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The Experience of Avatar
5th January 2010 4:52 ∞ Art, Astral Concepts, Bliss, Dreams, Empathic link, Meridjet, Movies, Processing, Trust, faith, doubt, Wow! ∞ ∞ RSS 2.0
I will probably cry during the writing of this post. Possibly more than once. I’m just saying. Sunday when I came out of the theater as everyone else visited the restrooms, I started crying (again), hyperventilating a little and fighting to regain control of myself as people passed me entering and leaving the theater. This theater held 30 individual screens, so we’re talking a lot of people.
This post may contain spoilers. I’ll do my best to warn you in advance.
The thing that struck me most about the movie was the sense of found belonging. Found home. Brief plot synopsis here, and nothing that’s not in the trailer: A U.S. Marine who lost the use of his legs in some war or other is asked to volunteer (replacing his recently-deceased brother) into a special project on a planet called Pandora. The project is not strictly military — it’s purely a cash-driven project that is using the military as protection against an alien planet populated by a number of very hostile species. As the commander puts it, “You’re not in Kansas anymore.” This may well be the most understated use of that quote I’ve ever seen.
The project’s main objective is to mine for an ore called, amusingly, Unobtanium. There are three distinct arms of this project crew: the corporate, whose goal is to get to the richest deposit of this incredibly valuable ore; the military strong-arm; and the scientific, whose assignment is to negotiate with the native population to get them to move from their homes (situated directly on top of the richest deposit, naturally). Human beings are half the size of the native populace, and cannot breathe the air, so the scientists have developed “avatars,” human/native hybrid-clones that are inhabited by sleeping volunteers. Jake Sully, our wheelchair-bound protagonist, is one of these volunteers. (End synopsis.)
We saw the movie in 3-D, and I strongly urge you to see it in 3-D as well, because otherwise it just won’t have the same effect. It is the most amazing thing I have ever seen. While many of the plot points are predictable enough, the execution is astoundingly unique. The cinematography is profoundly beautiful. There are elements to this planet that are deeply moving, connections between the natives and the planet itself that even the most spiritual of our aborigines couldn’t touch in their dreams. It’s what spiritual people long for, a belonging and a bond that each of us, as distinctly individual people with no practical way to transcend that, wishes we could touch. It will move you and, ultimately, leave you yearning deeply for expression.
I’ve had my share of interactions with the subtle levels of reality, with the astral, with spirits, with spiritual concepts that seek to satisfy my need to find “home.” This movie expressed those needs so well that I may never recover. Perhaps that sounds dramatic. But what it didn’t do was show me the way to fulfill them. If this planet and project existed and this movie were, for instance, shown to people as a way to inspire them to volunteer, the ranks of those volunteers would swell to such proportions that the project would be overrun with people trying to get in. I want so much to tell you how the natives accomplish the bonds I wrote of above, but that would be a spoiler, and I refuse to provide in words what only the movie, in context, can show. You must see this movie. Anyone who leaves this movie with a cynical attitude is not a human being. Anyone who can deny that they were moved is, above all, someone I couldn’t dream of relating to (and wouldn’t want to). (I predict this movie will launch several million soulbonds.)
It’s not even the fact that the military is predictably untouched in the film, referring to the natives as “savages,” even as our own ancestors did, and as no doubt our current military does in the Middle East. The military in this film simply hold a mirror up for us, asking us if we are human or if we’re too savage to have hearts. Because so many of us, calling “savage” anything we don’t understand and which won’t bow down to our requirements to rape and pillage the natural resources — we are the real savages. This is not a new concept. We’ve seen it in everything from “Lassie” to E.T. But never before has it been so transcendent in its execution. Never before have we had a glimpse of something so profoundly greater than ourselves that we have grieved our own humanity. Or, at least, I do.
