The Sexual Sublime and Salvation on Pandora: The Romantic Imagination of James Cameron

“I see you.” That simple phrase by Jake Sully to Neytiri consummates their relationship long before their having sex from which Jake “becomes a man” in passing the initiation rites through taming a mountain banshee (ikran). The metamorphosis of Jake over the course of Avatar has been hailed and derided by critics. Does the film promote environmentalism and anti-capitalism in a futuristic reinterpretation of colonialism? If so, is the film guilty of promoting implicit racism with the “white savior narrative”? What do we make of turncoat heroes? Is Avatar just a CGI retelling of the Pocahontas story with the natives winning this time? All such critiques and appraisals of Jake Sully in Avatar miss the more fundamental, though subconscious, reality of the film and its story: becoming a man again in an age of technological deracination and sexual frustration—something that is common in James Cameron’s many films—entails the creation of a family. Funny how “conservative” critics, most especially, miss this.

When we are introduced to Jake in the beginning in the film, he is wheelchair bound. Being wheelchair bound is a symbol of sexual impotency. Moreover, the film’s narrative is over-laced with sexual innuendo and language. The former marines turned RDA mercenary security force are here to conquer Pandora. The RDA’s presence is the manifestation of the Baconian dream realized by force: putting nature up on the rack and exploiting her to reveal her most intimate secrets.

The creation of the “empire of man,” as Francis Bacon called it, is the goal of Enlightenment scientism which, properly speaking, becomes the driving force behind both political liberalism and socialism: humanity’s technological and scientific control over nature (and human nature) to remake it into the universal paradise of peace and wealth (liberals and socialists just disagree on the means to make this happen). Of course, what goes on behind the scenes—though vigorously protested by liberal and socialist ideologues—is how this empire of universal peace and prosperity is the result of conquest (Friedrich Engels famously supported the American invasion of Mexico on this ground). Some classical socialists recognized this (Marx and Engels) even though they believed that there would come an end to conquest from which the spoils would be redistributed and conquest no longer necessary for universal peace and prosperity to occur. At this moment of the cessation of conquest, those most negatively affected by the conquest to universal peace and prosperity should be the first to reap the redistributive benefits.

The Romantic Imagination

In Irrational Man, philosopher and historian William Barrett explained the Romantic movement—the most vigorous and forceful (and ironically destructive) spirit of opposition to the so-called Enlightenment—as “protest of feeling against reason” and “the protest on behalf of nature against the encroachments of an industrial society.” There is nothing Enlightenment or liberal or even socialist about Avatar’s true aesthetic and emotional message, though our contemporary critics are among the most illiterate people on the planet. It is thoroughly a work moved by the romantic subconscious and manifests the artistic triumph of the romantic imagination. (This too is a common occurrence in Cameron’s many films.)

Pandora is a fertile and exciting new world, green and lush; a “virgin” land so to speak. There is a grand diversity of life that exists in a careful equilibrium on the planet. The Naavi are holistic beings, creatures of energy, emotion, and eroticism. The humans in the film, in most scenes, are encased in mechanical monstrosities. They’re robotic. They’re unpassionate. They’re here for purely material reasons: conquest, money, trade. They are homo economicus on steroids, they are the embodiment of the Enlightenment understanding of man in its liberal or socialist form because liberal and socialist anthropology both maintain the essential materialism of man rather than the spiritual or animistic (which defines the Naavi and historically defined pre-industrial humanity). The humans in Avatar, from the romantic disposition, aren’t humans at all. In fact, from the purview of psychoanalytic romanticism, the Naavi are the film’s sublime reimagination of what humanity was before the Enlightenment: erotic, emotional, and holistic. The Enlightenment, as all true students of philosophy know, destroyed that soul which the Romantics ecstatically rebelled in favor of. The Enlightenment began the materialization of human life and stripped away the enchanted cosmos from our consciousness. Pandora tries to restore that enchanted understanding of the world.

The Romantic movement was, by definition and reality, reactive. It was a reactive movement against the universalization of the homo economicus of the Enlightenment brought on by awakenings that romantic figures had over their life. So too is the progression of Avatar a series of awakenings away from the impotent and wheelchair bound Jake Sully to seeing the true reality of life in his passionate elopement with Neytiri which causes him to react against the RDA. When Jake Sully “becomes a man” and then has sex with Neytiri under Ewya, the “tree of life” (a pantheistic and animistic symbol that restores the nature and spirituality of ur-humanity), life is restored in Jake and he becomes a human once again by becoming a Naavi who are not foreign aliens but the symbolic representation of pre-Enlightenment humanity. Jake Sully’s new life is by shedding his technological emptiness and embracing the primordial holism offered through the Naavi.

