There was much discussion at the time of its launch as to whether James Cameron’s latest product Avatar would save the US movie industry or sink it. Now it has become one of the biggest financial successes since Titanic (which Cameron also directed), but the excitement has centred on market protection possibilities rather than the aesthetic qualities of the film itself. This one won’t go straight to DVD because it is not possible to take a camera into the cinema and burn pirate copies, and that means guaranteed sales and profits. To wear ‘RealD’ glasses, each viewer one-by-one is a captive audience and once again we witness miraculous technology moulded to serve commodification and the separation of each of us from the rest.
Does that mean that this triumphant enclosure of private viewing space also opens up a little room for a subversive message about industry as such, about a fragile eco-system under threat from ruthless exploitation and collective resistance? Cameron has acknowledged that there are resonances between the plot – the people of Pandora suffering at the hands of a mining corporation and their struggle to drive back the invaders – and US activities in Iraq. Some have claimed the film as an inspiring story of liberation. The massive audiences for the film have not yet manifest themselves in the streets as anti-imperialist protest, but there are now many reports of viewers drawn into the utopian vision of the Na’vi as an interlinked community network, and linked with nature rather than torn, as we are, from it. They look blue, but they might also, in an optimistic reading of the film, be smuggling in a connection between communism and ecology. We can be sure that more people have tuned into Pandora than what went on at Copenhagen, and so we should have something to say about it.
The problem is not so much that the film is politically ambiguous – something to be teased out and argued through here (spoiler alert) – but that, insofar as the 3D does draw us into the year 2154, we are immersed in ideology at a much deeper level. Insofar as it succeeds as a form of technology it also succeeds in turning us into embedded viewers trapped in certain forms of representation of who resists and what they resist, and who we are in relation to them (which are already ecosocialist questions). We also need to ask how it is that an ecological message gets recuperated, neutralised and absorbed, so that instead of operating as a radical political critique it comes to be an ideologically potent part of the spectacle. There is a motif of ‘connection’ at three levels in the film, and this makes it a very appealing fantasy machine. Even if the film is radical in some respects, we need to notice how it sets the conditions for us to believe it is radical, how it incites us to enjoy those radical moments all the more firmly to keep us inside the limits of those conditions (for that is what fantasy, ideological fantasy, is).
The first, of course, is connection with nature. Pandora is a fantasy world organised around the weaving together of bodies and minds of the Na’vi and their animals and trees, and the evil RDA Corporation is intent on breaking this connection to get the mineral unobtainium that lies under a clan’s home tree. This idea is driven home by the division between the good anthropologists (led by Sigourney Weaver) setting up schools and hospitals in the Na’vi communities and the big business bad guys who will cynically exploit cultural insider knowledge to enable a military victory. This division of labour is quite misleading, and makes it seem as if those who seek to understand a colonised culture are only later corrupted by the military-industrial complex. In fact, anthropology was a discipline developed to enable colonial rule, and imperialist nations have always employed anthropologists to win the hearts and minds of the local population up the present day when the US has teams of anthropologists in Iraq and Afghanistan (as it did in Vietnam).
Then, in the tradition of Western anthropology it is the outsider who goes native who then seems to understand more about the culture they immerse themselves in than members of that culture themselves. At the very same moment as there is such admiration for these romanticised lovely slender and harmoniously organised blue beings there is an affirmation of the superiority of the one who knows better how to live with them and then to lead them. Our hero Jake Sully suggests that the clans from across the planet should get together and we see him addressing rallies here and there. We are supposed to believe that the Na’vi would never have thought of such collective action, that they need him to go around and inspire them. The connection is eroticised in the intertwining of the filaments of the Na’vi prehensile tails with their flying animal steeds, communication with their mother goddess Eywa through the hanging tendrils of the Tree of Voices, and Sully even excels at this practice when he learns to make that kind of connection and call on her to help the people.
