Intergalactic Blues: Fantasy & Ideology in Avatar by Max Cafard
INTERGALACTIC BLUES:
FANTASY & IDEOLOGY IN AVATAR
The Secret of Avatar
Avatar is the highest-grossing film of all time-- in the U.S., in at least thirty-one other countries, worldwide, and, as far as we know, in the entire universe. Its huge production and promotional cost of nearly $500 million is dwarfed by gross receipts of nearly $3 billion. This exceeds the GNP of at least 77 countries. Let’s face it. It’s the most important film in history. However, this is not because of the money it’s raked in. A number of cinematic nullities have pulled in a huge gross. It’s not because of its plot, the acting, or the directing. All of these are miserable failures. And it’s certainly not because of its supposedly progressive and ecologically enlightened message. That’s all a complete fake.
Avatar is the most important film in history in one very precise sense. No film has ever revealed in such a spectacular way the functioning of ideology in cinema. Avatar is unsurpassed in the history of cinema in showing the ways in which ideology turns things into their precise opposite. Perhaps most important, it reveals with complete clarity the fact that no message, no matter how formally radical or revolutionary it might be, will have any salutary effect on the real world, if that message is transmitted through the dominant media. It reveals the ultimate truth of mass media and of the cinematic spectacle. It reveals exactly what it means to be a spectator in mediatized society.
One of the primary rules of ideology critique is always to look for the purloined letter. Yes, “the truth is out there.” And usually not that far out there. It pops up several times in relation to Avatar. For example, the director, James Cameron, slips up and explains exactly what his film is about, in completely non-ideological terms, in an interview shortly before it was released. He says, “We’re telling the story of what happens when a technologically superior culture comes into a place with a technologically inferior indigenous culture and there are resources there that they want . . . . It never ends well.”[1]
I suppose that it’s not entirely astounding that the writer and director of a film might on some level actually know what his own film is really about. The astonishing thing is that almost everyone who sees the film thinks it’s about exactly the opposite, and he does his best to make them think this. They think it’s the story of how a very cool indigenous culture kicks the ass of a very nasty technologically advanced Empire, while a young American wins the very tall Blue Girl of his dreams. They think it’s a story that ends really well. Unlike these viewers, Cameron seems, at least for a moment, to recognize the difference between the “real story” of Avatar and the superficially impressive but inanely idiotic supplementary narrative that pretends to subvert the real one, while in fact powerfully reinforcing it.
It’s Really Special
We will take a very detailed look at the real story of Avatar. But first, let’s consider the film’s vaunted technical achievements and what we might call the “manifest story,” that is, what almost everybody seems to think it’s about: the plot. First, those really special effects. As one reviewer quipped, Avatar’s 3-D technology puts it “light-years ahead” of other films. Actually, Avatar is not only a considerable cosmological distance ahead of the others but even a whole ontological dimension ahead of the pack, since it appeared in some theaters in 4-D. The fourth dimension consists of elements that not only seem to be outside the screen, but really are outside it. Credit is usually given to John Waters for introducing 4-D with “Odorama” but this was only a new version of “Smell-O-Vision,” which goes all the way back to 1960, the beginning of this cinematic New Frontier. The idea of the Fourth Dimension can be found at least as early as Buster Keaton’s masterpiece, “Sherlock, Jr.” (1924), in which Buster is depicted as going back and forth through a movie screen.
When Avatar first introduced 4-D in Korea, no Na’vi managed to fly their pterodactyloid aircraft through the movie screen into the theater, but dimension-bending techniques included moving seats, the smell of explosives, sprinkling water, wind, laser lights, plus twenty-five other special effects.[2] The cinematic world historical significance of 4-D is that it moves the techniques of imagineering beyond the limits of the screen into the more immediate environment of the viewers. It’s a step in the direction of the totalizing of the imaginary experience, an increasing colonization or occupation of imaginary distance, the gap of fantasy. This could, on the one hand, work to subvert the powers of illusion, to the extent that ambient control distracts from the intensity of focus on the screen, the primary matrix of imaginary power. On the other hand, to the extent that it successfully reinforces the fantasy, it expands the empire of illusion, projecting it spatially outward toward the subject.
