Is James Cameron’s Avatar prolife?
Some critics of James Cameron’s Avatar saw nothing more than a breakthrough special effects extravaganza and dismissed the plot and characterisation as trivial and meaningless. Others saw and rejected it as an expression of Western ‘white man’s guilt’ at economic mistreatment and exploitation of less developed peoples. Others felt that they were being preached at, that Avatar was a green eco-sermon.
The first thing I would have to say about it as a movie experience was that, for me at any rate, it was a landmark experience of wonder. What attracts me more than anything in an imaginative story is the creation of a new world, a world with its own internally coherent order and ethos and feel, what J. R. R. Tolkien in ‘On Fairy-Stories’ calls ‘the making or glimpsing of Other worlds’.
The world we enter in Avatar is such a world, a new world -- immense, overwhelming, breathtaking, astonishing, surprising. I smiled all the way through with delight and awe at the giant Home Tree and the action that takes place in it, running up and down the branches, falling and jumping off them, and even riding along them at marvellous speed; at the floating Hallelujah Mountains roped together with huge vines knotted around great rocks; the wonderful flying sequences with the dragons (I know, they are Banshees, but that’s a hard one to swallow for an Irishman, and the Na’vi call them Ikrans, but if I call them that you won’t know what I’m talking about, so for me they are dragons); and the Tree of Souls and the Tree of Voices with the threads of light hanging down from them. I didn’t really need any action beyond these images to mark it down as a movie I would have to go back and see again.
But listening to people who said they got little or nothing more than a Wow from the film over the past month or two has prompted me to take a look at this sudden surge in critical response. Maybe part of what they dislike in the midst of the glorious panorama of multicolour is its rather conventional black and white ethical view of things? So what exactly is the taken-for-granted sense of right and wrong in Avatar? After all, it is the highest-grossing box-office success of all time so it obviously has some deep resonance with the cinema-going masses.
What are the animating ethical senses that propel the action of the movie and carry us along with it, moving us to identify with one character and not with others? A fairly obvious handful, I’d suggest:
- The sense of the wrongness, the injustice and moral ugliness of deliberately killing innocent people;
- The sense that we are all equal;
- The sense that we are all equal especially to those who differ from us in appearance and size, cultural background;
- The sense that we are all equal to those we are inclined to feel culturally superior to;
- And even more so, the sense that we are equal to those who are less powerful than we are, less well positioned to defend their right to life that we are through no fault of their own;
- Most of all, though, the sense that we are all equal when it costs us to live out that equality; that we are equal to those who are vulnerable to us, who are at our mercy, through no fault of their own, whose mere existence stands in our way, stands between us and the enjoyment of what we have, whose lives we could, by a choice, bring to an end, thereby ending by the same stroke the inconvenience, the call to self-restraint and responsibility compassion for our fellow beings, that their equal humanity represents;
- The sense of the danger that we will be drawn, perhaps unstoppably, to harm others because they stand in the way of us having something we want;
- The awareness that we cannot destroy others, or trample on their entitlements, without first depersonalising them in our minds and in the language we use about them; and
- The horrifying discovery we make, if we are lucky, that in destroying others, not only do we harm or destroy them, we also in and by the same actions, harm or destroy ourselves as human persons.
In Avatar Cameron has returned to the giant space corporation of Aliens ready to put lives at risk for commercial reasons. What drives the plot is a commercial operation to strip-mine a priceless mineral on an inhabited planet, a moon, actually, with an atmosphere, which has no industrial development.
In artistic works, names sometimes reveal the nature of characters. To me some of the names in Avatar suggest moral elements in the plot. The name of the moon-planet that they are here to exploit is Pandora, named after the first woman in Greek mythology. She was given a box by the gods but told never to open it. If it was opened, she was warned, all the troubles of mankind would escape and run wild all over the world. Opening Pandora’s box, thus, involved breaking a divine command.
The name of the mineral the corporation is stripmining for, Unobtainium, identifies the mining company’s irresponsibly unrestrained greed and aggression as their motive for breaking the divine command of restraint and respect. The mineral cannot be obtained without breaking the divine command not to wreck the planet’s ecology and the way of life of the people who live there, an archaic hunter-gatherer people, the Na’vi.
The back-story to the movie is that we have so over-exploited the Earth in the future that no nature at all is left and the spaceships in the opening sequence are part of an outreach from a now energy-exhausted Earth to sustain our lives. The mission is to bring back the mineral at any costs.
