Avatar and the Information Society

Biases on the table: I did not like Avatar, at least not as a film. As a demo reel for the next generation of CGI, I think it's excellent, but as narrative, it's both just a

There's an excellent discussion and links to articles about Avatar going on in the Race, Ethnicity, and Diaspora in the Digital Age forum, all of which largely sum up my own feelings on the film's political subtext, so I'll leave that discussion to one side here.

There was one bit of the film I found interesting in that it echoed a comparatively more recent cliched narrative: The utopian/dystopian views of the internet. No, the actors in blueface aren't surfing youtube in any of the scenes, but the Na'vi are possessed of their own world wide web, in the form of a planet wide biological system that connects all life on the characteristically subtlely named planet of Pandora.

Actually, this was a very interesting aspect of the film's world building, the ability of the Na'vi to plug into other life forms on the planet, and experience what that creature is experiencing. This is what reminds me of the utopian ideal of the internet, the rhetoric of ICTs as a means of accessing a network of global freedom, democracy, and collaboration found in early discourses of the potentials for online communication. In the film, of course, this story is buried within the trappings of the very old trope of the "noble savage," who is closer to nature and therefore more spiritual. Here that stereotypical mystical connection is literalized; the Na'vi can physically plug in to the flora and fauna.

The conception of Pandora as an utopian information society is further paralleled by the transformative powers of the network: at the end of the film Corporal Hero Whiteguy is permanently transfered into his Na'vi body via the system. Here's Jake Sully 2.0, the new wireless Na'vi clone. And, of course, the title of the film and its relation to gaming and online social networking presupposes this reading. 

But there is also an odd strand of technological determinsim. In Avatar, the information network is akin to the Na'vi god. However, the most powerful use of the system is towards the end, when the creatures of the world rise up against the human mercenaries in answer to Jake Sully's sarcastic pre-battle prayer for help: "I know you don't really exist, but..." And the information god answers. The fact Sully's aethiestic rationalist use of the system, his use of God as planetary tech support, further adds to the ambivalent fantasies of spiritualism in the film that conflate conceptions of the holy with pluging in to an information network.

There's a part in the film where Sigourney Weaver's character makes the cultural context of the film. Her Ripley-from-Alien-as-Scientist discusses this connection to the land in terms of an information network while attempting to persuade the dull-witted coniving Administrator character (Giovanni Ribisi doing his impression of Paul Reiser in Aliens). Dr. Sigourney basically says that the planet's biological internet has far greater potentials for exploitation than the Unobtanium. (Slightly more valuable than Difficult-to-Gettium but not as valuable as Nonexistantium). And here, I think, we see the shift in focus from the exploitation of material resources to information resources characteristic of capitalistic rhetorical constructions of the Information Society.