James Cameron's Avatar as an Exercise in World-Building: A Review

I saw Avatar over this past weekend. I liked it. A lot. And not just because Jeff Gomez’s production company developed the transmedia angles of the story. And certainly not just because Jeff and I have been friends for over twenty years. (Your people call this name-dropping; mine call it full disclosure. And, yes, there are spoilers in a couple more paragraphs. What of it?)

Science fiction has always had a special place in my heart because of the rigorous level of detail writing it well involves. The writer needs to build a world that makes sense to a reader as an integral part of the job. Writing, it’s been said many times, is an awful task but world-building is nothing less than an act of birth. There’s this thing inside you, gnawing at your nerve endings like a tapeworm, feeding you idea after lunatic idea. The only way to get it to shut up and go away is to write it out. So when I examine a work of science fiction--see a film, play a game, or read a book or short story--the main question I take with me is “Do I like the world? Would I want to visit or live in it? What made sense? What didn’t make sense?” and most importantly, at least to me: “What happens next?”

For me, that last one is the key. If it’s a world with room to grow, I immediately start thinking of new stories that might take place in it. Boring details like licensing agreements and copyrights mean nothing to me when that happens. If it’s a world with nothing to spur me to that point, I consider it an okay story and I forget about it. (Fanfic writers know exactly what I mean.) 

Worse, when considering those types of questions there's a bigger one that appears when a problem presents itself: "Would the offending element nullify the story if it were changed or removed?" If the answer is no, it represents a difference of opinion between the reader and author, not a flaw. If it's yes, then it's a real flaw that has to be dealt with.*

Getting the mundane details concerning the mundane infrastructure of a new world--the technology, the history, the social and economic rules, the politics, etc.--consistent is especially obnoxious, even in a story that has no non-human characters or influences. Including aliens makes everything much more complicated. The worst thing about telling a story about aliens is the need to make them, well, alien. That's tricky, because they need to be recognizable enough for your entirely human audience to identify with, and like or dislike as the case may be, but they also need some quality strange enough to make the reader really think about their own assumptions regarding what it means to be a three-dimensional person. The Na'vi, for all their hippie-dippie living-within-nature lifestyle and worldview, are alien. I'll get to why in a bit.

The movie's story has been covered elsewhere so I’ll keep it as brief as I can: Earth wants an energy source called Unobtanium** which is found only on Pandora, a moon orbiting the gas giant Polyphemus in the Alpha Centauri system. Pandora’s aboriginal native population is a  race of sapient nine foot tall cat-like creatures called the Na’vi. The Na’vi want the “Sky People” to go home and leave their world alone. Jake Sully is a paraplegic ex-marine who takes the chance to pilot a genetic Na’vi-like construct called an Avatar which was meant to be used by his deceased twin brother. The base's military commander wants inside information to facilitate the Na’vi’s removal/migration/destruction), which Jake agrees to give in exchange for his legs back. Jake wends his way into Na’vi society and with the help of a Na’vi princess named Neytiri spends three months learning everything about their way of life, at which point he also decides the “Sky People” should go home. The humans realize their tactical disadvantage but enormous military superiority and attack, Jake leads the Na'vi in a surprisingly effective counterattack, and the humans decide to leave after all. Jake’s reward is an ascension into his Avatar body. Roll credits.

I’ve read several reviews of the movie since I saw it, and a lot of them dwell on comparing the events therein to real world conflicts. Comparison with the war in Afghanistan in terms of military involvement against a mostly defenseless native population is apt but it misses that fact that our conflict there is a political one; we’re not taking anything out of the ground (although we might well be guarding installations built and operated by those who are). Comparison with the war in Iraq makes more sense to me because in both Iraq and Pandora’s case, the U.S. army is defending and enabling a mission of resource extraction—the violence and destruction it visits upon the natives has more to do with keeping the money safe and the bills paid than any ideological purpose, despite what our past and current rulers have announced.

