Dear Mr. Cameron,
If I may write on behalf of much of the audience, particularly on behalf of greens and naturalists, for a moment:
We loved your epic and cataclysmic movies. We loved your epic vision in the Terminator movies. We loved seeing Sarah Connor get buff in the second film, turning into a fringe Luddite warrior queen. And then John struggling to grow up as a Luddite messiah struggling with the role of technology in civilization. Aliens – the struggle between a truly horrible other and the corporate exploitation of planets. We loved Ripley there – “I don’t know what’s worse, Burke, you or them!” Then the Abyss, on the verge of nuclear destruction and Cold War paranoia, a vision of hope from an alien other. And, there was Strange Days, (which, granted has not aged well, but should be seen by everyone still), a great script dealing with millennial and revolutionary themes in L.A. Of course there was Titanic – finally capping a career in which you challenge the hubris of industrial society and the limits of exploitation as society pushes itself to the brink.
Avatar was a success in so many ways – a huge picture. HUGE! Years of production. Hundreds of millions of dollars invested. And yet it was at heart a totally primitivist adventure. How Gaian! How radical. What a stroke – and we kind of expected it, frankly. And we mean that as a complement. We know you have sentiment for the environment.
We heard you on Democracy Now! We saw you set up foundations for indigenous people fighting off the miners in India that were digging up their sacred mountain. We saw you go to Brazil to bring attention to the indigenous opposition to the Belo Monte Dam (that the government just pushed through.) We know you have the heart … but … wait a minute …
What is this we hear about Disney making an Avatar theme park in Florida? This primitivist story is now being whored out to Disney, where they can “create the world of Pandora” in their “Animal Kingdom?” Isn’t this exactly the opposite of your message? Oh, I’m sure the little Pandora restaurants would have great organic food, vegetarian options to appeal to the Peta crowd. You can get these little glowing mushroom things at the gift shop, and collect all the toys where you can plug the pony tails of the Na’vi into the pony tails of the little horses and flying creatures and they all light up together inspired by the earth mother there.
It’s like you are colonizing your own story. You know, it’s the later phase of colonization. See, first the colonizer first kills the indigenous, or moves them, or renders them otherwise incapacitated. Then the colonizer assimilates them in once the other is left drugged and impotent. Then finally the colonizer romanticizes the other, then subjects them to Western cultural categories … submitted to the curio shops, museums, libraries, movies. As anthropologist Edmund Carpenter wrote, “we make a false record of that which we are about to destroy.” Or, as Pee-wee Herman put succinctly, “Take a picture, it’ll last longer!” So we collected the cultures in our colonial museum – Epcot Center … all the cultures of the world around one little lake. Now you don’t need a train to get from France to Germany. Even the food is better. Put “Native Land” next to “Tomorrow Land” – this is the end point of colonization when the real has been murdered and picked clean. The indigenous is rendered impotent so that we can freely engage in primitivist tourism.
We’re not fooled. We’re not taken in by this. In fact, it demonstrates how phony the ending to Avatar is. We’ve gone back and forth on this, believe us. Marcuse said somewhere that we sometimes need happy endings – that it is kind of revolutionary because real life in capitalist society is so tragic and violent. Happy endings offer a narrative-projection into a possible future, and thus can offer a healing path. Chaplin did this effectively as the tramp – finding happiness despite getting into so much trouble.
It’s phony too for its precise namesake. Avatar? Of course natives need some wounded white warrior to come in and save them from ourselves. What? That’s sort of like Custer changing sides, right? (Like Vine Deloria – “Custer Died for Your Sins”?) Is this what you want to write? Seriously?
Something felt cheap about the last act of Avatar. The primitives winning and sending the colonizers packing without their “unobtainium”? Where did this ever happen? Is this supposed to be a wish fulfillment? It’s too phony for us. It makes us wonder how the other version of the script read. Is there something there on the cutting room floor? Is there a version of the truth that we all know lurks behind the camera?
Here is the gist of the alternate ending, which happens just after the shocking fall of home tree: The Na’vi are enslaved, taught English, taught that they are savages. They have some good and domesticated turn against their own kind, and they turn in the last few guerrillas (like what happened to Crazy Horse). Flash forward twenty years, the plane’s lush forest t is mowed down, the “unobtanium” is all dug up. The workers still on the machines are mostly Na’vi. The whites like their ability to breathe the air and their massive size is an asset. None of them speak their native language or have a memory of their native language. Some are leaving the planet to join mining operations on other planets.
If Avatar was made by a European it would happen this way. Avatar by way of Jean Luc Goddard or Werner Herzog. And everyone in the audience has a very sick feeling in their stomach.
The phony ending of Avatar cheats us. But it lets us into the mind of the decision to make a theme park at Disney. There were articles out a couple years ago about people feeling the “Avatar blues.” They were feeling nauseous by seeing such a beautiful and fantastical planet. They felt like they had never really touched nature or seen it in such splendor. The allegation is that it was too much. Too much 3D, too fast, too loud, too sensuous. This is what Jean Baudrillard called “the ecstasy of communication.” After the steroid-eyed 3D spectacle of Pandora, who can care about the forest? Who can even find their own home tree?
Maybe your sequels can solve this. Maybe your life can. Maybe our lives can by realizing this unwitting propaganda, this procession of the hyperreal in our lives? Maybe the best way to respond to this otherwise pristine robot is to find its green fissures, a radical departure, a war declared against simulation, against the grand narratives of industrialism. (To find Sarah Connor again – “No fate but what you make.”) To find a Pandora in the present. There is no better cure for the Avatar blues. It is here and now. It will never be in a Disney theme park.
We love your work and great skill. Please do well with this. We mean to help.
Sincerely,
Your audience
Green Fissures in an Otherwise Pristine Robot 