The Way Of Water: 001

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Edit: The full piece has been completed and is available free in PDF form here.

An-My Lê

Thales enim Milesius, qui primus de talibus rebus quaesivit, aquam dixit esse initium rerum, deum autem eam mentem, quae ex aqua cuncta fingeret…

Thales of Miletus, who was the first to investigate these matters, said that water was the first principle of things, but that God was the mind that moulded all things from water…

cero, De Natura Deorum, 45 BCE

This is the first of four texts discussing James Cameron’s The Way of Water. It covers the film’s opening 42 minutes. It is recommended that you watch at least those minutes, if not the full film, before reading.

Why is Avatar worth engaging with? Because it is one of the dominant myths of our time. There is no other work of art at this scale—either in terms of capital and manpower invested, or in terms of viewership and cultural influence, that touches on the major political issues of our time: indigenous land rights, ecology, climate change, virtuality, the biological family.

If the preface is wearying, skip it.

Preface

Things may change, but not for now and not for you; little point in feeling blue, for capital you must accrue, or end up someone else’s stew. And those who do not heed the warning, will not wake up in the morning; those who don’t protect their eggs, will see them snatched before they hatch, become some predator’s ganache. Serengeti rules are such, that fools and antiques make for lunch, and power is as power does, impersonal it bears no grudge.

But all this conflict and this warring’s built on sharing of the scoring, built on cells who stuck together; and found in sync some gain, and tethered; and trade and swap and weather the weather, better off when bound together.

So some exploit, some go exploring; some man the gates for others, snoring; some work production, others abduction, using the senses to adapt to fluxion, and surmount obstruction, and prevent destruction: yea, each possesses unique function.

Now none can ever stand alone, dependent are they stitched and sewn, like kings need peasants for their throne, like men need governance to own. For each has gone and specialized, has given up its ears or eyes, its mouth (it cannot feed itself), but lie in waiting for the heart-pumped blood pulsating—each sacrifice eliminating redundant traits, self-regulating.

But wait: for this coordinating sync begins with simple stating—with congregating calculating—with discriminating indicating. Yea, in the beginning was the word, a token from the clement lord, who bid the beasts mind what they heard, and what came next, and what referred; who taught that lions in their roaring tell the world, in each outpouring, health and strength, so others might avoid a goring…

Intro

The film’s first shots are of Pandora. Of the Ayram alusìng—the floating Hallelujah Mountains, engulfed in mist, dripping and saturated, clouds condensing into aerial rivers which cascade off their cliffs. Of the four-winged, blue and green fkio soaring beneath the Tree of Souls.

The story of Avatar starts and ends with Pandora. The Terran dream in which the films originate was not a dream of characters, or of conflict. It was a dream of an ecology, a silvan vision of bioluminescence. That’s where Avatar began for Cameron, and it’s where Avatar begins for us. Sunlight peeking through vines; explosively colorful fauna. Here’s the thing about drama, about monomyth, about narrative. All stories are eco-stories; all hero’s journeys are really narratives about ecology. The causal ripples, the structural interdependence, the pressures and tides. The hero is significant because of how he alters the balance. All heroes—and all villains—are either disruptors, protectors, or restorers of equilibrium.¹ This is why all monomyths begin with departures from reality: the arrival of a falling star, a new stranger in town, a causal ripple which journeys through time and space to the hero’s world. The ready-at-hand becomes present-to-hand. The inherited rituals grow maladaptive. The old gods walk again.

Our virtual camera moves through the canopy, and then the undergrowth—from macroscopic to microscopic—from the view of the Skypeople, to the view on the ground. A nantang viperwolf shimmers cross a branch. Sully narrates: “The forests of Pandora hold many dangers. But the most dangerous thing about Pandora? Is you may grow to love her.” This, over close-ups of Sully’s wife Neytiri. Both “woman” and “indigenous” stand for “close to nature,” and set up the basic symbolic indices of our story: white man—standing for a literally alienated civilization—falls in love with an indigenous princess—who represents embodiment and connection. I don’t make the rules; these aren’t essential or inherent traits of the demographies in question. Historical contingency has given these symbols their meaning and who are we to argue? The freckles across Neytiri’s nose and cheeks and brow are like a constellation of stars, and she stalks the forest silently, her belly engorged by the child within. The fertility of woman and earth here merged, united by a pronoun. Mother. If you know Cameron’s work, then you know something of what that concept means for him. In the dark, the stars glow ever-brighter, descending down Neytiri’s arms and hands, vaguely elvish. The Na’vi are tall and slender, like dancers, and that’s part of the web of symbols too. To symbolize is to typify—all compressions leave something out—but the good director complicates, adds to our field of types. Tweaks and extends the metaphors that structure our thinking.

Sully continues his story: “We sing the song chords to remember, each bead a story in a life. A bead for the birth of our son.” Within the flashback of memory, we see Sully hold up his first-born, Neteyam, to the rays of crown-piercing light—a sort of Simba, and this is the symbolweb too: the clan turn their heads to follow the Son, incanting Neteyam’s name. And we see Neytiri, fingering the beads, rosary-like, by the fire: animating power, bringer of structure and a promise of destruction to come. She sings to herself, in a quiet kind of prayer.

Music is the god channel, spirit manifesting in ever-changing form: splitting, blending, varying, consolidating. One theme is extinguished; another emerges from the silence and the empty space. Spirit vying with itself—strife and life and death all means of prolonging the story. There is ultimate victory in local defeat, and ultimate defeat in local victory; variation and newness are ways of continuing the song. Repetition is death; only novelty replenishes. A Ship of Theseus for a changing sense of “self,” of “family,” of “relatedness” through time. A note or chord that sounds utterly alien—erroneous, misplaced, dissonant—might find itself utterly at home a few bars later—the progression changing, and the key modulated. The Great Improviser modulates his song to incorporate error, erase its status as error, which is only determined in the rear-view.²

Sully: “A bead for when we adopted our daughter, Kiri, born of Grace's avatar”— under mysterious circumstance, a virgin birth. “A bead for the first communion with Eywa. The people say we live in Eywa, and Eywa lives in us.” Parts connecting to whole, connecting with each other through whole. Children at war, gathering round their mother, recalling relatedness, a shared inheritance. Another son is born—Lo’ak—and a daughter, Tuk.

“Happiness is simple, but who would’ve thought a jarhead like me could crack the code.” The warrior has found peace; Herakles does not slay his children; we see him playing with the little ones, telling stories of the old times, in their canopy’s hammock. Telling how the wardogs, the profiteers, were defeated and sent home to Earth—their lives spared in a show of grace. But many of the scientists were allowed, and chose, to stay. Cameron makes a lot, in this film, of contrasting warrior and scientist—mainly through the avatar of Kiri. But he’ll also take pains to pit the traditional warrior (integrated, vigorous, spiritual) against the modern-day marine (myopic, rigorous, mechanical)—as he pits the Na’vi healer-priest (holistic, mystical, embodied) against the human techie (analytic, reductionist, deflationary). Sully’s transition in the first film is from marine to warrior; it comes with an expansion of perspective, consciousness, and responsibility.

Now that we’ve been intro’d to the Na’vi kids, we get intro’d to Spider—the son of Skypeople, abandoned when his father was killed by Na’vi in the war. “Orphaned by the war, he was raised by the lab guys.” (Where war destroys, the scientists repair.) “He wasn’t part of our family. He was like a stray cat constantly around. Inseparable from our kids.” That’s Jake’s perspective, as a one-time Skyperson, and the perspective of his kids, who are innocents. What does Neytiri think? “Stray cat” would be generous. “To Neytiri he would always be one of them. Alien.” She turns to Sully, says: “He belongs with his own kind.”

But who are Spider’s kind, anyway? The bio-son of Quaritch; the adopted son of Sully. Every element in Cameron’s Avatar—and in Cameron’s films generally—is geared to complicate the family/alien dichotomy. Spider’s a mongrel, a hyphen, a slash. But to the children, he’s one of them. And insofar as Spider will be treated as family, in this film, he will act like family, and insofar as he is treated as outsider, as Skyperson? He will act like a Skyperson. And so Neytiri will bring a piece of her own doom upon her. She is still provincial, in certain ways. She is open-minded enough to marry a freak—to adopt a freak—to give birth to freaks—but she herself has never quite been a freak, never bridged two worlds herself, in her own body. She’s always been an Omatikaya. She always will be.

Already the lines are being drawn: inside and outside, who is part of la Familia, who’s adopted or biological, who’s a person and who’s a pet and who’s a beast of burden. Wanted and unwanted, valued and less valued. Whose body is adapted to the planet’s atmosphere; who needs to wear an oxygen mask (Miles “Spider” Socorro) every moment of his life. All of them are freaks in one sense or another. Sully is an avatar, his children are hybrids of avatar and Na’vi, Kiri is an immaculate conception, and Neytiri is the freak who agreed to start this family. Even before Sully got his avatar body he was a paraplegic, someone not quite whole by army standards. It is a family of outsiders who find themselves somehow in possession of immense local standing—the Toruk Makto, and the heiress to the Omatikaya clan.

