Prologue: Avatar as Rorschach
bron taylor
I first saw Avatar shortly after its release in December 2009. Like most
viewers, I found the bioluminescent landscape of Pandora stunningly beautiful.
I was also moved by the storylines: the against-all-odds resistance by the
native inhabitants of Pandora against violent, imperial invaders; the turncoats
from the invading forces who join the resistance; and the love stories. Sure,
there is the formulaic story—male and female find love, lose love, and find it
again—but there is also the love of a people for their home and their wild
flora and fauna, a contagious love that subverts the ecological and spiritual
understandings of some invaders, leading them to take a stand with those they
have come to exploit.
The film’s producer, writer, and director, James Cameron, is
adept at evoking emotional responses from his audiences and making huge sums of
money along the way. Indeed, no one’s films exemplify the blockbuster,
money-making film genre better than Cameron’s Terminator, Aliens, Titanic, and now Avatar, which banked $2.8 billion within the first two years after
its release, 73 per cent of which came from outside the United States.1
The figure would have been significantly higher had not the Chinese government
cut short the film’s run, reportedly out of fear that it might encourage
resistance to development projects and the government’s resettlement schemes
(Stanton 2010). The film also gained wide recognition for its many technical
innovations and won many awards, including best film drama and best director at
the Golden Globe Awards (which is decided by
3
the Hollywood Foreign Press Association) and
three of the nine Oscars for which it was nominated (although not for best
picture or director). The attendance records and professional accolades provide
one marker of the film’s appeal. But is there more to the film than
tried-and-true narratives of injustice being overcome and romantic dreams
fulfilled? Is it significant in some way other than for its technical
achievements and profit making?
When I first saw the film, I certainly thought this might be
the case. For more than twenty years, I had been tracking the development and
increasing global cultural traction of nature-based spiritualities, paying
special attention to how such spiritualities contribute to environmental
activism.2 My book documenting these trends, Dark Green Religion: Nature Spirituality and
the Planetary Future (2010), came out shortly before the release of Avatar. In it, I argued that
spiritualities that stress ecological interdependence and mutual dependence,
involve deep feelings of belonging and connection to nature, and express
beliefs that the biosphere is a sacred, Gaia-like superorganism, were taking
new forms and exercising increasing social and political influence. These sorts
of nature-based spiritualities generally cohere with and draw on an
evolutionary and ecological worldview, and therefore stress continuity and even
kinship among all organisms. They also often have animistic dimensions, in
which communication (if not also communion) with non-human organisms is thought
possible. Consequently, these “otherkind” are considered to have intrinsic
value (regardless of whether they are useful in some way to our own species)
and should be accorded respect, if not reverence. Uniting these Gaian and
animistic perceptions, I argued, is generally a deep sense of humility about
the human place in the universe in contrast to anthropocentric conceits,
wherein human beings consider themselves to be superior to other living things
and the only ones whose interests count morally.
In Dark Green Religion,
I examined a wide range of social phenomena that expressed and promoted such
spiritualities. Recognizing that the evolutionary-ecological worldview that
fuels dark green spirituality has had only a century and a half to incubate and
spread, and noting that despite this, the trends I had identified were rapidly
gathering adherents and momentum, I speculated that we could be witnessing the
nascent stages of a new global nature religion. Such a religion would have
affinities with some aspects of the world’s long-standing and predominant
religious and philosophical traditions, and it would, in some cases, fuse with
them, I suggested. Moreover, such dark green spiritualities could also coexist (rather than fuse) with the
environmentally progressive forms of the world’s long-standing religious
traditions, uniting in common action to protect the biosphere, even if profound
differences remained about the sources of existence. I also suggested that dark
green religious forms might increasingly supplant older meaning and action
systems, because the dark green forms more easily cohere with modern scientific
understandings than religious worldviews involving one or more invisible divine
beings. Consequently, the dark green forms could more easily adapt than most
long-standing religions to new and deeper scientific understandings, especially
when compared to religions that reify their “ultimate sacred postulates” by
chiselling them, physically or metaphorically, into inviolable sacred texts.3
These were the possibilities running through my mind when I
first saw Avatar. I had already spent
considerable time looking at artistic productions, including documentaries and
theatrical films that exemplified dark green spirituality; after seeing Avatar, I immediately thought it was another exemplar of such green
religion. Moreover, as it broke box office records, I could not help but wonder
if the film was evidence that global, cultural receptivity to the ideas
prevalent in dark green religion was even more profound than I had previously
thought. I also wondered if Avatar would
prove to be the most effective “dark green” propaganda yet produced. In short,
I thought, there might well be something exceptionally significant about the
film, even if the ideas expressed in it were nothing new and even though some
would conclude that the film was not great art. I suspected not only that Avatar was a reflection of the global emergence of dark green religion but that
it might even effectively advance
such spirituality and ethics.
