Well it seems we're all
going back to Planet Pandora. And why not? With the proclamation of a
coming sequel to the blockbuster sci-fi epic Avatar -- no, make that three
sequels -- the near-universal response from one and all has been "Sure!
Just tell me much money to bring and where to stand in line!"
Even the
recent announcement of a one year production delay hasn't dampened the ardor
and anticipation.
James Cameron's epic was the most important science
fiction film of the first decade of the 21st Century, least of all because it
proved that animation tools have matured enough to portray almost any story.
For example, the vivid animal characters in Life of Pi. Or else --
perhaps someday soon -- dolphins piloting starships?
(An aside: I liked Christopher Nolan's Interstellar even more, in part because
it contained more for my inner adult... a theme that I'll develop here.)
But of course, Avatar was about much more than
special effects. Director-producer James Cameron often conveys fascinating
messages. He wants to entertain everyone, but also to make some members of the
audience think. Hence, it is the lessons of Avatar that I plan to engage and dissect here, today... and across two more installments.
Specifically, did James
Cameron succeed in his blatant goal with Avatar
-- to craft a great teaching moment? *
Okay then, regarding Avatar, let's start by
admitting that --
1) James Cameron's heart is
in the right place.
Hm, well. In a sci fi
context, you can't take the clichéd meaning of that statement for granted! In
fact, I have no direct knowledge of JC’s cardiopulmonary placement....
Seriously, there's no
question that Mr. Cameron means well.
He's intent on doing more than just wrestle cash out of the pockets of a
billion people. He wants them to behave better. To care more. To broaden their
horizons of tolerance, diversity, vision and possibility. Moreover, he's
worried about how sketchily we're handling our duty as planetary managers. All
of these are causes that I share and that I try (with more limited reach) to
convey in works like Earth and Existence.
So, I'll not criticize James Cameron for using his art to
help make a better world.
Ah, but with this clear aim, how well did Mr. Cameron
succeed? And did this messianic ambition harm his art? Hold that thought.
2) Almost every review of
Avatar compares the plot to Dances with Wolves…
…or other classic
cautionary tales that preached similar values -- e.g. Pocahantas, Fern Gully, Silent Running, or Ursula K. LeGuin's The Word for World is Forest -- all of them portraying powerfully rapacious and greedy modern
people (e.g. male European invaders of North America) in tense conflict with a
group or tribe that -- albeit technologically primitive -- possesses superior, earthy
wisdom. Whereupon one of the invaders goes native and joins the oppressed tribe,
aiming to help them resist his own, morally-misbegotten, original folk.
At surface, that is indeed what we see in Avatar.
Some of the sillier, satirical references to this overlap -- such as "Dances
with (very tall) Smurfs" or "Lawrence of Ferngully" -- are both snarky and funny. I hear that Cameron
takes them in good humor. A successful person can. (Watch: Everything Wrong with Avatar in 4 minutes!)
Now, I prefer storytelling that's less derivative. A bright
fellow like James Cameron should be helping to lead Hollywood out of its
current creativity-funk -- a dismal cycle of remakes, comic book reworks and rehashing
old tropes -- that is resisted with consistency only by Christopher Nolan and
Alfonso Cuaron. Even Steven Spielberg has retreated (albeit brilliantly) into
retelling old tales. Perhaps we just live in cowardly times.
Hence, the derivative-cloned story is not what bothered me about Avatar.
When I go see a flick, I adjust expectations and try to enjoy each movie in the
spirit that it's offered. Generally, that requires cranking my originality
dial way down, along with the logic meter. For Avatar, I then spun up my cool
fun and gosh wow and
root-for-underdog dials ... and wound up enjoying it immensely!
Alas, A couple of other scales… well… I wish I hadn't
been forced to zero them out.
3) A key point: Avatar
depicts an evil-westerners-type story unfolding in our future.
Where Dances with Wolves
and Pocahantas were set in the past -- and Fern Gully in the
approximate-fantasy present -- James Cameron sets his story in a time-to-come,
after humanity has had another 200 years of experience, learning and
technological progress -- plenty of time to discuss its own flaws, failings and
potential for righting wrongs. Its potential for compassion and genius.
Ponder how our own values have grown more broad and
subtle, in just the last 50 years, since Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. A
journey that’s incomplete! Indeed, Cameron hopes to propel forward our grand
conversation about human self-improvement. A conversation that will be taken up
by our children, and theirs. A conversation -- and please consider this
carefully -- whose past will have included movies like Avatar.
Ponder the irony. Avatar portrays a future in
which films like Cameron's have apparently achieved nothing! We have learned
zilch, despite the best efforts of billions of sincere people, including James
Cameron. The social progress and rising acceptance that emerged from 1945 to
2015 stopped dead, and even reversed.
