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Anti-Technology Themes in James Cameron's Avatar
ThousandStars writes "'The anti-technological aspect [in James Cameron's Avatar] is strange because the movie is among most technically sophisticated ever: it uses a crazy 2D and 3D camera, harnesses the most advanced computer animation techniques imaginable, and has apparently improved the state-of-the-art when it comes to cinema. But Avatar’s story argues that technology is bad. Humans destroyed their home world through environmental disaster and use military might to annihilate the locals and steal their resources.' The question is two-fold: why have a technically sophisticated, anti-technical movie, and why are we drawn to it? Part of the answer lies in Neal Stephenson's Turn On, Tune In, Veg Out."
I saw it as showing bad uses of technology, and more about retelling the story of the native americans as well.
Technology, like beer, is the solution to, and the cause of, all of mankind's problems.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
I always read it as another "white people suck" movie, but this time, "white people suck in space", which is equally weird, because Cameron is about as white as they come.
This is my sig.
Just because a story criticizes something doesn't mean the teller wants to destroy it. In order to change something for the better, we need to criticize it. And if we just attack the criticism, we'll never get change.
Cameron knows better than most what's wrong with our technology and the way we use it. His dependence on technology makes it quite clear that he doesn't want to eliminate it. He's not "anti-technology", he's anti the things he says are bad, which is not technology itself. Really what he's anti is the ways people use technology to treat each other badly. Which is not about technology, but about people.
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make install -not war
But Avatar’s story argues that technology is bad. Humans destroyed their home world through environmental disaster and use military might to annihilate the locals and steal their resources.
Humans can do bad things using technology. That doesn't mean technology is bad. Next on Slashdot: classic tale "Hansel and Gretel" has a secret message of "gingerbread is bad".
Though not as prevalent as it was just a couple decades ago, "white guilt" is a feeling of responsibility particularly experienced by privileged white people for the suffering of blacks under the slave system. It is a modern phenomenon that such guilt is felt by people that are completely unconnected to slavery. The guilt manifests itself as an embrace of Black culture, a willingness to provide undeserved support to the African American underclass, and a tendency to promote multiculturalism and its anti-judgmental system of evaluating cultures.
So if the technology haves want to slum it with the have-nots, it shouldn't be any big surprise that they embrace an ideology that makes themselves the criminal and thus flagellating themselves thereby redeeming themselves. Of course, they do it in a way that doesn't actually put them in direct contact with the have-nots. This is typical behavior of those embracing cultural/technological guilt as a path to spiritual salvation.
The fact that they rely on bio-centric technology doesn't make them low-tech. Every major organism on that planet has a universal neural bus that can establish a physical and logical link in about .3 seconds. Does that sound even remotely accidental?
frankly i'm a little tired of all the "deep" discussions about this movie popping up all over the place. it's just entertainment, for crying out loud. why have a technically sophisticated, anti-technical movie? because it makes money! why are we drawn to it? well, because of its aesthetics, romantic content, exciting action, and good old marketing. case closed.
p.s. and even if cameron truly believes in the "messages" of the movie, big freaking deal. he's a director. there are many people in the world whose opinion on such difficult philosophical topics has much higher value for me than that of someone in show business.
weinersmith
I must have been answering the call of nature when the movie claimed that "technology is bad", because I didn't get that impression from it at all. At most, there was a "might makes right" is bad, and "allowing mankind to become subservient to quarterly shareholder reports" is bad, but that's about it.
The scientists in the movie did wondrous things with their avatar technology, and the Na'vi had their own, organic version of the same, but never did I see a message that any of this was bad. What was portrayed in a poor light was forcibly relocating a people so as to be able to mine out a large chunk of resource that they're sitting on top of, and that's just theft.
The submitter's 3D glasses must have been defective if he's getting an anti-tech message from this.
Since the beginning of time:
* Look, fire! Now I can keep my family warm and safe.
* Look, fire! Now I can go burn down the hut of my annoying neighbors.
* Look, trigonometry! Now I can build bridges.
* Look, trigonometry! Now I can launch projectiles at those bridges.
* Look, printing press! Now I can communicate broadly.
* Look, printing press! Now I can subjugate broadly.
* Look, nuclear technology! Now I can radiate cancer and use PET scans.
* Look, nuclear technology! Now I can blow cities up...
etc.
The villian used the phrases "fight terror with terror" and "preemptive attack". He was described as gearing up a "shock and awe" attack.
He was using the military to steal a valuable foreign resource, and funnel it into private/corporate hands, killing civilians along the way.
You're saying the message of the movie isn't supposed to be a parallel for Iraq?
For the record, I don't think it is a fair comparison because we're not stealing oil in Iraq. The Iraqi people own the oil and receive every penny for selling the oil. If anything, going into Iraq was a fiscal nightmare for the US. We're footing the bill for the war, and for reconstruction. We're funneling tons of money into Iraq, and liberated 30 million people from a cruel dictator. But given that Cameron is a vocal Democrat who drives a Prius and has suggested Bush lied about Iraq to steal oil, I'm sure he very much intended that to be the message of the movie.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
Nowhere in Avatar does it explicitly state that technology is the cause of an Earth where there's "no green left" (that's as close as I can recall to a quote from the lead character). It could just as easily been our tendency to breed like flies on a dung heap that led to the paving of the planet. It's also pretty clear that the main driving force behind the attempted rape of Pandora isn't Earth's government, but a greedy, conscienceless corporation.