The ultimate telos of this movement from screen to subject will ironically result in a complete collapse of the process and effect a suspension of the distance traversed. In the end, images will be generated directly in the brains of what was once quaintly called “the viewers,” or “the audience,” in reference to the then obsolete forms of sensory transmission. In a sense, the audience will become on a certain level (What should we say, “a fleet”? No, that’s not quite right. Let’s say “a multitude.”) a multitude of drones. Or, to put it in a more mystified and mythologized form, they will become a multitude of avatars.
Dreaming the Impossible Dream
In contrast to the futuristic nature of its special effects, Avatar is much more presentist, and, even backward looking and traditionalist, in the conceptualization and realization of its central narrative. The film begins with stereotypically “primitive” music and scenes of the primal forest. We’re thrown immediately in the world of romantic exoticism, soon to be contrasted with a dismal world of technological domination. We’re transported 150 years in the future, long after Corporate Capitalism and the State have ravaged Planet Earth. We have entered the era in which corporations not only rule the world, or what’s left of it, but are well on the way to ruling the universe. The story takes place in one particular corner of the universe, the moon Pandora, where the RDA Corporation has moved in to exploit a mineral of almost inestimable value called “Unobtainium.” As Selfridge, the top corporate manager on Pandora says, “Their damn village is sitting right over the richest unobtanium deposit for a hundred klicks in any direction.” The corporate rulers are not only dreaming the impossible dream, they are in the process of obtaining the unobtainable resource that will allow them to reap previously unreapable profits. And they don’t have to go a single additional klick to do it.
While corporations have thoroughly trashed the earth, they seem to have survived global collapse in some unexplained manner, only to move on to new commanding heights. In the process, they have realized the hopes of Milton Friedman and the anarcho-capitalists and replaced national armies with powerful Private Defense Forces. We get to see what the State looks like when it’s fully privatized, rather than being negated and abolished. RDA’s Free Enterprise Army is ready, willing, and—let’s face it—more than able to move in and overwhelm any resistance from the natives. We know what time it is. It’s turkey-shoot time.
Next, we meet the Blue Turkeys. The natives are a tribal society consisting of Humanoids of Color called “the Na’vi.” They are blue-skinned, ten feet tall, highly intelligent and physically powerful. They have a traditionalist, nature-worshiping, communal society that lives in complete balance with nature. They practice an animistic and pantheistic religion that centers around the worship of a great Mother Goddess, Eywa. Their planet, we are told, is a kind of Giant Brain in which there is “some kind of electrochemical communication between the roots of the trees.” It is “a global network” with “more connections than the human brain.” This is “All My Relations” updated. While real indigenous people have thought in terms of relationships of kinship and cycles of gift exchange, in Avatar the ultimate relations become technological and cybernetic ones, albeit in a primitivistically mystified form.
Signifying Monkeys
Unfortunately for the invading forces of free enterprise, Pandora is completely inhospitable to humans. Not only is it populated by hordes of ferocious creatures intent on killing and eating folks, the atmosphere is completely lethal to homo sapians. The Corporation’s primary solution to this problem is to engineer avatars, hybrid creatures containing a blend of Na’vi and human DNA. This allows the nervous systems of the human and his or her corresponding avatar to be “in tune.” Though the avatar appears to be a normal Na’vi, it can be remote-controlled by the human who shares its DNA.
The protagonist, Jake Sully, has come to Pandora to take over his murdered twin brother’s avatar (since only someone with identical DNA can do this.). Jake is a former Marine who lost use of his legs in military action. His superior, Dr. Grace Augustine, has little confidence in him and consigns him, or on the physical level, his avatar, to guard duty. So it’s time to hook him up to his avatar. When this is done, Jake immediate freaks out, crashing into everything in the lab before escaping and going temporarily AWOL as he cavorts through the Pandoran countryside. There is a ridiculous gap between the real Jake’s personality and that of his avatar. Jake is chastened by tragedy and to a certain degree reflective. His avatar turns out to be a charmingly stupid, somewhat gonzoid cartoon hero. This might seem strange, since nothing about either the human genes or the Na’vi ones would fully explain this. However, it soon becomes evident that all the Na’vi characters have a good dose of Disney DNA also, and these genes seem to be particularly dominant in the avatar called “Jakesully.”
