Avatar and the Meaning of Life

When I woke up this morning after watching Avatar for the first time yesterday, the world seemed … gray. It was like my whole life, everything I’ve done and worked for, lost its meaning … It just seems so … meaningless. I still don’t really see any reason to keep … doing things at all. I live in a dying world.

I wish I could hold out hope that those words could have been written by a studio publicity sock puppet drumming up controversy. In fact, it seems the writer is 17-year-old Ivar Hill, a gaming design student in Sweden. (Well, that might explain a few things right there.) Contacted by CNN.com, Hill elaborated:

One can say my depression was twofold: I was depressed because I really wanted to live in Pandora, which seemed like such a perfect place, but I was also depressed and disgusted with the sight of our world, what we have done to Earth. I so much wanted to escape reality.

What’s going on here? A number of things, it seems. On the one hand, we have a youth who has dedicated a significant chunk of his young life to unreal worlds encountering one that tops them all, and finding the experience so overwhelming as to eclipse the goodness of the world and the meaningfulness of life. Mixed up with this are environmental and perhaps political and social concerns which may be partly valid and partly exaggerated. On the other hand, such reactions aren’t necessarily all bad. Take the comment “I live in a dying world” — quite true, and perhaps telling. Never mind that, cosmologically speaking, Pandora would be be a dying world too. It seems that Pandora has nonetheless evoked a young man’s dissatisfaction with living in a dying world — a dissatisfaction ultimately rooted, in Christian thought, in God having placed eternity in our hearts.

Pandora is not Heaven, nor is it Eden. It’s an exaggerated playground fantasy world with mixed New Age overtones. Even so, in this young man’s response to Pandora may be, whether he knows it or not, a kind of homesickness, a longing for our true home. In the litheness and impossible acrobatics of the Na’vi we may glimpse a hint of the eschatological agility of glorified bodies in the resurrection. The heightened splendor of Pandora, with trees like mountains and mountains like clouds, may evoke the unimaginable glory of the new earth of which the beauties of this present world are only a foretaste. When a young man says he wants to “escape reality,” could the diagnosis be less than entirely accurate? The longing for escape may be unmistakable enough, but is it necessarily “reality” he wants to escape, or only the fallen reality of the world as we know it? Granted, if it leads him or anyone else to contemplate suicide, or other unhealthy forms of escapism, it may not much matter (or perhaps again it may; God will be the judge of that).

One key question, I guess, is whether Avatar is having a net effect of harming people who would otherwise be fine, or whether it’s merely a question of people hitching their wagons to Avatar rather than something else. Avatar is a big and obvious cultural target to hitch onto; maybe a lot of people wouldn’t necessarily have found something else if it hadn’t been for Avatar. But would that necessarily be better? Any time a cultural phenomenon grows big enough, from “Star Trek” and Star Wars to The Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter, people will hitch their wagons to it — healthy people in healthy ways, unhealthy people in unhealthy ways. Some phenomena do appeal more, or even primarily, to unhealthy people, or unhealthy impulses in people. That’s why my commentary on, say, the Twilight phenomenon has been basically negative: because I think the appeal is largely, though not necessarily entirely, unwholesome. This is a different thing from saying “Some people will respond to this in unwholesome ways.” That’s trivially true of everything, including the Bible.

To put it another way, I think that the Twilight phenomenon has little to offer to people who are basically healthy morally and psychologically, and that turning away from it is the healthiest response. I would say the same of the Dan Brown franchise, and of other works I view as morally problematic or objectionable. In a sense, that’s what a morally objectionable work is — one that basically healthy viewers will likely want to turn away from, and for which the appeal, to many who don’t turn away, is something significantly unhealthy. By contrast, a work that can be enjoyed by healthy people without significant issue is a basically acceptable work, even if it poses a problem for unhealthy people. An example I’ve long used: The sort of ethnographic nudity in a film like The Mission need not be a moral issue for basically healthy adult viewers, though it might for immature or unhealthy viewers. (On the other hand, a salacious sex scene poses a moral issue for healthy viewers too.)

Incidentally, The Mission is also a film about rapacious Westerners exploiting noble savages, and sympathetic Westerners going rogue and siding with the savages against their own fellow Westerners. Of course, it’s also a story in which the Christian West has something ennobling to offer the savages. Still, there’s nothing inherently objectionable about the picture of rapacious humans trying to exploit and rob innocent aliens. It’s basically the scenario C. S. Lewis anticipated in “Religion and Rocketry,” as I noted in an epigraph in my review of District 9. Granted, we might roll our eyes at the idealization of the Na’vi, particularly if we remember (as someone pointed out recently) that even Dances with Wolves didn’t portray the Indians as uniformly noble; the Pawnee were treacherous and violent. An alien race might be different, though. In any case, I think an eye roll is sufficient response; neither outrage nor hand-wringing seems mandatory to me.

At any rate, Avatar, for me, is a film in which healthy people can find a great deal to appreciate and enjoy. As my review credits Jeff Overstreet with noting, it’s a film that makes unprecedented use of special effects to create vistas of beauty and wonder rather than of horror or grotesquerie. Its spiritual vision is sub-Christian, certainly, but not anti-Christian. As Peter Chattaway has aptly observed, it’s one noble-savages movie that does not pit “true spirituality” against “organized religion”; whatever other millstones are hung around the necks of the humans, they aren’t evil, hypocritical Christians (or notably religious in any other way, other than a cross around the neck one of the sympathetic humans, Michelle Rodriguez’s chopper pilot).

Nor is Avatar fundamentally antithetical to Christianity. In general, nothing about Pandora radically precludes us from imagining God creating such a world. Like the Force in the Star Wars movies, Na’vi religion can be interpreted in different frameworks. It wouldn’t do to say that Eywa is God, or even a symbol for God; but Eywa could be a created intelligence with delegated oversight of Pandora, not entirely unlike the Oyeresu (planetary angels) in Lewis’s Space Trilogy. The Soul Tree — much like Vulcan’s Mount Seleya in “Star Trek” — is closer to nirvana than Heaven, but either could also be thought of as a sort of extraterrestrial analog to the limbo patronum. At any rate, I’m not going to jettison either “Star Trek” or Avatar over the issue. Avatar is a flawed film, but I appreciate what is beautiful in it in the same way that I appreciate the mythological paintings of Titian and Rembrandt, not because I believe in the worldview depicted, but because beauty as such belongs to God.

From what little I’ve seen of even obsessive, over-the-top fan reaction, people are not coming out of Avatar gushing, by and large, about pantheistic spirituality. People love Pandora (and other fantasy landscapes from the Star Wars universe to Miyazaki’s films) for the same reasons that we all love wild, unspoiled, strange landscapes in nature documentaries, but in a unique way, because Pandora is wilder and more alien than anything on Earth. Most of us live far from unspoiled nature, and are well aware (perhaps exaggeratedly so in some cases) of the “spoiled” state of too much of our world. The Na’vi combine appealing qualities of imaginary races like elves and fairies as well as extraterrestrials, mythical adventurers like Tarzan and Conan, and exotic indigenous populations, whose closeness to nature and simplicity of lifestyle holds aesthetic appeal to moderns. The idealized portrayal of Na’vi nobility is appealing because we are a fallen race that remembers Eden and is haunted by Heaven.

None of this is to discount the problematic aspects of Avatar — only to note that the film can still be enjoyed by those with adequate perspective on its issues. Not everyone has adequate perspective, of course, which is why (as Anton Ego noted in Ratatouille) the critic’s job includes providing perspective. Even so, unhealthy, obsessive responses will still take place. I don’t minimize that. I do suggest that they may say more about the viewers than the film.