The movie focuses on the need to bring balance into man’s toxic relationship with Mother Earth. It juxtaposes two world-views, one in harmony with nature, one antagonistic to her. Here she is referred to as Eywa and the All-Mother. She is the biological sentient guiding deity of Pandora, a lush, jungle moon. She is like Gaia of Greek mythology, the personification of the Earth and a primordial deity.
Judging by the alleged effects of climate change man’s relationship with Earth is getting worse. The climate activists of today are known to engage in creative antics to draw attention to their cause, but this is not new. This was the impetus for activist Steward Brand in the early 1970s to demand that NASA provide us with an image of “the whole Earth.” He said it would make the people of the world view the planet Earth in a new way and sure enough, the modern environmental movement was galvanized in part by this new perception.
This was achieved with “The Blue Marble,” the most famous image of Earth, taken on December 7, 1972. It is one of the most reproduced images in history. It has been half a century, and this effect has never been replicated. Apollo 17 was the last piloted lunar mission, and no humans since have captured such an image directly. Blue Marble made man a witness to the precariousness of his home and has been cited as "the birth of the environmental movement.”
My contention is that Avatar: The Way of Water is intended to accomplish today what The Blue Marble did 50 years ago. It’s an immersive journey into a world of people intimately connected to their world and wise to the need for balance and sustainability. The scientist played by Sigourney Weaver discusses her findings about the sentience of Pandora, now facing an invasion by humans that do not recognize her sentience or the interconnectedness of all her creatures.
Their living world is assailed by marines, the reconnaissance of a military-industrial complex, who have no choice but to take over a new planet as the Earth has been mined, clear-cut, stripped, plundered, polluted, and rendered inhospitable to life. The humans and their robot swarms have resorted to exploiting the resources of new living worlds because of catastrophic environmental destruction of their own.
What characterizes The Na'vi is their connectedness to the environment and all living things. They connect to plants and animals with their long braids, using them like USB cords to directly commune with Eywa. The infiltrating marines, while similar to the Na’vi in form, have shaved their hair in accordance with military regulations and have no connection to the world. This is illustrated in a scene where a marine fails initial attempts to mount a reluctant flying creature and resorts to forcing it to comply. In contrast, the true Na’vi can connect with the creatures who take them up willingly.
This force versus cooperation typifies the human relationship with nature. In many ways, the humans are aliens, not just to Pandora but to their own dying world. They cannot breathe the air on Pandora, and their machines are resisted by flesh and blood animals and warriors with wooden arrows against machine guns. This symbolizes the machinification of man, no longer part of Gaia, not part of Pandora, and dependent on conquest for continued survival. In the open scenes, the humans descend like UFOs with tractor beams of light like an inverted version of the typical alien invasion.
In recent comments, Cameron said, “I always think of [testosterone] as a toxin that you have to slowly work out of your system.” This attitude is reflected in the caricatures of toxic masculinity presented in the marines. The male-dominated culture is at odds with the Na’vi who have a harmonious balance between their males and females. The humans don’t care about balance, remarked one of the Na’vi.
The invader’s culture of conquest is graphically displayed during a scene in which a majestic whale-like Tulkin is hunted, harpooned, and brutally slaughtered to traumatize the Na’vi that venerate the creatures. The heart-wrenching scene is reminiscent of the 1990 film Dances With Wolves where the carcasses of dead, skinned buffalo lie strewn across a field, their tongues removed by white hunters, and their carcasses left to rot wastefully.
Avatar shows us Man at his greediest and most craven. One particular scientist admits that he drinks alcohol because the truth is, their scientific research puts money above empathy. His research is funded by the atrocious and wasteful killing of Tulkin whales. They are slaughtered for nothing more than a vial of golden liquid extracted from their brains. This conflicted scientist seems bothered by the fact the immense intelligence of these massive creatures matters nothing to humans. Later, he laments their unappreciated emotional capacity far exceeding what humans can feel. The gratuitous violence in that scene is obviously another way to turn the audience against the mistreatment of Gaia and her inhabitants by appealing to their empathy. The Way of Water imparts a vision of a world in dire need of protection much like the Blue Marble photograph was used to create empathy for Mother Earth and a sense of urgency about saving her.
