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Dec. 31, 2009 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
12:30
1546 The True Meaning of 'Avatar' - The Freedomain Radio movie review...

From crippled soldier to ten foot tall painted hippy - one of the greatest transformations in artistic history!

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Avatar is an epic journey of emotional growth, and what a journey it is.
Anyone who starts out as a crippled soldier and ends up as a 10-foot tall painted hippie can be said to have gone through one of the lengthiest metaphorical transformations in artistic history.
Just like District 9, Avatar is, in essence, about the development of empathy.
Putting yourself in the mind of an alien is a metaphor, of course, for the development of sympathy and empathy for a foreign perspective.
At first, these aliens are inhabited for exploitive reasons to learn their ways in order to better control and manage the resources they sit on.
At the end of the movie, however, the very desire to exploit and destroy has become alien to the protagonist.
Two main groups hang poised over the natives in Avatar, those possessing empathy and reason, and those driven by cruelty and exploitation.
At the start of the film, Jake Sully is a physical and emotional cripple who cannot walk or breathe on his own, a clear metaphor for infancy.
To reinforce this, he is repeatedly called a child and a baby by Netiri, a Navi woman.
Even the 3D technology used to view the film reminds us that we must have had the same struggles figuring out how to see the world when we were rabies.
Jake has been asleep for years in a frozen state of mute transportation.
A substitute for his brother who, he informs us, has been murdered for the paper in his wallet.
This sets up the movie's basic moral premise that greed for things drives violence against people.
But Jake shows no signs of mourning his brother's death, lacking even the self-empathy required for basic grief.
In the first act of the film, Jake is tempted by two opposing worldviews, both based upon family metaphors.
The first is Colonel Quaritch, a deeply scarred soldier who constantly refers to Jake as son and himself as daddy.
Quaritch views Pandora as an environment to be controlled, conquered, and exploited through violence.
He pretends to value negotiation, but only as a prerequisite for the inevitable violence he is dying to unleash.
He is the archetypical bad dad who exploits the sentimentality of family and patriarchy to extract blind obedience from those under his power.
He takes great pride in the fact that he was almost killed on his very first day on Pandora, which is why both the Na'vi and Jake's growing empathy represent threats to him.
Because if people can live in peace on a world that immediately tries to kill him, then the violence that he brings to his every environment becomes more clear to him.
In other words, the world only attacks him because he wants to kill the world.
On the other hand is the good mother slash scientist Dr.
Grace Augustine, who possesses great empathy for children.
She is shown educating and loving the young Navi, and a deep curiosity and respect for the Navi culture.
Although a chain-smoking scientist herself, she has great affection for the mystical culture she studies, which is in many ways diametrically opposed to her own viewpoint.
This ability to accept and enjoy aesthetic differences in viewpoints is one of the hallmarks of the mature and wise mind.
The good doctor, however, possesses a fatal moral weakness that leads to her demise.
Like any infant, Jake yearns to learn how to walk, and faces two paths to achieving that goal.
Towering over him in a grossly exaggerated war robot, a metaphor for a child's view of an oversized and brutal father, Colonel Quadditch offers to give Jake his real legs back, which will be essentially paid for through the destruction of the Navi.
Learning how to walk to gain stature and strength by exploiting and destroying others is a clear analogy for the development of a pathological personality.
The good mother Dr.
Augustine offers him a different path, which is not bribery and destruction, but rather empathy and curiosity.
The infant Jake can learn how to walk immediately, and the scene where he does clearly evokes a baby's first tottering steps, by putting himself in the skin of another.
If he develops empathy and curiosity, an act of imagination at first, then he can walk immediately, even if only in his own mind.
Since true empathy must always begin as an act of curious imagination, this metaphor fits perfectly.
The Na'vi are much taller than humans and live in a wondrously foreign and dangerous world, and offer instruction and protection, a direct analogy for a toddler's view of his parents.
This is constantly reinforced throughout the movie, since after being called an infant, Jake is raised by the Na'vi to competent adulthood.
Jake is also constantly put into wombs and cribs by Dr.
Augustine and the Na'vi.
However, while Jake is in this magical learning and growing paradise of good parenting, the bad dad, Colonel Quaritch, continually takes over his consciousness, a metaphor for the repeated dissociation and regression that occurs when early trauma is reactivated.
The bad dad continually unplugs Jake from his new life, causing his Navi humanity and empathy to fall inert on the ground.
