The Way of Water, Please Meet the Way to Eden
Considering the problematic utopian ideology of James Cameron's Newest "Avatar" Epic
After seeing Avatar, The Way of Water, I stumbled across Star Trek’s, “The Way to Eden.” The 1969 Captain Kirk/Mr. Spock TV episode is silly on the outside, true to life on the inside, whereas the plot for The Way of Water follows its predecessor-- outwardly attractive, inwardly false.
Like the first movie, Avatar, 2009, The Way of Water continues the storyline of very bad white men (represented by Marines and unscrupulous businessmen) wrecking the earth, making a mess of Pandora, and killing off the nature-loving Na’vi. James Cameron’s movie is spreading the word around our planet via movie theatres that paradise is coming and there’s gonna be hell to pay.
In “The Way to Eden,” the Enterprise rescues a small craft ready to burn up, saving a group of space-weary hippies destined for Eden--a place to wander free, joined to nature, a Burning Man for all seasons, free of regulations and technological nightmares like dentistry and online banking.
Their leader, a brilliant doctor in another lifetime, and according to Spock, very insane, blames modern society. “Herbert” is the name given to the duds of the world fronting modernism: bureaucrats, pencil pushers, someone unoriginal all day long. When Captain Kirk informs the hippie crew that they’ll be required to submit to physical exams, they start shouting Herbert!—Herbert!—Herbert! ad nauseum. From my days of rage with the hippies and budding terrorists of the late 1960s, chanting was one of our favorite pastimes, especially screaming at all the “Herberts” wisely telling us to go cut our hair and get a job.
James Cameron’s natives of Avatar don’t chant, they get even. Humans have a stink on them that the seafaring humanoids of Pandora can smell on Jake Sully—a human transformed into a Na’vi. Racism is alive and well among the Na’vi when at the start of The Way of Water, Jake’s wife, Neytiri, tells her husband that the human boy playing with their kids should be with his own kind.
In Star Trek, the hippie crew takes over the Enterprise, begins the search for Eden, finds it, and aims the ship towards their utopia. They nearly suffocate the crew in order to give themselves time to transport down to the planet. When Captain Kirk and company revive and beam down, they find a beautiful planet full of lush plants and flowers, and trees bearing scrumptious fruits, every inch Eden, every inch full of poison.
The crew discovers one of the rebels dead and their leader is found nursing his burnt feet. Every bite of Eden carries death, and the leader behind the mutiny runs from his “captors,” climbs a tree, bites into a luscious-appearing fruit and dies.
Gene Roddenberry glimpsed the hippie nightmare unfolding and called out its insanity. However, James Cameron is the resurrected leader from “The Way to Eden,” becoming a kind of “The Wrath of James.” Today, he enjoys lots of money, fame, and a zealot’s hatred for the human race, especially the Marines, who are the embodiment of evil in both movies. Cameron leads the latest chant of the Davos-progressive crowd--people as a cancer on the planet, deserving of death after befouling earth and daring to move their hot mess to another planet. From this political/cultural opium den, the smoke of self-hatred wafts across the planet.
Yes, we’re a broken people until the end of time, but a people who in the past 150 years, thanks to fossil fuels and Judeo-Christian values, have made the world greener and brought more people out of absolute poverty than at any other time in human history. Western medicine and technology has reached into the remotest parts of the world offering a nearly blind old woman in the Himalayas cataract surgery, and the ability to see her loved ones again and her very own backyard. And what a view!
Two thousand years ago, Christians took to the battlefield and attended the wounded and the dying, making Roman generals scratch their heads, puzzled at Christians comforting strangers. Early Christians also rescued babies left in the forest to die. A child up to the age of two would be carried by his Roman father and left in the woods to be devoured by wild animals. The child’s sin? not being born perfect. Perhaps the director of the Avatar movies should contemplate this marked change in human consciousness.
Cameron does give us a movie where I recognized the World War Two generation of my parents—no nonsense, strict, loving, with mom and dad roles well defined. Jake’s not opposed to public humiliation when disciplining one of his boys, even threatening to “knot his tail” if he acts up again. On this side of the universe these actions would precipitate a call to child services.
Cameron got a little bit of truth on the table with the depiction of the family. Too bad he’s lost his ability to see the beauty of present-day earth, especially the accomplishments of its inhabitants, and learn the rest of the story from our imperfect, yet amazing past. There’s still time for him to fall in love with the human race, instead of hating it.
