(posted on Facebook where my illiterate ramblings have a higher chance of raising consciousness/provoking new thoughts than here)
Why should we care about Avatar?
Because it’s the highest grossing film of all time, so it's worthy of our attention. As someone who is left-leaning and cleaves to some sort of spirituality, this is a film which encompasses themes of both and has captured the imagination and attention of huge numbers of people.
Because it's a fantasy about human emancipation. At the end the Navi (standing in for indigenous humans here) kick the profiteering humans off their planet. We return to the uncomfortably unaugmented reality of our multiplex seat (so it's a fantasy). But human emancipation is rightfully our preoccupation and something we yearn for and that the film taps into.
Because it (which is rare) dramatises primitive accumulation, or accumulation by dispossession: in the searing scene where the indigenous are confronted with the might of a menacing imperialism bearing down on them, destroying their home with heavy machinery and fire. This is of course “all of our” history, repeated throughout the world from the enclosures in England, to the current battles of forest-dwellers in India or the Amazon basin; the cry of the Navi echoes through us all. This scene is the primordial scene of modernity, and yet it paved the way for our multiplexes. In many countries where the film was watched, the cinema might have been built on land cleared in scenes which it echoes. And it's a film that dramatises colonialism and is quite explicit and unflinching about the rapacity of the corporate colonials' values, their inhumanity, relative to the spirituality of the Navi. As ever in that history, our oil is under their land; we go after it; the indigenous and nature suffer.
What does it mean when a film with those themes can be made and lapped up by popular audiences? People with corporate employment, lifestyles and attitudes can enjoy the film, with no apparent tension or contradiction, hence its runaway success. I think for some people there is more here than just enjoying a good story and amazing special effects. There's a relief about being able to feel sympathy for and enjoy the victory of, indigenous, spiritual people, and by proxy the environment which the latter's culture is so nurturing towards; before returning to modes of work and life which unfortunately but inescapably help to further those negative outcomes. These struggles which are still ongoing can be indulged in as the ultimate form of escapism, from our role as the (mostly unwitting and unwilling) perpetrators.
That primitive accumulation and naked imperialism can now be depicted and consumed is possibly a function of a couple of things; (this is the less serious one:) with the advent and glorious usage of 3D/IMAX technology, the natural and indigenous world (in a souped up form) comes to life; the blinkers we wear are more effective, our technological extensions more extended; so more subversive scenes can be depicted; we're more convincingly sealed off from reality.
More profoundly, it's only in the absolute inconsequentiality of our caring, that we can care (e.g. someone at work in a corporate environment can rave about how much they love the film – after all one which is explicitly critical of ongoing corporate colonialism – without being fingered as a communist, as would have happened in at least one place and time in capitalism, 1950s America); but the absolute inconsequentiality is a problem. It's the result of our complete loss of political access under neoliberalism in the last 35 years, “an astonishing period in which politics has been depoliticised and commodified” (David Harvey). We're sealed off from political reality, from our political thoughts being consequential, as surely as were it taking place on another planet.
On another tack, a really interesting theme was the spirituality of the Navi, which is very tangible. They feel it, are able to call on it, and hear its response. This is perhaps a characteristic of indigenous culture in reality; while the more our blinkers are extended; the more our modes of rational understanding, scientific control and sensory surrogates are extended, the further removed it is, or we are from it. The more, as a result, when we call the answer is nothing, a void; inducing the self-fulfilling nihilism of Western culture. Watching the film maybe some of us swoon over the depiction of a tangible and communing spirituality we crave and remember.
Another theme which is brought out is resource constraints, with the future human civilisation thirsty for oil, and having to encompass other planets in order to obtain it; palpably we only have one, and the oil which underpins our lifestyles, including our consumption of fantasies in multiplexes, our distancing from reality, is running out. As a result, hard constraints will return; this threatens a return from 3D fantasy to materiality; but this needn't be a creeping horror. If we were able to organise and address the issues with creativity and focus (i.e. the return to materiality could augur the return of politics) we could resolve them. A possibility reduced though by our role as consumers of fantasies. But added to, at the same time, by learning from and solidarity with indigenous struggles.
So is it any good? Because of the way it has been able to project these themes to such a wide audience, any criticisms for commercialising those themes (as have been voiced) redound to its credit. And (insert joke about making us care about blue aliens etc). So in a word, yes.