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."

Comments

Who said it was anti-technology?

[plague3106]

I saw it as showing bad uses of technology, and more about retelling the story of the native americans as well.

Re:Who said it was anti-technology?

[Wahakalaka]

I for one am in favor of using the military to solve all conflicts, and destroying all of nature. Anyone that disagrees is a dirty hippie. There's no middle ground here.

Re:Who said it was anti-technology?

[Anonymous Coward]

Except of course that the Native Americans were nomadic, had no notion of property rights (unlike the Na'vi and their Hometree), and rejected the idea of owning land.

Ah yes, I remember hearing about how the Cherokee uprooted their longhouses to follow the great fields of corn as they traveled around the prairie.

But the ones I really feel sorry for are the Pueblo tribes. Carrying those cliff dwellings around must have been rough! No wonder they could not resist the mighty white man's manifest destiny, they were all tired out.

There is no problem with that, just don't expect not to be forced off someone else's property that they've rightly claimed.

There is so much wrong with that sentence it's hard to know where to start. "Rightly claimed" here means "someone on another continent decided that they owned this land, and had the right to give it away".

I see your webpage links to "Objectivist Roundup". Just out of curiosity, how do you feel about the concept of eminent domain?

Re:Who said it was anti-technology?

[Thumper_SVX]

Another hint: floating mountains, people. Come on.

I'm going to really show my geekiness here, but the floating mountains were explained in the original screenplay, though granted only hinted at in the movie. The "Unobtainium" is a room-temperature superconductor. It is well known that a superconductor in presence of a magnetic field will float, and if you look around the entire area it shows curved constructs of rock that look suspiciously like lines of magnetic force... like melted iron twisted by the magnet. This was hinted at because the guy running the base (whose name I forget) had a piece of Unobtainium that floated in a magnetic field on his desk. Although this raises questions like why they didn't just mine the floating mountains, it's still a cool and at least reasonably plausible explanation... at least if you try not to think about it too hard :)

Re:Who said it was anti-technology?

[Chyeld]

I thought it was a rather clever nod to exactly what it was.

Change vs Destruction

[Doc Ruby]

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.

Crap

[Anonymous Coward]

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".

Dances With Smurfs.

[SharpFang]

Dances With Smurfs. That's what it was.

Re:Dances With Smurfs.

[AP31R0N]

No, it was Dances with Thundercats.

Thundercats are badass; Smurfs are decidedly not.

Re:Dances With Smurfs.

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

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.

Re:Dances With Smurfs.

[steelfood]

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.

Didn't get "tech is bad" from the movie at all...

[wAnder]

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.

Re:White people suck in space

[LateArthurDent]

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.

It's a "people who try to take things from others by force suck" movie. As are the other movies in the same category you are referring to. The fact that the people who did this to Native Americans happened to be white is completely irrelevant, and your comment not only implies that all whites think they have the right to take from others by force, but it also implies that Cameron somehow should be bound to also think that, because he happens to be white.

Basically, don't make things about race when they're not. Besides, I personally saw it more as anti-corporate (in the same way as Alien) then anti-technology.

Re:White people suck in space

[tjstork]

Basically, don't make things about race when they're not.

It's America, everything is about race any more. It's identity politics.

Assuming Facts Not In Evidence

[hyades1]

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.