I was reminded, over and over again and in so many unique ways, how much I need what I can’t have, and how beautiful it really is, or can be. My connection with Meridjet has led me to bliss, to agony, to depths of feeling and experience that are gifts of the highest order. And yet, in spite of the profundity of that connection, I still yearn. I think perhaps this is why so many people see the ultimate human “destination” as reunion with the Source, as dissolution with a great sea of All that is God (or one concept of God). I have never felt the pull to that dissolution, and I still don’t. Because the very nature of a bond is transitory, fleeting — without your individuality and the individuality of the other to whom you are bonding, there is no bond, there is only a gray wash of eternity without change. If we don’t feel the yearning, the bond is meaningless. If we don’t lose that bond, however briefly, it fails to inspire. As Kahlil Gibran wrote in one of my all time favorite quotes, “The deeper that sorrow carves into you, the more joy you can contain.” The more we own our pain, the more we accept that cutting, the larger the void that joy may pour into, filling us and bringing us bliss.
Pandora is the perfect expression of that bliss, that union with God — but even on Pandora, there are degrees of separation, there is pain, there is bliss. There is no perfect union that can last forever, because anything experienced without color or change eventually numbs us to its effect. Pandora is nothing if not colorful, vast, amazing in detail, uncertain, changing, horrifying, and wonderful. And Avatar brings to life — incredible life — expressions of those colors that I’ve never conceived of. If one could regret the realization of perfect union the way that one can regret a love relationship that led to betrayal, I might regret seeing this film. But I don’t think it’s possible to regret understanding. I know I certainly don’t.
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11 Responses to “The Experience of Avatar”
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All content ©Sheta Kaey 2002 and beyond for Spirit Companion.com. This work is licensed under a 
Creative Commons 3.0 United States License. Some Rights Reserved.
Let me confirm this review and say well done! I was there with you and understood how this movie could move you – only I could not write such a great review. I want this to be how it is in the spirit world without the humans and don’t care if i had the body of the people but with the “connection” as someone who has watched this movie will understand. We would have such world peace if only we could connect in such a way with the world and everyone around us. Of course i plan in my mind that the spirit world will be nothing but peaceful. My brother who has not seen a movie in many (10+ years) was very moved – glad he got to see such a magnificent movie for the first time. If you want to be really moved see the movie – my all time favorite for now.
This is a movie I definitely have to own. I need to talk to Meridjet, too. I’m interested in expanding my experience of the otherworlds, now.
Thank you so much for taking us!
Your review , so far, is the only one that has inspired me to *possibly* see this film. As a filmaker and someone in the industry I absolutely diispise James Cameron . He is a complete jerk. His budget for marketing and promotion on this film went way past the mark of irresponsible and vulgar. It really is going to take them years to recoup the cost.
The second issue I have is the whole “one white man to rule them all” sort of tone. I grew up around the American Indian Movement,I cut my teeth on radical (!!!) Native American tribal papers. The names of Anna Mae, Leonard Peltier, Russell Means, John Trudell, and Dennis Banks were said around our dinner table on a nightly basies. Wounded Knee and Alcatraz are images I will never be able to wipe from my brain To say that I have tasted and seen and experienced the bitterness and stark reality of that fight that continues even now is an understatement. The whole patronising double standard of Dances with Wolves., Pocahontas, etc etc is an old problem that it sticks with you.
Being as I do work with spirits and know what it is to deal with the Fae, I may see it. It’s a great deal to think about. The healing has to come sometime. At what point do we say oh well, these horrible things happened, but here is this new shiny and we’ve given it a Hollywood ending with lots of marketing bucks behind it so it goes down a bit easier. It will depend how my ancestors react to it – because I have to listen to them just as much as I do the other spirits.
While there is an element of “one white man to rule them all” ala Dances with Wolves to this, to me it was a standard plot given as an excuse to make a truly transcendent film — not the other way around. I like Cameron, not as a person but I like his movies as entertainment. This movie was not entertainment. It reached inside me, past my mind that was thinking “same plot, different movie,” to the place that knew what was happening. The protagonist, Jake Sully, yeah, he does things the natives couldn’t do (or only rarely) better, but not because he was white or special — but because he was desperate to reach them to help save them. He wasn’t rescuing, he wasn’t one-upping, he was making desperate choices because of love, for them and for his lady. Some of it is trite, but I see many, many differences.
