Amazing Grace is a Christian hymn about forgiveness, redemption and… Avatar. That’s right, the first verse does a great job of summing up the plot of James Cameron’s 2009 film. The grace is the god and guiding spirit of the planet Pandora and its wood spirits are the sweet sound. Jake was a wretch when he worked for the evil mining company that undermined the planet, yet he is saved by its native species. He was lost as an ignorant human but now he is found, reincarnated as one of the Na’vi. He was blind, but now he sees.
At a time when religious belief seems be declining across the Western world, how did one of the most iconic and most-watched films of the last two decades manage to sneak a religious message under our noses? Well the answer simple. The message isn’t religious. The plot is a picture-perfect allegory for human redemption right until the very last moment. Instead of giving us hope, Avatar subverts religion and leaves us with a bleak and nihilistic picture.
In Durkheim’s, Elementary Forms of Religious Life, he says that religion should not only be seen in terms of traditional ideas about gods, heavens and so on but should also include any ideas or objects that are considered sacred. This allows us to think of traditionally religious concepts, like the redemption we hear in Amazing Grace, in the same way we consider non-religious ideas. The notion of heaven as a “higher place” or paradise, is, according Durkheim’s perspective, very similar to the ideal of a utopian society. In short, the values and ideas that we associate with religion don’t necessarily belong to organised religion.
This blurry distinction between what belongs to organised religion and what doesn’t is clearly seen in how often we use the concepts of heaven and hell to describe things in earth. We say something is heavenly when it is pleasing or wonderful whilst we may reserve the word hellish for when something is difficult or unpleasant. Through Pandora’s Na’vi, we see a vision of a better society, but it’s not heaven, it’s just heaven-like. As Cameron suggests, we want to see ourselves as the Na’vi and we want to live in a utopia like Pandora.
This brings me onto the idea that I want to explore in this video, salvation. Christians associate salvation with Jesus saving humanity through his death and resurrection. And Outside of organised religion, we can link this to the common belief in social salvation. This is the hope that through suffering, we may ultimately create a better society. For example, after the Second World War, a number of initiatives were set up to prevent the atrocities that happened…UN Human Rights…
This is all very nice heart-warming but it’s a theme something we’ve seen in countless films like Erin Brockovich and almost every superhero movie. It wouldn’t be true science fiction if Avatar didn’t push the envelope and challenge this optimistic belief, as Sondra Hausner writes “fantasy writing and film, by their very nature, give the imagination room to consider possibilities that are not confined to known physical and social realities, enabling their creators to construct philosophical thought experiments and thereby explore moral and social questions in new ways.”
And Avatar certainly looks at the question of social redemption in a new way. It adds a twist to the narrative we’re used to seeing. Instead of returning to Earth to fix a flawed post-capitalist economic system, our protagonist jumps ship. He permanently changes into another species altogether and decides to live on a completely different planet. Humanity is not changed; their ways are not altered, and they will probably just find another planet to exploit. Whilst our central character is redeemed and saved, our society is not.
Whilst salvation traditionally offers hope, Jake’s species transformation serves up bleak nihilism. He doesn’t die for our sins…he dies to escape them. As I argued in my last video on District 9, this may stem from growing feelings of doubt towards the idea that we can build a better, just society down on Earth. Back in 1898, H.G Wells showed us just how evil aliens were. Almost a century later E.T showed us that aliens could actually be very friendly, and now we are shown that aliens are in fact the ones who are morally superior. Our only hope, according to this prevailing attitude, is to leave humanity altogether.
I’m probably just cherry-picking films here, but if I’m correct that science fiction is becoming increasingly pessimistic about humanity and social salvation, why is this the case? Avatar’s twist on traditional ideas of redemption may reflect the declining religious belief that we are seeing in some western countries. Whilst Durkheim was an atheist, he still saw the merit in the communal side of religion that could bring society together. Without that social fabric tying us together, what hope is there for collective social redemption?
Whilst this is one explanation for why we’re seeing more and more nihilism on screen, there are certainly many competing explanations. In my last post, I suggested that perhaps this was somehow influenced by an ongoing economic crisis at the time. I guess you could also point the finger at censorship and argue that subverting such sacred religious ideas may have been suppressed a few years ago. Asking these questions and imagining answers to them is part of the joy of sociology and so I’d love to hear your thoughts on why nihilistic cinema is becoming more common. Let me know in the comments down below.
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