Perhaps the single most complex element of the movie Avatar, both scientifically and mythologically, is the idea of the avatars themselves.
The avatars were originally created as a labour force adapted to conditions on Pandora, but proved too expensive for the purpose. Later, after pressure from the UN, scientists and the general public to establish fuller relations with the Na’vi, RDA changed the avatars’ mission; they became ambassadors for humanity among the Na’vi. Since this failed to have satisfactory outcomes the avatars have been redeployed for reconnaissance, field science and exploration—and, covertly, under Colonel Quaritch’s command, to gather military “intel” on the Na’vi. In future they could have other uses, such as supervisors if the Na’vi are ever made to labour in human mines…
The avatars look like Na’vi, more or less. Yet they are not Na’vi, and nor are they human. They are made things, grown in a tank from a mixture of human and Na’vi genetic material. In fine details they differ from the Na’vi: their human-like eyes, the number of their fingers.
And they are unlike Na’vi, and humans, in that they don’t have minds of their own. An avatar needs the consciousness of a “driver” to function.
As a driver, Jake Sully is joined to his avatar by a “psionic link.” Lying inert in his link tank, perhaps kilometres away, he can operate his avatar as if it were his own body. He sees and hears and feels through the avatar’s sense organs; his mind controls the avatar body’s movements. While he is linked to the avatar it is as if he is the avatar.
New technologies rarely find just one application. Aside from the application on Pandora, what else could you do with avatar technology? The ability to grow mindless bodies, including presumably fully human ones, itself offers possibilities, even without “driving” them. They could be used as banks of organs for donation, for instance, or test beds for medical advances, or they could be used to explore the tolerance of the body to various extremes, heat and cold, airlessness.
“Driven” avatar bodies could be used as soldiers in the battle-field, disposable cannon fodder controlled by trained operators from the safety of link tanks in bunkers far behind the lines. Avatars could also be used on such assignments as bomb disposal, or sent into hazardous environments such as future Chernobyls.
How about entertainment? You could stage fight-to-the-death gladiatorial contests with “nobody” getting hurt. And we can’t begin to discuss the opportunities for pornography in a book about a 12-rated movie!
All of this would depend only on the cost—as Jake says, the avatar programme has turned out to be “insanely expensive”—and on whether an avatar body really does have no mind of its own. You would have to be absolutely sure that it cannot feel, or grieve, no matter what you do to it, or make it do.
In the chapters that follow we will look at how an avatar could be built and operated. But avatars also carry an extraordinarily complicated mythological weight, a weight that surely shapes the Na’vi’s reaction to them. Remember, the warrior Tsu’tey accuses avatar-Jake of being “a demon in a false body.”
There have been many fictional portrayals of mind-links and mind-swaps before, from F. Anstey’s Vice Versa (1882) to the recent movie Freaky Friday. In the 1960s, the boy hero of Gerry Anderson’s TV puppet show Joe 90 became a special agent “thanks to a fabulous electronic device which can transfer the brain patterns of those who are the greatest experts in their field” (according to a publicity brochure of the time). Joe’s gadget, a limited precursor of the avatar link, was itself anticipated by the “Educator tapes” of James White’s many “Sector General” stories, and the idea has recently been revived in a more adult form in Joss Whedon’s TV series Dollhouse. The recent movie Surrogates saw an ageing Bruce Willis operate a young-looking robotic “avatar” of himself. But the concept has never been taken so far as in the movie Avatar.
And the concept has much deeper mythological roots.
To begin with, Tsu’tey is right: an avatar is a false body. It is a made creature: that is, made by humans, not by nature, or any god.
Avatars are like the golems of early Judaic legends, which were beings created from mud by rabbis who approached God closely enough to attain the power to create life. The most famous such story concerns the Golem of Prague, set in the sixteenth century. Golems crop up in popular culture, such as in the X-Files episode “Kaddish.” Typically a golem is a slave of its creator. And having been made by a mortal it is a lesser thing than any human, who is made by God. The Frankenstein monster is a descendant of the golem myth, the dead brought back to life through science.
But golems have minds. The avatars of the movie are like golems but without minds of their own: they are controlled by the consciousness of their human operators. As such the name “avatar” is apt. The word is used in computing to describe a user’s representation of herself in some computational world, a game or a shared space like Second Life. Thus Jake is the “user,” the avatar his representation in the world of the Na’vi. This usage of the word seems to date from the 1980s, and it was popularised in “cyberpunk” novels like Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash (1992).
But the word “avatar” has much deeper roots. Ultimately it derives from the Hindu, from a word for “descent.” An avatar is a manifestation of a god on the Earth. This is not like the divinity of Christ in the Christian religion; through the Incarnation Christ was God made man, whereas a Hindu avatar is more literally a god walking the Earth. Perhaps an avatar is more like an angel of Christian, Jewish and Islamic traditions. Interestingly, avatars in Hinduism are often sent to Earth for a specific purpose, just as avatar-Grace is sent to educate the Na’vi, and avatar-Jake is sent to negotiate their evacuation from Hometree. And, incidentally, Hindu deities are often shown as blue-skinned, like the Na’vi in the movie.
The control of the avatars by minds outside their bodies is like demonic possession, in which a human is controlled by an outside force. So Tsu’tey is also correct to say that there is a “demon” inside that false body. In the Christian tradition, the Bible contains many references to demons being driven out of possessed people. But the oldest references in western culture appear to go back to the first civilisations; the Sumerians believed sickness was caused by possession by malevolent spirits. And shamanic cultures, like the Na’vi, often also believe in possession. Disease is caused by vengeful spirits, the spectres of animals or of wronged humans, that can be driven out by exorcism.
James Cameron’s avatars are thus a modern reworking of a whole set of very ancient mythic elements. And with such a background the reaction of the Na’vi to the avatars can only be complicated, depending on how they interpret the avatars in the precise traditions of their own culture. To the Na’vi, humans are “sky people,” tawtute, and the avatars “dreamwalkers,” uniltirantokx, bodies possessed by spirits from the sky. Maybe it’s no surprise that at the start of Jake’s adventure we learn that the avatars have been forbidden to come to the Omaticaya clan’s Hometree.
But how is an avatar body created in the first place?