The Evil Dream
Inspirations the Avatar films didn’t take
On a far-flung forest world indigenous humanoids live in a tribal culture and in harmony with nature, their Edenic surroundings and way of life a sort of dream. Till the arrival of humans from Earth, some of them scientists but mostly loggers, soldiers: colonists. Spearheaded by a macho military man, they treat the natives as savages, burning them out of their forest homes. The natives rise up and eventually expunge the colonists but for a compact made with the more sympathetic and on-side humans. Will their world now settle back into peace and harmony or has human contact changed it forever?
This is the story of The Word for World is Forest, written by Ursula K Le Guin. What’s the link between it and James Cameron’s Avatar films? Allusion, homage? What Alasdair Gray once coined as ‘diffplag’ (=diffuse plagiarism)? Or great minds thinking alike? Le Guin, gracious to her science fiction peers if not Cameron, told Hari Kunzru, “Cameron had a lot of people to thank, but he dodged all that.”
It was thanks of a sort when Cameron cited his early inspirations in a legal document during a plagiarism suit with a rival screenwriter. Among his favourite SF authors were Clarke, Bradbury, Heinlein, Poul Anderson, Theodore Sturgeon, and Isaac Asimov; he also mentions reading William Gibson and Lem—but no Le Guin. It’d be weird, though, if he hadn’t come across her in the decades before he made Avatar and since she published The Word for World is Forest. “I had read tons of science fiction,” he said in a TED talk, going on to describe exactly the kind she was famous for: “[It] was not fantasy in the sense of pure escapism… So much of literary sci-fi is about creating worlds that are rich and detailed and make sense at a social level.”
Ever since the first Avatar, people have been drawing the more conspicuous parallels between it and Le Guin’s novel: the respective forest settings of Athshe and Pandora, the colonialism allegory story-lines. There are subtler ones, too, with the novel and also with Le Guin’s wider “literary sci-fi”:
The native Athsheans have a culture based on dreams; the main Athshean character Selver becomes a “great dreamer” in taking his pacifist people to war. The Na’vi (so we learn through diligent research of the Avatar expanded universe) call their warriors “dream walkers”.
In the films and the novel the villain is a soldier, Colonel Quaritch (Stephen Lang) in the one, Captain Davidson in the other: both men contemptuous of the local population and accusing those who aren’t of being race traitors.
Captain Davidson rails against the allure of the forest world, its evangelising for itself: “There was something in the air, maybe pollens from all those trees, acting as some kind of drug maybe, that made ordinary humans begin to get as stupid and out of touch with reality as the [natives] were.” While Colonel Quaritch warns Avatar’s Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) about going native for Pandora: “You’re not getting lost in the woods, are you?”
Sully isn’t the only fractious human in the Avatar films. In the second one, The Way of Water, we meet Dr Garvin (Jermaine Clement), a guilt-ridden, morally compromised marine biologist who echoes the novel’s haunted and haunting Dr Lyubov.
Le Guin’s magnum opus is Always Coming Home, a story set in the future among another low-tech, eco-friendly people who merge Native American culture with Taoism (a.k.a. ‘the way of water’). The name of that story’s narrator? Pandora.
To be fairer to Cameron he wasn’t the only artist who might’ve taken inspiration from Le Guin. In the novel the lags of interplanetary colonialism give time for the government back home to change to a more progressive administration. This anticipates the same plot-twists in Alan Moore and Ian Gibson’s comic The Ballad of Halo Jones and Joe Haldeman’s ’Nam-in-space novel The Forever War. Le Guin’s forest-dwelling Athsheans are small and furry, triggering in humans what Dr Lyubov calls the ‘teddy bear’ response—and where else have we seen them? The story goes that George Lucas wanted a Wookie home planet for the decisive battle against the Empire in Return of the Jedi but he couldn’t find enough tall extras, hence Ewoks. But then again his own teddy bear aliens live on a forest world called Endor; in The Word for World is Forest, the Athsheans launch their repulsion of the imperialists from a site called Endtor. (Star Wars fans, more open about their sources, featured an alien race in their roleplaying game called the Athsheans.)
