Lately, through a prolonged series of unfortunate travel mishaps, I’ve been spending a lot more time sitting on airplanes than I normally would like to. This means going through the usual routine: if I’m well behaved, reading a book – if I’m naughty, scrolling through the collection of schlocky films the airline has to offer on the seatback screen. And so, being a sucker for schlocky action films, this is how I’ve come to have recently watched all three of James Cameron’s Avatar films in succession.
I have some comments.
My viewing experience isn’t ideal. I’m watching these movies on a miniscule screen 6 inches away from my face, while getting kicked from behind by a toddler and having to stand up to let the woman in 46F use the bathroom for the 8th time. The sound quality is poor, the colors are washed out, and the airplane is stiflingly hot. Still, I have to admit that I actually enjoyed the movies for what they are: an experimental expression of technology and evoking emotion passively through visuals, rather than overt storytelling.
In retrospect, I actually think that the subprime viewing experience is part of what drove my broader issues with these films, but maybe not for the reasons that you think. My complaints aren’t leveled at the quality of Cameron’s cinematography, writing, direction, or at the movies at all, really. My issues with the movies grow their roots much deeper, at a part of society I’ve been quick to critique, yet slow to form any concrete suggestions for mitigation or improvement. To put a name to the beast: Humans are notoriously bad at imagining alien life.
What I mean by this is, perhaps paradoxically, the Avatar movies are not really about what it means to be alien; rather, I believe their core message is about what it means to be human by putting up mirrors to human society. They seek to explore how humans navigate an alien world rather than the, in my opinion, much more interesting alien world itself. For God’s sake, they literally put a human in an alien body as the core conceit of the movie, to save the viewer the effort of having to imagine what it’s like to have a non-human experience. Unfortunately, I think these movies do this particularly poorly in many ways, in the end destroying what could have been a very unique and engaging message.
I won’t spend much time rehashing the common criticism that the first Avatar movie is essentially a blue re-skin of Pocahontas, or Dances with Wolves. That commentary exists in a hundred other places, and is easy to find if you look for it. Instead, let me point out that Avatar struggles from the same perspective as Disney’s Pocahontas does, in that it is a human (European) perspective on what is fundamentally an alien (Native American) story. The cultural point of view of the people that the story is really about, whether it’s Native Americans or the Na’vi, is essentially erased from the storytelling, leveraging the culture of the “other” as a way to add mysticism and wonder to the story without actually having to tackle the true nature of the non-Western society.
This isn’t anything new when it comes to Pocahontas, since Western audiences have been doing this sort of thing for millenia. We’ve co-opted the Arabian One Thousand and One Nights, the Sumerian Gilgamesh, and even the Bible. Not to say that the original versions of these stories have been destroyed or warped, but that a Western audience is only ever exposed to Westernized versions of these culturally non-Western stories. This leads to a lack of true cultural understanding; we perceive the characters in these films not as a part of their respective society, but through our own eyes, as a member of our culture looking into a strange land with foreign rules and attractive otherworldly curiosity. And Cameron has launched this perspective into outer space.
Frustratingly, the alien life in Avatar looks and acts distinctly human, or at least Earth-like. There are trees, ferns, oceans, rocks, cliffs, and grass. The Na'vi have roughly the same body shape, structure their society in tribes just like humans, and even speak in a language that really isn’t all that different from human languages. They sing songs that sound human. Their rituals are essentially copies of rituals from various human cultures. Hell, the fact that they have rituals at all is potentially laying a human perspective of what culture should be on something that would ultimately be free from human assumptions and axioms.
This is a common issue viewers have with Star Trek. Why do the aliens always look vaguely human? Of course, it’s a practical issue; aliens need to be portrayed by human actors, and their costume/special effects budget isn’t massive, so only so much can be done to create aliens in their stories. (There is in fact an interesting in-universe explanation for why this is the case; an ancient species of panspermic spacefaring aliens seeded worlds with their genetics, leading to the evolution of the numerous bipedal, 2-armed species we see in the show.)
