Weather Banter - View Single Post - Avatar, the answer to a Copenhager's dream

rochrist

Eric Gisin wrote:
Green propagana is not limited to faux documentaries like Inconvenient
Truth,
it's also in activist SciFi. Note that new-age lunacy has infected
several recent SciFi movies.

http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/a...nhagens_dream/

Andrew Bolt
Wednesday, December 23, 2009 at 09:36am

MOST people will date the death of the great global warming scare not
from the Copenhagen fiasco -
boring! - but from Avatar.

It won't be the world's most expensive warmist conference but the
world's most expensive movie that
will stick in most memories as the precise point at which the green
faith started to shrivel from
sheer stupidity.

Avatar, in fact, is the warmist dream filmed in 3D. Staring through your
glasses at James Cameron's
spectacular $400 million creation, you can finally see where this global
warming cult was going.

And you can see, too, everything that will now slowly pull it back to
earth.

December 2009. Note it down. The beginning of the end, even as Avatar
becomes possibly the
biggest-grossing film in history.

Cameron, whose last colossal hit was Titanic, has created a virtual new
planet called Pandora, on
which humans 150 years from now have formed a small settlement.

They are there to mine a mineral so rare that it's called Unobtainium
(groan), of which the
greatest deposit sits right under the great sacred tree of the planet's
dominant species, humanoid
blue aliens called Na'vi.

If Tim Flannery, Al Gore and all the other Copenhagen delegates could at
least agree to design a
new kind of people, they'd wind up with something much like these
3m-tall gracelings.

The Na'vi live in trees, at one with nature. They worship Mother Earth
and, like Gaians today, talk
meaningfully of "a network of energy that flows through all living
things". They drink water that's
pooled in giant leaves, and chant around a tree that whispers of their
ancestors.

They are also unusually non-sexist for a forest tribe, with the women
just as free as men to hunt
and choose their spouse. Naturally, like the most fashionable of
Hollywood stars, they are also
neo-Buddhist reincarnationists, who believe "all energy is borrowed and
some day you have to give
it back".

And, of course, the Na'vi reject all technology that's more advanced
than a bow and arrow, for "the
wealth of the world is all around us".

Sent to talk dollars and sense into these blue New Agers and move them
out of the way of the
bulldozers is a former Marine, Jake Sully (played by Australian Sam
Worthington), who drives the
body of a Na'vi avatar to better gain their trust.

(WARNING: Spoiler alert! Don't read on if you plan to see the movie.)

But meeting such perfect beings, living such low-emission green lives,
Sully realises instead how
vile his own species is.

Humans, he angrily declares, have already wrecked their own planet
through their greed.

"There is no green" on their "dying world" because "they have killed
their mother". Now we
land-raping humans plan to wreck Pandora, too, with our "shock-and-awe"
bombings, our war on
"terror" and our genocidal plans to destroy the Na'vi and steal their
lands.

So complete is Cameron's disgust with humans - and so convinced he is
that his audience shares it -
that he's made film history: he's created the first mass-market movie
about a war between aliens
and humans in which we're actually meant to barrack for the aliens.

(WARNING: Second spoiler alert!)

In fact, so vomitous are humans that Sully, the hero, not only chooses
to fight on the side of the
aliens but to actually become an alien, too. He rejects not just humans
but his own humanity.

All of this preaching comes straight from what's left of Cameron's heart
after five marriages and a
professional reputation of on-set meanness.

Avatar, he's said, tackles "our impact on the natural environment,
wherever we go strip mining and
putting up shopping malls", and it warns "we're going to find out the
hard way if we don't wise up
and start seeking a life that's in balance with the natural cycle on
life on earth".

Mind you, most of this will be just wallpaper to the film's real
audience, which won't be greenies
in Rasta beanies or wearing save-the-whale T-shirts made in Guatemala.

No, scoffing their popcorn as they wait impatiently for the inevitable
big-bang shoot-'em-up after
a fairground tour of some cool new planet will be the usual bag-laden
crowd from the
Christmas-choked megaplex - the kind of bug-eyed folk who thrill most to
what Cameron claims to
condemn, from the hi-tech to the militaristic.

Still, you can hardly blame them if they don't buy the message that
Cameron's selling, since he
doesn't really buy it himself.

Here's Cameron condemning consumerism by spending almost half a billion
dollars on a mass-market
movie for the Christmas season complete with tie-in burger deals from
McDonald's and Avatar toys
from Mattel.

Here's Cameron damning our love of technology by using the most advanced
cinematographic technology
to create his new green world.

In fact, here's Cameron urging his audience to scorn material
possessions and get close to nature,
only to himself retire each night to the splendid comfort of his Malibu
mansion.

Not even his own creations live up to the philosophy he has them preach.

For all their talk of the connectedness of nature, the Na'vi still kill
animals for food - although
not before saying how sorry they are, of course, since we live in an age
in which seeming sorry
excuses every selfishness.

Likewise, despite all their lectures on not exploiting nature, the Na'vi
still come out top dog in
the food chain.

Even when they physically become at one with wild pterodactyls, by
hooking up to them through some
USB in their hair braid, they manage to convince their flying reptiles
to act like their private
jets.

Isn't this against the rules? I mean, in this caring and
at-one-with-nature world, shouldn't a
plugged-in pterodactyl just once in a while get to direct its human
passenger instead - by either
telling it to take a flying jump or to at least act like lunch?

In all of this, Avatar captures precisely - and to the point of satire -
the creed of the
Copenhagen faithful.

Rewind what you've seen from those Copenhagen planet-savers in the past
two weeks.

There were the apocalyptic warnings of how we were killing the planet.
There were the standing
ovations the delegates gave last week to Venezuelan President Hugo
Chavez's furious denunciations
of capitalism, consumerism and the US military.

There was Bolivian President Evo Morales' cry for a simpler life: "It's
changing economic policies,
ending luxury, consumerism ... living better is to exploit human beings."

There were great crowds of activists such as Australia's Professor Clive
Hamilton, who, like Avatar's
Jake Sully, sermonises on the need to embrace "Gaian earth in its
ecological, cybernetic way,
infused with some notion of mind or soul or chi".

And there was the romanticising of the primitive by the demonstrators
outside dressed as ferals and
wild bears, as they banged tribal drums or chanted "Ommm" to Mother Earth.

Of course the Cameron-style have-it-both-ways hypocrites were there,
too, luxuriating in the very
lifestyles they condemned.

Take Prince Charles, who flew in his private RAF jet to Copenhagen to
deliver a lecture on how our
careless use of resources had pushed the planet "to the brink".

And then had his pilot fly him home to his palace.

But, yes, you are right. How can I say this great green faith is now
toppling into the pit of
ridicule, when Avatar seems sure to do colossal business? Won't a whole
generation of the
slack-jawed just catch this new green faith from the men in the blue
costumes?

That's a risk. But having the green faith made so alien and such fodder
for the entertainment of
the candybar crowds will rob it of all sanctimony and cool.

Would a Cate Blanchett really be flattered to now be likened to a naked
Na'vi, running from a pack
of wild dogs in a dark forest?

Would an Al Gore really like to have millions of filmgoers see in 3D
where his off-this-planet
faith would lead them - up a tree, and without even a paddle?

No, we can now see their green world, and can see, too, it's time to
come home.

The way this movie gets wingnuts frothing with fury has already made it
an unmitigated sucess.