(It is probably important that in these films—in these Pocahontas narratives—the white Westerner is an untitled commoner, while the indigenous love interest is royalty. Maybe it’s a form of wish fulfillment; maybe it’s the practical fact that no monarch would be caught dead hacking through undergrowth; maybe it’s an unconscious projection of the relative worth we ascribe to the races. Either way, the titleless soldier-slash-frontiersman must have his excellence revealed; the native princess recognizes something in him, a courage and nobility which she marks as royal, and which makes him a worthy mate.)

There are hints of strife among the children as they play, echoing battles past and foreshadowing battles to come. They’re arguing over property, a toy tetrapteron, tugging it back and forth while they shoud, “It’s mine!” “I hate you,” shouts Lo’ak. “I hate you times infinity,” Tuk rebuts. Dad steps in and softly polices them, “Don’t make me come over there.” Children’s games like a microcosm of adult conflict, but is material possessiveness the way of the Na’vi, or is this Sully’s influence showing?

Now we get a scene for the parents in the audience—of “date nights away from the kids,” Jake and Neytiri performing aerial acrobatic (vaguely erotic) on their banshees. This is the beginning of many nods to the film’s intended audience of nuclear families: an all-ages blockbuster, its characters are built to be relatable to both generations, and their problems, relationships, and interactions are partially reflections of modern family life. Me? I kinda hate this aspect of the movie, it breaks immersion and comes across corny. But I’m willing to cede that it says something true about Sully’s lingering—and perhaps unshakeable—earthly interpretive framework, the way he naturalizes and domesticates all that’s mystical and strange about his new adopted world. Fat chance that the Na’vi date, but whatever they do, Jake can’t be bothered to tell the difference.

But this text isn’t about what I like or dislike. It’s about the film. Or not even. It’s easy to wonder: Why write or even read a novella-length monograph about an Avatar sequel? I say: None of this is about Avatar. All of it is metaphor for the everyday web of conflicts and relations that we are all, irretrievably, enmeshed in.

A New Star in the Sky

“Happiness is simple.” Happiness as resting protocol. Happiness as an equilibrium that feels like it will last forever. Everything suddenly perfectly right. This is how moods can be: Feeling like they’ll never end. Projected onto the world, cheery map collapsing onto territory. Hence depressive ontology and its claim on nihilistic realism: the depressive feels not that he is depressed, but that he has discovered the true nature and meaningless nature of the world. There are kinds of happiness that make people believe in God: not that they have fought for and found a haven of safety, but that the world is a fundamentally safe and loving place. But “baby we were born to die,” as the Boss sings it, and equilibria are made to be disrupted. Every regime is eventually succeeded. The question: on what terms does the succession play out? “Entropy increases with melting, vaporization or sublimation.” Apropos the film-at-hand, see also “Entropy increases when solids or liquids dissolve in water.” Heat causes the atoms to vibrate faster and faster until their bonds break apart, and re-bond with oxygen atoms, and float upward as gas. Connections are broken, stabilities destabilized.

“Happiness is simple. But the thing about happiness? It can vanish in a heartbeat.” Sully and Neytiri are lying together in the darkness when they suddenly sit up, their eyes shooting skyward. A new star in the sky that brightens and glints and grows. “That could only mean one thing”—life, crossing the great desert-threshold of space to reach this planetary amniote, this oasis, this bubble-ecology of the void like an apple. Here comes appetite, searching for energy. A causal ripple. A stranger, riding into town.

At first it’s a godly light, a star over Bethlehem. Then, from holy white and blue, a gun-metal gray: Great ships, lowering landing modules, beams of fire shooting out below the rockets as they land and napalm everything for miles. Huge billowing clouds of flame, the megafauna panicking, fleeing in every direction but without hope—a sequence which evokes nothing if not the aboriginal conquest of Australia.

Quickly, but this is important to get out of the way: the modern West idealizes pre-European indigenous populations as pacifists living in uncomplicated harmony with an Edenic nature. There are shades of comparative truth in this picture: nomads may live more lightly off of land; slow-changing cultures keep better equilibrium with environments. But our best attempts at serious historiography show that geo-engineering, deforestation, environmental destruction, species extinction, and agricultural breeding programs were all common in the pre-Columbian Americas. If there is a difference between indigenous and Western peoples, it is of degree and not of kind—of situation, more than disposition. It is probably time to dispense with the simplistic view that Avatar depicts the “true, essential barbarity” and parasitism—the “carcinogenic” quality, quoting Sontag—of Western peoples and cultures, at least in contrast with some inherent, mutualistic, quasi-Zen enlightenment of indigenous Na’vi. Cameron’s Na’vi—or at least, the Na’vi as they are commonly interpreted—are closer to Western caricatures than to flesh-and-blood organisms subject to evolutionary logic.³ They have the feel of a colonial-era, quasi-Christian moral construct, as contra Darwin as creationism. And Cameron has repeatedly hinted that darker, more violent “fire” tribes also inhabit Pandora, and will make an appearance in future films—this at least being faithful to the cultural and moral heterogeneity of native peoples across the Americas. There is no monolith known as the American Indian, though historical compression, and pragmatic indifference, conspire to make one. There are the Republican Iroqouis (Haudenosaunee), and there are the Imperialist Aztec (Mexica), and there is a world of difference between.⁴

This is a film, Disney funding not withstanding, that depicts what it really means to be an organism: the darker, tribal, cthonic realities that undergird our Christian moral intuitions and Apollonian aspirations. What it means to be subject to the sick and sublime logic of natural selection. Some organisms, blessed with chloroplasts, derive most of their energy freely, from the sun. The rest of us—even the herbivores—must destructure other forms of life in order to keep on living. Must tear and chew and grind and bathe in acid. This is food: the decomposition of complex structure, an increase in entropy. Organization converted into heat. Making a mess of the Other, in order to keep your internals orderly. Keeping the fire of the self burning by breaking down cell walls and molecular bonds. Even for plants, life is far from peaceful. Real estate conflicts are inexorable; roots battle over access to water and quality soil; leaves shade each other out, and struggle for sun through a crowded canopy. Flowers mimic and compete for pollinators in elaborate deceptions, emit false chemical signals to sabotage the growth patterns of rival plants. Amidst this conflict, cooperation abounds, no question: trade networks between evergreen and deciduous trees, mutualisms between the plants and the bacteria that help feed them. Nature is not only war. And war involves elaborate cooperation. This is what the microbiologist Lynn Margulis understood, in her work on endosymbiosis. Nature is as thoroughly defined by cooperation as conflict, and neo-Darwinian tales of selfish genes are partial narratives. I will try to argue that if you look closely enough, conflict and cooperation are revealed to be not opposed but self-constituting, interdependent processes. By the same token of group selection, if you’re not in you’re out, and if you’re not with us, you’re against us: the fact of multicellularity and cooperation, the emergence of teams and family units, does not change the ubiquity of warfare. It merely re-draws battle lines. It merely makes the warfare more elaborate.

Back to the plot; back to Pandora. It's unclear whether all this burning and killing is intentional, or just a byproduct of needing a large, flattened clearing to land the rockets. Either way the destruction is a feature, not a bug. Canopies provide cover for Na’vi; a barren waste gives the new base visibility for miles; it’s a strategy straight from the Vietnam playbook. And the megafauna, from a military’s perspective? Another a set of threats, another possible complication best eliminated—nothing more. And if the scientists on the command ship complain, well, that’s because they’ve invested their identities in paper wars back home; fuck ‘em, and full steam ahead. There are advantages to this lack of sentiment, this lack of aesthetic consideration. One advantage is survival.

Then a module like a black monolith touches down on scorched earth, and a cavernous metal hangar door extends into a ramp. Amidst the cinders and windborne sparks and the orange glow of Shiva, god of death, the great machinery rolls out accompanied by metal mechas. Terminators. Cameron’s been here before. Like forces of Mordor: a fiery renewal; machines enslaved to an idol. (And motifs in Horner’s score, here, echo Shore’s themes for Peter Jackson—another nod.)

Consumer of worlds, which loves only calories and gigawatts. Neytiri, wife of Sully, daughter and royal of the Omatikaya, watches from distant cliffs, senseless in her pain, tears streaming as smoke billows; morning comes, but no light penetrates the darkened sky.⁵

“Entropy increases with melting, vaporization or sublimation.”Heat causes atoms to vibrate faster and faster until their bonds break. Connections are broken, stabilities de-stabilized. Enthalpy coincides with an increase in entropy, united by the Gibbs free energy principle. Prayer! Sacrifice! Service! to the Goddess of Entropy, the Lord & Lady of the house. Goddess, whose only counter is prolongation and economy! Goddess, indefatigable and invincible; the only victory against her is born of grace!

Now there is only darkness. The screen is entirely black. And then? A small, blurry, indistinct light. A new star in the sky. Above and around you, a large, white, overhead halo. Goggle-and-masked faces emerge from the shadows, peering down at you. “You're fine. Stay calm.” They shine flashlights in your eyes. You blink, groggy and startled. And who are you? Apparently a berserker—a hyper-aggressive, roid-raging marine. Reincarned as a “Recombinant”—the body of an avatar, the mind and memory of a KIA marine. A mutant, a mulatto. A hybrid. The worst thing; the thing you despised. You, become like the race-traitor Sully.

