Column - Avatar, the answer to a Copenhager’s dream
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Andrew Bolt
MOST people will date the death of the great global warming scare not from the Copenhagen fiasco - boring! - but from Avatar.
It won’t be the world’s most expensive warmist conference but the world’s most expensive movie that will stick in most memories as the precise point at which the green faith started to shrivel from sheer stupidity.
Avatar, in fact, is the warmist dream filmed in 3D. Staring through your glasses at James Cameron’s spectacular $400 million creation, you can finally see where this global warming cult was going.
And you can see, too, everything that will now slowly pull it back to earth.
December 2009. Note it down. The beginning of the end, even as Avatar becomes possibly the biggest-grossing film in history.
Cameron, whose last colossal hit was Titanic, has created a virtual new planet called Pandora, on which humans 150 years from now have formed a small settlement.
They are there to mine a mineral so rare that it’s called Unobtainium (groan), of which the greatest deposit sits right under the great sacred tree of the planet’s dominant species, humanoid blue aliens called Na’vi.
If Tim Flannery, Al Gore and all the other Copenhagen delegates could at least agree to design a new kind of people, they’d wind up with something much like these 3m-tall gracelings.
The Na’vi live in trees, at one with nature. They worship Mother Earth and, like Gaians today, talk meaningfully of “a network of energy that flows through all living things”. They drink water that’s pooled in giant leaves, and chant around a tree that whispers of their ancestors.
They are also unusually non-sexist for a forest tribe, with the women just as free as men to hunt and choose their spouse. Naturally, like the most fashionable of Hollywood stars, they are also neo-Buddhist reincarnationists, who believe “all energy is borrowed and some day you have to give it back”.
And, of course, the Na’vi reject all technology that’s more advanced than a bow and arrow, for “the wealth of the world is all around us”.
Sent to talk dollars and sense into these blue New Agers and move them out of the way of the bulldozers is a former Marine, Jake Sully (played by Australian Sam Worthington), who drives the body of a Na’vi avatar to better gain their trust.
(WARNING: Spoiler alert! Don’t read on if you plan to see the movie.)
But meeting such perfect beings, living such low-emission green lives, Sully realises instead how vile his own species is.
Humans, he angrily declares, have already wrecked their own planet through their greed.
“There is no green” on their “dying world” because “they have killed their mother”. Now we land-raping humans plan to wreck Pandora, too, with our “shock-and-awe” bombings, our war on “terror” and our genocidal plans to destroy the Na’vi and steal their lands.
So complete is Cameron’s disgust with humans - and so convinced he is that his audience shares it - that he’s made film history: he’s created the first mass-market movie about a war between aliens and humans in which we’re actually meant to barrack for the aliens.
(WARNING: Second spoiler alert!)
In fact, so vomitous are humans that Sully, the hero, not only chooses to fight on the side of the aliens but to actually become an alien, too. He rejects not just humans but his own humanity.
All of this preaching comes straight from what’s left of Cameron’s heart after five marriages and a professional reputation of on-set meanness.
Avatar, he’s said, tackles “our impact on the natural environment, wherever we go strip mining and putting up shopping malls”, and it warns “we’re going to find out the hard way if we don’t wise up and start seeking a life that’s in balance with the natural cycle on life on earth”.
Mind you, most of this will be just wallpaper to the film’s real audience, which won’t be greenies in Rasta beanies or wearing save-the-whale T-shirts made in Guatemala.
No, scoffing their popcorn as they wait impatiently for the inevitable big-bang shoot-’em-up after a fairground tour of some cool new planet will be the usual bag-laden crowd from the Christmas-choked megaplex - the kind of bug-eyed folk who thrill most to what Cameron claims to condemn, from the hi-tech to the militaristic.
Still, you can hardly blame them if they don’t buy the message that Cameron’s selling, since he doesn’t really buy it himself.
Here’s Cameron condemning consumerism by spending almost half a billion dollars on a mass-market movie for the Christmas season complete with tie-in burger deals from McDonald’s and Avatar toys from Mattel.
Here’s Cameron damning our love of technology by using the most advanced cinematographic technology to create his new green world.
In fact, here’s Cameron urging his audience to scorn material possessions and get close to nature, only to himself retire each night to the splendid comfort of his Malibu mansion.
Not even his own creations live up to the philosophy he has them preach.
For all their talk of the connectedness of nature, the Na’vi still kill animals for food - although not before saying how sorry they are, of course, since we live in an age in which seeming sorry excuses every selfishness.
Likewise, despite all their lectures on not exploiting nature, the Na’vi still come out top dog in the food chain.
Even when they physically become at one with wild pterodactyls, by hooking up to them through some USB in their hair braid, they manage to convince their flying reptiles to act like their private jets.
Isn’t this against the rules? I mean, in this caring and at-one-with-nature world, shouldn’t a plugged-in pterodactyl just once in a while get to direct its human passenger instead - by either telling it to take a flying jump or to at least act like lunch?
In all of this, Avatar captures precisely - and to the point of satire - the creed of the Copenhagen faithful.
Rewind what you’ve seen from those Copenhagen planet-savers in the past two weeks.
There were the apocalyptic warnings of how we were killing the planet. There were the standing ovations the delegates gave last week to Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez’s furious denunciations of capitalism, consumerism and the US military.
There was Bolivian President Evo Morales’ cry for a simpler life: “It’s changing economic policies, ending luxury, consumerism … living better is to exploit human beings.”
There were great crowds of activists such as Australia’s Professor Clive Hamilton, who, like Avatar’s Jake Sully, sermonises on the need to embrace “Gaian earth in its ecological, cybernetic way, infused with some notion of mind or soul or chi”.
And there was the romanticising of the primitive by the demonstrators outside dressed as ferals and wild bears, as they banged tribal drums or chanted “Ommm” to Mother Earth.
Of course the Cameron-style have-it-both-ways hypocrites were there, too, luxuriating in the very lifestyles they condemned.
Take Prince Charles, who flew in his private RAF jet to Copenhagen to deliver a lecture on how our careless use of resources had pushed the planet “to the brink”.
And then had his pilot fly him home to his palace.
But, yes, you are right. How can I say this great green faith is now toppling into the pit of ridicule, when Avatar seems sure to do colossal business? Won’t a whole generation of the slack-jawed just catch this new green faith from the men in the blue costumes?
That’s a risk. But having the green faith made so alien and such fodder for the entertainment of the candybar crowds will rob it of all sanctimony and cool.
Would a Cate Blanchett really be flattered to now be likened to a naked Na’vi, running from a pack of wild dogs in a dark forest?
Would an Al Gore really like to have millions of filmgoers see in 3D where his off-this-planet faith would lead them - up a tree, and without even a paddle?
No, we can now see their green world, and can see, too, it’s time to come home.
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