A few points and theses inspired by James Cameron's Avatar:
1) Why is hi-tech/virtual Hollywood so anti-imperialist and anti-corporate? Maybe it's the movies I'm choosing to see. But as an example, take the last three Pixar movies. The Incredibles has that sequence where Mr. Incredible is trying to hold down a job in an insurance company, defying bureaucracy and the profit motive to give fragile old ladies their health cover. Wall-E describes a brand-totalitarianism - the Buy'n'Large corporation - that has despoiled Earth, turned humans into dependent grubs, and conducted a program of mass delusion and seduction to keep the truth from citizens. (Only knowledge, love and virtuous robotics can break through the mental grip).
And UP!, though it's mostly about the joys of ageing, has its expected anti-corporate sequence at the beginning, where impassive suits in shades exploit the tiniest social and legal infraction to get old Carl out of his house, so the developers can move in. The Pixar paradox/hypocrisy - these vast, thoroughly commercialised and marketed 'event' movies preaching about the balance of nature, the primacy of relationships, the tawdriness of capitalist modernity - has often been noted.
And you'd have to say that, at first sight, Avatar is the height of this tendency. The colonisers of Pandora represent mid-22nd century American(ised) culture at its most brutal and reductive - its empty consumerism ("they don't want what we have"), its bottom-line commercial myopia, its terrifying patriarchal/hierarchical militarism (literally embodied in the military commander Miles Quaritch), all supported by a gross technological power. The humanoid species they face, and whose mineral deposits they want to secure, live in a state of hunter-gatherer equilibrium, supported by a mythology and set of practices familiar from accounts of aboriginal cultures. The Na'avis connection with nature, however, is more than merely systemic or ecological, but bio-neural - they can entwine their ganglia with the neurology of other fauna and flora in Pandora, and transmit and receive messages with them.
I want to say more about this piece of post-human wish fulfillment later. But I think it gives a clue to why the most technologically cutting-edge movies have a consistently anti-authoritarian tone. In essence, the geeks and techs have inherited the shooting lot in Hollywood. And geek/techdom often operates best in small, motivated, obsessive groups, who often simply want to be mostly left alone to solve their problems and come up with new ones. They obviously have to deal with the managers and executives who provide the resources and conditions for their furious imagineering - and who will impress marketing and audience considerations upon their work.
So it's no surprise that Pixar movies recapitulate the creativity-vs-bureaucracy trope over and over again, given their tense relationship with Disney for most of their existence (and now even that they're in the Mouse House, the trope still persists with UP!). And the stories of James Cameron's fuck-you attitude to his Hollywood paymasters, particularly as he pursues new technological platforms for visual wonders, are well-documented.
You also have to consider that persistent overlap between counterculture and cyberculture described by Fred Turner - for example, the way that Burning Man becomes the paradigm event for Google employees, serving as a utopia of autonomy, creativity and ingenuity. The crew of scientists (headed by Sigourney Weaver) who work for the human corporation in Avatar are an instance of this overlap. Of course, they are an analogue to the embedded anthropologists who are currently at work in Iraq and Afghanistan, and who have often accompanied American adventuring (and one shouldn't underestimate how much the American public's war-weariness shapes the radicalism of Avatar's narrative). But they are also the geek-squad par-excellence - chain-smoking female scientist, white and nerdy linguist, super-cerebral Indian neurologist, all building avatars that help you enter into the imaginative world of others. Analogue to the filmmaker and his team of obsessives, I'd suggest.
There's even a scene in the movie which refers to what you could call classic hacker politics. That's the moment where Weaver's head scientist is remonstrating with the corporates and soldiers as to where the real wealth of Pandora lies - and it's not the energy-providing mineral deposit called 'unobtanium'. "The Na'avi are hooked up to nature, they are part of a planetary network - imagine what we could learn from them if we lived with them, observed their ways..." This netological idealism - exemplified currently by writers like Kevin Kelly, but rooted in cybernetics and the philosophies of McLuhan and Teihard De Chardin - is at the core of the hacker belief system. The response from the corporate boss is salty - "what have you people been smoking!?" But from the tech-hacker angle, it expresses precisely the kind of linear, hierarchical narrow-mindedness that you'd expect from bottom-liners, money-men and top-brass strategists.
So the secret ideological drama of the digital movie spectacular is: highly skilled tech-creatives against the executive suits. But given that...
2) What does the Hollywood SF movie prepare us for? Where Avatar is most deeply radical - in the sense of getting to the root of our selves - is in its post-human banality. A future in which transgenic chimeras - the human/Na-avi "avatars" of the film's title - are brewed up in tanks, ready for use in exploration, diplomacy or war.
