AVATAR: The Future of the World

Is not the mechanical at its best a remarkable approximation to the organic? 

-- Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media, 1964


Most reviews of Avatar described it as a sort of sci-fi retelling of Pocahontas or Dances with Wolves. Jake Sully enters the world of the Na’vi to get the inside scoop on this group threatening the economic interests of the humans, much like John Smith or Lt. Dunbar. But a much more interesting message reveals itself to us if we consider McLuhan’s thoughts about art in Understanding Media:

No society has ever known enough about its actions to have developed immunity to its new extensions or technologies. Today we have begun to sense that art may be able to provide such immunity.

The artist picks up the message of cultural and technological challenge decades before its transforming impact occurs. He, then, builds models or Noah’s arks for facing the change that is at hand. 

The folks over at Metaphilm have a sense that movies may be able to provide us with immunity to technological change, if we try to “see through” them to the real message. As Fr. Barron says about the Dances with Wolves plot in Avatar, it really seems like something that would only appeal to a 14-year-old boy. Yet, as the viewer identifies more and more with the Na’vi people and less with the human antagonists, we sense that Cameron is playing with us.

The technology used by the humans in the movie is cool, but not unimaginable (that cool computer screen hand manipulation is demonstrated at a TEDtalk), except for the technology that allows Sully to enter the Na’vi body. But the technology that really steals the show is the interconnectedness of the Na’vi people to each other and their environment.  There is a scene where Sigourney Weaver’s character, Dr. Augustine, is studying a tree root and is amazed at the networking capabilities she finds. We see these capabilities utilized by the Ethernet-like braid extending from the back of all Na’vi heads that they use to communicate with Eywa--the Mother Nature-esque deity—and all the animals on their planet. Reminiscent of how Neo and company enter the Matrix, these braids connect the Na’vi completely and seamlessly with their entire planet, rather than pulling the wool over the eyes of the human race.

Avatar may really be best understood as the flipside of The Matrix. In his avatar, the world that Sully enters becomes more real to him than his human-embodied life, so much so that the movie shows him becoming more of a visitor in his human body and more connected to his Na'vi avatar. By the end, taking the blue pill, Sully abandons his human body for his avatar. This action is perfectly understandable, as the audience has seen the destruction and brutality of the human race in contrast with the peacefulness and community of the Na’vi. Why would Sully choose to live in a disjointed, violent society in his imperfect body when he could live in perfect harmony with a “body like Shaq that moves like Kobe”?

The Na’vi people represent our cultural ideal for technology, especially since the internet. We want our technology to bring us closer together, to connect us in a beautiful web that nature could never accomplish. Cameron shows his vision of the future, wherein the mechanical doesn’t just approximate the organic, it is organic. With Avatar and The Matrix, we are given two visions of our technology.

We are also given two very different versions of people interacting with technology, which is most likely influenced by changes in how we used to interact with the internet and the changes that are still occuring with the advent of the social media--Twitter, Facebook and the like. The realm of computers and the internet used to be mostly for solitary types who were into technology, but these days, who isn't into technology? In America, technology is quickly becoming as universal a conversation topic as the weather--everyone understands the annoyance of a mysterious bad connection or the tragedy/joy when your computer breaks days after/before the warranty expires. Computer technology and the internet especially have become the new centers of our mediated lives, and if that was the fear of The Matrix, Avatar shows that we have nothing to fear and should embrace our new environment.

The mentality the Singularity movement--which you can read about here--takes to technological evolution is similar to the Noah's ark that Cameron built for us to face the technological changes that are coming. Avatar is a movie about "the arrival of the Singularity — a time, possibly just a couple decades from now, when a superior intelligence will dominate and life will take on an altered form that we can’t predict or comprehend in our current, limited state. At that point, the Singularity holds, human beings and machines will so effortlessly and elegantly merge that poor health, the ravages of old age and even death itself will all be things of the past." Cameron's movie beautifully expresses this dream, but we must wonder if the dream will change as dramatically as it has since The Matrix.


See also the review of The Matrix at Metaphilm.