Quaritch is a Victorian British name, for whatever that’s worth. There’s 19th century novel called Colonel Quaritch, whose titular character served abroad in British colonial wars, across India and Egypt. A more sympathetic character than our Quaritch, but still occupying the same brutal position as occupier. “The terror of what in defence of his own life he was forced to do revolted him even in the heat of a fight.”

What in defense we are forced to do. Choose to do, I guess. But in a them-or-me logic that most of us understand, knowing we’d make the same call. The only unusual thing about 19th century Quaritch is his sense of conscious conscience, and the extremity of his self-defensive acts. The basic logic of defensive maneuvering—aggression born of fear—is central to our toolkit, a move usually repressed below the level of clear awareness. So that we maneuver in pre-emptive ways that advantage ourselves at the cost of others, and strike threats before they may strike us, and in general choose, in those tradeoffs between personal suffering and the suffering of others, that more abstract latter form, which takes cognitive work to simulate, in contrast to the vivid acuity of personal suffering, which takes cognitive work to transcend.

“Let there be light.” Our 22nd century Quaritch awakens—is virgin-born—to torches. These films have all sorts of parallels to the Alien franchise, and these laboratory “birth” scenes, like the hypersleep-style avatar coffins, are one of them. Even the ship’s operating room looks like a Ridley Scott set. The marine’s first response to his awakening involves punching out the nurse attendants, flipping table trays, and knocking shit onto the ground. In other words: panic. The human nurses flee, calling for security and sealing the room. Other, Na’vi-looking bodies come restrain the colonel. “It’s me, Corporal Wainfleet!’ one shouts, looking him in the eyes. A name is a powerful thing. Quaritch’s feral teeth relax. These are his marines, his guys—like sons to him—their minds transplanted into Na’vi bodies. He’ll accept in them what he can’t accept in himself. He admires his new, sharpened canines in the glass’s mirror-like surface. Behind the glass, attendants watch him, hidden by glare, a two-way mirror. Underneath the surface, there is always another layer. And there are so many surfaces in this film, two-dimensional barriers which, broken, reveal endless worldly depth. The surface of skin, the surface of sea, and an ecology below.

Those he believed were his enemies turned out to be his allies. They looked him in the eye, and they said, You know me. And those he saw as threats turned out to be his agents, partisans, his right-hand men—extension of his own figurative body.

Message from the Past

Now, on-screen, we see this new, Recombinant Quaritch getting oriented. See him watch a screen of his own, a screen that shows his previous human self staring into a screen, captured by a webcam. Identity and virtuality recurse, as Quaritch’s past self briefs him on his present: “The idea is to get the minds of the saltiest on-world operators, like Corporal Wainfleet over there, and your humble narrator, into recombinant bodies... Loaded with my memory and my charm. What you won't remember is my death, because it hasn’t happened yet, and it ain’t gonna.” Everyone believes their equilibrium will never be disrupted.

As the screen-nested Quaritch-ghost speaks, a coffin-like link unit called the Soul Drive opens its lid behind him, and the Corporal steps out; another layer of background becomes framed focal point. And behind the orientation screen, over the top? The present-day Corporal, floating peaceful in zero-G. It’s hard to describe and hard to envision these layers—this series of rug-pulls like waking from a dream, only to wake again—but if you’ve seen the film, you’ll know the moment I’m talking about. What’s important is the takeaway and the takeaway is simple: Look at all these layers of past and present, virtuality and connection, all these nestings and simulacra. Look how the grounding of any figure can perpetually recede. There’s a trick in vajrayana meditation, to open up awareness, that works like this: Notice a figure, now notice the ground against which the figure stands. Take this ground as figure and repeat.

We’ve gone on too many digressions, are moving too slowly—so, quickly now, for the last time, let’s talk hybrids. Because every important character in this film—with the possible exception of Neytiri—is some synthetic, in-between species. “Freaks,” to get technical. It’s common, especially in conservationist circles, to think of hybrids as somehow unnatural. (A similar fear of status-quo change underlies the labeling of “invasive” species.) Downstream, maybe, of our simplified, middle-school biology understanding of speciation. We tend to see species as something pure, a natural, Platonic joint in the world. An organism by definition cannot reproduce with other species. (So the simplification goes.) True, hybridity is somewhat uncommon, and fertile hybrids are all the more rare. But rarity, on human timescales, can be a dominant factor of change and adaptation at an evolutionary timescale. This, too, Margulis understood. An event may occur once in a million years and still be transformative. And yet three new Senecio species (Yorkwort, Oxford ragwort, and Welsh groundsel) emerged in Britain from hybridization in just a few centuries. These hybrids endlessly cross with one another, back and forth, such that even the original, hybridized species typically contain small amounts of other species’ genes. Such hybridization is becoming all the more common with modernity, in large part the result of what Chris D. Thomas calls “New Pangea”—the way humans have bridged previous buffer zones between ecosystems via trade and migration patterns. In other words, these hybrids result from greater connection. And Avatar, as a franchise about ecology, is also equally a franchise about connection (tantra, link, queue): ecology at its most fundamental is the study of the ways that organisms’ fates are bound up, and interdependent.

There are serious scientists who believe that Homo sapiens are a back-cross between monkeys and pigs. The crackpot who advanced this idea, Eugene McCarthy, was perhaps the world’s leading authority on avian hybrids, authoring the Oxford Handbook of Avian Hybrids. Less controversially, all life forms are hybrids; all species are mongrels; all “humans” contain Neanderthal and Denisovan and Homo Sapien and viral DNA. Mitochondria once live autonomously before they were absorbed to become the cell’s powerhouse. The same is true of chloroplasts in plant cells. Without hybridity, there are no eukaryotes; without eukaryotes, there is no higher life. Sex—the hybridization of individual genomes—is the dominant form of reproduction; and even the clonal, binary fission of bacteria is supplemented by prokaryotes’ promiscuous swapping of DNA strands. “The idea of a tree of life should be replaced by the image of a more tangled mosaic of interacting lives in which [different species] may continue to exchange some genes for millions of years after they first separate” (Chris D. Thomas, Inheritors of the Earth).

Every known organism is an extensive system of symbiosis. One cannot conceive of the concept of the supposedly individual or atomic organism without a concept of symbiosis, both at microscopic and macroscopic levels. But our natural impulses towards conceptual purity, toward ontological essentialism, mislead us into genocide and holocaust, culling so-called American “beefalo” bison for possessing small amounts of cattle DNA—even as the much-protected European bison is itself a full-blown cross between auroch cattle and steppe bison. These essentialisms, no matter how “benign” or “progressive” should scare us; they are primordially fascistic in their violent upholding of some “original,” pure order falsely projected onto a nature constantly in flux.

The apparent opposite of hybridizing connection is rigid opposition, conflict, a keeping apart, “gardens need walls.” And yet, from what is synthesis born if not the opposition between antithesis and thesis? “You are my enemy now, and you shall be my brother-in-war.” Chase someone long enough, battle someone long enough, and they’re the closest thing you’ve got to a peer. It’s why Bond villains endlessly postpone on killing Bond. “You are my enemy now, and you shall be my brother-in-war.” Cue the ghost of Quaritch, speaking through the screen, still obsessed with his old rival: “Well, whatever happened, if you’re any clone of mine you'll be looking for payback, and Jake Sully would be the top of that list. Remember kid, a marine can’t be defeated. Oh you can kill us, but we’ll just regroup in hell. Semper fi!” Colonel out. Two fingers extended, shutting off the screen. One-way transmissions without feedback, passing themselves forward, tiling themselves across the universe. The marine boot will stamp itself across the stars because the logic of power does not need justification; it is definitional. And those at the top of an ecology may grow fat and complacent on the milk of their land, and the hungry will inherit the earth. No sacrifice too great, semper fi. Where the decadent sacrifice nothing, and lose everything, the marine will sacrifice everything, and therefore lose nothing.

Already we have the revenge cycles, the feedback loops of blood for blood. Some people think blood feud is a cultural construct; this is backwards; even vervet monkeys blood feud, and inherit the sins of their fathers. Culture is built to suppress blood feuds, to put a tamper on tribalism. The Laws of the Ancestors. The Tulkun Way. The Sermon on the Mount.

Already we have marine-as-ethos, marine-as-meme, marine-as-mindset, semper fi. Power and nothing but it; the taste for pleasure replaced by tough perseverance. A boot, a mantra, self-replicating, printing itself across the universe. Marine as demon, marine as transpersonal, parasitic intelligence. And then there was darkness. Operatic music plays, like something from Phantom Menace’s duel on Naboo, in the Theed palace generators. A group of Na’vi plummet from the sky on their banshees like starfighters, flying through the forest canopy. They wield the weapons of the Skypeople—hybridization, in service of survival.