While Star Wars does this somewhat better through the use of puppetry and later CGI to create distinctly non-human aliens, this effort is ultimately undermined by every alien race being able to easily understand each other and seemingly share a singular human-like Space Western culture. Of course, Star Wars isn’t meant to be a hard sci-fi story, and this choice works for the genre and goals of those films. But, by not exploring unique cultural differences of these visually rich settings, it detracts from an audience's understanding and appreciation of the alien as anything other than humans with a different shape.
There are interesting conversations in documentaries surrounding the production of Avatar that suggest that this human-centric perspective was not always intended. Significant work was done by world-class sociologists, linguists, and biologists to create a vibrant, intertwined fictional world; only a miniscule fraction of this work makes it into the films. Apparently, the music in the film (which is basically the usual Western big-picture orchestral fare plus some extra flutes and drums) was originally intended to be a fusion of Hungarian choral, Native American, non-tonal Indian, and a few other musical traditions in order to create an alien sounding performance. But, the key language here is alien sounding. Even if this vision for the film had come to pass, these aspects of the film still would have been human by the very virtue of being derived from existing human experience.
Note, also, that Avatar was never going to be able to be too alien. The film was a massive undertaking with unheard of levels of financial backing, and investors required a return on their investment. The film needed to be palatable to Western audiences, and anything overly alien to the point of being unapproachable to the viewers wouldn’t have been widely viewed. The alien experience was Marvel-ized to a point where a human being could resonate with the story being shown on the screen.
And, look, I get it. I don’t think it makes sense to make the same kind of financial investment on a surreal experimental experience. In that aspect, I suppose I’m glad that we got Avatar at all.
But it’s frustrating to have a piece of art that’s so close to approaching a genuinely interesting topic, yet refuses to engage with it in any meaningful way. Instead, I’m stuck watching 3 movies where “Ohana means family, even for aliens” and “whales look cool, even for aliens” are the core takeaways. Even the lukewarm “isn’t expansionary capitalism bad for the environment, actually? Even for aliens” message falls flat when it’s not grounded by any sense of greater impact that we haven’t already seen played out here on Earth.
This isn't to say that all portrayals of alien-human interactions are poorly done. The recent book-turned-movie Project Hail Mary handles first contact in a hard sci-fi way, showing how this process would realistically be long and drawn-out, taking weeks to simply get on the same page for language, shared assumptions, and communicative understanding. Similarly, Arrival does a phenomenal job of characterizing how humans would not only have to deal with an entirely foreign way of alien communication, but that our core way of thinking would be completely different from that of extraterrestrials. The takeaway for me is that, despite having roughly the same budgets, Avatar made over 4 times more at the box office than Project Hail Mary, demonstrating the differences in appeal between a story that honestly tries to imagine what alien life would be versus one that simply pretends like that's what it's doing.
In the 1970s, when NASA launched the two Voyager spacecraft on a trajectory towards interstellar space, they made a concerted effort to create a map back to Earth for any alien being that may later encounter these human objects. Our message to future aliens was carefully constructed by experts to be decodable without any previous knowledge of human information, and placed on each spacecraft as a large golden plate, resistant to being eaten away by cosmic radiation. Pictograms were designed to communicate via the most basic tools we have available; fundamental physics. Starting from an understanding of the time it takes a hydrogen atom to flip between its two hyperfine states, which will be the same value everywhere in the Universe, there is a clear path forward to a map of where Earth is given the locations of nearby pulsars, stellar lighthouses powered by the magnetized corpses of dead stars.
But, we don’t even know if this is enough. There’s absolutely no reason to assume that alien life will evolve in anything remotely similar to humanity, or that it even follows the basic rules of Earth biology at all, like evolution. Will these aliens even have eyes? Will they even have the technology to locate such a spacecraft, or hands to manipulate it? What if they navigate by a sense of smell alone? Nothing on the Voyager spacecraft was designed to smell a particular way. We could find ourselves in the unfortunate case of the aliens actually encountering human-built items for the first time, and being unaware that we even left them a message to come find us. Maybe aliens have been sending us messages in smell-o-vision this whole time, and we’re too focused on our sense of vision to even notice! We have absolutely no idea what the possibilities are for alien life, and pretending like we do is at best callous, and at worst actively counterproductive to both efforts to communicate with aliens, as well as a cultural understanding of ourselves and our place in the Universe.
