Musings: Lost in the Forest

I saw Avatar (in 3D) last Friday night and, well, I want to go back.  To Pandora.  As the friend I was watching it with said, I feel like a tourist in a foreign world, I just want to look at everything, touch, smell everything.  And ride those amazing dragon creatures.  What are they called?

I’m not giving anything away by saying the experience takes place between two worlds or states of consciousness.  And in a way, that was the same experience I had while watching it.  There was a part of me that couldn’t stop deconstructing Cameron’s social/racial assumptions.  And then there was the part of me that just wanted to let go of all my meta-conversations and give into the forest.  So to speak.

Speaking from the side that can’t quite let go, of course the parallels between the film and the US presence in Afghanistan are unmissable:

- “Let’s build them schools”

- “We need to communicate with their elders”

- “We (the Pandorans) know these mountains…they’re no match for us there!”

Respectfully, Greg Mortenson must have been a ghost writer.  Though I wonder why a film that so clearly preaches ideas of trust and non-violence needs to ultimately resort to so much destruction.  Could this film, with it’s impossibly charming, seductive fantasy world have had just as compelling a story line, complete with tension, suspense, themes of peril, etc., without all the explosions?  Seems like two very different impulses driving the film.

Again, speaking from my cynical side, the story still felt to me like a white man’s redemption fantasy.  Jake, the hero, even when blue, was clearly white.  The Na’vi, on the other hand, seemed to me, not white.  And while Jake blundered in the forest and learned from the Na’vi, in the end he was still their savior.  Feels like a revisiting of the American West mythology where a white man would be raised by the natives, and in turn lead them in some semblance of victory against Custer.  Or something like that.

Maybe Cameron is being very clever here. He knows a vast American audience will watch Avatar.  He’s being extremely un-subtle in criticizing the US Military’s occupation of foreign lands.  He can get away with this so long as he still delivers us an All-American hero to save the day.  We are, as Americans, mostly in love with the image of ourselves as the good guys, and as long as that rings true, Cameron can safely thrash our military.

I left Avatar feeling a bit guilty for my critical feelings. It seems somehow against the spirit to pick apart something that ultimately, gently, beautifully transported me like never before.  But in truth, I couldn’t watch Avatar without these thoughts tugging me back out of the lush forests of Pandora.

- Tanit

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