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Saturday, January 23, 2010
The sentimentalization of nature: Avatar is Pocahontas meets Michael Moore
posted by Rick Blue at 16h30
The Blue People
The record-breaking film Avatar is a visual wonder; and also a wonderful example of the sentimentalization of nature.
It portrays a beautiful and wholesome naturalism that stands up to a crushing militarized civilization fuelled by greed. It is Pocahontas meets Michael Moore. And although we leave the theatre identifying with the heroic blue aboriginals, all but the most deluded among us know they never existed and they never will.
But the more we feel cut off from nature, the more we long for it. And this film is like the pastoral landscape hanging on our living room wall. We need comfort from the concrete urban environment all around us. So we make do with a representation of our lost Eden.
We don’t think of cockroaches as nature. But they are. We don’t think of rats as nature. But they are. We want to be one with nature but not real nature. We want tamed nature. Cuddly nature. Real nature is ugly and dangerous. It will kill us all. The earthquake in Haiti was nature. Cancer is nature.
Worshipping idealized nature has become the religion of our modern secular society. It is preached in the gospel of environmentalism, which has so many features of our previous religions, including an approaching apocalypse caused by sin.
And it rests upon the idea – expressed so completely in Avatar – that civilized humans, products of nature, do not behave naturally.
This idea has been around for a while. It is a hallowed part of our literary tradition. Nineteenth-century romanticism in poetry and art featured the deification of nature and opposition to The Dark Satanic Mills of civilization.
And who can forget that wonderful archetype, the noble savage?
Avatar has restated that tradition in a much simplified form and turned it into what Hollywood ends up turning everything into – glorious, spectacular kitsch.
The Pantheistic planet of the Na’vi is a stunning visual work of the imagination. And it expresses the wish for nature to triumph over industrialism. But ironically, it is expressed in a form that depends upon state-of-the-art techniques made possible only by the very industrialism it decries.
We all share this ambivalence.
We might identify with the Avatar tribe, but we could never live like them. There are no iPhones, no laptops, no Starbucks, no plumbing, no electricity and no heat. They all live in a tree. How do they cook? What do they cook? How do they go to the bathroom and wash? Don’t ask too many questions. It is much easier to construct a Utopia when you can completely ignore the basic realities of life.
James Cameron has expressed this wish very well. And he has shown that it is an illusion that so many of us still desperately want to believe.