Um, this post gives enough detail about the plot ( the stuff about Jake, his switching sides, etc) that I think you should consider giving at least a spoiler alert.

“Take out the fantasy and sci-fi elements and there isn’t anything here Wendell Berry hasn’t also said.”
Wendell Berry should be required reading for anyone going into politics or positions of leadership, in my opinion. Too often we as a culture sacrifice good solutions for the expedience of bad solutions.

Then can’t we call the movie a clumsy failure on the grounds that it so managed to antagonize the very people who would most respond its “conservative” message?

I’m not familiar with Wendell Berry and clicked on his article hoping for something insightful. But it seemed pretty formulaic to me. People make fun of people unlike themselves blah blah blah. Nothing new there. Unfortunately, it works both ways. I once say a poster in a combox say that every government official, from the very top on down through those in charge of towns of 2,000 people or more, should be wiped off the face of the earth. He equated urbanism with liberalism which he stated was the number one danger to the U.S. According to the poster, only a complete return to America’s rural heritage could save us. It was a deeply insecure view masked with bravado – and hardly patriotic. It was the mirror image, in an extreme form, of the person who laughs at those who work with their hands. (I sure don’t. I’m glad and grateful there are experts I can pay to do some work, such as fixing the furnace or the plumbing, around my house. Work that I, who’ve always gravitated towards intellectual white collar jobs, never learned to do.)
I’m more interested in where that type of us versus them feeling comes from than in hand wringing about the fact that it exists. My top of the head reaction is that it starts in the home. Some of us are more like our parents than others are. Some of us go into similar fields of work as our parents do, others range far afield. It’s up to our parents to teach us that different choices of professional are okay. How our parents frame and react to people like themselves and different from themselves provides some early conditioning. Some of us maintain that conditioning, others reject it and go the other way.
The luckiest people are those who have parents who don’t signal disappointment (directly or indirectly) that they didn’t follow in their footsteps. Instead of wishing their adult child would be a Mini-Me, they are loving and secure enough to signal “I’m ok, you’re ok.” Not through lip service, you can tell who really means it and who doesn’t. We’re both okay is signalled by genuinely showing an interest in children’s differing interests. By drawing them out, starting with basic questions about their jobs (“What’s hard about it? What’s most satisfying? Do you struggle through challenges alone or are there people to act as mentors and confidantes?”). Rather than staring blankly with seeming incomprehension at their young adult children when they try to offer heartfelt commentary about their lives. It’s a special skill that some parents have (mine largely did) and other simply lack (from what I’ve heard from friends). Parents who can do that set their young adult children on a much more secure path than those who leave them anguishing over why they never really attained Mom’s and Dad’s “approval” of their life choices.
I suspect that people whose parents conditioned them to accept diverse life choices are much less inclined to use putdown humor to make fun of rural folks, city folks, and generally to rely on “othering” to make themselves feel better and heal unseen and deep seated wounds.

Rabbi Heschel’s supposition that the conversion of all Jews to Christianity would remove all living Jewish religious and cultural presence left on earth is false. Christianity comes in many different flavors/sects. I personally feel that the most authentic versions of Christianity are those that most directly recall their roots in Judaism. After all, is not Christianity a fulfillment of Judaism, as opposed to being separate and distinct?

Brilliant essay, Rod. (Yours, I mean- I didn’t read the Berry one). This is why I read this blog.
And I love _The Mission_ and Wade Davis as well. Have you read his book about Vodoun in Haiti?

This “Avatar” discussion connects with two of Rod’s “Long Drive Home” topics.
The Davis video, and an interview about The Gold Leaf Lady between Braude and his interlocutor, prompt some Christian reflections.
As Baue argues in his book The Spiritual Society, which draws on P. Sorokin, we are probably headed for a cultural revival of “the spiritual.” Many people aren’t happy with the materialistic, consumerist way of life and believe it causes ruination of nature. Therefore “the spiritual” becomes attractive. Also, as books like Quantum Enigma and Biocentrism show, science itself increasingly points towards theories that are more compatible with “spirituality” than the ones widely accepted now. So Davis talking about vanishing worldviews of indigenous peoples, and Braude talking about levitating tables and the “gold leaf lady,” may have much appeal. These men speak with the authority of science, about some intriguing phenomena and possibilities.
Such matters will be challenging issues for the Christian church.
1.Some phenomena may be, after all, misreported. It will not do for the church too readily to suggest that psychic phenomena support a Christian worldview unless it’s prepared to accept ensuing embarrassment.
2.Some strange phenomena may turn out to have convincing explanations from within the existing naturalistic paradigm and may require no adjustment thereof after all. (Remember Father Brown! Sometimes Chesterton’s fictional detective had to insist that some peculiar “evidence” was completely accountable for on the basis of common sense, when others were ready to invoke miracle or magic.)
3.Some phenomena may be fraudulent. People can be awfully skilled illusionists.
4.It could get sticky here: orthodox Christians have to consider the possibility that evil spirits may delude people. An anthropologist might be trained to accept “nonjudgmentally” and even to affirm what amounts to traffic between a human group and demons. If we accept the authority of Jesus, then we have to accept, in principle, the possibility that there are spirits that can interact with people and that are bad. There may be tensions between non-Christians who, with good intentions, would protect indigenes from missionaries, and missionaries who perceive the same people as living in spiritual darkness from which they need deliverance.
5.Finally, good miracles happen. How does the church tell when?

