The Machine in the Ghost
by Giampaolo Bianconi
(Adam Hirsch’s review of Avatar can be found here.)
Avatar, dir. James Cameron (2009)
I can only imagine how much fun James Cameron had designing every aspect of Pandora. Its luminescent landscape, shiny-coated animal life, and floating islands all convey the sense of wonder Cameron himself must have felt in the face of his technological toys. The film’s 3D is barely noticeable, which I consider a victory. 3D has always been a distraction; in Avatar it seems—ironically—natural.
In terms of anti-imperialist message—since this is, after all, a message movie in the most heavy-handed sense—Avatar does nothing to take us beyond territory covered by Starship Troopers. What makes Cameron’s film so fascinating, though, is its ability to convey the complex and often contradictory relationship between man, technology, and nature. Avatar is the most compelling blockbuster to illustrate those themes since Jurassic Park.
We’re all familiar with avatars, from instant messenger to video games. It is from the latter that Avatar the film seems to take most of its cues. The movie itself is a gamer’s wet dream: none of the code-as-world simulacrum of The Matrix, but rather a world-as-code in which humans uplink seamlessly to other bodies—alien bodies—and control them with relative safety. For the gruff, paraplegic former-marine Scully, played with innocence and charm by Sam Worthington, this means that he can walk at last, and feel the dirt between his humanoid toes.
Despite the primacy granted the avatar itself, the uplink is far more important to the film’s sensibilities. Humans need to uplink to better explore the planet Pandora. Humans create a world of uplinks—computers to computers and humans to computers—to order their world. As Sigourney Weaver—stilted as a supposedly hard-assed scientist—makes clear, the indigenous Na’vi are a step beyond: their whole world, she says, is a network. They can connect to every element of nature, from horses and giant flying birds to the land itself. Their trees are electric.
This means that the film’s ecological “message”—that of respect for the natural world in the face of its technological destruction—is effectively contradicted. The natural world is valued as organic technology. Nature is electric; nature is the machine. Even the spiritual center of the pure Na’vi—the tree of souls—is really a kind of organic computer. God is a machine. Don’t be fooled. Avatar isn’t about hugging trees and renaming your high school football team to avoid Native American caricatures. It is about where we want to be in twenty years: seamlessly, organically integrated. Sounds profitable to me.