Oh, there've been changes, between our present and the
future shown in Avatar. We've not only become interstellar travelers,
but have invented a wondrous method for putting our minds literally into the bodies
of other beings and walking around for a mile or more in their skins. (Not too
unlike the technology that I posit - but handle very differently - in Kiln People.) The avatar-embedding machinery at the core of the story is
potentially the greatest tool for tolerance, empathy and cultural learning
imaginable! Indeed, that is how Cameron portrays it being used...by one person. Maybe two.
Indeed, we've just set the stage for Avatar's
moral collapse: rooted in the fact that this
version of the "dances with others" scenario is set in a
depressingly ordained-awful future.
Consider. With Pocahantas and Dances With
Wolves, the audience contemplates the folowing implicit lesson:
"We come from
a savage past, when immature ancestors did terrible things, while a few heroes
lit candles in the darkness. Those mistakes still cling to us. Let's learn from
our past and continue to do better."
In sharp contrast - and without intending it - by setting
the very same story in the future, Cameron preaches:
"Humans are
hopelessly rotten. They will be oppressors with horrible institutions, no
matter how advanced we get and no matter how many tools of empathy we develop.
"Films like this one
won’t help, either.
"Give up."
To be clear -- that's not what he meant to teach!
But it is exactly how people felt, upon leaving the
theaters.
“I wish I were Na’vi,
instead of a cursed human.
"Or worse – an
American.
“I can’t wait till the
next time I can revisit Pandora and pretend I am defeating scuzzy humans!
"Especially
Americans.”
4) A movie asserting to be all about native
tribal life and ecology ignores everything we know about either.
While seated in the
audience, enjoying the color, beauty and action of Avatar, we are so
busy being visually awed -- and receiving let's-all-cooperate-with-nature
messages -- that we blithely accept a raft of contradictions. For example:
(a) On Earth, all functioning ecosystems are about
competition, predation and death. Animals in nature endure lives that are
vastly more tense and fretful than ours, not more placid and relaxed.
Hunger lurks just ahead. Brutal attack and death are always on the minds of predator
and prey and almost everyone, even the lion, dies violently. In other words, Disney lied to us.
But on Pandora? Sure we do glimpse a couple of predators
and some hunting by the Na'vi, but all of it softened and isolated. Nature, for
the most part, is a cross between Lewis Carroll and Land of the Sugarplum
Fairies.
(b) The Na'vi are a warrior people! Worthy of respect,
much as we are taught to respect the Lakota (Sioux) - the tribe that gets all the motion pictures about Native
Americans, from Little Big Man to Dances With Wolves. And okay,
the Na'vi sure do act like noble warriors cloned from the American plains...
except...
... except who have these "warriors" been
fighting, all those years and eons before Earthlings came?
At least in Dances With Wolves there's no evasion.
The Lakota are shown as what they gladly acknowledged themselves to be, at the
time – a brutally violent people, yet somehow noble and endearing -- while the
equally violent whites were not.
Okay. Fine. But in Avatar that whole background is
wiped away from view. They get to be gruff, adorably macho warriors,
without any context of endlessly vicious tribal war.
(c) As if to illustrate that fact, just like in Dances
With Wolves, the "noble" natives in Avatar come that close to treacherously slaying the protagonist
several times, once by a cowardly arrow in the back, without the slightest personal
grievance or provocation from either Lieutenant Dunbar or Jake Sully, offering them
no opportunities to honorably defend themselves. In the Costner film, they are dissuaded by a
medicine man saying "let's not kill him today." In Avatar, the
same brief mercy derives from magical (or coincidental) symbolism. Ah, how
admirably better that is, than -- say -- due process of law.
There are scads of similar oversimplifications that do
not strengthen James Cameron's case. But the key point is that none of them
were necessary, even under the pressure of a 3 hour run-time. The story and
lessons could have been conveyed, with the same visuals and characters and
overall plot, without patronizing us. Without pressing the director's thumb on
the scale.
Which brings us to a major point --
5) The Na'vi are portrayed
as justified to be both obstinate and incurious.
Indeed, some of the traits
that Hollywood adores in the upper plains nomads were despised by many
neighboring tribes of the time. Obdurate insistence on tribal changelessness,
macho-male dominance and utter unwillingness to adapt to powerful new ways.
(Except adopting the white man's weapons which, of course, the Na'vi do, as
well.) Utter contempt for any thought of compromise. Plus a recurring rash
impulsiveness that kept giving the most evil-despicable 19th Century
white men hypocritical excuses to start the next war.
Why do no sympathetic Hollywood movies sing paeans to
tribes who exhibited traits like calmness, curiosity and adaptability, as shown
by the Iroquois and Cherokee nations, who -- by the way -- respected women and
who invented democratic methods that were models to the American founders?
Tribes whose principal heroes included diplomats, inventors and intellectuals
-- like Hiawatha and Sequoia -- instead of always
brave, reckless raiders on horseback? Hey, I don’t disdain the admirable qualities
of Crazy Horse; he deserves his new monument in the Black Hills! But for
Hollywood to fixate only on that kind
of Native American hero isn't respectful. It is yet another kind of
patronization.