The majority of this I’d chalk up to a cousin of the principle ‘All puns have been punned.’ Take inventions: the fact that humans in prehistoric Europe and Asia invented the needle-and-thread at the same time isn’t (sorry Graham Hancock) evidence of some more advanced parent civilisation but an example of the way ideas have their own logic which’ll work itself out eventually wherever and with whomever. Given the right material and social antecedents, someone, in fact, quite a few people would’ve invented the needle-and-thread. So too in a historical period violently transitioning from colonial to post-colonial it was only a matter of a time till artists used alien-human contact, subtly or obviously, to allegorise that history. It’s like how it doesn’t take a unique mind to coin a new pun: every pun is out there, embedded in the language, and, in the age of the internet especially, they’re being unearthed every second.
So the question isn’t who did the space colonialism idea first or even who did it better. To paraphrase an aphorism from Always Coming Home, “Better and worse are egg-sucking words, they leave only the shell / Like and different are quickening words, brooding and hatching.” The question is how each artist approached it, how they advanced or simplified or popularised the idea.
Le Guin’s great, rejected title for her novel was The Little Green Men—rejected by Harlan Ellison no less, who offered in its place the one we know today. Le Guin’s natives are indeed little - “the height of a six-year-old”, green, plus hairy. And this is not an arbitrary look. The ‘teddy bear’ response that the Athsheans trigger in humans is what compounds the colonists’ underestimation of them. The worst colonists slur the Athsheans as “creechies” and treat them as weak and stupid till it’s too late. Cameron, meanwhile, inverts the height order. His natives are twice not half as tall as the average, easy to fear or admire—we literally have to look up to them. (Would fans of the films still get the post-Avatar blues and want to body-mod themselves into Na’vi if they looked like creechies, that is like hairy little green men?)
On top of their stature the Na’vi make a lot of nods towards the ‘indigenous’. In the sequel, Cliff Curtis’s Tonowari sticks out his tongue before battle like Curtis’s Maori ancestors did. Zoe Saldaña in particular has performance-captured Global South grief: she doesn’t glisten with tears like a WASP, but emotes emphatically, i.e. more ‘authentically’. Beyond these surface-level trappings, Na’vi culture runs on generic indigenous lines: tribal clans, folk medicine, scant technology, respect for nature’s Great Balance and a mother goddess.
The Athsheans’ culture is specific, based on dreams: they like to tell them to one another (unlike us) and they slip in and out of waking visions. Instead of repressing their inner demons, they use dreams to manifest and manage them (like Cameron did with his nightmare of a metal skeleton rising from flames which led to The Terminator). The humans on the other hand repress the unconscious in favour of the conscious, the irrational in favour of the rational. The Athsheans wouldn’t agree with Freud that this is what makes us civilised but with Marcuse that this is what makes us mad. Vice versa, it’s because of the Athsheans’ dream-culture that humans think of them as shiftless, primitive and absent-minded.
Le Guin’s not a satirist though; the Athsheans aren’t a smug lesson. She doesn’t dichotomise culture, vaunting the Athsheans’ arational, low-tech ways against their opposite. As ever with her writing there’s always another pole. The uncivilisation of an Athshean like Selver has a positive counterpart in the impeccably civilised and city-raised character Lepennon: not a human from Earth but an observer from the first world, Hain—‘first’ in the sense of most advanced and for having been the parent culture of all humanoid ones. Lepennon is another path our own culture could’ve taken alongside Selver.
This reminder that ‘it’s more complicated than that’ is a constant in Le Guin’s work. She’d have hated such an academic term but she can’t seem to think but dialectically. In her essay on utopias she endorsed “the Yang-Yin symbol [whose] each half contains within it a portion of the other, signifying their complete interdependence and continual intermutability. The figure is static, but each half contains the seed of transformation.” Between the Athsheans and humans it’s clear who’s the exploiter and whom the exploited; the angle of the injustice isn’t hard to make out. And Le Guin dramatises their conflict with as much whizz-bang as Cameron’s films. But her novel has the trickier knots, the more bracing reversals and unexpected commonalities. As a result it might not be as feel-good, but it is think-good.
The stakes and claims in The Word for World is Forest might be clear-cut. Even so the novel - the closest in Le Guin’s work to a battle of good versus evil - is less about a conflict than a relationship.
