Avatar As America’s Political Unconscious

• Film Review

By Nimanthi Perera-Rajasingham

A scene from the film

When one watches James Cameron’s Avatar one is tempted to dismiss it as a special effects film with a very traditional plot. After all, what is new about a story that tells you about a hero, Jake, a paraplegic war veteran, who leads a resistance against bad Americans?  The film uses some hyper-romantic version of primitivism to talk of a better world.  The simple, nature-connected natives are good; the technologically-advanced, materialistic Americans are bad.  The bad Americans want to conquer the resources of the planet Pandora, and when the natives get in the way of this they must be pushed out or exterminated.

To reduce this movie to only these elements is to actually miss many of the complexities of the film and how Cameron is playing with the very idea of primitivism itself.  The movie seems like a story about a people before the fall, but notice that the entire story takes place in a world that resembles nothing so much as a video game.  It is a virtual world, reminding us that Microsoft has actually created a computer game called Avatar.  The movie is not an attempt to simply capture some lost past but a trick, in which Cameron seems to be saying that the only way we can ever enter into the realm of some wonderful, purer world is through technology.
What is on offer is not an organic, prelapsarian world, but a Second Life-style computer world.  Second Life is a 3D virtual world that a person can enter via the internet, becoming a character of one’s choice.  One can choose how to look, how to dress, one’s friends, and how to spend real money.  Pandora is closer to this than some organic fantasy.

Literary theorist Fredric Jameson uses the concept of a political unconscious to argue that the collective unconscious in all narratives bears the traces of an uninterrupted class struggle.  Most texts, he would argue, locate a certain utopian vision of the world in the realm of a political unconscious, wherein a more equitable world can be imagined.  It is in the film’s function as America’s unconscious fantasy that we can find meaning in Avatar.
For example, the film is a narrative about the struggle between Native Americans and European imperialists; it is also a narrative about contemporary struggles against imperialism in occupied countries like Iraq, Afghanistan and Palestine, countries that have been brutalised because of imperial interests in oil.  In the film, the Americans attempt to force out the N’avi from their ancestral lands because the land has large quantities of a precious metal the Americans want.  These struggles are between wealthy corporate and colonial interests and the workers of the soil, the natives, and the rightful claimants to the land.

The film also envisions a certain utopia of a world where material resources are more equitably distributed.  Again, the political unconscious of class struggle gestures toward a better world.  This gesture is not a return to a primordial past but a desire for an equal sharing of the world.  Pandora is itself an avatar of what a socially, economically and politically just Earth could be.  Not people living in trees, or dressing in primitive garb, but a world in which the environment is not plundered by multinationals for endless profit, and where countries do not colonise other countries for the same reasons.  It is a gesture toward a world in which socialism could become a reality.

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Posted by admin on Feb 14 2010. Filed under Arts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry