Avatar --- Greed, Ecology and Interracial Love

Avatar, as a movie, is a story about Greed, Ecology and Interracial Love.

The greed represents the big ugly corporation, let’s say a Halliburton as example, about to plow under a whole race and culture for the sake of the quarterly bottom line.

The ecology is about living in balance with nature, respect of which is somehow pagan in the eyes of the people who brought you denial about global warming.

It is a story of Interracial Love in the retelling of the basic John Smith / Pocahontas ecounter of learning from one another on many levels - from the different angles of European versus Native cultures and on the old eternal theme of the male female level of human natures.

The movie is set in the future and on the rain forest like planet of Pandora inhabited by blue skinned beings/people – shades of Star Wars with a few more anthropological footnotes.

There is of course the high tech thing, science fiction within the movie storyline and the 3D screen effect of depth and a different movie perception.

The big style of the big Cameron movies seems to have a baroque quality matching the style though not necessarily the substance of the artist Caravaggio. In any case everybody is talking “Cameron” on this new flick the same way they used to talk “Caravaggio” when one of his new canvas’s hit town four hundred years ago.

Many religious and political nuts have come out of the woodwork to frame this artful masterpiece by Producer, Director and Writer James Cameron of Titanic and Terminator fame – frame it as some sort of Pagan Green Worship thing.

References to Americans and foreign wars in Iraq comparisons abound but I am told this old west Cowboy and Indian, recycled Pocahontas story, script, was sitting on a shelf long before the Neocon age of Bush 43. Cameron had been waiting for the technology to arrive to do what he and his artistic vision wanted to express on the screen ( thus my comparison to Caravaggio ).

And with TV documentaries, (perhaps projects of love) The Exodus Decoded (2006) and The Lost Tomb of Jesus (2007) with fellow Canadian and Orthodox Jewish “Naked Archeologist” Simcha Jacobovici - charges of Paganism, Druidism and Pantheism as labels attached to this film seem totally groundless – the grist of fool critics with alternate agendas.

Indeed, the poltical right, religious right, do not seem to know how to deal with different ideas on the stage of Hollywood success. This staking out and preparing boilerplate fodder to throw at different ideas mixed with recycled westerns, love stories and anti-war themes – with this brilliant film – is so anti-future and so anti-global. Get a life. (go visit Pandora)