Frontier Warfare

The convoy ambush is straight out of Call of Duty or Red Dead Redemption. The comp-animated tracking shots; orange tracers from the automatic weapons; slow-motion hit-stop as the Mag-Lev Jungle Train flips head over heels, balloons into billowing fire. (Solid into gas.)

It’s a train robbery of old, straight from the fables of a fifties Western. Natives ride in on horseback all war cry and hoof-stomp—except the horses are direhorses—“nectarivores,” in Cameron’s canon—and the warriors carry TOXON-81 Missile Launcher—descendents of the FIM-92 Stinger launchers used in our modernday U.S. military. This, technically, is not allowed—the Na’vi religion prohibits metal weaponry—but the Toruk Makto is given the right to bend sacred rules in exceptional circumstances, and an existential threat is such a circumstance.

Now Sully and his pack of warriors from the sky, armed with Recom M69 assault rifles. The Avatar Visual Dictionary tells us that these guns can take 0226-LSAR ammo—rounds that shatter on impact, break into paingful killings shards and deal lethal hemorrhage. These are the same guns that Quaritch—Sully’s brother-in-war—wields throughout the film.

As the train somersaults and explodes, Neytiri shoots hovercraft down from the air as triumphant music plays. Her bowstring has enough tension to pierce bulletproof glass. The Wiki informs me that the hovercraft are Aerospatiale SA-2 Samson rotorwings, but we can call them just rotorwings or Samson. Jake machine-guns down a Samson pilot as Neytiri sticks another with her arrows, whooping and hollering with their weapons held overhead. Up in the clouds on banshees, younger brother Lo’ak attempts to convince older brother Neteyam that they should descend, should join the fray. This pattern plays out over and over in the film, and my only defense is a heavy sigh. I’d rather not recap the dynamic in detail so I’ll be brief. Both of the sons are torn between warming the bench and listening to coach—or else defying their father and proving themselves men. Lo’ak wants to prove himself more than he wants to follow dad; Neteyam wants to follow dad more than he wants to prove himself. But Lo’ak has a talent for forcing the issue—and cries “Don’t be a wuss” before swooping down, toward the action. It’s not just your life you risk, when you pull this shit, and Lo’ak will learn this soon enough, the hard way. Neteyam’s forced to follow—protectively or egoistically, you choose. I find it a bit tiring, the taunting and goading, the predictable disaster that repeatedly follows Lo’ak’s impulsive involvement. But I guess what plot needs to teach him is the logic of connection.

A sidebar—Lo’ak’s hair, the two braids over his right eye, echo Eddie in Terminator: Judgment Day—a way to signal teen angst and rebellion and self consciousness and the partial blindness that results.

The Na’vi, including the supposedly pacifist scientists, are raiding the train for weapons and ammunition. Norm barks out commands: “We’re taking the whole case: mags, RPGs, the stingers.” Lo’ak jumps into the mix in search of a machine gun, wanting a piece of the prize, as Neteyam hustles to keep pace. Papa Sully spots them, just as more gunships turn the corner, start launching missiles at the raiding party. One of the blasts knocks over Neteyam and Jake goes searching amidst the same airborne cinders.

Look how, in the wreckage, panicking, Sully scans over a dead or dying body of a fellow Na’vi warrior without a second glance. He doesn’t check vitals, doesn’t pull the body off the wreckage. He just scans for his son’s face, doesn’t see it, and moves on. And when he finds his son, all his attention stays there. This is what it means to care. This is what it means to love. This is why love, famously, is scandalous to progressive culture. Love says: These people matter more than others. This family logic goes way deeper than any lip service paid to equal treatment. There is a line between a neighbor and a son, a difference that cashes out in disparate action, in “privilege,” in priority. This is the meaning of care; this is the meaning of triage.

All stories are eco-stories; all myths are tales of ecologies; and the hero is a metonym for the rippling force which sets an ecology back to equilibrium. This is a story about two peoples—about tribes and clans, families and lineages linked by blood and mutual debt. The boundaries of these groups’ bubbles, and the bubbles’ co-penetration, and the intrusion of the foreign in the familiar.

Sully spots his son, turns him over. He’s okay—or okay enough to earn a reprimand. “What the hell were you thinking?” the Father demands. He was thinking of hell.

Somewhere, Lo’ak looks on—learning his lesson, but not fast enough. Blood, staining his brother’s chests. One of those portents you’re lucky to get—the near escapes that say: Change your life—or else.

Wound-licking

Lo’ak, on the other hand, is like a young Jake before he became an avatar. Possibly before he lost the use of his legs. Reckless to a fault. Screwing up constantly. But very, very brave. Strong Heart, No Fear, but Stupid, as it were. It’s natural Jake wouldn’t like seeing that part of himself. Neytiri isn’t as hard on [Lo’ak], because she loves Jake, so of course she loves her son who is like him.⁶

Strong heart, no fear, but stupid. Ignorant like a child. That’s how Neytiri described Jake, when they first met. When he was just an avatar; when they were on opposite sides; before their little Romeo and Juliet act changed the course of the war. Jake is still stupid—most of the movie’s plot revolves around his stupidity—but he’s less impulsive. Less eager and willing to see blood drawn. He is a father, and there are stakes in the world now, stakes greater than his own piddling hide.

Back at the village, hidden in a cave system of the floating Ayram alusìng—the Hallelujah Mountains—Tuk playacts with a toy banshee: “Attack! Attack! Gotcha!” I remember, in High Noon, the Gary Cooper Western? Where the kids are roleplaying with finger guns. That’s how they learn; that’s how you know they’re learning. Cue Miles: “I’m definitely faster when I’m blue... And the animals respect me more,” as Kiri helps him apply Na’vi-like chest stripes with dye. Using pigment to signal the allegiance which biology denies him. She’s helping him because she knows what it’s like, being an outsider, and because that’s the role she’s chosen for herself, to nurture, and bridge, and heal. The only one in her family that isn’t frothing to fight.

And then the war party returns to the fortress of the Omatikayas. These days—partly because artillery, air forces, and Fourth Generation Warfare have rendered physical walls outdated; partly because Western countries are living through a period of remarkably peaceful homelands—these days, we think of the domestic and the militaristic as separate spheres. There is home life, tranquil and innocent; and there is the foreign front—some godforsaken desert overseas, where the blood runs like wine—and never the twain shall meet. This is a historical aberration. Pioneers placed their wagon trains in defensive circles, built their cabins without windows to withstand attack. The Sinaguan and Puebloan cliff dwellings of the American Southwest were built into sheer rock faces, and ground floors devoid of windows or doors—accessed only through retractable ladders which were raised at time of threat. “The house of every one is to him as his Castle and Fortress as well for defence against injury and violence, as for his repose.”⁷

The Sully family dismounts. “Fall in,” the father barks like a drill sergeant. Jake still hasn’t left his marine past behind him. That was his family before; this is his family now. He left one family behind for another, and now the mean old ex is knocking on his door, threatening the children. He’s a drill sergeant even to his sons, who call him “sir”; he carries automatic rifles to raids, and he cares for them compulsively at home. Now he’s reprimanding his sons: “You’re supposed to be spotters. You spot bogeys, and you call them in. From a distance! Jesus, I let you two geniuses fly a mission and you disobey direct orders.” Can you sound more like a drill sergeant? But he’s right. It wasn’t just for their safety, that they were up there, high above the action. It was to site exactly the kind of gunships that caught them off guard—a duty they absconded for love of metal and blood. The Na’vi corpse, sprawled out on a slab of concrete? The one Jake glanced at, passed over, in the search for his son? That’s blood on Lo’ak’s hands—and Neteyam’s too, because family ties obliged him to follow his brother, and in doing so, he defected on his tribe. There are books about the kinds of societies where they break this preference out of you—where children turn their parents in to the State, observe a higher loyalty. These novels are always dystopian, but maybe that’s because they’re written from our perspective—the perspective of the provinces, of a retrograde and tribal people—“primitives,” they’ll call us looking back, as we call our predecessors who thought themselves modern. But 2170 AD is not enough time, and blood still runs thicker than water, and Lo’ak gives his father and commanding officer a “Sorry, sir.” Jake tells Kiri to bounce, because her gentle, accepting femininity threatens and undermines the hard absoluteness of his authority, and also his nerve in exercising it. She just wants to tend to her brother’s wounds, because he’s family, and she cares.

Sully grounds Lo’ak—literally grounded, as in “can’t fly”—where the metaphor for childcare comes from. Then tells him to “get that crap off” his face. Lo’ak has painted himself up to look like a full-bore warrior—cosplaying, the same way Miles does. That insult will get passed forward, in a few moments, if you give it time.

This is cargocult: You put all your effort into getting the costume right, when the costume is secondary, and earning it comes first. The costume’s just a token your community gives you, that says you’ve earned it. And Miles, who will never get the costume right, because of his biology, watches on in silence as Lo’ak’s chewed out—tends to the banshees, fiddles with the leather of their harnesses. (Leather—splayed skin of the dead.)

