Click here to get this post in PDF

Avatar & Deuteronomy 7

Avatar is an interesting combination of The Matrix, Dances with Wolves, and Shrek. The Matrix because it involves a human electronically entering another world to live on a different plane; Dances with Wolves because it involves the conversion from Christianity (or some form of agnosticism) to a native religion of animism; and because it involves morphing into another being entirely and remaining that way. I’d like to focus on the Dances with Wolves aspect in this post.

In Dances with Wolves, the American soldier eats a form of communion with the natives by eating raw blood of a buffalo, he marries into the tribe, and he adopts their religion by learning about their view of the deity and adopting that view of life. The process in Avatar is even more explicit, for Jake begins the process of actually becoming a clan member. He seems to believe in nothing, for he tells Natiri’s mother his “glass is empty.” the stupidity of both the Pandorans and the humans is astounding. The humans seem to be entirely materialistic in either a military or capitalist way. The military is a mercenary arm of the capitalist acquisition process. The Pandorans win out because Jake has so little to lose in becoming one of the Pandorans. They have a religion, a community, and living in his Avatar body gives Jake a chance to not only walk and run again but learn how to hunt, conquer the challenges of Pandora, and even fly. So, it’s really a no-brainer that he would choose Pandora over Earth.

The Pandorans are stupid to think that Jake, running around with the chief’s daughter, 3/4 naked, spending all day with her, learning from her, will not result in their developing a relationship rivaling the chosen, arranged marriage between Natiri and Tsu-Tey, the next clan leader.

Deut. 7 warns clearly that assimilation is the great danger for the believer. “Nor shall you make marriages with them. You shall not give your daughter to their son, nor take their daughter for your son. For they will turn your sons away from following Me, to serve other gods; so the anger of the Lord will be aroused against you and destroy you suddenly.” Dt. 7:3-4. When Jake goes through the initiation ceremony to become a member of the clan, He repeats what they teach – that your born twice, once naturally and once as a man. Thus, Cameron’s depiction of the Pandorans’ religious culture parallels the biblical born-again concept. What would James Cameron have done if the movie involved a Christian culture from earth, attempting to draw the Pandorans into the true faith? What if the Pandorans resisted not an attempt to take their valuable minerals at the expense of their religion but an attempt to teach them that the true riches are not in a tree or in a planet’s “living” network, but in the true and living God who created all things, including Pandora?

This would be difficult in the setting Cameron created because he creates a world in which animistic, pantheistic, ancestor and nature worship, all combined in one, is scientifically and religiously valid. Even the roots of the plants of Pandora are interconnected in some way that indicates the planet itself is one organism. The main religious center of the Pandorans is an area with an electromagnetic power that is measurable by scientific instruments. The prayer tree by which the Pandorans can connect their tails and pray and hear their ancestors is audible and visible. Thus, Cameron has taken ancient, primitive paganism and visually created a world that makes it seem not only technologically possible but religiously possible. Genius. Diabolical genius, but genius nonetheless. Never mind that it has nothing to do with reality. But this is the power of myth; it need not be true to create a religion, a culture, a society, a way of life.

Again, it is evident to anyone watching the movie (even if the characters in the movie are totally blind to it) that Jake and Natiri are destined to be a pair. Jake must be thinking like an American teenager, when he has Pandoran sex with Natiri. How could he make a commitment to a woman on another planet, while he’s in a body that is temporary and not his at all? She tells him how she views sex – the proper way: “I am with you now, Jake, we are mated for life.” This seems to pull Jake into reality, and he says to himself as he reenters his human body world, “What the hell are you doing, Jake?” Earlier, as he reenters his human body, unable to walk and not really interacting with another human being like he interacts with Natiri, he had said that he had begun to think of his human life as the dream world and the Pandoran world as the real world. No wonder! He has legs in the Pandoran world, he has a great girl friend with whom he hunts, flies around on a big dinosaur bird, and runs around nearly naked. Talk about a boy’s dream come true. In the human world, he moves around in a wheelchair, barely has time to sleep much less develop any friendships, and works for a covetous, avaricious corporation that would like to destroy the Pandorans but for the bad press that would come from it.

But the biblical lesson of not communing with, marrying with, and adopting the ways of the pagan is clearly set forth, even if the Director had not intended to do so. The end result is almost perfectly scripted from Deut. 7.