Compare how the novel and the films depart in how they deal with exploitation. The humans’ designs on Pandora aren’t only for its resources (in the first Avatar the mineral unobtanium, in the second the anti-ageing whale-hormone amrita) but for the world itself. This joint exploitation and colonisation is overseen by General Ardmore, played by Edie Falco, who explains to Quaritch her world-building ambitions, that Pandora is to be the New Earth. (I like to think The Way of Water is a wish-fulfilment dream of a ground-down Carmella Soprano, kept by Tony from financial autonomy to such an extent she dreams herself as the overseer of a whole world. Talk about a spec-house!)
The resource being extracted on New Tahiti (what the humans call Athshe) is not a super-fuel or miracle drug. It’s what the Athsheans’ word for world is. There’s a precedent here: the gobbling up of Europe’s forests to fuel its wars and weapons which drove the first colonists to look further afield. That it’s ‘just wood’ for which colonists have space-travelled to Athshe is meant to come across as a bit absurd: what would the economics of interstellar extraction of timber of all things even be like? The absurdity is the point.
But Le Guin’s story is about more than the lengths humans go to make a profit, or even the indigenous peoples at the sharp end of colonialism. Specifically it’s about American imperialism. Written in 1971, it was Le Guin’s response to the Vietnam War, with all its defoliating bombs and “exterminate the brutes” massacres: an evil dream she manifested to try manage.
History on her side as it was, she nonetheless dodged the temptation to grandstand. The closest thing to an all-out villain in her work since The Shing from her novel City of Illusions is Captain Davidson. While all the villains in the Avatar films are white Americans or Australians, Davidson is mixed race, a “euraf”, what’d make him in today’s preferred nomenclature Black. In our colonial times and beyond having that heritage could mark you out as one of the wretched of the Earth. But simply overturning this racism would be too self-congratulatory for Le Guin. She inverts it instead. For Davidson, it’s a mark of his racial supremacy to hail from the Cradle of Man.1 On a similar tack, a lesser writer than Le Guin might’ve thought it a cute irony to make the novel’s Vietnamese character a US marine-style grunt. She doesn’t go in for such a linear reversal. Her Colonel Dongh is a soldier but not a grunt; he’s mealymouthed top brass. After all the oppressed becoming the oppressor is less interesting than them becoming the oppressors’ bureaucrat.
Ken MacLeod in his introduction for The Word for World is Forest writes: “The invaders from Earth are indisputably the bad guys and the rebellious natives are entirely in the right.” But he points out that:
the novel’s revolutionary defeatism doesn’t fall into the trap of romanticising the revolt of the oppressed. The Athsheans are changed by the very act of fighting… the world they win back is not the same as the world that was taken from them; and their fight is not fair, or discriminating or by the rules. It is dirty and brutal and shocking.
The right side of history isn’t a pretty place. The Athsheans are fast learners: they hone a keen race-hatred in retaliation for the humans’ hatred of them. Since the humans call them creechies they call them yumens back. The yumens’ lankiness, hairlessness, their skin’s lack of green, disgust them, even or especially with yumen babies. Most shocking is the chapter of the novel when they massacre the colony’s hundreds of imported women before any of them can mate with the male colonists and so “breed like insects in the carcass of the World.” Having cauterised the colony from propagation, the Athsheans’ subsequent defeat of its men is dirty and brutal too. They sequester everybody who survives on a reservation, as dispiriting as those forced on real-world Native Americans.
Everybody except for Captain Davidson and his soldiers, who carry on conducting futile scorched-earth strikes. Davidson’s will to power inverts the Athsheans’ dream culture; he was never their nemesis so much as their dark half (their left hand of darkness). “By God,” he insists, “sometimes you had to be able to think the unthinkable.” Whereas Athsheans aim to harmonise with their irrational side, Davidson represses his till it bursts out atrociously. But in the end he’s defeated only by his own madness. Selver, whose wife he raped and murdered, doesn’t best him. Davidson, in a final spiteful strike, accidentally crashes his chopper and cripples himself.
Davidson is at Selver’s mercy, yet Selver doesn’t take righteous revenge. The novel ends in a stalemate. Even here, though, there’s an exchange, a “seed of transformation.” Davidson has become a mad god to the Athsheans, one who provoked in them the novelty, the divine gift of murder, of killing people. In turn, Selver, also considered a god by the Athsheans for his visionary dreams, gifts Davidson their former pacifism, their version of ahimsa: he will not harm him.
