Avatar: Misanthropic Muse?

 

Recently released was the third installment in James Cameron’s Avatar movies; and in seeing the new Fire & Ash film I left the theatre, like after the second movie, with an imbued sense of unbridled misanthropy. Leading to the pondering, is that truly the point? 

Ramping up Agent Smith’s prescription of humanity as a virus in The Matrix, the Avatar franchise depicts the species as exactly so, spreading to other worlds even. In this sense it’s akin to the Nina Paley documentary film Thank You For Not Breeding, which uses the analogy of humanity being akin to a cancer spreading uncontrollably and maliciously. 

Is humanity necessarily a virus, or could such be symptomatic to only its habits? With that, is it not a virus?

While the Na’vi natives of Pandora are shown to have many similarities to human tendencies— namely in regards to tribalism, such are purely logical in the face of the attempting onslaughts. Rather than extraterrestrial invaders coming down to Earth, the ‘sky people’ coming from Gaea are the abhorrent aliens. 

By the closing scene of the third installment, Pandora is made out to be clearly more than meets the eye, as prior films already heavily implicated. Zooming out for a final short, shows the planet inhabited but within the spiritual realm the population of Pandora all interconnects with.

Pandora gets its name from Greek legend. As the mythology claims, the first woman on Earth, Pandora, is given a box as a (poison pill) gift from the gods, and instructed not to open it. Like Eve in Eden however, curiosity got to the cat as was always planned; from the box all pestilence and suffering and all that can be claimed as ills to the human condition sprung. Pinning the punishment onto Pandora, as explanation for the negative in the Garden of Earthly Delights, simply for married in lineage to Prometheus, who both molded mankind and stole fire from the gods to illuminate his clay. 

Na’vi have a spiritual superior strength while man has mechanistic ‘might’. In that Pandora being as it is christened, is heavy in irony. Opening Pandora’s box isn’t humanity’s quarrel; it’s breaking in. Like Plato’s cave allegory, but the inhabitants of the cave are the enlightened ones; mixed with the Jungian invigoration of the primitive perceptions… the Na’vi are written to reflect this in blatant juxtaposition to the sky people. 

Living in conjunction with the world they inhabit. Intrinsically connected to it in a literal, metaphysical way. Even though intelligent and conscious of the fact as humans are on their home world, the Na’vi do not counterintuitively attempt to refute their link to the broader ecology. Portraying invading humans as largely sociopathic, save a select few. Mechanistically, snobbishly, and militarily mistaking the “savagery” of the native population for stupidity. Savage is subjective; throughout the course of climaxes, mankind is repeatedly reminded to be incredibly brutal in its breaking into the world. Not dissimilar to real world situations like American forces in the jungles of Vietnam fighting against speaking trees; or British soldiers unfamiliar to the Virginian terrain. 

Art imitates life; earth isn’t totally in shambles from pulsating tumors; and being the lie that attempts truth, the creation of an entirely new world being ravaged in interstellar rape, makes an acceptable allegory for box office hits. Differing in depiction from other blockbusters like the Independence Day movies, it’s a polar opposite picture. It’s not aliens invading, it’s aliens being invaded.