‘Avatar 2’, ‘Moby Dick’, And The Paradoxes of Eco-consciousness
To face up to climate change, we need to face up to our role in it, as a species — and personally
It’s about halfway through Avatar: The Way of Water that the reason behind the second invasion of the Na’vi homeworld Pandora gets a name: Amrita. This is the gleaming, golden oil that has brought the military power of the colonising ‘Sky People’ to the planet, substituting the much-mocked unobtainium mineral of the first Avatar.
In one of the film’s most memorable scenes, we get an in-depth look at how amrita is gathered. A flotilla of high-tech, heavily armed boats scours the seas. In painstaking detail, they hunt down a pod of Tulkun whales and cooly slaughter them. Then, from the hunt to the harvest: The extractor-scientists are sent in, and literally drill the precious liquid from the whales’ brains.
I had been reading Herman Melville’s Moby Dick in the months before I saw the film, and the resonance between the two texts was striking. And not just because they both involved whales and whaling.
Because, here’s the thing: Avatar 2’s whale lobotomy actually used to happen (and possibly still does). Rather than the fictional amrita, it was Spermaceti that was the prize — a cloudy, waxy liquid found in the heads of sperm whales that produced cleaner, longer burning candles, as well as cosmetics and makeup. In the nineteenth century this was a big deal, and spermaceti became highly coveted. It also became part of the justification for the systematised destruction of the sperm whale worldwide. Even after electricity became widespread — as late as 1985 — sperm whales continued to be hunted and killed at prolific levels, to the point where the species is still recovering.
Spermaceti was prized because it gave more potent light. It was a luxury technology — one that expanded human possibilities and boosted quality of life for those who could afford it. By comparison, the value of Avatar 2’s amrita lies in its ability to prolong human existence by halting the body’s ageing process. The parallel between the two is clear. In both history and Hollywood’s reimagining of it, it is the demand for a reality-altering substance that drives murderous, systematic violence.
Weak sauce Hollywood environmentalism
This, however, might be where the parallels between Avatar 2 and Moby Dick end — at least in terms of narrative treatment; because Avatar 2, as a text, is firmly entrenched in the moral quagmire of late capitalism. By which I mean: it recognises that the foundations of our modern, global system are based on unremitting violence against nature. Yet with this recognition comes paralysis. It lacks the self awareness, or the conviction, to say anything original about this predicament; to offer any viable alternative, or even just to face up to its own complicity in the current mess we’re in.
Of course, the film venerates tribal customs and wisdom as an antidote to the imperialist aggression it depicts. This is a significant dimension of anti-colonial struggle; one that ultimately clashes with capitalist values despite the best efforts of many companies to claim they support indigenous communities — a kind of ‘tribewashing’ much in the same vein as greenwashing. For some viewers, this will offer an inspiring and meaningful message about resisting capitalism and finding alternative ways of being.
In practice, however, that message can only succeed so far; because, as a huge, multi-million dollar product that is itself at the vanguard of Hollywood’s own corporate entertainment juggernaut, Avatar 2 leaves a strange aftertaste. Most of us can recognise the morality at the film’s heart, but its delivery feels flat, uninspired, by rote. Somewhat paradoxical.
The fact is, a multi-millionaire director preaching about eco-consciousness feels a bit like Hitler fronting a campaign for vegetarianism. Or MacDonald’s telling you to make healthier food choices. The message may be valid (and, in both cases, recognisable) but there’s a disconnect between the story and the voice expressing it.
That’s no shade on James Cameron, a legendary filmmaker who has created some truly iconic cinema. Judging by his advocacy for marine conservation, he may well believe in Avatar 2’s recourse to tribal traditions and customs.
However, there is a reason the film’s message lacks impact, and I would argue it’s partly down to the cognitive dissonance between the message and the product. Avatar 2 is, in its own small way, part of the very problem it depicts. As a result, its critical cut-through is entirely blunted.
There are, of course, plenty of films and shows wrapped up with corporate interests that manage decent critiques of power structures. The two are not entirely incompatible. Tony Gilroy’s Andor (2022), as part of Disney’s Star Wars stable, is a strong recent example.
However, what’s significant about the blandness of Avatar 2 is that it is emblematic of our struggle, in the developed west and elsewhere, to truly engage with the brutal paradox at the heart of the climate crisis.
