The suicide fantasy

I went to see Avatar and found it quite interesting. Although many reviewers have complained the film takes too long to reach its climax, I thought the early and middle sections were the most enjoyable parts. The visual achievement is dazzling, in both design and execution, making the exploration of both the human and alien portions of Avatar’s beautiful world very entertaining.
Right after our hero consummates his relationship with his alien love, the whole thing goes very sour. I couldn’t quite put a name to its disagreeable flavor at first – it’s preachy and predictable, to be sure, but that isn’t what makes its gorgeous rainbow soup curdle during the grand finale. I figured it out later that night, while reading a seemingly unrelated post from Mark Steyn on National Review Online, discussing angry global warming fanatics reacting to their disappointment over the pointless farce at Copenhagen.

As quoted by Steyn, George Monbiot snarls, “Goodbye Africa, goodbye south Asia; goodbye glaciers and sea ice, coral reefs and rainforest. It was nice knowing you. Not that we really cared.” Meanwhile, Polly Toynbee shrieks, “What would it take? A tidal wave destroying New York maybe – New Orleans was the wrong people – with London, St. Petersburg, and Shanghai wiped out all at once.”
Avatar is the CGI-enhanced, $400 million version of the dark dreams peddled by Monbiot and Toynbee. It’s a suicide fantasy, the Hollywood blockbuster equivalent of a troubled teenager’s notebook sketches, scribbled by someone who hates himself only marginally less than he hates the rest of the world. To elaborate further, I must include some mild spoilers from the movie’s plot – although, really, if you’re more than twelve years old, you already know exactly what happens in this film. The only element of mystery awaiting you is finding out who kills the bad guy. I promise not to ruin that.
Science fiction and fantasy provide a storyteller with the fantastic power of an infinite blank canvas, upon which any setting can be created, to sustain any sort of plot. In Avatar, James Cameron has created a world that justifies the smug arrogance and bitter alienation of the radical environmentalist. The alien world of Pandora really is a maternal Gaia spirit, with every bit of the flora and fauna connected in a mystical web that capitalists and soldiers are too blind and stupid to see. The alien Na’vi really are what infantile liberal mythology has made of the American Indian: innocent, peace-loving, simple, and so harmonious with nature that they can literally plug it into their pony tails. Lacking the conflict and flaws that make the Indians so fascinating and tragic, the Na’vi are utterly boring, aside from the heroine brought vividly to life by a remarkable performance from Zoe Saldana. The childlike environmentalist daydream of a “perfect” society, sustainably at peace with Mother Nature, is captured in the image of the Na’vi tribe snuggled in hammock-like leaves, embraced by the vast branches of their goddess tree. No ambitions, no failures, no questions, no achievement, no future. These giant blue aliens leave absolutely no carbon footprint.
What happens to this wish-fulfillment watercolor of eco-paradise? Why, greedy idiots with guns and bulldozers show up to mow it down, of course. Humans suck, man. They deserve to die… and die they do, in a hail of arrows, fangs, teeth, and lots of screaming plummets from great heights. All those military toys beloved by the right-wing warmongers of the military-industrial complex prove to be useless against the righteous fury of an aroused Gaia and her chosen champion, a redeemed soldier who has seen the error of his ways. Take that, Marine killbot slaves of Big Business.
During the big battle scene, as dinosaurs were chowing down on soldiers, the middle-aged couple seated next to me were grinning happily… delighted by the defeat and destruction of their own miserable species. The dialogue in Avatar makes it clear that humanity’s future depended on the success of the Pandora mission. “We sent the aliens back to their dying world,” intones the hero, narrating scenes of the defeated humans as they’re perp-walked off the planet, just the way environmentalist radicals have dreamed of handling the executives of Exxon-Mobil. Earlier, the hero tells Pandora’s nature spirit about the evil of his fellow man: “They killed their mother, and they’ll kill you.” Good thing for the universe we’re doomed!
Just as Cameron brings the primitive superstitions of radical environmentalism to life on Pandora, his portrayal of the human invaders matches the stereotypes held by campus crusaders of Big Business and its blood-for-oil military stooges. The corporate and Marine villains of Avatar are incredibly stupid. For one thing, if the fate of humanity rests on the Pandora mission, you’d think the governments of Earth could find someone other than a backstabbing middle-management weasel and a blatantly psychotic colonel to run the show. Even if you can accept their moral bankruptcy, their incompetence is shocking. It never occurs to them to solve their Na’vi problem with a missile from orbit – and they’re explicitly shown watching orbital surveillance of the gathering alien armies. For that matter, they could have nuked the troublesome Na’vi goddess tree from orbit, then arrived at the blast site with medical supplies and tearful condolences for the horrible cosmic tragedy of a “meteor” they just couldn’t stop.
The villains are also as willfully blind as the Left imagines its capitalist boogeymen to be. They laugh down the report of a scientist who obviously knows what she’s talking about, and has hard evidence to back up her position. They also clearly never bothered to read the best-selling book on Na’vi culture written by said scientist, because if they had, they could have used their miraculous cloning technology to whip up a swarm of sacred milkweed pods and a big red dragon, and flown into their negotiations with the aliens as epic heroes of legend. They also could have made those negotiations, and violent conflict, completely unnecessary by simply tunneling horizontally into the huge deposit of vital minerals beneath the Na’vi tree city. But, you know, capitalists prefer genocide to creative thinking. Bullets are so much cheaper than drilling equipment.
The key to understanding the intentions behind Avatar, and the response of its audience, is to remember that the tale is set in the far future, and we are never shown the suffering billions dying on a ruined Earth. This is a suicide fantasy, exactly like those many of us indulge as teenagers: we’re so much wiser, smarter, and empathic than the bummer adults running the world around us. They don’t understand the mystic truth burning in our young hearts. They’ll be sad when we’re gone, and they’ll finally realize how righteous we were. They’ll finally understand their grim obsession with money and material goods is soul-crushing, because they’ll be standing over the pulverized dust of our radiant souls. Death and tragedy will tear the scales from their eyes.
The can of holistic whup-ass opened by the magical world of Pandora at the end of Avatar comes from the same grocery of doom that supplies George Monbiot and Polly Toynbee with their nightmares. Read their words again, and understand they don’t really believe those things will happen – no one is stupid enough to believe the twaddle about submerged cities dispensed by the global-warming cult. They want those things to happen. They daydream about glaciers melting and creating tidal waves that deposit soggy clumps of coral reef and rainforest in the middle of London. They shudder with orgasmic delight as they imagine drowning capitalists and politicians coughing out a spray of ice water, dodging the enraged polar bears swept into Fleet Street by the morning tide, and crying “George! Polly! You were right! You were right all along, and we were so blind… Save us!” But it will be too late, and George and Polly will only be able to fold their arms and blaze with smug satisfaction, glowing bright enough to remain clearly visible as they sink into the frigid depths.
Avatar was written by a man who thinks those who disagree with his environmentalist obsessions are so blind that, in the future they will create, the last decent man in the universe will lead a far more noble alien race to victory over us, and literally renounce his humanity as part of his reward. James Cameron invites you to join him in the most beautifully rendered adolescent daydream of suicide ever created, and share his sense of righteous superiority over those who refuse to applaud at the end. I’m a sucker for good-looking dragons, so I gave him a golf clap for those.