Avatar Wants You To Go Native, Challenge Authority, and Kill It

I am a movie junkie, but not as bad as the hard core junkies. I can't quote every famous line, nor can I name all the films by the most obscure of actors like one of my friends can.. But I love movies and the experience of sitting in the theatre away from the reality of the world. (Which perhaps, makes me less the movie junkie and more the escapist).

Hollywood has unleashed a fair batch of entertaining flicks this holiday period and the three I am looking forward to are Sherlock Holmes, Avatar and Up in the Air. Up in the Air in particular seems like it will be the most rewarding despite being on the tail end of the economic curve, what with its George Clooney main character traveling the country helping corporations lay people off. Given recent economic indicators, the layoff trend is probably at or near its apex, if it didn't hit that back in October.

Avatar has been grabbing all the press and attention, and largely for James Cameron's impressive use of technology in this film and across his directing career. I will see the movie even though I will surely be bludgeoned to death and annoyed by its message. It's a retelling of imperialism, or America run amok, with the innocent Na'vi people as the recipients of our avarice and aggression. With all our technology and military and capitalistic ways we are destroying those who are close to the earth and living a truer more natural existence, as Cameron would have it. The main character makes the choice to fight against his homeland (the U.S.), in order to preserve the purity of the other society.

In other words we are asked to root for a traitor to U.S. goals and side with nature.

Ross Douthat writes about the movie, and Hollywood's substitution of pantheism in place of more rigorous religious expression. Like Buddhism (as practiced by many Americans), pantheism is vague enough to be quite comfortable for those seeking a system of belief that does not require anything that might overwhelm personal inclinations. It also dovetails with the current environmental movement, allowing you to feel spiritual while buying your compact fluorescent bulbs at Walgreens. You need never step into a church, or forgive, or otherwise inconvenience yourself, because you are too busy being a steward of the earth in its entirety, one small footprint at a time. Human individuals get lost shuffle and are considered only in platitude under the phrase "future generations."

Douthat reminds us that nature can be as brutal as any God, and that deifying nature does not account for the nature of evil, since in nature all things are as they are (without moral judgment).

The question is whether Nature actually deserves a religious response. Traditional theism has to wrestle with the problem of evil: if God is good, why does he allow suffering and death? But Nature is suffering and death. Its harmonies require violence. Its “circle of life” is really a cycle of mortality. And the human societies that hew closest to the natural order aren’t the shining Edens of James Cameron’s fond imaginings. They’re places where existence tends to be nasty, brutish and short.

Religion exists, in part, precisely because humans aren’t at home amid these cruel rhythms. We stand half inside the natural world and half outside it. We’re beasts with self-consciousness, predators with ethics, mortal creatures who yearn for immortality.

(N.Y. Times)

Douthat quotes Alexis de Tocqueville and both of them have a good fix on this move away from individualism and toward a vast concept of "oneness."

Then there are those who would protest all of this say, "It's just a movie, relax." Perhaps. After all, James Cameron is no Leni Riefenstahl.