Avatar Scriptment: Summary, Review, and Analysis

Part 2: Analysis of the Avatar Scriptment

NOTE: This is just a series of random thoughts and comments I have about 'Avatar'.

"It's fine for a guy to be attracted to women, but I need the male audience to respond to this guy and say, 'Yeah, I see why people would follow him'."

-James Cameron on Josh Sully

I could've chosen any one of about half a dozen quotes from Avatar which similarly show that Josh is a great man because of his inner character - his bravery and independence - rather than the superficial traits pop culture ascribes to men ("attitude" and "testosterone" or being a "NASCAR Dad" or any other laughably desperate label), but this quote is just arch-Cameron in its totally casual incisiveness.

The scene in the story where cynical Grace warms up to Josh is cool and refreshingly non-timid behavior for a man (it could only happen in a movie, though: most workplaces would fire the man on the spot for being "hostile" or "aggressive"). Later, Zuleika also takes to Josh because of his bravery.

So I guess the point I'm making here is that Josh is going to be a real man in the Rudyard Kipling sense (James Cameron's words....although he'd be wise to never use them again, as Rudyard Kipling is now politically incorrect).

In addition to Kipling, Cameron also tossed out names like Edgar Rice Burroughs, H. Rider Haggard, Lawrence of Arabia (the movie itself) and Russell Crowe in Gladiator as inspirations for Josh Sully.

But reading Avatar, there's one other movie which I don't think there's any question provided some dose of inspiration (and more than just a teaspoon): Dances With Wolves. The two stories are so remarkably parallel that it's impossible to think that Cameron wasn't influenced by the 1990 classic. (In the notes on the laserdisc for The Abyss: Special Edition, Cameron actually acknowledged Dances With Wolves - and Kevin Costner, specifically - for reopening the doorway for 3-hour movies, which had gone against Hollywood business philosophy for over a decade.)

"People have asked me if I am pessimistic or optimistic about the future and my answer has been recently that I am pessimistic about systems and optimistic about individuals."

James Cameron, 1998

Last fall, Sports Illustrated wrote about the aftermath of Pat Tillman's death, and writer Gary Smith did a really awesome job of describing the cognitive dissonance between Pat Tillman's family - this strong, independent-minded group with true California fiber - and the U.S. Department of Defense - which is both the most powerful entity in the history of mankind and the most bureaucratic and system-centric entity.

So after Pat was killed, the Army told the Tillman family a series of lies (deliberate, orchestrated lies), and they expected the Tillman family to react the way that the average military family would react: they'd give their honesty away. They'd nod their heads mournfully, thank the military for being our heroes and saviors, and then repeat the Army's lies for the rest of their lives. Instead of following this script, though, the Tillman family called the Army out on its orgy of truly dark lies. The Army wasn't just embarrassed by the Tillman's search for the truth....they were confused by it. (The lieutenant who wrote the Army's second official report, Ralph Kauzlarich, laughably said that the reason that the Tillman's wouldn't stop pursuing the truth is because they weren't Christians who knew their son was in Heaven. Thus he exposed himself as both corrupt and wholly ignorant of Christianity.)

Here's how Sports Illustrated writer Gary Smith interpreted the dynamic (which continues to this day, incidentally): "How were men who made their living in a bureaucracy....people accustomed to giving truth a little pull here, another tug there for the sake of their institutions, to foresee the tension that would be created when they began stretching the story of the death of a man who put so little stock in institutions....and so much in living an honest life?"

Now, there is a reason for this story in a James Cameron blog. It's to illustrate a real-world example of the eternal human conflict that's at the heart of Avatar (or at least near its heart): the tension between people who love the systems which support them (and who cede their honesty and their consciences to that system), and those people who are compelled to something more ethereal and abstract (perhaps God, an ideal, a personal dream, whatever) and, by having this greater dream or faith, don't have to give a damn for systems and institutions.

I don't think it's a stretch to say that Avatar is probably as violently an anti-system story as anybody could possibly write. I mean, the SECFOR military in this story is the most uniformally sadistic and corrupt force you can imagine. (They're always called just "the troops", although I'm certain that political correctness has forced a change in that language.) The troops are shown as sadistic automotons, taking delight in the genocide of Pandora's indigenous people throughout the story and, at one point, mocking a crippled man when he falls out of his wheelchair.

The sadism of the troops is equaled, though, by the sadism they receive. The story seems to take great joy in concocting newer, more-grotesque ways to kill them. "The troops" die from....

-Being stampeded by a herd of rhino-like animals
-Asphyxiation
-Run over by tractors
-Pierced by the beak of a pterodactyl-like beast (while Grace shrugs casually)
-Arrows through their throats....

