James Cameron's Avatar

Beware: Human Pestilence Invades

I recently went to see the film “Avatar” in 3D, a film directed and produced by James Cameron. I don’t think I need heap any more praise on the visual spectacle of the film which, without doubt, was superb. Instead I would like to comment on the story line.


The plot of the film is “Independence Day” in reverse. In “Avatar” we find human beings from Earth playing the role of the evil advanced aliens intent on invading, exploiting and ransacking another planet, a planet called Pandora, home to a technically primitive race. The purposes of these Earthly aliens, against whom resistance is otherwise futile, are ultimately foiled by one of their own genetically engineered undercover agents who falls in love with a female Pandoran and starts to identify with his lover’s race. Interestingly, a pre-film trailer advertised an animated children’s film where once again the plot was built around the premise of invading Earthlings threatening a peaceful alien society. In the shift from the nervous helplessness of the cold war period to proactive Western military initiatives our social milieu seems to be on the move once again.

“Avatar” is popular filming at its best and most typical. In many ways it resembles pantomime; the film employs expected formats and templates known to work at an entertainment level, making it easy and fun watching. It contains scenerios and characters readily recognizable and lacking in ambiguity; we know who are the good guys and who are the bad guys and therefore we know who to cheer and who to boo. The film as a whole is an ensemble of tried and tested cinematic clichés. Many scenes have counter parts in other blockbuster productions and the feeling that “I have seen and/or heard that somewhere before” (and probably many times) pervades the whole production. Like the medieval mystery plays it is secure formatted entertainment that isn’t going to spring any nasty surprises; fulfillment of one’s expectations of the direction of the plot is part of the enjoyment.

Some aspects and themes of the film are timeless; like, for example, a love story complicated because it transcends a cultural or racial divide and a denouement showdown between hero and villain. (I remember writing a story with such an ending when I was twelve!). However other types and themes are specific to contemporary culture, especially the use of character types who today we love to hate: There was the corporate coward; a villain of little physical presence and courage who viewed the world only through corporate interests and profit, thus greatly simplifying his picture of reality; to him the Pandorans were mere “savages”. But the main villain of the piece was the brutal military commander who was looking for the first pretext to use military muscle instead of diplomacy and understanding; to get to those exciting slap-stick drama scenes we were all waiting for you just knew he would eventually get his way. Connecting the interests of the two bad guys was the anonymous and faceless corporation that employed them to clear the way, at any aesthetic cost, for its profit making.

Above all, the film taps into contemporary Western culture’s nagging guilt and anxiety; guilt about what it has done to more “primitive” societies in the past and the conduct of recent wars; anxiety (and guilt) over environmental stress caused by an industrialised free market society. The Pandoran culture is reminiscent of the American Indians, Black Africans and Australian Aborigines - all cultures that have suffered under Western contact. The military hardware used to subdue the Pandorans looks like a more advanced version of that used to brush aside the ramshackle militia of Iraq and Afghanistan. But as with Iraq and Afghanistan so with Pandora; easy victory in a war using conventional hardware merely acted to usher in the real war; a war with a hidden and inscrutable foe difficult to understand and cope with; a foe over which advanced military technology has little effect. In ‘Avatar’ the real foe turned out to be the planet Pandora itself and it was by this device that Cameron developed his environmental theme. Hinting at Lovelock’s concept of Gaia, Cameron depicts a planet enveloped by some kind of mother Goddess. The Pandorans pray to this deity and worship her. They have a mystical connection with her and consequently live in harmonious relationship with their Eden like environment - unlike the attacking Earthlings who have lost both their connection with the divine and their Eden. We therefore know that these fallen invaders will begin to destroy that environment for the sake of gain once they get their hands on it. At the prayer of the plot’s hero Pandora’s Gaia Goddess raises up the wild life of the planet to help defeat the invading aliens, a twist that echoes the Earth virus defeating the Martians in War of the Worlds. Like the Egyptian charioteers who pursued the Israelites across the Red Sea the forces of Earth were overwhelmed.