You could throw the entire plot out the window, for all I care. Take the white people out of it. Just give me what the Na’vi have — that profound, we’ll-never-see-it-on-this-planet (native or not) connection, and let it transport me somewhere other, somewhere that is home. These people have/had something that N.A.s can’t hope to touch because the way our planet functions is nothing like Pandora. And that’s what takes it to the spirit realm, for me.
I understand your feelings, despite my own purely ignorant upbringing. I spent my childhood feeling I’d been born in the wrong time and race; I daydreamed constantly of being native American. But though I was reminded of that historical wrongness and the plight of our natives, this movie takes it to a whole other level. Outside of plot trappings, this movie is so far from Dance with Wolves that it should speak to all races. I hope you will see it. I hope you will understand what I mean. Similarities, yes. Same-same, no.
…I guess, for me, it ruffles my fur that people say it is “Dances With Wolves” in space. It may share threads of similarity in it, but it doesn’t suffuse you with the world in the way that Avatar has. Dances was like a window into another time; this movie is like stepping through a door.
This movie doesn’t give the white man an out: he has to do more than any Na’avi to prove himself. It also doesn’t, in my opinion, caricature the plight that Native Americans went through, but makes the similarity in treatment burn through the film. I actually had participatory emotional responses to the film, which alone is good because I usually don’t, and the immersion into the Pandoran world simply brought more out of me.
I left the movie changed, maybe not completely, but like I’d had a vision of something that I might be able to plug into, or at least come to understand after my own fashion.
It’s much more than Dances with Wolves, agreed. The guy was making desperate choices, not inspired ones.
Wow.. Great review.. I’ve watched this movie a couple of times already and I must say it is very very very good. Compared to James Cameron’s work, Titanic, this is so much better. How the movie depicts the outsiders destroying what the people love and cherish and how somebody raised in a very different way can begin to appreciate the roughness and beauty surrounding him..
Love your review..
Thank you! Yeah, it was a very powerful movie. I don’t really get the people who are saying it was “Dances with Wolves” in space. I thought that the deeds performed by the white-guy-outsider were done in desperation to help the people he felt at home with — not to show off or be better than they were.
This is my first comment to this blog… I literally *stumbled upon* this site… and I must say it has answered many questions for me. This is the first actual blog entry I’ve read here, and it inspired me to find a way to watch Avatar. (I have two very young children, so it’s not easy to get out of the house) I’ve just returned from watching it. The movie affected me much the same way it did to you… I am crying as I type this. I’m a major weeper, so it’s not a stretch to imagine my tearful eyes in the movie theater. However, I’m in a sort of mourning now… for the “oneness” that never is. For the beauty that is not.
Then again, I have been inspired to resume my journey bringing this to the isolated humanity we all live with now.
I’m so happy that my post inspired you to see the film and that it affected you the way it did me. I’d hate to inspire someone who ended up hating the movie.
It’s quite a moving and profound experience. I’m not a very jaded person — I find bitterness unrewarding and difficult to maintain, and why would anyone want to maintain something so unpleasant? I think some people use that as a shield, but it strikes me as tragic. Avatar is a film that touches people on levels many people would prefer to leave untouched… and ironically I think that’s one of the points the movie is trying to make.
Thank you for commenting, and I hope you’ll stick around.
“…ironically I think that’s one of the points the movie is trying to make.”
I agree entirely. Rather than the “one white man to rule them all” theory that some here express, I feel it is exactly the opposite. Here is this man… this classic, American man…. jaded, military, incredibly transparent and shallow. And he finds a better way. He finds something his soul has longed for, in a species that could not be more different than his own.