The waters where we make our stand: On Avatar, Avatar 2, and activism
Despite its flaws, Avatar 2 has much to teach us about our relationship to activism and the natural world. This is a relationship that desperately needs renewing if we are to truly face up to climate and ecological breakdown.
Avatar 1.0
The original Avatar was more than a movie; it was an event.
It was pulled from some theatres by the Chinese Government for fear it could incite land revolts; it was slammed by the Christian Right for its ‘anti-Americanism’; it was employed eagerly by anti-extractivism and anti-colonialism protesters across four continents; it elicited depression among some of those who left cinemas to face the impoverished Earth of our cityscapes; and it led some viewers to sell their 4x4s, leave the army, and much much more (I know this, from watching the #Avatar twitter-feed, for some time, during its original theatrical release). This was no ordinary film.
After 13 years, and a decade overdue, the first of the Avatar sequels has finally hit the big screen. My argument here will be that, once again, and despite its flaws, this is a film that fits our time. A film that we can and should learn from.
Avatar 2.0
At the heart of the sequel are huge, wonderful, wise whale-like creatures, called ‘tulkun’. They are hunted ruthlessly for the oily elixir of life that they contain by the Earthlings that have returned to Pandora. The hunt-scene in which an adult female (with a calf) is pursued to death, and then mined for the oil, is quite literally one of the most soul-rending scenes I have ever seen at the movies.
While the humans and the Na’vi are at war in the film, we learn that these Pandoran ‘whales’ have taken a vow of non-violence. And that they are wiser, more emotional beings than any of us bipeds. What a magical thing for a blockbuster movie to dwell on, to show us.
Both Avatar films have at their centre processes of ‘education’; deeply-needed possibilities in particular for our avatar(s) in the films to really learn from indigenous inhabitants. Might we be at a moment — deeper into ecological crisis than we were when the first Avatar was released — where we can learn from indigenous peoples’ analyses of ourselves about what is missing from our worldview (such as: a sense of the sacred), and even perhaps from the whales and dolphins whose cultures (yes, they really do have cultures too) are in some ways more impressive than our own…? I’m thinking in particular of the way they stick together no matter what, forming super-organisms beyond our fantasies of individuality.
This is the kind of thing we are going to have to re-learn how to do, if we are to face up to the self-imposed existential threat of climate and ecological breakdown.
An existential threat
Avatar is often called an ‘escapist’ film, a science-fantasy, but I’ve argued elsewhere that it’s anything but. It was a powerful and timely piece of popular culture that starkly narrates and questions the exploitation of nature for profit, and offers viewers the importance of resisting this by way of means that work.
Might The Way of Water provide a new opportunity for this kind of message to hit home? Avatar’s release coincided with the Copenhagen COP summit, widely recognised as a failure. 13 years on, we have recently had the damp squib of COP27, agreeing in principle to compensate the Global South for loss and damage from the escalating climate more-than-emergency while also in effect heading towards more loss and damage through ever higher climate-deadly emissions! The biodiversity COP just concluded at Montréal, COP15, has at least concentrated minds on putting nature front and centre, but the accord that’s been achieved there will be a paper tiger, unless somehow there is will to implement it that proved quite elusive with regard to the Paris climate accord. Moreover, the increasing tendency to financialise nature, which the biodiversity CoP process accommodates, is profoundly dangerous.
The biodiversity CoPs supposedly protect land and oceans; of these two, it is the latter which are if anything much more crucial, dominating as they do our ‘blue’ planet. The pollution and acidification of our oceans in particular represent a potential existential threat. A potent one, because of its terrifying interaction with climate degradation.
Our very existence risks becoming meaningless, if, as has occurred (on Earth) in the future envisaged in the Avatar series, we gamble our very existence, and fall out of balance with life.
The Tao of water
If Avatar showed us the way of air, Avatar 2 — riffing perhaps on the Hong Kong democracy protesters — concerns The Way of Water. Life will so often find a way; and resistance is fertile.
But the deeper reference of the title (which of course lies behind the choice of metaphor made by those democracy protesters) is to the ancient and contemporary philosophy of Taoism. ‘Tao’ means ‘The way’. Water symbolises the Tao because it is fluid, adaptable, changing; because it appears weak (compared to, say, rock), but can ultimately wear away the strongest thing. The logic of Taoism is a logic of paradox: what appears strong (e.g. outright force) is often weak; what appears weak (e.g. surrender, or non-violence) can be profoundly strong.