It's typical of apologists for the on-going, real-life ecological devastation we're inflicting on our little blue planet to try to misrepresent Cameron's message as anti-technology. In fact it's clearly a cautionary tale against our current trend toward a global corporate oligarchy. The tech in the film is a tool, neither good nor evil. It's used by the heroes for positive purposes and the villains in the service of corporate greed.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
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The phrase "peaceful people living in harmony with nature" is the part that doesn't hold up. It completely ignores nature's primary means of maintaining harmony, namely killing off things. Preador and prey populations are regulated by scarcity for the former and hunting for the latter. These peacful people live in harmony with nature by the virtue that they are able to do the "harmonizing" better. The only reason their local super-preadator isn't using them as snacks is either A: they've developed killing skills superior to the local preadators, or B: alien-magic.
Living in harmony with "nature" is like living in harmony with fire. They both have the same movtives, none. They both care about you in the same way, not at all. They both have the same feelings and desires about eating you.
As for what the Europeans did differently than the Native Americans with regard to their loved ones when they lacked the benefits of modern medicine. The Europeans invented scientific method and modern medicine. I've no doubt that the Native American's would have done so as well, eventually, but it would have come at some point after they figured out bronze.
Moderation : -1 Conservative Viewpoint
We, as humans, abuse things by nature
We're not the only species that does that, and possibly all do. Elephants will make a green area into a desert. Before there was multicellular life, the anarobic bacteria changed the earth's entire atmosphere, filling it with the deadly oxygen. Those life forms that couldn't adapt to the poisonous atmosphere went extinct.
It's not human nature to abuse nature, nature abuses itself.
Free Martian Whores!
Obviously, Avatar had a heaping dose of sophmoric fantasy wish fulfillment(So, there are, like, these natives living in harmony with nature... and the alien princess(she's blue; but in a hot way) she digs you man, totally digs you. Also you can walk again!). There can't be much disagreement there.
What I find interesting, though, is how much the reviewer's hatred of that colored the rest of his review. For instance: "During the big battle scene, as dinosaurs were chowing down on soldiers, the middle-aged couple seated next to me were grinning happily delighted by the defeat and destruction of their own miserable species." So, it's "my species, right or wrong"? Party A unilaterally invades Part B's property, making war against them without provocation in order to take their stuff. Obviously only commie peacenik self-loathing liberals could possibly approve of Party A losing. Could anyone, ethically, fail to approve of Party A losing?
Imagine, for sake of argument, that(instead of a bunch of noble savages living in harmony with nature) the story had involved a rugged, self-sufficient band of human colonists, instead. These brave, decent, souls renounce the venality and softness, and collectivism of a dying earth and strike out to build their own future, by their own honest labor, on a different planet. A couple of generations later, the sinister corpronational minions of earth show up, looking to take what they have built. Had this been the story, the writer of that review would have loved it(and he wouldn't have been the only one, how many westerns involve the struggle by plain honest folks to hold on to their land in the face of corruption and oppression?). For extra credit, the story could even have been a thinly veiled allegory about abuse of Eminent Domain, that would really have gotten them going.
That is what irks me about this review. The reviewer hates the presence of the liberal environmentalist noble savages so much that his judgment is blinded to anything else. Their presence is so unacceptable that only a self-loathing hippie could possibly cheer their successful defense of themselves and their property(C'mon, does the goodness of the castle doctrine not carry over to blue people?). And the ridiculousness continues:
"For one thing, if the fate of humanity rests on the Pandora mission, you’d think the governments of Earth could find someone other than a backstabbing middle-management weasel and a blatantly psychotic colonel to run the show."
Actually, that is pretty much exactly what you'd expect. This is a mining mission not an epic heroic quest. Yeah, it is an important one; but it isn't as though the President Of Mankind is going to strap on his power armor and oversee things personally. They'll send a mid-level manager(presumably competent enough to achieve and/or backstab his way to a good rank in whatever metric they use) and a standard military detachment, it's just a few primitive aliens, after all, routine job. The goods are important; but they would have no reason to expect unusual difficulty in obtaining them.
"They laugh down the report of a scientist who obviously knows what she’s talking about, and has hard evidence to back up her position."
Yup, I totally can't think of any instances where politically, militarily, and/or culturally inconvenient science(or intelligence data, for that matter) has been belittled or ignored. None at all. Only those Hollywood liberals would dream up such a thing.
"All those military toys beloved by the right-wing warmongers of the military-industrial complex prove to be useless against the righteous fury of an aroused Gaia and her chosen champion, a redeemed soldier who has seen the error of his ways. Take that, Marine killbot slaves of Big Business."
Because it is, after all, only in the pernicious propaganda of limp-wristed liberals that asymmetric warfare can be harder than it looks, and high-tech hardware can meet low-tech countermeasures(any bets on whether the military killbots of the future are finally using encrypted video links?). Technological supremacy especially never fails in hostile terrain that your forces are unused to operating in.
When I go see a movie that is billed as 'entertainment', I am not there to be preached to about particular message.
Might as well go and see Mall Cop or some other "mind-numbing" entertainment.
A movie is just another medium for storytelling. People typically like stories that have value. Some teach lessons, some show insight into the human condition, others are commentary on the human condition. Even "summer blockbusters" recognize that a movie can't subsist on fancy computer graphics and big explosions alone, and at least pay lip service to this idea.
You're welcome to stick to your slapstick comedies. But don't go watch a movie that tells a story, and then complain that there's actually a real storyline.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
That line only exists in your head. Get over it.