Specifically: that environmental decline is not some unfortunate anomaly that is happening to us, the human species, and the planet more broadly. In fact, it is something that is happening because of us. We are collectively responsible for this crisis, through our extractivist relationship with nature — and some of us far more than others. And we continue to dig the hole deeper, every single day.
Melville’s mad eye
In contrast to Avatar 2, reading Moby Dick in 2023 is bracing precisely because it makes so few apologies for the inherent violence of whaling, and of humanity’s relationship with nature more broadly. This, of course, being over a century before climate change was a scientifically accepted idea.
Melville does not look away from an uncomfortable truth — the truth that we are all, to varying degrees, complicit in and reliant on the ongoing destruction of nature. ‘You are part of this too’, the novel seems to insist in 2023. It throws down a difficult but vital gauntlet to the individual reader, and, more broadly, to the entire notion of environmental and social justice. In doing so, it also challenges any lazy (if well meaning) assumptions that human and non-human nature can find a truly harmonious, sustainable existence — even if we all start drinking oat milk.
In light of current environmental discourse, some might argue this line of thought is counterproductive. Faced with climate chaos, we are sorely in need of global solutions and the collective will to realise them. Small personal acts, like going vegan, are a part of consciousness raising.
Yet surely, if we really mean to attempt such unprecedented change, we need to take an honest look in the mirror. To face up to climate change, we need to face up to our role in it as a species. A novel written in 1851 may seem an unusual forum for such a conversation — but to read Moby Dick critically today is to receive that very invitation.
In Cameron’s film, by comparison, the viewer is a passive bystander. Despite all its visual glamour, it fails to really engage with the paradox that humanity’s recent technological progress has unfolded in direct proportion to environmental destruction. In this way, it is typical of our global political and cultural deadlock over how to address the bind we’re in.
Quite simply, Avatar 2 has nothing new to say; no new direction to offer. Indeed, it exists as a near carbon (ahem) copy of the first Avatar film, some 13 years on. Likewise, despite the recurring parade of high profile climate conferences and pledges, we still lack the global political will to adopt a real alternative to our current capitalism and the apocalyptic damage it’s doing to our world. Snail’s pace reforms that continue to privilege profits over planet seem to be the only genuine strategy.
Avatar 2 is both a cultural product of the late capitalist malaise we find ourselves in, and symptomatic of its deadlocked position.
Ishmael versus bourgeois blindness
Moby Dick, by comparison, has no such issue. While some of its values may seem objectionable to us today, Melville never flinches from magnifying them clearly and directly. The raw honesty of his writing is wholly refreshing — and opens up a space for real critical engagement.
The novel’s protagonist, Ishmael, has an enquiring mind, and one that’s preoccupied with diving into the very guts of the bloodthirsty industry he’s joined. Literally at times, as he describes, in graphic detail, the dismembering and processing of the whales the Pequod catches.
By turns, whaling is depicted as a kind of existential horror and a noble, glorious expression of human power and perseverance.
As Ishmael contends:
“I freely assert, that the cosmopolitan philosopher cannot, for his life, point out one single peaceful influence, which within the last sixty years has operated more potentially upon the whole broad world, taken in one aggregate, than the high and mighty business of whaling.” (p.119)
Why? Because, the narrator argues, whaling vessels have been the vanguard of a global progress — one we would now recognise as being entangled with both colonisation and globalisation. They have sailed to the farthest reaches of the earth, establishing contact with “savage harbours” and opening up the possibility of trade in the process.
It’s a narrative that closely parallels the idea of manifest destiny which justified and encouraged American expansion westward — and eventually metamorphosed into the spread of the USA’s influence globally.
So, according to Ishmael, whaling is the great engine driving a globalised humanity forward, and whale oil is both its fuel and its product. It’s the magic that makes the ritual work.
It’s easy to argue, in 2023, just how flawed Ishmael’s vision is. It was, after all, the same vision of progress that brought genocide upon the first peoples of the Americas, and which continues to justify all shades of ecological and social destruction today. If whale oil lights the candles at the alter of progress, it’s so the grisliest sacrifices can take place upon it.
However, we must also recognise a certain exaggerated humour in Ishmael’s stubborn, passionate defence of whaling. As readers, we are left with a sense that he protests too much; that his support for the industry is probably tied up with his own wide-eyed optimism, his hunger for an adventure he can call his own.