At the end of The Way of Water, the protagonist awakens to the idea that the ocean has become his home, saying, in the film’s last lines: “This is our home, this is our fortress. This is where we make our stand.” A mysterious and attractive idea: making our stand in/on/through water. If aliens were to visit Earth, this blue planet, they would quite possibly name it Ocean. Could Avatar 2 help enable us to make our stand? In a wise, non-violent way, a way that sees beyond killing.
There is a magnificent scene earlier in the film when a young Na’vi who feels the closeness of the life suffusing the planet says that Ey’wa — the god of all living things, similar to our idea of Gaia — is “Like a word about to be spoken”. I found this supremely evocative of another world that is still possible. On a quiet day, one can almost hear it breathing.
But perhaps we should hesitate to assume that we are well-placed, at least just yet, to hear this word. Perhaps its nature might even always be: about to be spoken, rather than actually spoken. If the word can be heard, perhaps only the tulkun are yet well-placed to hear it. Jake, our foremost avatar in the films, is on a long, sometimes cyclical journey towards being able to hear it; and so presumably then are we. My colleague Tom Greaves put this matter as follows, in an email to me:
“The mode of meaning that we receive from the Earth is rather different from human language — this mode of meaning, if we must think it in terms of human language, is closest to a ‘word about to be spoken.’ What we need to do is keep attuning ourselves to that word about to be spoken, the meaning of the earth — — and that means learning to be much more silent and not constantly trying to ‘put words in Ey’wa’s mouth’, so to speak. She is never going to speak a word that is like the meaning we expect from the spoken.”
Something along these lines fits of course with the paradoxical, humble, and unhubristic philosophy of Taoism: consider for instance the crucial injunction that ‘The Tao that can be spoken is not the Tao.’
There is a journey that we need to go on, to re-attune ourselves to existence lived as a communion of subjects rather than a domination of objects. Some of us are surely further on this path than others; but it will be complacent to assume that we come to an end of this journey…and madly hubristic to assume that we (you and me) have already arrived there.
We can however, I think, risk noting something like this, to round out this section: Water is also associated with balance, in Taoism, because it invariably finds an equilibrium. This sense of balance is what ecology — what we need — is all about.
That is pivotal to the way we are seeking to waymark.
The cure for Avatar-depression
What is the antidote to Avatar-depression? It absolutely can’t be merely going to the theme-park that Disney has been quick to construct.
‘Avatar-depression’ will start to lift once we’re busy at work restoring planet Ocean to be as beautiful as the unravaged parts of Pandora are.
And the greatest thing about The Way of Water is how much of it consists in relatively unhurried exploration of that (threatened) beauty.
As some Reviews have already emphasised, there is much that is weak in Avatar 2. But let that not obscure its manifest strengths. The real lesson of Avatar is about how to make our stand. To try to attain to the wisdom of whales, and the intelligence of indigeneity and of our own wisdom traditions. The Way of Water includes repeated teaching on breathing techniques and meditation, teachings that, as I watched, I found myself breathing along with. In a nod to the shape of the climate movement, the film also has children teaching their parents how to breathe in a way that allows them to survive. Is there any other blockbuster movie which has attempted anything like this?
What if we were to start to treat whales and dolphins, as the ocean-dwelling Na’vi do the tulkun, as “our brothers and sisters”? This would be utterly transformative — and it would require of us transforming the way we treat the oceans: the way we treat them as a gigantic mine, cesspool and waste-dump; the way we pollute them with sonar and worse; the way we treat their inhabitants. (Incidentally, James Cameron himself badly needs to step up in this regard. It was very disappointing and profoundly ironic to see Avatar: The Way of Water launched at a Japanese aquarium with a troupe of captive dolphins performing in front of Cameron and the cast!)
Bringing back the elixir
In Avatar 2, the oil for which the tulkun are murdered is literally an elixir of life, which is exported to Earth to prolong our (unsustainable) lives here. In the traditional formula of the ‘hero’s journey’, an ‘elixir’ that is often of a more metaphorical character needs to be brought home, as the ultimate learning from the journey. The elixir that actually needs to be brought to Earth is ecospiritual understanding, including the deep truth that in the end violence is no solution to anything. The tulkun are trying to teach these messages. The Avatar films — or the characters within them — are groping towards this knowledge.
