My thoughts on Avatar

Just got back from the IMAX 3D Version, and my mind continues to percolate things to say about this film. First of all, I'd like to say that I'll be posting spoilers for the film here, so beware! I avoided learning too much of the plot beforehand, so if you want to keep your experience pristine, then read this afterward.

I loved the movie, just so you know, and what I wrote below is simply an examination of the movie from several of my favorite angles.

Avatar and the Monomyth

Joseph Campbell (look him up) talks about one myth, one story, that has been told again and again throughout the ages, the Hero with a Thousand Faces. Every heroic story follows this familiar arc -- the hero, a person with something to set him apart from his fellow man (in this case, Jake has been paralyzed), is placed in an unfamiliar environment with rules that are different from what he knows. He masters those rules, returns home, and changes his old environment as a result of what he has learned from this unfamiliar environment -- he has changed and can now benefit his fellow men. There are embellishments in this tale that are often added -- magic weapons are given, spells are learned, the hero falls in love, etc... but the pattern remains the same.

Avatar is such a satisfying film because it follows this pattern so precisely. We have Jake, a man set on an alien world with rules of its own, who learns the ways of its native people (riding a horse, flying, learning their language, marrying their princess) and returns to his old way of life altered and able to help his fellow people -- an interesting twist is that for Jake, his alteration completely changes who he sees as "his fellow people."

What makes Avatar also brilliant is that it contains a second monomyth embedded within the first -- we have Jake, and Jake's Avatar, his "true" form, and in helping his "new" people with the war, he uses the knowledge he has learned from the "alien" world -- the realm of the military. Indeed, the juxtaposition of these two forms is what I want to talk about next.

Avatar and the Higher Self

I think you probably know the original meaning of Avatar -- a Sanskrit word for an incarnation of God in human form, taken on in order to restore balance and Truth to the world. When I first heard about the movie James Cameron was making, I though he had it backwards -- here's a human with a weak body coming from a place of separation from nature, incarnating into an already pure environment as a spy to help destroy nature.

In Jake's vat-grown artificial body he has all the freedom he lacked in his real body, literally running and jumping for joy as soon as he inhabits it. It makes him more alive, more real, more himself. And yet, it is just a temporary state, and he must continually go back to the "real" world where he is not in communion with nature

However, halfway through the film, Jake's identification shifts. He is now more the Avatar body than his old one, and living his life almost entirely through its remote controls and senses. He becomes initiated into the tribe, and this ceremony is the turning point for the whole movie -- he has been forever altered, and cannot unsee or unlearn his life in the forest.

He proves, through war, that he has mastered his new body, and can use it to change things, to do the impossible, to make Pandora (Earth) a better place. And this is when it struck me: his Avatar body is like his soul, real and more himself, and his body (as it were) is the fake him, the (in a Sanskrit sense) real Avatar that his higher self has used to help get him to this place of truth.

I can hear the MUM students groaning already, but I was really struck by how perfectly this fits with the experience of meditation. At first, Jake does not identify with the Avatar body at all -- he claims that it looks like his brother, not himself. But fellow Avatar operator Norm doesn't buy it; "It looks like you," he insists to Jake.

At first, the higher Self is seen as "not me" or "not belonging to me", but gradually, it becomes something you get acquainted with and really start to enjoy. After some time with the repeated experience of this Self, something happens, and it's suddenly you now. It's YOU, and the old you is seen as more of a shell, as something that may come and may go, while the real you is ultimately permanent.

After all this time of denying your own actual identity, the sudden realization of your own true nature may completely destroy your previous life, as it does for Jake -- he is basically a prisoner of war after his destruction of the camera. However, it always turns out that the life which emerges after the Self is realized results in true happiness, free from fear or limitations -- Jake fearlessly destroys all the opposition and becomes the new leader of the natives on Pandora.

At the very end of the movie, Jake leaves his old body permanently at the ceremony for his aptly named "birth." His real body, his immortal spirit, opens its eyes as the word "AVATAR" manifests -- very powerful. The total transformation into spirit reaches completion, and full enlightenment is attained. And he gets the girl to boot. ;-D

Avatar and Politics

Okay, raise your hand if you caught some -- ahem -- similarities between the events of this movie and what happened to the Native Americans.

