During the time of year when much of the world celebrated the birth of Christ, millions of moviegoers worldwide flocked to see the movie "Avatar." The name "Avatar" itself means the advent of a deity. But the deity revealed to the world over Christmas was not Christ, and the message was far from Christian.
Many conservatives complain that the movie is a left-wing lesson in radical environmentalism. The Vatican has objected that the movie encourages nature worship. Evangelicals are worried that the movie indoctrinates youth into neo-paganism. The average moviegoer, without a political or religious ax to grind, is left vaguely dissatisfied, without being able to say exactly why the movie is disappointing.
The answer why Avatar is a cinematic failure is instructive. A movie, or any other work of art, is good to the extent that it promotes the dignity and worth of mankind. In modern art, the image of man has all but disappeared. Worse, we may say that the image of man has been terribly degraded. The 'art' of Damien Hirst, for example - the highest paid artist in history - is too abominable to mention.
We can say this sort of 'art' is based on a hatred of man, just as art in Christian society was once based on a love of mankind. What is loved is idealized, that is, the object loved is portrayed as better than it really is. What is hated is shown in a worse light. In movies today, romantic love, patriotism, and the sanctity of marriage have been replaced with hellish images of pain, despair, and degradation.
The heroes of an earlier age - the lawman, the doctor, the saint - have been replaced by the swindler, the killer, and the thief. The homemaker, the devoted wife, the chaste and loyal sweetheart have been replaced by images of the demimonde.
This hatred of mankind entered our society under many guises, including "The Generation Gap" "The War Between the Sexes" and "Class Warfare." In all these cases, a spirit of contention and disunion replaced the natural affection which binds marriages, families, and nations together. It is natural, of course, to cherish and protect what is our own. The media however, issues a steady and unremitting call for us to turn against what we should love the most.
That is the great dark secret of the age, that our society has been poisoned with a hatred of mankind. As one philosopher put it, "The more one loves gold, the more one hates his fellow man." Therein lies the explanation for the existence and prevalence of every business which preys on mankind, from cigarettes and alcohol, to abortion mills and tattoo parlors.
If we accept this unpleasant notion as true, then we are led to ask, whence this hatred? As society moves farther from God, man is no longer seen as the image of His Creator, a being gifted with rationality and the power to create. No longer partaking in the nature of the Creator, man himself becomes merely a creature, a being driven by passion and instinct. In short, mans becomes a beast.
Taken to its logical conclusion, this hatred of man becomes the script of Avatar, a movie in which man is portrayed as a virus infecting a planet. Avatar merely gives artistic expression to ideas held in common by radical environmentalists, establishment ethicists of the ilk of Peter Singer, and Wiccans and other pagan religions. The real spiritual force behind Avatar is revealed by Wiccans who say the movie "is full of pagan messages."
Ultimately, this hatred of mankind has a supernatural origin. The fallen angels hate mankind for taking their place in creation. Avatar is a retelling of the story of the fall of man in which the roles of man and demon are reversed. It is not the demons who are cast out of Heaven, but we, mankind, who fall from Heaven to ruin their pristine and innocent Eden.
In a curious reversal of the Gospel story, a character named "Grace" dies before a sacred tree named Eywa (Eve) in the presence of a red dragon. This same tree later saves the tribe of demons, with the help of the red dragon, but not before the demons attempt an ascent back into heaven by means of ropes suspended from the sky! The parallels to the Biblical story of the fallen angels is too startlingly close to be a coincidence.
The religion most condemned by the Bible and by rabbinical literature is the religion of Egypt - a religion whose deities are half man and half beast. It was a religion in which man had not fully emerged from nature, a religion in which man worshiped and exalted the Creation, not the Creator.
The most ferocious of Egypt's mythical beings was a woman with the head of a cat or lion, and a long tail. This strange demon was the goddess of war, and it may be that she is the inspiration and model for the strange beings who inhabit the world of Avatar.
It is said that the criterion of all works of art is truth. In order for a particular work of art to be good, it must reveal the truth about some aspect of existence. Avatar is unsatisfying because it leads viewers away from the light of Christ and the truth of the Gospel, and for that reason, its message is felt at some deep level as an affront to the soul. Avatar may be summed up as a movie which uses the most alluring visual imagery to propagate the worst possible falsehood and error regarding the existence of man and his eternal destiny.
(Updated Jan 25th 2010)
By Staff of the Christian Civic League of Maine