The Naavi are not poetic instantiations of Native Americans as some critics claim. The Naavi are James Cameron’s artistic (re)imagination of what humans were before the onset of scientistic and industrial conquest and revolution. The contrast between the Naavi and the film’s apparent humans offer a deep deconstruction into the question of humanity itself. Is humanity merely the material form it takes as Enlightenment anthropology suggests? Or is humanity really the erotic emotionalism and passion that moves the soul and gives us life as the romantic anthropology asserts?

Sex and the Sublime: From the Epic of Gilgamesh and Edmund Burke to James Cameron

Avatar is not merely a beautiful film. It is a sublime film. The film reaches into the heart of humanity and stirs our passions. It is not a film that one merely experiences intellectually. It is a film that brings out the flames of critics and viewers alike. There is no denying the emotional potency of the film which explains its cultural success when first released.

In the Epic of Gilgamesh, Enkidu is humanized by the sacred harlot Shamhat. He also witnesses a marriage ceremony in Uruk when brought into the city from which he will meet Gilgamesh. Sex as the pathway to civilization and life is a common trope found in our earliest literature. Sex and food, Aristotle reminds us over two millennia after the Epic of Gilgamesh, reveal our civilized habits or uncivilized barbarism.

Sex is a sublime act. So what is the sublime? Edmund Burke is the most important philosopher on the question of the sublime. It serves as one half of his aesthetic treatise, which is as much an investigation into the psychology of the soul than anything else. Burke writes:

Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain, and danger, that is to say, whatever is any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime, that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling. I say the strongest emotion, because I am satisfied the ideas of pain are much more powerful than those which enter on the part of pleasure.

“[T]he strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling” is how Burke understands the sublime. We might go further and simply say that the sublime is what causes the strongest emotion, excitement, and pathology in human life—body and soul. Sex, undeniably, qualifies. It is hardly the pleasant delicacy that Burke associates with the beautiful. Death, also, is sublime. As Burke says, “Fear or terror, which is an apprehension of pain or death, exhibits exactly the same effects, approaching in violence to those just mentioned in proportion to nearness of the cause, and the weakness of the subject.” (More on that in a bit.)

If sex is both a medium for new life and civilization and is the most sublime reality that humans can experience, then it is unsurprising that sex became one of the perennial themes in romantic literature and romantic filmography. Consider Cameron’s many films which pulsate through our hearts and contrast human life trapped in, and in a war with, technological tyranny: Terminator and Titanic most especially. The sexual acts of Reese with Sarah and Jack with Rose consummate their bonds and brings forth the quasi-eternal life (John Connor is the son of Reese and Sarah and Rose living for Jack despite his death in the ship’s eventual sinking and the romanticized ending of Titanic implying love after death) of the romantic imagination of James Cameron.

The most human thing you can do in the face of technological tyranny and annihilation is sex because sex is a consummating act between non-technological entities—it is the bond that unites organic lifeforms in an act of defiance against the cold mechanicalism of technological self-creation. It implies the possible birth of children (as it explicitly does in the case of Reese and Sarah in Terminator) and is something that awakens us from the slumber of boredom (Jack and Rose in Titanic). In short, the technological world fears sex because sex is an act of defiant rebellion against technological, scientistic, supremacy. After all, the perverse dream of scientism is to spawn children without sex. Freeze your eggs and get a sperm donor and voilà, children can be created.

Avatar follows the romantic imagination that Cameron set out building with Terminator which runs through his most impressive films: The Abyss, Terminator 2, and Titanic. Titanic, of course, represented the triumph of Cameron’s romantic imagination before the filming and release of Avatar. Cameron’s core filmography follows a simple dialectic: technology is bad and endangers humanity and nature which is meant to be understood as essentially synthetic. The forces of industry and science are bad because they necessarily strip the world of nature, destroying nature in the process of creating metal monsters that humans consider indestructible. The suffocating tyranny of technology and science push us down the road to armageddon. What is the spirit or force that counteracts technological tyranny? What is the most heroic act of defiance, rebellion, to technological tyranny? Love. Principally love through sex. Sex is sublime and reminds us of our humanity in our cold, technological, age. Sex literally restores the passion and ecstasy eliminated by the advancement of technological scientism.

