Click here to get this post in PDF
Avatar – Double Entendres
The movie has many double entendres. For example, the destruction of “home tree” shows a couple of the multiple trunks toppling. It brings to mind the falling of the twin towers. Combined with the Colonel’s comment just before the final battle about fighting terror with terror could be a comment on the GWOT, Global War on Terror.
Do you get the sense that there’s something of a reflection of the War in Iraq as you see the military, hired mercenaries, trying to take the valuable asset (read “Oil”) from the natives (read “innocent Iraqis”)?
Dr. Augustine (Sigourney Weaver) discovers that there’s an actual physical or biological connection amongst all the trees on Pandora (there is on earth too, Dr.) and that it’s like a neural network from which the natives can download memories. But at the same time, the place they download from is a religious, holy place. So which is it? Is unobtainium a valuable mineral to be used for technological purposes, or is it some supernatural substance that should not be touched because it’s a holy thing to the natives? Does the natives’ belief make it holy, or is it holy in some objective way? Would a scientist, taught modern secular naturalism which presumes no supernatural entity has anything to do with anything in the natural world, be worried about the religious beliefs of primitive peoples? This is getting into the religious double entendres, it’s all mixed up in Cameron’s world of Pandora – the technological and the supernatural.