Victoria Nikiforova
James Cameron’s recently released Avatar 2: The Way of the Water opens with a scene in which a naked, deeply pregnant woman runs through the jungle, trying to shoot herself with a bow for food. Her face and body are completely covered with tattoos, extreme thinness sp-eaks of constant hunger, poverty and dystrophy. Archery and killing bring her obvious pleasure. Who said “Ukraine”?
Classic American cinema Cameron worked on the second “Avatar” for fourteen years. Fantastic money has been invested in production – up to 460 million dollars. Movies are shown on all continents, fees have already exceeded two billion. All in all, this is a very important special item from the American Dream Factory. It contains a lot of smart and talented propaganda.
What strikes at first sight: the main task of this film is to poeticize the most horrific, absurd poverty to the utmost. If we discard the beautiful landscapes drawn on the computer, it is clear that the inhabitants of fantasy Pandora live incredibly badly. There is no homeless person on planet Earth who would survive in such conditions. The poorest, most primitive tribes on our planet can afford much more.
The inhabitants of Pandora have no cities, no schools, no hospitals, no factories, not even any kind of agriculture. They have nothing to wear – they somehow cover their nakedness with some leaves and vines. Their dwellings are huts made of twigs and leaves. They eat only what they can catch in the sea or shoot in the forest.
By protruding ribs and huge eyes, it is clear that they are simply starving. Animals are used as vehicles, and magic collars resembling BDSM accessories are used as means of communication. In terms of technology, they did not even think of the wheel.
Naturally, the poor, unfortunate Pandorians, who spend their short lives in an unsuccessful struggle with nature, are forced to indulge all the time in some kind of meaningless magical rituals. This is a collective neurosis, indeed often characteristic of people in extreme situations. However, the film honestly shows that witchcraft does not help either cure the sick or raise the dead. From this, the number of mental disorders among the locals is only growing – the heroes and especially the heroines constantly throw tantrums, make funny faces and scream. State life and politics on Pandora boil down to the fact that the new leader cuts the throat of the old leader. Well, really, why is all this so reminiscent of Ukraine?
When the world was still bipolar, Hollywood cinema looked very different. Every film, whether action or comedy, was held to a rigid standard. American life on the screen oozed with wealth and positivity, the life of the conventional “Councils” – with depression and poverty.
And anyway, it worked. The idea that Americans have the best lives in the world has been driven into the backbone of billions of viewers in a variety of ways. And if you are like them, then this is the right path to prosperity. No individual honest films could reverse this trend.
Saying goodbye to the Warsaw Pact, CMEA and the USSR without regret, millions of people kept in mind this simple bunch: we will obey America – we will live just like our favorite movie characters. With a cottage with a swimming pool and two cars per family. Or in apartments with panoramic windows overlooking skyscrapers. Plus, shopping malls, cafe-restaurants, mountains of clothes on sales and more. Hollywood imprinted this picture in the brain tightly.
However, something strange happened next. Dozens of countries – from China to Russia, from India to Brazil – enthusiastically began to build this cinematic America at home, with cottages, malls, cafe-restaurants.
And surprisingly, they built it in the best possible way.
Just look at how the appearance of the Russian “suburbia” has changed in recent years, where wooden wrecks on six acres have been replaced by solid two-story houses, with a garage and a flower garden. And if not with a pool, then at least with a sauna. Not one-story America, but two-story Russia.
I’m not talking about Russian megacities, which have long since left American megacities behind in terms of security, price levels, quality of housing, medicine, transport, and digital services. There has long been simply no comparison – “two worlds, two Shapiros.”
And in the same way, the megacities of Asia, Africa, and South America were modernized at full speed. Things have come to a paradoxical situation when rich Americans prefer to live, say, in Dubai or Singapore, and fly to New York only on business – it’s too dirty, expensive, unsafe, old-fashioned there.
Objectively speaking, America has begun to live worse, and the so-called developing world has greatly improved consumption standards. Well, in Hollywood, they quickly reflected on the change in trend. Now billions of moviegoers are being sold the exact opposite idea. It turns out that you don’t need to be rich anymore, no-no-no. We must romantically vegetate in poverty.