I haven’t seen anyone compare Avatar to Lawrence of Arabia yet. I think there’s a lot to compare between the two films if you want to look at Avatar as a Soldier Gone Native story (and you sort of have to because that’s what it is). The trouble there is that Lawrence was a soldier and acted like a soldier throughout the movie--his real choices boil down to not whether to wage war but how to do it--while Jake Sully starts out acting as a soldier and sort of phases in and out of the role. Apparently James Cameron couldn’t quite get the point that you can both act and think like a soldier and still identify with the enemy. (Sometimes being a good soldier compels you to do so.)

On that particular point, one problem from a story POV I noticed is that if Sully is so damn smart a Marine why doesn’t he ask that the Na’vi infuse him into his blue body as soon as he knows it’s possible to for them do so? I understand that by that point in the movie time is a factor; a massive air assault on the Na'vi homeland is imminent and it looked as if the infusion/transfer ritual took the entire tribe’s attention for at least a few hours. But strategically, it would have been something to address. If nothing else it would remove his biggest vulnerability in the Avatar program—the fact that when anyone hits that big red button on the capsule, he migrates back to his own body and his Avatar falls asleep until reactivated. In a combat situation it’s not what a marine should quietly accept if he knows what he’s doing, and the first real scene between Jake and the base military CO show that yeah, Jake Sully knows his stuff. It didn't detract significantly from the story, but it bugged me.

I had other other pet peeves. The human base on Pandora seems to be using the Air Cavalry model of engagement pioneered by the U.S. in Vietnam: large semi-permanent bases supplied by air, and utilizing choppers to ferry troops and equipment wherever they’re needed. Did the Na’vi never get the idea to place snipers around the base perimeter? Even if they can’t hit gunships and bulldozers with bows and arrows surely they can hit unarmored troops disembarking from shuttles now and then. (The final battle sequence made it clear that a large number of Na’vi warriors are able to maneuver their flying mounts right down an enemy’s throat, bury a poisoned arrow in his heart and then fly away without a scratch.)  We’re not even sure what or who killed Sully’s twin brother—had it been a Na’vi arrow at point blank range during a scientific jungle expedition, it might have given rather more weight to Jake’s willingness to help the military achieve their goals in the first part of the film. The movie is already intentionally tilted against the humans by making the extraction mission essentially a military one—would it have hurt to have a bit of counter weighting while Jake is trying to come to terms with how he’s going to make amends for the crimes of his people? More importantly, would it have hurt to give Jake that extra bit of conflict? (“Dude, that native princess you’re so hot for? Yeah, well, she murdered your brother for being in her part of the jungle at the wrong time. How do you feel about her now, huh? Huh?”)

But the thing that really severed the comparison to Iraq or any other real life conflict for me, the deal breaker, the part where the analogy broke down entirely and what made the story worthwhile--the alieness-- is that the Na’vi have something no human can reliably claim: empirical proof of their deity’s existence.

This is a big deal, both to me personally and as a plot point so I’ll dwell on it a bit.  When we talk to each other about belief in God we generally mean one of three things: yes, I believe in God but it’s not like he’s giving me instructions; or yes, I believe in God and he is giving me instructions (and my doctor has prescribed medication for that); or yes, I believe in God because it’s politically/socially/economically expedient or beneficial to do so. In any of these cases, the level of belief espoused doesn’t begin to approach, for example, that of the typical Medieval peasant who believed that God and the Devil actually existed and that Heaven and Hell were places as real as the earth under their feet. The reason for this is that we just plain know more about the universe than we ever have before, and we know that religious scripture doesn’t explain the world and the universe in which it rests nearly as well as empirical knowledge does. Scripture, no matter how much you want it to be true, is still a myth, a fairy tale, and not a very coherent one at that. That doesn't mean it has no psychic value to those who do believe, just that it tells the observable story of our history and planet poorly.