Dare we hope that in the coming sequels — that will be made, now that Avatar 2 has been commercially successful — this will become understood. Spider (Quarritch’s son, who has become a ward of the Omataciya) has laid down a crucial seed here: in saving Quarritch’s avatar, against all expectation, near the end of The Way of Water, he might have begun a process of that avatar developing a conscience about what he has been doing, and coming to understand something of what I have laid out above.
A magnificent novel that might influence James Cameron is Starhawk’s The 5th sacred thing, which features the ultimately successful (albeit at quite a cost) practicing of non-violence against initially unthinking militarism. The long climactic fight scene in Avatar 2 is tiring; I mean, it is tiring to have the myth of redemptive violence played out yet again on our screens. (The ending of Avatar 1 was on balance more satisfactory in this regard, as the violence employed by the Na’vi failed to turn the tide against the Earthling invaders; it was only Eywa who did that.)
Is it possible that the Earthling soldiers, possibly led by the Quarritch-avatar, might at some point refuse to go on any more, and throw down their weapons? I wish we had reached that point already in the final stages of Avatar 2; the callous and cruel mission-centric attitude of Quarritch’s crew, even at the predictable cost of their own lives, was becoming too one-dimensional. The tulkun may now lead the way, perhaps working on the Quarritch-avatar’s conscience in the space that Spider’s remarkable generous life-saving gesture has opened up. A gesture that occurred because of the Quarritch-avatar’s own decision, a little earlier, to save Quarritch’s son, when a furious Neytiri sought to ransom her adopted daughter by threatening Spider’s life. It was the Quarritch-avatar himself who planted the seed of the transformation I am driving at; by retaining the value of family. Our children are our future; we need to change everything in order to assure them of a future.
There are promising moments too in Jake’s journey in this film; he goes on another learning journey, less drastic than that in Avatar 1, but still significant. Waymarks include him saying “I’m done with war”; he is groping towards a pragmatic and peaceful way, and beyond vengefulness, for the sake of preserving the next generation.
But above all it is the tulkun who show the way, beyond violence, and into tune with all life. In Avatar 2, this depth of insight is moved aside by the myth of redemptive violence, and the plot of the film hinges upon the one tulkun who is willing to fight. Perhaps in Avatar 3–5 a full dramatic arc may be able to avoid retreads of that myth, and find a way to really embody the tulkunian way of water. (Is it too much to hope for that these films might also ultimately overcome the problematic plot twist included in the Special Edition version of Avatar 1, and inherited in Avatar 2, whereby Jake becomes the official tribal leader of the Omataciya? Indigenous wisdom risks being occluded by a white saviour complex so long as Jake is not only toruk makto but also the actual tribal leader.)
Sequels are virtually impossible things to execute. Avatar: The Way of Water had an even more impossible task than usual: for where does one go after a living planet has risen up in rebellion? What plot can possibly make sense, after that?
I have argued here that The Way of Water did a surprisingly good job at an impossible task.
That is roughly what we have to do too, on a far grander scale that the film is indicating the outlines of to us, at this desperate moment in our planet’s eco-political history.
Bringing back the elixir 2
When you leave the cinema, after watching this film, you need to bring the sense of the deeper-than-deep value and beauty of life (at which this piece has been gesturing) with you. Until the Avatar film series takes something like the turn I outline above, of the colonisers learning from the Na’vi, learning from their own lives, and (perhaps above all) learning from the tulkun, you need to bring the real ‘elixir’ — which is the sense of the ineffable value and beauty of life, and of the aliveness of our world — home with you.
As you emerge — probably into artificial, nature-free streets — let yourself feel some sadness, and some grief at what is lost…and then some rising energy, and a compassionate yet fierce determination.
To evoke that other world.
As our own planet continues to die (rather: to be killed), listen deeply for the word that is about to be spoken. Perhaps, just perhaps you can help us collectively get into a state from whence…we might truly be able to help speak it.
• Rupert Read teaches Philosophy at the University of East Anglia, and is the author of Why Climate Breakdown Matters.
[Huge thanks to Tom Greaves and Marcus Hemsley for comments that have greatly enriched this piece. Thanks also to Peter Kramer, Vincent Gaine and Deepak Rughani for discussion, and to Atus Mariqueo-Russell for invaluable editorial assistance.]