When the shuttle brings us for the first time from the mother ship down to the mining base on the planet and we swoop in over the lush green forest, we see the vast gaping wound in the hills that is the giant strip-mining operation with its outsized, frightening people-dwarfing vehicles, a scene of nature devastated that reminded me of a photograph of strip-mining I saw in National Geographic. The transgression of the limits of fair and responsible economic activity and the use of mercenaries to drive out the inhabitants of the planet brings about in those who command and carry it out, a radical deformation of their own humanity.
The sense of the loss of self that is associated with the operations mounted from this base is captured in its name, Hell’s Gate. Those who pass out through these gates on their mining and anti-aboriginal missions are going against the Light, descending into the Hell of self-harmed humanity.
The head of the commercial operation is Selfridge. His name intimates the freezing to death of his self by greed and the abdication of his conscience to the corporation he works for. Meeting company targets irrespective of the human cost has quenched in his heart the respect that should be there for the way of life and the rights of those who stand in the way of his gaining access to the minerals he wants, and the compassion that should prevent him from ordering the violence that will destroy their lives as well as their home and their habitat. His language expresses belittlement and contempt for the people of the planet and an angry impatience to push them out of their home in the great Hometree so he can get at the minerals in the mother lode under the tree.
His brutal orders are carried out by Col. Quaritch. He has wrecked his humanity even more thoroughly than Selfridge. He is bursting with violence and his language savagely depersonalises the inhabitants of the planet as ‘savages’. We sense his explosive eagerness to get the go-ahead to lead his helicopter gunships and bombers, and ground troops armed to the teeth with modern weaponry on a seek and destroy mission against the forest people who are armed only with bows and arrows. Justice and compassion have been extinguished from his heart by aggression beyond the bounds of reason and responsibility.
If courage is the defining virtue of a soldier, then he has lost his humanity. Col. Quaritch's name may still faintly sound like ‘courage’, but the self-restraint that defines the courage of the soldier has been replaced by debasement as a mercenary at the service of quarrying for riches. On December 13th 1862, General Robert E. Lee is said to have remarked to General James Longstreet on Telegraph Hill during the battle of Fredericksburg, ‘It is well that war is so terrible, otherwise we should grow too fond of it.’ No sense of this spiritual danger for the soldier of losing one’s humanity by giving oneself over unrestrainedly to killing remains in Col. Quaritch, he is no longer able to give quarter.
The moral tension in Avatar hinges on us identifying with both sides in the conflict at the same time. For this to work there has to be a person we easily identify with who is a member of the powerful group and then identifies with the vulnerable group, enabling us to see things from both sides. In Avatar that Everyman is Sully, a Marine who has lost the use of his legs and so is in a wheelchair. ‘I joined the Marines mainly for the hardship’, he says, ‘all I ever wanted was a single thing worth fighting for.’
Selfridge gives him the mission of going among the natives of Pandora to see if he can learn anything that would enable them to persuade the Na’vi people diplomatically to ‘relocate’ voluntarily away from their Hometree so the company can mine the minerals under it. Col. Quaritch gives him a more duplicitous mission, to find out anything that could be used to force them to move or help the mercenary force move them by force if, or as Quaritch cynically says, when, diplomacy fails.
We identify with Sully’s joy when he regains the ability to walk 'through' the genetically engineered human/Na’vi body he is steering mentally, and we share his astonishment and enchantment as he enters the amazing forest world around the Hometree. And we follow him as his allegiance gradually shifts from the world of economic exploitation and military deception to the more wholesome life of the Na’vi people at one with their world of nature. He brings us with him morally as he becomes increasingly sickened and frightened by the contempt for the forest people shown by the corporate functionary who has submerged his conscience and personal responsibility in the institution he chooses to belong to, and the mercenary whose ethical sense is overridden by the violence in him just waiting for a rationalisation to be unleashed, indulged and acted out. Through Sully's response we are increasingly alienated from them by their willingness to deceive and betray the forest people and Sully himself. ‘The strong prey on the weak and nobody does a thing,’ Sully says.
Crucially for the moral tension in the movie, as the movie shifts back and forwards from the Hometree and Hallelujah Mountains to Hell’s Gate, we grow increasingly uneasy, together with Sully, as he realises how he has sullied his conscience by his participation in the deceptive betrayal of trust inherent in the mission he took on, which is essentially setting the forest people up for destruction.
