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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.
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That it was a private military force that did the attacking, not a governmental one. Presumably, the government on Earth was not willing to allow any military attack on the Natives, hence their attempts for 5+ years for a diplomatic solution.
Also it should be noted that a statement such as "no greenery left on Earth" is an exaggeration at best, considering life would die on the planet without the Oxygen Cycle. Unless the Humans attempted to develop machines to replace the functions of the plants.
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".
Some of this is standard noble savage stuff.
It's an ideal -- peaceful people living in harmony with nature -- that doesn't hold up to close scrutiny. For instance, what do they do if one of their buddies is born with a genetic disease like Polycystic Kidney Disease or needs some other benefit of modern medicine. Also, in the real world packs of wolves and bears don't just leave you alone.
This stuff sounds great until you start to think about it really hard.
P.S. And at the end of the movie I was rooting for the "indians" just like everyone else.
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.
that Luke uses 'The Force' and turns off the computer.
Was Lucas trying to say something with that, I wonder...
This Sig does not Exist.
Dances With Smurfs. That's what it was.
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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
Is it truly an anti-technology message, or a warning against the misuse of technology?
I use irony whenever I can, but my shirts are still wrinkled...
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.
Frankly, I have no plans to see this movie -- I never had even the slightest interest in it. In fact, I just generally don't like any movie like this. Not my thing. I do enjoy making fun of it vis-a-vis the "Dances with Smurfs" thing from South Park, but what I've heard about the movie, that's probably a pretty apt sort of representation.
If you remember "Dances with Wolves" at all, its about an American military officer just after the Civil War who goes out to a frontier post and then ends up making friends with the Indians, and then helping them against a later invasion to attempt to drive them out onto a reservation type situation. Here, the Indians have been replaced by those little blue smurf-y things.
As someone noted above, the military force in this particular situation was private and not governmental, however it was essentially the private armies of the British East and West India Companies that were responsible for most of the horrors of colonization by the British (I've never been too clear on the situation with the Spanish insofar as to whether or not they were regular military or not).
This seems to be more like some sort of post-colonial clap-trap than an "anti-technology" film, of course the two things usually go hand-in-hand when perpetrating the myth of the noble savage. In any case, I have no interest in actually watching it.
I was astounded by the organic synaptic link technology the Navi had. The Navi were possibly more advanced than we were. Their organic synaptic link tech was more advanced than anything we have. The thing is, they didn't develop weapons. Their entire planet was a linked up hive mind.
What new possibilities could this technology have had? could they start growing Organic ships like the Vorlons from Babylon 5? I'd imagine the Navi probably had better math and science than us.
I'm pro-alcohol but also pro-moderation.
Avatar was a fairly amazing movie. I'm comparing and contrasting with the new Star Wars. There was probably even more bluescreen in Avatar than Star Wars but Pandora felt convincing and vibrant, completely alive. You never hear people criticizing the Death Star battle in A New Hope saying it looks like a video game, it was just awesome and exciting. I think part of the video game critique comes from movies that overuse bad CGI and make things look little better than the average page and part of it comes from the audience being unable to connect emotionally with those characters. Compare Pandora with any of the environments from the the new trilogy and it's just a lesson in CGI done wrong and CGI done right.
The false dichotomy most people fall into with environmentalism vs. tech is that it's an either/or proposition. "Look, we're either running around in the boonies with bones through our noses and die of preventable diseases before we're 30 or we have to clearcut the forests and live in sterile concrete and steel towers, there's no middle ground." And that's not really true. What's needed is the judicious application of technology, conforming with the needs of the environment rather than trying to thwart or control it.
I'm interested to see what the conservative backlash against this movie will be. Conservatives have been wanting to chew Al Gore's eyeballs out ever since an Inconvenient Truth. There's a strange kind of glee about destroying environmental sacred cows like the Arctic Wildlife Refuge. It's not like the truck barreling down the road indifferent to whether or not there's an animal in the road, it's the truck deliberately swerving to hit the animal, just for fun. This movie is big, awesome, has s'plosions, is from a director who has made some of the most awesome guy movies ever, and it has a message that could only be seen as environmentalist propaganda. This is a 20th century fox film so that explains why Faux News has been told to keep a lid on it. If this came out from any other studio that network would be frothing. Dunno if Limbaugh had anything to say about it yet. He's not affiliated with Faux and has no financial stake in the project. He'd have to go apeshit over it.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
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.
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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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First of all, the obvious : Nice graphics, of course, though still not quite out of the "uncanny valley", where I'd want them to be. A nice evolutionary step, but certainly not something that won't be surpassed next month (year). It's a bit like those old Disney movies like fantasia "pushing the boundaries of animation". Great looking, but easily surpassed.
Imho the movie is massively anti-technology and pro-"magic". Magic in a sort of a mythological "natural religion" kind of way, and of course conveniently leaving out anything even remotely resembling an actual natural religion (just one example : all natural religions mandate (yes mandate) intra-religious wars between families, individuals and villages, or various combinations of that. Of course, deadly competition between inhabitants of the same place is a physical necessity in any non-agricultural religion, due to the massive inflexibility, unpredictability and unreliability of food sources, and the (natural) inability of a species to do birth control, resulting in exponentially increasing populations that regularly get "adjusted" by a famine or some such, a subject conveniently skipped over in the movie).
Before you ask, flying dragons, and other magical servile creatures seemlingly bread to replace everything from a helicopter to a toast maker do not count as "technology" in my mind. I do not find this strange at all. Nature has provided us with far less than it has provided these aliens. It seems gaia didn't love us from the start ... my ancestors never rode on flying dragons.
Another thing I find quite funny is the location of that village and that tree. What energy source would they have ? Given the extreme "coincidental" location they have, one would think it ... just might be those very same minerals. This would mean, of course, that all that "native" stuff is just "plundering" exactly the mineral source as the humans want. If that wasn't the case, imagine just how "unlucky" those natives must have been to build exactly there. But, of course, keeping mountains floating in the air is just so much more important than keeping humans alive (after all, the movie dialog makes clear that following any course of action other than acquiring those "unobtanium" minerals would result in massive casualties on earth. Of course you'd think that sort of urgency would make people appoint a military commander who is actually capable of dispatching multiple ships, or realize that a space-faring human race probably has options of using orbital bombardment, or even just sending one of those probes to make a *tiny* course correction on a meteor. Problem solved. The aliens obviously have no hope at all of repulsing any form of long-distance attack, whether that's missiles, ray weapons or even meteors).
Avatar as a suicide fantasy
Given the reaction on other blogs this review will loosen quite a few feelings. Apparently it hits close to home for quite a few people. Great stuff for discussions.
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!
You mean the same guy who bought us such pro-technology, pro-big government, pro-big business block-busters as Terminator, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, Aliens, The Abyss, Titanic, and The Dark Angel Series has now gone over to the dark side?
Say it isn't so!