The Na’vi are exactly the opposite. All the trees and many of the higher animals on Pandora are neurologically linked, forming a limitless pool of psychic energy for the Na'vi to draw on. Their Earth Mother goddess Eywa isn’t merely as real as the ground they walk on—she is the ground they walk on. She is the animals they hunt, the trees they live in, the air they breathe, the water they drink. More importantly, she makes herself available to them. The Na’vi use trees as repositories of collective memory:  the Tree of Wishes collects the hopes, dreams and goals of countless past and present clan members. The Tree of Souls retains the entire clan experiential history of all the Na’vi who were ever born or died. More importantly, the psychic contents of these receptacles are available to any clan member who wishes to access it. Forget about a concept as abstract as faith for a moment: what if you could talk to your great-great grandfather to ask him a question about a problem you’re having today? What if you knew that no life ever really ended, but got stored in a mass collective that every human on the planet could access pretty much at will? And what if empirical investigation backed your belief up? The world would be a very different place.

That’s the reality of the Na’vi culture postulated by James  Cameron. The problem in the telling of this portion of the story is that even the humans who are in a position to get it (read: "the scientists"), don’t seem to. One example of this I saw in a scene where Sigourney Weaver’s character is trying to dissuade the human leadership of the need to not escalate the conflict. Her effort is based on scientific evidence of the massive collective neurological activity that the whole planet seems given towards. But she’s limited by the fact that she’s using this information as knowledge but not as experience—possibly because she’s never had the experience of connecting her Avatar to those special memory-storing trees the way Jake has. To her the fact of trillions of trees sharing bioenergy with each other across the planet is fantastic and amazing, but not spiritual. (She does become spiritual about it later, but too late to prevent the destruction.) In either case, her persuasive technique fails for an obvious reason: the curiosity about the natural world that propels the scientific mind is not what businessmen and soldiers are prone to sharing or understanding. That might have come from what I thought the scene needed to really make the point—the language of conflict. If you want to make a point to a soldier, fine; speak in terms he can comprehend. Say: this world is entirely connected at a psychic level and it responds or at least has the potential to respond in kind to any massed conflict. Make war on one clan, you make war on the whole biosphere. Any escalation that big has to end in the planet’s swallowing our forces up. You go in, Colonel, you're not coming out. And you, Money Guy, are going to have to explain to your bosses why their expensive army disappeared without one extra kilogram of Unobtanium to show for it.

I realize that in order for the movie to proceed, the business and military types pretty much have to ignore that argument, but at least the point gets made on screen. When an American general claims that his God is bigger than the enemy’s, he’s really just expressing his belief that his side has better weapons and training than theirs does. Yet those better armed and trained soldiers get their asses handed to them at the end of this movie, to standing ovations all over the country. A living, breathing, loving Goddess-planet who rises up to defend her children makes all the difference. Without her, the natives lose, and that’s not the point of this film.

This too, is the sort of thing that only exists in a fictitious world: in real life the Gaia Hypothesis remains a hypothesis (if a fascinating one) and if the Earth is actually planning humanity’s demise, then it will happen at such a slow speed that it will take us generations to figure it out. But Harry Harrison used that strategy in writing Deathworld, where on the planet Pyrrus, all native life is in fact psychically linked, and quite honestly, has been trying to eradicate a colony of violent humans for a couple of centuries when the novel opens.  Worse, the native wildlife is winning the struggle. The only reason the hero figures this out is because he, too, is a low-level psychic and isn't  emotionally invested in the Pyrran colonists' struggle.

The film’s conclusion made sense from both a writing and a character development POV: Sully’s reward for having organized a successful defense of Pandora against an invading army is to literally become a Na’vi, which is both logical and works within the story.*** And he gets the beautiful native princess and he gets a big rep boost for having been the first war leader in recent memory to unite the various Na’vi clans, and so on. I don’t agree with those who call that part of the film racist. I do agree with the possibility that Jake and Neytiri are involved in an inherently dishonest relationship. Let's face it, he's a human and she's a giant blue cat. Her entire biology is poisonous to him. That doesn't resolve until the moment in the film near the end where they are actually holding each other--their real bodies, her head the size of a furry basketball and his breathing mask keeping him alive--and then they declare their love for each other. That scene could not have played out any earlier or differently and still mean anything.

Now, if Jake he’d gotten all those wonderful things while remaining a human, or if he had somehow convinced the Na’vi to abandon their culture (or even their home tree) and adopt a more human-like material existence--no doubt under the thumb of the U.S. military--then it would deserve the criticism.