Since his first days in Hell’s Gate, he has witnessed at first hand another way of relating to the forest people, tin tha actions and attitudes of Dr Grace Augustine. She is a religiously sceptical scientist who treats the Na’vi with respect. She has set up a school for their children and works among them. Through her Cameron leads us to a way of interacting with the forest people that, because it is respectful of them, does not harm our humanity when we adopt and practise it
Her name intimates Augustine’s book, The City of God, which sets out the inescapable interaction in our lives between the attunement to the Everlasting and the struggle for everyday existence in nature and society.
Augustine’s insight is that the two dimensions should interpenetrate. Respect and compassion for one another, heightened and refined in the heart’s straining for attunement to the Everlasting, should flow into our relationships with one another as justice. ‘Without justice,’ Augustine says, in the most famous sentence in the book, ‘governments are nothing but bands of robbers’. We are in no doubt as we listen to Selfridge and Quaritch that Hell’s Gate is a staging post for the excursions of a band of robbers.
Cameron leads us into his attempt to evoke the forest people’s religious experience through Dr Augustine’s scepticism and scientistic approach to it. As a scientist she does not believe in fairy tales, so she approaches the flow of energy that unites all living things on the moon/planet of Pandora experimentally, collecting samples and trying to measure and understand the energy flow mathematically. It is, she says, something like a neural interconnectivity joining everything together. Cameron has several fine symbols of this interconnectivity.
My favourite is the laying on of hands that follows Sully’s acceptance as a full member of the Na’vi. The camera rises over the people and pans down on them from above and in an effective symbol of the unity among the people, the people around Sully lay their hands on him, then the circle around them lay their hands on the shoulders of those who have already laid their hands on Sully’s shoulders, and a moving Mexican circle of solidarity ripples out until they are all united in a visible sign of the bond of unity among them.
Other symbols seek more directly to suggest the connectivity of all the life in the forest with its Ground – the bioluminescence that awakens when they run along the giant tree branches, the delicate floating or dancing light-seeds symbolising divine choice or favour, and the threads of light that hang down from the Tree of Voices and the Tree of Souls symbolising lines of communication with the ultimate source. And Dr Augustine’s openness to, and being pulled towards, this ‘religious’ tension towards the ultimate source of life is hinted at in her first name, Grace.
As her name suggests, the ultimate source of life cannot be commanded or constrained. We may call out to it and open ourselves towards it, they we have to wait. In the movie, Grace Augustine is wounded and dies. But the life force does not prevent or reverse her death. Within the religious experience of the forest people as Cameron evokes it, our existence as creatures is limited, we are born and we have to die, but death is not an evil but a moment of our existence as creatures; we come from life and when we die we continue to participate in it in some new and mysterious manner.
But Cameron goes a significant step further. He unambiguously allows the religious dimension of the sustaining source of the life force to become articulate. Throughout the movie, the Na’vi speak of and to ‘Eywa’, the ‘All Mother’, as an unseen personal source at the heart of life in the visible world. Indeed, the very sound of the name ‘Eywa’ is similar to contemporary vocalisations of the Tetragrammaton, and clearly is a personal name for a personal divinity. Some have seen pantheism in this, though pantheism would not experience the ground of the world's existence or the divine as a person.
I think that is to misunderstand what Cameron is about. He is making a movie so he has to make connections with us, his audience. His hero is a white, Western, American, not because he is 'obsessing about' or ‘working through’ or ‘imposing’ white guilt about colonialism, but, in my opinion, more mundanely, because that is the initial mainstream audience he has to connect with to get box-office lift-off for the movie. In the same way, in the Secondary World Cameron has created, the Na’vi are an archaic people living in a forest world, so in order to keep to the 'historically' credible form of religious consciousness such a people are popularly understood to have had, he portrays their religious experience as similarly archaic.
Further, Cameron is aiming his movie at a mass Western audience, first and foremost; and for that audience, widespread cultural loss of religious consciousness may safely be presumed among a significant proportion of them. So he is trying to make an imaginative connection for the audience with the imagined religious consciousness of an archaic forest people. He does this though the death of the sceptical scientist, Dr Grace Augustine, whose final words are addressed to Sully, ‘I’m with Eywa, she’s real.’ Is Cameron, then, ‘promoting’ belief in the Earth Mother or Earth Goddess? Again, I don't think so. I think he’s just making a movie that involves a sustained evocation of reality as experienced and understood religiously by an archaic people, and at the same time has to connect with a Western audience for many or most of whom alienation from living religious experience is a taken-for-granted.
