UNDERSTANDING THE SHIFT

AVATAR

By Dennis Gaumond

While the movie, 'Avatar' was in theaters, I was in Costa Rica, so I just recently got around to seeing what all the fuss was about. I must say it is a remarkable movie - visually beautiful, very compelling - I give it five stars. I'm sure it will set a new standard in movie-making, much like 'Star Wars' did back in the Seventies.

I feel moved to comment on a couple of things about the movie that I didn't like so much.  The first is something that I call the 'Tarzan Syndrome'. Hollywood loves to put out themes where the world is in jeopardy and one man rises to the top to save the day. That messiah figure is always a white, Anglo-Saxon male, even if the story takes place in a foreign land. In the case of Tarzan, a child of white aristocratic descent is raised in Africa and soon becomes 'king of the jungle', despite the fact that black people have been living there for millennia. In the movie, 'Samurai', Tom Cruise quickly rises to become top gun in the Samurai world, despite the fact that all the other Samurai warriors have been living and training in this tradition for their entire lives. 'Avatar' continues in this Hollywood tradition - the hero/saviour is a white guy living in a cloned blue-body.

'Avatar' is similar to many Hollywood themes, including 'Star Wars' - there is a conflict between good and evil. In 'Avatar' we have corporate greed threatening the lives of a beautiful indigenous race living in harmony with nature - a metaphor for what has happened and continues to happen here on Earth. The movie succeeds in pointing out the problem, but like most Hollywood movies, falls far short in presenting the solution to the problem. Again the solution we are offered is war. The good guys find a way to defeat the bad guys in spectacular battle scenes - the hero and the villain meet in the final scenes to duke it out, etc.

Wouldn't it be refreshing if the movie offered a different solution? Wouldn't it be great if the movie gave us the spectacle of war, which the box office feels is necessary, but then the war effort fails and the good guys have to resort to something else. What if the good guys ultimately win by using the power of their collective consciousness to send light to the darkness - to change the minds of the bad guys by sending them love? Wouldn't that be a breath of fresh air? But Hollywood prefers to give us clichéd stories with predictable outcomes, and we continue to eat them up.

They say that the true nature of misinformation, which we are fed constantly by all forms of mass-media, is that it consists of 90% truth and 10% distorted truth. The 90% truth gets our attention, and then the distortion subtly misinforms us, leading us off of the path and keeping us ignorant. It is certainly easy to see that the news media employs these tactics. I feel that 'Avatar' is yet another example of this.

Even the use of the word 'avatar' is a distortion. An Avatar is an incarnation of divinity, an enlightened, ascended being who descends into physical form in order to help, usually by offering teachings. An Avatar is a being of pure love, incapable of violence. I believe that we are being misinformed when we are given the idea that our problems will be solved by some messiah figure who will lead us through the battle. We can't sit around waiting for 'the chosen one'. We must solve our problems together, collectively.

I truly believe that war is not, and never will be, the answer to the human dilemma. Even when one side is clearly and obviously 'good', which is rarely the case, we will never ward off evil on the battlefield. We cannot fight darkness with more darkness. Love is the only solution.