I went to see Avatar on Sunday evening, and found myself generally in agreement with Ed Morrissey’s review. 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.
If the main reason to watch this movie is the “stunning graphics” I’ll go purchase an XBox game – some of THOSE games beat any movie for stunning design
All this talk about American Indians……isn’t what happened to the American Indian the best example of where unchecked illegal immigration leads to?
I don”t usually pay much attention to these things ,but with the media blitz
and all–
the crunchy granola environmental leftie Hollywood movie makers,teamed
up with the despicable greedy corporate ‘ Soilent Green’ burger makers,–Mickey-D’s.
Ah,……all is well in my world.
Merry Christmas
Excellent analysis. I would add that coupled with this suicide fantasy is a large measure of self-loathing. This is because Godless secularists have no mechanism for reconciling their sin-free plastic reality with their own sinful actions. They can only give themselves a pass. Thus we see AlGore’s house consuming more energy in one month than mine does in a year. AGlore scolds us about our carbon footprint, yet charters a jet that burns several thousand pounds of jet fuel per hour. He assures us that he buys offsets, but he doesn’t want to talk about his ownership of the company that sells carbon offsets.
When you think of how conflicted these people must be, it must be very hard for them to live with themselves. No wonder they frequently appear angry. No wonder they are desperate to usher in their secular Utopia, when all these problems will be solved, and when they can conquer their own, very flawed, human nature.
Like Wall E this is pure Greenie bullshit and just because it is technologically innovative is no reason to see it or give it a pass. People have to stop letting things like this slide and refuse to be bamboozled by this. Boycott this and all like movies.
I came to the conclusion years ago that liberals and especially enviromentalists are a slow-motion death cult ever in search of a palatable kool-aid recipe for the masses.
A well written and oh-so-close-to-being-spot-on essay.
The suicide ethics (Judeo-Christian self-sacrifice: self-destruction as noble) is 2,000 years old; but it has been made blantantly obvious by the so called environmentalists. They do *not* seek cleaner air & water and a habitable (by humans) Earth. They seek and worship primordial nature–and seek the destruction of mankind. Themselves, of course, exempted.
This *is* a suicide fantasy–but not one in which the “radiant souls” die; one in which most of mankind dies.
That’s the short version. The long version is below.
Obama & the New Left are certainly not attempting anything “new” or “progressive” here. And the issue–the fundamental issue–is not political but moral. Obama & his minions know it; it’s time we, the opposition, knew it.
===============================
“The best ordered state will be one in which the largest number of persons … most nearly resembles a single person. The first and highest form of the State … is a condition in which the private and the individual is altogether banished from life …” (Plato’s _Republic_ & _Laws_ c. 370 BCE)
Recommended reading: The Ominous Parallels: The End of Freedom in America, Leonard Peikoff; 1982.
Excerpt, Page 1, Chapter 1:
“Here is the theory:
“It is thus necessary that the individual should finally come to realize that his own ego is of no importance in comparison with the existence of his nation; that the position of the individual ego is conditioned solely by the interests of the nation as a whole … that above all the unity of a nation’s spirit and will are worth far more than the freedom of the spirit and will of an individual….”
“This state of mind, which subordinates the interests of the ego to the conservation of the community, is really the first premise for every truly human culture…. The basic attitude from which such activity arises, we call-to distinguish it from egoism and selfishness-idealism. By this we understand only the individual’s capacity to make sacrifices for the community, for his fellow men.”
“These statements were made in our century by the leader of a major Western nation. His countrymen regarded his view point as uncontroversial. His political program implemented it faithfully.
“The statements were made by Adolf Hitler. He was explaining the moral philosophy of Nazism.
“And here is the ultimate practice (as described by William Shirer in The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich):
“The gas chambers themselves [at Auschwitz] and the adjoining crematoria, viewed from a short distance, were not sinister-looking places at all; it was impossible to make them out for what they were. Over them were well-kept lawns with flower borders; the signs at the entrances merely said BATHS. The unsuspecting Jews thought they were simply being taken to the baths for the delousing which was customary at all camps. And taken to the accompaniment of sweet music!