Okay, you can put them down now.

Really, this is the most obvious thing in the film, and James Cameron does a great job clubbing us over the head with it. Really, this could be said to be like Dances with Wolves (another film that everyone loved because it follows the monomyth so exactly) but in space. Still, let's look at this angle for a bit.

The greed that the white ma... I mean that the humans have for natural resources remains insatiable even in the 22nd century. Unobtainium (groan) is simply the new oil or coal or land, and Pandora is simply America or any other place Native people once inhabited. On the surface, it seems fairly all right to just get the resources -- after all, the Natives aren't using them, right? But as the plan unfolds and it seems that the Natives won't leave peacefully, well, we need those resources, right? So send in the Cavalry!

It was very hard to watch certain parts of this film -- the burning horse when the battle seems almost lost was very intense -- because it so perfectly channeled the despair that Native people feel when their homeland is overrun by invaders with highly advanced weaponry that leave no room for resistance. The terrible firepower of the shock troopers in power armor, the flight of the people after the destruction of the home tree, these all triggered collective American memories of the near-extinction of the buffalo, of the trail of tears, etc... and I feel, may be slightly lost on some foreign audiences even though this is a universal human issue. Still, Cameron hit on something here.

Jake tells the Na'vi goddess Eywa that there is "no more green" where the humans live, that they have "killed their mother," a clear environmental warning. So there's that message in the film as well; that it is right to protect nature, and senseless to destroy it.

Many people could say the message is heavy-handed, but at least Cameron shows the situation instead of telling us for 90% of the film, which makes it much better in my opinion. And he may have hit on something, which brings us to:

Avatar and the Emergence of a New Earth

It's become somewhat of a cliche in spirital circles to say that we are entering a new age, a time when things will be better and when humanity will live in harmony with Nature instead of fighting it. I live in a community where many people meditate, and the term Heaven on Earth is common parlance, so you can understand how I might be seeing signs of growing awarness wherever I look.

The portrayal of the Na'vi as respecting all life, and regretting its loss is certainly just like Native peoples all over the world. Neytiri, Jake's eventual wife, tells him not to thank her for the deaths of the doglike creatures when she saves him. (Of course, I'd like to point out that the Na'vi have no problems killing humans at the end of the film, but I guess it's okay if its to defend their homeland, hmm? But I digress.)

The Na'vi share an innate bond with nature, a literal link to anything in the forest. This is totally sweet as a concept, but it's also a perfect portrayal of modern human desires -- we want to be able to commune with animals and plants like that, to be one with them. (By the way, do Na'vi have sex with their hair links? Just a thought. But again I digress.) According to many spiritual teachers, by becoming more natural (one way is to return to the way native people lived, or at least by respecting the earth more), human beings can regain their link with nature, which is actually the oneness of all things in creation (as Sigourney Weaver tries to point out to the clueless corporate executive).

As the audience, we undergo the same transformation Jake does. We start out as clumsy, broken, incomplete, and fall in love with the beauty of nature and the freedom that comes with respecting it. We start out as members of the human race, and emerge as Na'vi at the end. We see the military method of conquering another people fail utterly, and rejoice.

Some might fault Cameron for having the Na'vi win the war -- in a typical Deus Ex Machina moment, the Na'vi are saved when Nature Herself in the form of the creatures of Pandora overruns the human troops and brings victory to the native people. But this did not happen to the American Indians, or the Zulus, or the Incas or the Aztecs. Neytiri says that the goddess Eywa does not choose sides. Why couldn't Cameron leave it at that, and let the audience see what really happened back in those conquests?

Perhaps what Cameron is saying, however, is that now, things will be different. Now, militarism will not solve problems, will not win, and in fact, is totally senseless. This time, Eywa, the Goddess, Mother Nature, will answer the people who are protecting the world and its resources. There will be a response so clear, so unmistakable, that even those who are blindest must not fail to see. Even if this isn't what Cameron intended, Avatar may still play a great role in influencing the subconscious of the audience and preparing them for whatever great changes may be coming.

This is Ted Walker. Thanks for reading. I'm going to bed. Good night.