I did not write this and do not claim to. I'm just happy someone wrote this all down in a forum, its one of the most extensive and well-thought of explantions about the symbolisms in Avatar. And I would like to share it, all thanks should be credited to Extant who wrote it.
The Hidden Debate aka the whole movie in one gulp
Here's a breakdown of the all the major symbols in the movie and the debate they represent, as well as an overview of the significance of the mythological structure of the story, written for a discussion about Avatar between some fellow students and myself. I thought this might be easier to digest than several longer separate entries I was planning on writing, since it outlines the actual relationships between the symbols and puts them all togther for you. I also try to evaluate some political issues about the movie, such as the criticism that indigenous peoples are misrepresented and that they, once again, appear to need to be saved by a white man, and try to weigh these issues in the context of the movie as a whole and the ultimate effect it has (or could have) on the audience.
Enjoy! And feel free to respond to any of the ideas below. The pen is mightier than the sword, and all that...
I think there’s definitely some issues of cultural appropriation in the movie. What other people have already pointed out is definitely right: the Na’Vi do appear to be a mix of various indigenous cultures, and it brings in the ongoing issue of depriving indigenous peoples the world over of having their own voice and telling their perspectives and experiences accurately. There’s also the issue that the hero of the story is a white male (obviously American, or whatever the U.S. exists as 150 years from now – we’re not told) and that this is a retelling of the “going native” myth. I went into the movie expecting to be offended by both, but by the time I’d walked out of the theater, my opinion had changed.
The reason was the symbolism and altered structure of the myth compared to previous retellings.
While there’s still issues of cultural appropriation present, I realized as I was watching that the Na’Vi culture was not simply an amalgamation of images associated (accurately or not) with indigenous cultures, but was actually based on the Gaia Hypothesis and some of the debates within holistic science, using symbolism, sometimes borrowed from indigenous cultures but also (a little more obscurely) from Western traditions, to communicate the ideas.
I think it’s easier if I explain the ideas first, then break down the symbolism: If you’re not familiar with it, Gaia Hypothesis posits that the Earth functions as one organism, with all the systems of the Earth interacting to function much the same as the various organs in our own body interact, creating a self-regulating system that accounts for the stability of temperatures over millennia, as well as the sustaining of conditions favorable to life. Many Gaia Hypothesis and Earth systems scientists have started looking at indigenous stories and beliefs and are coming to the conclusion that they truly may have known far more about the Earth and ecology than Western culture has given them credit for, but just kept the information in a very different way than Western science. Also, Holistic science, especially hand-in-hand with Gaia Hypothesis, suggests that there are four parts to how we think and interact with the world: through reason, senses, emotion, and intuition. Reason and sensing, it says have been the core of Western civilization, especially in science, since the Enlightenment, with emotion and intuition increasingly pushed aside and labeled as unacceptable. Holistic scientists argue that because we evolved living close to nature, emotion and intuition are equally valid sources of information, and even allow us to perceive things that reason and senses alone do not. They propose that using all four forms of perception are necessary to a truly skillful and ethical approach to subjects such as ecology.
For an absolutely fantastic interview explaining Gaia Hypothesis and the paradigm of holistic science, watch this interview with Dr. Stephan Harding:
So, to break down the symbolism in Avatar:
First, there’s the goddess Eywa, who roughly stands in for the goddess from which Gaia theory took it’s name, the Greek goddess of the Earth – not just the personification of the earth, but the creator as well.
Second, there is the Tree of Souls, the glowing willow-like tree that is the heart of the root system that covers Pandora and through which all energy flows. This is from the Celtic/Druidic tradition – or at least the modern interpretation of it – of the Tree of Life, with the roots forming the earth. This root system and energy flows thus represent the Gaia Hypothesis idea of a world where everything is quite literally connected, forming one giant system or organism. (The laying of hands on Jake during his initiation ceremony forms a web from the Na’vi’s bodies as the camera pulls back. This is an extension of that symbolism, showing the interconnection of all the people in the clan.) The branches of the Tree of Life represent the heavens and are supposed to carry down blessings and messages from the gods, which is why the Na’Vi connect to the branches of the Tree of Souls and the Trees of Voices with their queues (braid tendrils) to communicate with Eywa and their ancestors.
Then there are the Na’Vi’s queues (braids) themselves, which are essentially an extension of the Na’Vi’s nervous system, so that what we’re seeing is the Na’Vi connect to Eywa (Gaia) directly, still using the nervous system and brain but without the involvement of senses and reason. This symbolic for the intuitional and emotional perception of nature proposed by Gaia Hypothesis and holistic science. The movie essentially took an idea – emotional and intuitional knowledge - which is normally dismissed as superstition because it can’t be seen or logically proved (perceived by reason or sense), and turned it into a physical connection so that the event and its role could be literally seen by the audience. Further paralleling the debate between traditional Western science and holistic science (as well as some indigenous cultures), this emotional/intuitional knowledge is put in direct opposition to Western science and culture and the knowledge available to the reason and senses, as represented by both Grace and the RDA corporation. Grace, with all her science, is unable to perceive the depth of the global system itself. She knows it’s there and can track bits and pieces of the electrical signals, but the actual knowledge contained in the root system and the Tree of Souls is completely inaccessible to her, and she must rely on what the Na’Vi tell her to have any idea of the system’s significance. (This also brings up the divide between information and knowledge, where Grace, like Western culture, is constantly chasing after information and accumulating vast amounts of it, but still cannot know anything from it, where as the Na'Vi, through a different knowledge system, can.) Similarly, the RDA is literally unable to perceive reality because they perceive the world only through reason and senses, causing them to be blind to the global system and the true nature of Pandora’s existence. This leads them to operate from a very skewed system of ethics in which the world is a dead thing to be manipulated, completely oblivious of the extent of the destruction they cause – an accusation Gaia theory and holistic science has leveled at Western science.