And the list goes on.

I'm going to be totally honest with you: I'd be amazed if even a shred of this important element of the original story exists anymore. Both The Pentagon and the Department of Homeland Security have offices at every major studio, and, I mean, they might be bureaucratic morons but even Cletus the Slack Jawed Yokel can spot the profoundly anti-military sentiment in here. It's not like trying to decrypt Finnegan's Wake or anything, ya know? (And for whatever it's worth, Cameron's brother, Dave, was a Marine.)

(I guess....I guess I'm partial to this "political" angle of Avatar. Not just because the military's evils often get whitewashed (FYI: Pat Tillman was not - NOT - killed accidentally. It was murder.) and not just because I think that this tension between systems and creative people is an important human dynamic in everyday life as well as in dramatic arenas, but because there's so much damn political correctness nowadays about "the troops" that, reading the story, I felt cathartic chills. I mean, I went to a baseball game last year and during the 7th inning, they didn't even sing "Take Me Out to the Ballgame" anymore, but instead made everybody stand up and place their hands on their heart while they sang "God Bless America". Everybody was pretending to cry and all this phony nonsense. I mean....it was disgusting. But whatever, aye?)

And speaking of cognitive dissonance....

"The seafaring nations of Europe grew mighty from the wealth returned from the discovery and settlement of the New World. Those societies who stayed home languished, those who embraced the unknown prospered. Seen broadly, we are a species which owes its current success to Exploration."

-James Cameron

James Cameron spent his time on NASA's board of advisers aggressively championing exploration and pushing hard for a move to Mars. His writing about exploration is (no surprise) inspiring and I don't think that there's any question that it's fully thought out and heartfelt. He uses words like "our outbound quest can [satisfy our soul]." and "We need to push outward." He didn't use the words "manifest destiny"....but he might as well have.

So it's hard to believe that a man who spent so much time, money, and energy romanticizing exploration write a story in which that very human trait results in so much villainy. One would expect that the timid souls who languish on decaying Earth would be the villains in a James Cameron movie.

In Avatar, the RDA are the European colonists and the Na'vi are the Native Americans, right? (Right. This analogy is made time and again in the scriptment.) So it's totally contradictory that the "Europeans" are the heroes in his real world view, but in this fictional world, they're the villains.

I know that, in a way, I'm writing about a false dichotomy: Avatar doesn't denigrate exploration, but rather exploitation. But I think we've seen in modern, feminized America how much guilt by association we have. Americans have turned on the very men who explored, civilized, and colonized this land. Columbus is the bad guy in textbooks across the country, and the Spanish, Dutch, and Englishmen who braved unspeakably dangerous voyages to carve out a life from the wilderness are all evil racists. (I wonder why the white people who so hate their ancestors don't commit suicide out of shame.)

So what I'm saying is that the message of Avatar won't be that mankind's exploration is bad, it will be that the RDA (the businesses pillaging Pandora, the "system") is bad. But, well, that's just not how lazy-minded people will perceive it.

I think it will be a great irony when two people are discussing whether we should explore the universe and the "con" side of the argument says, "No, we'll just screw everything up, just like the bad guys in Avatar!"

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Really quickly, I also wanted to write about one of my primary gripes in science fiction - a pratfall that I wish that the greatest of all science fiction minds, James Cameron, would avoid - and that is the tendency to overlook the idea of the Singuarity. The Singularity is a broad, complex idea which I don't want to carry on about here, but in a nutshell it's the idea that our various technological advances in every field - from genetics to nanotech to IT - are advancing exponentially (doubling roughly 18 months, in accordance with "Moore's Law" which referred to computer processors) and that around the year 2030 (and there's frightening consistency in the projections) our technology will be so advanced that we'll transcend humanity.

I know, I know, it's an abstract concept that sounds flaky, but make no mistake there is some hard science behind it and some truly great minds, including Ray Kurzweil and Bill Joy.

But it's a lot easier to write stories where mankind in the future is just like mankind of today, only we don't have winters and we do have spaceships....but some very important research suggests that things are a whole hell of a lot more complex than that. In this, Avatar is really archaic science fiction - from the 1960's mind of Ray Bradbury rather than from the 2000's mind of James Cameron, where I wish it would have come from.

Cameron has said that he aspires for Avatar to be mythic, and it will be. But I wish he could have created something more realistic, too.

(And if anybody wants to read my illustrated science fiction epic which doesn't shy away from the Singularity....e-mail me at DavidCBrennan@aol.com!!!)