After calming down, Jake’s avatar joins a mission in the Pandoran forest. He gets separated from the others and is nearly devoured immediately by the terrifying local fauna, before being miraculously saved by the Na’vi princess Neytiri, who happens to be in the neighborhood and wipes out the scary creatures. Despite all the technological sophistication of the Corporation, Jake seems to have almost no training for survival on Pandora. It’s amazing that he lasted even long enough for the Magic Princess to save him. Neytiri notices immediately how difficult it is to convey anything about Pandora to thickheaded Sky People like Jake. Mo’at, the female shaman, agrees. Showing the trans-planetary nature of clichés, she remarks, “It is hard to fill a cup which is already full.” However, this lovable idiot begins to grow on Neytiri. She takes him to the communal dwelling place, an enormous thousand-foot high tree which is appropriately called “Home Tree.” Despite widespread suspicion about the aliens and their avatars, the Na’vi decide to allow Jake to stay and to teach him about the culture.
At this point in the story, we come to one of the things the audience would be most curious about: What is a Na’vi drug trip like? As part of his education, Jake’s avatar gets to have a vision. Mo’at purifies his body with holy smoke, and then takes “a glowing purple WORM” from some rotten old wood and deposits it in Jake’s mouth for him to chew. Immediately, those around him “seem to TRANSFORM, becoming threatening,” and “SPACE is utterly distorted, and SOUND as well—echoing, THUNDEROUS.” He sees “a ring of glowing trees, which seem miles high,” and everything is “bathed in spectral radiance.” There’s more, but you get the point. It all ends with a vision of “a diving LEONOPTERYX,” a huge ferocious creature, bearing down on him. However, you have to check the script to find all this out, because the audience gets to see none of it. Apparently it was judged to be too dangerous. In fact, the whole movie is about, and in a sense is, a drug experience. It’s all about escapism through spacing out, but none of this can be expressed too explicitly. So the audience is robbed of this particular cheap thrill. We move on.
Winning (Or Else Wasting) Hearts and Minds
Meanwhile back at the space colony, Jake catches up on the Corporation’s strategy on Pandora. As he summarizes it: “That's how it's done. When people are sitting on shit you want, you make them your enemy. Then you're justified in taking it.” However, the Corporation and its army, presumably after reading ancient military manuals from Vietnam and Afghanistan, has adopted the tactic of trying to “win the hearts and minds” of the natives before massacring them. However, to their surprise (no ancient history books having survived) this has been a complete failure and relations have deteriorated. So while bribing the Na’vi into compliance would the Corporation’s preferred, most cost-effective tactic, the military is fully prepared to annihilate what they see as backward Blue Gooks, should this be necessary. As Selfridge puts it, “killing the indigenous looks bad, but there's one thing shareholders hate more than bad press—and that's a bad quarterly statement. Find me a carrot to get them to move, or it's going to have to be all stick.”
Jake’s avatar has been accepted into Na’vidom, so this infiltrating avatar is the last hope for arranging a non-genocidal, non-stick solution to the problem of getting the goods. Selfridge tells Jake what his mission is: “Look, Sully—find out what these blue monkeys want” And Col. Miles Quaritch adds that Jake will “get his legs back,” courtesy of the Corporation, if he succeeds in betraying his new Na’vi friends. We can feel at home in this future world. Big Brother still pours huge investments into top-priority military hardware, while at the same time strictly rationing non-essential medical treatment that could merely make someone’s life worthwhile.
Jake continues his mission among the Na’vi, but is increasingly won over by the natives. They decide that his education has progressed to the point that he can be officially adopted into the tribe. Now a full-fledged Hometreeboy, he aids his newfound peeps in resisting an attack by the Corporation’s army. Beginning to emerge as a budding tribal hero, he single-handedly disables one of the Corporation’s huge military vehicles. As a rookie tribesman, Jake gets the rather individualist, patriarchal right to choose a mate, but in an act of primitivistic political correctness, Jake and Nevtiri end up choosing one another. Thus, they incidentally introduce romantic love into this communal tribal society, no doubt flouting tradition and the wisdom of the ancestors.
Monkey Business
Jakesully and Nevtiri then consummate their union. The Na’vi may forgive the blue Romeo and Juliette for sacrilege or whatever, but it’s hard to imagine that the audience will forgive the director for depriving them of the one thing they were most curious about: How do the Na’vi do it? Tragically, we get no idea what Blue Monkey Sex is really like. All we see is totally romanticized fore-foreplay and voilà, the lovers are peacefully interwined, snoozing blissfully on the forest floor.