The love that Reese has for Sarah leads him to transcend space and time to make love with her which will give the world the savior child of John Connor. In Terminator 2, The T-800 played by Arnold Schwarzenegger learns love in protecting John Connor and sacrifices his life for the boy, the most loving act that any human can do (“Greater love hath no man than this, that he lay down his life for his friend”). Bud and Lindsey rekindle their love in saving the world from nuclear annihilation. Despite the suffocating boringness of high society on the grandest ship to sail the sea before its sinking, the love of Jack and Rose bring life to the technological monstrosity floating the Atlantic; their love of each other endures beyond Jack’s death and the Titanic’s sinking: “My heart will go” as the famous lyrics sung by Celine Dion’s unforgettable voice passionately proclaim.

In Avatar, Cameron continues to refine this dialectic of techno-scientistic tyranny as a danger to human and natural life which must be challenged by an act of erotic rebellion. Cameron’s 2009 masterpiece, and it is a masterpiece, represented the climax of his imaginative vision of this subconscious that we all sense. Whereas in Terminator the forces of law and government (LAPD in the film) are incompetent to stop the mechanical monster, by the time we get The Abyss and Terminator 2 the forces of law and government are pawns of technological tyranny. Titanic takes a step back because of its chronological historical situatedness, but Titanic prefigures where Avatar goes: technology and science is all that matters, in Titanic science and technology are independent of all government because science and technology transcends law and government with its universal intent. The RDA, in Avatar, represents the horrifying vision of the future of human life down the rabbit hole of the romantic’s fear: no government, no law, no politics—just the scientistic lust to dominate in the form of a technological corporation which has gathered its own scientists, its own army, and its own motivations. The RDA is the RMS Titanic perfected, unbound and unchained in its pursuit of absolute scientific conquest. What Cameron has subconsciously proclaimed throughout his filmography leading to Avatar is that techno-scientism eventually transcends all national boundaries (the humans serving the RDA are of all ethnic and global backgrounds) and will pursue not merely the conquest of earth (as it is now complete) but the eventual conquest of the universe as its next logical vanishing point. In this conquest everything dies, humanity is enslaved and becomes less than humans (merging with the technological monstrosity they have built) unless an act of humanistic recovery occurs. That recovery is through sex and through that sex the birth of children and the beginning of a family. James Cameron is a prophetic visionary director of the family as the only and last bastion of defiance to this techno-scientistic world of cold cruelty.

Avatar and the Romantic Imagination of James Cameron

The core message of Avatar is the question of how do we retain our humanity, and therefore our freedom, in a technological age of despotism? I have, already, in a roundabout way answered that question by examining Cameron’s filmography and how it leads to Avatar. But the recovery of humanity and freedom through an act of sexual rebellion against technological tyranny and nihilism goes further in Cameron’s 2009 masterpiece than in his other films. In the previous iteration of Cameron’s romantic imagination, sex led to death however heroic and noble it was. The sacrificial savior tended to be the archetype of Cameron’s concluding image of humanistic triumph: Reese and Jack both die to save their female beloved and the T-800 sacrifices himself out of a newfound (human) love for John Connor; they all become sacrificial saviors at the end of the character developments which represents the highest manifestation of their humanity (even if one is technically a machine). Jake Sully and Neytiri survive. What gives?

Jake’s becoming a man again (his becoming human again) through his love of Neytiri doesn’t end with the sacrificial savior but with a reborn savior—the recovery of humanity in Avatar is itself a salvific act because we have lost our humanity through our enslavement to technology. No longer can the act of sacrificial death save us as in Cameron’s earlier filmographic romanticism because the romantic sacrificial hero still had humanity and showed his humanity in self-sacrifice. Having exhausted this thread of thought and now believing humanity has become so corrupted by technology, Cameron opts for the archetype of the resurrected savior to resolve the crisis of humanity in the technological age. More specifically, the implication of Avatar’s love story of resurrection entails the formation of a family as the ultimate act of rebellious defiance against technological tyranny and nihilism. While a child is born from the love of Reese and Sarah that leads to having a surrogate father before he sacrifices himself, and Rose lives on and has a family out of love of Jack and his sacrifice for her, and Bud and Lindsey recover their broken marriage in The Abyss (they are too old to have a family though), Cameron goes beyond this romanticist train of thought by accepting the necessity of a family out of the rebellious act of love that frees us from technological tyranny and nihilism in the conclusion of Avatar.