“For there was light music. An orchestra of ‘young and pretty girls all dressed in white blouses and navy-blue skirts,’ as one survivor remembered, had been formed from among the inmates. While the selection was being made for the gas chambers this unique musical ensemble played gay tunes from The Merry Widow and Tales of Hoffmann. Nothing solemn and somber from Beethoven. The death marches at Auschwitz were sprightly and merry tunes, straight out of Viennese and Parisian operetta.
“To such music, recalling as it did happier and more frivolous times, the men, women and children were led into the ‘bath houses,’ where they were told to undress preparatory to taking a ‘shower.’ Sometimes they were even given towels. “Once they were inside the ‘shower-room’ — and perhaps this was the first moment that they may have suspected some thing was amiss, for as many as two thousand of them were packed into the chamber like sardines, making it difficult to take a bath — the massive door was slid shut, locked and hermetically sealed. Up above where the well-groomed lawn and flower beds almost concealed the mushroom-shaped lids of vents that ran up from the hall of death, orderlies stood ready to drop into them the amethyst-blue crystals of hydrogen cyanide….
“Surviving prisoners watching from blocks nearby remembered how for a time the signal for the orderlies to pour the crystals down the vents was given by a Sergeant Moll. ‘Na, gib ihnen schon zu fressen’ (‘All right, give ‘em something to chew on’), he would laugh and the crystals would be poured through the openings, which were then sealed.
“Through heavy-glass portholes the executioners could watch what happened. The naked prisoners below would be looking up at the showers from which no water spouted or perhaps at the floor wondering why there were no drains. It took some moments for the gas to have much effect. But soon the inmates became aware that it was issuing from the perforations in the vents. It was then that they usually panicked, crowding away from the pipes and finally stampeding toward the huge metal door where, as Reitlinger puts it, ‘they piled up in one blue clammy blood-spattered pyramid, clawing and mauling each other even in death.’ ”
[...]
===========================
From Plato to Hume to Kant to Hegel to Comte to the current crop of little Platos populating American & European universities, this sort of “progressive thinking” has been the rule rather than the exception throughout mankind’s history.
The exception, up to now, has been the United States of America.
The cause of the success of totalitarianism? The ethics of self-immolation, of self-sacrifice.
The implied ethics underlying the United States: rational egoism, the basis for the politics of individualism–the (selfish) right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
If one wishes to defeat the current trend toward the ancient idea of totalitarianism, one would need make those ethics *explicit*.
As Ayn Rand did, which is how she was able to predict–in 1957 in her novel Atlas Shrugged–the current trends we are seeing.
Let me repeat: This battle can only be won by rejecting the morality of suicide in favor of a morality of life.
The rest, as they say, is poopie ca-ca (i.e., derivative).
“The suicide ethics (Judeo-Christian self-sacrifice: self-destruction as noble)”
If this is true, and given the success of first Judaism then Christianity, I’d be VERY worried : that success might repeat …
But we all know there is a radical difference between Judeo-Christian self-sacrifice and “environmental” sacrifice. As the more perceptive of you probably already noticed, the “green” version is missing the “self” part of sacrifice.
You see greens don’t self-sacrifice. That’s perfectly possible to do with zero political influence in a capitalistic society. As we all know, they demand sacrifice from others, extracted at the point of a gun, and they’re too stupid to see that includes themselves, instead believing in their own private escape hatches (e.g. “green jobs”, exemptions of “green companies”, …).
Any green party, or any loony environmentalist is perfectly free to buy large areas of land and make reserves out of them, or water cleaning facilities, or … They are also perfectly free to pay factories to clean up their mess, and nobody don’t seriously doubts factories would jump at this chance to get more revenue, or even the chance skim a little of the top, with full agreement from the greens, right ? Oh wait, green parties are not doing this. So there is exactly 0% “self” in the sacrifice demanded.
Note the greens idiocy does resemble a religious concept that is indeed very old : that of tribute, of ransom, of taxes. To remain in the good graces of the “believers”, the “superiors” (the green party members), we must pay tribute to their god(ess) (“gaia”). And everybody must be forced to pay tribute. They will work in the temples of Gaia (“green jobs”), and dictate just how much money they need. This concept is as old as prostitution, and several magnitudes more disgusting. You can find this concept in Indian tribes, who demanded virgins to rape from weaker tribes in trade for (temporary) peace. The minoans who did the same, and the (still existing) muslim concept of “Jizya”.
