Let us scratch: Cameron's missed opportunity in Avatar

In response to a reporter James Cameron agreed that Avatar was based on Dances with Wolves amongst other moves and then added, "It's almost comfortable for the audience – 'I know what kind of tale this is.' They're not just sitting there scratching their heads, they're enjoying it and being taken along." If only he had allowed more scratching of heads and less taking along, this would have been one of the best movies of all time.

I thoroughly enjoyed the first two-thirds of the movie. An amazingly new world and context never written about or filmed before. I could say much about the imaginative beauty of these "alien" creatures--the flying is superb, the native's cosmogony intriguing. But then the movie gives into the inevitable story arch pressure to produce purely good and evil characters battling out to the bitter end. So pathetic given the amount of money, time, and talent spent on this film. I thought up five better endings while driving the 10 minutes home from the theater--and, yes, I shared each one to my children's chagrin.

I'm still glad I saw the film because I like the questions I've been wrestling with even as the film was winding down. And ultimately I'm more interested in these big questions, than with any final evaluation of the film. Why do smart, talented people insist that a movie end in a battle to the end between the arch enemy and hero? Are these archetypal surges coursing through our veins? Or is it just laziness? Or, as the liberal conspiracy theorist wants to believe, is it the false consciousness of the masses which demand such easily digested endings?

Whatever it is, I will--hope against hope--continue to demand better. Cameron could easily have done better and still connected with the deep psyche of his audience. What a lost opportunity to truly engage the complexities of our current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. There were several allusions--shock and awe, pre-emptive war--but these are thin critiques of war because they are cast in an arena where our hero is pure goodness, our villain--the rampaging, hard-ass military commander--pure evil. It's impossible to compare the characters in Avatar to the characters playing out our own wars; real life always has an element of ambiguity, no one is pure evil.

I find it supremely ironic that those (many I think) who would disagree with my critiques of the movie would be the same who supported the war in Iraq. How can this be? I believe it is because the content--fighting native people's in their country or world--is not the real issue. The issue is seeing war as THE way to find peace. In this story arc war is the only possible option to defuse the tension and tip the scales back. Certainly there can't be any other options.

But wait. Maybe if we took a few minutes, slowed down the pace for a second, checked the escalating emotions. We have many good examples: Miyazaki's Princess Mononoke comes to mind. A similarly themed story in many ways--the native animals are under attack by the westernized and militarized industrial complex--yet the the conclusion is so different. Instead of two-dimensional evil doers we get Lady Eboshi, a woman who hires prostitutes and lepers to work in Irontown. She is not pure evil; she cares about her workers even as she works to denude the land. And our heroes are even more complex: Ashitaka, the boy-warrior, is infested with an evil curse; San, the supposed "princess mononoke," is a vicious, bloody faced girl. The traditional action ends as the "evil" men shoot the spirit of the forest--a huge elk--and take its head. Later, the head is returned in order to avoid total destruction. In the end there is both destruction and rebirth; there are no clear winners or losers, no one is demonized. And Ashitaka chooses to remain in Irontown to help rebuild it. The "answers" are complex, multilayered, human.

If only Cameron had enough confidence in his audience, enough confidence to lose a few viewers along the way. If only we, as an audience, were willing to reject simplified revisions of past injustices. I'm all for rewriting (rerighting) the past but it doesn't take much imagination to realize that a revitalized, re-envisioned, remetaphorized past requires new rules, not merely a reversal of the winners. The natives lost the battle in American history and in Cameron's world they win; yet both narrative arcs require extreme hatred, caricature, and violence in order to bring the story to a close. To steal a phrase from Donna Haraway's "Cyborg Manifesto," Avatar's ending (opposed to its compelling explorations of the embodied Avatar, the Cyborgian mix of human and alien) "generates antagonistic dualism without end (or until the world ends)," relying yet again on our Apocalyptic mythology which refuses partial/hybrid/faulty integration and paradox--all big words for the human condition.