The Nature of Stories
February 4th, 2010Last month I went to see Avatar, along with however many million others. I found it much as friends had said: beautiful, but predictable.
Well, fair enough. If you are going to risk that much money on a film, maybe the last thing you want is a plot that is difficult or challenging for the audience. Bring out the good old formulas, because you know they work, and let the public roll in. You can tell a derivative story with great verve (though I don’t think they did so this time).
But let’s look at the story a bit more closely. It’s interesting precisely because it was pitched to be ‘safe’ and to have the broadest possible appeal. It tells us something about ourselves.
First, there’s the ecological message. The good guys live in harmony with nature, with a mystical reverence for their surroundings. The bad guys are rapacious corporate types, mining ore and blasting trees. In the end the world nature-spirit decides the issue. This is not a new myth, but these days it’s definitely main stream. At one level it is silly – even cynical. We’re sitting in our heated or air-conditioned cinemas watching the result of a massive technological effort, and what it says to us is that we must get back to beautiful Mother Nature, (who in the real world is a cold and bloodthirsty bitch and not at all nice to her children.) But stories are dreams, and dreams can have truth even when they are silly. At a time when more and more of us accept that we must change to balance the ecology of our world, this is the story we want to hear.
And where, by the way, is the old frontier-pioneer myth? The bold explorer setting out to conquer new lands? We don’t tell that one any more.
But some things don’t change. In one of those early scriptwriting conferences, one of the Avatar crew will have said, ‘And it’s got to end with a battle’. A nice heroic battle, with lots of special effects and the good guys winning at the last moment against impossible odds. It’s a must. Hard-wired into our souls, still, is the thirst for crisis and blood. We can turn a lot of things around. We can accept that the bad guys’ army should look and sound very like the US military (who didn’t notice that reference to ‘Shock and Awe’?) and that the good guys are twice human height and blue-skinned and by the way look a lot like the First Nation tribes of America. But they’ve got to fight. They are the gladiators. We are the audience yelling in the stands. What does that say about us?
Maybe there are a few things about Nature we haven’t forgotten.
