Avatar: Cultural Incarnations

Avatar: Cultural Incarnations

Avatar is 21st century movie magic culture. It is the cult of hollywood performed to perfection. American culture ate this film. I consumed this film. Avatar is the product of US-secular/christian-consumer culture gone mad; it filled the masses; it was the bulldozer; it assimilated the ‘other’. I argue that the material production of Avatar is its own critique: the excess of wealth, privilege, and access needed to produce the film is an index, a scaffold, that marks the asymmetrical levels of global inequality in the present. In this way I believe the film is offering insight into subaltern realities that always already confront the encroachment of dominant military/industrial practice and ideology. When and where does US secular christian culture wake-up to its own participation in the formations of violence, historical and present?

The critique of Avatar stands firmly in relationship to its ‘other’ readings - its possibility. Avatar is an event that projects an image of possibility on the American psyche: the possibility of integration. Avatar animates cultural dialogue attempting to integrate many dynamic forces: science/religion, sacred/profane, nature/culture, matter/spirit. The integration of these forces bridge the gap of correspondence between neurobiology and life-after-death, indigenous knowledge and genetic engineering, wisdom and technology. Avatar makes possible both the critique of industrialism and capitalistic orders, while “seeing” new ways of ecological being, even an economy of spirit (Ewah). It is at once mythical and magical, science fiction and social commentary - integrated.