Thoughts On Avatar

The planet Pandora is as you say plainly an allegory of the telecom and entertainment industries. Plug in to this abundance. The two levels of allegory collapse and divide continually. Avatar=the avatar.

Pandora’s proprietor species has superficial features of “indigenous” cultures…(Margaret Laurent has detailed the borrowings from Vodun)…but the Na’Vi tribe is a fantasy of a superior race, natural lords of the entertainment and telecom industry/Pandora (and Pandora has always been the trope of technology), a fantasy self- image of the proprietors of our actual entertainment industry (Cameron, Jobs, etc), a Nietzschean self portrait as they imagine themselves in their natural state, as they ought be, before they were taxed or dragged down by modernity, democracy, slave morality – strong, homogenous, the blond beasts of Nietzschean dreams, blue, healthy, natural aristocrats. On horseback and dragonback. Flying their private jets.

This allegory of a *specific industry* (Pandora= Digital Media, the allegory collapses as avatar/avatar, nature-in-film/spectacle) is central to the film’s principal ideological mission, a self-justification: this industry is presenting itself as innocent of imperialism and capitalism. It is reinforcing an increasingly precarious commodity fetishism, repairing a threadbare veil on itself.

This industry – spectacle – is offering itself, its commodity entertainments, as the compensation for and redemption of the real planet earth and our species humanity (foils to the Na’Vi natural supermen in several too familiar ways – depraved, unhealthy/disabled, and diverse) it destroys. This thing – Avatar, the enterprise – destroys nature and humanity to produce itself, but one ought be pleased, it seduces its audience to think, because it offers a virtual substitute for what it has taken (the common, human health and – very significantly – freedom and leisure): it dresses its capitalist imperialist destruction up as its opposite for a wired elite to enjoy, to be compensated by (the pleasure of watching Avatar is offered a small elite of the planet’s population in exchange for the lost leisure of life without the need to sell labour power) and it reminds that elite (invited to identify with the Na’Vi and indeed to inhabit as their avatar the Na’Vi’s newest member and leader) of its real superiority and virtues and natural rights to this spectacle produced by the expropriation, enslavement, destruction of the not tall and blue not monogamous not homogenous not supermen and the earth they/we live on.

Avatar presents a vision wherein Pandora/Digital Media/Entertainment Industry is supplied with unobtainium by natural right and wherein it is a monstrous interplanetary crime to ponder a challenge to its monopoly on its sources of wealth (we can easily see the plea for intellectual property protection here as well). At the same time it takes a seemingly “dissident” stance by condemning its assigned culprit (humanity depicted as the US/imperial earth military) for the actual way real concrete Pandora/Avatar The Commodity and the Enterprise has accumulated capital. It is a less noble other, humanity, that seeks to attain it violently; the noble Na’Vi (entertainment industry moguls) declare their innocence of this process of imperialist conquest and expropriation and capitalist exploitation. In the fantasy it is easy to recognise the flattering self image of Cameron and Speilberg and Jobs, these California supermen, fit and youthful, dressing down every day, in these blue cats, natural rulers of a magically abundant planet, an elite which very special individuals, with unique gifts, may join even if not born into it.

It’s also a plea for the ideological efficacy of infantile genres – Pandora=Digital Media. In Avatar, Digital Media is presented as it is figured by childish fantasy products, blue elves stuff, and celebrated in this form, so that this form itself the childishness of it, becomes (and we can hear all the fasho echos) the redemption and purification of the proprietor class, and the arrangements of property, positioned as if opposed to all its own evils (concentrated in the earth military and the damaged, diverse, vicious and weak humanity that operate it). Notice the fasho themes about the body after which the movie is named, the Avatar, the Na’Ci body, in contrast to the vast robot casing that the weak and depraved species/race – ours – requires. It seems hippie dippy yoga stuff, but there is a familiar elitist fasho tradition that has always borrowed from imagined others…”oriental” and “traditional”…to sell its white supremacism.