AVATAR, ARCHETYPES AND FOOLISH HEROES

I went to see Avatar not expecting much more than a spectacle. After all, it was a ‘Disney Picture’, and Disney pictures have a baked cookie-cutter storyline to them, with characters and situations cut from the Hero’s Journey mold, haven’t they?

The first 20 minutes confirmed my dark suspicions. A crippled marine in place of a child as hero, alone in a mocking adult world, but offered the chance to redeem himself and save his world. But then the story got interesting. The Hero’s Journey became the Fool’s Journey from the Tarot. The Patriarchy became the enemy and the dark, beautiful and treacherous world of Pandora became the only way to save the planet and our souls. The Masculine confronted the Feminine, and the Feminine won.

THE HOLY FOOL. Jake Sully

( ‘Sully’, verb, ‘to soil, to make dirty’)

An interesting name for a clean-cut American hero, yes? He’s come not to clean things up but to make them dirtier!

He’s wounded in the legs – the appropriate symbolic wound for the Fisher King of 12th Century Romances. He cannot be healed and his lands cannot be renewed until a perfect Knight asks the right questions. In this story he must ask himself the questions. In the end he must shame himself by admitting to his treachery. Only then can he begin his Healing journey.

He’s a fool with a strong heart. The Goddess gifts him constantly but he will not recognize the gifts. He makes inappropriate jokes at the wrong moment. He acts, ‘the fool’.

Contrast his buddy who has slavishly learnt everything about the Na”vi’ and yet does not have the blundering fool’s ability to make a mess of things – as when Jake first wakes up in the lab and disregards everyone’s call for him to be cautious. ‘A bull in a China shop’.

Assigned to the team as a security guard/soldier, he wanders off and becomes entranced by the flowers and plants. He fails to understand the threats hurled at him and incorrectly attributes his survival to his own Machismo. Pure Fool!

THE WARRIOR. The Colonel. The dark side of the warrior. Given his orders, he follows them relentlessly. Patriarchal thinking is about confrontation, winning and losing. Compare the actions of the women in Avatar with the actions of the women in Clint Eastwood’s, Unforgiven. The latter can only express their needs through the crippled language of the Patriarchs.

A woman’s world vs a man’s world. In the former, woman is strong, seer, teacher, partner, warrior. In the latter she is a whore and victim who calls up the Dark Warrior in an act of vengeance when the Law refuses to help. The two worlds could not contrast more.

Similarly with Cormac McCarthy’s depressing, masculine world of The Road. A story that begins with the author-induced suicide of the mother figure so that he can develop his world of bleak masculinity. I wonder how that story would have played if Doris Lessing, Jeanette Winterson or Margaret Atwood had written it? Would they have envisaged a mother killing herself rather than staying to fight for her child?

THE HEALING GODDESS GAIA. Neytiri is an ‘Avatar’ of her, as too is her mother, the Seer/Shaman. In Avatar acknowledgment is given both to the healing power of the earth and to the reality of death as part of the cycle of life.

I was intrigued why the planet was called ‘Pandora’? Was the use of a name that has become synonymous with ’women’s treachery’ the beginning of a campaign to reclaim women’s stories and return them to their original meanings? Was it a way of presaging a world built not on conflict but on cooperation? Even if we stay with the corrupted version of Pandora’s story that we have been bequeathed, we are still left with “Hope”. It is the first thing we need before we move to change the world.

Pandora? CLICK HERE.

Avatar is not a complete revision of the patriarchal hero’s journey by any means. It’s still a Disney Picture. Despite the tribal culture, nuclear family values are upheld. Neytiri obeys her parents. Women are given in marriage. It’s not a matrilineal culture. In the end the current cultural need to resolve conflict through a fight to the death between two Heroes is acted out. (But with an interesting twist if you think who it is that delivers the final, killing blow. The story has come a long way since the heroine twisted her ankle as she ran from the villain in her high heels…and was saved at the last gasp by the Hero.)

People have told me they found Avatar boring/irritating because they found the ‘story’ predictable and cliche-ridden. I always like to differentiate between ‘story’, ‘plot’ and ‘narrative’. The story of Avatar was sort of predictable to a point. The point being when he changed sides. The plot was intriguing. A hero fights most of his quest whilst in a coma and, in the end, embraces the Coma World as the real world. In his last fight he is defenseless whilst his Avatar does battle for him. Then he dies and is reborn as his Avatar.

Narrative? To me ‘narrative’ is the engagement between the audience and their values and wishes and the world of the film they are watching.This is what generates box office. It doesn’t matter how good the ‘story’ is if people’s narratives are not engaged.To me the narrative was one of engagement with the earth’s forces and the empowerment of individuals to live their personal values and to risk all to save their world.

And for me, personally, it was to revalue my own Fool’s Journey – and the fact that I, like Jake Sully, became my own Avatar and changed sides – and the way I value Pandora’s Hope as my constant companion through the darkness.