Feliz Na’Vi(dad)

Besides raking in about a billion bucks, the new movie “Avatar” has created quite a conversation about its treatment of religion, or lack thereof. (Caution: There are no big spoilers here, but thinking about these themes may make you miss the pretty trees for the forest.) The movie is absolutely beautiful, especially if you see […]

Besides raking in about a billion bucks, the new movie “Avatar” has created quite a conversation about its treatment of religion, or lack thereof. (Caution: There are no big spoilers here, but thinking about these themes may make you miss the pretty trees for the forest.)

The movie is absolutely beautiful, especially if you see it in 3D; the plot is basically Hollywood-by-numbers: indigenous peoples = innocent and kind; marauders = rapacious and short-sighted.

There seems to be an inverse relation, however between thinness of the plot (aptly described by Jeffrey Weiss as “Dances with Wolves” on another planet), and the voluble discussion about what it all means. Conservatives, particularly, seem quite upset about the digs director James Cameron takes at GWB in particular and capitalism in general. Humans are ravaging a planet named Pandora for a precious mineral called unobtainium. Yes, subtle.


But what about religion, you ask?

Ross Douthat of the New York Times calls the film an “apologia to pantheism,” because the Na’Vi aliens (though Pandora is their planet, so, technically, humans are the aliens, right?) worship a mother deity who is both a network of energy and the sum of all living beings.

Douthat writes: “… pantheism has been Hollywood’s religion of choice for a generation now. It’s the truth that Kevin Costner discovered when he went dancing with wolves. It’s the metaphysic woven through Disney cartoons like `The Lion King’ … And it’s the dogma of George Lucas’s Jedi, whose mystical Force `surrounds us, penetrates us, and binds the galaxy together.’

“Hollywood keeps returning to these themes because millions of Americans respond favorably to them. From Deepak Chopra to Eckhart Tolle, the `religion and inspiration’ section in your local bookstore is crowded with titles pushing a pantheistic message.”

Jay Michaelson of HuffPo disagrees: “Roughly speaking … (the) Na’Vi subscribe to a combination of pantheism and theism, a view scholars today call `panentheism.’ As scholar of religion Gershom Scholem observed, panentheism is usually rooted less in faith, as Douthat said, than in experience. Like mystics here on Earth, the Na’Vi have an experience of unity of consciousness with other beings, all of which (themselves included) are really just manifestations of one Being, which they call Eywa. “

Mark Silk of Spiritual Politics even sees strong Christian elements in “Avatar, ” …consider the name of the scientist played by Sigourney Weaver: Grace Augustine. Is Cameron giving us a little hint that the film may have something more up its religious sleeve than the Gospel of Sustainability?

“On first meeting our ex-marine hero, Jake Sully, the Na’vi princesses (says that humans are) greedy, thoughtless…unredeemed (uh, sullied). Did I mention that his life is spared and he is chosen to learn the ways of the Na’vi because the Goddess’ seeds alight on him? Later, he’s informed that the Na’vi believe every person can be `born twice’…born again. And, at the end, he is in fact reborn as his avatar. Throughout the film, Augustine serves as the person who pretty much understands all this, albeit … through a glass darkly. So without overdoing it, I’d say that Cameron has married some good old Christian grace-and-redemption theology to his eco-anti-imperialist parable.”


Finally, we have Mayank Shekhar of the Hindustan Times writing from the country that gave us the word “avatar” before we all started using it to refer to our infinitely more attractive online personas. In Indian theology, an avatar is a deity who has descended to earth. In the blue Na’Vis, Shekhar sees an echo of Lord Shiva. And Indian filmmaker Ashok Roa told Hinduism today that “the film’s use of avatar is a close relationship to the original meaning. It is a word meaning reincarnation and isn’t meant to always mean a representative of God on Earth. It simply means one being in another form.”

Got all that?

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