The muslims, if you look up documents from early 20th century, also called the collecting of jizya a noble self-sacrifice on their part. And I have little doubt the minoans thought their restraint in trade for women to rape to be a noble self-sacrifice too, though primary sources are a bit hard to find due to the wiping out of thier civilization.
Here’s another Christian tradition you might want to consider : DON’T take people at their word. Instead, look at the fruits of the tree. Look at acts, and especially, the final consequences of those acts.
It follows with “and trees with bad fruits will be uprooted”. Do note, however, that this is in the passive (as all acts of God are). The correct interpretation is to let greens do what they want, but not to participate. If possible, separate yourself from them as much as you can.
What it really says is a great wisdom : idiots don’t need help destroying themselves, so don’t attempt to help them. Instead, walk the other way. And when the world comes down on their heads, the chance of them seeing the error of their ways is a lot bigger.
[...] Doctor Zero – The Suicide Fantasy [...]
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This post was mentioned on Twitter by mmealling: #avatar as suicide fantasy: http://bit.ly/8VaAiF (could someone please take Cameron’s tech and make a _real_ movie?)…
Interesting reading of the movie.
I thought this movie was for enjoyment, but I clearly wasn’t taking the entertainment industry seriously enough!
Thank you mister author for pointing out that there are extremists on “the left”. I seem to recall a basic premise of politics that anyone who is extreme enough is actually in the same camp of extremists from the opposing side, but perhaps this was not taught to everyone in high school.
What I want to know is: What should we do about it? Give us some ideas. The suicidal ideation concept seems pretty good, but where are some answers or call to make things better? Or are you just putting your philosophical luggage on the metaphorical table, then waving and screaming in the hopes that others will hear? When is the last time you tried that at a dinner party? Did it work? Ok, then.
Does this mean I should join “the right” in order to save us from “the left”? Pro tip: they’re both the same at this point.
I appreciate your analysis of “Avatar” and I don’t mind the spoilers, as I am not about to waste my money seeing it. I’m not much of a sci-fi/fantasy movie fan in the first place, but the main reason I won’t see it is because it’s directed by James Cameron. Both my hubby and I hated his “Titanic” on a lot of levels; the gaggle of teen-age girls sitting near us and squealing every time Leonardo diCaprio’s mug appeared on the screen just made the experience that much more annoying. We both were ultimately offended that Cameron hijacked a real historical tragedy and inserted a good amount of Leftist/Enviro-green drivel on top of it. So I’m glad for your review. It’s saved me both time and money.
Keep up the wonderful work you are doing with this blog and continue your incisive commentaries on the state of affairs in these United States.
I don´t find that colonel Quaritch character being “teh complete evol”, he did support Jake getting his “real legs” back, he had the guttes to admitte he got pwned on his first day instead of being butt-hurt, his first seen briefing was quiet to the point.
Even when he fights alone and not against very good odds, he doesn´t give upp to pseudo-emoish despaire or beg for mercy, although he kinda loose the plot he still goes forth and fight.
It doesn´t make him worst or shallower (if his main concern and belief is to complet his missionthought cowardice would), it makes him BETTER.
If it was all for the suffering billions of Earth, the future of humanity itself, then you can bet the ex-marines wouldn´t have to be mercenaries.
The whole operation would be under direct military/governement control, as that dude in MIB said the soldiers would be the best of the best of the best… Unless, of course, Earth have been contaminated by an extremely contagious forme of too stupid to live, in which case the movie would be a fight against idiocracy.
They go for the big tree because it is above the biggest deposit within 200 kilometers from the base, lol. Why don´t they go for the biggest deposite on the planet right away?
One might think these ersatz-villains are incredibly incompetent but think about it, IRL, libschizoids have been known to be far worst. Bill clinton, sarkozy, yeltsin etc etc. “The Left” is even blinder.
“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.”
Simply put, no.
Conflicts and fla-a-aws DOES NOT automatically make characters somewhat “deeper”, be they fictional or real life. FAIL is to be laughed at, not praised*.