Rod, you might check out a book called “Spirit of the Rainforest”. The ex-shaman in the book (from a much anthropologically studied South American tribe) looks to debate the anthropologists whenever he can. In his tribal culture homicide was the leading cause of death– followed by all the perils of the jungle. Animism was not a friendly relationship with the spirits, but a desperate attempt to stay alive by appeasing them. The arrival of missionaries was seen by his people as divine rescue–and the loss of cultural violence is not mourned.

Sound the MORAL RELATIVISM alarm. We’re at Defcon 2. Maximum readiness!
Okay, anyway, heh, Rod, this is sorta what those evil ‘moral relativism’ liberals have been pointing out…just because a culture isn’t ‘ideal’ doesn’t mean it is a great idea to run in and demolish it for a dirt-poor clone of Western culture.
And that sometimes really weird things screw things up. I remember an example of a culture that had handcrafted stone axes that were pieces of junk, but symbolized patrilineal inheritance and community status…until well meaning missionaries started giving away amazing steel axes and blew the society up. No one had ever written the rules down, much less bothered to inform the missionaries, but axe owners had status, it was a rite of passage to get them, etc, etc…and now everyone was an ‘axe owner’.
Incidentally, it’s worth pointing out that the Na’vi culture is sexist. They’re divided up like some Native Americans, where a man is the tribal leader and a woman is the spiritual leader, and, what’s more, they require them to be married. Sexist right at the top, and probably sexist in other jobs, too, although apparently both genders can be warriors so the entire issue isn’t really relevant for the film.
Should we go in and try to fix that to let a woman be leader? Sure, it looks like a tiny little change from our point of view, but remember the axes:
Do they marry someone else…or what? What if they’re gay? (Can Na’vi be gay?) Is the tribal leadership simply how the Na’vi view all marriages, with the women in charge of certain things and the man in charge of others, and should we try to change that too?
Or should we assert that men and women have certain roles, but women can actually ‘be’ men, and men can ‘be’ women, like the fiction in Egyptian leadership where female leaders simply declared they were men? (And someone’s about to mention the ‘two spirit’ Native Americans here, so I might as well.)
Pull one tiny thread and the entire society can fall apart.
Your Name
Rabbi Heschel’s supposition that the conversion of all Jews to Christianity would remove all living Jewish religious and cultural presence left on earth is false. Christianity comes in many different flavors/sects. I personally feel that the most authentic versions of Christianity are those that most directly recall their roots in Judaism. After all, is not Christianity a fulfillment of Judaism, as opposed to being separate and distinct?
Yes, but that’s a coincidence. What if the hypothetical was all Hindus converting to Christianity? Would we want that?
Now, of course, a middle ground might be ‘The culture continues to exist, but the religion is not followed’, but that raises the question: Is that even possible? Can you discretely divide a religion and the culture it is in, and replace the religion?

As someone probably pointed out on a previous thread, the plot of “Avatar” isn’t that different from the plot of the first book in C.S. Lewis’s space trilogy, “Out of the Silent Planet” in which the villains, Weston and Devine, discuss wiping out the native alien population in order to make Mars safe for human colonization.

I’m reminded of a SF story from the 50′s or 60′s. A human “Avatars” into a ‘Loper’, an animal that runs on the surface of Jupiter (sic).
Was it Clifford Simak who wrote it? The ending had a similar style.

