DeConick A.D

K
CHAPTER EIGHT
Spiritual Avatars
Jake Sully
Jake Sully lives on a dead world: Earth, one hundred years from now.
Death is not Gnostic hyperbole in his story. It is reality. The planet’s
population has skyrocketed. Humans are drowning in their own toxic
waste. Poverty and starvation are rampant. Natural resources have been
depleted. Lucrative off-world mining has become the sole objective of big
corporations, and science is riding uneasily on their coattails.
The first time we see Jake (figure 8.1), the hero of James Cameron’s
cinematic masterpiece Avatar , he is waking up in a cryogenic pod. He has
been in hibernation for six years on a ship flying to Pandora, a new world
that humans are colonizing to strip it of a precious natural resource. This
resource is a superconductor mineral called, tongue in cheek, unobtanium,
a mineral that will save Earth from its energy crisis.
We know immediately that the message of this movie is an environmental
appeal to save the earth, to use our natural resources more responsibly,
to protect all living things from extinction. We also surmise that
the message will be driven home with a “Go native!” refrain, like a sci-fi
redo of the 1990 epic Dances with Wolves . This message and its refrain
are obvious and conventional. But they only represent the surface of this
movie. Below the surface beats a Gnostic subtext, with its message of the
irresistible journey of our spirits to find wholeness, to become integrated
with a being that transcends us all.