So . . . what moral or ethical messages to take away from this film?

First, if you would orchestrate and implement the death and destruction of native populations, hire Barfbacks rather than the truly talented. A Barfback is Dean Ing’s term for an engineering student who memorizes everything he’s taught, can recite it back from memory on demand, and will never have a creative or original thought. Those are the guys you want to use to get into the native populations’ head, and report back as ordered. A Barfback will mimic their teachers well but will never integrate any of their experiences. Empathy-laden whiners like Jake Sully are losers who learn a few tidbits about their enemy then start thinking of them as people, and then, oh the vapors.***

Second, do not attempt to make war on the entire biosphere. Hyperbole aside, the Industrial Revolution’s disciples, despite all the material comforts they've developed--indoor plumbing, air conditioning and antibiotics to name a few--have been having their way with our planet for over 200 years and she’s pissed. Between global warming and peak oil, the Earth has closed her legs and is now reaching for the Glock in her purse. The results will be painful.

Third, under no circumstances should you ever acknowledge that the enemy’s God is real and your God is a fairy tale backed up by tanks, gunships and the not-so-free market. Hell, soldiers tend to lose focus if they even go so far as to believe their enemies are human beings, forget having a tangible Goddess that defends them in real time.

I can easily imagine what happens next. I don’t buy the film’s statement that “the invaders went home.” Invaders don’t go home; they either win and displace the natives, they lose (and are generally wiped out in the process) or they are faced with a draw, come to some settlement before either side is wiped out, and stick around for the long term. Besides, it takes six years to get to Pandora from Earth and even as the main mining base is being closed, other starships en route are due to arrive shortly and their captains won’t have the fuel or the desire to turn around and go home. Plus, there’s an extra angle to look at for a sequel: Eywa is real and I guarantee that the news will reach Earth one day. When it does, human converts (or wannabe converts) will do everything they can imagine to migrate to Pandora and try to become part of her. I can easily imagine a horde of Na’vi who are at their wits’ end trying to manage a crowd of eager humans who want nothing more than to lie down at the roots of the Tree of Souls and take off their breathing masks in the belief that their deaths will be subsumed by the great tree goddess. And of course, some would-be converts won’t be quite so peaceful in their attempts to become part of Na’vi culture.

I’m looking forward to seeing if James Cameron’s story developers and I think alike.

-----

 *It's one thing to ask your audience to temporarily suspend disbelief. It's quite another to insist that they sit down, shut up, and watch the damn movie.

 **Unobtanium means, "the element that can't be acquired." Sort of gives the ending away on page one, doesn't it? Granted, the ending was clearly inevitable, but still . . .

***Physical transformation as a metaphor for spiritual transcendence is as old as story-telling itself: for modern examples think of Clarke's Star Child in 2001: A Space Odyssey, or Asimov's Andrew Martin in The Bicentennial Man. It works the other way, too: Gregor Samsa's morphing into a bug in Kafka's The Metapophosis remains an excellent example of a metaphysical demotion.

****One thing I did not see in the film and wish I had: what's the army's slang term for the Na'vi? Every enemy has one, and I refuse to believe the culture that spawned such favorites as "Wog," "Chink," "Jap," "Kraut," and "Raghead" and "Haji" cannot come up with something similarly derogatory. 

Comments

[Jeff Gomez]

Enormously enjoyable and rollicking assessment, Jonathan. A few points of information, not based on my personal association with the film but based on my own observations of the story as it appears in the release version:

1. As indicated by the enormous list of credits, Cameron went through a highly elaborate process of world-building, working with some of the best creatives and academics to evolve everything about Pandora and the universe of its time, from the language of the Na'vi to the functionality of the starships that get humans to the world. The more you think about all of it, the more it actually makes sense as scientific extrapolation. Good observation!

2. I think it's important to note that the Na'vi have never been at war with the humans before the start of the film and are not moved to war until the last possible minute. The film in fact establishes that there were closer diplomatic relations between humans and Na'vi, which is why they speak English and why the Weaver character is so well known by them. They would not have thought to set up an attack strategy against the human outpost with snipers and such. All they want at the point of the start of the film is for the humans and their behemoth machines to stay away. This is why you see arrows sticking out of bulldozer treads instead of out of people toward the start of the film. Humans are visitors afflicted with insanity that the Na'vi could take or leave, it seems, until they start blowing up too much stuff.