Coincidentally, Ellen Degeneres made headlines with a comment about this very topic:
"This is the five-year anniversary from the fire and mudslides that killed [people] and people lost their homes, their lives. This is crazy. On the five-year anniversary, we're having unprecedented rain….Mother Nature is not happy with us," she said while standing in front of the flood waters.
The sinking ship scene strongly recalls Cameron’s Titanic. This is an essential reference, as the Titanic has often been used as a metaphor for wealth and privilege, hence its sinking represents the crumbling of complacent power structures. Significantly, Cameron was in a deep-diving submersible, personally inspecting the wreckage of the actual Titanic on 9/11/01 as the WTC Twin Towers were crumbling. If we look at 9/11 as “blowback,” a term used by those believing this was punishment for American deeds abroad, perhaps in the name of resources to fuel an unsustainable system, then it makes perfect sense to symbolically link the attacks on the Pentagon and the WTC Towers with the sinking of the Titanic.
This is appropriate since the plot of Avatar is primarily about how humanity failed the Earth and now must send its military to secure new resources without regard for indigenous life or the unavoidable consequences of the ecological balance they would upset.
The Titanic failed to avoid collision with an iceberg, a problem so large only a fraction can be seen at one time. Its failure to take appropriate evasive or mitigating actions resulted in disaster.
The recent movie Don’t Look Up, starring Leonardo DiCaprio, metaphorically depicts the Earth as Titanic being steered by capitalists blinded by greed. Their refusal to take a comet seriously (a space iceberg) results in their destruction. I suspect DiCaprio was chosen as the face of Don’t Look Up to drive home the Titanic metaphor in the movie. The predominant theme was science must prevail over greed, or the earth will not survive.
Another example of the imbalance of the West portrayed in the movie pertains to what might be termed mental illness or neural divergence. One of the Na’vi has a seizure while connected to the world spirit via an immense tree. She is examined with technologically sophisticated medical scanners when her Western medicine practitioners are told to leave and allow traditional medicinal practices to be used instead. They said she should not connect to the spirit any longer and saw her mystical experiences as symptomatic of an illness. We see here how modern medicine would have effaced that part of her and cut her connection to Eywa. Luckily for her, the shamanic healing ceremony takes place, and she is healed.
Cameron’s Terminator franchise introduced Skynet, an artificial neural network-based conscious group mind and artificial intelligence system, which has a correlation to Avatar’s neural-linked Na’vi, who literally plug themselves into Pandora. This mirrors the direction the World Economic Forum is steering us. They are dedicated to, among other ambitious goals, restraining man’s destruction of the Earth via climate change induced by his overuse of its resources. But most interestingly, The WEF has introduced Gaia in the form of the Global AI Action Alliance (GAIA) for …harnessing the transformative potential of artificial intelligence by accelerating the adoption of trusted, transparent, and inclusive AI systems globally.”
This global, all-pervasive artificial intelligence sounds a lot like Skynet. GAIA is strongly analogous to Eywa, the all-pervasive intelligence of Pandora, accessed through meditation, deep breathing, and control of the heart. This was the so-called “way of water,” an immersion in the interconnectedness of “all.”
Avatar is a deep-sea dive into the heart of Gaia, Eywa, and Mother Earth. The blue skin of the Na’vi, the vivid blue skies, and the blue underwater scenes convey the meaning of their mantra, "the way of water connects all things…”
James Cameron means us to see from up close and inside what The Blue Marble revealed from afar: that sense of oneness is expressed by astronauts as the “Overview Effect.” They say viewing the Earth from space affects their perceptions of the world and our place in it. If I’m correct in my assessment, Avatar’s powerful visuals could be as great a catalyst for environmentalism as the Blue Marble was 50 years ago.
Thank you for reading. Please subscribe and share. Stay tuned at InfinitePlane.Live for the next live stream when we discuss this movie and other topics.
Tim Ozman,
IPR Host