Reverend Billy of the Church of Stop Shopping (and the Green Party of New York City) recently published a post on his blog about the new “inverted Western” film Avatar and its “earth-based spirituality.” Read the full thing here.
John Wayne’s shoot-em-ups helped the American public learn to handle imperial war. Avatar is an inverted western. It’s James Cameron’s achievement that the corporatized military is led by a Dick Cheney with muscles, and that the “Indians” have a practical and potent earth-based spirituality. Cameron faces down the tree-hugger comments of someone like Rush Limbaugh by making the star of the movie a tree, and making it taller than the Empire State Building. Then he puts 3-D glasses on all of us and throws us from the top, and we dive off into the air, willingly swan-diving with a powder blue Naomi Campbell-like native, into the giant foliage below.
We need to urgently ask the question – how is it that American colonial wars that have nothing to do with “freedom” or “democracy” rage on for years? Can the underwear bomber really extend the war? That’s all it takes? Thousands more will die? The old story structures that persuade us to be violent need to be upended, and Cameron has done that. But – we’ve had great movies before. Think of Dr. Strangelove and the cold war. Think of The Truman Story and consumerism. The fact is that Avatar is not enough. A movie theater is not a commons. Power cannot shift there.