It goes quite otherwise in the unexpurgated script. Neytiri remarks, in a surprising move of tribal coquetterie, “Kissing is very good. But we have something better.” Next, “she takes the end of her queue and raises it.” Wanna queue? What do you think! “Jake does the same, with trembling anticipation. The tendrils at the ends move with a life of their own, straining to be joined.” Ah, Ah! Autonomous part-objects! Extraterrestrial desiring machines! “MACRO SHOT—The tendrils INTERTWINE with gentle undulations.” Ah! Ah! You earthlings can hardly imagine! “JAKE rocks with the direct contact between his nervous system and hers.” Total contact! The sexual body without organs! “The ultimate intimacy.” Ah! Ah! Ahvatar! Of course, “the night” is itself “alive with pulsing energy as we DISSOLVE TO—LATER. She is collapsed across his chest. Spent. He strokes her face tenderly.” Ah! Ah! Of course, we miss all of this, except a somewhat inexplicable afterglow, in the film.
The closest we come to getting an answer in film itself to “How do the Na’vi do it?” is that they do it with horses. Though the horses are really more like flying prehistoric monsters. Neytiri introduces Jake to “mounting” and “becoming one with” the creature. As the screenplay relates the consummation of this extraordinary act of interspecies intercourse:
JAKE nervously grips the surcingle of the mare. Neytiri holds its nose-ring while Jake clumsily mounts. Jake bends one of its ANTENNAE down to the tip of his queue. He hesitantly touches them together and -- -- the tendrils INTERWEAVE. Jake's PUPILS DILATE and his mouth drops open. The horse's eyes also go wide and it HONKS nervously. Neytiri touches her fingertips to the neural interface.” Neytiri says “This is shahaylu -- the bond. Feel her heartbeat, her breath. Feel her strong legs.” Jake closes his eyes, nodding. One with the horse.[3]
Is there any doubt about what’s going on? Strangely, our director seems to be afraid to depict Jake and Neytiri queuing, but he doesn’t hesitate to show Jake queuing his horse.
Meanwhile, back in civilization, Quarritch soon finds Jake’s video diary, in which that dumbass troop stupidly reveals all his traitorous thoughts like some idiotic teenager putting videos of his drunken malfeasances on YouTube. The Corporation decides to attack the Na’vi, bomb Home Tree into oblivion, and grab the Unobtanium. Jake and Dr. Grace are given an hour for a final attempt to reach an agreement with the Na’vi, after which Shock and Awe will be unleashed. Jake and Grace’s plea for reasonable compromise with genocidal imperialism fails. When their erstwhile tribal friends discover their role as emissaries for the Corporation, they accuse them of being spies (that is, precisely what they have been) and take them prisoner. The attack commences, fire and brimstone rain down, and in the holocaust Home Tree is immolated along with many of the Na’vi. Back at the military-industrial complex, Jake and Dr. Grace are disconnected from their captured avatars and thrown in the brig. One of their allies, a wise Latina, releases them, but Dr. Grace is seriously wounded during the escape. She later dies among the Na’vi.
In a major turning point in the narrative, Jake’s avatar gets loose and proves himself by taming the Great Leonopteryx, alias Toruk, a monstrous flying creature that has only been subdued five time in the entire history of the Na’vi. Thus, Jake’s avatar, the former bumbling blue idiot, becomes the Superhero of Na’vidom and the leader of hordes of warriors from other clans who begin arriving in burgeoning numbers. The Corporation launches an overwhelming and seemingly irresistible attack, using all the firepower the martial imagination can muster. However, just as Shock and Awe seems on the verge of winning, Jake’s avatar manages to blow up Quaritch’s gigantic aircraft and rampaging hordes of giant prehistoricoid creatures stampede and decimate the advancing army. Victory is snatched from the jaws of defeat by the jaws of prehistoric monsters and by what looks pretty much like good old American Ingenuity and True Grit on the part of Jake’s avatar. Quaritch survives the battle and almost ruins the fun by cutting off Jake’s oxygen, but Neytiri saves the day by skewering the Colonel and rescuing Jake at the last possible moment. Blugrrl power rules!