In his public statements about the film, Cameron has
expressed a clear intention to promote themes that are central to what I have
called dark green religion. When accepting his Golden Globe Award for best
picture, for example, he said: “Avatar
asks us to see that everything is connected, all human beings to each other,
and us to the Earth. And if you have to go four and a half light years to
another, made-up planet to appreciate this miracle of the world that we have
right here, well, you know what, that’s the wonder of cinema right there,
that’s the magic” (Associated Press 2010). Soon after, in an Oprah Winfrey
television special that was broadcast shortly before the Academy Awards
ceremony, Cameron repeated this theme, adding, with delight, that at the climax
of the film the audience had come to take the side of nature in its battle
against the destructive forces of an expansionist human civilization. Here,
without using the terminology of contemporary environmental ethics, Cameron
expressed an affinity for deep ecological or biocentric theories, in which
nature is considered to have intrinsic value. Indeed, according to an exchange
during an Entertainment Weekly
interview, it appears that Cameron was even on the radical side of biocentric ethics.
When an interviewer asserted, “Avatar
is the perfect eco-terrorism recruiting tool,” Cameron answered in an equally
provocative way, “Good, good, I like that one. I consider that a positive
review. I believe in ecoterrorism” (Moorhead 2010).4
In the light of such statements, it seems clear that dark
green themes and activist motivations underlay the film’s production.
Furthermore, the negative reaction to the film by most conservative
commentators, whether political or religious, revealed significant concern that
such views and imperatives might be gaining more adherents and cultural appeal.
But while pundits and scholars speculated about the possible significance and
influence of the film, they usually supplied little evidence to support their
assertions. So I began to gather such evidence, establishing a website domain
to track relevant information as it unfolded.5 I knew that a more
concerted inquiry was needed.
Avatar as Rorschach
Given my own response to the film and
informed by the sociology of knowledge, I knew that generating a truly critical
inquiry would be difficult.6 I was keenly aware, for example, of my
own tendency to view the film through pre-existing prisms. I therefore
anticipated that many others would simply interpret the film through their own
intellectual and cultural lenses, including scholarly perspectives grounded in
postmodern philosophies, post-colonial critical theory, cultural anthropology,
evolutionary biology, environmental ethics, and film studies, as well as
perspectives rooted in ethnic and religious identities and other subcultures
and enclaves, whether political, ideological, economic, tribal, or military.
The spiritual, moral, and political dimensions of the film
have elicited wildly diverse reactions, nowhere more apparent than in the
popular press and in cyberspace. The filmmaker and the film have been labelled
pro-civilization and anti-civilization, pro-science and anti-science,
un-American and too American, anti-Marine and pro-Marine, racist and
anti-racist, anti-indigenous and pro-indigenous, woman-respecting and
misogynistic, leftist and neo-conservative, progressive and reactionary,
activist and selfabsorbed. And, of course, there have been religious labels:
pagan, atheistic, theistic, pantheistic, panentheistic, and animistic. More
about all of these perspectives are provided in the following essays.
Observing the stunningly diverse and highly contested
cognitive and emotional responses to Avatar
reminded me of the famous Rorschach psychological test, in which individual
reactions to ink blots shown on cards vary widely, presumably because of
differences in the psychological constitution and cultural context of the test
takers. While, as readers of this volume will find, there have been some
surprising reactions to the film, it is also the case that if one were to know
the cultural context and cognitive frames of the observers, it would usually be
possible to anticipate their responses.
That different individuals and groups tend to perceive
things differently is, on the one hand, a dynamic to be welcomed, because
differently situated people may have insights that people placed elsewhere may
not. On the other hand, it is a problematic tendency, for it is also possible
for our cognitive frames to create a field of view in which other perspectives,
as well as information that might disconfirm our expectations, remain out of
focus. So it worried me when I thought about what insights might gleaned, or
missed, when considering the film, given the strong human tendency to see what
one expects, especially when we often remain insular, segregated in our own
cultural enclaves, including supposedly enlightened, academic ones.
On a personal level, although the film seemed to exemplify what I had found in my previous research, I did
not want to conclude too hastily that Avatar
provided more evidence for my dark green theses. So, with regard to initial
perceptions about the film’s dark green themes and cultural significance, I
thought I should suspend judgment, pay close attention to responses and
interpretations of the film at variance with my own first impressions, and seek
further information. I was concerned, however, about more than whether I might
misperceive the meanings and significance of the film. In the initial months
after its release, I noticed that in academic circles, there was little
cross-disciplinary debate about it. Moreover, many of the scholarly views that
were expressed struck me as “ivory towerish” in nature, disregarding the ways
in which those not embedded in scholarly subcultures were responding to and
often embracing the film—even seeing their own feelings and predicaments
reflected in it. The tendency toward Rorschach-style, quick-reaction analyses
seemed to me methodologically flawed. Last but not least, even though the film
was replete with religious themes, in the first few months after the film was
released, despite a great deal of public discussion and debate about the film,
I could not find nuanced discussion of its religious dimensions.
