Dreams and Magic Tricks

I saw “Avatar” at the Potsdamer Platz IMAX theater, in the best possible conditions. Being the big sci-fi fan that I am, I had been eagerly awaiting the movie for months. As I sank into my plush chair, with the 3D glasses covering half my face, I pictured myself, even before the movie began, as a humanoid projected into the future.

When the 20th Century Fox logo finally appeared on the screen, in all its 3D glory, I immersed myself into the film and felt a childlike joy and delight that mundane life can rarely offer. Jesus taught us that if we did not get to the Kingdom of Heaven as children, we would never get there.

As if I had been a child, I plunged into the astonishing cartoon, mesmerized by the fantastic neon colors of Pandora, with its floating, forest-covered mountains and its beasts, butterflies, and birds. I identified with the Na’vi, its graceful blue inhabitants, who seemed familiar from the very beginning: I think the old children’s magazines “Cutezătorii” or “Minitehnicus,” published here in Romania, used to have a series of comic strips named “Terra 2,” in which the aliens were sky-blue and 10 feet tall.

In fact, science fiction marked my entire childhood. I remember how impatiently I used to wait for the day when the sci-fi stories booklet was supposed to hit newsstands. The amazement I felt back then, as I read stories set on distant planets, was similar to the buoyancy I felt while watching James Cameron’s creation.

When the movie ended, I wished I would never have to leave my chair: I wanted to remain on Pandora forever with my blue woman, graceful tail, adornments, and tattoos. I wanted to become my avatar, the dream walker of nostalgia…

Too bad I am no longer a child. I am no longer a teenager either, although I have tried my whole life to stay fourteen. Even during the movie, frequent sparks of skepticism had been annoyingly interrupting my reverie and imaginary journey.

My fascinated mind had caught small signs of distrust, furtive cynical grimaces, which gave way to sudden intrusions of lucidity similar to the little muscular spasms that wake us from slumber. After the movie, however, the spell broke entirely, and my diabolical critical thinking, miserable intellect, and unfortunate maturity tore the dream to pieces.

In a split second, the abyss opened before me: The miracle was abruptly revealed to be a magic trick, and the fairy-tale became a bedtime story. As the dream faded away, I clearly saw the ordinary ideology behind the billion-dollar movie.

“Avatar” seems to adopt the eternal, primitive, and false dichotomy between nature and culture, separating the noble savage and the civilized man and defining the individual who lives in harmony with nature and the one who destroys nature for money and power as two different people. The appraisal of shamanic primitivism, as well as the invention of a utopia that has no correspondent in the history of the human species, suddenly looked obscene.

Murder, torture, cannibalism, and slavery have always accompanied the history of the “noble savage,” long before his contact with the European civilization. On the other hand, the fact that the movie showed “us” as vicious capitalists and militarists, without making any references to the huge scientific, philosophical, and artistic culture inherited from Europe, is another insincere simplification.

In the movie, the line “We will fight terror with terror” was a reference to the Gulf War and George W. Bush’s doctrine of preemptive attack. In reality, there is no connection between the war on Pandora and the Gulf War or international terrorism, for that matter – not even as a far-fetched metaphor. Only deplorable ideological blindness and extremism could lead to such comparisons.

The paradox of the movie lies in the fact that it increases the fortunes of the very capitalists it criticizes and seems to fight against. Like Bob Marley, who made his record label rich by singing about freedom and Che Guevara’s image, which sells millions of dollars’ worth of t-shirts and baseball hats, Cameron sells idealism for gold and freedom for diamonds.

To the Americans, he sells the image of America as the policeman of the world. He sells them self-hatred and the feeling of guilt toward Native Americans and nature. Just like vampires, America sells well as the symbol of dehumanization, venal capitalism, and military imperialism.

Without the regrettable ideological stench that forms the Manichaean* backbone of the movie, “Avatar” would have remained a miracle. It would have been a movie you could watch again and again, a movie you would have actually liked to live forever inside of you. I am terrified by the upcoming sequels, which will probably reveal the magic trick behind the dream completely.

Editor’s note: The author of this piece, Mircea Cărtărescu, is a Romanian poet, essayist and novelist.

*Editor’s note: Manichaeism was a major Iranian Gnostic religion. Its cosmology describes a struggle between good, represented by a spiritual world of light, and evil, represented by a material world of darkness.