The epic concludes with all but a few of the hopelessly unregenerate humans parading back to their spacecraft, defeated and dejected, ready to return to their ruined world (presumably until “Pandora Syndrome” wears off and they find another planet with Unobtainium, or maybe just Difficulttoobtainium, to plunder). The Na’vi perform a ritual in which Jake’s spirit transmigrates completely into his now super-heroic avatar body. As we will see, this signifies that the Apotheosis of the Drone is complete.
Theory I: Like Wow!
But not everyone sees it this way. There have been a wide range of interpretations of Avatar that go in various directions, though most take it as a given that the central theme is the triumph of noble savagery and the beneficent forces of nature over a corrupt, greedy and generally iniquitous civilization. For example, Ido Hartogsohn in “Avatar: The Psychedelic Worldview and the 3D Experience”[4] interprets Avatar as a kind of New Age Revelation. He says that “it is as anti-civilizational and anti-technological as a John Zerzan book, psychedelic like a Terrence McKenna talk, and glorifies the indigenous and shamanic world view. The fact that some people have failed to appreciate these highly explicit traits in Avatar, and call it clichéd or hackneyed is, to my mind, largely based on blindness to Avatar's role as a mythic specimen of our culture.” Terrance is long gone, but I’d like to check with John on this. But, OK, let’s admit it. It’s a mythic specimen of our culture. The question is: “A specimen of what?”
How neo-primitivist is it? Hartogsohn cites examples of plot elements that are taken from authentic tribal cultures and concludes that these show that “the Avatar story is as anti-civilizational and neo-primitivist as it gets.” He admits that it is “a highly ambivalent and even paradoxical film. It uses the most advanced technology to go on a long harangue against technology. But it has the maybe naïve hope that our pod experience, like Jake's, will make us want to leave our pods and reconnect with our bodies.” Yeah, sure. As they say, “hopefully…” But in reality there’s little (read: no) chance that such a film can have that effect, especially since the solution to Jake’s problem is not reconnecting with his own body, or coming to terms with its limitations, as actual living earthlings might have to do, but rather it is casting it off in favor of a technologically engineered one. Of course, if you believe in New Age magic merged with cybernetics, you can hope that the technobody will eventually morph into a real person rather than remaining a techno-nobody. But nobody in their right mind can really believe that.
It’s not surprising that Avatar should go over well in Lalaland, since it’s so full of New Age fakery. For example, Jake observes that the whole planet is a vast system of energy that the Na’vi can plug into—sometimes literally. It sounds really far out, like those holistic, personally empowering, non-polluting electric cars (all you do is plug them into the grid at night). “They see a network of energy that flows through all living things. They know that all energy is only borrowed.” Yet there is no evidence that the Na’vi have to pay back all the energy they drain from the system. True, they die, but this just gives back a small amount of the total energy they use. Therefore, this is just ideology—they actually use a surplus of energy, draining it continually from the system, but they claim that they are only borrowing it and will pay it back. The Na’vi are not far from the kind of self-deception that is endemic in some Green and most New Age circles. The Na’vi are, in fact, a mythologized embodiment of precisely such false consciousness.
Hartogsohn, however, thinks that it is “no less than amazing” that such a revolutionary film, “with its psychedelic qualities and ideas, shamanic values, and indigenous politics,” and which “challenges all that is sacred to western materialistic thought and champions shamanic ideas and values deemed to be ludicrous by the dominator culture” has “already earned more than a billion dollars and is quite probably on its way to becoming the highest grossing film of all time.” Right. Show me the money. The New Age Revolution is over and the primitive has won, all on the basis of box-office receipts.
A hard act to follow, this powerful assault on Western civilization. What could possibly come next? Hartogsohn tells us exactly. After the Revolution comes the Renaissance. “Considering that the next big 3D event is Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland, a story jammed with weird acting mushrooms and even weirder realities, it seems that we might be facing a kind of psychedelic renaissance brought on by 3D cinema.” In other words, after a “fundamental challenge” to the “reigning values” of the “dominator culture,” we don’t do something mundane like starting an actual, real-world revolution to put the new values into effect. No, we move on to Alice in Wonderland.
Theory II: Objet Petit @