Avatar

I recently saw the latest, greatest movie on the block - Avatar. This is a technical masterpiece. The quality of the special effects is truly on a different scale altogether. James Cameron has managed to create a lush world peopled with characters, animals and plants that look real. For me perhaps the biggest technical achievement is in the eyes. The eyes are very realistic and give the blue skinned Na'avi a full range of emotions. A huge amount has been written about the movie and will continue to be written. Notwithstanding the special effects, the actual story of Avatar is pretty weak; in this respect, Titanic's story was much superior. So viewing it from a straight forward story point of view, the movie is actually disappointing.

However, confining oneself to just the story or even the special effects actually does Avatar a disservice. This movie has several layers to it. To understand what this movie is about, one needs to at the very least acknowledge the different levels at which it operates.

At the most obvious level, Avatar is a love story set in a different planet. Like nearly all Hollywood love stories, this movie has a predictable happy ending. Watching the relationship evolve from the beginning, it was soon clear that there was not going to be any unrequited love nonsense. However, dig a little deeper and the movie actually asks several questions.

For example, to what extent should organizations be allowed to go in search of profits? This is not something abstract or imaginary. Entire societies have been devastated physically an unalloyed pursuit of profit. Neither is this something that happened in the past and does not happen today. This devastation is going on even today. Why are indigenous Indian tribes being slaughtered in the Amazon? Why did the native Indian population of the Caribbean islands essentially die off soon after their discovery? What about the African slave trade? Slavery is a reprehensible activity which needs to be stamped out in all its aspects. However, the African slave trade had been going on for several centuries before the arrival of the Europeans without devastating local societies. What changed when the Europeans came? Why was European demand for African slaves so much greater than what had come earlier that the local societies were destroyed?

Another question: do native societies have any value or are the values of a society that has greater material power more important? This question specially reverberates amongst formerly colonized peoples. Almost without exception, colonialism had the insidious effect of alienating native people from their culture. Stronger cultures were able to absorb the cultural effects of colonialism better than weaker cultures; none were immune from it. Throughout the colonial period and even till today, the underlying assumption has been that Western culture is superior to anything else in the world. While this is not generally not stated explicitly in the West anymore, nevertheless, it is there unstated and implicit in the writings of many Western analysts and writers. This for instance is the reasoning behind American's view of themselves being superior to the rest of the world. That someone would not necessarily want to live in an approximation of US society much less its clone is something that generally does not seem to occur to most Americans.

Yet another question: do material needs trump the environment? This is actually a rather subtle question that the movie poses. Why are the bad guys behaving in the manner that they do? They want to obtain unobtainium (or something like that) which is an energy rich material presumably not obtainable anywhere else. This material is needed to power the material needs of the society back home. The question is should this material be obtained at any cost regardless of impact of local society or environment. Is there a chance of a possible trade-off? Lest people think this is an abstract question, a direct analogy can be drawn at what is going on today in the real world. In the US Appalachian mountains, companies are engaged in mountaintop removal mining which physically removes a mountain in order to access a coal seam buried underground. The removed material is dumped down the mountain where it destroys streams and generally causes environmental havoc. In many oil producing countries, highly polluting methods of extraction are being used without regard to the environmental impact. How about using dynamite to kill fish? This method not only kills the fish in which the fishermen are interested in, it also kills other fish in addition to destroying the environment for all the fish. Why would companies and people behave in such destructive manner? To feed to appetite of the global material culture.

One point that I should note here is that people in developing countries are in many respects more sensitive to the issues raised by Avatar. The reason for this is that large numbers of them have experienced first hand or they personally know someone who has experienced firsthand many of the issues raised by the movie.

So Avatar operates at many levels. The more obvious levels are actually the less interesting ones. It is the deeper levels at which the movie operates that are more interesting and have far greater consequence.