Desire, Longing and the Return to the Garden: Reflections on Avatar

Abstract

I n the wake of Avatar hitting our theaters and rituals of Hollywood accolades, ecological thinkers around the world are busy parsing out its various meanings, codes, symbols and implications as a contemporary piece of environmental imagination. For the more radical environmentalists, it can be a surreal experience to watch certain ‘‘tropes’’—common patterns, theme, or motifs—so central to environmental ethics and philosophy presented not only in Hollywood-style Technicolor, but now in 3D, an immersive mode of movie-going. Like the characters, we can leave our bodies behind in the theater seats and enjoy a vicarious adventure in Pandora, and taste a life of symbiosis with nature—respect and reverence for natural ecological systems, and mourning the death of every single living creature—a mode of being so distant in our own industrial, Western lives. However, it is not enough to simply marvel at the first truly ‘‘green’’ film to hit the Oscars and popular media with such a vengeance. While we may exit the theater in a rosy glow (until we are hit with ‘‘Post-Avatar Ecological Depressive Disorder’’ (Croken, 2010) feeling perhaps finally vindicated to see radical green thinking on the multiplex screen, there is a serious opportunity for further analysis and investigation into our own practices and unconscious fantasies. Specifically, what we can witness in the film, its impacts, and its aftermath, are ways in which green fantasy lends itself to a splitting up of the world—and arguably our psyche—in our desire to return to a more innocent, primitive, and sensual mode of existence. From a psychoanalytic, objectrelations perspective, Avatar (and quite possibly much of ecological thinking) contains the seeds of splitting: How we split the world into good-bad / self-other, and idealize both other cultures and previous times. Therefore, what makes Avatar so compelling for millions of people is not only its technological prowess and dazzling imagery, glowing creatures, and transporting beauty, but the way both viewer and characters (via Jake Sully) find themselves suddenly being shuttled between two entirely different worlds. The affective dimensions of this film that Jake manifests as he is pulled between the two modes of Earthly and Na’’vi existence can be complicated, contradictory, paradoxical, and profound—attributes of experiencing contemporary industrial degradation and our own complicity in it. The parable in Avatar is as much about the experience of splitting as a central feature of contemporary, Western environmental subjectivity—what an environmental awareness feels like. In this film we can experience in a safe and culturally sanctioned context the deepest longings we have for the return to the Mother (embodied in the film by the allknowing ‘‘Tree of Voices,’’ the Na’’vi, and Pandora). No wonder we find it so powerful and yet so wrenching to return to the streets and buildings, to our own fragile and broken lives. Although humans have such profound capacities for splitting up our external and internal worlds, the movement between two worlds is often deeply painful, confusing, and disorienting. Anyone who has spent ten days on the Playa at Burning Man, or lived in a different culture for an extended time, or spent even more than a few days backpacking in wilderness has tasted this. And no one knows this experience of being pulled between worlds more than environmentalists. Philosopher Neil Evernden once referred to the environmental activist as the ‘‘natural alien,’’ an alien in his or her own culture and