I finally got around to seeing Avatar last night. Much has been written about it, often critical of its woolly eco-mysticism, but maybe I can approach it from a slightly different perspective….
This is yet another movie that expands on the theme that “we’re all connected”. The homages to Star Wars and Dances With Wolves were blunt. This shop-worn theme is not a bad starting point, and it took me awhile to figure out why exactly I found Cameron’s interpretation distasteful. It wasn’t just the perversion of the American Marine into heartless genocidal exterminator — that’s been done to death by Hollywood and anyone offended by that should really avoid nearly every movie touching on the military in the last forty years.
As a Buddhist, I can usually relate to the notion of interconnectedness, and when movies push this, I’m generally okay with that. But what was it about the Na’vi that was so jarring? Clearly these were no Buddhists. In fact they were hysterically hostile, unbalanced, irrational hunters and warriors. And after all the jib-jab about Eywa, it was something of a letdown to be handed a flatly mechanistic explanation for the interconnectedness of the Pandoran biome. It turns out that the explanation provided for a not-so-universal interconnectedness after all — because the “we” in “we’re all connected” pretty much excludes everything off-world. This made for a handy “us vs them” to justify the slaughter by the Na’vi of human soldiers (and of Na’vi by the humans) at the end of the movie. So for me this came across as, “yeah, sure, we’re all interconnected, but we’ve got to have a big massacre at the end because it’s Hollywood and we’re all about the box office”….
Now, there have been times when Buddhism has been perverted into supporting militarism. But by and large the record of Buddhism is pretty good. [BTW the link goes to a paper about Lewis Richardson’s Statistics of Deadly Quarrels, which studied the correlates of war. Richardson’s studies showed, among many other things, that Buddhist countries by and large generated fewer conflicts than did other religions.] But whatever you might think of the Na’vi, “pacifist” doesn’t come to mind.
And the strange organismic interconnection of the Pandorans seemed to me to yearn for a Spock moment: “It would appear, Captain, that the entire planet is a single organism!” at which point Kirk would conclude that a few well-placed phaser blasts would convice Eywa that it was unwise to hold a Federation shuttlecraft hostage… but I digress. There were no heroes in this movie. Sure, Jake Sully was put forth as a hero for siding with the Na’vi, but the whole assimilation thing seemed a bit too Borgish for my comfort.
And a word about the 3D technology: I hope this is not the wave of the future. As a user of monovision contact lenses, the 3D effect seemed uneven and distorted. Much of the left side of the picture was fuzzy. But now I’m resorting to pleonasm….