LOST DREAMS OR MODERN NIGHTMARE
To concern ourselves with dreams is a way of reflecting on ourselves—a way of self reflection. It is not our ego-consciousness reflecting itself … It reflects not on the ego … but recollects that strange self, alien to the ego. C.G. Jung
OK, so now we know that all box office records are broken, once again, and our fascination with extreme ends of the scales is sated once more: “the biggest … grossing the most … technical wonder …”.[i] We also can read the professional reviews to get criticism of the art form itself. In reading or hearing reviews from the audiences, there can be no doubt that the world of Pandora is a very compelling world indeed, enough for some to consider suicide after seeing the movie:
When I woke up this morning after watching Avatar for the first time yesterday, the world seemed grey. 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.[ii]
Many reviews seem to me to circle around “hype” or the “thrill” or the captivating qualities of Pandora but what kind of world is being represented here? Every review I have read points to a lost world of our past, a nostalgic longing for a natural world saturated with meaning and interconnectedness. This interpretation is probably what is behind the suicidal sentiments expressed above. It is hard to bear the loss of meaning and profound isolation we are living today.
Equally, no review I have read gives a mention of the central symbol of the movie. The central symbol is not Pandora which, as a symbol, has indeed gripped us hard. The central symbol in the movie lies in the title: Avatar! In my own research of the effects of this movie on the audience, nobody I talked to mentioned the word Avatar in terms of its symbolism! What’s even more incredible to me is that nobody I talked to knew what “Avatar” means in the modern context. This omission of any discussion of the most obvious and central symbol in the movie constitutes the anomaly that struck me forcibly, and released this essay.
So, what is an avatar today?
While I am writing this review, tens of millions of people are online, doing what the movie represents so well, in so much detail, and with an astonishing acceptance of its ordinariness. The fact that millions on a daily basis are already doing what the movie dramatizes may account for this easy acceptance of the movie’s premise and central symbol. Millions, maybe tens of millions now are entering their own avatar in order to inhabit another world for as long as they like. If you have not yet heard of this phenomenon, take a look at: www.secondlife.com. If you want to explore the seamier side of this phenomenon, just type in “virtual sex”. You will be astonished at the science that is supporting the invention of mechanisms designed to convince the user of the sensual qualities of the reality they have entered as their avatar.
This is not a movie about a lost innocence. It is training manual for the West, urging us to go further in what we can already do, in the millions: enter virtual reality as an avatar and go into, not nature, but cyberspace, or virtual reality. Avatar is the common name known to millions of “gamers” who daily enter their digitalized version of “Pandora” and engage in the same impossible feats that are shown in the movie. The beautiful images of Pandora, which have no correspondence at all with empirical nature on earth, are merely the technological means (graphics, 3-D, CGI, etc.) by which the modern ego is captivated and seduced into leaving earthly reality and entering virtual reality, perhaps forever, as our hero did. But note well, when he did succeed finally in becoming a Pandorian resident, his earthly body died!
This is no mere fantasy. Millions are doing it already. This movie simply acts as an openly seductive engine designed to encourage a particular “solution” to our loss of meaning and isolation. Our collective nostalgia for the past, a fancied innocence and primordial oneness etc. is simply the “unconscious desire” that can be caught and manipulated towards other ends, as the public relations industry knows so well. For all those who think it is about primordial nature and rediscovering our interconnectedness, I would urge them to remember how our hero enters Pandora: he lies in a coffin and “dies”, just as millions do when they log on. They die to the ordinary world and their bodies waste away as they spend 12 or 16 hours online in cyberspace enjoying their freedom! Yes, freedom, real freedom! Freedom from ordinary reality which is becoming harder to bear as we witness the accelerating emptying out of meaning in the natural world!
Avatar is a movie that encourages what millions really want to do, spelling out the method to enter cyberspace, at the cost of earthly life altogether. Avatar is decidedly not a movie urging us to reclaim our interconnectedness and oneness with nature. Pandora is not a representation of nature at all. It is a true and accurate representation of what we are already building and investing billions of dollars in: cyberspace or virtual reality, which is a reality indeed but not a natural one.
When our unconscious desires, e.g. nostalgia for a fancied past, are excited and aroused with captivating and well chosen images, we lose our discerning minds and thus confound a yearning for a “lost dream” with the denial of a living modern nightmare that is emerging before our occluded eyes. The entire engine of our modern technological society is now geared towards the development of cyberspace into which we are now openly being invited. We are to inhabit it in exactly the way shown by the movie, leaving behind, as the movie also shows, dead bodies, and a dead earth.
[i] Avatar (2009).
[ii] Quoted in The Telegraph, UK> http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/film-news/6977817/Avatar-fans-suicidal-because-planet-Pandora-is-not-real.html