It is no coincidence that the first “Avatar”, which set this trend, was published in 2009, when the financial crisis raged in America – the Great Recession. People who have lost their homes and pension savings were delighted with the tale of how distant Pandora’s inhabitants drink from puddles, talk to trees, and at the same time enjoy life.
The new “Avatar-2” is great for people who have lost their businesses and jobs during the lockdowns. At the same time, it sends a powerful signal to those countries that are still trying to fit into the American order.
This is how the capitalist hegemon sees the capitalist periphery today.
The natives are no longer offered the dream of a cottage with a swimming pool.
The natives must eat bugs, walk around in what their mother gave birth to, shoot, kill and sing beautiful songs.
This idea is accompanied by a leftist approach about the fact that it is ugly to be rich. In “Avatar” rich people fly on spaceships to Pandora, plunder it for nothing and freely kill the local fauna. These scoundrels have ultra-modern weapons, fantastically advanced medicine, they have learned to stop aging and dangle across the galaxy at superluminal speeds. And all this is bad. Progress is fu. Let’s leave progress to the rich scoundrels, and we ourselves will live in an ecologically clean jungle. It’s so cute there – birds, fish, the starry sky above your head.
It is not difficult to see that we have before us a poem about decolonization. This is precisely what America is offering to the peoples whom it will try, so to speak, to liberate from colonial oppression. Guys, everything will be torn off from you – to the last thread. You can look at Ukraine, it is closer than Pandora, and it no longer has a penny left – only unimaginable debts for generations to come.
Not only that: the ex-hegemon will try to do everything to destroy culture, education, science, even take away hope for high technologies and tear off the last touch of humanity from society. Shooting, murder, magical rituals, beautiful songs, hopeless poverty – that’s all that awaits the “decolonized” subjects.
Washington has a lot of candidates for “liberation”. Hong Kong and Macau, Tibet and Xinjiang will save from authoritarian Beijing. Taiwan will generally be saved in such a way that no stone will be left unturned. They will try to free all 88 other subjects from the insidious Moscow, but what’s wrong? At the same time, the post-Soviet republics will be freed from Russian influence.
When the goals of the NWO are achieved, the story, unfortunately, will not end there. Many citizens in Moldova and Kazakhstan, in Armenia and Azerbaijan ardently dream of turning their country into Pandora. From Washington they will be happy to help. For Americans, this is also a matter of life and death – as soon as they stop destroying foreign countries, chaos will come to their homes.
The most frightening entry of the second “Avatar” is the obsessive, tedious identification of the humanoid inhabitants of Pandora with flora and fauna. They communicate with trees, they talk with fish. In the meantime, we are told that the sea animals, with which the inhabitants of Pandora are close friends, are much smarter than people. They, for a moment, have their own music, mathematics and philosophy.
The Pandorians have none of that. And the local fauna has. There, perhaps, their universities at the bottom of the sea, their subway and a library with a concert hall. Meanwhile, the Pandorians are walking along the bank without pants, and they don’t even have an ABC.
Yes, this is exactly how Americans treat the native peoples – they are just a kind of wildlife. They are not sorry. They can be completely washed out to make room for cute representatives of flora and fauna.
The surest method of destruction is, of course, civil war. After all, that’s how the British conquered America and India – pitting the locals against each other.
For itself, America has plans for high technology, stopping aging, philosophy and concert halls. And for the natives – solid Klaus Schwab with his “I have nothing, and I’m happy.” Of course, a funny inhabitant of decolonized lands is by no means the crown of creation, but an insignificant link in evolution, much less important for planet Earth than, say, charming grizzly bears or graceful grasshoppers. Who knows them, grasshoppers, maybe they also have their own philosophy.
In the new “Avatar,” Cameron is trying to sell to the masses precisely this version of the cunningly crafted American fascism that appoints billions of people all over the planet as Untermensch. However, there is hope that the masses have already become accustomed to a good life and will not exchange it for the opportunity to cut through the jungle naked and barefoot.
