The First multicultural Gospel of the Obama Era

Rating: 10/10 (21 December 2009)

I am not going to insist on the technical prowess and creativity of this film. The special effects, both visual and sound, are superb, sublime, perfect, the merger of Star Wars and Matrix, of all the best means ever devised to make our eyes and ears believe the unbelievable. James Cameron is a god of sorts in that field and he used the most advanced studios to produce a divine and magical fairy tale. Anyone who pretends to love the cinema cannot and must not ever be reluctant in the slightest way to go and watch that film, two or three times if possible. And James Cameron is just as good when he deals with the surreal and supernatural of this extra-terrestrial civilization and when he exposes the brutality and human underdevelopment with no hope to ever be emerging from their dumbness of both military higher-ups and greedy industrialists. To list and explain all the allusions to all the films you can and will recognize would need two hundred pages. So I will pass and trust your own knowledge to enjoy the many allusions. I want to insist on the central message of the film, both ideological and cultural. Americans arriving on this planet finds a humanoid species, both intelligent and developed, but in a direction that has kept and exploited the direct relation that every individual can entertain with the beasts of nature and the telluric or subterranean forces of nature seen as the mother of the equilibrium without which nothing can survive. The only aim of the Americans is to recuperate some ore that is in great quantities under the main home-tree of this species, under all the sacred places and natural temples of this civilization, and to use brutal force if necessary to clear the area. Greed and death instinct are the two teats on which all these Americans have been fed. Genetic science makes it possible to invest the personality of a human into the genetically modified cloned body of a local humanoid, producing a spy who is to get into this community and bring back the information necessary for the military genocide while his human body is kept in some hibernating pod. The problem with that project is that the happy few who can thus get into that community fall in love with their civilization, their culture, their deep human feelings and their absolute cult of prowess, courage and intelligence invested in the full respect of mother nature. Eventually for one of them that love will mean falling in love with the daughter of the political (father) and religious (mother) leaders of the tribe. James Cameron is a genius in the way he depicts the strong human emotions on the American side, both negative and positive and this depicting is immediately effective on us who are well trained in reading, receiving and experiencing these emotions. We feel the full horror James Cameron wants us to feel in front of the ugly conquistador colonel and the admirable courage of this female marine who prefers betraying her camp to being part of a planned genocide. James Cameron tries hard to depict in the same way the extra-terrestrial feeling and emotions of these humanoids, both real and cloned, but there we feel them less because they are different and we are not in phase with them, especially since the special effects are making us slightly blind. But it remains absolutely sublime. The meaning here is that of the meeting of two human species and their divided objectives on both sides. It is the merging of the two species in order to produce collaboration, cooperation, exchange and even total gift of culture, technological power, natural knowledge, spiritual representations, and all other common or different domains. In other words we are dealing with the fascination of the other. Some call that inverted racism or mixing cultures, salad bowl or melting pot, integration or assimilation. But James Cameron shows us how that approach is dangerous and fatal for the weaker species who will always be the victim of the stronger species, understood as being the Americans who have no word of honor when greed is in play. At the same time if we do not respect the other in its total personality, religion and religious beliefs included, we will only produce a genocide, be it at least a cultural genocide teaching English and imposing our culture, and negating the natural evolution of the differentiation of languages, the punishment of the tower of Babel in our religious lore. James Cameron is telling us a parable more than a fable, and he is in perfect line with the deepest Judeo-Christian tradition of ours, of the Christ who was rabbi Jesus before being crucified. That deepest belief of ours is called love: to love the other in his or her difference and to give to that other all we have and share it with him or her, expecting the same attitude on the other side but at the same time refusing violence in the other case and loving our "enemies" as much as our "friends". In other words, and to cut short a long story, this film is the First Gospel after Barack Hussein Obama's election, even if that new spiritual approach of the world did not produce a miracle in Copenhagen. The Second Gospel of this Obama era will be the announced film by Steven Spielberg on the last novel by Stephen King, Under the Dome. After Saint James, the first Bishop of Jerusalem and the elder brother of Jesus in the end stoned to death at the foot of the wall of Jerusalem, we will have Saint Stephen, the Protomartyr of Christianity, stoned to death on the encouragement of Saul of Tarsus, the future Paul.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne, University Paris 8 Saint Denis, University Paris 12 Créteil, CEGID