James Cameron’s Avatar and the Doctrine of Limitlessness: American Fantasies, in Review

Avatar's Neytiri

Most negative reviews of Avatar waffle between complaining about the movie's shaky narrative execution and clichéd similarities to Dances with Wolves or any other movie that involves disenfranchised indigenous populations ever produced. These reviewers are technically correct: the movie's plotting is pretty shoddy at times, there are a lot of clichés, and the depth of characterization leaves quite a bit to be desired. But there's one thing these reviews consistently bring up that I reject: that somehow, Avatar is flawed for taking an anti-corporate, anti-military-industrial-complex stance. For example,  in a review entitled "Avatar's Sticker Shock (And Awe)," J. Hoberman of The Village Voice writes:

The rampaging Sky People are heavy-handedly associated with the Bush administration. They chortle over the failure of diplomacy, wage what is referred to as "some sort of shock-and-awe campaign" against the Na'vis, and goad each other with Cheney one-liners like, "We will blast a crater in their racial memory so deep they won't come within a thousand clicks of here ever again!" Worse, the viewer is encouraged to cheer when uniformed American soldiers are blown out of the sky and instead root for a bunch of naked, tree-hugging aborigines led by a renegade white man on a humongous orange polka-dot bat.

Why is rooting for the victims of imperialistic conquest such a bad thing, especially when it is presented in a light as unambiguously ethical as in Avatar? Why is it "worse" that "the viewer is encouraged to cheer when uniformed American soldiers are blown out of the sky" and instead root for the natives, who in the context of this movie are undoubtedly being victimized? The implication is that anything but an uncompromising belief in the realist fantasy of "progress" is naive, even in a fantasy movie. But the reality is that the so-called American project—which consists of reaching ceaselessly for the Unobtainable—is a fantasy in and of itself. Critics are cowards when it comes to condemning the inhuman acts we are capable of committing in the name of the economy exactly because they fear they may be losing their humanity by doing so.

I am reminded of Wendell Berry's essay, "Faustian Economics,"  in the May 2008 issue of Harpers, in which he discusses the "doctrine of limitlessness" inherent in contemporary thinking about the economy and ecopolitics. This doctrine he defines as a philosophy of "unrestrained consumptiveness, the commonly accepted basis of our economy is the supposed possibility of limitless growth, limitless wants, limitless…

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