Sully strides through the community, and the Na’vi admire him and cry out ‘Eywa heard you’. Good for him, and them; we are treated to Lawrence of Arabia all over again, and it is this triumph of the colonialist, his very body engineered by the human beings, that gives lie to the complaint that the film is misanthropic. Far from it, the film confirms that there is hope that human beings may redeem themselves, a message that is compatible with ecosocialism, but it also stirs in some more unpleasant racist, and sexist, imagery. Sully is even able to insinuate himself into the community to the point where he can himself break the arranged mating practices and eventually win his place in the heart of Neytiri, the daughter of the Omaticaya’s spiritual leader Mo’at’, and in the hearts of the Na’vi as a whole. We are perhaps even supposed to treat this as a sign of women’s liberation at the same time as the freeing of the people from some backward ideas about marriage. There is sex (and there is more that was not screened in the script for a deleted scene on tinternet) but this also, more than anything else, is the liberation of the outsider himself, sexual conquest masquerading as sexual liberation.
Sully himself is, of course, yearning for freedom, and here we vicariously enjoy a second kind of connection, connection of the poor damaged colonialist with his own body, or at least with a genetically-engineered avatar body that is good and whole and which, of course, he masters with a skill that matches and even outstrips the natives who were born into theirs. Sully arrives in a wheelchair, an accidental recruit to this business by virtue of the genetic makeup he shares with his dead brother originally signed and trained for the task, and leaves as a whole man. Here this second connection is connected with the first one, for Sully is able to give up on his human body and on the promise that it will be repaired dangled in front of him by the military as a reward for informing on the locals, and embrace his new life in a new much better body. The narrative through most of the film is precisely of him winning his right to this body through active learning, killing with compassion, ritual inclusion in the community and mating.
The collective struggle against the ‘dream walkers’ (that is us, or what is bad about us, the bad among us) picks up and extends this narrative in an image of politics that has a moment of paradise, that is Pandora before the arrival of the earthlings, a moment of fall and misery as the unobtainium is torn from the ground by the invaders, and a moment of victory and resolution when all is well again. Again, this is fantasy again at its purest, one that fuels much progressive as well as reactionary science fiction, but it is not a helpful model for the much more messy and inclusive work of combating oppression in the real world. That simple romantic narrative leads to burnout and disappointment, hopelessness and failure, and we need instead to recognise that ecosocialism does not mean that all will be healed and well again in a harmonious future, but that conflict and muddle is going to mark every step of the overthrow of capitalism and every step of the way after it is finished too. The final moment of the film is where Sully has fought and led the Na’vi to victory, is fatally wounded and then brought back to life in the new body, the moment when he flashes open his new eyes.
This brings us back to the 3D special effects, and to a third level for the motif of connection to play its way out in the film. Perhaps Avatar does not actually work better than a persuasive film or novel, and maybe that is something to be thankful for. However, in its very failure to draw us fully into Pandora – these RealD glasses do not fit right, the image is sometimes blurry, the picture is actually a little darker with the specs on – it snares us into the hope that we could see it better, that there must be an even clearer sharper image of this world if we were somehow able to take the things off and still have the 3D effect. But this is precisely where we are lured into 3D as the idea that we really will be connected in a much more profound way with what we are watching, that we will no longer be mere voyeurs but participants, anthropologists, heroes.
When we accept that we are already signing up to the idea that when we put on the spectacles we will see reality as it is, and so we are embodied in that idea as an ideological practice as a viewer of this film even if we not really want to believe it, even if we do not consciously deliberately believe it. Here this third connection connects with the first two, for we sit in the cinema with our glasses on drawn into the film all the better to be with Sully who is in the avatar machine implanted in his Na’vi body, and we are drawn into the sense that everything is connected with everything else, but with the twist that it is a technological process that is necessary to make that connection between human and nature work.
We can treat Avatar as a mere 162 minutes of escape from the real world, a little space of consolation for living in a world in which populations and habitats are being destroyed as brutally and quickly as in the film, but even then it holds us in its grip for that time as a repetitive self-confirming closed loop that is quintessential ideological fantasy. For those keen on recycling there are themes aplenty gathered from science fiction utopian other-worlds; these themes are now prompting claims of plagiarism from those who have noticed some unsurprising connections with the Russian World of Noon series (to take just one example). It is romantically ‘ecological’ but in such a way that confirms the way that ecology is usually understood as benign interconnection of living systems and the respect that human beings should show and feel for harmoniously integrated communities. It carries with it colonialist and imperialist images of sexism and racism as if they were part of the solution, part of paradise, rather than part of the problem. In this way it soothes us and sabotages authentic ecosocialist political action in a world out here that is already in 3D.

Ian Parker