At first glance, the film Avatar seems like another Romeo-and-Juliet-esque love story with fancy special effects and a happy ending. However, beneath the surface lies environmental as well as ethical symbolism for the world we live in: past, present, and future. Directed by James Cameron and released in 2009, Avatar tells the story of paraplegic Marine Jake Sully and his journey to fulfill a unique mission on the distant moon Pandora, where he finds he must choose between following the orders of a greedy corporate typhoon or protecting a newfound love and the place he feels he truly belongs.
The film embraces two different worldviews, the Mechanistic (first presented by Carolyn Merchant “The Wilderness Idea”, 2005) which is represented in the film by the corporate figurehead Parker, the Colonel, and the human soldiers – a paradigm through which nature is seen through the metaphor of a machine that can be dismantled and reduced for better understanding, and therefore exploited to progress society’s economic well being. The converse view – the Romantic worldview – is represented by Pandora's native race and is one that values the beauty and freedom of nature over scientific rationalization, a holistic outlook that holds everything in nature as being interconnected and intrinsically valuable.
Jake Sully was assigned a mission to replace his recently deceased brother; he’s told that he is the only person suitable for the job for a special reason – he needs a certain biological makeup to be put into the body of an avatar that’s identical to Pandora’s native race, the Na’vi. And so, when Jake Sully is set out on the mission of infiltrating the Na’vi society and convincing them to give over their land to the humans so it can be mined, he soon realizes that the sublime, breathtaking beauty of Pandora is not worth the typhoon Parker’s final goal of dominating the frontier and exploiting it for its instrumental value. In fact, through personally embodying a Na’vi avatar and his relationship with a female Na’vi, Neytiri, Jake Sully’s narrative self embraces the Na’vi mindset of Romanticism. Neytiri introduces Sully to an organic worldview – seeing all people and plants of Pandora as deeply interconnected, such that they cannot exist independently of the whole. While Parker and gung-ho commander Colonel carelessly rip through Pandora with chemical gas, guns and bombs in pursuit of what lies beneath, Jake Sully and his comrades try to convince their leaders not to do so. Sully and his human allies realize that displacing the Na'vi people is wrong, and destroying their invaluable planet for an economic venture isn't worth the catastrophic effect it would cause on Pandora. Yet, Parker and Colonel see the Na’vi people as different, and thus uncivilized and savage. Parker and the Colonel exemplify anthropocentrism – regarding their own kind as the most central and important element of existence. They view the Na’vi people as sub-human beings with no rights to the land they occupy. To the two leaders, the trees and plants on Pandora are all the same, homogeneous units only needed for their economic value. They follow the Master Narrative that they've inherited growing up on Earth, which leads them to believe that the Na'vi people are a small, useless obstacle standing in the way of their ultimate goal: economic progress (at any cost). Although Jake Sully was originally sent to negotiate the Na’vi people off their land so it could be destroyed and mined, he realizes that the essence of the Na’vi people relies completely on their relationship with nature and therefore rebels against his own kind to save Pandora from destruction and the Na’vi from displacement. The film ultimately creates a dualism between Human versus Na’vi & Mechanistic Worldview versus Romanticism. The humans in the film, mainly Parker and the Colonel, think of Pandora as a potentially profitable machine, while Jake Sully, his comrades, and the Na’vi see Pandora as a priceless life-giving land of sublime beauty.
Avatar also presents the paradox of the romantic worldview that is explained by William Cronan (1995) in “The Trouble With Wilderness”:
“…the central paradox: wilderness embodies a dualistic vision in which the human is entirely outside the natural. If we allow ourselves to believe that nature, to be true, must also be wild, then our very presence in nature represents its fall…We thereby leave ourselves little hope of discovering what an ethical, sustainable, honorable human place in nature might actually look like.” (pg. 17)
In the film, this is seen when Jake Sully tells the Na’vi people of human behavior on Earth:
“See the world we come from. There is no green there. They killed their mother. They will do the same here.”
Logically, If humans destroyed their mother, their planet, to the point where there is no green – the symbolic color of nature – then humans must be entirely unnatural beings that did not learn how to sustainably and ethically exist in nature through the course of their history. Through their presence in nature on Earth they caused its demise. Thus it is then implied that by allowing the human race to invade and control Pandora, history would repeat itself and the human race would ravage the planet for its valuable resources to the point of destruction. Pandora would become as barren and desolate as the planet Earth that Sully describes to the Na’vi people. Therefore, human presence on Pandora must not continue in order for Pandora to remain in its natural state and retain its sublime beauty and goodness.
This holds true when the final battle against the humans and their vicious machines proves victorious for the native Na’vi people. With the exception of a select few, humans are ordered out and never to return to Pandora. The Na’vi people are left to continue with their way of life – living ethically and peacefully within nature.
Overall Avatar presents two different ways of viewing nature, the Mechanistic worldview and Romanticism. It shows the tales of both views and their outcomes. It implies that if you view the world like a machine with interchangeable, meaningless parts and exploit it, you will drive the planet to its breaking point, turning it into something empty and lifeless. The storyline favors the Romantic worldview because those who represent it, the Na’vi, respect their planet as a delicately balanced living organism, intrinsically valuing every individual and therefore existing sustainably in nature. Conversely, the film gives a bad connotation to the Mechanistic worldview, showing that the humans who think this way are bound to destroy nature despite its beauty for the sake of greediness and profitability. In turn, the humans destroy the very thing that they rely on and fail to find an honorable way to exist within nature. Overall, when it comes to living within nature, the moral of the story seems to be that the Romantic worldview is the way to go. If we can learn to intrinsically value every plant, animal, and human on Earth without homogenizing or exploiting them for economic progress, we will live as honorably and sustainably on this planet as the Na’vi do on Pandora. - Meredith Whittier
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