Kiri helps Mo’at, the tribe’s Tsahìk—healer, matriarch, “grandmother”—tend to Neteyam’s wounds; she sneaks a tonic into her step-brother’s hand, to sip while she distracts Mo’at. Then she suggests yalna bark, instead, as ointment. “And who is Tsahìk?” “You are, Grandmother,”—as Neteyam yelps—“but yalna bark is better. It stings less.” Kiri is gentle yet firm with what she thinks is right. This is a film about succession, about the new ways that rise to replace the old, and the tensions that arise between generations—the replaced, and replacement.

And now Neytiri lectures her husband, backlit by a beautiful blue lens flare, about all the stuff I just mentioned. How hard he is on them. How he’s their father, not their sergeant. How they’re a family, not a squad. He sighs, stops polishing his weapon, and gives her that moment of intimacy which makes it—somehow—all OK. “I thought we lost him”—in a whisper, eyes wet. Neytiri’s eyes widen, her mouth drops ever so slightly; she puts her hand atop his. It’s less melodramatic than I’m making it sound, but also—I want to call bullshit on this whole interaction. Not that it isn’t realistic—it is; that’s the problem. I’m nervous with absolutes, but aggression is always fed by fear. Even if the fear isn’t felt, the entire reason, evolutionarily speaking, that an organism would be aggressive is, in the end, a form self-defense. “My life. My eggs. My children. My future.” We have some sayings, here on ‘Rrta, about mama bears. If an organism could reproduce and live in peace, it would, but it can’t, so there’s no use speculating. Flesh needs flesh, to stave off hunger. Flesh worries about lesser powers in its ecosystem one day becoming a threat—and kills them off preemptive. The humans, in this film, act out of fear when they incinerate the forest and butcher the megafauna and go after Na’vi. Fear of death in the short-term, or fear of death in the long-term—that greed for oxygen that drives them to hunt down tulkun. In other words, fear doesn’t excuse you, because everyone’s scared. Just because we sometimes forget that anger is a mask for fear doesn’t mean it should move our hearts when the fear is revealed. The question is, what do you do with that fear. How much you prioritize your own security, or those of loved ones, over everyone else. Anxious mothers make petty tyrants because they lose sight of the big picture. It’s not even that I agree with Neytiri—I’ve said it before, I’ll said it again. A family is a squad of soldiers. A village is a fortress. War is upon them; peace is not an option; failing to prepare your children for such a world is a dereliction of duty.

Lab Rats

So Miles has drawn blue stripes all over himself to fit in. He and Lo’ak and Kiri trek through a tent structure with Norm and some scientists and are promptly kicked out. “Avatars only; go around.” More boundaries, more questions of belonging. Lo’ak apologies, defensive and abashed, then promptly channels his shame into aggression, othering Spider in turn: “The blue stripes don't make you any bigger bro.” It’s playful, but it stings. “Well I can still kick your ass,” Miles retorts. Like his father. Like both his fathers.

Inside the lab, we see Norm getting pulled from his avatar terminal. “Hell of a day,” the techie quips. That’s right—fire and brimstone. The kids bust through the side-door, their physical bodies moving slower than Norm can teleport.

The Na’vi and humans are adapted to different envelopes, different environments. The humans have to make bubbles for themselves Pandora, little atmospheres pumping different proportions of gases. Spider needs an oxygen tank if he steps outside, and the Na’vi need extra CO₂.

But for now they’re maskless. “Yeah, ha-ha,” Miles mimes. “You know what really sucks? Is you can breathe earth air for hours, and I can only breathe your air for ten seconds.” That’s called foreshadowing. If they’re telling us, it’s cause we have to know. Kiri teases him, and they play animals together—like schoolkids, like lovers, hissing and snarling, feigning and dodging. (Na’vi are cat people, by the way, if it wasn’t obvious. They’ve got the tails, nose, ears, expressivity. There are some other influences and imports from the animal kingdom, but that’s the main one.) And if the “ten seconds” thing is set-up for future plot, it also establishes difference. There are things Miles can do, and things Kiri can do, and these things are different. The upside is that this allows for complementarity—a “stronger together” type emergence. The downside is that it makes co-living occasionally difficult, because needs and lifestyles differ. Jake and Neytiri have seen both sides of this coin; they came out the other side saviours of their people.

The Sully kids fist-bump the techies—between that and all the “bro” this, “bro” that business, the Americanization comes on a little strong, but you can make the case that this is exactly intentional, that of course prolonged contact and cohabitation with between the Na’vi and Terrans would make a Pandora a little more like Earth. And then Kiri straddles the glass tank that Grace Augustine’s body is preserved in, formaldehyde-style. What an unbelievably Christian name, Grace Augustine. “Hi Ma,” Kiri whispers, smiling, putting her hands against the glass, pressing her cheek close.

Is it a coincidence that her name is Grace, or that Kiri is her reincarnation? Grace in the Goldilocks zone. Grace, pity, generosity, charity—the way I understand these concepts are as ecological values, approximates to some unspeakable quality whose other manifestations include parsimony, economy, awareness, noticing, flow, hope, tao, appropriateness, the Goldilocks Zone, and Miller’s Law of Communication. They signify “the right thing” in that nebulous, impossible-to-articulate means of intuitive calculation, a hitting of mark that occurs only when one has ceased lying to himself, ceased fighting the flow and finally acknowledged it. Not the right thing for the short-term self, but the right thing for the system, which is also usually the right thing for the long-term self. These are terms which try to take us out of our own inclinations towards smallness—pettiness, provincialism, selfishness, retribution, anxiety, hatred, othering… states which lead us down the path of bitter suffering. Not only because they lead to unnecessary and unproductive emotional anguish, but because they perpetuate sub-optimal solutions, are fundamentally wasteful, destroy and squander. To be so much less than you could be, to quote Farscape’s Crichton. Grace, like its fellow approximation wisdom, is associated with greater perspective and spirituality, an understanding of relatedness (of oneness, of the genetic brotherhood of all life)—in direct opposition with myopia and a narcissism of small difference. They spotlight—hyperstitionally—the shared interests—too often & easily forgotten—atop which all our political and epistemic conflicts play out. As virtues, they are typically learned or derived from experience, particularly the experience of suffering; when gained, they are accompanied by an expansion of consciousness. None of these descriptions are right, but in the space between them is something true, though it takes the right spirit to summon it.

There is a fine film by Terrence Malick, The Tree of Life, whose opening words are these:

The nuns taught us there are two ways through life, the way of Nature and the way of Grace. You have to choose which one you’ll follow. Grace doesn’t try to please itself. Accepts being slighted, forgotten, disliked. Accepts insults and injuries. Nature only wants to please itself. Get others to please it too. Likes to lord it over them. To have its own way. It finds reasons to be unhappy when all the world is shining around it. And love is smiling through all things.

That isn’t quite right either, but there is something here—something important, in the opposition, some escape from the Hobbesian trap that Christianity caught a whiff of. You and I will not live to see that escape, but our descendants might. And the escape goes something like this:

The Universe is unfolding like a tree from seed. Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny. Things start simple, multiply, and diversify. Atoms transmutate at higher temperatures into ever more complex atoms. Minerals evolve, from simple hydrogen and helium into carbon, oxygen, silicon, nitrogen, and a thousand more. In the process, minerals invent life—lightning strikes amino acids, in the envelope of a clay pore—and life, in turn, goes on to invent a thousand more minerals. At every step, the Universe moves ineluctably towards complexity, born of ever more complicated bonds, arrangements, and organizations. Life begins unicellular; there are symbiotic mergers, to form complex cells; the complex cells coordinate, to form multicellular life; the multicellular life coordinates, to form ant colonies and institutions, like the Catholic Church—and all of this pointing to Gaia, to the Teilhardian noösphere, to planet-scale patterns.

In game theory, there is a strategy for playing games like an iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma which is called “tit-for-tat.” You begin the game cooperating. So long as the other players cooperate, you cooperate in turn. But if another player burns you, you burn them right back. This discovery gave rise to theories of reciprocal altruism—the idea that tit-for-tat cooperation between “selfish,” evolved organisms can tenably emerge. Chimps take turns, grooming each other for parasites. Since there are parts of their own bodies their fingers can’t reach and groom, both are better off for the arrangement. But if one of them freerides, the relationship breaks down.

What Robert Axelrod discovered was that tit-for-tat, strictly observed, leads to a death spiral. If one player makes a mistake—or for some reason is hard-pressed, and can’t reciprocate—then the other player will burn him right back, and he’ll burn them in turn, ad nauseam. In other words, blood feud. Hatfield–McCoy shit. And so what Axelrod pioneered instead is a strategy named “forgiving tit-for-tat.” If you defect on me, I’ll give you a second chance. And if you set up a simulation that is sufficiently life-like, then two paired-off players employing forgiving tit-for-tat strategies will win the highest earnings.

In Tree of Life, Malick pairs a Christian worldview with heavy naturalism—the birth of stars; lava cooling into land; algal mats—and it’s weird, and it works, and I think this is why. There is an almost divine wholeness that the Universe is working toward, a Paradisal sync. And if all aggression is born of fear, fear of the Other, then forgiveness is essential to this unfolding. Jesus died on the cross to teach us a lesson. It doesn’t solve the problem of limited resources and limited turf. It doesn’t solve the conflict that arises from two, mutually exclusive desires. But it gets us closer to Heaven.

