“How does it feel to betray your own race,” snarled Colonel Miles Quaritch. “You think you’re one of them? Time to wake up.” In 2009’s “Avatar”, Quaritch wore an exoskeleton to kill the film’s hero, Jake Sully, a paralyzed ex-marine, who traded his human body for a healthy Navi one. The two battled over the moon-planet Pandora, and which race would own it. Jake won the fight and a rebirth. In the last scene, his paralyzed body is laid next to his Navi one, and the sentient planet, Ewya gets to work. Trees glow like fluorescent power lines and Ewya transferred Jake, permanently, into his Navi body.
Sixteen years later, “Avatar 3: Fire and Ash” hits the screen and once again, the film ends with a human turned, partially, into a Na’vi. A teen named Spider, Quaritch’s son wears a mask to breathe Pandora’s air. Its batteries run out. Choking to death, Kiri, his adopted Na’vi sister, prays to Ewya, who webs his lungs in fauna to alter his biology. Spider breathes Pandora’s air. At the end, he grows a Na’vi tail and plugs into Ewya, where spirits lay hands on him and welcome him to the Na’vi way.
Why cherry-pick these two scenes? The first and third Avatars end the same. The culmination is a human who was part of the colonial force to seize the planet, transforms fully or in part into a Na’vi. Not the expulsion of the colonizers. Not the realization by humans that a sentient planet is more valuable than high-priced metal. The Avatar Trilogy is a liberal purging of guilt over European hegemony through racial passing. The real goal of the films is soothing the liberal soul, not explore the beauty and terror of revolution.
Going Native
Why is Avatar the highest grossing film of all time? The first one clocked nearly $3 billion! The whole trilogy made a total of $6 billion. Why did so many buy tickets? Some even had Post-Avatar Depression Syndrome. In the Guardian, one fan wrote, “Ever since I went to see Avatar I have been depressed. Watching the wonderful world of Pandora and all the Na’vi made me want to be one of them. I contemplate suicide. If I do it, I will be rebirthed in a world similar to Pandora?”
Suicide? It is just a movie, right? Well, no. In sci-fi, aliens have long been the blank screen for parts of human nature that are taboo or transcendent. Remember kids crying over 1982’s “E.T. the Extraterrestrial”? Remember being terrified of 1979’s “Alien”?
Sometimes, films provoke a near religious experience. Which is why it’s useful to turn to an obscure philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach who wrote in 1841 “The Essence of Christianity“. He put religion under a microscope, saying, “God is nothing else than man: he is…the outward projection of man’s inward nature.” Karl Marx was so inspired by it, he wrote in his 1843 “Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right” this famous line, “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.” As with God, so with aliens. Marx and Feuerbach would say the Post-Avatar Depression Syndrome of fans is the “sigh of the oppressed creature” who yearn for connection with each other and nature that they saw in Avatar. The splendor of Pandora and the holistic Na’vi was for millions the “outward projection” of their “inward nature”, denied in late-stage capitalism.
Well, okay but how? The Na’vi are the ideal image of humans. Imagine Pandora as the Garden of Eden. The Na’vi are if Adam and Eve were never cast out. The Na’vi are naturally athletic, no carbs, no fatties here. The Na’vi are dark-skinned. The Na’vi have tails that plug into trees and animals to telepathically commune with Ewya, their God. The Na’vi pray over the animals they hunt. They make their own clothes. They don’t use money. They are kind of communist. They practice tribal democracy. The Na’vi value spirituality over materialism. All love. No bling.
The Na’vi are the Noble Savage trope which is a mirror for a modern audience to critique itself. Unlike the Na’vi, we humans kill the Earth. We kill each other. We are sick with modernity and materialism. We eat poison food. We mass murder animals, served in plastic in stores. Many of us, lost the sacred. We worship money over life. All bling. No love.
The trick of the Avatar films is they split the audience by projecting the worst side of humanity on to the humans and the best side on to the Na’vi. The plot is driven by good overcoming evil so we, the audience can have a catharsis of our failures and remember our ideals. So, humans like Jake Sully and Spider transform fully or in part into Na’vi. The Na’vi defeat the human colonial force, the Resources Development Association or RDA. The Avatar films bring the audiences closer to their own alienated dreams. They give a brief, transient victory to the better angels of our nature and in the light of the silver screen, many, briefly, see the world they wish they could live. And the versions of themselves, they want to be.
