Cameron’s Avatar

Why we long to get back to the Garden


By Kate Ernsting

The day after Christmas this year, I found myself entering a theater to do what I’d vowed twelve years ago not to do again: pay to see a James Cameron film.

Cameron’s 1997 Titanic was visually beautiful but emotionally flat for me. Its wanton rewrite of history and silly proposition that an immature romance could be the center point for an epic tragedy made me rush to the video store to rent A Night to Remember.

Yet I broke my resolution for Avatar, drawn perhaps by the promise of really beautiful cinematography. I reassured myself that this film would be a fantasy from start to finish; so it was unlikely that historical fact and classical literature would become collateral damage.

On two counts I was right. Avatar was a richly crafted, beautiful fantasy. Although it doesn’t join the ranks of great classics, it manages to leave the ranks of history and literature relatively unscathed.

Of course, the plot was simplistic and predictable —I was usually at least two scenes ahead in figuring out what was going to happen next. There were the trite plot segments delivered clumsily—a morality film where the good guys proclaim how much they want peace but rush to wage gory war. (Let’s not omit any boring plot line with soldier mercenaries or greedy corporate goons.)

The science was absurd, but the fiction part was really fun. I would have paid nine-fifty just to see the wonderful, fantastical flora and fauna on Pandora. Sigourney Weaver was pretty much just herself; any moviegoer knows this is a plus in a film. When the main character learns that he has stopped being a cripple, his joy has real depth. Characters still hoot and act like they are on the verge of saying, “I’m king of the world”—but thankfully they don’t actually say it. So maybe the natives growl rather than uttering meaningful dialogue—so what? This is science fiction, people.

I caught myself enjoying the film. Why did this happen? Did my brain turn to mush? Had Cameron changed?

In Titanic, he put his hand to craft an epic and failed, in my estimation, only achieving a hollow blockbuster.

In Avatar, he tries to create mythology, on a scale that only J.R.R. Tolkien has succeeded in doing successfully.

He didn’t exactly succeed, except in one way. In its depiction of gloriously beautiful Pandora, the film reached out — not forwards to heaven but backwards to the place where original integrity is restored. Joni Mitchell wrote it and Crosby, Stills and Nash sang it at Woodstock: “We are starlight, We are golden, We are caught in the Devil’s Bargain and we’ve got to get ourselves back to the Garden.”

The story of the Garden of Eden reminds us we need to find a path back to original innocence, a way out of original sin. The story of Pandora captures that much of this mythic, but essentially human yearning. Cameron’s film of Pandora at least gives us a chance to remember this longing.

So this time I was only rushing back to read C. S. Lewis’ Perelandra.