Avatar struck box office gold with a blending of Ferngully (or Atlantis or Star Wars) & The Matrix, and a bit of LOST thrown in for good measure. This film was so familiar as I viewed it that it was hard to shake the feeling that I'd seen it before. Perhaps because I have.
Like so many films before it, the film creatively syncretizes numerous religious perspectives into a palatable dish that goes down easy for the heroes of the story. The Na'Vi bear a striking resemblance in many ways to American Indians, and of course we are now supposed to side with them. Long gone are the days of Cowboys and Indians when we look down on the natives for their savagery. Instead their respect for the earth and believe in Eywa is touching. This "god" is a panentheistic entity nearly impossible to distinguish from "the force" of Star Wars fame, except that it is eventually referred to as their "great mother."
Also thrown in for good measure are a couple references to Christianity, in order to help make all this feel familiar enough to be palatable. Flying mountains are called the "Hallelujah" (literally "praise God") mountains, and this show-stopping line by one of the native Na'vi people during an initiation process where the hero (Jake Sully) is striving to be among their people. Neytiri says, "Every person is born twice. The second time is when you earn your place among the people forever."
All of which gives me pause to stop and reflect on the significance and impact of these references. Are these references included because of their resonance with movie viewers? Are they a reflection of the muddled convictions of the writers and producers of these films? Or is there a deeper reason for such repetition? Is there a constantly unsatisfied longing that prompts such spiritual speculation? Is there a desire to be reborn and a lack of awareness or trust in how to go about it? Perhaps that is unrealistically hopeful.
But the more intriguing question for me is to consider the effect such speculative fiction has on our souls. What is the net result of such repetitive viewing of stories like these? Does it function as a placebo in the place of the real remedy? Or does it awaken the longing in the soul even deeper to fertilize the soil for the planting of the seed of the Word of God? Like most such questions, I suspect the answer is both, or either, or neither one. People receive messages differently, and these stories are such a muddled mishmash of confused ideology that it is hard to know what among it will stick in the mind from one person to the next.
What I do know is this. There are important reasons films like this continue to do well at the box office. Spirituality sells. Consumers are not only interested in these things, they will pay to reflect on them. Another reality worth considering: Packaging matters. Avatar is arguably one of the most visually impressive films ever released, and this is part of the appeal for many people. I've been stunned how many people have told me that seeing Avatar makes them think or heaven, or that they hope heaven looks like that. More than anything else, this tells me the makers of this film have tapped people's creative imaginations.
Whether you regard films like Avatar as wonderful or dangerous (or both), there are lessons to be learned from considering why so many people are enamoured with them.
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Hm, Avatar.
I watched "Angels and Demons" last night, the pre-quel turned sequel to "The daVinci Code." Along with great numbers of other movies I've watched recently (from sci-fi "Serenity" to the pseudo-Christian "A Walk to Remember") the movie suggests that religion has little bearing on actual reality but is simply a "personal belief."
The unspoken assumption is that personal belief is just a fairy tale people spin in their own head to find comfort in a meaningless world. Implied in that is an unshakeable belief that the world is meaningless at its core.
This is the dogmatic belief of our day: that the world is without meaning and the best we can hope for in the empty darkness is to weave a security blanket from our own cotton-candy faith.
Francis Schaeffer dug his shovel under this weedy assumption in his various books. He points out that Western philosophy took this track through our own stubborn humanism. Back in the Enlightenment, Humanists and Theists alike were mesmerized by the power of rationality and logic. They decided that they would stop depending on God's words from the Bible, and instead were supremely confidant that by using human reasoning alone they could find absolute meaning in life for themselves. Thus followed a string of philosophers from Kant to Kierkegaard to Nietzche, progressively disproving each other's attempts to prove morality and absolute truth. By the time the existentialists rolled around (Sarte, Camus, etc.) philosophers began to believe that since they couldn't prove meaning and reality by our own human logic, it therefore can't exist. A bit petulant, I think. Sartre was therefore forced to such sad theories as that it doesn't matter what you do (help an old lady across the street or push her in front of a bus) as long as its your choice, an act of your own will. Sound Disney-familiar? Philosophers by and large have been so humiliated today by our grand failed experiment in finding meaning for ourselves that they don't even know if we exist. They admit it's an act of faith to believe we are even real in any sense. This is where rejecting God's authority and depending on our human reasonings has led us--into empty darkness, where Nietzsche lived in insanity for the last eleven years of his life, unable to write anything coherent any more, or to follow Sartre and passionately fight for causes he believed to be right, though according to his philosophy, their rightness was subjective.
Schaeffer says modern people have an upper and lower story with no stairwell between them. In the lower story is the nuts and bolts of our daily life, the pragmatic world we find ourselves in. The upper story is our belief or meaning. Using human genius we have failed to find a way to connect a higher meaning to our lower lives.
We are left with a meaningless world where we gingerly tiptoe around the fact of our ignorance of any real truth and use (as Schaeffer predicted) meaningless religious-sounding talk that sounds meaningful but actually believes nothing.
e.g Avatar.
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