better lesson that the Swiss had to offer Atlanta and, by extension, the United States, was how central the principle of mobility as a basic human right is to the success to their national transportation enterprise.  Each of the speakers touched on this point, but one in particular, Michaela Stoeckli, the general manager of the Swiss Rail Industry Association, spent some time with the issue.  She explained that, because it was long agreed among the Swiss that residents, regardless of their level of income should have access to the kind of transportation services that support them in their practical and leisure activities, transportation initiatives, even expensive ones, were routinely approved in popular referendums by overwhelming majorities.

Now, admittedly, convincing Georgians that mobility is a basic human right - given that they and other Americans are hardly persuaded that access to life-saving medical care is a basic human right - is a hard sell.  To add to this challenge, it is especially difficult for "outsiders" to participate in our national debates without being perceived as either patronizing or condescending.

But, as Professor Meyer observed, all the proposed engineering solutions for our transportation problems are for naught, absent the political will to follow through with them, and, it would seem, that progress here must start with a reorientation of our values.

In this respect, it is interesting to note that this particular forum was part of an ongoing program to promote exchanges of know-how between the U.S. and Switzerland called ThinkSwiss.  Perhaps that is exactly what we need to learn how to do - "think Swiss"  - and by that I mean recognize the benefits in store for us if we promote the right of mobility for everyone - so that we can once and for all realize the promise of the City of Tomorrow for transportation in the Atlanta area.


Sustainable Transportation Forum: Swiss Hit, Swiss Miss 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.