ECOPSYCHOLOGY NARRATIVE

Desire, Longing and the Return to the Garden: Reflections on Avatar

Renee A. Lertzman Portland State University, Portland Center for Public Humanities Portland, Oregon

n the wake of Avatar hitting our theaters and rituals of Hollywood accolades, ecological thinkers around the world are busy parsing out its various meanings, codes, symbols and implications as a contemporary piece of environmental imagination. For the more radical environmentalists, it can be a surreal experience to watch certain tropescommon patterns, theme, or motifsso central to environmental ethics and philosophy presented not only in Hollywood-style Technicolor, but now in 3D, an immersive mode of movie-going. Like the characters, we can leave our bodies behind in the theater seats and enjoy a vicarious adventure in Pandora, and taste a life of symbiosis with naturerespect and reverence for natural ecological systems, and mourning the death of every single living creaturea mode of being so distant in our own industrial, Western lives. However, it is not enough to simply marvel at the first truly green film to hit the Oscars and popular media with such a vengeance. While we may exit the theater in a rosy glow (until we are hit with Post-Avatar Ecological Depressive Disorder (Croken, 2010) feeling perhaps finally vindicated to see radical green thinking on the multiplex screen, there is a serious opportunity for further analysis and investigation into our own practices and unconscious fantasies. Specifically, what we can witness in the film, its impacts, and its aftermath, are ways in which green fantasy lends itself to a splitting up of the worldand arguably our psychein our desire to return to a more innocent, primitive, and sensual mode of existence. From a psychoanalytic, objectrelations perspective, Avatar (and quite possibly much of ecological thinking) contains the seeds of splitting: How we split the

world into good-bad / self-other, and idealize both other cultures and previous times. Therefore, what makes Avatar so compelling for millions of people is not only its technological prowess and dazzling imagery, glowing creatures, and transporting beauty, but the way both viewer and characters (via Jake Sully) find themselves suddenly being shuttled between two entirely different worlds. The affective dimensions of this film that Jake manifests as he is pulled between the two modes of Earthly and Navi existence can be complicated, contradictory, paradoxical, and profoundattributes of experiencing contemporary industrial degradation and our own complicity in it. The parable in Avatar is as much about the experience of splitting as a central feature of contemporary, Western environmental subjectivitywhat an environmental awareness feels like. In this film we can experience in a safe and culturally sanctioned context the deepest longings we have for the return to the Mother (embodied in the film by the allknowing Tree of Voices, the Navi, and Pandora). No wonder we find it so powerful and yet so wrenching to return to the streets and buildings, to our own fragile and broken lives. Although humans have such profound capacities for splitting up our external and internal worlds, the movement between two worlds is often deeply painful, confusing, and disorienting. Anyone who has spent ten days on the Playa at Burning Man, or lived in a different culture for an extended time, or spent even more than a few days backpacking in wilderness has tasted this. And no one knows this experience of being pulled between worlds more than environmentalists. Philosopher Neil Evernden once referred to the environmental activist as the natural alien, an alien in his or her own culture and

DOI: 10.1089/eco.2010.0037

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society, feeling the pain of natures destruction while most carry on as usual. We see this aspect of environmental subjectivity in Aldo Leopolds famous quote that the price of an environmental education is to live alone in a world of wounds. The more we know, the more we are pulled between worldssocial worlds, biotic worlds, psychic worldsforced to shuttle, like Jake Sully, to and from a reality we are bound to (the one of cars, toxic waste, carbon emissions, and so forth) and one we aspire to help make real (biotically whole, harmonious, and synergistic). The splitting we see in Jakes character as he becomes increasingly involved with the world of Pandora is one that most environmental advocates can relate to: The parallel lives we lead, with our desires to protect and conserve natural systems, while most of us are forced to drive, fly, and engage in myriad practices we know to be in some way part of the damaging system. Of course, it is not so black and white; those of us who love nature and want to protect it, may also be quite attached to our long-haul flights to New Zealand, our leather hiking boots, and various guilty pleasures found at the supermarket. The point is that such attempts to split the world into black and white are inevitably bound to fail. Where Avatar may reify vividly the sort of splitting that makes sense in our cultural and psychic histories (one need only recall the Garden and the Fall, and longings to return to Arcadia), it also can be disastrous emotionally and politically. With the splitting comes longing; and with the longing for an unobtainable Utopia (yes, Camerons UnObtainium on Pandora), comes a form of melancholia that can only lead to a form of paralysis (or death, as Jake who effectively leaves his imperfect and frail body behind). As with Timothy Treadwell, who left to live in harmony with Grizzly Bears, only to meet his death with one (Grizzly Man) or Christopher McCandless (Into the Wild) who sought to merge with wild nature in Alaska and met his own end, the risks of idealizing nature come with great risks. We dont see these risks in Avatar. Rather, when Jake becomes native, we cant help but feel euphoric on his behalf. It is not only the minerals on Pandora that are UnObtainium but the idealized image of nature before the Fall itself: the fantasy of returning to the Garden that continues to plague most of us with any form of environmental consciousness. One need not be an environmentalist in any shape or form to have known a deep longing for a return to something simpler, more pure, and innocent. Yes, sounds a lot like childhood. But where psychic maturity happens is precisely in our ability to mourn the losses of our childhood fantasies, and idealisms but to not fall into a stasis of melancholia, either. As Du Toit (2010) has astutely noted in his essay, Leaving the World: Avatar, the film visually splits the world into two realms:

The technological world of the Corporation, all steel and bulkheads, shot in grim, greyed-out colours, and the magical world of the jungle, which is presented as a fairyland . . . In entering the world of the jungle, Jake Sully enters the realm of Faerienot another physical realm but another world entirely. This is particularly obvious in the sequences where Jake first arrives at Home Tree, the natives city-in-the-branches. Butterflies all round, glowing mushrooms, silver leaves, gargantuan trees with buttresses spiralling into the light: this is not Pandora, this is Lothlorien; and the aliens are not humanoids from another planet, they are Tolkiens Elves, imbued with all the powers and qualities proper to them. On one level, the mass success of Avatar is a remarkable event in disseminating environmental imagery and values to a mass audience of eager moviegoers. On the screen at the multiplex are representations of the very ethos that has mobilized environmental work for decades. As we witness Jake going through the agony of being split between two worlds, we can notice a reflection of our own struggles over the years; what it is like to have an ecological consciousness among the machines.1 So, what is the message in the parable of Avatar? While the film purports to be pro-environmentalEnter the World, the tagline saysthe psychic message delivered by the story is about leaving the world. Our bodies and our planet are too broken. It is now about constructing virtual worlds through which to extend our fantasies of a place prior to the rift. Don the glasses and leave our world of plastic cups and sticky soda, and drift among the trees and exotic species likely to be endangered on our own planet. Rather than an Avatar body you only need 3D glasses. However, unlike Jake, we can make the choice to stay put, to dig in, and to find expressions of Pandora right here growing up in the cracks in the sidewalk.

Note
1In thinking about Jakes dilemma and our own, we are well served

in remembering Melanie Kleins groundbreaking work concerning the paranoid-schizoid and the depressive positions (c.f. Klein, 1937). For Klein, the real task of adulthood is the capacity to mourn the losses of childhood innocence, and to move forward into a more integrative psychic capacity to both hold and contain complexity and multiplicity: the depressive position. In contrast, the paranoid-schizoid position is marked by manic defenses to ward off overwhelming anxieties, and leads to the splitting up of ourselves, others, and the world into fragments. In other words, the task of becoming a mature adult is to tolerate knowledge of the caregivers own human frailty and our

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own, and to continue living in the world with love, attachment, passion and capacities for reparation. Winnicott referred to this in terms of the capacities for concern as a vital stage of maturity.
REFERENCES Croker, R. (2010, January 28). No garden to get back to: understanding post-Avatar ecological depressive disorder. Retrieved January 29, 2010, from Religion Dispatches website: http://www.religiondispatches.org/archive/mediaculture/ 2226/no_garden_to_get_back_to:_understanding_post-avatar_ecological_ depressive_disorder__ Du Toit, A. (2010, January 10). Leaving the world: Avatar. Retrieved March 15, 2010, from A Subtle Knife website: http://asubtleknife.wordpress.com/2010/01/10/ leaving-the-world-avatar/

Klein, M. (1937). Love, guilt and reparation. In Klein, M. and Riviere, J. (Eds.) Love, hate and reparation (pp. 57119). New York: Norton, 1967.

Address correspondence to: Renee A. Lertzman Portland State University Box 751 Portland, OR 97207 E-mail: lertzman@pdx.edu Received: April 2, 2010 Accepted: April 2, 2010

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