As he pompously states:
“I prospectively ascribe all the honor and glory to whaling; for a whale-ship was my Yale College and my Harvard.” (p.122)
From one point of view, there is something naive and preposterous about such a defence. Our protagonist is hardly the most rational or impartial chronicler.
From another angle, though, Ishmael’s diatribe perfectly skewers the middle-classed, cosmopolitan discomfort with violence, while recognising the working class reality that has always been embroiled in it, and forced to experience that violence up close.
Thus Ishmael’s disdain for those privileged enough to look down their noses at whaling:
“over [their] mahogany” (p.305, Penguin Classics).
The men of the Pequod have no such luxury, and are faced with the tough, bloody reality of their work every day.
Likewise, the same bourgeois blindness persists today in the global north. Many of us living in wealthier countries feel — rightly so — a sense of disgust, outrage and anxiety at the advance of climate change and global environmental destruction. But we also so often fail to recognise that it’s precisely the labour we’ve outsourced to poorer countries — and poorer people — that allows us to have a comparatively comfortable life.
Disavowal of violence
What Melville is tapping into in Moby Dick — and what makes the novel so ripe for a leftist reading — is the violence of production under capitalism, whether that involves the slaughter of whales in the mid-19th century or the brutal labour regimes mining the raw materials that run our smartphones today.
As mentioned, a class-based reading of this phenomenon is absolutely necessary if we’re to understand it fully, and move away from the comfortable blindness so many individuals in the global north continue to exist in.
Historian Vijay Prashad expresses the problem like this:
“Let’s look at the structure of imperialism through the eyes of Zambian children in the copperbelt region of that country.
The copper underneath the ground enters the cellphones of people around the world. The copper is inside your hand; it’s your identity…
“That means you are directly connected to that child in Zambia [harvesting the copper]…That child is intimately linked to you by the imperialist exploitation of the copper resources in Zambia.
“But you don’t see that, because you buy the phone from a shop. It comes wrapped in plastic in a nice box.”
[Source: Symposium for 50th Anniversary of Walter Rodney’s ‘How Europe Underdeveloped Africa’]
Melville — through Ishmael — and Prashad some 170 years later, are both calling out the disavowal of the violence of capitalist production. The bourgeois squeamishness which cannot bear to look at the raw facts of that violence, and which cannot face up to it despite (or because of) the benefits it continually reaps from it.
In 2023, in our various attitudes towards climate change and ecological destruction, there is often no difference. We are aware, in theory, that many of our individual freedoms and privileges — such as our ability to travel by plane — come at a huge collective price to the environment. Yet many of us (this author included) struggle to face up to the reality of this — to the fact that something must change in this state of affairs. Partly because of the threat to those privileges such a recognition might pose.
At one level, it’s a moral dilemma that applies to any of us. The products and services created through such violence can be found among all sectors of society, rich and poor alike — though obviously in far greater concentration among the rich.
The situation also can’t be extricated from class privileges at a global scale. It is, after all, those of us who have a certain standard of living, often in the global north, who are the direct beneficiaries of this continual exploitation. And while many of us will attempt small sacrifices as a means to redress this injustice, such as reducing our consumption or carbon offsetting, this can only ever be a drop in the ocean.
The brutal truth is that, through our consumer freedoms, we are all complicit in this violence against the earth, and those who are exploited in the process.
By proxy, some thinkers such as degrowth proponent Jason Hickel have argued that richer nations hold significantly greater responsibility for climate breakdown. This, of course, leads us to the thorny prospect of redistribution as a means to counteract both climate change and material inequality on a global scale.
Guilt, clearly, is not the answer. But recognition must be part of it. Without it, no real alternative solutions can be identified, and we will continue, as a species and global ecosystem, on our slow march to devastation.
It would be easy to criticise the reverence towards free market capitalism — and its freewheeling imperialism — that is more or less explicit in Ishmael’s defence of whaling. But to do so would perhaps be to miss the larger challenge that Moby Dick poses. Namely that the privileges that facilitate our quality of life are entirely dependent on acts of violence against nature and our fellow man. On continual bloodshed that we would prefer not to see.
But in Melville’s novel, see it we must.
At one level, to the modern reader, there is something wholly abhorrent about Moby Dick’s whaling.
Yet at so many others, its description is compelling — because it is so remarkably insightful. It is the passionate honesty with which Melville’s novel navigates the puzzle of human violence that makes it as vital and resonant today as it’s ever been.