Lo, soul, seest thou not God’s purpose from the first?
The earth be spann’d, connected by network
The oceans to be crossed, the distant brought near
The lands to be welded together⁸

Lab Rats, part 2

Anyway, Kiri and Miles and Lo’ak are at the lab together. From Kiri’s perspective—as Kiri, with Kiri, connected—we watch a recording of Grace on the holo-screen, making Lovelockian/Gaian speculations about Pandora. All these messages from the past. Welcome to orientation. “Maybe I’m just losing it out here, but I’m seeing real evidence of a systemic response on a global level. I can’t... I won’t use the term ‘intelligence,’ maybe ‘awareness’ is a better word. It’s like the entire biosphere of Pandora is aware and capable of cognitive response.” The language, the webcam, evoke Annihilation, which in turn shades Heart of Darkness, or Tarkovsky’s Stalker. But here, envelopment and dissolution into nature—they’re positive things, “connectivity,” oneness. Post-acid ideology. And then Grace says she’ll be “crucified” if she goes public with her theory. More Christian imagery; we’re being hit with it hard. Lo’ak, ever the crass teenage boy, asks aloud who “knocked her up.” More Americanisms.

This is one of the more persistent motifs of the film: the characters getting briefed, catching up on their history via video panel. Those who learn history? Get a chance to break the pattern. We saw it with the Colonel, en route to Pandora; we see it now with Grace; we’ll see it soon with the Colonel all over again. And of course! This is a sequel. The meaning of “now” derives from the meaning of “then.” Not just for the characters but for us, as audience members, ten years removed from the original Avatar. Cue overgrown ruins and wreckage, forest vines suffocating decades-old tech. A scuttled Star Destroyer—soundtracked by Streisand (“The Way We Were”) and sunk in Ozymandian sand.

But I think these scenes are also about virtuality, about how the ability to enode information allows us to connect with others who inhabit distant realms of spacetime. And every second—every shot, every line of dialogue—in this film is in some way about connection. See e.g. what happens next: Lo’ak and Miles bro it up, teasing Kiri about her dad, the basic algebra—bonding by choosing a common target. “I’m thinking their two avatars went out together in the woods…” More algebra in the fucking. Lo’ak and Miles fist-bump. But now Kiri, fierce and wounded, hisses at Miles—“Hey!”—and you can tell it bothers her, and Miles, seeing it, eats his smile, looks at the ground abashed. The basic triangle—pairing up in twos. First Miles played outsider, the one with the air mask and the false stripes. He and Lo’ak went at each other, teasingly—“I can still kick your ass, bro”—and for a brief window, Kiri was on the outside. And then Miles and Kiri went at each other, play-snarling, and they were a twosome, and Lo’ak was out. Here Lo’ak and Miles gang up on Kiri, til Kiri and Miles share a look, and now it’s just Lo’ak on his own, playing defense.

Miles gets vulnerable, so Kiri’s less exposed: “Sometimes it’s not so great to know who your father is.” He’s talking about his own dad—spoiler, it’s Quaritch—but he could just as easily be talking about Lo’ak’s father. Because it’s not easy being Sully’s son, either. Son of the Toruk Makto. It’s like being a bench-warmer rookie on a championship team. Cameron scripted the Bronny James story years before it aired.

Cut to the recombinant Miles Sr., on a transport ship to Pandora. He’s wearing a gas mask, his little private atmosphere, so you know the ship’s filled with Earth-air.

Orientation

Quaritch briefs his squad. “For our sins in our past life, we have been brought back in the form of the enemy.” It’s standard karmic cycle stuff: only by understanding other perspectives in the system of samsara can you escape it, can you cease perpetuating it. The only way to truly opt out of complicity in the cycle of death is renounce one’s right to life and silently starve. It’s not a coincidence that this is something approaching radical Buddhism. In the meantime, for us mere mortals, all we have is grace.

The marines’ mission is to to hunt down and kill the Toruk Makto, Jake Sully. The crew is pumped; they bump fists, just like Miles and Lo’ak. You can read it either way: the brothers raised like American Marines; the marines raised like brothers. Bonding, over a shared enemy. The team’s headed for Bridgehead City, AKA Hells Gate 2.0, another threshold, another airlock, another foyer. Another Christian concept. The structure built by terminators in the ashes of the forest. The death of one ecology gives way to the birth of another. Bridgehead, after all, is military speak for a secure position behind enemy lines.

We see close-ups of Recomb Quaritch and his squad, their mask-assisted breaths forefronted in the audio mix, so they evoke Vader, but also parallel Miles, and Kiri, and emphasize the running “your atmosphere / my atmosphere” motif. Then a shot of Bridgehead City—a barren desert for miles radiating round its walls. An old joke—bomb everything to oblivion, set your ship down in the middle of the ruins, remark “What a shithole.” Played to the tune of Newman’s “Political Science.” Pollution spews into the bay, ash covers rock, and plumes of chem-smoke rise from vents and stacks. The recombs disembark—step off their transport like the mechs. Their snake-like, queue-like, tethered connection to Pandoran air is no longer necessary—they can breathe freely now. “Masks off.” Fresh Pandoran air, the envelope their bodies are built for. It smells like home.

We’re re-introduced to Edie Falco’s General Ardmore, head of RDA’s Sec Ops—camo-clad and kickboxing a punching bag in her mech-suit. Last we saw her she was addressing any Na’vi and Earth monkeys still living at last round’s base. Via video message, natch—the nested screens are inescapable in this film, which makes sense, given it’s called Avatar. Have we talked about what that word means, in the Sanskrit Puranas? Dreamwalkers, the Na’vi call them. All of Cameron’s films come from dreams—the glinting chrome body, emerging from flames, that becomes Terminator. The bioluminescent forest, that became Pandora.

Ardmore’s message: “I'm addressing those who are illegally occupying the Hell's Gate facility. Your crimes are acts of terrorism under Solar Unity law, and will be punished as such. Terrorism carries a mandatory sentence of death.” It’s always fun when military forces site “international” laws, as if anything about their operation were strictly legal. It’s mostly propaganda for the folks back home, i.e. the purported addresses? Are not the addressees. The same went down on the American West, six or eight or ten generations ago, when the U.S. gov pretended that that their pat little treaties were binding. Law only works within a community that has enough shared culture to agree to rules, let alone follow them. It’s a form of cooperation—and there is no ground for cooperation with a body that wants your extinction.

Brief sidebar to chat about decision rules. It’s a concept that might be familiar to lawyers or cyberneticists. Legal structures, and much of human coordination, uses definitions in order to determine a corresponding reaction—for instance, “manslaughter” versus “murder” entail different sentencing guidelines. Defining, or categorizing, a situation becomes a key bottleneck, and its own battleground, as conflicts shift to linguistic warfare—e.g. pro-life and pro-choice camps fighting over what counts as a life, what counts as a human being. Politics itself becomes an enormous battle for definitions, and bureaucracy’s greatest weapon is its ability to plausibly define a situation-at-hand. Is this a national emergency? Because if so, there are special budget allocations available. But first, you need to argue for the classification. Is this a state of war? Because if so, it’ll need the approval of Congress. But Congress hasn’t declared war since 1941, so clearly there’s wiggle room. You see what I’m driving at. Accepting a definition is accepting a framework is accepting a course of action. So for the folks at home, the Na’vi are labeled terrorists, because that word warrants a violent extermination.

Ardmore and the Colonel shake hands; more precisely, her mechasuit (or “Skel Suit”) shakes hands with Quaritch’s recomb, while her actual hand mimes the motion of shaking in mid-air. She looks him-slash-us in the eye, his fresh face doubling for ours, as we take his perspective: “A lot’s changed since your last tour here. Walk with me.”

The base is one big construction zone—dirt and dust, gravel and sand, and rising from it, great metal structures painted the yellow of caution tape. Robotic crabs scurry, industrious, across the screen.

Every audience surrogate requires, by law, his fair share of over-exposition, so: “We’re not here to run a mine, Colonel. As on-world commander, I’ve been charged with a greater mission.” She sips from her corporate coffee cup, as around her, an automated assembly line glows with the red of molten metal. The same pattern, stamping, tiling itself across the universe. Metal machine logic. “Earth is dying. Our task here is to tame this frontier. Nothing less than to make Pandora the new home for humanity.” Like a parasite, hunting for a new home, using rocket fuel to sneeze. “But before we do that, we need to pacify the hostiles.” She sips her coffee, smiles to herself. Manifest destiny, baby, with a whole new spin.

RDA started as a Silicon Valley startup that connected the world with high-speed rail. Then, when the resource wars broke out, they pivoted to algae farming, to feed humanity. The search for unobtainium, and for a livable planet, was always an existential mission. Offense, in service of defense.

Earth is dying. Ten billion lives are at stake. It’s one thing to fight for your country—but to fight for your species?