Here, Cameron subconsciously intuits the shortcoming of the romantic sacrificial lover. Jake is a romantic hero. Byronic even. But he cannot be alone or die alone in an act of romantic sacrifice as do most romantic heroes in Romanticist literature and storytelling. Something more must manifest itself if the technological tyranny and nihilism of scientistic slavery is to be defeated rather than an individual act of defiance to retain or recover an individual humanity. The answer Cameron arrives at in the conclusion of Avatar, which is the storyline for Avatar 2, is the family. Avatar represents the collective answer to the collective crisis of technological tyranny and nihilism rather than an individual answer to the collective crisis as his earlier films portrayed.

Part of the problem of the romantic hero was that his yearning for organic or collective unity and harmony was severed by the atomistic revolution of modernity. Hence why romantic heroes from poetry to literature to film are lonely geniuses, lonely lovers, and lonely wanderers. Their loneliness speaks to the triumph of atomistic modernity. The impossibility of recovering that organic holism means that the ultimate act of heroism is to die in defiance of atomistic cruelty still yearning for that holism that cannot be; it is the conscious act of dying for the impossible that makes romantic self-immolation so poignant.

As mentioned, that is what Cameron’s early heroic protagonists embody prior to Avatar. In Avatar, though it is the romantic film par excellence, Cameron transcends the alienated Byronic hero and offers a path for holistic restoration. It is simply not good enough to choose humanistic freedom in a defiant death, moving though it is. Cameron seeks humanistic freedom in life as the only pathway out of the tyranny and nihilism of techno-scientism.

In order for the romantic spirit to go forward, it must go backward. Cameron doesn’t continue down the romantic path forged by the great romantic writers of the nineteenth century which his earlier films brought to life for us on screen. While he takes their romantic themes and dispositions, he ironically marries it with the Aristotelian answer to societal problems: the family as the basis of everything. This is paired with an intense pantheistic spirituality that borrows on biblical imagery with a new age tilt. (It should be noted that the Naavi are also hierarchal and militaristic despite their “native” trappings because even Cameron subconsciously knows that is the reality of human nature: a hierarchal, militaristic, spiritualism is the core essence of humanity.) Cameron’s answer to the problematic shortcomings of romantic self-sacrifice and the Byronic hero is to embrace the romantic warning against techno-scientistic tyranny (which he has been focused on since Terminator) and marry it, pun intended, with the new-old solution of love in the family which ultimately transcends the alienated Byronic hero (Reese and Jack most notably in Cameron’s earlier films). The creation of a family through love is the greatest act of liberative rebellion against the sterile and destructive techno-scientistic ideology consuming humanity and the cosmos.

So the film moves to its inevitable conclusion. Jake, a mercenary who lost his humanity recovers his humanity by “going native.” The recovery of Jake’s humanity (in becoming a Naavi on screen) makes him an enemy to the techno-materialistic monster that is the RDA. Jake’s newfound humanity entails his love for Neytiri which is sealed in their sexual love under the gaze of the tree of life, Ewya. Jake’s restored humanity and love for Neytiri permits the apocalyptic showdown between the mechanical monsters and organic heroes on Pandora with our organic heroes, Jake and Neytiri most prominently, emerging victorious. Jake and Neytiri seal their bond even more through the birth of a child which represents the formation of a family as the final act of liberative defiance against the scientistic tyranny that ruined Jake and threatened to destroy the whole of Pandora (the romantic reimagining of earth and all organic life therein).

Over the course of Avatar, Cameron transcended the romantic impetus of erotic rebellion among individuals as mere individuals and reached its collective end to resolve what is not an individual crisis but a collective crisis. Salvation is found in the family. The formation of a family in love is the ultimate act of rebellious defiance in the face of technological tyranny and annihilation. Avatar cemented Cameron as the greatest romantic artist and director of our time and Avatar: The Way of Water will but play on these themes and cultivate a new romantic imagination with the centrality of the family as the cornerstone in the fight against the tyranny of the empty rainbow, “Wherever we go, this family is our fortress.”

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