For all these reasons, I thought a more judicious and
interdisciplinary approach to the film and its reception was in order. Hoping
to precipitate such an enquiry, in the spring of 2010, I issued a call for
papers focusing on the spirituality and politics of Avatar. I eventually received more than thirty submissions. Several
were published in the Journal for the
Study of Religion,
Nature,
and Culture, which I edit; a wider array appear in this volume.7
The authors in the following pages express many points of
view, sometimes, but not always, finding points of agreement. Each of them
offers fascinating and important insights into the film and its putative
significance. As I argue in my concluding reflections, despite my cautious
approach, I think many of the essays provide further evidence of my argument in
Dark Green Religion and my related
initial impression about the film and its reception: Avatar reflects and dramatically presents dark green religious and
ethical themes, and its commercial success is due in part to the profound,
recently unfolding, and increasingly global changes in worldview that provide
fertile cultural ground for dark green artistic productions. In short, the
essays in this volume demonstrate that it is “good to think” about Avatar, as well as about the cultural
trends that gave rise to it and the diverse and contested reaction to it.8
These thoughts might even be of the kind that precipitate action, not on
Pandora but right here on Earth.
« « «
Acknowledgements
I wish to acknowledge the support of the
Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society at
Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich, Germany, which supported my
writing and orchestration of this project while I was in residence there as a
Carson Fellow in 2012. I am very grateful to the centre’s directors, Christof
Mauch and Helmut Trishler, for their invitation to study at this wonderful
think tank, which provides scholarly habitat for scholars working at the
intersection of the social sciences, environmental history, and the humanities.
And I want to thank the fellows for many helpful conversations and
recommendations about this and other, ongoing projects, as well as the staff
and research assistants who provided such a warm welcome and were helpful in so
many ways.
This book has been a truly collaborative effort, not only by
the contributors but also by reviewers and editors who labour on the Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature,
and Culture, to which most of the writing in this book was originally
submitted. The list of reviewers, many of whom offered helpful editorial
suggestions as well, includes Paul Ray, Greg Johnson, Bart Welling, Pat
Brereton, Terry Terhaar, Paula Willoquet-Maricondi, Rachelle Gould, Matthew
Holtmeier, Randolf Haluza-Delay, Britt Istoft, and Stephen Rust. Those who did
especially heavy lifting during the review process were David Barnhill, Adrian
Ivakhiv, Lisa Sideris, Robin Wright, Robin Globus Veldman, Reyda Taylor, Joy
Greenberg, and Joseph Witt. I received helpful leads to Avatar-related writing from Bernard Zaleha and Edward Noria, and
especially helpful theoretical suggestions and recommendations from Carson
Center Fellows Lisa Sideris, Anthony Carrigan, and Ursula Münster. I may have
forgotten others who provided a good lead or insight along the way, and if so,
I am grateful to them as well and regret their omission here.
Notes
1 Avatar Box Office Mojo,
http://www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=avatar.htm, updated 3 February 2013.
2 In 1991, I
began publishing a series of articles about such phenomena (see Taylor 1991 to
2008) and orchestrated collaborative research leading to the book (Taylor
1995a).
3 The term
“ultimate sacred postulates” is from anthropologist Roy Rappaport (1999), who
argues that oral traditions are more likely to be environmentally adaptive than
those based on writing because they are more flexible than those that put their
religious guidelines down in inviolable, written, sacred texts.
4 For more on
Cameron’s long-standing environmental radicalism, see Renzetti (2009).
5 Shortly
after seeing the film, for example, and hoping to track its reception and
influence, I created an online venue to provide further information about the
film; see “Avatar and Dark Green
Religion” at
http://www.brontaylor.com/environmental_books/dgr/avatar_nature_religion.html.
6 For the
classic statements regarding the social construction of reality, the latter
focusing on religion, see Berger and Luckmann (1966) and Berger (1969).
7 See the Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature,
and Culture 5, no. 4 (2010) and 6, no. 2 (2012).
8 That species
are not only “good to eat” but “good to think” was famously asserted by
anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss
([1963] 1969, 89), who was expressing the idea that they are culturally
and religiously significant in a number of ways. This is what I intend to
suggest by borrowing the phrase here.
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