There have been quite a few interesting posts and columns about Avatar in the last few days, so I thought I would revive my bad habit of discussing film commentaries without having seen the movie in question. What most caught my attention in the responses to the film was Ross’ discussion of the role of pantheism:

Instead, “Avatar” is Cameron’s long apologia for pantheism — a faith that equates God with Nature, and calls humanity into religious communion with the natural world.

From everything I have read about Avatar, this is not the most remarkable and theologically subversive aspect of the story. Some reviews have mentioned in passing where the word avatar comes from, noting that it is the Sanskrit word used to refer to a deity that has taken human (or animal) form. The great Hindu epic cycles revolve around such avatars, chief among them Rama. In Sanskrit, the word means “descent,” and its equivalent in Christian theological language would be sunkatabasis, which means condescension. The interesting thing about the word’s use in this film is the implication that the human who takes on the form of one of the aliens is actually vastly superior to the kind of being his mind is inhabiting, and that he is willingly lowering himself to their level. In the end, he decides to protect them against others of his own kind, but this is not all that different from the idea of a deity manifesting himself to defeat the demonic forces that are menacing his people.

The humans in the story are raised up above the aliens, and their use of avatars gives them something of a god-like quality, and it seems as if the depiction of them as “crude, one-dimensional native stereotypes” helps maintain this difference very well. We see this in sci-fi stories all the time: well-meaning human visitors must come to the aid of the noble, spiritually enlightened but ultimately more primitive, somewhat helpless people who are being threatened by the exploitative humans and/or their allies. One of the first to come to mind, and one of the most obnoxious, treacly paeans to the virtues of liberal humanitarian interventionism, is Star Trek: Insurrection, whose basic storyline seems almost identical to that of Avatar.

Otherwise, the film seems to be a major studio version of Captain Planet, complete with blue-skinned heroes and devotion to Gaia, or a more technologically-savvy version of Princess Mononoke.