Oh, Kevin, I do agree with you, and I will say again that I do not accept the idea that adopting a general attitude of respect for cultures alien to our own means that we remain agnostic about the relative worth of the values of those cultures, or indifferent to the cruelties within those cultures. I think Mel Gibson’s “Apocalypto” offered a far more morally complex take on this topic, because its protagonist was trying to escape a horrifically violent, evil culture that, unbeknownst to that culture, was about to be destroyed by Europeans. One of the real narrative weaknesses of “Avatar” was its presentation of the Na’vi as utterly noble.

Mr. Dreher, @ 4:17 PM, writes:
“I think Mel Gibson’s “Apocalypto” offered a far more morally complex take on this topic, because its protagonist was trying to escape a horrifically violent, evil culture that, unbeknownst to that culture, was about to be destroyed by Europeans. One of the real narrative weaknesses of “Avatar” was its presentation of the Na’vi as utterly noble.”
That’s one of the major problems I have with movies like “Avatar” and “Dances With Wolves”. It’s always the Americans’ turn in the dock, never the “Good Kind Selfless Natives’ ” turn. Since when are we THAT morally valueless ? Is modern Western (or, really, post-Western) society really that meritless ? Have our ancestors done nothing that is worthy of praise or emulation ?
Sorry, but I flatly refuse to believe that.
I hate to disillusion people, but the Native societies that were displaced by Western settlers were capable of some pretty horrible things. The Texas Rangers, for example, had to deal with Comanche bands that routinely killed settler women and children. The Trail of Tears was balanced off (if one wishes to use the term) by thousands and thousands of raids that killed white farmers or railroaders.
I also seem to recall that many “Noble Savages” that would scorn a train or living on a farm were capable of such ecological atrocities as slash-and-burn agriculture or driving hundreds of buffalo off cliffs to get just a few to eat/use.
Man’s inhumanity to Man works both ways. Anyone who constantly mocks and derides normal American commoners (as the cultural troglodytes and self-hating post-modernists currently infesting the American academy and media institutions would seem to be doing) should go back and take another look at history. Humans IN GENERAL are a bloody-minded, grievously savage race. I don’t know of ANY ethnic or racial group that survives without a heritage of blood, violence, murder and vicious, pointless death.
It’s just what Humans do. The sooner we accept that, the sooner we acknowledge that and say to ourselves “We will not kill—today”, the sooner we can get over ourselves and start doing a thing or three that we don’t have to droop our heads in red-faced shame about.
I. Will. Not. Kill. Today.
Your servant,
Lord Karth

Lord Karth: I. Will. Not. Kill. Today.
Love the Star Trek reference! Captain Kirk in “A Taste of Armageddon”!

Not seen Avatar yet but will do.
The lecture brings out the value of story telling. The political story of the planet in the 21st Century is the, 9/11, its causes and consequences, but its heartening to think that there are other more numerous stories out there, that dont, in the first instance turn on some great potentially destuctive conflict. The greater weight of the ‘ethnosphere’.
I wonder if its too late, and that the writing is on the wall for all those surving elders of soon to be lost cultures and world views. Pretty soon Avatar maybe coming to a cinema near them, rendering diversity a curiosity of history and entertainment.
Business interest is probably outstripping both politics and nation states and storytelling in terms of changing the world. We need a better narrative for living, and not one that we forget when we get in the cinema car park.

I saw Avatar and liked it. The plot is thin, but the characters are likable enough. The creature and environment design coupled with the photo realistic 3D computer graphics were worth the price of admission.
My favor Avatar joke was on a recent Daily show. John Oliver called in from Pandora saying Tiger Woods should convert to the Na’vi religion. John Stuart puts on 3D glasses and says “I’m not sure your point makes much sense, but it is stunningly realistic.”

Good call, Michael! That story was “Desertion,” by Clifford Simak. It was one of my favorites, too. The ending seemed to me, as a young girl, unutterably poignant. The protagonist, Fowler, finds himself the last man on the orbital station from which explorers have descended to Jupiter, never to return. He has brought his dog, Towser, along with him (for no logical reason except that Simak was very fond of dogs and liked to include them in his stories). So, when he decides he too must make the journey and find out what happened to his men, he has to take Towser along.
SPOILER ALERT–though you can’t really understand the ending without reading the whole story, which I certainly recommend. If you want to read it before reading my brief quote, try google books and look for “Science Fiction: a historical anthology,” by Eric S. Rabkin.
Yes, they could find things. Civilizations, perhaps. Civilizations that would make the civilization of Man seem puny by comparison. Beauty and, more important, an understanding of that beauty. And a comradeship no one had ever known before–that no man, no dog had ever known.
And life. The quickness of life after what seemed a drugged existence.
“I can’t go back,” said Towser.
“Nor I,” said Fowler.
“They would turn me back into a dog,” said Towser.
“And me,” said Fowler, “back into a man.”
“Desertion,” and other stories like it that caught my imagination when I was young, were about going cosmically native–abandoning the tiresome enterprise of the Empire of Man for a change of allegiance that was not a devolution, but an opening to greater wonders.
“Avatar” also bears some resemblance to Ursula K. LeGuin’s “The Word for World is Forest,” a dark post-Vietnam novel that doesn’t have such a happy ending. As is often seen, media SF steals without compunction from the print version. ; )