The Earthling’s military campaign to oust the Pandorans was referred to in the film as “shock and awe”. The destruction of the huge tree house of the Pandorans was very reminiscent of 9/11. Thus it is clear that Cameron consciously incorporated themes of contemporary interest and relevance into his film. But perhaps with less self awareness Cameron alludes to one overriding and recurring theme that I return to time and again in my blogs; that is, Avatar is yet another manifestation of fundamental tensions I have variously expressed as analysis vs. intuition, cognition vs. feeling, left brain vs. right brain, mechanism vs. Aquarius, machinery vs. the life force, science vs. mysticism, reason vs. fideism etc; in short all that is conveniently labeled under the rubric of what Karen Armstrong refers to as Logos verses Mythos. In the film the Earthlings are portrayed as an evil science obsessed and machine wielding race who use their analytical knowledge to conquer for the sake of personal gain, but there is something vital missing from their divide and conquer analysis of situations; namely, a mystical holistic factor that the Pandorans well understand, an understanding they express with the aid of their mythic religious symbolism. However with a nervous glance over his shoulder at the all conquering authority of science in our culture Cameron pays lip service to science: He hints that the Gaia Goddess of planet Pandora is an outcome of the intertwining roots of Pandora’s trees which form some kind of huge planet wide neural network larger than any human brain. In the film this realization never dawns on the one track male minds but instead comes to a sensitive female scientist (another cinematic cliché). The analytical minds of the Earthlings are too focused on the simple and elemental – in this case securing the crystalline mineral riches of Pandora - to see the wood from the trees so to speak.

In spite of Cameron’s ultimate concession to analytical science Pandoran culture is imbued with mystical and archetypical religious motifs; with prophecies, portents, prayers and an incarnate savior destined to bring hope and salvation. It is therefore difficult to take Cameron’s “scientific” rationalization too seriously. Certainly the toy town rationalists are unlikely to be satisfied with Cameron’s scientific gloss because it lends kudos to religious practice and therefore ultimately subverts their purely “logos” outlook: OK so you might have at the back of your mind that the deity you are relating to is actually some kind of planet sized neural network. But this scientific patter merely puts a technical negligee on a ritualistic and mythical mysticism that doesn’t conform to the analytical standards of scientific evidence and thus is no block to religious and superstitious practice - in fact quite the reverse; it adds scientific kudos to religion!

But that scientific negligee so easily falls away. In the final analysis an experienced theism is less about the theoretical ontology of deity than it is about a how one relates to that Deity. A child may have all sorts of erroneous ideas about the ontology of his parent but that doesn’t stop him/her relating to the personality of that parent. Thus it is possible for the self same relationship to migrate to a different conceived ontological object. Likewise, it is very easy to regard any pseudo scientific patter about Gaia as an apology to science, or itself merely a mythico-metaphorical understanding of deity, an understanding that can, if needs be, be discarded all together in favour of a much more grandiose metaphor of God. The Divine Personality is primary and the conceptions of the exact nature of the ontology reifying that personality is secondary. Therefore just how individuals relate to deity is relatively tolerant of idiosyncrasies in those individuals’ beliefs about the ontological nature of deity. And here is an example: Christians relate to the Father via Christ in the power of the Holy Ghost; this is the Holy Trinity. On occasions, however, Christians have attempted to fine tune their conceptions of Trinitarian ontology. The resulting nuanced differences in Trinitarian doctrine have lead to sharp disagreements and even mutual accusations of heresy and blasphemy. But nevertheless in spite of mutual animosity, and even loathing, caused by the theological hair splitting there is little that Christians can do to stop other Christians claiming Christ their own and relating to the Father via Christ in the power of the Holy Ghost.


Today, in some quarters God Ontology has changed beyond recognition and become bound up with pseudo scientific patter about God like aliens. The UFO contactee stories run parallel to our social milieu and like an accompany dream life may contain a Freudian encoding telling us something about our waking world. Does the new “Westerners as alien conquerors” ethos portend a change in these contactee stories? Will we hear of UFO occupants being shot down and enslaved in Area 51? Will abductees bring back stories of alien Grays who are terrified by the influence that human technological and industrial activity is having on the Earth and/or cosmos? There is, it seems an underlying sense of guilt and failure in the face of a vision of human beings as sinfully proactive protagonists who spoil and desecrate. It is surely ironic that there are echoes here, as in Cameron's film, of the timeless stories of Eden, the human fall and a loss of connection with the Divine.

Robot Brains: I bet he can't he see the wood from the trees.