As an emphatically not-de-religionised person myself, I don’t find Cameron’s evocation of the religion of the Na’vi in the slightest bit religiously threatening or offensive. A bit hokey, perhaps, but not bad for an artist working out of, and speaking to, a religiously alienated, largely secularised mass culture. As moderns we are, like Dr Grace Augustine, secularised maybe a bit too much. We believe in matter, in data; forgetting, perhaps, that even the word ‘matter’ has an echo in it still of the Latin word, mater, meaning ‘mother’; and that to speak of ‘data’, the given, is to invite the question, ‘Given by whom?’
And in the Jewish and Christian traditions one of the principal symbols chosen to express the intensity, the particularity, the warmth, the care of the divine for each one of us is based on the experience of motherhood and the fierce yet tender unconditional love of a mother for her baby. In the words of John Paul II,
'The second word that serves to define mercy is rahamim … rahamim, in its very root, denotes the love of a mother (rehem = mother’s womb). From the deep and original bond – indeed the unity - that links a mother to her child there springs a particular relationship to the child, a particular love. Of this love one can say that it is completely gratuitous, not merited, and that in this aspect it constitutes an interior necessity, an exigency of the heart. … Against this psychological background, rahamim generates a whole range of feelings, including goodness and tenderness, patience and understanding, that is, readiness to forgive.' (Dives in Misericordia, 1980, note 52)
The Bible ‘attributes these motherly characteristics to God when it uses the term rahamim in speaking of Him.’ This love, ‘faithful and invincible thanks to the mysterious power of motherhood’ is expressed for example in Isaiah: ‘Can a woman forget her suckling child, that she should have no compassion, rahamim, on the son of her womb? Even these may forget, yet I will not forget you.’ (Is 49.15)
I think in the context of the imaginary world conjured up by Cameron in Avatar, the religious symbolism is part of what he puts before us as a counterweight to show us what he believes is missing from hearts of the Selfridge and Quaritch. Something is missing from them that should stop them from destroying the forest people and the world that is their home and habitat, to extract minerals from it. How do we describe that something that they have closed their hearts to?
In order to be able to live properly, we need our lives to be embedded in a wider network of life, families and neighbourhoods, communities and societies, founded on respect for the right to life of each one – where that respect translates into a self-restraint that prevents the strong from destroying the weak simply because their being there stands in the way of us having what we want.
Avatar is about people whose hearts are hardened against respect for the right to life of people far more vulnerable than they are. They are so bent on knocking down the forest to get at the minerals underneath it that they are willing to destroy the lives of the people who live there and disrupt their way of life with all its interconnectedness social and ecological. They don’t care what they have to do as long as they can get what they want. The movie invites us to feel and see that people who feel and act in that way are humanly deformed and dimished by the dominance of this willingness to harm and destroy others less powerful, less advanced and more vulnerable than them selves; and part of the way it does so is by offering us an attractive vision of an archaic unity of the forest people with nature and the divine.
Avatar is prolife, then in the sense that it is a joyous, entrancing celebration of the beauty of life in nature and among people united in trust. But it is prolife also in a deeper, more ethical way. It calls forth from us as we allow ourselves to be immersed in it, the sense that we are all equal, even when it costs us to live out that equality. It moves us to feel that we should have equal respect for those who are vulnerable to us.
It moves us to ethical revulsion at the hardness of heart of those who destroy the lives, home and habitat of those who are at their mercy, through no fault of their own, simply because they are in the way.
Avatar, finally, moves us to feel that where others stand in the way of us having what we want, and they are at our mercy, then, more than in any other situation, we should exercise responsible self-restraint and compassion for them.
When we are watching a movie we ‘suspend disbelief’. Afterwards, we see that the story was exaggerated, that the baddies were too bad to be true and the goodies too good to be true; but that doesn’t stop us also feeling that, nonetheless, there was still a lot of truth in the story.
The final romantic and unrealistic battle-victory in Avatar reminds us that after all the evils had been let out of Pandora’s box, the one thing still left in the box was Hope.
But as we leave the cinema and return to realife, we bring with us a greater hope than we had before we saw the movie. We have been confirmed and upbuilt in the ethical senses that ground acknowledgemnt of the equality between us and those who differ from us and respect for the vulnerable and the realisation that we need to be fair and self-restrained in how we are with those who are weaker than we are and are at our mercy.
We return to daily life strengthened by the last gift in Pandora's box, Hope. That Hope will help us build a culture of equal respect for all, especially the vulnerable. After all, Hope is realistic. It reminds us that unlike the simplifications of the movies, the real people we live among are neither all good nor all bad; that our society, too, is a muddle of good and bad; but that it is not so damaged or corrupt that we may not set in motion by what we do changes for the better.
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