Avatar, the lure of Neverland

Note: This weekend I decided to do a fun kind of op-ed for the paper.

OK, everybody else in the world has commented on it, so I suppose it’s my turn.

James Cameron’s Avatar broke box-office records to become the highest-grossing film of all time, beating out his previous film Titanic, which held the record for 12 years.

Surprisingly, the extraterrestrial fantasy provoked a fair amount of political commentary. One commentator called it, “the Atlas Shrugged of the Left.” Some conservatives criticized its portrait of a ruthless military officer serving his evil corporate masters, whatever the collateral damage.

Left-wing commentary was generally favorable, though there were a few who criticized it as an updating of the “White God among the natives” genre.

Briefly, for those vacationing in Antarctica who missed it, the story takes place on a world called Pandora, the moon of a gas giant planet circling the star Alpha Centauri. Pandora is home to an intelligent species human enough to have attractive native women, if your taste runs to ten-foot blue-skinned women with tails.

Humans can’t breathe the atmosphere, so they interact with the natives through avatars, bodies grown from a mix of human and native DNA, controlled through a mind-link.

The planet is the source of a valuable element “unobtainium,” which the evil corporation will stop at nothing to get. (The word unobtainium actually originated with aircraft engineers who wished they could have a metal with characteristics including… you get the picture.)

A crippled ex-Marine is recruited to replace his identical twin as an avatar controller, and enlisted by the psycho security chief to get the natives to move to a reservation or something, so the corporation can rape their land. But the good-hearted warrior goes native and dances with big flying animals waaaay cooler than wolves.

The film is stunningly, achingly, beautiful. There are anecdotal reports of young viewers suffering mild depression because they can’t climb into a tanning bed and wake up on Pandora.

Nonetheless, there’s a lot about it that is, well… kind of dumb.

Contrary to Hollywood gospel, there actually aren’t a lot of high-ranking psychos in the U.S. military. You don’t get promoted very far if you’re out-of-control nuts. And wouldn’t you think a super-expensive space program would psychologically screen at least as thoroughly as NASA does?

Corporations are the stock villains in Hollywood, where $300 million films are made by humble craftsmen working in a cottage industry. And it’s interesting to note how many people who fear and distrust multi-billion dollar corporations are perfectly fine with multi-trillion dollar governments.

The Pandoran natives, whose culture is an eclectic mix of African and American Indian tribal societies, live in harmony with nature on their world. On Pandora nature doesn’t seem to include lice, fleas, or intestinal parasites.

Pandoran women have high rank in their society, and at least some are hunters. That would be wonderful news to women in Earth hunter-gatherer bands. The division of labor in hunter-gatherer societies is; men hunt, women gather. There are no exceptions.

But hey, Pandorans aren’t human so you can imagine any society you like for them.

In the rousing climax the Pandorans, led by the Marine, defeat a hi-tech armada with bows and arrows.

Something like this actually happened in 1879, at a place called Isandlwana. A Zulu impi 20,000 strong got lucky (and the Brits got stupid) and wiped out a British column of 1,300 men. Unfortunately Zulu losses were so heavy their nation never recovered.*

And by the way, constructing effective longbows requires at least a medieval level of technology, not early primitive.

But pfaugh on quibbles! I loved it as much as I loved Cameron’s Terminator, and I’m looking forward to the sequel.

Obviously, in spite of the science fiction trappings, this is James Cameron’s fantasy of utopia, or heaven. Being a fantasy we are not required to take it seriously. It is only mildly disturbing that Cameron himself appears to take it seriously as a political statement.

So Cameron wouldn’t be the first creative genius who was nuts. Think of Van Gogh and enjoy it anyway.

*There was a great movie made about the battle of Isandlwana, Zulu Dawn, with John Mills, Peter O’Toole and Burt Lancaster, magnificent in one of his greatest dramatic roles.

One of the greatest tributes paid to any soldiers was by an old Zulu veteran of the battle, describing the last stand of the British troops as the Zulus overwhelmed them.

“Like lions they fought! Like stones they fell, each man in his own place.”

A collection of Steve’s columns “The View from Flyover Country: A Rural Columnist Looks at Life” is available on Kindle.