The whole theme of Sight (“I see you,” “No one can teach you to see,” etc.) is an extension of the intuitional/emotional knowledge vs. reason/senses debate. (If you read the script, there was a whole bunch of lines cut from the final version that got even further into this, like “When you see nothing, you See everything; when you hear nothing, you Hear everything” – probably cause it sounds really silly if you aren’t catching the debate. :P )
There was also very strong life vs. death symbolism woven into the movie, with life associated with the Na’Vi culture and death associated with the human culture. The death symbolism is set up in the beginning with Jake’s brother’s funeral in which a box is closed and slid into a furnace. This is paralleled multiple times by the link machines used to connect to the avatars, which resemble a coffin. These are closed like his brother’s coffin was and then (at the main base at least) slide into a tubular recess in the wall. In addition to specifically outlining this symbolism, the movie script also reads that the bays of cryosleep pods on the spaceship are supposed to resembled the cadaver drawers in a moratorium. In comparison, the Na’Vi funeral we’re shown actually symbolizes life: the grave is a round, bowl shaped hole in the ground, with the deceased Na’Vi placed inside in a fetal position, surrounded by flowers. A seed of from the Tree of Souls (symbolically the Tree of Life) is placed inside the womb-like grave with the fetal body. When we attach this life vs. death symbolism to the arguments the humans and Na’Vi respectively represent, we get the very strong narration, “That way, death; this way, life” – also part of the Gaia science vs. Western science debate.
So now that we’ve got the symbolism out of the way, let’s tackle Jake: First off, I’m not happy that the hero of the story was a white, American male. Obviously, we can see the problems with this – the “white savior” and the “guilty white-man’s fantasy” and all that. But during the movie and in talking to some very culture-shocked people afterwards I quickly came to the conclusion that he was necessary. We’re talking about a story which symbolically tackles multiple aspects of Western civilization and tries to point out their faults and limitations – not just the limits of imperialism and the use of the military to represent corporate interests, which was the obvious points of the plot, but the limits of our science and our faith in reason and sense as well (blasphemy!). In this sense, the paradigm in the movie was very alien to most of the audience, and Jake was necessary as a literary device to walk people into it. If we actually look at Jake’s character, he starts out almost as a shell. All we know about him is he’s a former marine, he’s paralyzed, and his brother’s dead. Not much of a character there, just enough for us to identify with and step into. His experiences with the Na’Vi become 90% of his character, and like a boat he carries the audience into the other paradigm, being the vehicle through which they are introduced to these new ideas and different perspective. Whether this worked is up for debate, and I think will be partially dependent on those of us who perceived the symbolic meanings using the movie as a talking point to start more overt discussions with other people who maybe just saw the surface plot.
As for the structure of the myth, it really struck me that this retelling both had a metamorphic structure and ended differently than any other “going native” myths I’m aware of. In every previous retelling I'm familiar with, the white man has an epiphany and then always returns to his own people, but "carrying the message from the indigenous people about how to live in harmony with the world." (And then the indigenous people usually get wiped out as his ship sails off.) End of story.
However, Jake actually goes through a metamorphosis in which he doesn’t just learn to see things from another perspective, but actually looses one identity and gains another. In this journey, Jake goes through four ages/rebirths common in many mythological structures: the first rebirth is when he first gets his avatar; at this stage Neytiri accuses him of being a “child”. The second rebirth is when he gets his ikran (the bird they fly on) in the trials that must be passed by adolescent Na’Vi. The third rebirth is his acceptance to the clan, which Jake tells his commander is the “last stage in becoming a man” and becoming a full member of the clan. The fourth stage is when Jake bonds with the Toruk, fulfilling the position in a legend last held by a clan elder, as told by Neytiri. Thus we see the full cycle – infancy/childhood, adolescence, adulthood, and elder – something I can’t remember seeing in previous retellings, and which gives the story a different purpose than previous stories in which the white man essentially steals the indigenous knowledge then goes back to save his own people. The cycle is completed at the very end when Jake transfers to permanently to his Na’Vi body, his human body literally dying with his soul reborn in a new body, presumably returning to the beginning of the cycle.
And this is where the difference strikes me the most: whereas the myth has always ended before with the white man returning to his world, Jake doesn’t return to humanity (symbolically Western civilization), but abandons it completely, shedding his human body and human identity to take his place among the Na’Vi (Gaia Hypothesis and a more holistic knowledge system). And the story isn’t finished! They’re planning to do two sequels to Avatar, making it a trilogy. The sequels will continue to follow Jake and Neytiri. To me, this is absolutely fascinating, because not only are we continuing a myth where it’s always ended before, but we’re continuing it with the main character now (presumably – it’s sci-fi) permanently in the “alien” or “indigenous” culture – a culture which is symbolic for a real paradigm shift in science and Western culture that’s been slowly gaining momentum over the last 30 years, and which is even beginning to recognize that indigenous cultures might know as much or more than our own scientists. Such huge changes, after so many similar retellings, are like saying, “We've realized there's something to learn here, and that it doesn’t work to just learn it and take it back with us. We have to stay inside it, to become it. …Now what?”
When you take into account the whole symbolic debate between knowledge systems embedded in the movie, I came out with the impression that it wasn’t so much Jake that saved the Na’Vi – it was the Na’Vi that saved him. (Keep in mind, Jake didn’t win the battle, Eywa did when she sent the animals in [as Disney-esque as it was]. ;) )
The sequels could totally flop on their face – I’m really half expecting them to – but the fact that Cameron has changed the myth, given it some real symbolic substance, and is continuing it means that more people will try after him. Maybe, eventually, we’ll end up with a new myth that’s wiser and actually worth telling.
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