Also, do you have any idea how cliché that sounds? I must confess I don´t quiet see what “magic” drug-addiction and alcoholism could bring and don´t want to.
“These giant blue aliens leave absolutely no carbon footprint.”
They don´t need to, unlike ours, their planet is already warm enought.
“The alien Na’vi really are what infantile liberal mythology has made of the American Indian:”
Hehe, not exactly them, rather something even more precious in the eyes of liberals. Namely, “native” african tribes. Zulu and Masaï types to be more precise. If the jungle setting, general esthetic, the dark skin and lack of covering cloths needed in cold climates are not enough, the “I see you” greeting is a dead giveaway.
“No ambitions, no failures, no questions, no achievement, no future.”
Jesus, I have mocked countless aliens over the internet, without even realising it!
“We sent the aliens back to their dying world,”
If I or some people I look upp to where in power, that would be named Immigration Policies.
Funny that the left is so righteous. Their ideology deny the very existence of such things as righteousness and heroisme.
*Unless the level of fail reached is truly epic, a hard-worked for achievement in itself.
Tech Question:
Q
Hi, what blog platform is this? Can I download it for free or..? I would really like it if you could answer this question! Regards!
But we all know there is a radical difference between Judeo-Christian self-sacrifice and “environmental” sacrifice.
That’s like the idiotic insistence on the part of those trapped in conventional political “science” that there’s a world of difference between fascism/Nazism and communism.
In that false alternative, as in yours, the sacrificial victims are just as dead in either case; all that changes is the name of the god who’s collecting the sacrifices.
As the more perceptive of you probably already noticed, the “green” version is missing the “self” part of sacrifice.
You plainly do not know the difference between run-of-the-mill “environmentalists”, and core enviros. The latter will be perfectly happy to self-immolate. They just have to take the rest of us out first, to make sure.
And even if you were right about the envirocultists, that would apply equally to historical Christianity anyway: it was always the serfs, not the clergy or the kings with their Divine Rights, who were sacrificed.
Resources like the one you mentioned here will be very useful to me! I will post a link to this page on my blog. I am sure my visitors will find that very useful.
@ Leoma Dabrowski:
See the little string of text at the very bottom of this web page… click on “WordPress”
@ theBuckWheat, who wrote: “This is because Godless secularists have no mechanism for reconciling their sin-free plastic reality with their own sinful actions.” Please. As a “godless secularist” who thinks that this review is brilliant, I have a hard time imagining a more ignorant and offensive remark than yours. Religion is hardly a protection from the self-loathing that you describe, since the environmentalist philosophy that the movie seems to espouse is simply another form of it.
The site was definitely fantastic! Lots of good information and encouragement, both of which we all need!
I came upon this blog from Facebook, I congratulate that you have done a great job with your layout. What is your comment on the debate on the blogging platform? BlogEngine vs. WordPress vs. Movable Type?
I was considering seeing this movie, but it sounds worse than Watchmen. Thanks for talking me out of it.
The politics was so laughingly fat-fingered and transparently clumsy that for me, it was rendered invisible, and I just enjoyed it as pure visual fantasy. This is a shader tour de force.
Maybe I’m underestimating the political impact of clumsy fat-fingering, but moot; the movie is out, it is a smash populist hit, and if it is from eye-candy spoon-fed indoctrination like this that is where the center of mass gets its popcorn-fed sensibilities, well, God bless us all, we’re in a life boat over-run with complete idiots.
As if “Grapes of Wrath” was any less fat-fingered, now 70 years ago. We are several generations into the Theocracy of Social Scientology in America. What 1st amendment? “S”ociety is God, and the state is its proper church. Get with the program. It’s been decades since you could have a political discussion in America without referring to the totalitarian religious terms ‘S’ociety and the singular myth “The Economy,” it’s all we hear from the moment we are born. Of course the Matrix is real…
No, it’s not. It’s the economies, stupid. But that is a lost term. We are all about forced association, not free associations, plural. The phrase used to be “United We Stand”, we’ve successfully lurched to “United It Stands” on the way to history’s latest totalitarian FAIL.
And, we’re worried about blue puppets made from streaming triangles flying through armies of shaders…
[...] Created by people who wouldn’t live this way if they could. Doctor Zero: the ultimate suicide fantasy. [...]