Third Time’s the Charm
So why is Avatar 3, such a damn mess? The film spins its wheels, repeating plot points from the first two Avatar movies. Critics and fans, felt James Cameron, director and writer, ran out of steam. The real answer is that at the heart of the Avatar Trilogy is a conflict between liberalism and anti-colonial politics. Cameron can’t “go all the way” and have the Na’vi destroy the human colony, permanently, or all humans joyfully transform into Na’vi by shedding technology and their bodies. So, Avatar 3, descends into the smaller conflict of a Swiss Family Robinson drama. It retreats into the token liberal human, who becomes Na’vi.
“Avatar 3: Fire and Ash” begin where “Avatar 2: The Way of Water” ends. Jake Sully (a mature Sam Worthington), the ex-marine, Na’vi hero and dad, along with wife, Neytiri (an excellent Zoe Saldana) who hates Spider, the family’s adopted human son. He is the child of Col. Quaritch, their enemy. Spider must go with the humans. He only breathes Pandora’s air with the hi-tech mask but it runs on batteries. During an attack by the Mangkwan tribe, white face painted Na’vi who hate Ewya, Spider and the Sully kids, scramble in the forest. Spider’s mask loses energy. He chokes on Pandora’s air. Kiri prays to Ewya and the planet threads fungi into his lungs. Hocus Pocus! He breathes Pandora’s air, making him a human-Na’vi hybrid. He grows a queue, a Na’vi tendril from the base of their neck that is like a fiber-optic cable made of nerves. It connects him to Pandora. Spider is captured by the RDA. The scientists realize that Spider is worth more than the metal they can mine. If they reverse engineer Ewya’s fungi in his lungs, all humans can leave the polluted Earth and finally, take Pandora from the Na’vi and colonize it permanently.
The final battle is the Sully Family and the Good Na’vi versus the RDA soldiers and fiery Mangkwan. The sight is majestic. Na’vi fight Na’vi on dragons that spin and bite. Exoskeleton wearing humans fire guns in strobe light. Whales smash military ships like a foot crushing a soda can. Jake and Col. Quaritch do an MMA match on floating rocks, until Spider falls. They work together to save him.
The last scene of Avatar 3 circles back to the last one of Avatar 1. Now, Spider breathing Pandora’s air, holds his queue’s tendrils to a sacred underwater tree. He plugs into Eywa. He is greeted by the spirits of dead Na’vi and the welcome him home.
Once You Go Blue
What to make of all this? First, notice that the emotional pay-off is not the Na’vi victory over the human colonizers but a human who becomes Na’vi. Return to the earlier point of the Na’vi being an image of ideal humanity. They are simple and natural and good. They are pure. The are the Noble Savage trope. The reward for the liberal human protagonist is to leave one’s broken body, in Jake’s case, paralyzed legs, in Spider’s case an identity crisis, and become a whole being again, fully healed, fully at home.
The question has to be asked. What cost do we pay when a major film sells anti-colonial politics but at the price of the Noble Savage trope?
Avatar 3: Fire and Ash fails as a story but succeeds as a liberal wish-fulfillment. At the core of liberal consciousness is the painful awareness that one’s privilege comes at the cost of immense historical violence. Slavery, colonization and racism are the infrastructure that holds up one’s life. In order to solve this crisis, a desire to be an ally can become a desire to shed one’s old self and adopt a new one. Liberal consciousness wants to plug into the struggle and emerge as a race-traitor, a class traitor to rejoin the Global Majority of non-white people and workers.
We have seen this liberal wish-fulfillment in movies for decades. Think of 1990’s “Dances with Wolves“, or 1970’s “A Man Called Horse“ or 2007’s “Freedom Writers“. The tell-tale sign is when the transformation of the liberal hero along with their acceptance by the natives is more central than the freedom of the people.
What separates the Avatar Trilogy from say, 1967’s “The Battle of Algiers” or 1960’s “Spartacus” or 1954’s “Animal Farm“. In those films, the people’s struggle takes center stage, the beauty and horror of revolution is the main character. The pay-off is a glimpse into a whole new world, a new social order that boggles the mind. And renews the spirit.
The Avatar Trilogy is a success. The billions the films raked in are in part, of course, due to the spectacle. Aside from that they films are evidence that masses of people want, desperately want real change, real connection and real meaning in their lives. Movie-goers leave theaters, blinking in the light, seeing that yes, another world is possible.
