A lot of ink got spilled over the past weekend about the new Avatar movie, including on my own blog, and I have been sitting around reading all of these articles and essays, and pondering why this movie seems to have touched such a nerve among the cultural commentators.
It feels as if Avatar in some way defines the moment we are living in, beyond merely the racial issues noted last week by David Brooks, and beyond depicting the kinds of avatar existences already enjoyed by many real life humans through the medium of video gaming systems.
An answer formed in my mind after I saw, in the very same newspapers and blogs that were chattering about Avatar, discussions of the flood of new data produced by the current generation of American military drones now being deployed in Afghanistan.
We are, these days, very close to a moment when our soldiers will be able to fight wars remotely, like Jake Sully in Avatar, using aircraft and armored bodies that we occupy only electronically, but which feed back to us a constant stream of real-time video and data. This must be a military commander’s dream—to be able to send our Marines out to fight in such a way that there is no prospect of getting them killed.
Such a vision differs from the one you usually see in Arnold Schwarzenegger films, where humans enlist machines to do the fighting for us, with the possibility that the machines will someday turn on us. In the Avatar vision, we ourselves are transported into these remote bodies and live through them so that we can go out and harm others without any risk of damage to ourselves. It is—looked at this way—a nightmarish vision of what future warfare might look like. And it has been laid bare by a Disneyfied 3-D flick. You can just feel the cultural zeitgeist feeling its way forward with its octopus tentacles, trying to determine what the implications are.
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Article comments
1 - 2dreviews
Interesting reflection.
You often hear about how people in Hollywood are smart. I think it was clever of Cameron to create cliched characters, and fill his work with relevant themes and ground-breaking technology.
Ebert said walking out of this he felt as he did walking out of Star Wars, which too was created from a myriad of relevant sources.
2 - Michael Graham
The film is technologically groundbreaking. The film challenges American/Western imperialism. The film promotes pantheism and/or panentheism. The film touches on our longing for utopia. These are all popular things and Cameron has woven them together well. See my analysis here.
3 - Kimberly Davis
Thank you for these comments, though Michael, I have come to believe that the film touches a nerve less because of its depiction of a challenge to American imperialism (which we've seen before) and more for its portrayal of remote warfare, which is new and is rapidly becoming a reality--with so-called "war porn" being sent back by our drones to stateside "cubicle warriors."
4 - Shiloh
I think people in general though, put waaayyy too much thought into movie watching. It IS just a movie, and people watching it need to remember that.
On the whole remote warfare thing, why is this bad? So technology moves forward, such that less our our soldiers are lost. Of course there will be pros and cons as with any technology, but what does it matter to discuss it now? It will come either way, if it isn't already here. We already have remote controlled reconnaissance planes and there isn't much an issue with those.
Way too much worry, way too much thinking, In my honest opinion.
5 - mahen
it is infact a picture of the war in iraq,