Getting back to Avatar, it is one thing to see a
native people who are in tune with their world preaching to us that we should
try this at home. Terrific. Yay, that!
But it is quite another to be finger-wagged by folks who
never faced the temptations that we faced, and who yawn in complete lack
of interest when they meet people who are able to cross the vast gulf between
the f%#ng stars!
All right, compassion, love, courage and eco-oneness rank
high in the pantheon of traits. But right after those, can you think of any
gift more admirable than curiosity? In Avatar, there are humans who express all four!
Show me one Na'vi who does.
6) Other critics: The White
Messiah Complex.
This
brings us to one of the more obvious criticisms of Avatar, bruited by reviewers like David Brooks and John Podhoretz,
who bemoan the “white messiah complex.”
“It rests on
the stereotype that white people are rationalist and technocratic while
colonial victims are spiritual and athletic... that nonwhites need the White
Messiah to lead their crusades... that illiteracy is the path to grace. It also
creates a sort of two-edged cultural imperialism. Natives can either have their
history shaped by cruel imperialists or benevolent ones, but either way, they
are going to be supporting actors in our journey to self-admiration.” -- writes David Brooks.
Hm,
well… duh? And you’re shocked, shocked (!) that a film-maker who is gambling
hundreds of millions of dollars would go with a core protagonist who is
guaranteed familiarity and viewer identification in his core audience? Ever
hear of a film called Rapa Nui? I
didn’t think so.
No, I won’t carp on James Cameron
for centering his story upon Jake Sully. The creator of Sarah Connor and the kickass
girl-marines of Aliens has nothing to
apologize for. We owe him some benefit
of the doubt.
Indeed, one could reverse the
complaint. Clearly, the most relentless preaching in Avatar is not about the technological or tactical or messianic
talents of Jake Sully, but the moral and esthetic superiority of the Na’vi,
along with the beyond-all-redemption vileness of every aspect of western
civilization.
== Sympathy for the alien…
and ourselves? ==
Elsewhere I talk about our quirky Western/American habit
of relentless self-criticism. Our reflex to dismiss our own culture’s value while
extolling the other. (See my essay: The Dogma of Otherness.) Sure, it’s not
universal, even among Californians -- we all know plenty of neighbors who
display smug insularity, chauvinistic nativism and even xenophobia. But the
counter-trend has been powerful for more than two generations, and it has won
more battles than it lost.
For example the widespread notion
that ‘greater wisdom’ is to be found in eastern mysticism has ranged from the
very real value that Steve Jobs got from his years in an ashram, to the mild
sense of no-excuses discipline my kids received from their karate instructor...
all the way to the hysterically pathetic reverence that Star Wars fans give to
a nasty little faux-guru sock puppet named “Yoda,” who never does or says a
single thing that’s verifiably wise,
or even helpful! At the far extreme are those westerners who reflexively
despise everything about their own culture and give unlimited excuses for
anything that's not.
Consider how this theme -- “us is bad; others is good” - often
plays in science fiction films. Aliens have to be pretty darned vicious and
ugly (e.g. Independence Day) in order
to fill the villain role. And District Nine showed that even nasty appearance no longer disqualifies the other
from sympathetic treatment.
Look, I know this cultural phase is
necessary, in order to help break lots of bad-old habits that go back 60
centuries. My own life-long fascination (in both science and fiction) with the other
-- ranging from the expanse of human diversity to animal minds, to possible
alien or artificial intelligences -- surely stems from the Otherness meme that
I absorbed from an early age. I'm glad of this cultural innovation, and I try
my best to help promote it.
Alas, we are prevented from even
noticing that this meme is operating.
Or the blatant fact that it is special, recent, and mostly unique to the
neo-west. Name one another culture that ever preached to its children: “admire any other civilization but always
criticize your own! No prior people
did that. Indeed, no other culture benefited
as much as we have from relentlessly seeking our own flaws and finding the
positive in others. Or incorporating a goulash of cultures within itself.
We now view diversity as strength!
And we got to that point by relentlessly self-criticizing 6000 year old habits
of intolerance that most cultures took for granted.
All
right, that’s a difficult irony to convey. Though the brilliant 1980s sci fi
film Alien Nation managed to do it,
combining some of the traditional, otherness-moralistic chiding with a few
grains of rare praise and approval.
That film taught the audience a more
subtle lesson:
“You people still have a long, long
way to go, before you're truly decent or civilized.
"But you are getting better! You’ve come far, in fact.
"And we believe you can go
farther still.”
Is that so hard to do? Mix in a
little attaboy reinforcement, amid
the chiding?
Apparently it is. Because outside of
Alien Nation – and Star Trek, of course – I can think of no other example from Hollywood, where the intolerance-scolding message was ever sweetened
with a little encouragement. A little hope.
It could easily have been done, in Avatar.
But it wasn’t.
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