Human contact with the Na’vi goes way beyond this sort of modest exchange. It might in fact do them wonders. In the second film Sigourney Weaver plays Kiri, the Lisa Simpson of the Sully family: a mix of avatar DNA, human DNA and Na’vi spirit, being as she is the daughter of the avatar of Weaver’s character from the first film, Grace. Kiri becomes a sort of miracle-worker, marshalling other life-forms from afar. The film hints she is a chosen child, an adaptation if not reconciliation between the Na’vi and the human. Pandora actually needed this human input to make a prophet. Kiri is after all the daughter of grace.
Selver also learns to adapt to the yumens, to kill and wage war like them, and he spreads that knowledge to his fellow Athsheans. But he learns guilt too, and it horrifies him like a new sickness, a “mortal chill.” He worries, “This is the dream now, the evil dream. I thought to drive it, but it drives me.” The ghost of his friend Dr Lyubov, who died in a massacre Selver orchestrated, asks, Paulo Freire style: “Are you the prisoner or am I?” The loss, the damage, the change is mutual and irrevocable.
So what has Jake Sully sullied? The main way the Na’vi have changed since the first film is that they now know how to use guns. The spectacle of their battles with the humans is rousing; the sequel’s climactic, crowd-pleasing moment is a boorish whaler getting his arm torn off. Apart from that, the violence is nowhere near “dirty and brutal and shocking.” A PG-certificate holiday-season blockbuster was always going to have to at once sanitise and sensationalise violent resistance. More telling, however, is the moral of that violence…
Jake Sully and his Na’vi family fled Quaritch and his commandos to seek shelter among Pandora’s ocean tribes. There his son Lo’ak helps a whale-like Tulkun called Payakan with a harpoon that’s stuck in its fin. For this Saint Jerome thorn-from-a-lion’s-paw gesture Payakan befriends Lo’ak. But Lo’ak’s siblings and his hosts warn him that Payakan is an exile from his own kind for killing them.
To find out the truth Lo’ak connects with Payakan. Flipping the story of Jonah (or for that matter Geppetto) he lets himself be swallowed by the whale. Inside he connects his braid-like queue with the Tulkun’s and sees its backstory in a traumatised animal flashback, not unlike the chimp’s in Being John Malkovich.
Turns out Payakan didn’t directly kill his fellow Tulkun, only led them on a suicide mission against the human whalers. For now this doesn’t change his pariah status; the Tulkun are anti-violence as well as anti-killing. That is till the humans slaughter more Tulkun, and Colonel Quaritch takes Lo’ak, his siblings and friends hostage.
Payakan joins the fight to free them. Without his leviathan power it would’ve been lost: like Selver he’s a pacifist who’s learnt to kill. His story is the moral of the film, and for the Sullies and Na’vi in general: not to run but to commit mass violence against the humans. And that doing so isn’t only just but jubilant.
Elsewhere than her interview with Kunzru, Le Guin was more judgmental of Cameron. In the intro to the second volume of her Hainish Novels and Stories, she alluded to “a high budget, highly succesful film” which “completely reverses the book’s moral premise, presenting the central and unsolved problem of the book, mass violence, as a solution,” concluding that, “I’m glad I have nothing at all to do with it.” Le Guin’s judgment carries a seed of non-judgment; she’s not contrasting the moral of the film with the better one of her novel. Her novel doesn’t have a moral, only a moral premise.
Which is how it avoids being a worthy political tract, and more to the point, still manages to be a pacey, award-winning genre work, one published by a populist SF house, and still on the shelves half a century after it was written. It might not have made a billion dollars but it’s proof of what can be done within market constraints and with a finer grain. Cameron has said the first Avatar films were more like palette-setters, intentionally simplistic and morally black-and-white. He needed to get everyone on the Avatar train, make enough profit to keep it rolling. For the rest of the series he can show us the complications. If anybody has the talent and will to realise such a vision it’s James Cameron. But spectacle too has its own logic. This might be the dream now, the evil dream. He thought to drive it, but it drives him.
For more about Avatar: the Way of Water and the new phase of James Cameron’s career, read my feature at Film Cred. And touching on many of its same points, this is a good review of the film at Damagemag (not a positive review; the review itself is good) by
.In Starship Troopers fascism is racially diverse. Not because director Paul Verhoeven thinks that diversity is itself racist, but that a cannier fascism wanting to last would be all-inclusive.