Our Tragic Flaw

Spoiler alert: Do not read this unless you have already seen Avatar, or do not plan to see it.

With great anticipation for nothing more than a fun and fascinating romp, I saw Avatar in 3-D last night. As much as I enjoyed the visual experience--and I did enjoy it--my experience was marred by a profound sense of a missed opportunity.

This feeling may have been inspired by the film's hit-you-over-the-head-with-a-hammer moral message: that white people destroy nature and indigenous people have learned how to live within its bounds and are all the happier for it.

The Nav'i people were portrayed as an idealized Native American race perfectly in harmony with a breathtakingly beautiful and somewhat perilous natural world. Cameron adequately developed an idealized Native American spirituality that, he strongly suggested, we'd all do well to adopt.

But James Cameron missed a much more significant (and timely) moral message in the second half of the film. Faced with impending extinction at the hands of the evil corporate greedmaster and the evil military grunt, and wildly out-gunned, the Nav'i adopt the ex-marine (who has been hanging about with them with decidedly mixed motives) to lead them in a violent battle to protect their territory. What ensues is ugly in the extreme but, of course, good triumphs over evil in the end...

Except that now the Nav'i people have been ruined by their violence. (At this point, of course, I am going beyond the fairy tale into my own commentary.) The white man/Nav'i impersonator has acculturated them to the ways of warfare and much of the planet has been laid to waste.

As long as we are writing a fairy tale, why not write something new, something adequate to our particular circumstance, one that might inspire a fresh approach to an old problem? Why rehearse the ancient and clearly flawed approach that we must meet violence with greater (or at least more cunning) violence?

Cameron has re-enacted Custer's Last Stand, where the white man is thoroughly defeated. But we all know how that ends. It isn't hard to see how a similar fate might await the Nav'i. The corporate monolith that wants that unobtainium, and the market demand for it, hasn't gone anywhere. Surely a fresh battle awaits. How many battles before the planet is thoroughly ruined, its indigenous people totally ravaged, and the unobtainium finally obtained?

Cameron missed a colossal opportunity to write a new ending, one driven by Nav'i spirituality which might have taught that violence only begets violence, and that there is no way to peace, only just peace. The vast neural net of all the living beings on Pandora (the unfortunately named planet of the film) might have out-thought the white invaders, not in terms of cunning in combat, but in terms of the real forces at play--as Gandhi might have called them, the moral forces at play, satyagraha.

I invite the reader to explore for herself what fascinating ways this movie might have been brought to a peaceful and truly hopeful close. In the past twelve hours I have come up with several scenarios. Check your movie listings this time next year for Avatar 2.0...it'll blow your mind!