Soft Technology, Alchemy and Escapism: A Critique of Avatar (I)
Happy New Year to all. Since it is the beginning of the year, I thought I’d experiment a little and write from time to time some commentaries on esoteric ideas related to popular culture. And what better way to start than with a review of the movie Avatar.
While I was watching Avatar, the concept of mundus imaginalis coined by historian and philosopher Henri Corbin kept crossing my mind in regards to the world of Pandora. Mundus imaginalis is, simply put, the world of imagination – a world we project out of our mind. To us today this may be a poetic expression, but to traditional esoteric thought, this world was as real as we are, an intermediary place between this world and the divine one. It was a place we could access in our dreams and visions by the aid of a so-called ‘third eye’.
It is a phenomenon of our contemporary imagination to present this spiritual world as more accessible. What could make us transcend the barrier between our mundane universe and this magical one? The answer often is: technology. In Avatar, we see that technology (of a very expensive and sci-fi kind) can turn Jake Sully into an avatar capable of interacting with the world of imagination, symbolized by Pandora’s Navi people. We can see technology facilitating the forbidden interaction between the elusive Navi and the human beings.
But how does this apology for avatar technology reconcile with the explicit denial of technology amongst the idealistic Navis? After all, the Navis reject all complex machines and prefer hunting with spears and arrows. The movie’s answer is, by differentiating between ‘good’ technology and ‘bad’ technology. The good technology is the ‘soft’ kind: the one of computers and complex systems. It is this technology that allows one to ascend to the forbidden world of the Navis. Remarkably this world, we learn, is built on the same principles as soft technology. Grace the scientist puts it plainly: the Home Tree is a neural network connecting all trees on the planet. And if that wasn’t clear enough, we have the very explicit image of the Navi ‘jacking in’ the planetary system with their hair (Naughty as I am, I briefly wondered why would Jack and the Navi girl need to have sex the usual human way when they seemed to make love through their hair just fine).
So, despite appearances, you didn’t have a denial of technology in this movie, but a manifesto for a new, ‘softer’ type of technology, which, as we see, is ‘eco-friendly’. So eco-friendly in fact that the Eywa – the Gaia soul of Pandora – could play the same role as the virtual reality chamber in switching a mind from the human body to the Navi one. The implications are hard to miss: Pandora’s box and the virtual chamber are the same thing. Soft technology, and the magic of the planet go hand in hand.
To this alliance of technology and magic the movie opposes ‘bad’ technology - the 19-20th century type, made of squeaky metals, grey machines and heavy robots. This is an evil world, a world without a soul, filled with clumsy robots and robotic human beings that are all symbolically destroyed at the end of the Navi-human war.
The ideal is now the slender life-like avatars, not the cold steel machines. The avatars are so organic and alive that the Navi themselves seem almost unable to distinguish between their own kind and the avatars. Of course, we are explained, this is not Navi simple-mindedness; it is a spiritual insight that is render valid by Eywa herself. For her, the avatar machine the humans invented was so excellent that it was no problem to relinquish poor Jake from his own defect body into this new, bettered body. The humans may be the battered kind in this movie, but their superior technology is good enough to fool Mother Nature. As this movie states, we are no longer breeding Frankenstein monsters, but beautiful bluish living creatures.
We have definitely evolved from Cameron’s previous technology discourse in Aliens (1986). There technology was definitely portrayed negatively: you had robots and heavy weaponry that in the end could do nothing but give a false sense of security to the human soldiers. Life – the ugly, but organic aliens – wiped the humans out with or without their prized technology. There was a feeling of gloom about it; the inability of humanity to either communicate or adapt to an organic universe. Here, Cameron seems to have found the technological key that opens inter-species communication. Not only that, but the universe has become a friendlier place, no longer inhabited by human eating monsters, but by slender and sexy aliens.
So slender and sexy, that they made me think about the whole alchemical mythology of improving the human body. Why would Jake need new legs from a corrupt Company when soft technology can offer him a whole new and more agile body? The Navi may not live forever, but they are ideal human beings, tall, erect and hard to kill. How puny, pathetic and clumsy human beings are in comparison, particularly in that last scene where wounded ones are escorted away by towering Navi. The message is clear: it is better to be a Navi than a human.
This is where the whole message of the movie becomes rather problematic. A human being can only become a Navi through soft technology, or more explicitly, virtual reality. Bettering the body is achieved simply by jacking into VR and assuming another identity. Subsequently, there is a disengagement with our mundane reality and our selves. ‘I want to be somebody else’ is not just a song, it is an ideal in this movie. After all, modern culture encourages us to deal with our imperfections by escaping them, be it through plastic surgery or by immersing in more and more realistic make-believe. Of course, the computer gaming industry loves Avatar. Escapism sells.
Perhaps I’m being a bit harsh with what is, after all, a movie (so an escapist device per definition). Yet I can’t help not observing the increasing success of art forms that promote fantasy and disengagement with the mundane world. Sure, the mundane is kind of boring, but we still live in it.
Next time, if you are still patient with my bulls$%t, I will try next time to talk about the religion of the Navi, pantheism and Paracelsianism.
Tags: Alchemy, avatar the movie, escapism, esoteric, eywa, frankenstein, henri corbin, magic, mundus imaginalis, navi, pandora, technology, virtual reality
February 2nd, 2010 at 12:35 pm
Aw, this was a really quality post. In theory I’d like to write like this too - taking time and real effort to make a good article… but what can I say… I procrastinate alot and never seem to get something done.