I’m reminded of a SF story from the 50′s or 60′s. A human “Avatars” into a ‘Loper’, an animal that runs on the surface of Jupiter (sic).
Was it Clifford Simak who wrote it? The ending had a similar style.
IIRC, each human had a canine companion also converted into a loper. Both refused to return. The dog said, ” I would go back to being a dog” and the last line in the story, the protagonist said ” and I would go back to being a man” Sorry for the digression.

“I hate to disillusion people, but the Native societies that were displaced by Western settlers were capable of some pretty horrible things. The Texas Rangers, for example, had to deal with Comanche bands that routinely killed settler women and children. The Trail of Tears was balanced off (if one wishes to use the term) by thousands and thousands of raids that killed white farmers or railroaders”
Isn’t that kind of like suggesting that if there had European Jews during WW2 who were scattered throughout Europe deliberately fighting and killing Nazis that those Jews were just as guilty of atrocities as the Nazis?
Personally, I kind of think those ‘native societies that were displaced by Western settlers’ had a right to become violent with these white settlers. What were they supposed to do, just sit there as pacifists and let white people wipe them out? To be sure, I’m not suggesting that all Native American cultures were perfect and didn’t share in humanity’s tendancy toward brutality, but I also think that it unfair to equate things like the Trail of Tears with the completely justifiable violent response of Native peoples to centuries of oppresion, genocide and having their land stolen from them by white settlers.

The Vatican does not approve…
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/01/12/vatican-slams-avatar-prom_n_419949.html
VATICAN CITY — The Vatican newspaper and radio station have called the film “Avatar” simplistic, and criticized it for flirting with modern doctrines that promote the worship of nature as a substitute for religion.

Following up on Rod’s comment, “One of the real narrative weaknesses of “Avatar” was its presentation of the Na’vi as utterly noble” and also on Lord Karth’s comment, that is an excellent point, I agree.
The problem with viewing indigenous peoples as “noble savages” is that it is easy to emphasize the nobility while ignoring the savagery.
Human nature and behavior is alwasy more complex than that. To use another example, the year that the foreign film “Pan’s Labyrinth” came out was the same year that “The Lives of Others,” came out. One film dismissed the humanity of the “villains” while the other found the humanity, even in the secret policeman. That’s why I just couldn’t get into “Pan’s Labryinth” and why I loved “The Lives of Others.”

‘”Avatar” is not morally nuanced, or even sophisticated. And yet, I found myself enjoying the film more than I expected to, and I believe that of all the criticism I’ve read of the picture’
AVATARS simplicity is its strength….moral complexity…aka jake jilts neytiri etc may mirror your life, but makes an ugly story.
The Mission is not a better story for being ‘tragic’…just uglier.arent people sick of stories showing how ugly life is? AVATAR is loved around the globe for NOT being The Mission….only the sofisticated seem to have trouble with it./

alicia; ‘The problem with viewing indigenous peoples as “noble savages” is that it is easy to emphasize the nobility while ignoring the savagery’
well, alicia, its their world/planet, not yours…The ‘savages’ are so called by those who claim not to be.They then us this designation to justify their enforced cultural changes…..
The na’vi dont need this nor do any ‘savages’

Rod, you are very right.
Although I have never watched fantasy films before, for years I have considered myself a potential writer of fantasy novels. In fact, what I plan to do may well strike you and others as extreme.
I want to write in languages of my own fantasy novels in verse rather than prose. Still, in spite of this somewhat strange (I imagine you will think) idea my aim is exactly a combination of looking at endangered indigenous cultures (from a hopeful viewpoint) and at the modern conflicts between what Benjamin Wiker calls Epicurean ethics and the more traditional ethics of religions like Catholicism and Orthodoxy.

Not much creativity here. Just an updated special effects other world version of tarzan. My guess it was made to teach the evil white man valuable lessons. yun