Cameron's chief conceit for the Na'avi are their aforementioned neural extensions, emerging from the back of their heads in a comely braid. I guess that, given the average spectacle of interspecies symbiosis and biosemiotics that one sees in any nature documentary, such an evolutionary adaptation isn't impossible. But it does feel like a somewhat cheesy imposition of Silicon Valley fetishism - the ganglia look like the strands of a fibre-optic broadband cable come alive - on an otherwise convincing, Earth-climate like biota. The whole transhumanist ambition (represented by Ray Kurzweil) of consciousness transferring itself to other physical entities is given its full spiritual due by Avatar: only the Gaia-like energies of the planet can enable the transfer of a human consciousness to its chimeric avatar, without all the intervening technology (though the very tendrils of the earth seem to effect a direct cortical connection).
As well as SF trying to prevent certain futures happening (as William Gibson says), I also think it can function to soften us up for others. So an even greater paradox about Avatar, than its anti-corporate-modernity message, is the way it deconstructs its own overt sermonising about respecting the integrity of a natural environment. What we're watching in the incredibly realised alternative biosphere of Pandora is an enormous act of virtual geo-engineering (or perhaps geo-imagineering), in the sense that Stuart Brand has recently been advocating to a sceptical environmental movement.
The 3D cinematography is intended to help us immerse ourselves deeply in this neo-natural world - but ultimately, we are always aware that the director and his team has expended enormous efforts to realise every tree, multi-ped and leaf of this world. Standing behind Avatar's surface drama - a gross industrial hypermodernity vs a holistic pre-modern community - is the spectacle of digitality: a demonstration of the sheer malleable power of computerisation. (Cameron on his digital filmmaking: "It's this form of pure creation where if you want to move a tree or a mountain or the sky or change the time of day, you have complete control over the elements.") And as we know (or should do), this computerisation is as vital to unlocking the codes of our genome, as it is to creating dazzling pixellations of a non-Terran nature.
So come back to Sigourney Weaver's moment (as scientist Grace Augustine), trying to stop the destruction of the Na'avi's sacred centre, Tree Home, by invoking the value of Pandora's self-conscious networks of species. Genomics companies regularly make the same argument for preserving Earth's bio-diversity - that there are remedies and compounds genetically latent in the very densest of our biotas. From his superego, Cameron is trying to make an argument for his own version of the Green New Deal - which for him may involve learning as much from the epistemologies of non-Western populations, as much as their ecologies. But the digital id of this movie pulses with a sense of power-over-nature which is incontrovertible.
This Cartesian separation and dualism comes out most ludicrously in the Na'avi (and the human rebels') armed and strategic response to the invasion of the corporation onto the planet's most sacred ground of all, The Tree of Souls. Jake Sully, the human who plays the oppressor-turned-indigene, has asked the planet's collective consciousness Eywa for assistance in their coming battle. In the movie, this assistance results in a stampede of the more implacable and lethal of Pandora's wildlife upon the exoskeletons of the Corporation's armies. (It's great to know that Eywa aims to "maintain balance in all things" through strategic force manoeuvers in specific field battles). But surely a more thoroughly ecological act of conscious rebellion from a planetary consciousness would be similiar to the microbial victors at the end of Wells' and Spielberg's War of the Worlds - a subtle change in the molecular exchanges in Pandora's atmosphere, such that any skin-exposure would result in some form of pain, enervation or death.
The battle-triumph of the Na'avi over the Earthers actually locks them into a very old-fashioned, non-networked, scarcity-oriented, territorial mode of existence. I wonder whether Cameron's mooted sequels will involve a mutation of the Na'avis culture along the same, often tragic paths that befell both Australian and American native societies - or whether the Na'avi judgement on the Earthers culture ("what can you give people who's cup is always full?") will find a way to persist, even in the face of the Corporation's re-invasion that would surely form the basis of a future sequel.
The constant challenge that the best SF media poses is about how we might not be able to even understand what a non-human consciousness might be saying to us - see Tarkovsky's Solaris or Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. Like Spieberg, Cameron seems fascinated by non-human challenges to our volition, the way they force us into hubris - the rampaging robots in the Terminator movies, the super-intelligences in The Abyss, the unavoidable iceberg in Titanic, the insectoid mother in Aliens 2, the strange deep-sea creatures in his nature documentaries.
But there is nothing uncanny about the aliens in Avatar. Indeed, it's the ease of their assimilation into the coming consensus towards a green-tinged, bio-genetic capitalism which is most disappointing about the movie. All differences, even non-human ones, can be blended together in the breeding tank to create the next level of American commercial agency - wiser, less dominant, but still (as Grace Augustine advises us) able to "take value" from the equilibria of natural systems. As Di Lampudesa might say: change everything, so that nothing changes.