The Voyager spacecraft are now the furthest human objects from Earth, so far away that we’re barely able to communicate with them, and continuing to travel farther and farther away. Poetically and tragically, I fear that culturally we’re moving away from an understanding that the Universe is not centered on humanity.
There was a similar set of plates made for the Europa Clipper mission a few years ago. These plates do not contain enough information to communicate with potential alien life – something many scientists believe could possibly exist on Europa. Instead, they are engraved with a picture of a planetary scientist, a poem, a single equation without any explanation of its meaning, a drawing of a bottle over a not-to-scale drawing of the Solar system, and 103 waveforms of the word “water” spoken in different languages.
This is profoundly stupid.
We have a potential opportunity to communicate with alien life. We should be providing them with the ability to progress towards a meeting with humanity, or at least a way to communicate remotely if a physical meeting isn’t possible. An alien race that encounters the Voyager plates and is successfully able to decode them will know that we are able to communicate in radio waves, and would be able to know our location to beam a radio message to us. An alien race that finds the Europa Clipper plate would be unable to decode it, and would just see a confusing array of symbols. Potentially catastrophic is the very real scenario where this alien race might spend a significant amount of time and effort attempting to decode this plate that actually has nothing available to decode.
We would have wasted an opportunity to communicate. And for what? To send a narcissistic assortment of symbols that makes us happy and panders to the 800 different administrators who had to sign off on it to a different world? And while this isn’t the biggest problem for a mission to Europa in particular, because we could actually feasibly go there physically in a human lifetime right now if we really wanted to, I’m worried that this sentiment is only increasing – and could potentially damage real efforts to contact alien life. This should concern you, too.
So, this is what I’m stuck thinking about while sitting in a plane, stuck for hours on the tarmac, for the second time in a few weeks. As we continually push forwards as a species, we lose a sense of who we are in a broader Universal context. I don’t mean for this to be hokey hippie bullshit - I mean in a very real, physical scientific sense, we are losing a societal awareness of the cosmos and the fact that we are but a speck in the vast unknown.
At the same time, we’re beginning to interface with the first real alien thought processes we’ve ever encountered: Artificial Intelligence. And it’s rapidly becoming clear that we’re utterly inept at realizing what behavior is driving the interesting phenomena under the hood. Does this machinery actually learn, or is it memorization? What does it mean to learn, or to think? What does it mean to be conscious? At the risk of sounding cliche, I worry that our engineers were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should. Or at least, they never stopped to think about thinking, because Goddammit, there's profits to be made, baby!
I don’t want this to come across as alarmist, because I’m truly a proponent of including AI effectively, responsibly, and ethically in our existing systems. I just also believe that maybe we should be spending more time, money, and effort as a society thinking about what these systems actually are. Not how they work, not how many workers they can replace, not how fast they can do the job of 3 engineers, but really stop to let it sink in – we’re encountering alien life for the first time, in real time, and we’d rather put it to work than figure out how it works.
I can’t help but think about Mark Fisher’s book Capitalist Realism (this is a common problem for me). Fisher lays out a theory of mind in which our actions, thoughts, and even imaginations are constrained by our experiences in the world around us. Since we live within systems, our behavior and mindsets are shaped to fit within those systems – and as a result, we experience a profound inability to conceive of a world different than ours, where the rules in a different system would influence our minds and imaginations in a different direction.
While Fisher is talking about how Capitalism restricts possible action and behavior, I think a similar thing is going on with the Avatar movies. We’re so embedded in a human system, so used to thinking about the world from our own two eyes, that we’ve lost our ability to actually imagine worlds and lives beyond our own beyond what we can dominate with a human context. Or maybe we never had such an ability. It would be nice to (re)grow that sense of Universal belonging again.
It’s ironic, then, that this disconnection leaves us alienated from the rest of the Universe in such a fundamental way. Alienation from truly being alien.