And what was it I said before, about fear being used as an excuse for aggression? “Why’d you do it, son?” “Well, I was scared.” “In that case…”

Haunted by the Past

Ayram alusìng: the Hallelujah Mountains. Site of the great—and final—battle of the last war. Hiding place of the Toruk Makto and his Omatikaya.

And the recombs? The recombs are here to test a hypothesis. Every time they send troops to the Hallelujah Mountains, searching for Sully’s base, they take on heavy casualties. The RDA’s presence in the Ayram alusìng seems to trigger what Ardmore calls “an immune response” from the mountain banshees—a portentous phrase, echoing Augustine’s Gaian language. But maybe—maybe, the hypothesis goes—the recombinant bodies of Quaritch’s crew will be perceived as indigenous. Miles Sr. has the very stripes his son would kill for. “And how might we test that hypothesis, General?” “The hard way.” “Outstanding.”

Strong Heart. No Fear. I’d say Stupid, but Quaritch, bastard or no, is miles cleverer than Sully.

The recombs look around with awe and wonder, as their rotorwing soars through the floating, magnetized mesas. Maybe they’ve started to go native; maybe marines are capable of an aesthetic response.

Nearby but out of sight, the children of the Sully clan—plus Spider—dance and run along the great vines that serve as bridges between the mossy mesas. All the younger, newer entrants to this story—all the second-born—feel their outsider status, and strive to change it. Lo’ak’s always trying to get involved in his dad’s military operations; Miles is always trying to fit in. What’s Tuk’s strategy, youngest of the bunch? “You’re not supposed to go to the battlefield. I’ll tell mom if you don’t let me come.”

This, as reported by Lo’ak, his voice bratty and high-pitched, mimicking Tuk. And why is Lo’ak ragging on Tuk? Because Miles accusingly asked why he brought her along. Offense born of defense. Tuk sticks her tongue out.

Vines hang, and ferns sprout, all about them, and there are fractal-shaped, fiddlehead or nautilus-type plants. Pan up: the verdure is engulfing the wreck of a rotorwing, vines supporting its metal frame like a canopy. “Are there any dead bodies up there?” Tuk asks, half scared, half blasé, as Kiri wanders off on her own, through violet pitcher plants, as flying reptiles—circular, spinning wings like a whirling dervish—float and parachute around her. She lies on her back, making snow-angels in the tall grass, like a raver in shag.

She closes her eyes. A slow ripple begins to emanate from the spot where she lies, and woodsprites—atokirina’, seeds of the Tree of Souls—falling, rest on skin. Miles finds her in the clearing, unconscious, dead to the world—dissolving into Gaia—and he shakes her desperately awake, terrified.

The recombs, too, have found the ruins. Nature reclaiming artifice, burying a Tower of Babel—in verdure, in sand, in water, whatever. The corporal swats at buzzing bloodsuckers. Quaritch-Reincarnate leans down, swipes at the overgrowth, reveals a single stenciled word on the metal beneath. “QUARITCH.”⁹

Above it, a blue wreath of stars. Quaritch straightens, peers over the metal and into the cockpit of the AMP exoskeleton, where a pilot had sat. A skull peers back at him, memento mori. Then he sees the arrows, sticking out the chest—examines their fletching, the yellow feathers. His Na’vi ears twitch and tighten back.

Palm fronds rustle; quiet footsteps. The Sully children watch through the overgrowth: Kiri whines how Dad will ground them for life, and Lo’ak just blows her off. She and Tuk are the outsiders here—too young, too girly, or both—which means Spider is in—“Bro, we have got to check this out”—and even if his heart’s trembling, he’d never say no.

They stoop as they sneak through brush, clutching their short bows—good for small game but not much else. The Colonel and the Corporal enter the link shack—a small trailer, really, with two link units, where human drivers controlled their avatars. This is where Jake and Norm controlled theirs, in the great war. This is where Quaritch came in his mechasuit, to kill them. It is a link between pilot and avatar, but also present and past.

—Which is now dawning on Lo’ak and Miles. “That’s where your dad, and my dad…” The stories—they’re real. Lo’ak calls it in: “Devil Dog, this is Eagle Eye, over.” “Eagle Eye, send your traffic.” That’s Jake—Devil Dog—on the back of a banshee, patrolling the airspace with Neytiri and Neteyam. Neteyam isn’t on the kids little time travel expedition because he’s old enough for grown-up duties, and that too is a boundary.

“I’ve got eyes on some guys. They look like avatars, but they’re in full camo and carrying ARs. There’s six of them. Over.” “What’s your pos? Over.” A gulp. “We’re at the Old Shack.” “Who’s we?” Another gulp. Miles didn’t want to call it in in the first place, thought they’d get in trouble. Which they will, but it’s beside the point. Lo’ak, hot head aside, sees the bigger picture.

“Me. Spider, Kiri… And Tuk.” Neytiri, who’s listening, gasps. That’s all her eggs, the whole brood sans one—in a single woven basket, and the nest is surrounded by cuckoos. And it brings back all the old fears—back when Jake was her whole world, in his own egg-shell of a link unit—soft skin and senseless, totally vulnerable.

Jake tells his son to pull back, very quietly—and to their credit, they do. Then Neteyam suggests a shortcut; Neytiri war-whoops; and their three banshees veer through a gap in the rocks. Little steps, like Kiri and her yalna bark.

The kids, fleeing toward home, bicker about how much trouble they’re going to be in, working through the old “I told you so routine.” Which is to say they’re still kids; the worst thing they can imagine is parental discipline. This is the moment their imagination expands—not by inches, but a whole paradigm shift—because the recombs leap out from the undergrowth, and shortbows don’t inspire confidence when you’re looking down the barrel of a 50-caliber assault rifle.¹⁰

“Mawey,” says Kiri to Tuk. Be calm. But she and Tuk are the only ones struggling. Lo’ak and Miles, on their knees, stand stock-still, chests out. Defiant. Proud.

There’s an odd look in Miles Sr.’s eyes as he looks at his son, who he does not know is his son. Something sad and sentimental, as his ears twitch. Then the fingers give the Sully kids away. “Hey Colonel, check it out. Four fingers. We got a half-breed.” Quaritch wants to see Lo’ak’s fingers too, and Lo’ak, at first feigning submission, turns his hands out to reveal, well, “the” finger. Two of them. Learned from his dad, of course. And Quaritch catches it too, smiles. “You’re his, aren’t you.” He likes this kind of defiance. Couldn’t stand to watch his prey roll over, pathetic. He lives for a real adversary, a proper fight. Even if it’s just the empty gestures of a strong heart.

He yanks Lo’ak up by the scruff, by the nape; if it weren’t so rough, it would be almost fatherly. “Where is he?” Lo’ak pulls the oldest of moves—feigning ignorance—with a twist at the end for flavor. For bravery. Ke plltxänge oe nì'Ìnglìsì—hu vonvä'. I don’t speak English—to assholes.

But the Colonel, American or not, is no country fool, and he calls the bluff in broken, half-grammatical Na’vi. Peseng ngeyä sempul? Another yank at the braids; Lo’ak roars in pain, baring his fangs, still defiant. Time for next strategy: Move on to the women. Miles rears up, rabid, angry and pleading. “What’s your name kid?” asks Quaritch. Like he knows what’s coming. Because the body of this stranger, on a strange world? Looks a lot like his old body looked, so many years ago. Biology is the costume you’re stuck with; it gives you away every time.

Quaritch Jr answers. “Spider.” A pause. “Socorro.” The Corporal’s eyes angle toward his commanding officer, watching Sr.’s face. All of the Colonel’s men know what that name means. It is a word they haven’t heard in a long, long time. A lifetime ago. A name from another realm, another corporeal form. Socorro. So when Quaritch Sr. flicks his hand, the marine holding Quaritch Jr. knows exactly what to do. His hands let go of Spider, who stumbles forward. Facing his fate. His history becoming his future. The Colonel moves slowly, like you do when you’re trying not to startle an animal. He’s a different person suddenly—among hostile foreigners, he’s found family. His ten-foot, Na’vi form kneels down, to get on Spider’s level.

“Miles?” “Nobody calls me that.” “Well I’ll be damned. I figured they sent you back to Earth.” “You can’t put babies in cryo, dipshit.” Like father, like son.

“What’re we doing, boss?” His men’s eyes are on him, so the family reunion can wait. Quaritch radios in their position to Ardmore, waiting in a rotorwing—just like Lo’ak, moments earlier, called it in to Jake. There are maybe six things that happen in this film, but they happen over and over; every possible relationship, every gesture, is repeated and inverted and scrambled up, so that it’s explored in all its dimensions until you’re sick with it, sick with the structural analogies that keep piling up until the surface-level, Disney-safe good-and-evil plot topples over, and all you’re left with is blood and power.

Recomb Quaritch to Corporal Wainfleet: “Lyle, see if you can pull some data off that dash cam.” “Thing is deader than shit, Colonel.” “So are we.” Call it foreshadowing, call it theme; call it resurrection, or reincarnation. The past is never dead, and we will soon be getting footage. Cue Sully’s avatar, addressing the AMP cam: “It’s all over.” Human Quaritch: “Nothing’s over while I’m breathing.” “I sorta hoped you’d say that,” Sully growls, then charges. Being a dad is about being a protector—we hear Sully say it about twelve times in this film. So who are you, Jake, without a monster to battle?