3. It's public knowledge that Cameron had a fairly detailed roadmap of the plot of Avatar twelve or fifteen years ago. While I agree some of the dialog directly pokes at current events (no doubt to drive right wingers nuts), the story is timeless and mythic, harkening back to virtually every conflict between peoples in history. The actual politics of the film's story is about as partisan as the Trojan War.

4. I actually believe that Jake Sully is a warrior through and through, never once wavering from this archetype. I say warrior rather than soldier, because warriors don't need direct orders and a military hierarchy to dictate their actions -- they need to adhere to a personal code of right and wrong and stake their lives on it. They are driven by this quick decision-making and they carry out their intent with boldness and no hesitation. This is what makes Jake so driven, once things get under way, and it accounts for his seeming lack of internal conflict. You see, once he decides what's right, he simply goes for it. This is exactly what turns on the Na'vi about him, and it's why Eywa takes a gamble on him.

5. With regard to Eywa, it's important to note that its intelligence is truly alien. I don't think you can jack into her and call up grandma. It's more like a massive data flow. So the elaborate transfers that are attempted and happen in the film are extraordinary rarities done at great risk. Very much a last resort kind of thing, and something that failed with the Weaver character. I also don't think that Eywa had the tools to directly respond to the attackers until the sum total of Weaver's knowledge was integrated into the flow, and Jake nudged it to hurry up and tap into said knowledge. No human had understood this level of Pandora's potential until that last moment, so it would have been impossible for the Weaver character to adequately warn the military of the power they were up against. I think the scientists were simply trying to point out that there was potentially far more value in understanding the interconnectivity of the world that even that of unobtainium -- far more value in studying and relating to the environment than destroying it -- and THAT is something that the military and corporate types could not begin to understand.

Great going, Jon!

Jeff

[Jon Frater]

Hi Jeff,

Thank you many times over for the kind words as well as your excellent insights into the nuances of the final release.

A lot of responses I've seen to the film both make the observation that the moviegoing experience in Avatar was mostly about appreciating the technology required to create it; this is is proper, as visually, it is amazing. It wasn't the quality of the story that suffered as a result so much as it was the story's linear nature offering the characters too little wiggle room--their paths toward the ending seemed inevitable from the opening credits onward. Also, not a bad thing, if you consider the film as platform for the next installment--and with over a billion dollars in revenue thus far, I'm pretty sure a sequel to Avatar is coming.

Surely you or another of your team has seen this article by now, but in case you haven't, it makes for some brief but fun reading. Enjoy!

Jon

[Daniel Frater]

At the risk of being a Billy Carter to your Jimmah, Jon, I just spent an evening chasing a near-nekkid, giggly, spry, Huggies-clad toddler (oh, thats right, we have two of them, how could I forget) around the upstairs in order to bathe her (why won't she sit down in the tub, oh, why?)and accordingly my brain is sagging like a rotten two-by-four supporting my friend Karl's arse in a dilapidated outhouse in the same woods where the Evil Dead spirits lurk (forgive the misplaced parts of the analogy, just accept them, string 'em together, and you'll get it). Dead by dawn indeed. An accurate description of my life, at the moment.

Now, that's neither here nor there, but mostly here, if I had to pinpoint it precisely. I am, however, intrigued by your point about there not being a vulgar term for the Na'vi. Although I did not see the film yet--I live, you see, vicariously, and exclusively, through YouTube footage--I would suggest "JarJar", as the Na'vi are 1)blue like JarJar Binks and 2)the former is universally loathed enough so that even a fictional universe's popular culture would share in the inside joke. It's also a nice spin on "Jarhead". Presumably the human imperialists would have seen the Star Wars prequels and disliked them. The Na'vi also look vaguely Ethiopian or Somali in terms of their facial structure, so maybe that can get worked in, too.

Please kill me.