Interestingly, the turning point of the film occurs when Colonel Quattage plays one of Jake's video logs, where Jake, slumped in despair, realizes that the Navi cannot be controlled and manipulated.
Anyone who has gone through the personal crisis of genuine individuation truly recognizes this moment, when the instincts and the seemingly primitive forces of the unconscious break free of conscious control and can no longer be repressed.
Unfortunately, movies by their very nature cannot portray inner conflict, and so any progression towards more evolved mental states is usually portrayed through brutal and seemingly endless physical violence.
In real life, we outgrow evil by leaving it behind, not by engaging it in spectacular battles.
But this cannot be shown in movies.
Movie makers always succumb to the shallow desire for drama and brutal spectacle that is one of the hallmarks of evil.
As Jake's humanity and wisdom grow, the imperialist exploiters ready their weapons, and clear images of the U.S. war on terror arise.
The attack upon the Navy is directly called shock and awe, and it is impossible not to think of the destruction of the Twin Towers in New York when watching the giant tree crashing to the ground under an aerial attack.
The hysterical Navi stumbling through a snowfall of choking ash under a boiling charcoal sky seem like impossibly elongated New Yorkers on that fateful day.
This is a reminder that it is not only the helpless citizens of foreign countries that suffer the effects of brutal imperialism.
It remains a disappointing shame that the exploitation and destruction of indigenous peoples for the sake of their resources – the Navi are Iraqis and the Unobtainium is oil, of course – can only be explored through dissociated and fantastic metaphors, as was done in Battlestar Galactica during Season 3, when the Iraqi perspective was explored through the benevolent imprisonment of the humans by the imperialistic Cylons.
One day, the mainstream media will actually interview the victims of imperialism, or even show pictures of their bodies, rather than relying on artists to place them at a safe metaphorical distance.
But that day is not today, and will not be for many years to come.
The third act of Avatar is an extended and grimly metaphorical battle as the natural forces of unity, empathy, and sympathy battle with the cold and technological brutalities of exploitation and destruction.
Dr. Augustine sides with the Navi and is mortally wounded, because she is also an exploiter, although a more subtle one.
As the head corporate creep reminds her at the beginning of the film, her science is entirely paid for by the brutal exploitations of corporate militarism.
This is the corrupt cohabitation of science and the state that funds most modern research.
Avatar is the latest in a seemingly endless stream of movies depicting the noble savage whose mystical innocence and union with nature are depicted as infinitely superior to the cold technological brutality of more advanced cultures.
This is pure nonsense anthropologically.
Primitive cultures are almost always brutal towards their own children, but it does represent a very important truth unconsciously, which is that we are born innocent, virtuous, and empathetic, and must be brutalized into becoming evil.
Like all artistic environments, Pandora represents the unconscious itself, and this is reinforced by the metaphor of organic unity that Dr.
Augustine discovers late in the film, that all the trees and plants in the forest are connected, like a giant brain.
This recalls the Jungian idea that the unconscious appears aggressive if we repress and control it, but becomes meek and helpful when we release its energies through self-acceptance and empathy.
Thus Pandora, the unconscious, attacks exploiters and destroyers such as Colonel Quaritch, but lives in relative harmony with the Na'vi.
Even the predators that attacked Jake on his first night become allies against the military aggressors.
At the end of the fight, the bad father, Colonel Quadditch, who demands that Jake come to daddy, is killed by Neytiri, while Jake, separated from his avatar body, is slowly dying because he cannot breathe on his own, a metaphor for the moments after birth.
In an image that recalls the endless Madonna Christ paintings, the giant woman Netiri cradles Jake in her arms, placing an oxygen mask over his face so that he can breathe, just as a mother is responsible for bringing her baby's first breath to life.
As she cradles him, Neytiri murmurs, I see you.
Thus closing the necessary reciprocity of empathy, since she now no longer sees him as an alien, although she is seeing him in his human form for the very first time.
This mutual empathy between human and Navi brings Jake permanently to life in his new body.
That which was foreign and alien to him has now become as natural as his own skin, and he now fully inhabits the other, which is the true summit of wise empathy.
He has grown into a fully actualized personality, and thus regained his legs in the only way that growth and moral stature can be justly attained, through empathy and courage rather than violence and exploitation.
The movie ends as it begins, with Jake waking up, but this time for real.
And I for one could not help but imagine that his first act as a truly empathetic human being would be to double over in grief for the loss of his murdered brother.
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