There are little dots all over the faces in the cam footage—a small homage to the motion capture tech which made this film possible. We don’t see Sully kill Quaritch, we just see Quaritch’s son, grimacing while he watches—as he watches his fathers battle to the death. It won’t be the last time.

The sun is setting behind the great gas giant, Polyphemus. The sky is slipping into darkness. A father protects. And now Sully gets his monster, his cyclops. Quaritch, in the body of a giant, has returned and he’s taking the kids, Captain Hook-style. A blue Robin Williams, Jake will have to do battle with his past in order to safeguard his children—his future. And isn’t that just a giant metaphor for parenthood, the whole schebang?

Sully, Neytiri, and their firstborn arrive on their dragons just as the sun slips away, and they are warriors in the trees, with bows and machine guns. Neteyam is tasked with staying behind, with watching the banshees.

It’s the Colonel’s first night in the forests of Pandora. The canopy crawls with unseen watchers. Shapes that grow teeth. Slinths with their venemous lances, and stalkings slingers with their darts, and scorpion-like arachnoids. Packs of viperwolves that move like liquid darkness. Fifteen-foot thanators with armored backs and tails. Sully almost died, his first night. Neytiri saved him, and now they are together, in the trees, where the viperwolves once stalked him, and they are looking down on the recoms like predators on prey.

Quaritch, in the gloom, watches his former body die at the hands of the very bow that Neytiri now notches from above. Hunter and hunted, switching off forever. Not even death can stop the cycle. There is a pained look on Quaritch’s face; his ears twitch, and Miles Jr., crouching, looking on, turns away confused. Lyle grabs the display screen before his CO tears up. Best not to dwell on these things. And the Colonel, lost in thought, picks up his old oxygen helmet—the same kind that Miles Jr. wears now, breathes through, depends on. Quaritch pulls his human skull out from the mask, holds it out, in his hand, at eye-level. Alas, poor Yorick. Neither human Quaritch nor recomb Quaritch need the mask anymore.

He looks at the skull—right dead in the eye sockets—and crushes it to dust in his fist.

Kidnapping the Future

The recomb marines stand in the dark, in the rain, a swarm of insects buzzing round their heads, waiting for their air-evac. They’ve plunged to the heart of the jungle, and found gold. They are eager for extraction. But eclipse falls in the forest, and the beasts of Pandora are out.

Jake and Neytiri are utterly silent as they stalk through the coiling, glowing spirals of six-foot fiddleferns. The recombs are terrified, tense. We can hear the fauna crying out now through the bioluminescence, Kiri’s ears swiveling. Does she recognize them? Understand them, even? Are they the mimic calls of her parents? Neytiri creeps behind a tree, lets out a woop, and even Miles picks it out now, though the recombs are clueless. There are some things biology can’t give you.

Now Sully and Neytiri play “Short Range Guy, Long Range Guy,” AKA “Guys Smash, Girls Shoot.” Think Legolas and Gimli. Jake takes out a trooper—part of Quaritch’s squad, Quaritch’s family—with a hand ax. Neytiri, hidden behind a tree, aims a careful arrow at the marine holding Kiri and Miles. Kiri is praying to herself, incanting to Eywa: Srung si ayoeru... Nawma Sa'nok, za'u. A gun held tight to her head. Neytiri closes her eyes, in her own silent prayer, then lets its fly.

More recombs fall as the forest erupts with gunfire. They’re nameless brutes, marginalized by the plot, the demands of narrative economy, by their role as villainous henchmen. By the end of this film we’ll see a hundred more killed: civilian contractors, ships’ crewmen—drowned, shot, gored to death—and no one will care. Their lives are meaningless. That’s not my opinion, and I’m agnostic on whether it’s right or wrong. It’s a fact of the filmic world.

The Sully kids use their feline fangs to rip into their captors, and Lo’ak pulls the pin from a smoke grenade. Then they roll off, handcuffed, into the underbrush. The Colonel crouches behind a log, next to the limp body of one of his men. The arrow which killed him is yellow-fletched, like the arrows in the chest of human Quaritch. Another worthy rival. Another chance at revenge. Another smile. “Is that you, Mrs Sully? I recognize your calling card.” The survivors in his squad make hand signals, in the darkness; silently move into flanking positions, while Quaritch reloads his weapon. “Why don’t you come on out? You and I, we’ve got some unfinished business.”

“Demon!” she shrieks. “I will kill you as many times as I have to.” The corporal goads her while his flunky sneaks around and flanks her. The goading’s to distract her, and get her to reveal her position. “Got yourself a whole litter of half-breeds.” We see her braided hair through the scope of a rifle, and a finger, squeezing the metal trigger—but then an arrow thuds in his back, yellow-fletched, Neytiri’s calling card. Lo’ak: brave like Sully is brave, brave but stupid, so Jake has to pounce through the underbrush, pull his son under cover before he’s mowed down by answering bullets.

The Sully children flee, and Quaritch Sr. fires his grenade launcher into the canopy after them. Spider tumbles through the brush and down the hillside, into the dale below, where the marines grab him. Kiri screams down after him, not wanting to leave him behind, but Neytiri grabs her and goes.

This is where true colors show. When all the cheap talk about family becomes a costly fact. Which is that some people matter more than others—scandal at the heart of a liberal culture. On days like this, children are shocked into the realization, or have their long-nagging, unnameable suspicions confirmed. On days like this, parents learn who they are, and what they believe in.

Quaritch and his squadmates clip in to the evac ropes, dangling overhead. Jr.’s slung over Sr.’s shoulder, bleeding from the fall. They’re bathed in blinding white light, spotlights cast by the rotorwings above. The ropes retract and they’re airborne, beamed up like an alien abduction, and the lights blink off, and the spacecraft’s gone. The Sullys watch them, from below, as they disappear from sight.

The first thing Jake says to, anyone in his family when he greets them, is “Are you hurt?” Just over and over again, all movie. His children go off, and something happens to them, and Jake’s left with the wounded aftermath. I don’t know what it means, I’m just reporting what I notice. Right after he asks if you’re OK, he tells you you’re OK. That you’re going to be OK. That everything will be. I think this equivocation defines his character, defines his fatherhood—he’s never sure whether he’s asking or telling. In many ways he’s a weak character, a weak hero. Insecure in his identity. Unable to lend sound counsel. Dragging his friends and family into old vendettas. And the equivocation—it’s like his fate is halfway in his hands, the way all our fates are halfway in our hands. Sometimes we tell the world what to do. Sometimes the world tells us. “Are you OK?” “You’re OK.” “Everything’s gonna be OK.” By the end of this story, it won’t be.

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The rest of this text, covering the remaining minutes of Avatar, is readily available for any who are interested. Reach out to suspendedreason@gmail.com to request a copy.

1. Sometimes disruption is a necessary precursor to restoration. Sometimes destruction is a necessary part of preservation. Sometimes the hero’s disruption is the very destructive force the ecology needs protecting from. Sometimes the hero is the protector against the villain’s disrupting force.

2. Miles Davis: “It’s the next note that you play that determines if [the note before is] good or bad.” Herbie Hancock: “It was a really hot night, the music was on. Right in the middle of Miles’s solo, I played the wrong chord. Completely wrong. It sounded like a big mistake. And Miles paused for a second, and then he played some notes that made my chord right. He made it correct. Miles didn’t hear it as a mistake. He heard it as something that happened. An event. Part of the reality of what was happening at that moment, and he dealt with it. Since he didn’t hear it as a mistake, he felt it was his responsibility to find something that fit.”

3. In general, the film is better viewed as a depiction of Western post-colonial ideology than it is indigenous peoples—what @meaning_enjoyer on Twitter has called the progressive left's “white identitarian” take on racial politics, which is centered “almost entirely on euro-colonialism and the relationship of the world to white europeans, to the exclusion of all other experiences, perspectives and viewpoints.”

4. Western homogenization of indigenous peoples as culturally fungible reminds one of nothing less than the common American error of believing Africa to be a country instead of continent.

5. This, of course, mirrors the “pave paradise, put up a parking lot” images of the original Avatar. Some key themes in that film were clearcutting and legibility, which Sarah Perry discusses at Ribbonfarm.

6. /u/Thesalanian

7. Sir Edward Coke, 1604.

8. Whitman, Leaves of Grass

9. There are gaps in the san-serif, capitalized letters—vertical gaps in the “Q,” the “U,” the “R;” between the trunk and the cross of the “T.” The same stenciled typeface you find on military crates or construction zones. Those gaps are called bridges; the bridges create stability, prevent parts of the stencil—the center of an “O,” say—from breaking off.

10. That's the size caliber used in WWI anti-aircraft guns, or which the modern-day U.S. Coast Guard puts on helicopters to disable boats. AR-15s fire cartridges half that size. Ostensibly, it’s to handle Pandoran megafauna as well as Na’vi, who can stand over ten feet tall.